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...

Mr and Mrs Smith: with rootkit

p2p news / p2pnet: With the Sony BMG rootkit DRM scandal now the subject of an important new paper, Heise Online is reporting another example of the, "ever-warming relationship of copy protection and rootkit technologies," says Finland's F-Secure.

The German DVD release of the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith, "contains a copy protection mechanism which uses rootkit-like cloaking technolog," says the company's blog.

"The Settec Alpha-DISC copy protection system used on the DVD contains user-mode rootkit-like features to hide itself," it states.

"The system will hide it's own process, but does not appear to hide any files or registry entries. This makes the feature a bit less dangerous, as anti-virus products will still be able to scan all files on the disk. However, as we note in our article on rootkits, it's not that uncommon for real malware to only hide their processes."

If you're worried that your Mr & Mrs Smith may be bugged, Settec has provided an unistaller.

"All components of the Alpha-DISC copy protection are completely removed by the Uninstallation," it promises, adding, "After uninstallation is completed, you can keep the uninstaller on the hard drive for future use or you can delete it."

Do non-German copies also come with Settec Alpha-DISC rootkit DRM?

Stay tuned.

Also See:
new paper - MediaMax, XCP study, February 14, 2006
another example - Sicherheitslücke durch Kinowelt-Kopiersperre, February 13, 2006
F-Secure - About the Hidden Smith Family, February 14, 2006

(Tuesday 14th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7922

 

p2pnet talks to Nettwerk Music

p2p news / p2pnet: Canada's Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver on the British Columbia mainland, manages some of North America’s best-known artists, including Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne. It's also a member of the Big Four record label cartel's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

But that doesn't mean the man who runs it, Terry McBride, is a fool. To the contrary, in fact, and like p2pnet, based on Vancouver Island in BC, he's doing his best to help an American family which is being pilloried by the RIAA.

In August, 2005, the RIAA, subpoenaed David Greubel for alleged file sharing, accusing him of having 600 suspect music files on the family computer, but targeting only nine specific songs.

Nettwerk got into it when 15 year-old Elisa Greubel contacted MC Lars, a Nettwerk artist, to say she identified with 'Download This Song,' a track from MC Lars' latest release.

"My family is one of many seemingly randomly chosen families to be sued by the RIAA," Emily emailed MC Lars. "No fun. You can't fight them, trying could possibly cost us millions.

"The line 'they sue little kids downloading hit songs', basically sums a lot of the whole thing up."

But, "Suing music fans isn't the solution, it’s the problem,” says McBride.

He answered a few questions for p2pnet during which he said although he's behind the Greubels, "it's not about winning the case: it's about stopping all the litigation. Period. That's my focus."

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

p2pnet: How far are you willing to go with this?

McBride: As far as we need to in order to save the music business from itself.

p2pnet: Have you had any feedback from any of the artists you represent other than MC Lars?

McBride: Yes ... all supportive. All have gotten behind this.

p2pnet: Bob Lefsetz says, " Nettwerk manages such international superstars as Sarah McLachlan, Avri Lavigne and Dido. Along with middle tier acts like the aforementioned Barenaked Ladies, Sum 41 and Jars of Clay. And DEVELOPING acts like Brand New. Isn't this JUST the kind of guy who should be lining up behind Mitch Bainwol and the RIAA?

McBride: Why? .... we're members of the RIAA, but that doesn't mean that I can't disagree with them, which on this subject I do

Lefsetz ...... I mean Terry McBride is IN BED with the major labels. Doesn't Nettwerk function as the A&R for Sony BMG in Canada now??

McBride: Yes. We have and A&R deal to help Artists who want to be on a major label.

p2pnet: Lefsetz also says, "But Terry McBride is drawing the line. Because Terry McBride knows it's about fans, and careers, and what the RIAA is doing is eviscerating both. The fans are the present and the future ... it's been that way for decades, as has the sharing of music, its essential to the fabric." Is that how it is?

McBride: We love what we do. We're creative people with infinite imaginations. Litigation is destructive and has no place in the world.

p2pnet: Have any other production company people said they'd do the same as you?

McBride: Martin Mills from Beggar's in the UK.

p2pnet: What's your personal feeling about p2p, file sharing and the online music scene?

McBride: I think p2p should be a vibrant part of the on-line music scene, not bastardized.

p2pnet: Do you agree that $1 and up is a fair price for a download?

McBride: No higher than $1.

p2pnet: How do you think the labels should be dealing with Elisa and others like her?

McBride: The Labels should stop these actions.

p2pnet: Do you have a message for Mitch Bainwol and his colleagues?

McBride: Yes. Stop litigating. You're ruining my artists' futures.

(Tuesday 14th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7923

 

China defends Net censorship

p2p news / p2pnet: Online censorship in China doesn't much differ from that used in the west, the New York Times has a senior Chinese official responsible for managing the Internet, saying.

In fact, "China is basically in compliance with the international norm," Liu Zhengrong, who supervises Internet affairs for the information office of the Chinese State Council, states, according to the story.

By way of example, he cited powers the Bush administrations had gained under the Patriot Act to monitor Web sites and e-mail communications, "and the deployment of technology called Carnival by the FBI, which allows it to scrutinize huge volumes of e-mail traffic".

It was clear, "any country's legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information," he said. "We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front."

Objecting to "biased criticisms" of Chinese Internet controls that, "ignored similar restrictions imposed by foreign governments and private companies on their own Web sites," Liu also drew attention to Web sites run by the New York Times and Washington Post that, "reserve the right to delete or block content in reader discussion groups that editors determine to be illegal, harmful or in bad taste,' says the NYT.

"Major U.S. companies do this and it is regarded as normal," Liu said. "So why should China not be entitled to do so?"

Admitting China operates a, "technologically sophisticated firewall to protect the ruling Communist Party against what it treats as Web-based challenges from people inside China and abroad," Liu also claimed Chinese Net uses, "have free rein to discuss many politically sensitive topics and rejected charges that the police have arrested or prosecuted people for using the Internet to circulate views," says the NYT.

"Mr. Liu said there are now 111 million Chinese Web users and that in the past five years, China has expanded the bandwidth available to connect with overseas Web sites nearly 50-fold to 136,000 megabits per second, underscoring its strong commitment to allow its citizens to gather information and interact with people around the world," says the story.

And in a comment echoing another made by a Google spokeswoman, "The number of Web sites that mainland Chinese users cannot access amounts to a 'tiny percentage' of those available abroad," he said.

When it was revealed Google was censoring news from within mainland China by excluding sites, ""We ... considered the amount of information that would be omitted," said the company's Debbie Frost. "In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all."

Also See:
New York Times - In Rare Briefing, China Defends Internet Controls, February 14, 2006
omits a fractional number - Google: China search censor, January 25, 2006

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

If you're Chinese and you're looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate. It's a free DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

(Tuesday 14th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7921

 

The truth behind HDCP and video card support

2/14/2006 2:53:46 PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

The sad, pathetic tale of how the content industry is trying to make the PC as unfriendly as possible to high definition content has another chapter. In August I told you about the unfortunate decisions by the HD DVD and Blu-ray groups that would ultimately spell disaster for owners of existing LCD displays; without support for HDCP, you probably will not be able to view HD content from the studios on your PC (or TV, for that matter). The take-away was simple: don't buy a new display unless it supports HDCP.

Users worried about "future-proof" purchasing options also started to think about other components in their PC arsenal. Video cards, for example, would also need to support HDCP, and so many conscientious buyers thought that buying cards with support for HDCP would mean that their cards could carry them into the future. Unfortunately, they were wrong. For while many video cards—including offerings powered by ATI and NIVIDIA GPUs—advertise themselves as having support for HDCP, they don't necessarily support the next-generation of HD content from the studios. How can this be?

FiringSquad caused quite a ruckus when earlier this week they reported that current retail cards do not and future cards will not support HDCP. The good news is that this report is only half true. With regards to shipping cards, they are correct: no matter what a box's feature list may say, no video card supports HDCP fully at this time. Why? They have not been completely programmed. Until the specifications for the access control system are completely finished, implementing prottected HD support in the video card is impossible. For those of you who have been following the technological follies of the content owners that want to usher in this new era of HD content, then you know this is nothing new: AACS, the next-gen access control scheme that will be used by both HD DVD and Blu-ray, is still not finalized. That's right: with players and products being hyped as "just around the corner," the cornerstone of the roll-out still isn't finished. Still.

Video cards that support HDCP will have to be programmed with encryption keys while they are still in manufacturing. ATI confirmed to me that it will not be possible to patch or otherwise update cards without keys through software. Thus, any card already in the marketplace will never support HDCP, no matter what it says on the box.

The future will not be so bleak, however. ATI's PR manager, John Swinimer, told me that that retail cards will eventually be available once the technological specifications are finalized. Thus, reports that HDCP per se will kill the DIY market are exaggerations: within a year it should be possible to buy HDCP cards at the retailer of your choice.

Nevertheless, there is still plenty of ire reserved for the like of ATI and NVIDIA, both of which have done little to inform consumers that "HDCP support" means something other than, well, future-proof support at this time. Talking to anonymous sources close to the scene, the fiasco has resulted primarily from communications problems between the licensing authority, the access control spec people, and everyone else. In short, it sounds as though the next-gen security spec is a moving target. I must say that I find my source credible, if only because we've seen the exact same ambiguity from the Blu-ray camp when talking about mandatory managed copy.
A future so bright, you'll have to wear HDCP-complaint shades

We're in the midst of a a top-down, all-points-covered attempt to lock down every part of the HD viewing experience. In a nutshell, the content industry wants to see video encrypted end-to-end and passed only among approved devices that obey content access rules defined by the industry. This is not limited to the PC. Our in-depth primer on CableCARD revealed that the lock-down will also come to include the video streams from cable providers, too. In both cases, we see a disturbing trend: not only is the technology all about locking down the content, but the implementation is becoming locked down as well. For example, while CableCARD has been heralded as the great breakthrough that will allow for Home Theatre PC nirvana, the fact that CableLabs has to certify entire machine designs means that the do-it-yourself market is likely out of luck.

I suspect that the content industry may be in for a big, nasty surprise when all of this truly hits the public in the face. Never before has the rollout of the "next big thing" been so encumbered with built-in obsolescence, user-unfriendliness, and hypocrisy. Groans the world over will be heard when early adopters learn that their TVs won't play Blu-ray movies. Folks who bought computers recently will be disappointed when they learn that their hard-earned money couldn't buy them end-to-end support for HD content playback.

When you tell so many people that their electronics won't do what they should do—what they paid for them to do—many of them are not going to like it. The content industry is going to walk away from this with a certain amount of egg on their face and a fat stamp of "greed" burned into their foreheads. And a few will will realize the ultimate inanity of it all: that while the studio's HD content won't play on their TV or their computers, the HD content put out by the pirates will.

And that, my good friends, will be a fine example of irony.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060214-6177.html

 

"Trusted" storage specs nearly ready for your hard drive

2/14/2006 3:50:13 PM, by Jeremy Reimer

Microsoft co-founded the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) along with AMD, HP, IBM, Infineon, Intel and Sun Microsystems back in 2003, re-assembling and re-naming the group out of 1999's Trusted Computer Platform Alliance (TCPA). At the time, there was a mountain of coverage concerning Microsoft's proposed Palladium initiative, which was an enormous effort by the software company to change the very nature of the PC platform, from one where almost any sort of software was allowed to run unhindered to an environment where things could be more strictly controlled.

The reaction from many people was one of shell shock, and similarly to the evolution of that term, Palladium morphed into the more unpronounceable Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) and then simply Trusted Computing (TC). Along the way, some of the more grandiose plans for implementing Palladium fell by the wayside.

However, the TCG did not go away, and little pieces of the TC platform began slowly sneaking into computers. Intel received tremendous negative publicity when it shipped Pentium chips with unique identifier IDs (although nobody seemed to worry about unique MAC addresses in Ethernet cards) and was forced to leave the identifier disabled by default. Later, Intel released what was known as its "Fritz" chip, later renamed TPM (Trusted Platform Module). Many new computers, including some Lenovo ThinkPads and Apple's new Macbook Pros, come with TPM built into the chipset. TPM uses a hardware cryptography engine to generate and verify encryption keys (at least 2048 bits according to the latest Intel documentation). This forms the core of what is known as a "secure path" for the user's data, but other hardware needs to co-operate with the TPM in order to be fully trusted. This is where the idea of a "trusted hard drive" comes in.

The new hard drives will allow the creation of "trusted storage units," areas of the drive where only approved applications will be able to read and write data. Inside the hard drive, a trusted (and hidden) partition will store the keys and tables defining what rights the user or the host platform has to access the data. The drive itself does not have to be encrypted, but it can be. The hidden partition will not be stored in the disk structure itself, but rather on memory and logic chips that are traditionally used for low-level management functions. Essentially, the CPU tells the hard drive "yes, I have the key showing I am approved to access the protected area" and the hard drive replies "yes, and I am the hard drive that has the protected area you want to access."

"The work's been going on for a couple of years now," Willett said in an interview. "We're shooting for the end of March, possibly early April for an internal spec. It's all of the hard drive companies, the flash people—all the technical guys are involved. We're here today to let the rest of the world know what we're doing."

Possible uses of the technology include corporate authorization of secure areas on removable hard drives. Such authorization keys could then be revoked if the hard drive is lost, or stolen.

The debate over Trusted Computing is complex and often emotionally charged. Everyone agrees that privacy is a good thing, which is why encryption software has been made part of personal computer operating systems for some time now: users can already encrypt their file systems in Windows and OSX. The creation of TC takes the existing technology of encryption and makes it more pervasive and embedded in hardware. Rather than being simply about security, TC seems more about control. Intel insists that one of the fundamental precepts of TC is that it is "opt-in," meaning that users must activate the feature and can always choose to purchase computer hardware that comes without TPM (although Macintosh buyers may find that the latter is no longer possible). TC is also a haven for Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, and content providers may find the combination irresistible. Already, next generation high-definition video content is requiring a trusted HDCP-compliant monitor and a trusted video card. Is this all part of an inevitable transformation of the PC platform?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060214-6178.html

 

HAMACHI..........Simple and sweet! With Hamachi you can organize two or more computers with an internet connection into their own virtual network for direct secure communication. LAN over the Internet. Zero-configuration VPN. Secure peer-to-peer. Access computers remotely. Use Windows File Sharing. Play LAN games. Run private Web or FTP servers. Communicate directly. Stay connected.....(free).....GO THERE!


What it is
With Hamachi you can organize two or more computers with an Internet connection into their own virtual network for direct secure communication.

Hamachi is fast, secure and simple. It is also free.

What's in it for me
Think - LAN over the Internet.

Think - Zero-configuration VPN.

Think - Secure peer-to-peer.

Access computers remotely. Use Windows File Sharing. Play LAN games. Run private Web or FTP servers. Communicate directly. Stay connected.

Technology
Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture and NAT-to-NAT traversal capabilities.

Hamachi is the first application to mix seemingly unrelated networking technologies in one powerful package to deliver an unprecedented level of peer-to-peer connectivity. More ...

Security
Hamachi is secure. All Hamachi communications are encrypted and authenticated with industry-standard algorithms and protocols. Nobody will be able to see what two Hamachi peers are talking about. Not even us.

However what is equally important - Hamachi security architecture is completely open meaning that its detailed description is available for the review to anyone interested. More ...

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A special effort went into designing and polishing Hamachi user interface. The result is sleek, simple and intuitive, while still very much functional. Everything you need, nothing you don't.

Hamachi software contains no spyware, bannerware or any other -ware unrelated to its purpose. And it never will.
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RASTERBATOR.......... The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size.....(free).....GO THERE!
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/



If you don't like to queue, download the standalone version of The Rasterbator!
The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size.

The Rasterbator is very easy to use. You can either upload a file from your computer or use any file that is publicly available in the Internet. After you have cropped the image and selected a desired size, the rasterbated image will be sent to you as an easily printable pdf file.

Using The Rasterbator requires that you have Macromedia Flash Player 7 and Adobe Reader (or other pdf viewer).

The Rasterbator uses the excellent iText# library in pdf generation. We extend our gratitude to the development team!
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

 

Invention: Viper vision

* 18:16 14 February 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Barry Fox

For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world's weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas. His column, Invention, is exclusively online. Scroll down for a roundup of previous Invention articles.
Viper vision

Vipers "see" by sensing the infrared radiation emitted by the heat of their prey using sensitive organs on their head. Inventor John Stapleton of New Jersey, US, thinks same trick could enable the visually impaired to better sense the world around them.

Stapleton's device uses an ordinary digital camera light sensor to capture a scene which it converts into a mosaic of light spots. An array of infrared LEDs then transforms this mosaic into a pattern of heat points which can be projected onto a user's forehead.

As the human forehead is very sensitive to temperature change, Stapleton believes subjects will be able to translate the heat projection into a coarse image in their mind. The technique could also be used to relay Braille messages, he says.

The patent contains more theory that practical test results but says initial trials make the idea look hopeful, affordable and non-invasive, unlike retinal implant surgery.

Read the viper-vision patent here.
Anthrax hairbrush

Since the anthrax-by-mail attacks five years ago, post rooms have been using chemical swabs to check suspect packages. But workers taking swabs risk contamination and swabs can easily be ineffective, picking up other muck that can mask dangerous particles.

Now researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in California, US, have come up with a handheld tool, shaped like a hairbrush, to make mail checks quicker, safer and more accurate. At the top of the "brush" are a cluster of brass pins and four solid legs. The pins are very thin – around twice the width of a human hair – and slightly shorter than each of the legs.

An operator only has to hold the brush against a suspect surface and press a button to activate it. The legs then vibrate at 10 kilohertz, while the pins are electrically charged with 100 volts. The vibration should shake any anthrax particles free from the surface while the charge makes them to jump up and stick to the pin tips.

The brush can then be placed into a docking station, switched off and shaken. Any attached particles should fall down onto a test bed where they can be analysed carefully.

Read the anthrax-detector patent here.
Feel the force

Touch-sensitive screens are now commonplace, on phones, PDAs, GPS devices and even remote controls. They let you scroll through text or over a map by simply touching the screen and dragging your finger across it.

But doing much more usually involves regular icons, which can be fiddly. Philips has patented an idea that promises to solve this problem, by making the screen pressure-sensitive as well as touch-sensitive. The idea is to use sensors to register any increase in fluid or gas pressure at particular points beneath a screen's surface.

Pressing harder on a map could increase the scale to reveal more detail. Increasing the pressure on a display feature could make it grow in size for more accurate finger control. And, pressing forcefully on the name of a TV programme could reveal further information about the show. Philips believes it should also make devices easier to operate with just one hand.

Read the force-sensitive screen patent here.

Read previous Invention columns:

Exploding ink, the Moody media player, the Spy-diver killer, preventing in-flight interference, the inkjet-printer pen, sonic watermarks, the McDownload, Hot-air plane, Landmine arrows, Soldiers obeying odours, Coffee beer, wall-beating bugging, Eyeball electronics, phone jolts, Personal crash alarm, Talking tooth, Shark shocker, Midnight call-foiler, Burning bullets, A music lover's dream, Magic wand for gamers, The phantom car, Phone-bomb hijacking, Shocking airport scans, Old tyres to printer ink and Eye-tracking displays.
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New Test Helps Predict Your Risk of Death

Associated Press

February 14, 2006 06:31:32 PM PST

It sounds like a perfect parlor game for baby boomers suddenly confronting their own mortality: What are your chances of dying within four years? Researchers have come up with 12 risk factors to try to answer that for people over age 50.

This is one game where you want a low score. Zero to 5 points says your risk of dying in four years is less than 4 percent. With 14 points, your risk rises to 64 percent.

Just being male gives you 2 points. So does having diabetes, being a smoker, and getting pooped trying to walk several blocks.

Points accrue with each four-year increment after age 60.

The test doesn't ask what you eat, but it does ask if you can push a living room chair across the floor.

The quiz is designed "to try to help doctors and families get a firmer sense for what the future may hold," to help plan health care accordingly, says lead author Dr. Sei Lee, a geriatrics researcher at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who helped develop it.

"We know that patients and families want more prognostic information from doctors," Lee said. "It's a very natural human question of, 'What's going to happen to me?' We also know that doctors are very cautious about giving prognostic information because they don't want to be wrong."

This test is roughly 81 percent accurate and can give older people a reasonable idea of their survival chances, Lee and his colleagues say.

Of course, it isn't foolproof. Other experts note it ignores family history and it's much less meaningful for those at the young end of the spectrum.

The researchers even warn, Don't try this at home, saying a doctor can help you put things into perspective.

"Even if somebody looks at their numbers and finds they have a 60 percent risk of death, there could be other mitigating factors," said co-author and VA researcher Dr. Kenneth Covinsky.

There are things you can do to improve your chances, he notes, such as quitting smoking or taking up exercise.

The test is based on data involving 11,701 Americans over 50 who took part in a national health survey in 1998. Funded by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, the researchers analyzed participants' outcomes during a four-year follow-up. They based their death-risk survey on the health characteristics that seemed to predict death within four years.

Their report appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Donald Jurivich, geriatrics chief at the University of Illinois at Chicago, took the test and got a nice low score. Jurivich is 52. He said he'd feel better about his score if both his parents hadn't died prematurely.

He praised the survey for measuring people's ability to function — such as being able to move a piece of furniture or keep track of expenses — signs that can be more telling than other health factors.

Willie Hood Jr., 74, a patient of Jurivich's, pooh-poohed the test "because I don't know when I'm going to die and nobody else" does either.

"My grandmother, they said she wouldn't last the night away, she lived three more years," Hood said.

Dr. George Lange, a 57-year-old internist at Columbia-St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, faulted the test for not measuring blood pressure or cholesterol. Lange got a healthy low score on the test, too, but he's overweight. He was surprised he didn't get points for that.

In fact, that's one of the most puzzling aspects of the test. People with a body-mass index of less than 25 — which includes normal weight people — get a point while those who are overweight aren't penalized.

Covinsky, one of the test designers, said that BMI measurement includes underweight people — those who have lost weight because of illness, a risk factor for the elderly.

As to obesity, Lee noted there are more points for diabetes and for difficulty walking several blocks — both associated with excess weight.

The researchers think their mortality predictor might be a useful tool in the "pay for performance" trend that is part of the nation's health care system. Medicare and other insurers are increasingly basing reimbursement rates on how patients fare, said Covinsky.

"One health plan can look better just by cherry-picking health care patients" and accepting only the most robust patients, Covinsky said. This test could give a more accurate assessment of health plans, he said, so that "you can actually see which ones are taking sicker patients and compare that" when measuring performance.

___

On the Net:

JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org

 

privacy1 Privacy and anonymity on the Internet

Privacy and anonymity
privacy1 Privacy and anonymity on the Internet are as important as they are difficult to achieve. Here are some of the the current issues we face, along with a few suggestions on how to be more anonymous. Online privacy issues are in the news every week now. This is good for us, because when it's newsworthy and notable it means people still care about the privacy of their personal information in some fundamental and important way. Privacy on the Internet (or rather, a lack thereof) has been with us for ages, but as technology converges we are all forced to make some important new choices about what we are willing to disclose. Let's start with a few examples.

Privacy and anonymity
Kelly Martin, 2006-02-14

Privacy and anonymity on the Internet are as important as they are difficult to achieve. Here are some of the the current issues we face, along with a few suggestions on how to be more anonymous.
Online privacy issues are in the news every week now. This is good for us, because when it's newsworthy and notable it means people still care about the privacy of their personal information in some fundamental and important way. Privacy on the Internet (or rather, a lack thereof) has been with us for ages, but as technology converges we are all forced to make some important new choices about what we are willing to disclose. Let's start with a few examples.

Recent events have found the Electronic Freedom Foundation warning users not to use Google Desktop's new "search across computers" option, which stores a user's indexed data on Google servers for up to 30 days. It's making headlines, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. In recent weeks we've also heard about government attempts to subpoena information from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Perhaps a subpoena for all the files indexed on your Google Desktop is not that far away. Then there are the wiretaps in the U.S. by those three-letter agencies, which we're just hearing about now. First reported by the New York Times, these were wiretaps on U.S. citizens that were sometimes done without requiring court approval at all. I don't know about you, but even when I'm not doing something wrong (which is most of the time), I get very nervous when I hear about privacy issues popping up in this way.

This is on top of all the old news that barely makes headlines anymore: botnet Trojans controlling access to your computer's data and stealing your identity; rampant spyware infections that have been with us for years and are sometimes quite nasty; the fact that only about a third of the public even know what spyware is; and finally, there's even the occasional military breach that exposes the personal information of people who probably value their privacy very much.

Where are we headed with online privacy? Well, perhaps you should publish your darkets secrets in a public blog right now and get it over with. The fact is, we haven't had much, or any, privacy online in quite a while. In the search for privacy, what do we have to do to become anonymous on the Internet?

Privacy starts with you

Many people, and security people in particular, value their privacy. We don't like to be tracked and followed. Most of the time this desire does not stem from any malicious intent, but rather from the knowledge of what others who are more malicious than us can do with this information. Our day starts at the office: nothing is private on your office computer, and most people know this already. It is a corporate asset, a tool to conduct business that can (and perhaps, should) be searched at any time. Fine, let's move on to the home computer then. At home one can do "other" things with his computer besides just work.

Most people start with their local system - clearing out their Web browser cache, recent URL lists and more with tools of yesteryear like TweakUI. But as broadband connections have become inexpensive and pervasive, we are increasingly being tracked by our IP addresses at home. If you have high speed Internet at home, odds are your IP address is relatively static now - cable and DSL modems are often assigned the same IP address for up to a year. Website owners can track your repeat visits much more easily - what time you arrived, how long you stayed, and how often you come back. Nothing new here. Many of us disable cookies in our browsers too, but that semi-static IP address at home can have just as big an impact on your privacy as cookies do.

Often the most anonymous place to surf the web is still with a laptop at a coffee shop with free WiFi, or at an Internet cafe. But one day even these places will require a fingerprint for authentication before you're granted access, and you'll have to worry about your fingerprints too. For now however, we have other concerns.

Big name privacy

The big names in the Internet world already know quite a bit about us. When Google bought Dejanews and spawned Google Groups, they bought an archive of almost everything written on the Usenet since the very early days. The Internet Archive keeps old copies of your blog or webpage, so even things you've written about and deleted are still there. Google Mail had to deal with all sorts of privacy issues when it first appeared, because they (almost) never delete any of your email. And now we have the venerable Google Desktop - which, when shared between computers, has your data stored on Google servers for 30 days. Data that might subpoenaed by someone without your knowledge, a particularly dire fact for those of us who don't even live in the U.S.

I don't mean to be so hard on Google. They're just an easy target, because they're the new juggernaut. What about Yahoo and MSN? Have you read their respective privacy policy (Yahoo! / MSN) and terms of service (Yahoo! / MSN)? Do you trust them with your data? I for one am glad that I don't live in China. Google's corporate mantra of "do no evil" might be the most reassuring of the three, but this data can still be subpoenaed without your knowledge.

Meanwhile, the trend on the desktop is to index all your local data into a fast Internet-style search. Apple's Spotlight on OS X and the Google Desktop have done this for some time; by the end of the year your new Windows Vista system will be able to index all your documents and data too. But imagine when a system like this becomes infected with a Trojan - and that index becomes an easy source for a hacker to search for keywords like "tax," or "credit," or "bank." While it's true the data was always there, it's also becoming more accessible.

Little name privacy

There are all sorts of things we can do to take back our privacy and in doing so, become more anonymous. Some are cumbersome and difficult to do; others are not. For the purpose of this column I'll focus primarily on Web access and surfing, because this seems to interest people the most. On the Web, there are always logs and those logs point back to your IP address.

I've used SSH port forwarding for years to divert my IP address to somewhere else, but it doesn't add any additional privacy because we (presumably) own the machine we're forwarding to, and therefore a quick lookup of the IP address come back to us. Anonymous Web and SOCKS proxies are commonplace, but they are often slow, unreliable, and sporadic. Plus, you must assume that the freely available ones are all logging everything, regardless of what you read, and that the commercial ones that swear they'll never sell your data may or may not be trustworthy - perhaps, but remember that your web surfing history may still be requested by someone tracking you (and thereby have this date given out, without your knowledge) once again.

Using proxies on compromised machines masks your IP address, but it's entirely illegal. If this is what you're using, you deserve to be caught. Just remember that the compromised machine might very well be a honeypot, tracking you back to your source IP.

If broadband access in the home keeps your IP address semi-static, what about using dialup? We can have pre-paid dialup Internet access via prepaid cards. I see ads for them all over the subway where I live, and for a moment I thought they might give me some anonyomity. Not a chance. You're still traced back to the CallerID in your home or hotel room, though admittedly every time you connect you'll have a new IP. That might been good enough for most of us.

You could take this one step further and setup your own PBX like the free Asterix PBX to mask your CallerID, and then use the prepaid Internet card. While it's entertaining to imagine people going to just extremely, that all seems a little excessive (and non-trivial) to me.

And then there are the liveCDs that help provide some form of anonymity. My favorite today is the Anonym.OS liveCD introduced at SchmooCom recently. Based on the secure-by-default OpenBSD operating system, it goes to the extent of randomizing your (wired or wireless) MAC address on boot, configures Tor onion routing, provides a simple graphical interface, and more. It's a nice step in the right direction. Including these features on a liveCD provides a high level of anonymity and it's a welcome relief. I've installed Tor on my home system as well, but find it rather intrusive - having a liveCD helps avoid that issue. Either way, with Tor your apparent public IP address on a website will appear to keep changing. One thing puzzled me about Anonym.OS, though: I'm curious why a simple tool like netstat, normally included in a base install of OpenBSD, aren't installed. I still like to know what's going on whenever I can.

I think the final frontier is still wireless. If you need a cheap, easy-to-borrow IP address that isn't yours (but is entirely legitimate), there is always one available inside a WiFi coffee shop, an Internet cafe, or your local public library. Surf with a cappuccino, along with everyone else. Socialize a bit. Your IP address is a cup of beans. When combined with a system like Anonym.OS, these are good and mostly anonymous options for most people.

What's my IP?

Often an IP address is the only piece of information available to a webmaster to track your visits - assuming you've disabled cookies in your browser and don't mind SessionIDs. Web logs can be subpoenaed too. Did you download Nmap 4.01 recently? My understanding is that Fyodor has had an effective log retention policy for when the feds come knocking, but what about everyone else? Do you use Nessus? Ethereal? Metasploit? Have you tried the latest (and excellent) Back Track pen-test liveCD? These are common tools used for legitimate purposes. Most of us couldn't care less that these downloads are tracked back to our IP. But it's still a useful excercise to go through: finding out how easy it is to map your IP address to an approximate physical location.

Most of us don't have malicious intent, so what about tracking the attackers who do? In the news, the physical location of an IP address used to attack a service is often used to attribute blame to certain country or region of the world. I suspect these addresses are rarely the real origin of the attack, but it's a start. There are dozens of "show my IP" services out there already to find out your public IP address while you're behind a proxy. Need more information? Sometimes a simple WHOIS or dig lookup doesn't suffice. To help find an approximate physical location there's the free IP address locator and the IP-to-country database - both useful tools. Or you can find IP blocks listed by country of origin, in CIDR format if you prefer. The latter is useful if you run web services and receive repeated attacks from countries that don't need access to those services.

As with anything, all these tools can be used for good or evil. "Do no evil," is a mantra that most of us should agree with. I'm happy it was popularized by Google. Sometimes we simply desire to be anonymous for no other reason than to be anonymous, and so that others can't track us. No malicious intent at all. But finding privacy on the Internet is not always so easy to do.

Making a choice

Most of us in IT have a certain sense of paranoia about privacy and security - often with good reason. During my own exercise to find out how hard it is to become anonymous, I've come up with a rather simple conclusion: it's all about deciding what amount of privacy and personal information I am willing to give up, in exchange for the goods and services I'm looking to have. As for me, I think I'll keep visiting public WiFi hotspots and use those liveCDs for some time to come.

Kelly Martin has been working with networks and security since 1986, and he's editor for SecurityFocus, Symantec's online magazine.
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/386?ref=rss

 

New guide to staying safe online launched
idtheft2 BT has published a ten-point guide to help prevent internet users becoming victims of online identity theft.


The guide appears in an internet security report published today, written in conjunction with government, Get Safe Online, Lloyds TSB, Metropolitan Police and Yahoo....Ray Stanton, head of security at BT Global Services, said: “Online identity fraud is a growing and, until now, a silent part of fraud in the UK, which accounted for £1.7 billion last year, £35 per adult per year.


New guide to staying safe online launched
February 15, 2006
Quentin Reade

Computer BT has published a ten-point guide to help prevent internet users becoming victims of online identity theft.


The guide appears in an internet security report published today, written in conjunction with government, Get Safe Online, Lloyds TSB, Metropolitan Police and Yahoo.


The report found that 8 per cent of UK PC users have fallen victim to online fraud and 15 per cent know someone who has been targeted by an internet criminal.


However, the report shows that customers are still not taking appropriate, available steps to protect themselves - one in ten people questioned, for example, indicated that they would have no qualms about giving their credit card details to an unidentified third party.


Ray Stanton, head of security at BT Global Services, said: “Online identity fraud is a growing and, until now, a silent part of fraud in the UK, which accounted for £1.7 billion last year - £35 per adult per year.

“We want to make sure that people are aware of the threat and are protecting themselves online, so they can enjoy the benefits of the internet.”


Ten point guide to protect your online identity


1. Keep your wits about you at all times
Understand the risks and operate on the internet in the same way as you do in the offline world, with caution and appropriate scepticism. But do not be frightened; with simply precautions it is safe to use online banking and traders.


2. Question why a website is asking for information about you?
Think about whether it is somewhere or someone you want to give your details to. Only use secure web sites and also use common sense when it comes to phishing emails and web sites


3. Never give any online security details to anyone unless it is completely necessary.
Be particularly cautious if you share your accommodation with other people. Consider pass-wording your computer to avoid unnecessary access.


4. Look after your password
Change your passwords regularly and avoid standard passwords like a family member's names or dictionary words. When creating a password use a combination of letters, numbers and even special characters, like an exclamation mark when possible. This will make your password 'strong'. Do not use the same password for every secure site you are registered with.


5. Never click on links in emails
Always type the web site (www) address for banks, financial institutions and retail sites into the browser address line or store them using the browser's favourites function.


6. Keep up-to-date
Keep your security software (anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware and firewall), operating system and applications such as Microsoft Office up-to-date at all times.


7. Remove the spies
Check all files on every computer that is connected to the internet at least once a week using anti-spyware and adware applications.


8. Keep your connection secure
Make sure everyone who uses the computer understands the precautions they need to take when online. Do not leave your broadband live unnecessarily and if you use a wireless modem ensure you set it to use at least 128-bit encryption if you are registered for online banking.


9. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is
Don't open emails or go to sites that claim you have won a prize, unless you've entered a specific competition. If an email looks suspicious and is unsolicited delete it and don't open it.


10. Know where to go for help should you be a victim of online identity theft
There are wide range of organisations and groups that people can turn to for advice should they be the victim of online identity theft. These include the police, industry bodies and suppliers of online services.


http://www.btplc.com/onlineidtheft/onlineidtheft.pdf

http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/80488.html?aff=rss

 

A Crawler based Study of Spyware on the Web

bino Malicious spyware poses a significant threat to desktop security and integrity. This paper examines that threat from an Internet perspective. Using a crawler, we performed a large scale, longitudinal study of the Web, sampling both executables and conventional Web pages for malicious objects. Our results show the extent of spyware content.

For example, in a May 2005 crawl of 18 million URLs, we found spyware in 13.4% of the 21,200 executables we identified. At the same time, we found scripted "drive-by download" attacks in 5.9% of the Web pages we processed. Our analysis quantifies the density of spyware, the types of of threats, and the most dangerous Web zones in which spyware is likely to be encountered.

We also show the frequency with which specific spyware programs were found in the content we crawled. Finally, we measured changes in the density of spyware over time; e.g., our October 2005 crawl saw a substantial reduction in the presence of drive-by download attacks, compared with those we detected in May.

PDF Download - cs.washington.edu
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gribble/papers/spycrawler.pdf

 

Free speech in China,

p2p news / p2pnet: Today is the day Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco face a US congressional human-rights hearing to explain why they're actively cooperating with China to help keep news and information from the country's citizens.

The four companies claim it’s simple: follow China's dictates or be banned from doing business there, in the process robbing the population of Net services, albeit it limited ones.

"In a joint statement issued last month, Microsoft and Yahoo said that they lacked the leverage on their own to influence world governments," says the BBC.

And yet the entertainment and software cartels are aggressively, and successfully, forcing China to follow distinctly non-party lines when it comes to so-called "copyright crime".

Motion Picture Association of America boss Dan Glickman is an old friend. He regularly visits China where Hollywood has set up a number of joint "operations," with the sole purpose of keeping the movie studios fat and happy.

And in Hong Kong, Hollywood star turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenneger recently staged a blatant Hollywood-inspired dog-and-pony show with martial arts comedian Jackie Chan.

But things are apparently different when it comes to free speech.

"Superficially, members of China's Internet community are free to search for whatever they want. But when using the Google search engine, they will be unable to find information on certain topics," says an editorial in the Tapei Times. "You are free to set up a Web log (blog) and air your opinions, but you may well find that your blog is suddenly and inexplicably closed down. Those who assume that their Internet presence is anonymous may suddenly discover records of their transactions across the Internet used as evidence against them. On the Internet, the Chinese government is an omnipresent Big Brother, and in a cyberspace without borders, it has set up a "cyber curtain."

"That China has been able to create this 'cyber curtain' is not a reflection of its extensive power, but due rather to the connivance of the world's major Internet companies, who have provided the means for China to keep a tight rein on freedom of speech on the Internet. Google openly expressed its willingness to cooperate with the Chinese government, and Google staff have secretly connived with Chinese officials to ensure that certain search terms, which the government finds objectionable, will not turn up any results. Last year, Internet giant Yahoo provided information that helped the Chinese government to sentence "dissidents" Shi Tao (師&#28644 and Li Zhi (李&#24535 to lengthy prison terms. Microsoft also shut down a popular Chinese-language blog that has published content unacceptable to the Chinese authorities.

"These leading Internet companies claim to espouse freedom and openness yet, in order to win access to the China market, they have seen fit to bow to pressure from Beijing. In doing so, they have sold out fundamental values. Human-rights organizations, Reporters without Borders and the international media, which all uphold freedom of speech, have harshly criticized the behavior of these firms.

"The struggle between money and values that these companies have entered into is a terrible one. The world's most popular Internet portal site, Yahoo, has stated that it is 'deeply concerned' by some governments' efforts to control access to the Web, and hopes that the 'cyber curtain' can be torn down.

"But the company is not so naive as to believe that any company, whatever its size or share price, can resist pressure applied by the Chinese government. That's why the firm has announced that it will cooperate with Internet, media and communications companies, and the US government, to resist efforts by the Chinese government to monitor Internet traffic. This is a late awakening, but it is certainly better than staying asleep.

"This battle against the pernicious affects of the cyber curtain will be fought on the keyboards and in the minds of every free individual. Every free person should write to the media and to their government to support freedom of speech; every person, organization and nation should express repugnance at China's violation of human rights, and call for the ripping down of China's 'cyber curtain'."

But is it all merely a question of time? Will China eventually let its people go?

"Even as China chills debate, filters out dissenting views and harasses or imprisons critics, many observers believe it eventually will lose the information battle," says the Los Angeles Times.

"I don't think they are winning because deep in Chinese people's hearts, they don't agree or obey," it quotes Pu Zhiqiang, a Beijing lawyer and free-speech advocate, as saying.

"Ultimately, the authorities can't win with these sorts of tactics."

Also See:
BBC - Net firms face grilling on China, February 15, 2006
Tapei Times - China's censorship affects us all, February 15, 2006
Los Angeles Times - Battle Heats Up Over Chinese Censorship, February 15, 2006

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

If you're Chinese and you're looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate. It's a free DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

(Wednesday 15th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7925

 

China 'piracy' clamp-down

p2p news / p2pnet: "About 90 percent of software used in China is pirated, according to researcher IDC and the Business Software Alliance, a trade group funded by Microsoft Corp," says Bloomberg News, going on:

"DVD copies of Hollywood movies sell openly on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai for as little as $1 apiece."

Britain’s The Economist has questioned the veracity of both the BSA and IDC when it comes to statistics involving "piracy".

"It sounds too bad to be true," it said in BSA or just BS, "but, then, it might not be true.

"The association's figures rely on sample data that may not be representative, assumptions about the average amount of software on PCs and, for some countries, guesses rather than hard data," it says. "Moreover, the figures are presented in an exaggerated way by the BSA and International Data Corporation (IDC), a research firm that conducts the study. They dubiously presume that each piece of software pirated equals a direct loss of revenue to software firms.

“To derive its piracy rate, IDC estimates the average amount of software that is installed on a PC per country, using data from surveys, interviews and other studies. That figure is then reduced by the known quantity of software sold per country-a calculation in which IDC specialises. The result: a (supposed) amount of piracy per country. Multiplying that figure by the revenue from legitimate sales thus yields the retail value of the unpaid-for software. This, IDC and BSA claim, equals the amount of lost revenue.”

Meanwhile, China has closed 76 Web sites and arrested 18 people, "for providing downloads of Hollywood movies, music and other illegal content, responding to pressure from the U.S. and Europe [read Hollywood] for enhanced protection of intellectual property," says Bloomberg.

It has the US movie, publishing, software and recording industries saying illegal reproduction of their goods in China caused losses of $2.4 billion last year and, "The Bush administration is considering complaining to the World Trade Organization, U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman said yesterday," it states.

Would that America's top administrators, Shotgun Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, would exert the same kind of pressure on US companies that support censorship in China.

Also See:
Bloomberg News - China Shuts 76 Web Sites, Arrests 18 in Online Piracy Crackdown, February 15, 2006
BSA or just BS - New student file sharing horror, August 22, 2005

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

If you're Chinese and you're looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate. It's a free DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

.

(Wednesday 15th February 2006)
[ POST A COMMENT TO THIS STORY ]
http://p2pnet.net/story/7927

 

Hollywood vs.Your PC: Round 2

Legal options in digital entertainment are growing. But they come with restrictions that can hobble your ability to enjoy the content you've paid for--and even threaten your control over your system.

Dan Tynan
From the March 2006 issue of PC World magazine
Posted Tuesday, January 31, 2006

« Previous Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next »

As we move to a world where all entertainment is delivered digitally, the battle over copyright protection is turning into a full-blown war. And consumer rights may end up being the biggest casualty as media companies hunker down and try to redefine what users can and can't do with the content they've paid for and the hardware they own.

From Apple's iTunes and Real Networks' Rhapsody music network to movie rental sites like CinemaNow and Starz' Vongo, legitimate digital media services are exploding. But each additional option brings a new battle, new restrictions, and even new dangers for unsuspecting users. Copy protection included in Sony BMG audio CDs allowed virus writers to co-opt the system and sneak onto users' PCs. Satellite and HD Radio, which promise higher-quality audio and more content, may become difficult for listeners to record if the music industry has its way. And TV fans are finding that cable stations are limiting their ability to time-shift shows; pending federal legislation may curtail their rights even more.


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Worse, since we last looked at this battle in 2002, technology firms, which once struck a balance between the rights of content owners and the rights of users, have sided more and more with Hollywood as they strive to secure the content they believe will help sell their products.

We'll look at the multiple fronts of the digital wars--from file sharing to music to TV--and give you a hint of what's next.

* Copyrights and Wrongs
* Musical Discord
* Digital TV Behind Gates
* Vista Blurs High-Def
* Playing Fair
* Digital Media Faq


Next Page: Copyrights and Wrongs

Copyrights and Wrongs

Peer-to-peer file sharing remains the bogeyman, driving entertainment companies toward ever-increasing control over content. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court decision holding Grokster liable for the actions of its copyright-defying users, and despite more than 13,000 lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, file swapping is still growing. According to P-to-P research site Big Champagne, some 6.5 million U.S. users share files at any one time--up more than 30 percent from the year before.


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Media companies have responded in two ways. Using their influence in Washington, D.C., they've pushed for laws friendlier to the rights of content owners. At the same time, Hollywood has threatened to withhold access to its libraries unless electronics manufacturers build devices with sufficient copy protection.

This is not the way the copyright process was supposed to work, according to Jessica Litman, author of Digital Copyright (Prometheus Books, 2001).

"Copyright law was intended to protect reading, viewing, and listening as much as creating and distributing," says Litman, a professor of copyright law at Wayne State University Law School. "Now it takes what people previously saw as their rights and treats them as loopholes the copyright owners will close, if they can."

Take books, for example. You can read a book anywhere you want, skip chapters at will, give the book away or sell it, quote portions of it on your blog, or scan it into your PC and print out a copy. And when the book eventually becomes part of the public domain, you can do anything you please with it--including printing copies and selling them at a profit.

Buy an electronic book, however, and your rights start to wither. You're now subject to the terms of an end-user license agreement. Depending on the EULA, you may be able to read the book on only a limited number of machines (usually just one), and you probably won't be allowed to sell it, lend it, or make backup copies.

As you move up the content spectrum to digital music, movies, radio, and TV, the rules can be just as restrictive.

"[Hollywood's] model is to make experiencing copyrighted material--reading a book, listening to music, or watching a movie--legally like going to a movie theater," Litman says. They want you to buy a ticket, watch ads, eat only their food, leave when they want you to, and pay for it all again each time you do it, she says.

Brad Hunt, senior vice president and chief technology officer for the MPAA, disagrees, arguing that content owners are seeking ways to offer users more options than they have with today's media. "Instead of saying 'here's the movie locked to a piece of plastic, take it or leave it,' content owners may make other rights available to you to do more with it," he explains.

Next Page: Musical Discord

Musical Discord

The primary battleground for digital content has long been music. To combat widespread file swapping, the record industry has attempted both copy protection for CDs--most notoriously in the form of Sony BMG's XCP rootkit (see "Copy Controls: How Far Will They Go?" for more)--and digital rights management schemes for online music. Each has made life more difficult for legal purchasers of music.


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Usually, copy-protected CDs don't prevent you from making copies so much as they limit how many copies you can make and where you can make them. If you played a protected Sony CD on your PC, for example, you could rip three copies of the CD to your hard drive. If you then put this music into your Windows Media Player library, you could burn three other CDs. But Sony's XCP scheme prevented iPod fans from easily copying MP3s from the CD to their music libraries, though a workaround was available upon request.

Online music rules are even more complex. You can play music purchased from iTunes on up to five systems, for example, but if you want to add a sixth, you have to log on to one of the other machines and "de-authorize" it. You can burn a playlist to a CD, but no more than seven times. You can share tunes across five computers on a local network, but the other users can only listen to the music. Still more restrictive are the rules for iTunes' video downloads--there's no sharing at all.

Yet as DRM schemes go, iTunes' FairPlay system is fairly transparent, Jupiter senior analyst Joe Wilcox notes. "People know it's there only if they try to violate it," he says, adding that with Windows DRM, he's had problems with both legit music playback and the purchasing process.

Moreover, incompatible DRM schemes can lock users into a particular technology. If you purchase your music from iTunes, realistically you have two options: to buy iPods for the rest of your life--since iTunes music won't play on other players--or to ditch your library and start over. Players that support Windows Media Audio DRM are more plentiful, but similar restrictions apply to them.

Later this year, new DRM technologies may challenge the hegemony of FairPlay and WMA, says Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies and editor of DRMwatch in New York. One approach, the Marlin DRM scheme, is based on personal identity: It would let you access content on a variety of portable devices according to who you are, not what device you're using. Another DRM platform, code-named Coral, would allow service providers to convert content from one DRM format to another, making it playable on a wider variety of devices. Both schemes are backed by two closely allied consortia whose members include 20th Century Fox, Hewlett-Packard, Philips, and Sony.

Navio, a small Silicon Valley startup, is taking yet another tack. Instead of buying digital files, users, in Navio's scheme, buy the rights to enjoy them. So when a user is at work but wants to hear a song that he downloaded at home, he can log in to Navio, which confirms that he has rights to the song and allows him to download or stream the song to a new device. Files can still use DRM technology to prevent unfettered file swapping, while consumers get many of the same freedoms they've grown used to with analog content.

Navio CEO Stefan Roever, whose company seeks to change purchasers of digital media into buyers of the rights to enjoy that media in myriad devices."If the rights are properly defined and ubiquitous, they'll become more valuable to consumers than the actual files," says Navio CEO Stefan Roever. Then only people with no money and lots of time will fool around with file sharing, he adds.

Navio already enforces media rights for the Fox Sports and Fox Music Web sites, and at press time it was preparing to announce a deal with a major record label.

Meanwhile, another front is opening in the war over digital music: The RIAA is pushing for legislation that would prohibit listeners from recording or sharing individual songs broadcast via new digital radio services unless they paid a fee for each song. Nevertheless, the group favors being able to record digital radio in blocks of 30 minutes or longer.

"We support time-shifting," says RIAA spokesperson Jenni Engebretsen, but not "cherry-picking individual songs and storing them in a library on an MP3 player in a manner that substitutes for a sale."

According to Public Knowledge, a consumer rights group based in Washington, D.C., such rules would extinguish fair-use rights that listeners have enjoyed in the past--there are no such restrictions on the right to record personal copies of songs from traditional radio broadcasts.

Next Page: Digital TV Behind Gates

Digital TV Behind Gates

The battle over rights in the digital TV arena is already well under way. By March 1, 2007, according to Federal Communications Commission rules, all new TV devices (tuners, VCRs, DVRs, and set-top boxes) for sale in the United States must be capable of receiving digital TV signals. For the past few years, media conglomerates have been scrambling to keep their expensively produced, highly profitable digital content from drifting all over the Net. But the protections they've devised may keep viewers from doing things they are accustomed to doing--such as recording, time-shifting, and sharing shows.


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In 2003, the FCC ruled that over-the-air digital TV shows must carry an 8-bit "flag" that broadcasters could use to limit how viewers recorded such programs; all TV gear would have had to recognize this flag. But last May, a federal court struck down the broadcast flag, ruling that the FCC had exceeded its authority. Flag supporters have tried to persuade Congress to authorize the flag; that has yet to happen.

The MPAA's Hunt says such controls are necessary. "If content owners have no assurance there will be some form of protection from redistributing digital TV, that high-value content normally provided to broadcasters would move into the pay-TV world," he says. That could mean networks like ABC and NBC might no longer get the rights to show Star Wars or Harry Potter movies, for example.

Meanwhile, TiVo owners recently got a taste of what life under such a flag might be like. Last September the popular DVR service changed how it responded to the Macrovision copy protection built into pay-per-view and video-on-demand content. For the first time, content owners could prevent viewers from recording PPV and VOD shows on a DVR. They could also require deletion of shows from the recorder after a certain period. TiVo already prevented viewers from burning protected content to DVDs or using the TiVoToGo service to transfer it to a PC.

Fred von Lohman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, says that this change is a classic case of content owners taking away features consumers have paid for.

"Two years ago the TiVo you bought did one thing, and now suddenly it does something different," he says. "Despite the fact we're buying more media than ever before, products are treating us more and more like pirates each day."

But TiVo VP of product marketing Jim Denney says the changes have had little impact on the vast majority of TiVo users.

More restrictions may be on the way for home recording. At press time, sponsors had just introduced the Digital Content Security Act (HR 4569) in the House. This bill would close the "analog hole" by requiring devices that allow users to make digital copies from analog sources to employ copy protection technology. If the analog hole were closed, protected shows could carry signals that prevented them from being copied by any device at all, or could limit copies and prohibit them from being digitally redistributed, or could restrict viewers' time-shifting abilities to within 90 minutes after a broadcast.

Next-generation home recording via high-capacity blue-laser DVD technology promises a little more freedom but also additional restrictions. Both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs (the two major blue-laser DVD formats) will carry a digital watermark that will let players identify illegally copied discs and prevent playback of the content. Backers of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats have announced their support for "mandatory managed copies," which will allow home users to make a single copy of their high-definition discs and share them across a home network--something that consumers can't legally do with today's commercial DVDs.

Next Page: Vista Blurs High-Def

Vista Blurs High-Def

If microsoft has its way, your digital entertainment options will be served via a PC in your living room. To fully enjoy the benefits of digital content, however, you may have to buy new hardware.


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When Windows Vista appears later this year, it will allow playback of HD video--but it may do so only if your monitor or TV supports Intel's High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection scheme. Without a DVI or HDMI port that handles HDCP, your aging 42-inch plasma set could display the film at lower DVD-quality resolution, or not play it at all (for details, see "Most Monitors Won't Play HD Video,"). The same will likely be true of Blu-ray and HD DVD recorders, though final specs of the content protection scheme for those two formats were not available at press time.

The Vista DRM scheme puts playback decisions in the hands of content providers. But showing the content at a lower resolution is more likely than shutting it off, says Marcus Matthias, a product manager in Microsoft's Digital Media Division. "Frankly, we'd have zero interest in doing all this if it wasn't something [that content owners that Microsoft partners with] were interested in having," he admits.

Although HDTVs sold today typically support digital copy protection via their HDMI ports, many older models do not. According to Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research for market research firm iSuppli in San Jose, California, the percentage of HDCP-compatible computer monitors was "in the low single digits" when she surveyed the market in 2005.

HDCP will make it more difficult for consumers to share HD content--and will keep them from making legal "fair use" copies--by preventing the capture of HD programs by unlicensed devices. But like most DRM schemes, it's unlikely to stop determined pirates. In 2001 researchers at Carnegie Mellon University uncovered several flaws in the scheme, long before it was developed for commercial purposes. German electronics company Spatz is already selling devices that it claims convert HDCP signals for non-HDCP displays.

Olin Sibert, a longtime DRM developer, believes that Vista's DRM, while technologically impressive, is unlikely to be effective in the long run. "Content that can be experienced can also be copied. You can place obstacles in the way, but you can't ensure content will never be copied."

Next Page: Playing Fair

Playing Fair

Only the most rabid BitTorrent users would want to live in a world where copyrights don't exist, but nobody wants one side to call all the shots either.


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"Hollywood is speaking with one voice, holding the reins on the one thing everyone needs: content," says EFF's von Lohman. "In that kind of environment, consumers are going to get screwed."

But Microsoft's Matthias says that it's in everyone's best interest to find solutions that media firms and users can live with. "At the end of the day, if consumers don't see a value proposition for next-generation content, there are a lot of very big companies who've made some very big bets that aren't going to pan out," he notes.

As happened with the backlash against Sony BMG's copy protection technology, users must reject bad DRM schemes--not because they violate computer security, but because they punish the people who actually paid for the digital content, say consumer advocates.

"One approach [to piracy] is to make it as hard as possible to create and share illegal copies of digital content," writes Navio's Roever in his corporate blog. "Another is to make it as attractive and easy as possible to buy digital content. The more successful the industry becomes at achieving the latter, the less it will need to rely on the former."

Next Page: Digital Media Faq

Digital Media Faq

Music
Work with--and around--content protection on your digital music files.

How do I know whether my CD has copy protection on it? Copy-protected CDs often come with a label identifying them as such, though that's not legally required. Amazon.com clearly identifies CDs containing copy protection schemes, so searching there for the CD title may turn up the answer.

Ack! My CD has DRM all over it. What can I do? Not a lot. Most tools for bypassing DRM are illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, though low-tech workarounds exist. Some users have circumvented Sony BMG's copy protection by placing a strip of tape on the CD's outer edge where the data layer is, to stop the PC from reading it--but if the tape comes loose, it could gum up your CD drive. Other solutions involve drawing over the outside track with a black marker or disabling the computer's autorun feature--and thereby preventing the copy protection software from loading--by holding down the <Shift> key as the CD loads.

Can't I rip MP3s without a PC? If your MP3 player offers in-line recording, you can legally rip MP3 files directly to it from your stereo, bypassing your PC. Archos, Cowon, iRiver, and Samsung all make players with this feature. Video Without Boundaries' Flyboy portable video player can do the same with DVDs. Since this method relies on analog output and doesn't break digital encryption, it doesn't run afoul of the DMCA.

Video
Beware of viewing and recording pitfalls as you navigate the digital video waters.

My DVR has "flagged" a program I recorded and will delete it in a week. Is it still possible to keep a copy? Nope. If content owners use Macrovision's copy protection to flag a program, you can't burn a copy of that show to any other storage medium. But this affects only a small number of pay-per-view and video-on-demand programs, and it applies only to TiVo subscribers--so far. Other video recorders or TV service providers may have different rules; for example, the Dish satellite network lets you record pay-per-view programs but not its Dish on Demand movies.

I'm in the market for a new high-def display. Should I wait until the DRM dust settles before I buy? Not necessarily. Virtually all new HDTVs have an HDCP-compatible digital interface, which is the one new HD players will use. More and more PC monitors do, too; look for the term "HDCP-HDMI" in the product description as you shop.
Contributing Editor Dan Tynan writes PC World's monthly Gadget Freak column. He is also the author of Computer Privacy Annoyances, from O'Reilly Media.


http://pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124164,00.asp

 

1.2 petabytes of storage

p2p news / p2pnet: Can you imagine world without data compression? And where you never have to back anything up?

US inventor Michael Thomas, owner of Colossal Storage, hopes to achieve exactly that. He says he's the first person to solve non-contact optical spintronics which will in turn utlimately result in the creation of 3.5-inch discs with a million times the capacity of any hard drive - 1.2 petabytes of storage, to be exact.

To put that into perspective, mega is 1,024 times kilo, giga is 1024 times mega, tera is 1,024 times giga and peta is 1,240 times tera.

Back in May, 2004, we wrote, "Electrons' electro magnetic properties cause an interesting effect that you depend on. Absolutely. It's called electricity and electric current is measured by the abundance, or lack, of electrons in the ferroelectric nucleus, better known as voltage or static charge. Ferroelectric spintronics is, in turn, the method by which electric fields and photons change the properties of ferroelectric molecules."



In the past, data storage has only been able to orient the direction a field of electrons as they move around a molecule, Thomas told p2pnet. "But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule," he says.

"Normally all the electrons could spin randomly working against the best electrical signal. The electrons are also capable of spinning in both directions a once. But my unique method for creating uniform in-sync spinning electrons will for the first time allow a whole new field of science and electronics to emerge.

"With the ability to control electron spin we will see much smaller electronic devices on the market."

An analogy would be our solar system with all the planets circling the Sun in a clockwise direction. Spintronics would add spin to the planets and their moons in a determined direction as they rotated around the sun.

"One field under study is optical spintronics following Faradays laws," Thomas continues. "The potential data capacity is enormous, and there'd be a very high data transfer rate. Consequently, there'd be no need for expensive compression software like MPEG and others, and no need to backup data."

The goal of spintronics is to generate a perfect spin current using an electric field and UV photons in a high-k dipole dielectric material like a ferroelectric molecule, says Thomas, going on:

"It was important for the material to be a bianry dipole that could then be made reversible, have non-dissipative of power, and not suffer from leakage current lost over time."

What would this mean to you? It would allow the manufacture of double sided disks made by separating the ferroelectric molecular coating layers by a plastic, metal, glass, or ceramic substrate.

And how would this allow you to store immense amounts of data on the discs?

"I'm convinced intraband / outerband resonant absorption by circularly polarized UV photons leads to spin polarization of electrons and, that it's possible to create an 'Atomic Quantum Switch' which carries an electro-static field, electro-magnetic field, and spin orientation," he said.

"And that can be made to represent non-volatile 0's and 1's."

Thomas' agent in Japan is in talks with "several big name companies," he states, saying he expects it'll be two to three years before prototypes will be built.

"I'd say we can expect a finished product to be on the market in about four to five years," he says, adding the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each.

Thomas is a 30-year pioneer whose projects include a computer with a 3D display, instant response, able to run every available OS and application simultaneously, virtually no power consumption or moving parts and complete security - and whose physical component is about the size of a pack of playing cards.

Also See:
spintronics - Spintronics, May 6, 2004
instant response - Every file you ever owned on 1 disc, February 25, 2004

(Wednesday 15th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7929

 

Many MP3 players become obsolete within a year of launch


Posted by Seán Byrne on 15 February 2006 - 00:53 - Source: Independent Online Edition

While the vinyl record is considered obsolete as a medium for music since the 90's, the record was invented back in 1900, starting off as a 78rpm 10" disc. Later on 45rpm and 33rpm records came out, however a good majority of later record players could play even the earliest 78rpm records. While vinyl has pretty much done away with in most music stores today, it was one of the longest running popular means of carrying music. The cassette had a shorter life, which was introduced in 1963 by the Philips Corporation and began dying out as medium for pre-recorded music in the late 90's. The MiniDisc had an even shorter lifespan of about 8 years before it got taken over my MP3 players, at least as portable player for music.

Now, we are already seeing many MP3 players becoming obsolete. For example, consumers are ditching their 1 to 2 year-old models for shiny new models, just like most consumers replace their mobile phone. A lot of the early versions do not support DRM, which makes them unsuitable for most music download stores. While Apple now allows users to send in their iPod for a battery replacement, not that long ago, Apple expected consumers to fork out on a new iPod once the battery gave up after about 1.5 years of average use.

Finally, Sony which has only launched their Sony Walkman Bean just six months ago has already discontinued it. The Bean was well featured with a 50 hour battery life, 45g weight, but with poor sales, Sony decided it will discontinue this model in April.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There was time when that phrase carried technological currency. You didn't buy a new television just because your 1960s wooden cabinet version had gathered a little dust.

Sony's Walkman Bean had the basic specs for success: it is well-designed, smaller (just 45g) and cheaper (£79-£99) than the celebrated iPod, and has up to 50 hours of battery life. But after less than six months on the market, Sony has announced that the Bean will be discontinued in April.

The reason behind this can be traced back 40 years to one Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. He predicted that the number of transistors on a chip - and so its performance - would double roughly every two years. "Moore's law" is what drove the quick growth of computer processors in the 1990s. Now cameras, TVs and music players have also "gone digital", a similar theory applies.

The industry says that the quickening pace of technological change, and more importantly, the growing influence of fashion, means that most mobile phones and digital cameras are discontinued within nine months.

The full article, which also discuses about the short lifecycles of TVs, VCRs, mobile phones and digital cameras can be read here.

With Apple coming out with a new iPod every couple of months, all it takes is for a couple of months to go by and before their new model to become discontinued. While there are a few improvements that can be made to the iPod, it will be interesting to see what Apple will come out in the next generations. At least for now, their iTunes store is still compatible with their earliest iPods, however it will be interesting to see how long this lasts. Even though a new pre-recorded cassette will play back in cassette player made 40 years ago, chances are that the iPod may become obsolete over the next couple of years, particularly with how quickly technology is changing and the music industry constantly trying to impose tougher DRM measures.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13068


Why your MP3 player is already out of date


After less than six months on the market, Sony's Walkman Bean is to be discontinued - a victim of the digital revolution and the fashion for ruthlessly upgrading. Oliver Duff reports
Published: 14 February 2006
f it ain't broke, don't fix it. There was time when that phrase carried technological currency. You didn't buy a new television just because your 1960s wooden cabinet version had gathered a little dust.
Sony's Walkman Bean had the basic specs for success: it is well-designed, smaller (just 45g) and cheaper (£79-£99) than the celebrated iPod, and has up to 50 hours of battery life. But after less than six months on the market, Sony has announced that the Bean will be discontinued in April.
The reason behind this can be traced back 40 years to one Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. He predicted that the number of transistors on a chip - and so its performance - would double roughly every two years. "Moore's law" is what drove the quick growth of computer processors in the 1990s. Now cameras, TVs and music players have also "gone digital", a similar theory applies.
The industry says that the quickening pace of technological change, and more importantly, the growing influence of fashion, means that most mobile phones and digital cameras are discontinued within nine months.
Televisions and DVD equipment fare a little better but current hardware will be rendered obsolete by the imminent arrival of "high definition" pictures, incompatible with any models older than two years.
"You do get exceptions, but six to nine months is about standard [shelf life] for the majority of mobiles," said Bryan Magrath, the operations and marketing director of Dixons.
In the past year, the company has phased out video recorders, portable cassette players, 35mm film cameras and, most recently, cathode ray tube televisions. "The rates of sale on these products slowed to such an extent that it is no longer viable to keep them in store," said Mr Magrath.
The reason behind this is obvious, really: the digital revolution. "A lot of products that had longer life cycles in the past were analogue and weren't running on the digital treadmill," he explained. "Once products start to have integrated circuits, they get into the relentless upgrading you see with computers."
There is a more fickle reason behind the quickening turnover of consumer electronics: fashion. "Our attitude to technology has changed from using something until it breaks beyond repair, to constantly replacing it because something cooler is in the market. I know people with five or six iPods who change their mobile every few months. That's not unusual,"said Tom Dunmore, editor-in-chief of the gadget magazine Stuff.
Until recently, old mobile phones were treated as obsolete kitchen drawer-fillers but they have enjoyed a resurgence as users tire of relentlessly-expanding functions and the nostalgia for 1980s "brick chic" grows.
Garry Evans runs RetroFones, a website selling second-hand phones. He reports that some mobile users prefer an older handset. Two classic favourites are the late Nineties Motorola StarTAC that became the blueprint for today's flip-top mobiles, and the Nokia 8110, famous for featuring in The Matrix.
"The problem with phones today is that they are so complicated they are more prone to breaking down," he said. "There are more things that could go wrong and I don't think they are manufactured to last.
"If your phone breaks down, it's cheaper to buy a new one than have your old one repaired."
Mr Magrath says that when Dixons purchases break: "We divide products into two categories. Pretty much anything under £150 probably isn't worth repairing."
Mobile phones
Modern mobile phone technology is said to date back to April 1973 when a Motorola employee, Dr Martin Cooper placed a gloating call to his rival Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs, while walking the streets of New York talking on a Motorola DynaTAC. It weighed almost a kilogram and looked like a beige welly.
Bell Labs launched a trial commercial cellular network five years later in Chicago, but mobiles only began to proliferate in the mid-1980s with the introduction of the first generation of "cellular" phones. Initially, these were designed for installation in cars, but some were converted for use as "transportable" phones. They were the size of a briefcase and cost thousands of pounds.
In the 1990s came the second generation of digital phones. The larger "bricks" disappeared and tiny 100-200g devices became the norm.
When WAP internet technology was introduced in 2000, comparatively few users took advantage. The same was true of the third-generation (3-G) technology, meant to convert the handset into an entertainment centre.
The Motorola E1000, now retailing for free on most contracts, was one of the first 3-G phones on the market, but while it had the new technology, it was huge and had a comparatively short battery life. It will be relegated to the dustbin with the release of the company's 3D version of its super-slim V3 phone.
Digital cameras
The first camera dates back to ancient Greece, with the pinhole camera obscura. But while the camera - in its simplest form - worked, there was no way of preserving images. The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris.
In 1889, Thomas Edison invented the first commercially successful camera. But amateur photography did not take off until 1923, when Eastman Kodak produced the first 16mm reversal safety film, and Bell & Howell introduced cameras and projectors with which to use it.
The first digital camera, developed in the 1970s, weighed 8lbs, was the size of a loaf of bread and captured black and white images on a digital cassette at a resolution of .01 megapixels. Steven Sasson, an engineer working for Eastman Kodak, is credited with the design.
Technology has come so far and so fast that anything currently on sale below four megapixels is of questionable worth because there are already camera phones - notably by Nokia and Sharp (for Vodafone) that take three-megapixel pictures. More are on the way, meaning that it is hardly worth paying a premium on such low-quality pictures. At the higher-spec end, once non-professional photographers move past nine megapixels - more than adequate to enlarge to A3 print size - it becomes overkill. Expected developments in digicam technology include such basics as moving the power button further from the capture button - so a rushed attempt to take a picture doesn't turn the camera off - and obtaining better quality in poor lighting, currently a big downer.


Music players
Developed in the 1870s by Thomas Edison, the gramophone, or phonograph, was the first device for listening to recorded music. Cylindrical tube-like records were used; the 10-inch disc was developed 30 years later in 1900 and record players became the most popular way of listening to music for almost 100 years.
In 1963, the Philips Corporation introduced the cassette recorder. They became widespread in living rooms and in cars, and reached the pinnacle of their performance by the mid-1980s. But in 1988, the advent of compact discs eclipsed both the cassette, and the record player. The MiniDisc had a brief heyday in 1996, but soon became obsolete as the MP3 player began to dominate the market.
The iPod digital music player, which has colonised the online music market, was introduced in 2001. Domination has been secured with the opening of the iTunes store (500m downloads by July 2005), smaller models (the Mini, the Nano and the Shuffle), a 60 gigabyte video iPod, and a new remote control iMac computer with easy access to music, photos and movies. Tens of millions of players have been sold. Most other MP3 players, like Sony's Bean, have struggled against such market dominance.
Computers
The personal computer has come a long way since the birth of the abacus some two millennia ago. Charles Babbage is credited with being the first person to design a fully programmable computer as early as 1837 - an "analytical engine" that would use punched cards and operate on steam power.
It wasn't really until the Second World War, when the military required fast, accurate retrieval of electronic data, that computers stepped out of the pages of science fiction and into reality. One notable achievement was the American ENIAC (1943) which used 18,000 vacuum tubes and 1,800 square feet of floorspace.
In the 1970s, technology moved on from very powerful single-purpose computers to cheaper systems for the consumer market. The Apple II, launched in 1977 from the modest surroundings of Steve Jobs' parents' garage, was many people's first foray into personal computing, and its popularity allowed the trio to create a team of computer designers and a production line.
Computing has become ever more affordable, although the Mac Mini (£359) will be left out in the cold when Apple moves all of its computers to Intel processors (the Mac Mini has a G4 processor, now two generations old).
Now that PC development has reached the boundaries of most people's expectations, ever-increasing processor sizes are only really useful for those who want 3D gaming - the next wave of machines will be "media centres" for the living room. The basic idea is a "computer in a telly" with only one cable - the power cable. It will have a wireless mouse, keyboard and internet capability - and a wide screen. One such machine is the Sony VA1, released next month.
Video recorders
The first professional videos were Quadraplex machines introduced by Ampex in the US in 1956. They became the industry standard for 20 years and had good picture quality, but they also had drawbacks: expense, an inability to freeze pictures and quick-wearing tape heads.
It was not until the 1970s that videotape moved into the mass market, with the arrival of the Japanese analogue systems: Sony's Beta (1975) and JVC's VHS (1976). VHS won that format battle due to its longer tape time (three hours, compared to 60 minutes) and was adopted as the industry standard for film releases for more than 20 years. But VHS finally succumbed to the disc-based DVD format after it was introduced in 1997, gradually overtaking VHS sales and rentals to the point where VHS is no longer sold and will before long become the concern of historical collectors.
DVD technology has developed to allow affordable recording. £399 buys a Sony DVD/HDD recorder, allowing you to not only record to DVDs, but also store your favourite films on an 80GB hard drive. The problem is that existing DVD technology is not all that it is cracked up to be: it will begin the journey to obsolescence when incompatible high-definition televisions start flying off the shelves. The real question is who will win the format war: Blu-Ray discs or HD DVDs (available later this year).
The profligacy of digital video formats on the internet means that standalone video players may in turn succumb to "media centre" computers in people's lounges.
Televisions
The small screen has come a long way since John Logie Baird gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system in 1926. The squat model had a tiny little screen in the corner and a bulge at the back to cover the whirring discs of lenses that made it work.
In the past 80 years, the screen has become far bigger and of rather better quality than the 30 lines of scanned image he displayed, barely enough to reproduce a recognisable human face.
Baird's cumbersome set was quickly surpassed by the cathode ray tube (CRT) television, manufactured in the 1930s and used in almost all televisions for six decades until the invention of the LCD panel.
The turn of the millennium heralded the arrival of flat-screen plasma TVs working on similar principles to a fluorescent light, with gas injected between two panels to create ultraviolet rays and the red, green and blue phosphors which make up the image. Last month, Dixons announced it would no longer stock traditional CRT televisions.
For £1,200, Samsung sell a 42in flat-panel plasma television with a sharp, vibrant picture. The problem is that it will be obsolete after "high-definition" (HD) television arrives, offering twice the picture quality.
Couch potatoes with more cash may be interested to know JVC are releasing a gargantuan 70in HD TV in March, expected to retail for under £3,500. The only problem is they may have to sell the couch to get it in the living-room.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article345309.ece

Apple investigates iPod batteries after five seperate lawsuits
Posted by Dennis on 11 February 2004 - 18:41 - Source: BBC NEWS

Quakester2000 and GristyMcFisty both used our news submit to tell us that Apple is investigating the batteries of their iPod portable digital music players. The investigation is a result of five lawsuits, which were filed against the company in December last year. The reason for the lawsuits are the iPod's batteries. The battery life is not as long as Apple advertised and besides that, the battery life degrades over time.

In its quarterly financial report to the US Securities and Exchange, Apple said it had been named in the class action suits and that it would be looking into the claims alleging "misrepresentations by the company relative to iPod battery life".

The allegations detailed in the legal action, under the names Chin, Keegan, Hughes, Westly and Craft, include unfair competition and claims of false advertising, fraudulent concealment and breach of warranty, Apple says.

The lawsuits say Apple's claims about the built-in battery have violated California's competition laws, and that it has breached the state's Consumer Legal Remedies Act.

Since the end of last year, Apple has offered an extended warranty scheme which covers iPod owners for an extra year. It has also provided a battery replacement for affected iPods, at an extra cost to consumers.

 

Which one is the female?

 

Try that again, Which one is the female?

 

Virtual sex, online

p2p news / p2pnet: Some 87% of 2,484 students polled at 150 Canadian colleges and universities say they've had "virtual sex" online.

What is virtual sex?

Dating service CampusKiss.com (Yup) doesn't say, exactly, but as part of a Valentine Day promo post, it gives an amazingly detailed set of answers to questions in which 51% of males and 49% of females said they'd had virtual sex, listing IM (53%), webcam (48%) and phones (44%) as the most loved (ahem) means.

Offline, locales listed as unusual places for sex included:

* campus bar (2.4%)
* classroom (4.24%)
* Parent's bed (16%)
* library (4.63%)
* prof's office (1.68%)
* public transport (5.93%)
* public washroom (15.18%)


But a, "whopping 46% of students chose 'other' to this question with places as wild as graveyard among the most popular".

And women seem more daring than men, says the survey - 50.3% versus 42% choosing 'other' locales including:

* Goodwill dumpster
* Airport runway
* Alexander Graham Bell Museum
* back of my mom's car as she was driving it
* traveling freakshow caravan


So what's the first thing the people who answered the questions do afterwards?

Some 32%, "go running to the bathroom" (35% of women vs 30% of men), 31% fall asleep, 19% light up and 12%, "get the munchies and go to the fridge".

(Wednesday 15th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7930