October 2004 Archives

NW Venture Voice has a post by Martin Tobias on his visit to India:

- The Indian economy is firing on all cylinders. Auto sales, pharma sales, real-estate, outsourcing and IT jobs are up double digits YonY.
- India's growth is accelerating even as China comes on line.
- Indian companies are moving up the value chain, especially in IT. There is a consolidation going on at the top of the IT outsourcing business by Wipro, Infosys leaving the middle market and small players looking to product development for growth. Look for Indian companies to get into original branded software product development in a big way (look out America).
- The bio/pharma sector is probably hotter than the IT sector. A partner in a leading executive recruiting firm said he has triple the number of searches going on in bio/pharma versus IT.
- The VCs that only visit Bangalore and think the India story is only about BPO are missing the mark.
- The Indian government is serious about divesting state owned enterprises (the old bedrock). Twelve new ones are being offered in the next three months.

The most interesting one to me was the fact that every day in the Economic Times of India was another article on an Indian IT company moving up into product development. And details of all the government programs to support this. While the culture of development is significantly different from the culture of a call center, it is probably just a matter of time. The recruiter I was talking to said most of his "C" level hires are returnes from America and Europe. Salaries go MUCH farther in India. India produces more computer engineers than America. It is only a matter of time before this combination of American trained management and inexpensive raw talent starts to deliver really cool products.

While I didn't spend alot of time looking for investments or talking with potential partner companies, it was clear to me that there is WAY more going on in India than most people are considering. I advise every start-up I work with to consider what their strategy to leverage India and China is. It can be as simple as outsourcing QA/testing or call center. It can be as complex as outsourcing all development and selling into the local markets. Whatever the strategy, the CEO who doesn't leverage the growth and market efficiencies going on in India/China does so at his peril.

Bush Campaign Acknowledges Ad Was DoctoredWashington | October 28Reuters - President Bush's campaign acknowledged on Thursday that a television ad depicting soldiers listening to Bush speak had been doctored so that some of the faces of the soldiers appear more than once.

The fact that Americans pay more for prescription drugs than do Canadians or most Europeans has been prominent in the news lately. Both Kerry and Bush now promise to do something to reduce the gap. Virtually absent from the public discussion of the issue has been an even more troubling aspect of the way in which prescription drugs are currently distributed: the inability of the residents of developing countries to obtain life-saving drugs at prices they can afford. This post provides a few details concerning the seriousness of that problem. The next post will outline – and solicit reactions to – a few ways in which the problem might be solved or at least mitigated.

Direct and Related Links for 'The First Casualty'

Just off the phone with John Hanke, former CEO of Keyhole, now GM of the Keyhole unit of Google. We spoke about the implications of Keyhole's acquisition. A few things stand out.

First and foremost, Keyhole is in the Holy Crap That's A Lot of Data business - that alone is reason for Google to be interested. Their database stands at 12 terabytes and growing. It covers more than 50 percent of the earth's population, and includes satellite imagery, mapping data, topographic overlays, and, pay attention here, geolocation-based content tags. In fact, in his presentation at Web 2.0, Hanke showed an application, which he called geoblogging, which allows folks to fly around Keyhole's data and annotate various things they see. "They identify a spot, then talk about it, upload pictures they took there, whatever," Hanke told me. "That then becomes an icon, a point in the Keyhole database" that others can view and comment upon. (Want to check it out? Head here.)

The idea is to bring the Force of the Many and the Architecture of Participation(caveat, PDF download) to a visualization of the earth. Jaw dropping yet? But wait, there's more. Hanke also showed the overlay of real time traffic information from third party sources, like the CalTrans traffic feed. Mapping data to geography will allow for multitudes of such applications. Imagine Google scaling Keyhole to all web surfers for free, and then opening up the APIs for all to develop on.

Yowza.

Hanke told me that when he started Keyhole he and his team had a dream of building a revolutionary product that "touched millions and millions of people." Reality intervened as the bubble burst and resources became dear. But with Google now in the picture, that dream is once again alive, Hanke says. "We could have remained an independent company," he told me. "But the power of the Google brand, the infrastructure..." Not to mention, Hanke added, Google's mission, which fits nicely with Keyhole's.

Will Google let Hanke realize his dream, and keep doing all the cools things Keyhole was attempting to do? I asked Hanke if it'd be a fair assumption to make that he'd only sell his company to someone who shared his passions and his dreams. His response? Yup, that's a fair assumption.

NB: Gary notes in his post that there are other players in this field, notably TerraFly. Take note, Yahoo....

Hat tip: Jeremy for blogging the conference, thanks.

Fundrace: Now this is what I call geolocation search. Search for contributors in your area to either Democrats or Republicans. All based on public records. Powerful stuff.

Hat tip: Metafilter.

Direct and Related Links for 'If you use KYOCERA cell phones, READ THIS!'

The emerging markets and third world are the real opportunity for fixed wireless technologies.NextNet Wireless has proved it with successful projects in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Now the company has teamed up with Bangladeshi ISP, Access Telecom, to launch a wireless broadband service for business and residential users. Access Telecom was the first ISP in Bangladesh to introduce broadband services, commencing operation in 2000. Once again, Access Telecom is the first to deliver commercial NLOS plug-and-play broadband services operating over licensed 3.5GHz wireless spectrum.

: In a deal that could give a boost to local search marketing, Google has acquired Keyhole Corp., which sells online satellite maps.

Keyhole offers users aerial photographs of specific addresses, and also allows them to search for nearby conveniences, such as bank teller machines or hotels. Unlike every other Google offering to date, Keyhole is a paid-only service that currently costs consumers $29.95 a year--down from the pre-deal fee of $69.95 a year.

: Some more instant thoughts on other potential bidders for MKTW (see stories below):

-- FT (Pearson): Already own part share in MKTW. Would give it a very strong position in U.S., something it has been lacking against WSJ...

-- Yahoo Finance: Even though it is among the most used consumer finance and biz sites, it has somehow lacked respect within the biz-fin media community, since it is, at heart, an aggregation play at best...MKTW would give it a boost. I doubt Yahoo would like to go into a pure media play with MKTW's news operations. Doesn't make sense...

-- NYT: Well, they're building up their tech site, and now business section would be the next step...

-- CBS: No, please don't...

Marketwatch, the publisher of CBS Marketwatch--the news and financial online site--is up for sale with a $400m price tag, says the New York Times. This follows a good quarterly report on Wednesday. Possible bidders include Viacom, which owns 23 percent;...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Cornell University have demonstrated a device that allows one low-powered beam of light to switch another on and off, on silicon, a key component for future “photonic” microcircuits in which light replaces electrons for propagating signals. It is highly desirable to use silicon—the dominant material in the microelectronic industry—as the platform for these photonic chips. The approach developed confines the beam to be switched in a circular resonator, greatly reducing the footprint required on the chip and allowing a very small change in refractive index to shift the material from transparent to opaque."

TiVo has been in the news recently with a couple of plans to make their service less useful than it could be: first, TiVos will now auto-delete pay-per-view and video-on-demand movies, and second, TiVo is making sure that you can't use a TiVo to view NFL games outside the specified market area. TiVo's lawyer explains.

zmcnulty writes "The day has finally come: Over at TechJapan, we've got a translation of a Japanese BB Watch article stating that Sony has announced the Playstation Portable will cost 20,790 yen (about $195 USD) and is to be released on December 12th. Also, the battery life is quoted as being 4 to 6 hours. Not exactly what I'd call fantastic, but at this price, looks like Nintendo is in for some serious competition. Free your doubts about software too, as Sony has announced 21 titles will be released in December as well. Here's the official Japanese PDF press release regarding the PSP's release."

One of the oddities of modern business is that companies often seem to feel compelled to spin off their best performing businesses on the idea that in selling it out, they can get a better return on the standalone business than when it's saddled with other businesses that are dragging it down. That's why AT&T spun off AT&T Wireless a few years back, despite how obvious it was that having a wireless component was going to be a necessity in the future. The whole thing makes you wonder whether or not these types of conglomerate businesses really make sense, if the best they can do is simply sell off their most important pieces. It looks like the trend isn't going to slow down however, as rumors are spreading that HP is now going to sell of their printer business -- the only profitable division they have. Of course, the other way of looking at this, since the spun off division would apparently keep the HP name, is that it's really a ditching of all those other divisions (reinvented under the name Innovative Technologies). Of course, HP went through a similar move a few years back when they spun off their testing unit under the name Agilent, so they have some experience in tossing off side businesses.

One of the more heartening developments in this election has been the outspokenness of scientists who strongly disagree with the Bush Administrations ...

Very cool. Congrats!

From forum.skype.com :: View topic - Version 1.0.0.94 released, Skype API made public via the voip weblog:

I'm glad to announce that the Skype API is finally mature enough to be included in a public build. So as of now we have the API included in the main Skype for Windows.

We just released version 1.0.0.94, you can get it from http://www.skype.com/ go/getskype

This is just the beginning of the API show, quick intro about what's coming up and going on:
* API forum to be made public in the coming days, API info to be posted on the www.skype.com website
* We will be introducing software developer programs (days to weeks from now)
* We will be introducing certification programs (days to weeks from now)
* Licencing - no licence is required to use or develop with the Skype API
* New features for the API - conferencing support and other things that you've been asking for. Support for upcomgin Skype features.

(reg. req.): Philips has launched video-watermarking software that will enable content rights holders and criminal investigators to trace back to the original source pirated material on DVD discs, VHS tapes and digital files released over P2P networks.

The software, called "RepliTrack," is billed as a turn-key video-watermarking solution for forensic tracking purposes.

Comcast's Third Quarter 2004 Results show that the largest cable company in the country is showing no signs of a broadband slowdown. “Our high-speed Internet service led the way, adding over 549,000 subscribers - the highest level of quarterly high-speed Internet additions in the Company's history, ” CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. The company now expects its total high-speed data aka broadband adds to be around 1.6 million - 1.7 million, up from the previous range of 1.5 million - 1.6 million.

Cox Communications says that during the quarter it added 184,446 high-speed Internet customers, the most Cox high-speed Internet customers ever added in a quarter. Cox ended the quarter with over 2.4 million high-speed Internet customers, representing year-over-year growth of 32%. In addition, the company dded 82,596 Cox Digital Telephone customers, the most Cox Digital Telephone customers ever added in a quarter. Cox ended the quarter with over 1.2 million telephone customers, representing year-over-year growth of 33%.

Now taken together, both these numbers indicate that their low-introductory pricing is working, and the company is managing to key the big bad Bells at an arms' length. Last quarter it seemed that DSL would slow down their growth, but that clearly did not happen. The cable companies need to continue this rampant march, and hopefully build up mass so that they can blunt the FTTx impact on their business. I think next 12-18 months will be all about execution for cable companies and they better get it right.

David Pescovitz:
The Times Online has dug up the spooky secret history of John Kerry's Rocky Mountain retreat, a barn that Teresa Heinz Kerry's former husband imported from Suffolk, Great Britain. The building's former address, Rookery Farm in the village of Elmsett, is known to be haunted by the ghosts of a father and son who hung themselves in the barn in the 19th century after going insane.

The owner of Rookery Farm in Suffolk told The Times that she had detected an unexplained presence in the farmhouse on several occasions since moving there in 1992. Julie Hunn, 47, a legal secretary, who lives at the farmhouse with her husband, Andrew, said: “Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling that there’s somebody there or you’ll see a shadow. It’s happened two or three times since we moved here.”

More from SCC's victory over Lexmark's DMCA claim:

"Nowhere in its deliberations over the DMCA did Congress express an interest in creating liability for the circumvention of technological measures designed to prevent consumers from using consumer goods while leaving the copyrightable content of a work unprotected."

"We should make clear that in the future companies like Lexmark cannot use the DMCA in conjunction with copyright law to create monopolies of manufactured goods for themselves just by tweaking the facts of this case[.]"

"Congress gives authors and programmers exclusive rights to their expressive works (for a limited time) so that they will have an incentive to create works that promote progress. Lexmark’s reading of the extent of these rights, however, would clearly stifle rather than promote progress. It would allow authors exclusive control over not only their own expression, but also over whatever functional use they can make of that expression in manufactured goods. Giving authors monopolies over manufactured goods as well as over their creative expressions will clearly not “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts,” but rather would stifle progress by stamping out competition from manufacturers who may be able to design better or less expensive replacement parts like toner cartridges."

This week, AMD will launch its Personal Internet Communicator (PIC). Priced at $185 (without monitor) and $249 (with a monitor), it is aimed squarely at the next users of computing. First, a look at the details:

InfoWorld: “AMD estimates that more than 200 million households around the world with sufficient incomes to support a PC have yet to purchase a system. These potential users might not even realize they can afford a computer until they are presented with a low-cost product like the PIC, the company said. The PIC is a small form factor desktop designed for simplicity and affordability. A customized version of Microsoft’s Corp.'s Windows operating system and basic application software ships with each system. Most of the software settings are locked in before the system ships in the hopes that users won't break any applications, and service calls can be kept to a minimum. AMD's Geode GX500 embedded processor powers the bare-bones system. It also comes with 128M bytes of DDR (double data rate) SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), a 10G-byte hard drive, four USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports for the USB keyboard and mouse and a monitor.” The PIC machine also includes a modem.

News.com: “[AMD] also specifies a version of Microsoft's Windows CE operating system, fitted with Windows XP-extensions, allowing it to provide consumers with a graphical interface, e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging and word processing. The PIC machines will also be able to play multimedia files and show PDF and PowerPoint files, AMD said. ‘The performance (of a PIC machine) is very robust,’ said Steve Howard, an AMD spokesman. ‘It boots in 25 seconds, and, once loaded, the browser performance is very snappy and word processing and spreadsheet is equivalent to what you'd see in a PC today.’”

The Wall Street Journal adds: “One key to the AMD effort is the Geode, an inexpensive line of chips purchased from National Semiconductor Corp. The chip in the communicator draws just a watt of power, a fraction of the power consumption of AMD and Intel Corp. chips that use the same software. The other key element was assistance from Microsoft Corp. The software company worked with AMD on an operating system that is based on the Windows CE product line for hand-held computers -- enhanced with elements of the Windows XP software for PCs -- offered at a low price AMD isn't disclosing. The communicator also comes with a word processor, spreadsheet and other simple application programs, licensed from a German company that Mr. Gino Giannott of AMD declined to identify. The devices are designed to be limited in function, so users can't accidentally erase important files or add software that would keep the system from operating normally, he said.”

Here is a look at the wider view on AMD’s strategy:

News.com: “The machine is geared toward families who make the equivalent of between $1,000 and $6,000 annually. Three companies in India and Latin America will be among the first to market versions of the machine, an AMD representative said…AMD will introduce the PIC as part of an effort it calls 50x15, which aims to raise the percentage of the world's population that has Net access to 50 by 2015. Right now, only about 10 percent of the global population can access the Net, the company says. Reaching the next large group of computer and Internet users--people in countries such as China, India and Russia--has become a major focus of many of the big names in computer technology. Most of those companies appear to agree that lower-price personal computers will help them sell more products.”

WSJ: “AMD doesn't plan to market the device itself. Rather, it hopes to take orders from telephone companies and Internet-service providers, which will put their names on the communicator and sell it to customers -- perhaps as part of a bundle with Internet access or telephony. Besides targeting India and China, the company plans to aim at Brazil, Mexico and Russia. ‘We are not interested in being in the system business per se,’ said Gino Giannotti. ‘We are interested in providing an opportunity for people to improve their lives.’”

News.com: “Although it intends to steward the low-price PIC into the market, AMD isn't getting into the business of manufacturing computers. The company drew up the plans for the PIC, but tapped Solectron to build the first run of the machines. The chipmaker plans to go forward by essentially licensing the PIC design to local companies, including telecommunications or Internet service providers, allowing them to use local contract manufacturers and control distribution, marketing and pricing of their PICs. Thus the companies will sell PICs under their own brand names and be free to subsidize the machines' cost to lower the price consumers pay.”

AMDBoard has some pictures and specifications, while Slashdot has a discussion.

Tomorrow: Emerging Market Realities

Researchers at The University of Manchester and Chernogolovka, Russia have created the first-ever single-atom-thick substance, a fabric they call “graphene”.  The substance is stable, flexible, and highly conductive, and researchers believe it could be used to create computers made from a single molecule.  Professor Andre Geim at The University of Manchester was able to extract a single plane of graphite crystal, resulting in the new fabric.  The hope is that the fabric will be used in the future to create nanotubes, transistors for microscopic computers, that could result in some seriously small electronic gadgetry.

Guardian Unlimited has an article on Wikipedia. Having run the editorial division of Encyclopaedia Britannica for several years, I've followed the rise of this open-source encyclopedia was great interest, and wonder how muchit can serve as a model for other large-scale knowledge-creation projects. It has no editors, no fact checkers and anyone can contribute an entry - or delete one. It should have been a recipe for disaster, but instead Wikipedia became one of the internet's most inspiring success stories.... To its fans, it is a fantastic research resource - albeit one that you should use with caution; and an incredible example of what can be achieved by collaboration and cooperation over the internet. To its detractors - mostly those from the traditional world of encyclopedias and librarianship, it is barely worthy of the label "encyclopedia".... The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day. [Ed: The Britannica also spends several million dollars a year on editorial salaries, costs, etc.] But numbers mean nothing if the quality is no good. And this is where the arguments start....

NASA is awaiting the pictures from Cassini and expect to start receiving the transmission from the spacecraft at approximately 6:30 pm PST [Reuters]

Oregonian reports that Intel Corp CEO Craig Barrett, got down on his knees in front of more than 6,000 technology managers, and begged forgiveness at the Gartner Group conference. Intel had five projects to be scrapped or delayed; it is sitting on a record inventory that reduced third-quarter profit growth to the slowest pace in five quarters. Stock is down 34 percent year to date, and if that is not all, AMD is really kicking their butt. The bad news ain't over. LCOS chip did not work out really. "Their product road map has some holes," Sangeeth Peruri at New York-based J & W Seligman, which manages $20 billion told the Oregonian. The big fund dumped its shares in the company because "They will struggle to fend off market share loss to AMD for the next four to six quarters." Nothing seems to be working! Comm unit, is losing more money than ever and this includes all the Centrino-stuff. The division's operating loss came in at $251 million in the most-recent quarter up $208 million a year earlier. "We ate crow," Barrett said and later in an offline interview said managers at Intel, the world's largest computer-chip maker, had become too relaxed. Not just the managers, but also the CEO! (How about taking responsibility and saying well I resign. It might be symbolic to employees, that even CEO is not about the law!)

Cory Doctorow:
Marc Perkel sez, "I'm distributing Fahrenheit 9-11 on my web site. I spent $2000 to buy 100mb line for 2 weeks before the election. If you haven't seen it - take a look and pass the link around."

Link

(Thanks, Marc!)

By Tom Foremski - SiliconValleyWatcher.com Wall Street’s delight with Google’s first quarterly financial report late last week led to a big jump in Google’s share price as analysts boosted their earnings estimates. This seemed a little worrying in that it...

The recording industry's inability to understand technology is certainly leading to some bizarre court cases. The latest is in Australia, where the industry is making Stephen Cooper out to be some sort of criminal mastermind for putting together a directory that linked to sites that offered MP3s for download. They claim that this is worse than just sharing, because Cooper had ads on the page, by which he made money. As if to prove how awful that was, they go on about just how many visitors the page had. Of course, the problem with this entire argument is that Cooper wasn't distributing a single MP3. He was simply pointing to other sites that did. As such, what he offered was no different than Yahoo or Google, both of which point to plenty of sites that offer MP3s for download, and both of which offer ads.

Creative Commons licenses are attached to Web pages. But we also want our licenses to be useful for materials distributed in file formats around the Net.

The first format we've learned to tag is MP3, the popular audio compression format. Other common formats — image, video, text, other audio formats — will follow soon. This is an ongoing process, and we welcome your feedback. (You can also read a more detailed technical explanation of what follows.)

If you just want to get started, try the ccTag app, available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Jason proposes an interesting theory below: he argues that the recording industry's war on P2P may be a distraction from an even more mission-critical battle -- gaining control of "me2me."

It looks like David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix would agree with Jason; in a recent piece on the RIAA's strategies, Bernstein writes:

"[The] labels are missing the fact that store-bought CDs, while probably retaining a place in the consumer's world, cannot provide what today's users want: total portability of their music. If users can connect electronically to every song or album they have ever paid for, wherever they may roam, well, the CD just can't match that."

Cory Doctorow:

California's Proposition 69 makes it legal for the cops to collect DNA from innocent people and store it indefinitely, and makes it nearly impossible for you to get your DNA back from the criminal database. So this anti-69 Flash is worth watching for the message, but I'm blogging it because it is, second-by-second, one of the most effective political pieces I've ever seen. Excellent, compact, on-message copywriting and great layout/design/pace.

Link

(Thanks, Cindy!)

WSJ writes about the lessons learnt in Asia:

Lesson No. 1: Phones need to be sleek and small.
Lesson No. 2: Target the youth market.
Lesson No. 3: Teaming up produces results.
Final lesson: Don't make companies bid for new parts of the wireless spectrum to offer 3G.

In heavily networked Japan and South Korea, young people such as Ms. Suzuki don't think twice about using their mobile phones to create short movies, watch the Webcam inside their home or download pop songs from the Internet. In South Korea, people can even watch live, streamed television on their phones -- one operator offers eight channels -- and use their phones to make bank transactions or buy movie tickets.

That is a sharp contrast to the U.S. and Europe, where advanced mobile services driven by high-speed Internet connections only now are getting off the ground. "You typically see [phone] innovation in Asia first, and then it makes its way over to North America," says Perry LaForge, head of a Costa Mesa, Calif., telecommunications trade group called CDMA Development Group.

Consumers in the U.S. and Europe may never go wild for advanced "third generation," or 3G, phone technology like the mobile-phone aficionados in South Korea and Japan. Still, industry executives say lessons can be learned from those nations that could speed the adoption of 3G technology in the West.

Cuba Changes Cash Transactions on Island, Rejects U.S. DollarsAnita Snow | Havana | October  25AP -  Cuba announced Monday that U.S. dollars will no longer be accepted at businesses and stores on the communist island starting next month in a move that will radically change the way cash transactions have been done here over the past decade.

You all know by know that HBO has encoded it's programing with DRM technology to restrict the recording of the data beyond the initial copy to your DVR or PC Based DVR.

To get a full grip on why this is so bad and why HBO needs to be Boycotted read linked story in full. Even those of you that do not realize the shear idiocy of DRM and the actions of HBO will get clued in. [www.theinquirer.net]

:

A chart which shows the $112 billion total entertainment spending in U.S., by types..online is a very small sliver for now, and shows the potential. And mobile is trying to take a part of that as well, according to this new Yankee note.

Media and entertainment companies don't view the mobile distribution as a critical channel. As such, they are willing to withhold their content to force carriers into a distribution agreement they deem acceptable. However, this limits the growth of mobile entertainment and is short-sighted on the part of both industries, according to this note...

Civil libertarians and some technologists say the new passports are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person's biographical information (DOB, sex, passport# etc) - and even their photo - from several feet away!

:
Yahoo and Adobe have tied up...the two will launch integrated services that will feature Adobe products...

To start with, this week Adobe will introduce a co-branded Yahoo Toolbar--which besides Yahoo's usual toolbar features--that will integrate Adobe products such as Create Adobe PDF Online, a web-based PDF creation service.

Over time, the co-branded toolbar will launch additional functionality, such as the ability to quickly and easily convert web-based content into Adobe PDF files, the companies said in a statement...

A future release of Adobe Reader will feature Yahoo Search as the default Internet search...

AP: For Adobe, the products will further bridge the worlds of online and off-line content, as it strives to expand its software tools beyond the off-line desktop publishing space into the powerful realm of the Internet.The partnership, which had been under discussion for several months, is wide-ranging....it will be expanded later...

The prospect for a search engine price war was writ large in Google's quarterly earnings. A competitor seeking chinks in Google's armor will see that the company lacks a war chest for a sustained price war for online ad placements....

Yahoo announced last week on the Yahoo Search Blog that Yahoo Images search ( http://images.search.yahoo.com ) now has over a billion images. Google Image Search, for those of you playing...

Forget how Google's revenue has increased looking back at last year. The real issue is, how did the company manage to make much more profit out of sales between quarters this year?

theodp writes
"Ever wonder what a 95-year copyright term is worth to Disney? Plenty! According to Forbes, the top-ten earning fictional characters of 2003 grossed more than $25 billion - Mickey Mouse ($5.8B), Winnie the Pooh ($5.6B), Frodo ($2.9B), Harry Potter ($2.8B), Nemo ($2.0B), Yu-Gi-Oh ($1.6B), SpongeBob SquarePants ($1.5B), Spider-Man ($1.3B), Wolverine ($900M), and Pikachu ($825M). "

Two separate articles in the NY Times suggest the state of computer animation film making these days. The first, is a discussion about how Steve Jobs took Pixar to the point it is now, though plenty of troubles early on -- and compares it to competitor Dreamworks, who hasn't found the same level of consistent success. The second, is a discussion about the new Tom Hanks movie, Polar Express, that uses a fully digitized Hanks in five separate rolls. The article discusses the complicated process of using the motion capture sensors on both Hanks' body and face at the same time, claiming it goes beyond what others have done in the past. Of course, you have to wonder if this makes him ineligible for an Oscar. Last year, Andy Serkis, the actor who did the same thing to bring to life the Gollum character in Lord of the Rings, campaigned for an Oscar nomination and was more or less told that virtual actors don't count. Will that still apply when the "virtual actor" is Tom Hanks?

Direct and Related Links for 'Intel Switches Off LCOS TV Chip'

Direct and Related Links for 'Microsoft to buy another TV station?'

If previous LinuxWorld events were anything to go by, you'd imagine hackers fortifying the defences against the invading hordes of suits. But in this month's event in London, the suits and sandals achieved a kind of happy equilibrium, with corporate representatives competing to establish their roots in the community, and the hackers in the .ORG village making a notable effort to appear more professional. Even the two desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, put aside their holy war to exhibit under the common banner of freedesktop.org.

Those of you who are out there rejoicing WiMAX, Broadband over Powerline and other such incremental technologies, it is time to pay heed to Morris Chang, the 73-year-old maverick who founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. He tells The New York Times, that

we're all going to see lower growth in the next 10 years," and "Next year "will not be a very high-growth year, but it will be a positive year; beyond that I'm pessimistic. If Moore's law has not slowed down in the lab, it will surely slow down in the marketplace, and that in turn will have an effect on foundries.

The uptake of VoIP in small communities is going to be a bit of problem because of E911 issues. Even though the industry is working hard to overcome these issues, it is a nagging issue for first responders. Case in point, Northland county in Minnesota.

Few people in the Northland are ditching their home phones yet, but the lure of dirt-cheap or free long-distance calling could turn a technologically challenging issue into a life-and-death situation. Here's the problem: Emergency calls made using new Internet telephone services ring in through a nonemergency line to the St. Louis County 911 center. Lt. Kevin Kivisto, who oversees the county's 911 emergency operations, said Internet emergency calls usually are more difficult to handle than land-line and cell-phone calls because the 911 operator must ask the identity and location of the caller. In a normal 911 call, that information automatically appears on a screen when the operator answers the call. If you can't speak into the phone, emergency responders still know where to find you. "They are going to get answered, but they're not going to get answered first," Kivisto said.

Finis just announced the SwiMP3, a waterproof MP3 player which uses bone conduction to vibrate the sound directly
into your head via your cheek bones (it actually attaches to your goggle straps, but we’ve also seen a prototype for
googles with a bone conduction MP3 player built right in). They don’t much storage capacity, but they say it has enough
space for 30 songs, which sounds like it should clock in somewhere around 128MB.

[Via MacMinute]

Tom Werner's got a cool little service called Gravatar, which lets you display a unique icon next to the posts or comments of authors. Your icon is tied to your email address, so your unique picture can appear at any place that you comment, as long as Gravatar is enabled on the site. If you're interested in trying it out, there's even a Movable Type plugin for implementing the service on your weblog.

Imagine this if you will. Your employer tells you that you shall store all of your work on the network drive and that you are not allowed to backup that data to a CD or put the information on any type of external storage including your computer. Does this scenario make you shake your head in dismay. Well a friend of mine lived under those rules for 3 years until there was a disaster and the IT department destroyed the data for his department along with a faulty backup strategy.

When the head of the company demanded and explanation and got in my friends face over why they did not do individual backups he broke out the company policy paper he had signed not once but three times. The end result was the IT head was fired along with 4-5 of his cronies that had developed this ridiculous policy.

So if you are in the IT department you better look at the policies that you place upon your employees and think about the worst case scenario. We live in the age of Electronics and like people devices die. What would happen to you today if you had a fire in your house and destroyed your media. Banks have safety deposit boxes for a reason and I make a trip monthly to swap out a external hard-drive so in the case of a disaster at home I only will loose a months worth of data. Check out this Story. [Meryl.net]

On Monday, we offhandedly declared Blu-Ray the winner over HD DVD to be the replacement of now standard DVD. Many have said that it's "too early to tell," but given both competitors have announced there will be products with their technology available to consumers before the end of 2005, we here at Gizmodo certainly don't think so. On the contrary, it's almost too late.

And so, we're declaring Blu-Ray the winner. Sure, the fact we want to call our optical media "Blurry Discs" for the next 10 years or so is a factor, but that's far from the prevailing one—Blu-Ray is not only technically superior to HD DVD, it has a far stronger corporate backing, and has demonstrated the ability to have more content available to push the format. After the jump, we break down the three areas—technical, financial, and commercial—where Blu-Ray has set itself apart from its only competition.

As I was reading Fred's post on Digital TV, it reminded me of the recent Jon Stewart/Crossfire phenomenon (see here for more if this is news to you). As I've pointed out lately with regard to print, the same goes for TV: You don't want to make "Must See TV" - you want to make "Must Point To TV". Television will be driven by the conversation, just as will print.

Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) on trust. Recently added to p2p-politics.

Xeni Jardin:
Updated: An audio excerpt from Eminem's new anti-Bush song "Mosh" can be downloaded here, from The Regular. Quoth the caucasian rap superstar in a Rolling Stone interview, "Bush is definitely not my homie." Link

An anonymous reader points us to two links for listening to Eminem's "Mosh" in its entirety. Real Audio Link, ASX link.

BoingBoing reader David Stein sends a transcript of the song's lyrics: Link

Reader dapulli says, "On wednesday Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 in the UK gave out the link to the download of this track on national radio. You can listen to him doing so here on thursday about 90 minutes into the show -- Link"

Documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage, SPIN is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality. Pat Robertson banters about "homos," Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George Bush talks to Larry King about halcyon — all presuming they're off-camera. [Watch (video/x-pn-realvideo)] [info link] In addition to the streaming version here, very large VCD and DVD quality files of the full film are available for download. Part of the Illegal Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age exhibition. [demandmedia]

RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

Some users of the Vodaphone V602 in Japan are outfitting their phones with a night-vision device made by Yamada Denshi.  The device, meant for military and defense uses, works with the V602 and allows its users to “see” through clothing with night-vision sensors that pick up body heat.  The device is so popular among pervs in Japan that it prompted an official statement from Vodaphone.  One priceless tidbit: “we would never sell a phone that was enabling someone to see someone naked.”  Well there you go.  Naked-watching is not officially endorsed by Vodaphone.

First it was Project Pronto, then it was Project LightSpeed. Now after publicly dissing FTTH for years, SBC is dreaming of 18 million fiber homes within three years. I am not sure, what changed their mind. Maybe, the FCC gave them the cake, the bakery and the silver as well.

Karl Bode: While the triennial review paved the way in keeping competitors from new fiber builds, the FCC last week went even further, declaring fiber to the node builds within 500 feet of customer premises didn't need to be shared. After the ruling, SBC proclaimed they'd cut the deployment schedule for project lightspeed from five years to three. The bells had been complaining for years that there was no incentive to build fiber networks with regulation in place. No incentive, despite the fact cable dominates North American broadband, and the bells need television services tied to DSL bundles to better compete. No incentive, despite the fact the local and long distance business is stagnant, and the bells are morphing into pure, bandwidth hungry data companies that need fiber to survive.

: In Microsoft's Q3 earnings, MSN again achieved segment profitability while growing revenues by 10 percent over the year-ago quarter, on "continued strength in its Internet advertising business".

Revenues for MSN unit came in at $540 million, compared to $491 million in the year-ago quarter...while operating income came in at $77 million, up from $57 million in the year-ago quarter...

For its mobile and embedded devices unit, revenues came in at $69 million, compared to $53 million in the year-ago quarter. The unit shrinked its operating losses to $20 million, down from $34 million in the year-ago quarter.

Word from Yahoo this afternoon that they're announcing a size increase, what they're calling an upgrade, to Yahoo Image Search database. According to the company, the database now includes an index of more than 1 billion images. I wouldn't be...

pr1000 writes "Wired is reporting that the State Department is planned on adding RFID chips to new American passports, starting with diplomat's passports in January. Those worried about the privacy concerns of RFID should take notice, as this rollout could set a precedent."

There's been lots of excitement over fiber deployments lately, and the latest is over SBC's announcement of Project LightSpeed, which SBC announced milliseconds after the FCC gave in to their demands. Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports, notes that this announcement doesn't seem very different from almost every other fiber announcement in the past decade from the Bells -- all of which eventually went away for one reason or another (sometimes without giving back the incentives that were given to them). However, that "hasn't stopped the media from applauding like children watching a clown make balloon animals each time a bell issues another press release." He also challenges the assumption that (as the Bells claimed) they had no incentive to build out fiber without this FCC ruling, noting that cable is still cleaning DSL's clock in the US (though, almost nowhere else) and the cable guys have a credible triple play offering while the telcos are still fumbling around with useless temporary partnerships with satellite providers, rather than coming up with a real triple play solution that comes over a single pipe. Meanwhile, it's also worth noting that the SBC offering is only fiber to the node and then some updated form of DSL to the premise -- meaning it still won't have anywhere near the bandwidth that they could offer. What still should be interesting, though, is to see how wireless technologies play into all of this. For all the talk of triple play offerings, the focus is always on the home, and never on the mobility of people who live in the home.

The Cato Institute held a panel discussion yesterday featuring key negotiators in the discussions on the currently stalled Induce Act -- two from each "side." These are a few of the people who were infamously locked into a room together after Senator Hatch told them to come up with a workable compromise before the Congressional session ended.

For (dis)Content: David Green, MPAA, and Mitch Glazier, RIAA.

For technology/innovation/Betamax: Markham Erickson, NetCoalition, and Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge.

Below are few very rough notes on the opening gambits from each; I couldn't stick around for the whole thing. You can listen to audience Q&A, etc., here. Fascinating stuff:

David Green begins by digging deep into an old bag of tricks -- attempting to induce, if you will, "shock and awe" over how anyone can get the lastest Hollywood product in mere "seconds" via P2P. He then segues into a discussion about how, no matter what, "everyone" agrees that bad actors must be taken out (if not by Induce, then something else, and soon), complains bitterly about the Grokster decision, and ends by arguing that Induce isn't a new and radical change to copyright law. No mention of Betamax, even while addressing this last point.

Mitch digs into the same bag, pulls out the chestnut about P2P as conduit to porn. Because you must think of the children. Discusses the various drafts; sounds as though he didn't care which one made it past the goal line. Says it's pretty clear to everyone that there is a bad business model here. These actors are bad and need to be isolated. We don't want to hurt the Yahoos and Googles of the world. But these people do need to be stopped.

Gigi starts with Betamax. Larger principles at stake. If this was just about P2P, she wouldn't be here. She calls Mitch on the porn gambit; says it's cynical and unfortunate that he mentioned porn. [People start to clap; she says, "No clapping."] Everyone here has a PC or another innovation, and it's because the Supreme Court found that the VCR is not an illegal copying tool. Technologies capable of substantial non-infringing uses are okay. This is critical. Led to all kinds of innovation. Critical to this economy. The problem with the Induce act, is that it was so broad that almost anyone would be liable. Cites EFF's "brilliant" mock complaint against Apple. Says under the "reasonable person" standard, of course iPod would fall under that. Says we heard all of this, "We won't go after Apple, we won't go after the iPod." But history shows otherwise. Induce would have punished more than bad actors, and further, more than tech companies. Even CNet was getting nervous. Never mind the promises, "No, no we won't sue you." Again, history shows otherwise.

Says she also hears, "We need to get rid of Grokster." But do we? Argues lawsuits are working. DoJ is helping. HR 4077 may even lower the standard for copyright infringement. Legit services gaining popularity, and album sales are up. Finally, spyware is scaring people away from P2P. People talk about impossibility of "competing with free" -- but you can actually do that.

Stresses again that people shouldn't be fooled that this is about P2P -- it's about who controls the future of technology. The content industry wants this. Or govt. controlling it for them. Broadcast flag -- represents kernel of that debate. Who will control: content or tech?

Gigi closes by reading the end of Grokster opinion out loud -- a lesson for content industry, for everyone. "We live in times when quicksilver changes..." Warns: Be careful what you ask for. Because you may kill the golden goose.

Markham starts by stating that "the entire Internet is a giant copying machine." So everything is a peer-to-peer platform. Legislation must distinguish between architecture and everything else. Betamax is the foundation upon which today's tech industry stands. There's got to be something above and beyond architecture. Betamax is responsible for the great products and services we have. Induce Act undermines Betamax. Proponents said they weren't touching Betamax. But our concern was that you were making cause of action irrelevant. The result is explosive litigation over every new tech that comes down the pike. We had reason to fear. So far, the content industry has sued everything that comes down that pike.

Markham says he disagrees that some in tech companies support Induce. Says they all have substantial concerns. His group worked on creating an alt. draft. Thought: secondary liability is case law, not statute. So put in Sony Betamax-like language. BSA had a thoughtful draft. IEEE did, too. Senator Hatch took all the drafts and told Copyright Office to meld/make it work -- it produced two drafts. Behavior-based and business model approach. Smart approach. But problem is that we needed time to work these things out. Hatch wanted to move this out of committee during the session. Told us to go into a room and work it out.

We tried to do that. Problem -- these discussions quickly devolved into a draft with a technology-specific approach. We had a huge problem with this approach. Who is "good," who is "bad"? This is a losing strategy. Future of the Internet is decentralization. Trying to construct this box will have a tremendous chilling efffect. Look at Internet industry and consumer electronics. The future is portability. Guess what? A lot of that content will be distributed over the Internet. They said, "If you're a good actor, you'll win in court." That doesn't help. Not when you need people to invest.

We need to look at the actions, not the tech itself.

Moderator Adam Thierer says Cato has been largely uninvolved. His own position a tough one -- he's an intellectual schizophrenic over copyright. He struggles. A hard sell on copyright policy. His qs for David and Mitch: What about the Sony precedent? That's a good decision. Made lots of money. Clearly we wouldn't have wanted it to come out another way. Why shoot the middleman at all? Analogy to gun debates. Why not just enforce directly against the infringer?

Qs for the other side -- isn't there any role at all for secondary/contributory liability in copyright law? Aren't some people really inducing? What conduct should be clearly illegal? He says the rule is: don't ban or mandate business models to solve copyright problems. But asks, are there exceptions to the rule?

Later: Coverage from Wired: Toe-to-Toe over Peer-to-Peer.

The idea of placing smart tags in passports has been around for some time, the EEC plans to implement it in 2005, and the US is in the process of planning for it as well. Unclear if global standards have been agreed to. The issue that has come up are the privacy implications for reading passive tags at a distance. Could a group of people passing through a portal have their passports read from their pockets or purses? Could something like a metallicized sleeve prevent reading? Fundamentally, what value does read at a distance, versus a simple optical scan provide? Another issue is the actual data held on the passport itself, will it contain details, or just an encrypted ID number for lookup? This Wired article discusses the key issue of read distance for passive chips. Also comments from a number of privacy groups. Bruce Schneier sees it darkly. Roy Want, principal engineer at Intel Research is quoted regards the difficulty of reading at a distance. Want's group has come up with a number of leading edge ideas which I follow. See an interview regards their current work on ubiquitous computing. Worth following....

Richard Epstein of the Financial Times has a serious-minded trouble-making piece on open source in today's paper. He starts with a diversion, arguing that the submarine aspect of the GPL -- incorporating open-source code into your proprietary app will make...

Direct and Related Links for '12 worst offenders of outsourcing'

Cory Doctorow:
This is so freaking cool: the Dutch Parliament has unanimously declared that most images owned by Dutch public broadcasters should be posted to the Internet and dedicated to the public domain. This is astonishingly great forward-thinking from what has always been one of the best Parliaments in Europe.

He described the problems he encounters in his work: "Technically, there are increasing distribution possibilities. However, [distribution] rules are the obstacles. Even a broadcaster's own production rights forbid online distribution. Programmes made with public funds belong in the public domain."

"Based on my experience in education, you just about have to fall on your knees and beg for images. This is ridiculous," said Ms Broekers-Knol, member of the Upper Chamber, supported by her fellow parliamentary colleagues.

Link

Cory Doctorow:

Windows errors on giant public billlboards are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto."

Link

SBC Communications, finally, is getting its FTTP groove on. The company has started to formalize and pick vendors for its mega-billion dollar rollout. The big winner of this bonanza is Alcatel, which has built a sizeable portfolio of FTTP/C products.

To drive fiber deeper into the SBC network, Alcatel will provide SBC with its remote 7330 IP DSLAM solution, which is capable of supporting wire speed triple play services and multiple variations of DSL for SBC's Fiber to the Neighborhood architecture. In addition, Alcatel provides its 7340 Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) solutions. Alcatel is the world's leading supplier of broadband access solutions, with more than 50 million lines of DSL shipped. SBC has selected Alcatel's 7750 Service Router and 7450 Ethernet Services Switch

: RealNetworks's Q3 losses widened as litigation costs in its antitrust case against Microsoft continued to weigh on its bottom line.

It reported a net loss of $7 million, compared with a loss of $3.7 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $68.3 million from $51.8 million, helped by online music and video game sales...

CEO Rob Glaser reiterated that RealNetworks was still aiming to achieve profitability, excluding legal expenses, by the end of 2004.

Sub Services and Online music: Real now has over 1.55 million paying subscribers, up from over 1.4 million at the end of the second quarter of 2004. Paying subscribers to music service Rhapsody and premium radio services increased to over 625,000 from over 550,000 at the end of the second quarter of 2004. One year ago, Real's music services had more than 250,000 subscribers.

CBS MKTW: "The company blamed the expected shortfall on $700,000 of "incremental revenue" from its Harmony service that is unlikely to be repeated in the fourth quarter. The company also said it will not renew underperforming video content contracts, but new subscriber additions during the quarter should offset the loss."

Read Seattle Times' report for some more analysis..

Some more details here...

Anonymous Coward cuts-and-pastes: "Less than a week after a pirated version of Halo 2 began appearing on the Web, another of the year's most sought after games has been stolen. Ironically, it also happens to be a game titled after a larcenous act itself. That's right. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has become the latest victim of piracy, with illegal copies of the game, its manual, and its cover appearing on various Web sites."

jd writes "The estimate for the number of genes in human genetic code has been savagely revised downwards. The new estimate, of between 20,000 to 25,000 genomes is marginally less than the 27,000 for the Arabidopsis, a flowering plant in the mustard family. Earlier estimates had placed the number of genomes at around 44,000 - or even as high as 100,000. Eric Lander of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts is quoted in the CNN story as saying that the number of genes isn't as crucial as how they are used." Read on for more, below.

About a year ago, we had a few stories about how Comcast's supposedly "unlimited" broadband plans really weren't unlimited. They have a "fuzzy cap," and will cut off those who go above it. Now, a subscriber to broadband service from Cogeco is discovering they also have a fuzzy cap on bandwidth. The user was cut off after downloading 150gigs this month. Some people respond by saying that these bandwidth hogs deserve to be cut off, but that isn't the point. If the company is promising "unlimited" broadband, and then limit it, that's false advertising. If they want to put a cap in place, that's absolutely their right -- but they shouldn't be advertising that the connection is unlimited. If they have a cap, they should tell users what that cap is.

In March, voters in Californias Mendocino County approved the nations first ban on growing genetically engineered crops. On November 2, residents ...

Knowledge@Wharton has a nice backgrounder on satellite radio business models by XM and Sirius. Worth to read through!

"f XM and Sirius are successful signing up consumers - and so far, that is still a big if - their businesses could be highly profitable. "I think the technology and the model will be profitable," says Fader. "Down the road, subscriptions will be common in radio."

But ultimately, Faber says XM and Sirius will have to get by without depending on automakers to market their receivers. "Right now the model depends on people buying new cars, but ultimately the businesses will have to stand on their own," says Fader. "In a couple of years, I see satellite radio growth divorced from the auto market."

Wow. "Announcing: Audio.Weblogs.Com. It shows the newest podcasts, in reverse chronologic order, the same way weblogs.com shows the most recently updated weblogs. Now you can sample the work of the podcast community before installing an iPodder app. Podcasters, you can ping via XML-RPC, the same way you ping weblogs.com (all the major weblog apps are compatible) or through a Web form. There's even an RSS feed that contains the most recent 100 podcasts, and if your desktop aggregator is enclosure-aware, you'll even get all the podcasts (but watch out it can add up to quite a bit of disk space). " - Dave Winer.

Madisonian Theory dons the little red hood to explore the levels of copyright use/abuse in three recent opinions. Great stuff:

Too Much Copyright: "The conventional 'copyfight' wisdom is that excessive emphasis on copyright's property-like character can lead to quashing, instead of promoting, innovation and creativity.

Too much copyright (and badly understood copyright) has other pernicious effects. Today's example: the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Arkansas in Arkansas Democrat-Gazette v. Brantley...The Arkansas Supreme Court...effectively [allowed] the newspaper (or any litigant) to hold up the civil litigation process – not a copyright case, but any case – on the ground that the evidence is covered by some copyright interest."

Too Little Copyright: "Sometimes, though, a little copyright goes a long way. Take Grosso v. Miramax (pdf link to the court's opinion), where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a screenwriter who sent an unsolicited script to Miramax could sue Miramax for breach of an implied contract – a state law claim – after portions of the script turned up in Rounders. This is so, it turns out, even though the Ninth Circuit ruled that the screenwriter's copyright law was rightly rejected on summary judgment."

Just Right: "Once in a while, and perhaps more often than academics sometimes concede, the court gets it right. Take Compaq Computer Corp. v. Ergonome Inc. (pdf link to the opinion), in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a jury finding of fair use....For all of you out there teaching and using ergonomic principles to stay healthy at the keyboard, fear not: copyright won’t stand in your way."

David Galbraith writes about Yelp:

Backed by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal, Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know.

Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages. In fact, until this year, Dex, one of the major suppliers of local listings, did not even have search.

Google and Yahoo have embryonic local services sites but Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It's a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest.

Add Yelp to Yahoo and Google local, Citysearch and Craigslist and an interesting space is shaping up.

Good piece on how Google and Yahoo differ in their approach to local search.

I think that there is a significant difference from when one wants to search for a research paper on World War II, and when one searches for an Italian restaurant in D.C.

In the former, you want a pretty wide swathe to ensure that you aren't missing something or you are trying to expand your investigation. In the latter, you want to know what Italian restaurants are out there, where they are, how much they cost, and whether they are right for you. Locally, precision is key.

US military accuses Reuters of lying. Reuters had a camera crew on hand to see people digging a man, a woman, and four children out of a house in Falluja, and have video footage of this up on their site. The US military denies this ever happened, and have released a statement saying that "intelligence sources indicate a known Zarqawi propagandist is passing false reports to the media." Incredible...

Motorola's V710 problems, as noted by Russell, and a whole scores of others are pretty real and are causing the company major headaches. The company fessed up to this in its conference call. Moto said that the alignment of the camera module is off center causing a recall and replacement of the phones in the channel. An announcement of this issue should come through in the next few days, Legg Mason analyst Timm Bechter says, and points out that the company has a history of botching up products. Verizon is pissed to say the least and is looking else where, and chances are it could be looking at Nokia. "As has often been the case for Motorola, designing appealing products has been its strongpoint, while delivering those products on time and without problems has been more of an issue. We remind investors of a similar issue with one of the triplets last season, where the antenna blocked a portion of the camera's view, and of the Motorola T720, which never made it through full testing with Verizon Wireless due to late delivery and was instead launched below Verizon's traditionally stringent testing procedures, with many problems." I am hearing that Motorola Razor might be delayed because of quality issues. Timm doesn't point out that the Moto UI just simply sucks! I wonder what Albert Lin of American Technology Research have to say about this?

WSJ writes about the growing number of US VC firms now coming to India:

Successful Indian entrepreneurs and financiers in Silicon Valley are discovering that going back to their roots is good business. As the U.S. technology sector has slowed, many Indians say they prefer to invest in the dynamic subcontinent rather than the mature U.S. The rise of the Internet-based global communication and sharp declines in Indian long-distance charges because of telecommunications deregulation also make investment easier and less risky.

Promod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, returned to India only four times since he left New Delhi for the U.S. in 1972 -- until this year. He says he has taken four more trips in 2004 to look for opportunities and to "open doors for our companies," especially in telecommunications, a sector that is struggling in the U.S. but taking off in India.

Vinod Khosla, among Silicon Valley's best-known venture capitalists, has gone part time at Kleiner Perkins to devote more time to business and charity in India. Vish Mishra, a senior partner at Clearstone Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif., and other venture capitalists are vetting "pitch" sessions with Indian start-up businesses via Web conferences.

Other entities are bolstering the Silicon Valley-India infrastructure, too. Chip maker Intel now makes 40% of its investments abroad, up from 5% in 1998, says Intel Capital Managing Director Sriram Viswanathan. "The pain level has gone down" in India, he says. "The offices look the same in Bangalore and Santa Clara."

Silicon Valley Bancshares has opened a subsidiary in Bangalore, and Cisco Systems Inc. said in September that it plans to open a venture arm there. Silicon Valley's legal powerhouse Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati now has a full-service India practice. "On average, we are forming one subsidiary in India per week for U.S. companies," says Raj S. Judge, who heads the India practice team. "Three years ago, it was one every quarter."

Today, our handheld devices are powered by batteries, which are heavy and inconvenient. Fuel cells are just arriving on the market as a replacement. But there is a new contender: micro gas turbine engines under development at the MIT. Engineers there shrunk jet engines to the size of a coat button. And their blades which span an area smaller than a dime can spin a million times per minute and produce enough electricity to power your PDA or your cell phone. While there are still a few hurdles to overcome, these micro turbine engines should be operational in two or three years, with commercial products available four years from now. These micro jet engines also have the potential to free soldiers or travelers to carry heavy batteries. The engineers even think their engines on a chip could be used in poor countries to bring electricity there. Read more...

Here are a three specialized databases that do a good job providing info about and/or access to thousands of digitized books and texts. + Digital Book Index This database (free to use) contains information about more than 100,000 digitized books...

The Sioux tribe of North America sent a letter to the famous Parisian The Crazy Horse demanding that the nightclub change its name out of respect for a former chief.

Harvey White Woman, a descendant of Crazy Horse who lead the fight against the US military in the 19th Century, said the letter was prompted by the discovery that stage shows at the Crazy Horse featured pseudo-Indian feathered headdresses - on mostly naked dancers.

"I want the young people of my tribe to remember him as a strong leader and warrior and not some nightclub in Paris," he added.

BBC News.

During the boom and early bust years there were plenty of stories of chief executives losing their jobs with handsome payouts. Remember how Webvan's George Shaheen was supposed to get $375,000 per year for life while having $7 million loan the company gave him forgiven, after driving the company directly into the ground? Well, now it turns out that PeopleSoft's Craig Conway, who was clearly fired for dishonesty is falling back on his golden parachute that is giving him an immediate payout of $16.5 million. Getting fired for lying never felt so good. And, of course, despite years of corporate scandals, the lesson is still the same: lie, cheat and steal -- and if you get caught, just wait for the severance package.

If you've been following the automotive electronics world, you'd know that there's a lot happening in that space right now, as everyone's trying to figure out how to move entertainment and computing systems into the car. The original applications focused on automotive tasks, such as providing drivers with additional navigation information. Then came basic entertainment options, like in-car DVD or video game players. Now, carmakers are looking much more seriously at ways to more closely link up home and automotive entertainment systems, realizing that if home entertainment is going digital, the content should flow seamlessly from one to the other. People have been talking about applications that let you download music while you fill up your car with gas since at least 2000, and more recently there have been a couple of companies introducing WiFi-enabled car stereos to make transferring your MP3s easier. Still, rather than talking about what customers might really want, the automakers seem to be going out of their way to say they're going to "avoid an automotive Napster" by making sure your vehicles are chock full of copy protection, because, apparently, everyone is just dying to trade MP3s with others racing down the highway. Honestly, it seems like copy protection shouldn't be a big issue at all in this situation. How often are you going to be moving someone else's music and videos into your car rather than your own? All the copy protection is likely to do is to cause problems when someone wants to have copies of their songs in multiple cars, and on their home stereo at once. Of course, maybe the trick is that mobile phones or wireless iPods will replace in-dash car stereos, and a simple local area connection will connect a playing device to in-car speakers and video screens.

WSJ writes:

The TiVo video recorder, the iPod music player and the Xbox game machine all owe their existence to the same high-tech innovation: smaller, denser, cheaper disk drives. For nearly 50 years the disk-drive industry has driven advances in computers and gadgets by supplying new ways to store data.

But there's one thing drive makers can't produce: sustainable profits. Even during the tech boom, when makers of other high-tech innards like software and chips feasted, drive makers collectively lost money in 1998 and 1999. More losses followed during the bust.

For a few shining months last year, the $22 billion-a-year industry looked ready to pull out of its long slump. Sales and profits rose with the first whiffs of a tech recovery. A consolidation wave had reduced the field of competitors, and fertile new consumer markets were opening. Instead, the next 12 months became the industry's latest debacle, as drive makers repeated their mistakes of the past.

Encouraged in part by aggressive sales forecasts from computer makers, they overproduced. Looking to recoup their investments in research, they began targeting each other's markets. Inventories of unsold drives mounted, sparking deep price cuts that erased drive makers' razor-thin profit margins.

The events of the past 12 months show just how tough it is to profit by selling disk drives, how fewer competitors can mean more competition, and how prices and revenue can fall amid improving demand.

Barron's writes:

Dense cities, with millions of people who can't afford cars or cellphone service make China a great testbed for wireless VoIP. That could create opportunities for makers of wireless networking chips, like Intel, Broadcom and little Atheros Communications.

Chinese phone operators have a good reason to bankroll voice over Wi-Fi or WiMax: Subscriber growth at China Mobile and China Unicom has been slowed by the availability of a cheap wireless alternative called Personal Handyphone Service. PHS offers limited-range wireless service at a fraction of the cost of cellular, typically about 8 bucks a month. Subscriptions for PHS have grown tenfold in three years, to more than 55 million. It's been a clever entree into wireless for its sponsors -- the fixed-line phone companies, China Telecom and China Netcom. It's also been a windfall for equipment suppliers like UTStarcom, the fast-growing -- if unevenly managed -- telecom outfit in Alameda, Calif.

To compete against PHS, China's mobile operators need a technology that's cheaper than cellular. Urban Wi-Fi networks would allow them to offer voice and Internet services at a comparable price to PHS, says Colin Macnab, the marketing vice president of Atheros. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Atheros has competed successfully against Intel and Texas Instruments with chips that are cheaper, yet more powerful. With a reception range of more than 800 meters, Atheros Wi-Fi chips can reach twice the distance of competing products. Wi-Fi makers are also adding power management features, to conserve battery life in devices like a handheld phone. So Wi-Fi voice technology has attracted the attention of China's phone firms, Macnab suggests.

The new Indian broadband policy was announced a few days ago. Considering that it was a few months in the making, it is a big disappointment. It will do little to spur broadband deployment across India. After all the thought that has supposedly gone into it, much was expected in terms of bold measures. And bold this policy is not.

It does not take up the most far-reaching measure proposed in the TRAI recommendations - unbundling of the local loop. It also does not address the issue of the hugely expensive bandwidth prices - both nationally and internationally.

So, yet another case of a missed opportunity. The Indian IT department and minister had a chance to jumpstart India along the South Korean path of large-scale deployment. But what instead is seen is a lack of both vision and will.

[Also read: my earlier Business Standard column on what is needed for boosting broadband in India.]

: Mark Glaser round up some of the recent developments in online media industry: sites such as the BBC and News.com are linking more outside their domains, and WSJ.com and NYTimes.com are opening up more complimentary content in a nod to the "news conversation" online. Call it the blog effect, really...

Richard Deverell, head of BBC News Interactive: "I think Google News has been a shot across the bow of all news originators, making us say 'hold on, there's a different way of doing this.' It's very easy to flip between different sources of news. We either try to reverse that trend, which is likely futile, or we facilitate it, and I'm keen that we take the latter route."

: That's the news bit coming out of the OJR story (also linked below): WSJ.com will also open up the entire site for five days starting November 8. This comes after the site started opening up one story a day through RSS and Google News, for bloggers to link to...

WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin: "Between Google News and everything else, we had to decide how to open them up, and it's something I don't have the answer to yet."

SIM cards have been shipping with miniscule amount of memory, enough to hold a few hundred contacts, calendar and couple of games. Israel-based M-Systems wants to change all that and is introducing something called, the M-Systems MegaSIM. The new card, a first for the cellular industry will combine high capacity flash-based storage, with densities reaching 256 MB, and advanced security features.  The technology will make it possible for the next wave of cellular phones to include a variety of advanced mobile services such as MMS, MP3 and video downloading, full PIM functionality, and high-resolution picture storage – along with advanced security features ensuring data integrity and security, the company claims. MegaSIM acts like any standard SIM card and can be integrated without the need for redesigns or complicated hardware integration.  It can be used by all 2G and 3G GSM service providers for user identification and authentication and to store phone settings and numbers.  it is one of those ideas, which makes you wonder why didn't someone think of it earlier. Every phone has a SIM card slot, and the combined card is smaller and perhaps more cost affective than adding separate memory cards. M-Systems will start-off with 16-256MB with higher capacities to follow. User data can easily be moved to a new cellular phone in a standardized way in the event of an upgrade or other phone substitution. Good one!

Fortune Magazine's Peter Lewis has a scathing review of MSN TV 2 "non-computer" and after reading that, I realized, Microsoft is never going to make it in the consumer electronics space. They just can't stop thinking that the whole world is a "computer." The reason X-Box works so well, no real Windows crap inside!

In 1628, King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden ordered the launch of the most powerful and technically advanced warship that had ever been built, the Vasa. Bands played, flags fluttered, and the entire city of Stockholm watched as the lavishly equipped Vasa glided into the harbor, set sail—and tipped over and sank. Some 50 souls were lost, but the captain swam ashore and crawled straight to a tavern. By those standards, the launching of Microsoft's new MSN TV 2 Internet & Media Player is a grand success..... Anyone who has enjoyed a high-speed, always-on broadband connection to a PC or Mac will find the "please wait" messages, even on the broadband-enabled MSN TV 2 Player, to be as welcome as scurvy.

Needless to say, the review did not go too well, and MSN TV 2 will soon give way to MSN TV 3 and 4 and 5...

The most remarkable thing that has come out of the Kodak v. Sun patent lawsuit is that everyone now is talking about software patents. That is mighty fine, especially because everyone seems to be agreeing that the US Patent Office has been granting patents that should never have been granted and that something needs to be done to fix a broken system. I call that progress. In the knock-me-over-with-a-feather department, Monday that chorus was joined by Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, who writes in his blog about the Kodak settlement and says that "[s]ome systemic changes need to be made" to the current patent system. I'm guessing that in his perfect world, those changes would be made retroactive to October 1st, $92 million ago.

Study shows most attacks come from exploited PCs belonging to DSL or cable customers. [PCWorld.com - Latest News Stories]

'-- Most phishing attempts come from about 1000 compromised "zombie" computers owned by broadband customers --'

...John

Bill Hambrecht (founder of the firm credited with popularizing the Dutch Auction system) calls the big bankers out in this Bloomberg piece:

Hambrecht says Google underpriced its shares in the Aug. 18 offering, which at $85 raised $1.92 billion, a record for any Internet company. Google allowed big investors, with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston Inc., the banks leading the IPO, to dominate the bidding, he says.

``Before they announced the price reduction, our bid stack predicted the stock would sell between $110 and $120,'' Hambrecht says. ``After the price reduction, the mean of our bid stack was $97. Our bid stack clearly showed that the price could have been higher.''

Hambrecht does allow that Google achieved its aims with its IPO, however.

Hambrecht says the offering achieved Google's objectives even though it was underpriced, because the auction allowed customers and other small investors to buy shares.

``It was never their objective to get the highest price,'' says Hambrecht. ``The company is awash with cash. They wanted marketability. They wanted access to their customer base.''

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Digital Light Processing technology is beginning to sizzle, and is going to gain further momentum. Clues of this could be found in the recent earnings report from Texas Instruments, the main proponent of this technology. In simple language, it is a worthy competitor to LCD technologies, and uses an optical semiconductor to recreate images. In the third quarter, the company reported better that expected revenues because of company’s Digital Light Processing (DLP) and wireless digital signal processor (DSP) products. DLPs are used in newer televisions, and according to the company, DLP based TVs have started to outsell plasma TVs in North America. (Christmas is coming, so this could be even better news, and in case any readers wants me to have one, well send it my way.) I think the company might have a bigger hit on its hands: the rise of cheap projectors in my view is going to increase DLP penetration. Who needs a big TV when you can get a tiny DLP projector that does the trick, and well doesn't take too much room, and is cheaper. Engadget is pointing to one from Toshiba, which is clearly buyable! Business 2.0 has a full lowdown on how this technology is going to be a big winner for TI.

Mark Frauenfelder:
luminifer sez: "This site has clips of a GW debate from 10 years ago, and clips from recent speeches/debates. The difference between the eloquent GW 10 years ago and what we have now is astounding, and maybe doesn't bode well for the future."

For [James Fallow's] article, rather than talking to campaign spinners for each side and reporting what they said, he dove into the archival record of each man's debates, and made an astonishing discovery: 10 years ago, George W. Bush was an articulate, forceful debater. Tough to belive, but when Fallows reviewed the tapes of Bush's 1994 debate with Anne Richards, he found that not only did Bush win the debate, but he spoke well.

Link

Doom9 sez:

Dutch civil rights organization Bits of Freedom has run an interesting experiment: They put up a text by a famous Dutch author, written in 1871 to accounts with 10 different ISPs. Then they made up an imaginary society that is supposed to be the copyright holder of the author in question, and sent copyright infringement takedown notices to those 10 ISP via email (using a Hotmail account). 7 out of 10 ISPs took down the material, sometimes within hours and without even informing the account holder. One ISP doubted the legitimacy of the claim and asked for some proof that the alleged plaintiff was in fact the copyright holder. Yet another ISP actually realized that copyright had long since run out on the work. That's real scary, don't you think? Made up society, Hotmail addresses and a website is gone.

BOF's paper is available here (PDF)

Realizing that not everybody has the money for their home theater to
be featured on MTV Cribs, Toshiba has launched their budget TDP-S80U SW80U projectors, which feature 2000 ANSI lumens,
SVGA (800x600) resolution, and a 2000:1 contrast ratio, for $1,300 and $1,500, respectively. And while it may be
budget, Toshiba didn’t skimp, as they did indeed use DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology, with the higher-end
SW80U including WiFi and a PC card slot so you can be PC-free for your presentations. But you know us, we’re ever
digging it because lately we’re been dreaming of Halo 2 on a fresh 120-inch screen (or wall, for that matter) in our
conference room here at Engadget HQ.

blakeross writes "Join us over at Spread Firefox as we raise funds for the most ambitious launch campaign in open source history. A portion of each donation will go towards taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating the release. All donors will be listed in the ad, the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web."

What's fascinating about the Jon Stewart takedown of Crossfire is not just what he said but how his message got distributed.

Terry Heaton reports that there have been almost 400,000 downloads of the segment at iFilm (which is how I saw it) ... in addition to countless (literally, countless) BitTorrent downloads. This was a flood of viral distribution that came from viral promotion.

Welcome to the future of TV!

In old TV, a moment like this came and if you missed it, you missed it. Tough luck. In new TV, you don't need to worry about watching it live -- live is so yesterday -- because thousands of peers will be keeping an eye out for you to let you know what you should watch (we call that metadata now) and they'll record it and distribute it.

The really stupid thing is that CNN didn't do this themselves: Hey, we had a red-hot segment with tsunami star Jon Stewart strangling our guys with a bow tie; you should watch; here, please, look at this free download because it will promote our bow-tie boy and our brand and our show and give us a little of that Stewart hip heat. That's what CNN should have done. Instead, they'll charge you to deliver a videotape (what's that?) the next day.

(Continued at BuzzMachine)

(Also check out:The Future of Television: Crossfire Downloads Exceed Broadcast Audience for more stats. thx revgeorge!)

...as he always has a scoop somewhere in any story he does on Google. This time, it's at the end, where (after he quotes some guy who runs a blog - really, a "Cambrian explosion"!?) he quotes a source:

"If you drive by the Google buildings in the evening," said a person who has detailed knowledge of the company's business, "the lights that are still on are the ones on the floor where they are working on the browser."

So maybe there's life yet in the Google browser rumors, despite protestations from very senior folks at Google (sources of mine and others) who claim Google is not interested in fighting that particular battle.

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Over the past few years, intellectual property policy in the U.S. has shifted dramatically in favor of business at the expense of the public interest. Software patents, automatic copyright extensions that can last as long as Congress wants them to last, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have all become policy with very little opposition from either Democrats or Republicans. A new political action committee, IPac, hopes to change that by giving a voice to the public interest.

David Emberton, who apparently is a Flash guru thinks that the onset of broadband era is going to radically change the advertising on the Internet, and will lead to new kind of adverts: somewhere between text and television ads, and Flash will be key technology. For those of you who have been following what I have long said, Broadband is like electricity. We have only begun to use it and just like electricity it is going to bring about a radical change in our lives. Broadband-enabled advertising is only one aspect of it.

My contacts in advertising have all recently been talking about “immersive full-video experiences” which they intend to implement with Flash. The idea is to ditch key elements of the text web interface (namely text and traditional forms), and create something that’s a hyper-real blend of video and animation. But that can easily be palmed off as advertising directors abusing the web. If you’ve spent much time stripping your work back to bare basics for the sake of standards compliance, you’d probably think so. However, you’d be missing the real insight here, which is that the development of broadband as a distinct space is finally starting to happen.

Finally, there might be some relief in sight for Nokia and Ericsson, and its got nothing to do with handsets. In fact it is their infrastructure business which might ride to their rescue. According to Pyramid Research forecasts GSM will drive 60% of operator spending in 2004, with CDMA and WCDMA accounting for 22% and 18%, respectively. Lucent and Nortel are serious players in CDMA markets, though the Canadians do have a sizeable GSM presence. GSM will continue to make up a significant share of global infrastructure CAPEX through 2009, flattening at 50% of the total market beyond 2005, Pyramind predicts.

This is a direct result of faster-than-expected GSM subscriber growth in Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe. Global CDMA spending, when expressed as a percentage of the total mobile infrastructure market, will remain relatively flat at 20% through 2009. However, the expansion of EVDO deployments worldwide (especially in the US) will lead to an increase in overall CDMA spending. Pyramid expects WCDMA spending to increase over the course of 2004-2005 and then remain relatively flat on a percentage basis.

Copernic Desktop Search (CDS), a product I reviewed (and still like a lot), released version 1.1 today. It includes a couple of new features and improved performance. CNET recently published a review of 6 desktop apps (Google, Blinx, Lookout, Copernic,...

TAGmclaren writes "The Sun-Sentinel is reporting on computer glitches already affecting the election in - you guessed it - Florida. Of the 14 early voting sites that opened in Broward County on Monday morning, 9 were reporting problems. In Orlando County, the touch screens crashed. More generally, SFgate.com is keeping track of all voting issues across the country - including lawsuits and other ballot problems." Update: 10/19 03:38 GMT by T: Thanks to reader Dale J. Russell for pointing out that "there is no Orlando County. The city of Orlando, Florida resides in Orange County."

Yesterday, I blogged about Big Brother in US supermarket carts, now he's arriving in Japanese shopping baskets.

NTT Software will launch in December a sales promotion system for retailers called "One to One History Analysis / RFID tag solution".

The stores must first attach RFID tags to products and shelves so that smart shopping baskets with built-in RFID readers can decode them.

When a shopper puts a product in her/his basket, the basket reads the tag and sends its data to a server for shopping history analysis. As the shopper walks around the store, the basket's reader decodes shelves tags and sends the location to the server which in turn retrieves a list of products on a nearby shelf, and another lists of the products already in the basket, to guess what the shopper might be looking for, and notifies it.

NTT Software's technology expert says "Thanks to the smart baskets' location recognition capability. The system can not only recommend related products but also promotion items of each area in a store. It can refer to individual shoppers' shopping histories and recommend products that match their preferences."

Via RFID in Japan.

CES has confirmed that Bill Gates will be giving the pre-show keynote at January's Consumer Electronics Show, a move that many are interpreting as the date Microsoft will finally unveil the Xbox 2. The PowerPC and ATI-powered development boxes are already in the hands of many developers, so it's reasonable to expect something soon, and Microsoft had initially planned to announce the original Xbox had the 2000 show, although that didn't work out quite as they had expected due to delays.

CES confirms Bill Gates keynote; Xbox 2 announcement expected [GameIndustryBIZ]

Related
Xbox 2 Archives [Gizmodo]
Google Buzz Index: Next Gen Portable Game Systems, Possible Xbox 2 Names [Gizmodo]

Bloomberg News (and no one else) reports SBC to offer its customers six months free, then $1.99 per month Wi-Fi hotspot service: Strange that this story is only on Bloomberg's wire service, but it says that SBC will offer existing customers--presumably its DSL customers--free Wi-Fi access through April 2005 if they sign up now. After April 2005, they will charge $1.99 per month. It's a great strategy. As noted many times in the last few months in this space, the combination of SBC building out its own hotspots with Wayport's help and reselling access to Wayport's networking and new McDonald's locations gives SBC a pretty remarkable single fixed cost for offering Wi-Fi access. In this model, the more users, the more they make. Their cost per user for accounting is already paid if they only offer this to existing customers, too, so that takes that overhead back into the DSL side instead of being a new cost for authentication or billing. This throws down the gauntlet. I noticed yesterday that, as I predicted, Boingo Wireless's $21.95/month introductory rate for 12 months--after which the service would be $34.95 per month--is now the permanent rate. The trend for venue owners and hotspot operators will now have to accelerate towards a fixed monthly fee per location instead of a per-usage fee. There's no way around this. If you decide not to play that game as a hotspot, you could be left out of the largest market of users, and increasingly marginalized by nearby competitors. If I can use one large Wi-Fi network for $1.99, or another for $20 or $30 or $40 per month, which do I choose? Airports still sit in the catbird seat: captive audiences may still have to pay more for usage....

VCs are pouring money into any search engine company they can find but they are missing the point about Google’s success. Google is not a search engine company....

dpnow writes I run a digital photography site and came across what I thought might be an interesting story. It's about a Cornell university researcher that has reverse-engineered the design of the ISO 12233 resolution test target, used by all the best digital camera testers. These usually cost over $100 but a free pdf download of the target is available. Print it out on a good quality printer and you have your own ISO-spec test target so you can find out how good (or bad) your camera really is! "

In an AP article that is sure to be republished widely, a Dell executive states that 20% of all Dell support calls are now spyware related. This ...

p2p-politics.org went live this morning. This was an idea a couple of us had last week. I blogged for a web designer on Thursday. J Christopher Garcia was among the first. Aaron did the backend design.

The idea is simple: Send a message. There is a pile of clips to select among. Select some that best express a point you think a friend should hear. Put the friends address into the email box. Add some text yourself. Click send. Your friend will receive an email, with links back to the clips, and also an invitation to do the same to someone else. Anyone can upload relevant content to the site, though for obvious copyright and other reasons, all entries must be reviewed before going live.

MoveOn was able to give us the initial content — 150 ads from the BushIn30Seconds contest. The Kerry campaign has added some of its own. I’ve invited, through a number of channels, the Bush campaign to add something. No reply yet.

The Internet Archive is hosting the content under a Creative Commons license. Thanks to Brewster, J Christopher, and Aaron for pulling this together so amazingly quickly.

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Juniper Networks, it seems is still the king of routers. Same sadly cannot be said of its security unit. Despite company’s early insistence that the merger with NetScreen had gone well, I wasn’t too sure. After all the head of NetScreen, Robert Thomas had quit the company, to go work at a start-up. Spin notwithstanding, I think that takes away some of the momentum away from the merger. It is hardly a surprise that the stock got whacked. Anyway back to the main news: Juniper reported Q3 earnings of $0.13 per share on revenues of $375 million (up 22% quarter over quarter), and beat Wall Street estimate of 11 cents a share. NetScreen sales were down 4 percent. But it is router sales up 19% sequentially that were truly impressive. I think the company has held its own against Cisco. Apparently big bells are now a big chunk of their business, including Verizon, which accounts for a whopping 10% of their total router sales. Sources tell me that the company is making some serious progress with SBC Communications, and is going to win in that account as well. The good news will only get better when the company starts shipping its J-Series routers, especially in high growth markets of Europe and Asia.

Barron's has an interesting story on how Intel is getting its nose bloodied in the cell phone and non-PC business by Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. The story points out that it has more competition from the likes of Korea's Samsung, Japan's Renesas Technology and Switzerland's STMicroelectronics.

"They are not today one of the accounts that we routinely go up against," says Bill Krenik, who's in charge of advanced cellphone products at Texas Instruments. "We occasionally bump into them, but we don't see them as a strong competitor right now. I wouldn't want to trade places with my counterpart at Intel," adds Krenik. "It's a very daunting thing to try to get into this market."

Marquis Investment Research's Greg Gorbantenko thinks that Samsung's handset weakness in 3Q 2004 might mean good news for Motorola.

Samsung's handset numbers were relatively weak. After posting a sequential volume gain of ~ 3M units in 2Q, this last quarter's flatness was quite disappointing for them. On the flip side, it may bode well for MOT (reports Tuesday 10/19 PM) when coupled with NOK's 3Q results. While NOK had good sequential growth of 5M handsets, they believe the industry garnered 10M extra. Since Samsung the #3 player received zero sequential growth, that means that chances are good that MOT held its position and may even have increased it a little sequentially. We believe most of the Street is going to be around 25M shipped for MOT in 3Q, we think it could be north of this. If ASP stays static like it did last Q, MOT could be looking pretty tomorrow night. Our deductive reasoning may prove profitable like it did in the last two quarters.

The shelving of the high-end Pentium 4 plans at Intel is a ground-shaking moment for the semiconductor industry, a decision that will not be fully digested perhaps for years to come. Just months after Microsoft demonstrated its new maturity by...

Grouper is a new P2P file sharing tool which allows private groups of people to easily distribute files among themselves with no limitation in file types and size, and with integrated IM (instant messaging) and security encryption. Grouper fills a...

In the article: Socially Networked Start-Ups Challenge Big Boys in Local Search, Pamela Parker takes a look at three new local search/social networking databases. Say hello to Judy's Book, Yelp, and Insider Pages....

Joe Fay, US Editor at Computerwire has penned an interesting analysis of the changes in Intel’s microprocessor roadmap. He asks how Intel will produce chips twice as large and sell them for about the same price as current products?...

Xeni Jardin:

Stem cell politics, comic mythology, and the death of Christopher Reeve all collide here. Link to Bushkilledsuperman.com

Xeni Jardin:
One of the most powerful televised exchanges in recent history. Stewart hits it out of the park. BoingBoing reader bryan says, "Jon Stewart blasted the hosts on CNN's Crossfire for hurting the democratic process instead of helping. He also calls Tucker Carlson a dick. Bittorrent: Link, and transcript here.

BoingBoing reader Hal points us to Salon's coverage (Link), and describes the interview/buttkicking alternately: "Tucker Carlson gets his ass handed to him on a platter -- without falafel to sweeten the taste."

In Salon, Charles Taylor says:

I've heard people talk about "The Daily Show" as an oasis of sanity, a public service. I couldn't agree more. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was another public service. He went on and acted as if the show's purpose really was to confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling. Given a chance to say absolutely what he thought, Stewart took it. He accomplished what almost never happens on television anymore: He made the dots come alive.

Here's an alternate BitTorrent link: Link. (Thanks, yatta)

Also, Ifilm has a stream here: Link

Craig of Craig's list says: "now The Daily Show is my most trusted source of news." It maybe tongue-in-cheek but it's not far from the truth.

The amazing thing is, the only reason I am able to watch it at all is because of P2P filesharing / Bittorrent. I think file sharing of videos is a key component of freedom of speech and public discourse when so much attention is focused on television. Although we can dance around singing "fair use", is there any chance news programs can make their content available via Creative Commons for people to share so those of us not in America and have better access to your "public discourse"?

UPDATE:
'Daily Show' viewers ace political quiz
Survey reveals late-night TV viewers better informed
By Bryan Long for CNN.

via Lisa Rein

Comment - TrackBack

What does it mean that women make up only one in 10 of the people in the computer games industry?...

An anonymous reader writes "There is an article over at News.com that talks about a small Florida company called Hybrid Mobile Solutions, that hacked XM Radio. They created a cable and software that makes the new XM Commander and XM Direct units work just like an XMPCR. They are in negotiations with TimeTrax to allow recording of XM Radio to MP3's. XMPCR was canned due to this late last month."

Along with Netflix's earnings announcements today, they also revealed that Amazon is about to enter the DVD rental market, requiring them to drop their own prices. First off, it's pretty interesting to see a company revealing a potential product launch from an unexpected competitor. You don't see that every day. Still, it says something about the nature of competitive information these days. Furthermore, despite all the hype about Wal-Mart and Blockbuster getting into the DVD rental business, it's Amazon's pending entrance that clearly has NetFlix worried. That's because Amazon is much more able to compete to NetFlix's strengths: offering movies that fall under the long tail, and coming up with good recommendations for other such movies to rent. Neither Blockbuster nor Wal-Mart were likely to compete all that strongly on either front, but Amazon clearly has experience in both. Amazon also has a pretty impressive logistics team, though, it will have to be adjusted for rental offerings, rather than simply selling goods.

This doesn't come as a huge surprise, but a new report suggests that interest in buying downloadable music online from places like iTunes seems to be fading. The main reason? All of those thousands of promotions seem to have ended. Apparently, those "buy a Big Mac and get a free download" and "buy a Pepsi and get a free download" type promotions are starting to close up shop. While there was a lot of hype about these music download stores, everyone involved still seems to simply have their head in the sand about what's really going on, and what the real competition is. If they ever do take a step back and see the market for what it is, we should expect to see some serious price drops, along with additional benefits and features for buyers, along with a real effort to use the music as a constant promotion for selling other, more profitable, things. In the meantime, though, most of these companies will stick with the fiction that a buck a song is the right price.

An excellent article at eTrucker.com updates us on the status of Wi-Fi at rest areas: Texas has signed a contract to install Wi-Fi at 105 locations by Oct. 2005, with service free for the first two hours. They're hoping this encourages truckers and others to pull over a little more to catch up and reduce accidents, among other elements. Michigan will roll out Wi-Fi at state parks, welcome centers, and rest areas charging $7.95 for 24 hours and $19.95 for unlimited access. (The article cites $7.95 for 24 sessions, which is taken from a typo in The State of Michigan's press release.) Iowa and Wisconsin are also trying free Wi-Fi as part of a trial....

: The Federal Communications Commission made more of the local phone companies' high-speed fiber networks free from competition rules...Telephone companies now don't have to lease new fiber installations to competitors at all, the FCC decided.

The decision was one of two the FCC made Thursday involving broadband; the second sets rules for using the nation's power grids to ferry high-speed Internet access.

Reuters: Fiber-optic networks are seen as pivotal for telephone companies because the capacity of the lines enable them to offer high-speed Internet service -- or broadband -- to more customers, as well as launch video and other services.

As reported in Doonesbury, President Bush’s hometown paper has endorsed Kerry. It is the weird thing about this election — the most pertinent news comes from the comics. (And speaking of which: Have they kidnapped Stewart? How can there be reruns before an election!)

According to the quarterly report [pdf link] we received today from Wipro, India's largest IT services and business process outsourcing contractor, revenue was up 47% -- and profits were up 67% -- over last year. Better yet, Wipro claims it has added 34 new clients in the last quarter, and "10 are Fortune 1000/Global 1000 customers."

Google unleashed the desktop beta on the world today. And as expected there is a huge furor around it. Since I am using Windows XP for a few days, I put it to test against Blinkx. My tests, admittedly very unscientific, show that Blinkx is a Mercedes compared to Google which is like a yugo. Having said that, I think this release has been rushed. Google needs to learn one thing: what works as a web interface doesn't necessarily work as a desktop UI. Secondly, if you are going to release something, don't rush it. Blinkx found music files, photos, and all sorts of things on this laptop. Google found limited stuff, mostly Microsoft mail and documents. Getting ready to uninstall already! Here is what others have to say: Kottke, Erik Speckman, John Battelle, Danny Sullivan, Business 2.0, BBC.

FCC's decision to extend monopolistic control over the last mile has The Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union all riled up. They are worried that lack of competition will only increase prices, limit choices, and result in slower innovation. “The FCC today took our country one giant step closer toward solidifying a two-company domination – the local cable and telephone providers -- over the consumer Internet market,” said Gene Kimmelman, Senior Policy Director for Consumers Union. “As both industries tighten their hold on high-speed Internet (broadband) access, consumers will see their choices diminish and their bills skyrocket.” “This stranglehold will stifle innovation as these duopolies discriminate against unaffiliated applications and services that in the past have driven the growth of the Internet and the boom in information technology,” Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, said. “As a result, our country will fall even farther behind Asia and Europe in broadband penetration.”

I agree. FCC is beholden to special interest groups, and has lost all veneer of fairness. Michael Powell thinks that also-ran technologies like WiMAX and Broadband over Powerlines will result in competition, and once again shows that despite his self professed love for gizmos, he really doesn't have a grasp on technological realities. I think it is time that consumers get to elect FCC commissioners, via the local ballet. No political appointments for this most important body, which is chartered with coming up with unbiased, fair and realistic regulations that affect consumer lives in the future. I think broadband and wireless networks are going to be a key to our future and global competitiveness, and FCC is selling it down the pike. Here is a recent FCC reality check:

• In the three and a half years that Michael Powell has been Chairman of the Commission, the U.S. had fallen from third to eleventh in broadband adoption.
• As a result, the digital migration that Chairman Powell has touted has become a migration to a massive digital divide. One out of every two American households with incomes above $75,000 have high-speed Internet connections at home. One-out of every two American households with incomes below $30,000 does not have any Internet connection at home at all.
• The cause of the failure of high speed adoption is clear, Americans are being overcharged by the cozy duopoly of cable and telephone companies. Cross national comparisons of price show that Americans pay fifteen to ten times as much, on a megabit basis, as consumers in Japan pay. Three years ago the price in America was three or four times as high.

: A recent JupiterResearch survey reports that only 34 percent of online users want to record TV on their PCs to watch on their PCs' monitors...when asked about the ability to record TV on their PCs and then watch this content on their TV, the number of consumers interested changes dramatically to 51 percent.

Xeni Jardin
:

BoingBoing reader Gerald says,

"A friend of mine noticed that the giveaway electric toothbrushes in boxes of Kellogg's Rice Krispies breakfast cereal can double as vibrators. Dunno if they're being given away in the States, but in Canada you can't escape them. She took pictures; they're blurry, but the point is clear [particularly when the toothbrushy half of the two-part device is removed].

Cory Doctorow:
You asked for it, you got it: the complete audio of all three presidential debates in MP3, packed into a single three torrent files on the Internets. Courtesy of the good folks at Torrentocracy.

Link to third debate

Link to second debate

Link to first debate

(Thanks, Gary and Guido!)

The end is upon us!  Today, the FDA approved the use of the VeriChip, an RFID microchip that is implanted under skin without need for surgery.  The chips are designed to include patient-specific information such as allergies or previous procedures that would be scanned at a hospital emergency room wirelessly.  In order to assure its ubiquity (and eventual mind control of the masses), Applied Digital Solutions is giving away scanners to 200 trauma centers.  This is the first time the FDA has approved devices like this, and we’ll be watching this slippery slope closely, comrades.

Again, I'm late on this but...Via Mamamusings, Elizabeth Lane Lawley's blog. She was one of the "Search Champs" invited up to MSFT last week to see what's on there.

Susan Dumais from MSR is our first presenter today, and explicitly released what she’s showing from the NDA. Yay!

She’s showing some really nifty stuff, including a personalized search tool that lets you do a web search, then drag a slider to make the results more customized based on what your local computer knows about you. It’s a split screen result, so you see the original results on the left, and the increasingly personalized results on the right. Very, very cool.

(Thanks, Pete)

OK, so now AOL is getting back into the browser wars, says eWeek. And the speculation about Google entering the game is overwhelming. Well, Doerr said at Web 2.0 it ain't gonna happen, and I don't think it will. At least, not in the way the traditional narrative might have it. I've concluded that the point is not the browser, it's the platform, and Google already has one to build on. It's the web (and IE, in fact).

SEW blog points to Google's strategy: building on top of the browser.

From an Indian web site pointed to by SEW:

Internet search service company Google today said that it was engaged in developing technology that was aimed at bringing about improvements in web browsers.

''Today's browsers are doing a pretty good job, but they can be improved. What we are looking to do is to enhance the quality of the browsing experience,'' he said.

What does that mean? It means that the browser is a commodity. Note while the journalist said "improving the browser", what Sergey said in fact was "improving the browsing experience." This is an important distinction. Google will build something else, something which will presume the browser as a starting point, and make *what is being browsed* more valuable. There are already plenty of folks who are making the browser valuable. Google's play is in what the browser shows you, not the browser itself. That was the brilliance of Google 1.0, and I'd warrant the same will be true of version 2.

Direct and Related Links for 'Justice Dept. wants new antipiracy powers'

Direct and Related Links for 'Kazaa loses P2P crown'

Intel reported its earnings yesterday, and while most of the media reported that it was not such a bad quarter, I don't think there is much good news left for this company. As Businessweek earlier pointed out that things are getting increasingly tougher for Intel, and this quarter is yet another sign. With the help of Raymond James analyst Ashok Kumar, I managed to cut through the cruft and want to highlight three basic points about Intel's quarter.

• Intel reported revenues of $8.47 billion, which are right in the smack middle of a revised estimates. Previous estimates were expected to be between $8.6 billion to $9.2 billion. In other words, the company is slowing much more rapidly than it likes to admit. Over past four quarter, growth was 20% and this quarter, 8%.
• Now lets take a gander at the earnings. Earnings came in at around 30 cents a share, or as company claimed, 11% growth year-over-year. Take out 4 cents a share of tax benefits, and you are left with a number that is below consensus estimate of 27 cents. And we know how accurate the analysts are. They take the data companies give them, and basically pass it off as their own analysis. I think you might be looking at a company that missed its own targets.
• Gross margins declined 370 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 55.7% on underutilization charges, weaker product mix, and inventory reserves. And the processor segment revenues are down 7% from the peak levels in December 2003 and hardly qualify as an inventory build. Now this is what pays for the adventures, or perhaps misadventures in communications and digital home and all the other crap, Chipzilla wants to peddle. It is just a reflection of a maturing industry with plateauing and now decelerating growth rates.

Craigslist's success in the local space has many wondering how do we cash in! Google and Yahoo have new and improved local editions, which means I don't ever have to use Citysearch ever again. Next up, Yelp, a new start-up, that has been bankrolled and mentored by Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal.

Yelp! is a service that allows you to find, share and manage recommendations for local services from people that you know. Most online local services sites are not that useful, basically just an online version of the Yellow Pages.

Yelp adds persistence and reach to the word of mouth process, which is the way most people find local businesses. It's a marketplace worth more than the entire online advertising market at $14Bn in the US and $40Bn worldwide and so is starting to attract a great deal of interest.

Google's new Google Desktop Search tool raises a number of search privacy issues. In this article, we'll look at some of the usual specters of search privacy plus some new things people should consider.

A rumored Google tool to search your computer's desktop became a reality today, a free download available from the new Google Desktop Search site. I've written (with help from Gary) a long review of the tool for today's SearchDay article,...

An anonymous reader writes "Today marks ten years since the first public beta of Netscape Navigator was released. Both CNet News.com and MozillaZine have full coverage, with the former revealing that AOL is planning to release a new version Netscape in the New Year (thankfully separate from the IE-based version of AOL's browser). Even the Netscape portal (which never mentions the Netscape browser) is celebrating the anniversary. A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the last decade (especially since AOL bought Netscape) and the baton has now passed onto the Netscape alumni-filled Mozilla Foundation, but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser), but twice (by being the first major commercial program to go open source)."

While people have been doing Google-based background checks on dates for many, many years, it appears that recruiters are finally discovering the same thing. Earlier this year we had an article suggesting that rather than have "references available on request" on a resume, some people might want to put references available on Google, since Google has become something of that "permanent record" we were always told to fear in elementary school. Of course, there's a downside to that as well... if your permanent record doesn't look so good, that's increasingly going to be a problem. Apparently, some recruiters are discovering resume discrepancies, information about being dismissed from previous jobs and strong personal opinions that scare them off. The article has suggestions for those whose Googled selves don't look so good, from asking for certain information to be taken offline (good luck with that) to at least preparing a response that deflates any potential negatives. Of course, what the article doesn't talk about is how to deal with others who have the same name, even if they appear smarter than you.

The wires are buzzing this morning after Applied Digital put out a press release claiming that the FDA has approved the use of their VeriChip as an implantable device that can pass medical info on to medical staff with the proper readers. Of course, if you've been following the Applied Digital saga over the past few years, you might be more than a bit skeptical. Two and a half years ago, Applied Digital claimed the FDA had approved the VeriChip. Except that never happened. The FDA had asked Applied Digital for more information about the chip, and Applied Digital somehow interpreted that to mean approval. Later, the FDA did give approval, but specifically said not for medical uses, which Applied promptly ignored and announced the device could be used for medical purposes, leading the FDA to tell them to cut it out again. So, forgive us if we're skeptical that the FDA has really said what Applied Digital claims they've said. So far, there hasn't been much of a track record from Applied Digital to support these claims. This is, also, the company that failed to pay back debt they owed IBM and then proceeded to threaten to sue IBM for daring to try to collect on the collateral (Applied Digital stock) they were owed as part of the loan agreement. Beyond trusting them to tell you what the FDA said, would you trust them to stick a computer chip in your arm?

As the debate over e-voting machines continues, Ed Felten has a somewhat scary discussion about how Diebold set up their machines to read smartcards -- and how easily it could be hacked to let someone vote repeatedly. Basically, rather than making sure the smartcard is valid, the system just asks the smartcard if it's valid, and then accepts a "yes" response. As long as someone with a $50 smartcard reader (assuming DirecTV hasn't shut them all down) can figure out how to send the simple "yes" command (and two other "okay" answers) they could create accepted smart cards and keep on voting. While someone in the comments notes that the disparity between the number of votes and the number of voters would be noticed, it's still not clear how they would figure out which votes are legitimate. I guess this isn't that surprising from a company that set up the universal password for their e-voting machines to be 1111. This is what happens when you try to build security by obscurity into systems that need to be secure -- and why open source voting systems make much more sense to make sure that security holes are found and plugged early on.

Motorola (NYSE:MOT) has teamed up with Master Card to develop mobile handsets that are able to perform secure financial transactions.  The phones are being equipped with PayPass, a contactless payment service developed by Master Card and VivoTech.  Master Card is seeking for customers having many low-value transactions that are mainly cash based.  McDonald's, for instance, is one of the restaurants that announced it will accept the transaction system by the end of the year (i.e. in Dallas and NYC, with more cities to be added in 2005).  Master Card is also teaming up with other cellular phone manufacturers such as Nokia (NYSE:NOK) on tests of Pay Pass capable phones in Dallas, TX.

Good article by Mark Glaser just went up at the Online Journalism Review: Will Satellite, 'Podcasting' Bring a Renaissance to Radio Journalism? The piece looks at the changing shape of radio, focusing on satellite radio, "podcasting" and the promise of more original journalism.

"It's a ripe moment for radio. Several trends are converging: digital audio production tools are cheap and accessible; new distribution paths like streaming, satellite radio, digital broadcast radio, wireless and 'podcasting' are emerging. And concerns over broader media consolidation underline the importance of independent voices and non-commercial journalism." -- Jake Shapiro, executive director of PRX.org, an innovative online exchange of public radio shows

Xeni Jardin:
Sean Bonner blogs, "I have a friend with a job that makes certain Police Department memos things he needs to take note of. This is the one he got this morning. I've known this person for a very long time and I'm vouching for it's authenticity:"

Subject: FW: Terrorist Attack on US Soil is Imminent Importance: High


LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE

At the meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) that was held yesterday in Houston, US Attorney Michael Shelby informed the group that a terrorist attack of 09/11/01 proportions was going to be carried out on US soil within the next 6 weeks.

Mr. Shelby stated that on 09/13/04, US Attorney General John Ashcroft had a conference call with all 93 US Attorneys, an event which is extremely rare. The US Attorneys were informed that without a doubt an attack was going to be perpetrated in the US within the next 6 weeks, prior to the elections. Mr. Shelby urgently requested that all law enforcement be aware of any situation that may be out of the ordinary and report the activity immediately. Mr. Shelby also requested that we get the word out to patrol officers and detectives to talk to their informants and report anything odd or remotely suspicious. Mr. Shelby ended this warning by saying that unless we get a bit of "luck" and the attack can be detected and prevented, that another attack of 9/11 scale will be carried out.

Please disseminate to all of your law enforcement contacts ASAP.

New Mexico Investigative Support Center

Direct Line: 505-541-7000


Fax: 505-541-7006

John E. Vinson, Director

Mike Outmesguine says, "I called the number at the bottom of the email and told them I'd seen this notice, and wanted to find out more about the source of the warning. A representative from the New Mexico ISC told me that they forwarded the notice along after having recieved it from the Southern District Anti-Terror Advisory Council in Houston. They gave me a contact at that organization, whom I phoned, but I only got voicemail. I've also contacted the public affairs department of my local FBI office. My question is if it is a regional notice for TX and NM, or if it's something much bigger and LA and other areas will be advised to go on notice."

And in related news, CNN reports:

A Democratic senator said he will close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, fearing a possible terrorist attack that could harm his staff or visitors.

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a "top-secret intelligence report on our national security" provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee "Based upon that information," Dayton wrote, "I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.

See also this earlier Cryptome post on a September memo warning of terror attacks, with links to earlier news coverage: Link

This just in: the Supreme Court has denied cert in RIAA v. Verizon, the case in which the recording industry initially won the right to unmask an anonymous KaZaA user with a special non-judicial, PATRIOT Act-like subpoena under the DMCA. The DC Circuit reversed (PDF) that ruling, but the RIAA appealed. Now the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case. It's wonderful news.

Despite the rhetoric surrounding P2P, this case is not about filesharers "hiding" from the law. It's about making sure that the law keeps protecting innocents until there is a bare minimum showing of illegal activity. Just because someone suspects you of being a "pirate" -- or would like to use claims of copyright infringement to gain easy access to your personal information -- does not make you guilty until proven innocent.

The DMCA allows anyone simply claiming copyright infringement the ability to get your name, address, phone number, etc. This removes critical constitutional and privacy safeguards on the mere assertion of wrongdoing. Many people are angry about the PATRIOT Act for removing these kinds of safeguards. Shift the context to filesharing, and they tend to shrug it off because it's about "pirates." But it's the same Consitution, and the same rights are being eroded.

Later: Wendy Seltzer @ Deep Links: "The Supreme Court's refusal to take the case leaves the DC Circuit's well reasoned opinion as law: The DMCA doesn't give the RIAA a blank fishing license to issue subpoenas and invade Internet users' privacy."

Later #2: Sarah Deutsch: "This decision means copyright holders and their representatives -- or identity thieves and stalkers posing as copyright holders -- will not be allowed to obtain personal information about Internet users by simply filing a one-page form with a court clerk."

Later #3: The Associated Press makes a mistake right off the bat in its coverage, claiming that the Supreme Court "sidestepped a dispute over whether Internet providers can be forced to identify subscribers illegally swapping music and movies online." Without a court, or indeed, any showing whatsover, we can't say these subscribers have done anything illegal. This dispute is about whether Internet providers can be forced to identify subscribers accused of swapping copyrighted files, on the mere rubber-stamped say-so of the copyright holder.

When respected journalist Farnaz Fassihi wrote her friends a letter about the bleakness of trying to live in Iraq as a journalist and a westerner, I doubt she realized it would become public, and that the WSJ would recall her, and place her on a mandated "vacation" until the election is over.

Have you seen the move made by Leucadia National (LUK) lately? The stock is up nearly 20% in past three months, especially in recent days. The company sold its big stake in MCI late September for a profit of about $20 million. This was a surprising turn around after the company decided to make a formal bid for MCI. (Wall Street Journal predicts a whole slew of Telecom Mergers are coming!)

The investment firm had previously acquired WilTel Communications and ATX Communications when they filed for bankruptcy, which seemingly legitimized the bid. So was it merely a case of cold feet, or did Leucadia engage in a classic "pump and dump" when it announced that it had sold all of its 5% stake for $266 million, a $20 million profit over its purchase price, a little over two months later? One widely quoted analyst, Muayyad Al-Chalabi of telecom consulting firm RHK, claimed even before Leucadia sold its shares that it "looks like a classic pump and dump."

The ever falling prices of PC-related WiFi chips has forced early pioneer Agere Systems to throw in the towel and the company had decided that it is going focus on more premium markets like wifi chips for "converged cellular/Wi-Fi and wireless voice-over-Internet Protocol," EE Times reports.

According to a company spokeswoman, mobility offers three times the growth of the PC market in terms of unit volume shipments. The company will emphasize its GSM/GPRS/Edge/WCDMA platform and develop a converged solution on the platform, with a wireless VoIP capability wrapped around it. That translates to a complete cessation of standalone WLAN chip development, including 802.11n, the much-hyped next-generation standard.

: Seems like a cool summer of music...the number of paying customers for this sector overall has decreased since April. NPD said that the number of consumers paying for downloads fell to nearly one million users per month in May, June and July from a peak of 1.3 million in April 2004.

NPD said the downturn coincides with the end of promotions and trial price incentives offered by several services.

(sub. req.): WSJ interviews Bill Gates...Gates on his supposed neutrality in the industry: We can go to the phone people and say, "Hey, put remote control and music in the phone." And that's not a business conflict for us because we don't make the hardware. We can go to the audio people and say, "Hey, get this built in." Not say, "Hey, you have to go buy our hardware to connect that up." And so, yes, being a pure software company helps.

Related: Bill Gates: Speech at Microsoft's Digital Entertainment Anywhere Event

: This was the story I was mentioning a couple of days ago...Wal-Mart is using its muscle to ask labels to sell CDs to the giant at lower prices..in this case, lower than $10. And the labels have little choice: if Wal-Mart cut back on music, industry sales would suffer severely -- though Wal-Mart's shareholders would barely bat an eye. While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart's total sales.

One thing the story doesn't take into consideration: the digital sales...

Michael Gartenberg from Jupiter Research has long been a fan of Microsoft's Media Center over TiVo. Today, he posted a lengthy piece explaining why the release of MCE 2005 is a milestone without peer:

MCE 2K5 is important. This OS will serve as the hub for Microsoft’s home strategy and is the cornerstone for a vision of allowing you have your content live in one central location but still have the flexibility to access that content in other rooms in your home on TV screens or stereos, take that content with you on your laptop, burn it to DVD or CD, use a portable media player to take audio and even video and pictures and with WM10 Mobile, take it on your PDA and Smartphone as well. No one else has this clear and articulate a message about the PC as a hub for the digital home for all content, including TV, Video and Pictures.

I must admit, with MCE 2005, Microsoft does have an entire digital lifestyle, end-to-end solution. My only worry is whether or not the market exists for such a device, as it seems people are only slowly adopting each new technology and aside from a few gadget freaks like myself, few would be able to take advantage of every available option in the new release.

PC World also has a first impression review.

Yahoo's profits for the third-quarter tripled versus the same period last year. From a the Bloomberg story, "Net income rose to $253.3 million, or 17 cents a share, from $65.3 million, or 5 cents, a year earlier...Excluding the gain from...

Virus writers have posted on internet forums and newsgroups messages that read: "David Beckham of Real Madrid was caught by photographers with his pants down. Early in the morning he was photographed with a Spanish hooker in a rather compromising position. Photos yet to hit the newspapers have been released here.."

But the messages direct you to a website where the file to be downloaded contains in fact a Trojan horse that can let hackers take remote control of an infected computer.

"Hackers and virus writers will try all kinds of tricks to entice people into downloading their malicious code - now they are trying to suggest that England's football captain David Beckham has been playing away from home," said a senior technology consultant.

WebUser.

theodp writes
"HP has taken umbrage with a Gartner analyst who pointed out that at $2,145 per liter, printer ink is more expensive per drop than Chanel No.5 or a good bottle of whiskey. HP hit back with a prepared email statement, saying the premium pricing just reflects their investment in R&D." This isn't new, of course. We've had a few stories in the past about how ink costs more than vintage champagne and how filling a swimming pool with ink would cost nearly $6 billion. Still, anyone who claims that they can price things so high because of the sunk costs that went into development is just screaming out for competition.

As was suggested last week, John Ashcroft has now put out a report talking about how the Department of Justice wants to deal with intellectual property issues and it basically reads like a dream list for the entertainment industry. Basically, they want both the Induce Act and the Pirate Act, as well as "more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors." Yes, that's right, rather than spend on real problems, like stopping terrorists, they want more cash to stop kids from letting a friend hear a song they might like. They apparently feel they need more power to stop casual sharing, defending an increasingly obsolete business model for a single industry who doesn't want to change with the times or fight their own legal battles alone. As was suggested last week, they're viewing the "war" against file sharing in a similar light to the war against drugs and corruption -- and it's likely to have about the same level of success. As a lobbyist for Kazaa (bias, noted) says: "They could be proposing here the greatest mass criminalization of conduct by otherwise law-abiding citizens since Prohibition." You get the feeling that, as law enforcement, the Justice Department feels they're better off if more people are breaking laws, because it gives them more to do -- even if there's simply no real reason they should be involved.

The private networks might be on their last legs. Latest data from TeleGeography's Global Internet Geography research service, shows that the Internet backbones now account for over 85% of the world's cross-border capacity used in fiber-optic networks. The balance of used capacity is dedicated to private corporate networks and international telephone traffic. Among other highlights of the recent report, the rate of Internet backbone growth varies dramatically by region. Mature Internet markets in the U.S. and Europe have seen relatively slow growth, just 30 to 40 percent over the last year. Asian backbones have upgraded much more rapidly—over 70 percent last year—and show no signs of slowing down. Technology Futurist offers a brilliant explanation for the trend. As a sobering though, our friends at Telegeography remind us that despite the super growth, a huge portion of international fiber-optic bandwidth still goes unused. On trans-Atlantic routes, for example, only about a quarter of currently lit capacity is actively deployed to carry voice, Internet, and corporate traffic. The remainder lies idle, either unsold or unused by service providers. This mismatch of supply and demand could persist for several more years due to the still untapped "upgradeable" capacity of current submarine networks.

The New York Times goes into some detail, Microsoft s Latest Plan for TV [nytimes.com], concerning the newest version, (3.0) of Microsoft's XP Media Center, which Redmond hopes will gain traction in the living room. Price points are dropping down to $1000 per unit, and new accessories from Cisco, Linksys and H-P include Media Center Extender, which uses wireless technology to send TV signals to additional TVs in your house.

The choice quote of the article is:

Still, it is an open question whether people want to watch television on their computers. "Convergence solves a problem consumers don't have," said Sean Baenen, a managing director of Odyssey, a consumer research firm. He said that simpler, single-purpose machines are easier to use.

But research by both Microsoft and computer makers found that most of the initial users of the machines were using them on their computer monitors, presumably on their desks. Only a small minority use the highly promoted ability of the computers to link to TV sets and sound systems for use in family rooms. (The machines come with remote controls and software with very large type so that they can be used by people sitting on the couch across the room from a big TV set.)

One reason, perhaps, is that video-recording functions and picture quality have not been as good as on a device like TiVo. A survey by Forrester Research found that people who recorded video on their computers were less satisfied than users of specialized recorders.

(Continued at PVRBlog)

Slowly but surely more and more details are leaking out about what’s going to be announced at the big Windows Media
press even Microsoft is holding later today. We already told you about
Plays For Sure, their new system for ensuring that when
you buy a song from an online music store it’ll be able to play on a certified digital audio player, and the launch of
Windows
XP Media Center 2005, but the latest bit of news to dribble out is that XM';s new
XM Radio Online service is going to be directly
integrated into Windows Media Player, though you’ll still have to keep waiting for a version of Windows Media Center
that works with a proper satellite radio tuner.

I thought you'd enjoy a contrast with the Bill Gates interview in the last article. Here is an interview with Linus in the Seattle Times, in their Business and Technology section, and as usual, it's charming and refreshing. He says Microsoft has a PR problem ("Largely deservedly, I would say.") and he finds their Find the Facts campaign "pretty amusing." But the most interesting part, to me, is what he says about the shared source program and about security. He contrasts shared source with real open source.

Says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of the Norwegian browser maker: "We're beating Microsoft by a 10 to 1 margin in [cell] phones" [Business Week: Technology]

'-- Microsoft has one big system. The integration of Internet Explorer with the desktop wasn't a good idea. When you combine big things, the chances things will go wrong increases. It's also the question of everyone using the same system. Hackers go to Microsoft because that's where the traffic is --'

...John

Business Week says that all those online games and streamind movies are really going to need bigger pipes and lead to a telecom revivial. But unlike the last time around, the last mile would and should get more dollars. I agree, and have been arguing for this since kingdom come, except in the US the lock-of-bells and regulatory mess are going to be a big issues going forward. Remember this ain't Japan, South Korea or China, which are starting out fresh. We are dealing with monopolistic mentality here and that takes a long time to overcome!

: Microsoft has allocated more than $20 billion to spend over the next six years in a drive to grab a share of the film and music entertainment market, the Times reports...this amounts to half the company's entire R&D budget until 2010.

It already has 270 patents pending on recent innovations that will allow customers to watch television streamed through the internet.

If you read Lexar's documentation, their JumpDrive Secure product is secure. "If lost or stolen, you can rest assured that what you've saved there remains there with 256-bit AES encryption." Sounds good, but security professionals are an untrusting sort. @Stake decided to check. They found that "the password can be observed in memory or read directly from the device, without evidence of tampering." Even worse: the password "is stored in an XOR encrypted form and can be read directly from the device without any authentication."

The moral of the story: don't trust magic security words like "256-bit AES." The devil is in the details, and it's easy to screw up security.

Although screwing it up this badly is impressive.

Lexar's product

@Stake's analysis

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Bush administration--specifically, the Department of Homeland Security--has wanted the world to agree on a standard for machine-readable passports. Countries whose citizens currently do not have visa requirements to enter the United States will have to issue passports that conform to the standard or risk losing their nonvisa status.

These future passports, currently being tested, will include an embedded computer chip. This chip will allow the passport to contain much more information than a simple machine-readable character font, and will allow passport officials to quickly and easily read that information. That is a reasonable requirement and a good idea for bringing passport technology into the 21st century.

But the Bush administration is advocating radio frequency identification (RFID) chips for both U.S. and foreign passports, and that's a very bad thing.

These chips are like smart cards, but they can be read from a distance. A receiving device can "talk" to the chip remotely, without any need for physical contact, and get whatever information is on it. Passport officials envision being able to download the information on the chip simply by bringing it within a few centimeters of an electronic reader.

Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity.

Think about what that means for a minute. It means that passport holders are continuously broadcasting their name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip. It means that anyone with a reader can learn that information, without the passport holder's knowledge or consent. It means that pickpockets, kidnappers and terrorists can easily--and surreptitiously--pick Americans or nationals of other participating countries out of a crowd.

It is a clear threat to both privacy and personal safety, and quite simply, that is why it is bad idea. Proponents of the system claim that the chips can be read only from within a distance of a few centimeters, so there is no potential for abuse. This is a spectacularly naïve claim. All wireless protocols can work at much longer ranges than specified. In tests, RFID chips have been read by receivers 20 meters away. Improvements in technology are inevitable.

Security is always a trade-off. If the benefits of RFID outweighed the risks, then maybe it would be worth it. Certainly, there isn't a significant benefit when people present their passport to a customs official. If that customs official is going to take the passport and bring it near a reader, why can't he go those extra few centimeters that a contact chip--one the reader must actually touch--would require?

The Bush administration is deliberately choosing a less secure technology without justification. If there were a good offsetting reason to choose that technology over a contact chip, then the choice might make sense.

Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The administration wants surreptitious access themselves. It wants to be able to identify people in crowds. It wants to surreptitiously pick out the Americans, and pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the very thing that it insists, despite demonstrations to the contrary, can't be done.

Normally I am very careful before I ascribe such sinister motives to a government agency. Incompetence is the norm, and malevolence is much rarer. But this seems like a clear case of the Bush administration putting its own interests above the security and privacy of its citizens, and then lying about it.

This article originally appeared in the 4 October 2004 edition of the International Herald Tribune.

Search marketing firm Fathom Online has assembled a Keyword Price Index to show average bid prices for various industries. The index looks at the prices for the top five spots for the 500 most queried terms for an industry, as...

Suburbanpride writes "Last year, as Slashdot readers may remember, the University of California, San Diego forced student website UCSDuncensored to change its name to SDuncensored, citing California education code that gives it exclusive rights to the name. This year, the target is youCSD, a student blog that has been critical of the administration. The university denies that the site's content had anything to do with the nastygram they received, which informed them that were in violation for not only the name, but for an image they took of the Geisel Library, which the university claims to hold a trademark on. There are dozens of sites that use UCSD in the name, not to mention the 1000+ members of the UCSD xanga blogring. What's next, campus police stopping people from taking pictures of the library?"

ZuperDee writes "According to this article, the French industry minister has approved a decision to allow cinemas, concert halls and theaters to install cell phone jammers, on the condition that emergency calls can still get through."

grcumb writes "As part of the DoJ Anti-trust settlement, Microsoft was ordered to provide freely available documentation for its communications protocols. InfoWorld is reporting that not only are they late in delivering the required APIs, but it's because they want to convert everything to the read-only Web Archive (MHT) format, which can only be viewed in MSIE. InfoWorld reports that, "In July, Microsoft said it would complete revisions of the documentation required by the court in the autumn, a season generally reckoned to include the months of September, October and November in North America, but may now have to extend work on a beta or test version of the new documentation into December...." So we have to wait longer for a format that makes the content harder for developers (developers! developers!) to use. Maybe they didn't read the documentation ..."

Hydrogen is not a transportation panacea--thats the conclusion of a new calculation by two British researchers. In order for our fossil fuel vehicles ...

In the late nineties, Washington policymakers took up a noble cause. There was a new technology, digital television, that almost everyone agreed would eventually revolutionize TV, but quelle horreur almost no one was adopting it. Among other things, local TV stations couldn t transmit digital signals on their existing analog channels. They needed digital spectrum. (If you think of the electromagnetic spectrum as a highway, digital and analog signals travel in different lanes.) So Congress decided to give the stations a leg up or, rather, a handout. Instead of auctioning off the digital spectrum (which might have brought in new competitors, not to mention money), or simply asking broadcasters to pay for it (it was worth, conservatively, tens of billions of dollars), Congress offered it to them free. It was, as Reed Hundt, who was the F.C.C. chairman, said at the time, the largest single grant of public property to . . . the private sector in this century. Senator John McCain was a little more blunt. He called it one of the great rip-offs in American history.

Xeni Jardin:
NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, and files a new dispatch to his blog today:

Once you start to slide in Iraq, it's hard to right yourself. There's enough to piss you off on a daily basis that if you let it compound there's bound to be trouble. For Iraqis--car bombs, roadside bombs, city-sieges, instability, uncertainty, and loss of hope--this is their daily diet. I asked one of our drivers, Wesam, how he was doing the other day. It was just a typical faux question in passing. He stopped me in my tracks with a heartfelt answer.

"We are so unhappy, Kevin."

"Who's unhappy? You? Everyone?"

"Everyone--its such a very bad situation. We don't know what to do."

Neither does anyone else here-- so it seems. We are bound together in this bloody conflict where the body counts have to break double digits to really get our attention anymore. It's a spiritual malaise as easily caught as a common cold. Big Daddy spelled it out best with one word in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," – mendacity.

Mine comes and goes depending on how much time I've spent quarantined in the hotel as opposed to out in the field. This week I've got it bad

very interesting post on the future of eBay, by Brian Dear. He keys off a question I asked Louis Monier on stage Weds...

One of eBay's main selling points for years has been: trust and safety. You're gonna be fine if you buy or sell on eBay, even if the other person in the transaction is a total stranger halfway across the world. And that is true. Most of the time, things are fine. Fraud happens occasionally, but the vast majority of the time, even big transactions like computer and car sales go smoothy.

Why do I think it might be nearby? Consider for a moment how much PC/Internet household penetration there is now. And how much high-bandwidth penetration there is now. There's a much better chance in 2005 that a whole lot of people who live in your own neighborhood or general vicinity will have stuff you want, and you certainly will have stuff they want, and both of you will have ways to find out about each others' haves and wants. Does eBay's trust and safety cushion still offer as much value in such a world?

I missed a bunch of cuts here. Apparently, the true magic of Hatch’s strategy will happen today. It will be hard to follow, because it will all happen so quickly. But this is the plan:

The House has passed HR 2391, the CREATE Act, which modifies how collaboration affects patentability.

Apparently, Senator Hatch will substitute that bill today, and plug in:

(1) HR 3632, which regulates the trafficking in fraudulent labels (including watermarks?), as well as a sentencing enhancement for using a falsely registered domain name in the commission of your offense, as well as

(2) HR 4077, which, among other things, includes the following:

(a) the PIRATE Act, which increases copyright enforcement power
(b) the ART Act, which criminalizes camcording in a theater
(c) a sense of Congress that P2P is bad (really)
(d) a reduction of the criminal copyright liability standard, to make it easier to catch file-sharers (the new standard is in the extended entry below)
(e) the Family Movie Act, which codifies ClearPlay-like technology

So what’s the politics of all this: By my count, (1) lots for the content industry, (2) one bit for family values (ClearPlay), (3) zero for the pubic domain.

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Internet Voice is a disruptive force, but there are some nagging signs of early pain for the technology. Most of these issues are around technological and regulatory issues. For instance, politicians are now lobbying hard to regulate VoIP. U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) and 61 other members of Congress, in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wrote that "VoIP services are inherently interstate in nature and should not be subject to a patchwork of state rules and regulations." The legislators say that FCC should hurry up and pass a ruling on Vonage's petition to classify business as an interstate information service no different than applications like e-mail. Such a ruling would put VoIP beyond the taxing and regulatory reach of the states, Internet News says. FCC chairman wants to leave this ruling as his legacy, we are told. But if the lobbying effort fails, you can pretty much kiss the independent business goodbye, because most companies would be left dealing with 52-state level regulatory regimes.

Recommended reading: Telephony magazine's current cover story.

Merrill Lynch is making a bold prediction: the demand for DSL gear after peaking in 2004 is headed south, at least in the US. They predict that the market could fall 15 percent per annum from $506 million in 2004 to $295 million in 2007. They say that because of already substantial penetration, the new-subscriber adds are going to fall. An already difficult situation will be made tougher by 5 percent annual decline in DSL per port price. So what is the silver lining? Companies focusing on Video-over-DSL like Lucent, Alcatel, and tiny names like Calix are going to do well as IP-TV slowly and surely becomes a reality. Calix is a standout here, and has a partnership with Nortel. I think Merrill Lynch has missed out on a big factor here: Nokia, which I am told has a great ADSL2 solution, and is being trialed by the likes of Covad.

Bad news is not going to be limited to Adtran, Catena and Advanced Fiber Communications. The entire food chain - PMC Sierra, Adtran, Redback could suffer in this slowdown. Merrill says that the "Longer-term outlook for DSL hinges on video delivery strategy adopted by DSL service providers.  We highlight that regional Bell telcos face an uphill task of matching cable's video offerings on a legacy copper plant that limits DSL speeds.  While the network need to be upgraded with additional fiber, the current regulatory climate de-motivates carriers from increasing investing aggressively." There is the China factor. I think Chinese equipment vendors like Huawei, ZTE Corp, and others in Asia are going to exercise a deflationary effect on this market. The US and other western companies will find life very tough competing with the Asian equipment makers in their home markets.

: The Gallup Poll has launched a free daily Web newscast, an eight-minute video featuring pollster-in-chief Frank Newport as a stand-up anchor talking about the firm's latest polling data and what it reveals about current events.

Interesting: it is Flash video, instead of WMV or RM...

Related: Gallup Moving Into Online Broadcasting

Google announced yesterday Google SMS, a way for people with SMS-enabled phones to access Google information. More details on it are available at http://sms.google.com . After some goofing around and...

I covered GoHook last January as a site that indexed completed eBay auctions. Since then it's expanded a little bit... If you go to http://www.gohook.com now you'll see that you...

Once again, technology is imitating nature with a new class of biologically inspired robots called "Biomimetic Robots." In this very long article, IEEE Computer Magazine looks at several projects currently underway. All these projects will have practical applications a few years from now. They include robotic lobsters for underwater mine research or flying insect-based robots for future spatial missions. Other projects are about cricket-inspired robots to be used in rescue missions or scorpion-like robots to be deployed in hostile environments for humans. and of course, there are the now famous and robust "sprawling" robots based on cockroaches. For more information, read the whole very well documented article. Or read more for a photo gallery...

That's the headline of Gretchen Morgensen's update on the Oracle v. PeopleSoft saga, in today's New York Times business section . . . proof that Silicon Valley's shadow side continues to intrigue mass media audiences and the journalists who indulge...

Topless Humans Organized for Natural Genetics

David Isen posted in his blog the the VON Magazine article he wrote about Japan, which I highly recommend.  I will not rehash his themes and closer examination of what Japan is doing right to lead the way in the delivering broadband services to the consumer market. 

Instead, I will talk about how some of Japan's neighbors are tackling the best way to deliver FTTP (Fiber To The Premise) to their countries.  Without a doubt, Japan is the leader in broadband in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, with over 1.5 million FTTH customers currently getting the service.  After getting burned with ISDN, NTT made a slower foray into FTTH, but seems to be picking up speed in delivering the service (competing with the pioneer Usen Broad Networks) and establishing a goal of 2 million FTTH subs by 2005.

But what about the other countries?  Australia also seems to be getting quite serious about FTTH.  One of the first companies to deliver optic fiber in Australia was Bright Telecommunications, offering service to about 200k homes in Perth.  The company has several packages, including video, high speed Internet and voice services bundles.  Telstra is working on an FTTH trial at Brookwater Estate, Greater Springfield, a new housing estate on the outskirts of Brisbane.  Bundling will also be centered on voice, video and broadband access, with a caveat: Telstra will be tuning down the throughput to match that of existing cable and ADSL services.  In Canberra, TransACT Communications will be offering broadband at 36 Mbit/s downstream and 1.6 Mbit/s upstream, relying on FTTC (Fiber To The Curb) and ADSL 2+.

In China, China Telecom (the country's largest broadband Internet provider) plans to try out FTTH services in the future, but for now will primarily rely on DSL to provide broadband access to its customers. Despite that, with the 2008 Olympic Games looming on the horizon, many telecom service providers in Beijing have prepared study plans to further develop the region's infrastructure.  Beijing's metro fiber optical network is projected to connect to other cities and connect contest and non-contest venues.  China Telecom has been quite active, and recently bought some optical infrastructure from Nortel (NYSE:NT).  As well, China Netcom is rolling out a wireless broadband solution using the 3.5 GHz spectrum, relying on Alvarion's WalkAir 1000 platform.

Finally, Korea has already deployed more than 50,000 km of fiber.  Korea Telecom (KT) is rolling out a FTTH pilot service in Kwangju, a southwestern city in Korea, for 100 subscribers.  The aggressive target set was to deliver between 50 to 100 Mbps of bandwidth to about three quarters of the total households by the end of 2010.

AT&T said it plans to use WiMax to deliver voice and data services to residential customers: Covad has the same plan and has already begun testing broadband wireless equipment. I'm curious about what frequencies the operators plan to use. I continue to hear from vendors and operators that most major carriers wouldn't deploy WiMax in unlicensed frequencies but as far as I know neither Covad or AT&T have significant licenses for spectrum that would be ideal for WiMax. I also continue to hear that the first batch of commercial certified WiMax gear will operate in 3.5 GHz, a piece of the spectrum that has been licensed in other regions but not the United States. The 2.5 GHz band, licensed to operators such as Nextel and Craig McCaw's Clearwire, will come six months later, at the soonest. That means that operators in the United States that wish to deploy WiMax in the unlicensed bands won't be able to do so for quite a while. In the meantime, I suspect that they'll have to use WiMax-like equipment rather than officially certified gear. This CNET piece says that Covad is envisioning a 2005 commercial rollout, but notes that timeframe may be ambitious because Intel doesn't expect WiMax to be integrated into notebooks until 2006. That's irrelevant because before Intel does that, other vendors will build CPE equipment that won't be embedded into computers....

We thought this might happen with non-standard 802.11g devices, but perhaps the cart was well ahead of that horse: The Wi-Fi Alliance said in a press release that any product that labels itself 802.11n and Wi-Fi will lose Wi-Fi certification--and thus their ability to use the trademark--if the device causes Wi-Fi interoperability problems. This is what some chip vendors were arguing needed to take place with non-standard 802.11g extensions, but that seems to have devolved in turf battles rather than action....

Cory Doctorow:
Yesterday, I caught a demo of Laszlo, a really bad-ass application development environment for the Web. Lazlo does was Java was supposed to do -- let you run desktop-app-like applications within a browser window. But Laszlo doesn't require any plugin on its own, or flaky, slow Java. Instead, the Laszlo compiler turns Lazlo code (which is written in very fast, flexible, human-readable XML) into Flash apps. Pretty much everyone has Flash installed, so users can run your apps without installing new software (but since the Lazlo code is compiled down to Flash, it could also be compiled down to something else -- IOW, if Macromedia gets to rank with you, you could compile your apps to Java, to C++, Mono or whatever).

But the big news is that Laszlo is now Free Software -- free as in beer and free as in speech, licensed under an open source license from compiler to server. To recap: I came for the eye candy, I stayed for the liberty. This is nice stuff.

Link

(Thanks, Tobias!)

Ted Bridis @ AP catches up with Ernie on the Induce Act, which is officially stalled -- for now.

Even as we fret about broadband, struggling with its definitions, and squabbling over which technology wins, I see the Asian marketplace taking a lead on rest of the planet. We know how South Korean and Japan have embraced DSL, but China is now the next frontier. 13 million Chinese already have DSL, which makes China the leader in DSL broadband subscribers Ironically, this is only 6% of China's total phone lines. The DSL Forum said high-speed DSL net grew globally with 30 million new subscribers over the last year. By the end of June 2004, there were 78 million subscriptions worldwide. While the last mile take-up rates accelerate, you are seeing a sharp decline in the bandwidth prices in the region. Gartner Group says that the international bandwidth prices in the Asia-Pacific region will continue to decline by 20-25% annually in the next 3 years.

This is because of the large number of players aggressively competing for enterprise business and the excess capacity across Asia. For the fast growing Indian market, new submarine cables like TICS (Tata Indicom Chennai Singapore), FLAG Falcon (Reliance) and SMW-4 will add capacity on both the western routes towards Europe and eastern routes towards Singapore. This will result in a 40-50% annual price decline for international connectivity from India.

Asian phone companies are buying up optical networks world wide on the cheap, reports Newsweek. Nothing surprising to the readers here, but still it is going to come as big news for the world at large, that many Asian companies are buying up companies at 10 cents on a dollar, sometimes even cheaper.

The digital networks on which American carriers spent billions in the late 1990s are being snapped up in fire sales by foreigners—and Asians are leading the pack. Since last year Global Crossing has been purchased by Singapore's ST Telemedia, Flag by Reliance of India. Now Tata of India is bidding for the network built by scandal-ravaged Tyco.

"Instead of being small players who have to pay big fees to use the international networks of companies like MCI or AT&T or France Telecom, some of the Asian telecoms can now sit down as equals and simply swap the use of the networks for free," notes OECD economist Sam Paltridge. The result, he says, is "cheaper calls for all of us."

I had a chance to meet with Jeffrey Citron, founder and chief executive of vowing yesterday. He was part of my Web 2.0 panel, and while we did not get a chance to ask a lot of questions, he answered most of them in an offline conversation. When asked to comment about Michael Robertson's SIPphone suing his company, Citron, who has never been accused of being shy, said, "Robertson took a cheap shot for publicity. They did not sue Cisco which makes the devices, and Fry's which sells them." When I asked him, but shouldn't everyone's hardware work with everyone's service. Citron commented, "Canon's toner cartridge doesn't work with Xerox copiers." His argument is that his boxes are optimized for Vonage. Robertson had emailed me with this, "Personally, I don't want a world where the store shelf has 20 different identical telephone adapters: on locked to Vonage, one locked to AT&T, one locked to Verizon, etc. What a mess! Thank god analog modem, dsl modem and cable modem didn't go down that path."

Vonage, he says is doing quite well thank you. At the end of third quarter 2004, Vonage had about 285,000 subscribers and added net 82,000 subscribers in this past quarter. He expects 4Q to exceed those numbers, as the company's service will be sold in 8500 retail outlets, versus 7000 right now. He expects subscribers to grow more than three times next year. (Jupiter Research expects total VoIP subscribers to jump to 12 million over next five years from current 400,000.) When I probed about the excessive competition, especially now that AT&T and others have jumped into the space, Citron said that in next 12 months, we will be left with 6-to-12 meaningful players. He says Vonage hasn't really seen anything worth buying, though he did not rule out consolidation. "Small players will be squeezed badly," he predicted. Well with over $200 million in venture funding, he can afford to be a little glib. He took a jab at AT&T and said, just ask them how many consumers they have signed up despite all the marketing blitz. Despite his optimism, Citron thinks that it will take more than five to ten years before IP share of voice traffic is over 50% of the total traffic. Vonage expects to launch a UK version of the service sometime before the end of the year.

: The spoken word audio company Audible has filed a shelf registration statement, with the potential of raising up to $125 million...

The company currently has no immediate plans to sell common stock, but intends to evaluate market conditions over time...the money would be used for general corporate purposes and potential acquisitions.

(sub. req.): Google Print, the books search service announced by Google yesterday, may raise some eyebrows in the book industry...

At least a dozen companies have already signed up to participate...Among the companies participating are Houghton Mifflin, Scholastic, Penguin, Warner Books and Hyperion.

Other publishing executives were cautiously optimistic, although they raised questions about how Google would ensure the protection of copyrights.

Recent trips to computer retailers had me wondering whether Hewlett-Packard (HP) and HP-owned Compaq brands weren’t giving way to down-market brands. The HP share of retail space seemed to be diminishing rapidly. Now, Merrill Lynch confirms this perception in a...

Christina Aguilera's nurse advert for Skechers trainers has been shelved after complaints from America's nursing body.

Sandy Summers, executive director of the Center For Nursing Advocacy says: "This ad simultaneously exploits the 'naughty nurse' and the battleaxe/Nurse Ratched stereotypes, setting the nurse up both as an available sex object and a mock-malevolent authority figure, rather than a competent professional."

Adrants.

jpkunst writes "ZDNet UK reports and PCWorld.com report that, according to Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, whose comments came during a discussion with Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, 'the browser wars are back', thanks to the emerging popularity of products such as Apple's Safari and the open-source Firefox. Andreessen warned that 'competition could compel the company [Microsoft] to use aggressive tactics to protect its Windows operating system monopoly'."

An anonymous reader writes "Google's new Google Print service (that lets you see scanned pages from printed books) has a pile of advanced browser-disabling DRM in it ('Pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content.'). This works with JavaScript turned off, even in Free Software browsers. Seth Schoen has posted preliminary notes on some breaks to the DRM (beyond just automating a screenshotting process), including a proposal for a circumventing proxy that would fetch Google Print pages and strip out the DRM. A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting; certainly the ability for a remote attacker to disable critical browser features like save, right-click, copy and cut against the user's wishes is a major security vulnerability in Moz/Firefox and should be fixed ASAP."

The latest "innovation" in identity theft seems particularly sneaky. Rather than just stealing the identity of random people, organized crime groups are stealing the identity of companies. They pick companies who have no reason to accept credit cards, and then apply for a merchant account in their name. They they charge stolen credit cards to that merchant account, and have the money passed off to another bank. The companies in question have no idea they're being ripped off, because none of this ever comes to their attention, until someone figures out what's going on, and the company is in trouble.

If you haven't been following the story of the former CEO of Aptix, you might just be able to wait for the made-for-TV movie that's destined to be made sometime soon. The short story is that Aptix got into a patent dispute with another company. In trying to fight it, Aptix's CEO Amr Mohsen was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. In order to fight that, he allegedly tried to hire someone to kill the judge in the case. The latest, is that in order to fight that charge, he's claiming he's mentally unable to stand trial. However, the judge is having none of that, telling Mohsen that it appears he's faking mental illness to get out of the trial. The lesson? Obviously, patent disputes are "gateway crimes" to much much worse crimes. No wonder the FBI wants to crack down.

A couple months ago, Verizon admitted that all of its various announcements about deploying fiber to the home was basically just for show... if the FCC didn't agree to announce that fiber wouldn't be subject to line sharing rules. In other words, "change the rules in our favor, or we're taking our ball and going home." A few days ago, SBC decided to make the same demand. It looks like the FCC is listening, because it's now been leaked that they're going to give in to Verizon's demand. However, in related news, an Appeals Court has said that the FCC can (as they did) freeze regular line sharing rates for telephone lines, while they come up with a new plan that hopefully doesn't piss everyone off so much. While both sides make compelling arguments why line sharing either helps or harms competition, the answer is that it really does both. Letting the Bells exclusively own the fiber sets up natural monopolies in those regions, but could help spur faster deployment of alternatives like high speed broadband wireless connections. While fiber has the ability to obliterate wireless bandwidth, there's a good chance the Bells will screw it up anyway, and the mobility aspect of wireless could be a big selling point over the fixed nature of fiber. Of course, the way things seem to be shaking out these days, the Bells may end up being the main providers of wireless services as well -- meaning that we're pretty much stuck in the same monopolistic quagmire many currently face. Once again, a more reasonable solution to such natural monopolies is to treat them more like the highway system, but no one seems to be considering that idea very seriously.

Chanel sells sexy fashion and perfume. Sexy Chanel, now renamed Sexy Chanelle, sells, uh, escort services in Toronto.  Oddly, she charges $4000 for 12 hours but $10,000 for 24 hours.  In any event, Chanel has sued her over her use of the domain name SEXYCHANEL.COM.  Part of the problem is the perfume bottle on the home page.  Via The Toronto Star.

Here is a demand letter via The Smoking Gun written by Mary-Kate Olsen's representatives to the distributor of a Save Mary-Kate T-Shirt, alleging trademark, publicity and privacy right infringement.

Fakes, or spoofs, as the major studios and record labels like to call phony files posted on p2p networks to overpower them, have been around for a while but recently, they've started to appear in increasing numbers.

That's because one of the entertainment industry's current pet theories is: flood p2p networks with fake files and users won't be able to tell the difference. So they'll give up trying to download and/or share.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

Xeni Jardin:

Link (Thanks, Wayne!)

Cory Doctorow:
Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive and one of the great heroes of the copyfight) just delivered an amazing presentation at the Web 2.0 conference, called Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. It lays out Brewster's plan to see to it that all the information ever created in the world is stored and made available forever. Here are my running notes:

Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not a non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything), Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc.

26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about $60K and takes up one bookshelf.

Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing).

It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too.

A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive -- to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all the books.

Link

Update: The Weblogs, Inc Web 2.0 blog has got Brewster's talk in MP3 as well as plenty o' pix.

Edward Felten and Derek Slater examine the latest draft (PDF) of the misguided Induce Act and deliver a one-two punch:

Felten: "This draft is narrower than previous ones, in that it tries to limit liability to products related 'peer-to-peer' infringement. Unfortunately, the definition of peer-to-peer is overbroad....By this definition, the Web is clearly a peer-to-peer system. Arguably, the Internet itself may be a peer-to-peer system as well."

Slater: "It could also apply to Windows networking, which allows sharing of folders over a network that certainly could be considered 'public.' Furthermore, it could apply to IM systems that allow people to send files. 'Locate and obtain' is in no way restricted to your typical search interface; consider an IM service with a chatroom called 'Share Music'(this is basically how sharing on IRC works, with bots that you can query). Even if you think they could successfully defend themselves, they could still be dragged through a money intensive lawsuit. And the boundaries of this definition will be continually pushed my new technologies.

Shall we go on?"

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The resumé of George W. Bush, a carefully annotated curriculum vitae for the incumbent U.S. president, with a foreword and an ongoing errata section to keep it honest.

EXCLUSIVE: Our friends at Six Apart are about to get another big round of venture funding. It is their series B round of funding, and the lead investor in this round is said to be August Capital. August's capital won't be much of a surprise for the two entities have old linkages. For instance, former August Capital partner Andrew Anker is now an Executive Vice President of Corporate Development. The amount of money raised is still under a shroud, though I am told it could be well over $5 million, a modest investment when compared to Silicon Valley's free spending ways of the past. (Press release says $10 million) Many of my better sources in Silicon Valley say that there was a good chance of Sequoia Capital participating in the round, but obviously that did not pan out. I have sources telling me David Hornik of August Capital spearheading the investment, and is likely to join the board of the company. The Trotts obviously are not talking, and neither is rest of the senior management. I had tried getting in touch with Hornik but he would not say. Anyway I am pretty certain of the news. Six Apart had received an undisclosed amount of money from Joi Ito's VC fund, Neoteny. Reid Hoffman, a member of the founding team and former executive officer of PayPal is also an investor. The company has been on a tear and recently signed a deal with Nokia where Nokia camera phones (ugly as they might be) play nice with TypePad, SixApart's hosted service.

• For VCs, Blogging is the next new thing
• technorati gets fed VC dollars
• Hornik explains his side of the story.

For past 24 hours, the web has been abuzz with words about Web 2.0. Jeff has been blogging up a storm, and so has Sean Bonner. So perhaps I would not repeat what they have to say. I will, however give you my impressions of what's going on, the color and the general atmosphere of this conference. Since morning I have had a chance to catch up with a lot of people I knew through RSS.

Still going through the program list, chats, and all the big thinking stuff, I get a feeling that Web 2.0 is more of a comeback fight for the web 1.0 folks. Its about second chances for folks like Kim Polese, Chris Alden, Joe Kraus, and scores of others are coming our of self imposed hiding, announcing their new projects. Venture capitalists, who had been feeling the ire of the limited partners are back, scouting for their next big deal. Blogging, for some is one way to go. (Bloom anyone?) Others are looking at wireless and VoIP. Still, they are looking. Even yesterday's villians, Mary Meekers and the posse are back into the sunshine as well. Marc Andressen, the man who hasn't done a lick for the Mozilla Foundation is chatting about broswer wars. (As Bill O would say, shut up!) After nearly five years of gray skies, you see sun breaking through. Perhaps it was apt, that the fog, that normally envelopes San Francisco lifted today.

The conference has a certain buzz, a sense of optimism. I am not sure, how lasting it can be. The quintessential skeptic in me worries about VoIP being the new dot-con. I fret about single digit growth rates, and I loose sleep over Silicon Valley's collective ignorance about user experience, wireless and other such esoteric things, that make cracking the consumer code impossible to those on the left coast. (I agree with Nick, small is they way to go!) Still, it is nice to see the smiles on so many faces. Even a crummudgeon like me, can deal with that.

: This follows WSJ story yesterday: For the first time, Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition is supporting multiple tuners, meaning that consumers will be able to watch one channel while recording another.

The product will also include the ability to exchange MSN-compatible instant messages while doing other things, such as watching TV or viewing a photo slideshow. The IMs appear as an overlay to the TV or other main image.

Related: Microsoft's Quest For the Home Hub; Janus Launch

Thomas Hawk has a great, lengthy review of the new Microsoft Media Center 2005, which he expected a bit more from, but it does sound like Microsoft's making some progress on it.

Highlights from the review:

• It only does over-the-air HDTV, but that's not entirely MS' fault. The cable and satellite folks have their own proprietary encryption schemes they're not into sharing with anyone.
• MCE will be available for purchase as a standalone product for the first time, instead of requiring you to buy a new PC. Could be a support nightmare for MS, but good on them for expanding the availability for build-it-yourself geeks.
• They've added the ability to buy and use Napster music and Movielink movies, which is novel. The Movielink thing is pretty comparable to the upcoming Netflix-TiVo deal, but Thomas says the video quality is low compared to uncompressed satallite, which makes sense, as you would want moves to be well under a gig a piece, while unencrypted movies could run several Gb in size and take days to download.
• They've tried to integrate the web a bit, letting you read hotmail onscreen and pay (!!!) to read RSS feeds through Newsgator.
• Overall, everything sounds snappier, but I think Thomas was underwhelmed mostly over the HDTV thing.

Magnavox writes "Futurist Thomas Frey has written an article about Monday's Nobel Prize in medicine opening the door for taste & smell patents. Dr. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, won the prize for scientifically describing how odor-sensing proteins in the nose translate specific tastes and smells into information in the brain. Patenting smells in the past was limited to describing the chemical composition of the substance. Receptor patterning opens the door for a variety of new patenting possibilities... Perhaps more important will be the decision as to whether smells can be trademarked as symbols of the products or services they represent. Sounds and colors are commonly trademarked today because of the commercial impression they leave on consumers. Smells cannot be far behind. Now I'm wondering if we can patent the smell of money."

museumpeace writes "The FCC, with no advance notice to congress, effectively made substantial cuts in the funding for the program that subsidizes provision of internet connection to libraries and poorer school systems. This was not small potatoes: 2.5 billion buys a lot of connection. [confess your real identity to them and the ] NYTimes will tell you all about the uproar. The ostensible cause according to FCC officials, who annoyed congressfolk by dodging the inquiry, was an attemp to control possible fraudulent spending in the program but FCC actions then went far beyond fiscal oversight. FCC deference to phone companies by way of reducing the amount they were required to contribute to the program has compounded its financial woes according to Technology Review which also covered the story. [and which will also require a "free" registration]"

Number Ten Ox writes "According to The Register the BBC wants help to develop their open source video codec Dirac. '[Lead developer Dr. Thomas] Davies said the codec could live on anything from mobile phones to high-definition TVs but not before a lot of further work is completed. For one thing, Dirac doesn't currently work in real-time. Davies also reckons that the compression offered by the technology could be further optimised. The BBC is working on integrating the technology with its other systems, but the corporation would welcome more help in developing Dirac.' Sounds like something worth helping with."

With the launch of Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer's (two of the Excite founders) new startup, JotSpot, most of the attention is being paid to how it competes with SocialText, the original hosted enterprise wiki company. However, Business Week's coverage is a little more interesting. It's probably due to how JotSpot is trying to position themselves, but Business Week suggests that, rather than just being something of an open scratch pad, JotSpot lets people build their own software programs. This may seem silly at first. Indeed, it's clearly overstating the power of wikis right now, though it does show how JotSpot is positioning themselves against SocialText by clearly promoting add-on wiki components that look familiar to typical intranet/enterprise software users. However, the whole idea has me wondering if the wiki concept really could be the platform for situational software. Situational software is Clay Shirky's way of describing a new breed of quick-and-dirty software designed to solve a particular task for a small group of people, often built by non-programmers. We've already written about efforts by Charles Simonyi to create a platform for designing simple to use programming environments for non-programmers trying to solve specific tasks -- but perhaps the wiki is one step ahead of this. The problem, though, is that the wiki, by itself, has limited programmability. You can enter text and make links, but that's not quite the same as building an actual application. While both SocialText and JotSpot appear to offer additional components that they've built, the next stage may be for them to start promoting easy integration with additional outside apps and components developed by others. If you start thinking of the wiki as less an open whiteboard for text, and more an open workbench for integrating web services-based applications however you'd like, things start to get much more interesting.

It's been rumored for a while that the Justice Department was looking to start helping the entertainment industry defend their outdated business model, and here it comes. Attorney General John Ashcroft is now saying that the FBI will begin cracking down on intellectual property violations. Showing just how far out of touch he is, Ashcroft claimed that the FBI's fight against intellectual property misuse "must be as forceful and aggressive and successful as our response to terrorism and violent crime and drugs and corruption has been." Of course, I'd imagine that plenty of people would laugh at the idea that any of those responses could be categorized as a "success." In fact, with many of them, you could make a credible case to call them dismal failures. Chances are, though, Ashcroft is right. The war against file sharing will be just as successful. In other words, a ton of our taxpayer money will go into fighting it, but the end result won't do a damn thing to stop what they're trying to stop. Personally, if we have to be throwing money away on such bogus "wars," there are plenty that belong well above the list before reaching file sharing.

Pamela Parker Caird spots a sign using a Google search term, rather than a URL, as an Internet 'navigator.'

The Now Economy is reporting about a very interesting study, claiming that "global Internet traffic analysis in June 2004 tevealed that in the United States peer-to-peer represents roughly two-thirds of traffic volumes, and in Asia peer-to-peer represents more than four-fifths of traffic volumes". The text is here.



Very nice mention of DV Guide.

Mark Frauenfelder:
Is Bush Wired? is a site that speculates on whether the President has a teeny earphone that prompts him during speeches and conferences.

"Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. Some said this continued into a q & a. And on the night of 9/11, when Bush appeared on television to address the nation, viewers of one television station in Quincy, Massachusetts heard another voice speaking, slowly and carefully, a few words at a time -- words which were then recited by the president. The voice was nondescript, male, definitely not the president's voice, says Quincy resident Robyn Miller. This went on for at least four sentences, she says, and then the "extra" feed was cut off."

Link (Thanks, Pointer!)

So the city of Kobe in Japan has a new plan where beginning in 2006 they’re going to start embedding RFID tags all
over the place, like in streets, utility poles, and signs, so that when you walk around the city you can point your
phone (which will of course have an RFID tag reader by then) at something and instantly be able to pull up more
information about that location. So how long until some unscrupulous person hacks the system and decides to RFID-spam
an entire city center?

[Via textually.org]

align="right" border="1" height="150" hspace="4" vspace="12" width="200" />

Kind of bizarre that it’s taken them so long given that UltimateTV, their first failed stab at the digital video recorder market, already had this feature years ago, but Microsoft is finally getting around to adding support for multiple TV tuners (which means no more terrible agony over which show to record) to the 2005 version of Windows XP Media Center Edition which they’ll be announcing next week. The Media Center OS will finally be capable of recording HDTV, but only over the air broadcasts—there won’t be support for recording satellite or cable HDTV (and there are a bunch of complicated reasons why that’s the case), at least not this time around.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics the Microsoft Corporation, it's Political Action Committee (PAC), and its employees contributed more than $2.4 million to federal political candidates and parties by September 13 for the 2004 election cycle. The next largest contribution by any company in the computer industry is only $774,794 by Cisco Systems.



Far surpassing its contributions are Microsoft's lobbying expenses: $8.7 million in 2003. That's 34% higher than the prior year. "Many of the contacts involved influencing government procurement in the software industry, sort of a government sales call. Company lobbyists also approached the government repeatedly about visa regulations for foreign workers, tax issues and rules governing the WiFi spectrum... Outside observers say Microsoft is sophisticated at other types of influence that do not require reporting, such as sponsoring policy forums, contributing to key political figures' pet charities, supporting like-minded think tanks and attempting to ignite grassroots support... Microsoft donated nearly $1 million in software and technical support services to both the Democratic and Republican conventions this year." (Bekker, Scott. "Following Microsoft's Money." Redmondmag.com Oct 2004)

Jeff Nolan blogs Q&A with Mike Volpi of Cisco. It was a chat that happened at Vortex. Only the highlights quoted here:

Q: what is Cisco's strategy to Huawei?
A: whether it's Huawei or anyone else, we do a better job of creating value on top of hardware. Innovation keeps us ahead of the pack, but it's consulting that enables us to guide customers to achieving more value out of commodity hardware
Q: what value are you adding above the router?
A: we started with a network who's sole job was to move data around, it's a relatively dumb mechanism. Where we are today is building a network that enables customers and ISV's to build applications (in essence this is what Moore was referring to earlier when he said that the internet is the new application bus).
Q: what happens when you cross networks
A: even with today's technologies dual mode phones are available. WiMax is more universal.
Q: Is Microsoft a competitor
A: not in routers, but they do want to keep the network as a commodity with little value add. It's like having a car with all kinds of fancy technology but still on crummy roads.

: Seems like this and the WSJ story earlier today on Microsoft's launch of new Windows Media Connect/Media Center software are related...the news company intends to offer a video news service to consumers in a move that marks a significant shift in its corporate strategy, according to Guardian.

The Reuters Channel will be the first news service available on a new media centre service launched by Microsoft...The news channel will be supported by advertising.

"We have ambitions to do more in the direct-to-consumer market," Reuters CEO Tom Glocer told the Guardian...

Executives believe the company has consistently missed golden opportunities for a direct consumer service. It sold its news to the start-up CNN, for instance, rather than setting up its own TV service. It did the same thing for Yahoo on the internet many years later.

The idea is to focus less on syndication (see related links below), and try and build own brands through more-focused partnerships...

Related:

-- Reuters.com's Pitch to Consumers

-- Reuters to Restrict Online Business News

-- Reuters' Rationale

-- Reuters CEO On The Future

-- Reuters Raw Video To Remain Free for Now

-- AP's Enjoying Reuters Fallout

At the Web 2.0 Conference Google board member John Doerr said that Google is not going to enter the browser space. "Browsers are going to come back...We'll see a lot of innovation," said Doerr, speaking to a roomful of attendees...

Cryofan writes "Mark Pesce, lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) writes here and here about using p2p networks, specifically bittorrent, to create a grassroots television network. He cites as an example the BBC's "Flexible TV" internet broadcasting model using that as the core of a "new sort of television network, one which could harness the power of P2P distribution to create a global television network." Producers of video entertainment and news would provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and the p2p network peers distribute the content themselves. Thus, a virtual 'newswiki' where the content is distributed bittorrent using some sort of 'trusted peer' or moderator mechanisms as a filtering/evaluation mechanism. So what is stopping anyone from doing this now? Awareness of the concept, perhaps? Lack of broadband connections? Lack of business models for content producers?"

Here's more evidence that VoIP is stepping towards the mainstream. Earthlink, who already offers a paid VoIP service via a deal with Vonage is now offering a free SIP-based softphone VoIP offering to let users talk outside of the traditional phone lines. This is more simlar to Skype or Free World Dialup than Vonage, which is designed mainly to connect to the traditional phone lines. In some ways it's interesting to see these two layers of the VoIP world develop (with plenty of overlap). At the surface, there are the pay-VoIP offerings that offer a gateway to traditional phone lines, and pretty much act just like traditional phone services, with a few more options. Then, beneath that, you have the VoIP offerings that simply avoid the traditional telephone system altogether (though, often add in offramps to reach traditional telephone networks later on). While some people think completely separate telephony is good enough, it will be very interesting to watch how both sides develop over time, and whether the completely below ground system really does start to take away a noticeable percentage of calls that would otherwise hit the traditional network at some point.

Mark Frauenfelder:
The US Air Force is looking into making bombs out of anti-matter. I want a key ring with a speck of it!

One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Link (Thanks, John!)

UPDATE:Tom sez: Anti-matter is easier to come by than one might think. 22Sodium isotope naturally emits positrons and this property is used in many nuclear metrology applications (PET scans, positron annihilation spectroscopy, etc.). So a bit of isotope table salt might fit nicely in Mark's ring. Link to PDF file

Bloomberg reports that AT&T is considering a switch from Microsoft Windows to GNU/Linux. They say they are primarily concerned about security. A spokesman says they've had more viruses in the last six months than in the previous 10 years: "A decision by AT&T to abandon Windows would be Microsoft's biggest loss to the 13-year-old Linux system. A surge in viruses and efforts to cut costs have driven customers to look for alternatives to Windows, which dominates the $10 billion market for PC operating systems. . . . "The pressure from Linux comes as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft's sales growth declines to its lowest rate ever. The company in July predicted growth of as little as 4.3 percent this year, down from an average 38 percent a year in the 1990s." If Microsoft fixes the security issues, they may not have to switch, they say. Then there is that cost thingie. "Microsoft gets about 80 percent profit on each Windows PC sale," the article states. AT&T figures it could save 50-60% on the cost of desktop software by moving to Linux. It could be this is just a bunch of talk. I expect a lot of companies negotiate better deals these days by dropping the L word into the conversation. But here is the part that sticks in my mind. I ask myself this: does AT&T know a thing or two about Unix? Is it showing any fear about Linux's lineage if it is thinking of switching from Windows to Linux and telling reporters about it to boot?

NANOTECHNOLOGY, CLIMATE RESEARCH

Unmasking the molecular secrets of marine diatoms


Part animal, part plant, these tiny single-celled algae appear to ignore nature's biological laws. In their gene mapping efforts, US and European scientists have uncovered an incredibly successful microorganism which could play an important role in climate control and even in the creation of new nanodevices. Europa)

/


Ecologists are not the only ones interested
in diatoms. They are also attracting the attention of
nanotechnologists, who hope that these algae will teach them how to
make minute silica structures impossible to do using current
materials and technology. The scientists also considered the
evolutionary implications of this genomic work. Their research provides
direct genetic confirmation of a theory that diatoms evolved when a
heterotroph, a single-cell microbe, engulfed what scientists say was
likely to have been a kind of red alga. The two became one organism and
swapped some genetic material to create a new hybrid genome.



From this US sequencing project and the related EU-funded project, much
has been learned about how diatoms perceive their environment and
survive in it. What’s more, once the details of silicon metabolism come
out, the stage should then be set for nanotechnologists to harness
diatom proteins for making nanodevices. Understanding the role of
diatoms in global climate control and new products generated through
nanotechnology are just two of the important spin-offs from this
international project. More here

NanoBot Backgrounder

Driving under the influence of Feynman

How Thor the black lab can save the Earth

Carlo's just a Copycat

Direct and Related Links for 'Insight into Microsoft’s Battle Plans?'

Local governments are up in arms over FCC ruling that deems cable system and its modem service as an interstate information service, and not a telecom or a cable service. Local governments stand to lose as much as $470 million dollars per year in cable modem franchise fee revenue, which should have been paid as a result of the cable operator’s use of the public’s property. Five national organizations have asked the Supreme Court to review the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to also review the underlying decision of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The National League of Cities, the United States Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, the International Municipal Lawyers Association , and the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, formed the Alliance of Local Organizations Against Preemption to pursue legal and regulatory actions as a result of the FCC’s ruling that cable modem service is not a cable service. In October 2003, the Ninth Circuit ruled that cable modem service is not a cable service but has separate telecommunications service and information service components. This development could have some serious ramifications for the VoIP players as well. If cable modem-based services are forced into following the same regulatory rules as phone companies, much of the inherent advantage of VoIP players is going to go away.

Looks like TiVO-to-Go is going to be available any day soon. One astute reader sent me a link to Good Guys advertisement, which is pushing T2Go on its promotional literature. Tarune D Dillon writes, "I noticed goodguys advertised it as soon," in its Saturday big 28 page flyers. Here is a link to the scan of the flyer. In related PVR developments, The Register reports that Silicon Image, a chip maker is working on a new processor that makes dumb drives smarter.

The company is using the fabled system-on-a-chip concept for its new SteelVine design. This basically lets a chip handle storage functions such as RAID, disk striping and making many disks look like one. Consumer device makers could plug the chip into their storage systems - media appliances or PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) - and give customers a bit more data protection. "We took all of the software and management stuff that is quite complicated and crunched it down onto a chip," Tirado said. "To a Windows or Linux box, we look like a disk drive."

Like trying to figure out which mercenaries the Yankees will hire for the pennant race each year, speculating on PalmOne's next move has become somewhat of a national pastime (to some, at least) since the company split from the Palm OS division last year. Even PalmOne execs themselves aren't immune: Earlier this year, a Palm exec raised more than a few eyebrows when he popped off that the Palm OS was "not viewed internally as a religion". Whether it was just posturing, or a hint at discussions happening behind the scenes, the comment suggested that Palm hardware would not always necessarily be wed to the Palm OS.

Now we learn that PalmOne will license Microsoft's ActiveSync for future devices. Is a Windows Mobile-based Treo or Tungsten far behind? It's unlikely. While the deal is a good one for both Palm and Microsoft - PalmOne gets the most popular enterprise-class email product and Microsoft gets more devices accessing Exchange data - it's probably not a pre-cursor to a more involved love affair. If anything, it's a response to RIMs continued dominance of all things email-related, and their recent shot at the Treo. With the release of RIM's slick-and extremely affordable--7100t, make no mistake that PalmOne is feeling the heat.

But don't be fooled, PalmOne is surely exploring other options. The Treo's current, older Palm OS, certainly doesn't feel like it was designed with a phone in mind. Spend five minutes with a Series 60 device and the shortcomings of the Palm OS for mobile phones becomes glaringly apparent. While Cobalt should address many of its predecessor's shortcomings-no multi-tasking, etc-it's been far too long coming. In the meantime, Symbian has been constantly tweaking its smartphone OS. A Palm-Symbian alliance would make sense, especially if PalmOne is serious on focusing on smartphones in the future.

Off the cuff, unscripted comments from maverick execs aside, the alliance between the Palm hardware and software folks already seemed uncertain. Where was PalmOne recently when PalmSource rolled out its new Cobalt operating system? They were barely involved in the announcement at all. Instead, the PalmSource focus was on new, white label phones. That's a big departure from years past. It seems that after months of treading water, the two are finally starting to go their separate ways, which was the point of the whole split to begin with. Bottom line? Something's up. It's just not clear what. While we won't see a platform switch in time for Christmas, don't be surprised if by this time next year you're hearing about a Symbian-based PalmOne phone...

Guest post by Matt Maier, Business 2.0's fearless gizmo correspondent and my fellow traveler into the wireless wonderland. Matt uses six phones at a time, talks on none, takes video clips on two and when he is slowing down he double fists fizzy and fancy caffeine drinks. And oh by the way, send him a note and remind him how well the Dodgers are doing. Let him smile for a week or so more!

maggeth writes "The Financial Times is reporting that North Korea's military and intel services have trained as many as 600 computer hackers specifically for attacks against South Korea, Japan, and the US. South Korea claims that the north has a five-year university program for hacker training and cites recent attacks on government computer systems. The South Korean defense ministry claimed in the report that 'North Korea's intelligence warfare capability is estimated to have reached the level of advanced countries,' and that the caliber of the North's hackers is high. So far it appears that these specific attacks are based in China, although it is not clear if North Korea is using Chinese networks or if China is involved."

NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu Laboratories have teamed up to develop a prototype micro fuel cell for 3G FOMA phones.  [Ed. note: FOMA is the name of DoCoMo's proprietary 3G network in Japan]  The logic behind the move is to cater to the power demand by heavy-duty 3G cell phone users.  But even normal users will also benefit, given the increasing power consumption of cell phones (which can be also used to play games, store information such as photos, play different music ring tones depending on the caller ID, etc.). 

The greater power capacity is due to the micro fuel cell, which is able to store 10 times as much power per unit weight as a conventional lithium-ion battery.  The fuel cell generates electric power through a chemical reaction by mixing hydrogen and methanol.  CNET reported that Fujitsu was able to increase the methanol concentration in the fuel cell by developing a better membrane.  The prototype unit measures 152mm x 57mm x 16mm and weighs 190g. 

The charging device is shaped like a normal cradle used to recharge handsets, and it meets all the specs of other FOMA mobile phone rechargers besides being compatible with all FOMA handsets as well.  Both companies anticipate that the prototype will be further refined, with development being completed by the end of 2005.  The key question is when the prototype will become commercially available - thus far, the jury is still out on some of these fuel cell initiatives in terms of products actually launched in the marketplace.

Note: TechTree (an interesting Technology Daily from India, which I enjoy reading) also mentions that Fujitsu apparently has another prototype power unit that incorporates the technology.  Perhaps this work can be extended to other devices, such as PDAs and laptops.  A 300 ml. methanol solution can hypothetically charge a notebook for close to 10 hours.

PolyFuel, a California-based fuel cell company, plans to announce that it has achieved a breakthrough that will make fuel cells both more efficient ...

A MarketWatch article reporting that the keyword VIOXX is going for $11.88 a click on Overture.  I just searched the term and it appears that the first 15 Overture listings for VIOXX are for attorneys seeking plaintiffs regarding the recall.  Merck's vioxx.com site is number 18.  Google has 8 keyword ads for VIOXX, all for attorneys.

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Bush administration--specifically, the Department of Homeland Security--has wanted the world to agree on a standard for machine-readable passports. Countries whose citizens currently do not have visa requirements to enter the United States will have to issue passports that conform to the standard or risk losing their nonvisa status.

These future passports, currently being tested, will include an embedded computer chip. This chip will allow the passport to contain much more information than a simple machine-readable character font, and will allow passport officials to quickly and easily read that information. That is a reasonable requirement and a good idea for bringing passport technology into the 21st century.

But the Bush administration is advocating radio frequency identification (RFID) chips for both U.S. and foreign passports, and that's a very bad thing.

These chips are like smart cards, but they can be read from a distance. A receiving device can "talk" to the chip remotely, without any need for physical contact, and get whatever information is on it. Passport officials envision being able to download the information on the chip simply by bringing it within a few centimeters of an electronic reader.

Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity.

Think about what that means for a minute. It means that passport holders are continuously broadcasting their name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip. It means that anyone with a reader can learn that information, without the passport holder's knowledge or consent. It means that pickpockets, kidnappers and terrorists can easily--and surreptitiously--pick Americans or nationals of other participating countries out of a crowd.

It is a clear threat to both privacy and personal safety, and quite simply, that is why it is bad idea. Proponents of the system claim that the chips can be read only from within a distance of a few centimeters, so there is no potential for abuse. This is a spectacularly naïve claim. All wireless protocols can work at much longer ranges than specified. In tests, RFID chips have been read by receivers 20 meters away. Improvements in technology are inevitable.

Security is always a trade-off. If the benefits of RFID outweighed the risks, then maybe it would be worth it. Certainly, there isn't a significant benefit when people present their passport to a customs official. If that customs official is going to take the passport and bring it near a reader, why can't he go those extra few centimeters that a contact chip--one the reader must actually touch--would require?

The Bush administration is deliberately choosing a less secure technology without justification. If there were a good offsetting reason to choose that technology over a contact chip, then the choice might make sense.

Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The administration wants surreptitious access themselves. It wants to be able to identify people in crowds. It wants to surreptitiously pick out the Americans, and pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the very thing that it insists, despite demonstrations to the contrary, can't be done.

Normally I am very careful before I ascribe such sinister motives to a government agency. Incompetence is the norm, and malevolence is much rarer. But this seems like a clear case of the Bush administration putting its own interests above the security and privacy of its citizens, and then lying about it.

This article originally appeared in the 4 October 2004 edition of the International Herald Tribune.

Cory Doctorow:
Thiru Balasubramaniam from the Consumer Project on Technology is at the general session of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, and he's just posted his transcript of a barn-burner of a speech on IP and international development.

All members of WIPO need recognize that higher and higher levels of IP protection, inherent in any harmonization exercise that takes no account of the circumstances of each country, are extremely detrimental to developing countries. Intellectual property rights have to be viewed not as a self contained and distinct domain, but rather as an effective policy instrument for wide ranging socio-economic and technological development. The primary objective of this instrument is to maximize public welfare. The national policy space of each country must be respected, especially when developing countries are asked to assume international obligations. Even the most advanced developed countries, with their complex laws, have to grapple with the anti-competitive practices linked to patents. The absence of any comparable legal regime in developing countries means that these countries are required to grant monopoly rights to IP holders, without any meaningful or credible instruments to regulate the exercise of these rights.

Given the huge disparities existing across the world it is open to question whether IP harmonization benefits developing countries. The developed countries to pay lip service to "development' in the context of Intellectual Property protection, but they do so rather self-servingly. The term 'development' as used by these countries, including in WIPO, means quite the opposite of what developing countries understand when they refer to the 'development dimension'. If you share the perspective of the developed countries, 'development' means increasing a developing country's capacity to provide protection to the overwhelmingly developed country owners of IP rights!

Link

Here's a truly disgusting story. Kodak bought some patents from Wang in 1997. The patents cover a method by which a program can "ask for help" from another application to carry out certain functions, which is more or less what Java does. Kodak's business is suffering from the digital revolution, so it decided to sue Sun for infringing its purchased patents. It claims that Sun pilfered its technology. The two companies worked on some joint projects together at one time that involved the same technology at issue in the lawsuit, which Sun argued was an indication of Kodak's implied consent. Friday, Kodak won, thanks to a patent system spinning out of control, one that is destroying creativity and innovation in the software industry.

Amit Yoran leaves the Department of Homeland Security a little over a year after joining. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

'-- The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned after one year with the Department of Homeland Security, confiding to industry colleagues his frustration over what he considers a lack of attention paid to computer security issues within the agency. --'

Looks like DHS is becoming more insecure.

...John

Direct and Related Links for 'Schwarzenegger signs bill banning paperless voting systems'

Developing Story: Search engines of as much interest for me as Kansas City Royals are to New York Yankees: a good way to build up sizeable lead on those dreaded Red Sox. Similarly I just view Yahoo or Google as a tool to solicit information I am currently interested in. Sometimes, a GMail impresses me or the adoption of RSS or something like that. Thanks to a tip from a Silicon Valley insider, I stumbled onto a rather obscure patent: US patent # 6,704,727 awarded to Overture Services on March 9, 2004. Overture as you might know is now owned by Yahoo, yeah.. that other search company.

The patent which was filed on January 31, 2000 could turn out to be yet another migraine for the company of the moment - Google. Why? After going through the entire patent, I realized that this is a patent that covers displaying paid and unpaid listings on the results page after a search term is input. Extrapolating a bit, what this means, is that those blue and green paid listings and all those text ads that show up on the Google page after you search for “Paris Hilton Video” and how they are displayed could now very well be under a Yahoo patent! Actually this could be a bigger nightmare for other search wannabes as well.

Having said that, this is clearly what i understand. I am no attorney, or no patent expert, so folks can make your own judgment. There are clearly smarter people out there who know more about these two companies than me, and I hope they can help set the record straight. Here is the description, right from the patent filing.

: Scientific-Atlanta is in the final stages of producing a product that takes a DVD player, DVD burner and digital video recorder and rolls them all into one...it hopes to unveil the new product during the first half of 2005.

The device will record content to both a hard drive and a portable DVD so the content can be replayed on a variety of devices...It's also expected to play DVDs.

Israeli WiMAX vendor Alvarion (Nasdaq:ALVR)announced earlier this week that it had signed a deal with French operator Altitude Telecom to deploy an advanced wireless broadband network across France.  Altitude will rely on Alvarion's BreezeMAX solution to roll out broadband wireless VoIP services to SMEs in addition to large businesses.  The French service provider is deploying Alvarion's solution to build a nationwide network using their 3.5GHz spectrum, to complement and upgrade its existing 26 GHz wireless telecommunications infrastructure.

This is certainly good news for folks in the WiMAX camp, although the spectrum is still an issue to be considered for a wider uptake.  Case in point: Altitude is the only current operator with a license to operate in the 3.5GHz throughout France.  Globes (an Israeli business e-daily) reports that the BreezeMAX network will be rolled out in four counties (initially in the Loire Valley, with plans for additional counties within a year).

Mitsubishi has developed an LCD that is capable of displaying images on both sides of a single liquid crystal panel. They will be used for mobile flip phones that use two displays, the main display and one that's viewable without opening the flip for displaying phone numbers or the time. The benefit to the dual-sided LCD is that the phone can be made 30% smaller while reducing production costs.

C-SPAN and StreamSage (the folks behind CampaignSearch) have made available the ability to keyword search the video of the first presidential debate, find results, and then click to watch the section of the video where your search terms are spoken.

The Supreme Court of Tokyo has upheld a ruling against developer Westside, who released a utility for Dead or Alive 2 allowing gamers to strip in-game character Kasumi of her clothes. The patch was ruled an infringement of Tecmo 's copyright - and the firm were awarded damages of about £10,000.

Ferrago , via WSN.

The Senate Judiciary Committee failed today to reach a decision on the Induce Act. Sen. Hatch hopes to take up the legislation again next week before Congress adjourns.

David Pescovitz:
A mysterious low-frequency hum emanating from the Earth is likely caused by ocean storms. First discovered by Japanese seismologists in 1998, the vibrations have a frequency between two and seven millihertz, inaudible to humans.

UC Berkeley scientists propose in the journal Nature that the hum is produced by interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, and seafloor. From a BBC News report:

The daily release of energy required to generate the hum is equivalent to a magnitude 5.75 to six earthquake, say Junkee Rhie and Barbara Romanowicz of the University of California, Berkeley.

David Pescovitz:
SCOTTeVEST announced a solar-powered version of their sporty mobile gear jacket. Global Solar's thin-film photovoltaic cells on the back of the jacket charge a small battery pack that provides juice to MP3 players, phones, cameras, and other devices stashed in more than 30 hidden pockets. The coat is outfitted with a "Personal Area Network" of wires running through the lining.
Link (Thanks, Mark Riedy!)

...on the Induce Act, and comes out on the right side:

Throughout the ongoing battle over Senator Hatch's controversial Induce Act, the dividing lines have been clear: the RIAA on one side, and the technology and telecommunications industries on the other, with one puzzling exception -- the Business Software Alliance. The BSA did appear at Senator Hatch's initial hearing on the Act, but other than that has been surprisingly quiet in the debate over subsequent drafts of the bill and the effort to defend the Betamax doctrine.

Last night, all of that changed. In a strongly-worded letter [PDF 65k], BSA (along with CSPP and the ITIC) told Senators Hatch and Leahy in no uncertain terms what's wrong with Induce and what any bill that expands copyright liability would need to pass muster.

Taiwan's indigenous super germ defies all antibiotics.

Shih Wen-yi, acting director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), called for calm yesterday as people began to fear there is an indigenous super germ that defies any and all antibiotics. Known as PDRAB, the super germ is all but indestructible. It may cause all kinds of complications, chiefly pneumonia. PDRAB stands for pandrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. So far infection has been confined to hospitals, Shih said. Mostly, weakened in-patients, many of them recovering from surgery, have fallen victim. Once infected, the victims often die simply because there are no antibiotics that could kill the PDRAB.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/ i_latestdetail.asp?id=22951

*PDRAB lives on catheters, it's got a 60 percent mortality
rate, it eats antibiotics for breakfast, and there's a iot of it around.

*I open Google news today, people, and what do I see...
Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, carbombs,
and a Presidential debate! Maybe it's time that
the entire population of the planet took a two-week
vacation.

Forget waiting for ET to call -- the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia.

Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell.

The coded message would only be discovered once the human race had the technology to read and understand it.

Writing in New Scientist magazine, Davies said the idea should be considered seriously.

For more than 40 years astronomers have been sweeping the skies with radio telescopes hoping to catch a signal from an alien civilisation.

So far the search has been in vain. But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio.

FROM BEV: the referenced New Scientist article is here, dated sept 18, 1999.

Nelson Minar's experience with MS04-028 (the JPEG trojan) mirrors my own:

Windows Update is one of the great unheralded Microsoft technologies.
It really works. Well, mostly. I downloaded the various
JPEG fixes from them and thought I was safe until I ran
GDI Scan, a deep scan
tool that tries to find vulnerable versions of the DLL. And it found
a vulnerable version, C:\WINDOWS\system32\gdiplus.dll.



Now what do I do? I don't know where to get an update.
Do I have to install Service Pack 2? Does
that even fix the problem? I'm a software professional and I'm
confused. What does the other 99% of the world do? [Nelson Minar: JPEG Vulnerabilities in Windows]

I saw only part of the debate last night, but the part I saw was consistent with this Gallop poll indicating Kerry won the debate, 53% to 37%. Yet according to “US Press”: the debate was a tie.

Was it a tie? Or is it just impossible for the press to appear anything but “neutral”?

Update: Here’s a report from The Times (UK) with a nice summary of different views, some neutral, others not.

Direct and Related Links for 'Bank Transfer Demos Quantum Crypto'

In September 2001 the FDA warned Merck, makers of the painkiller Vioxx, for engaging in a promotional campaign that minimized "potentially serious cardiovascular findings." The previous year, Merck spent $161 million on Vioxx advertising (more than Pepsi or Budweiser spent on advertising that year). Earlier this year, a securities class action complaint was filed on behalf of several Merck investors alleging the company engaged in a marketing campaign that included false and misleading statements concerning the safety profile of Vioxx and that company insiders sold personally held shares of Merck for over $175 million in proceeds. Today, Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market.

Is there a link between today's headline: Baghdad Car Bombs Kill 34 Children Receiving Sweets (from American troops) and this Wall Street Journal front page article from September 22th?



"Capt. Ayers took lessons from his fellow captains. In April, Capt. Jesse Beaudin convinced a friend from the U.S. to send backpacks, notebooks and pencils for schoolchildren. Kids mobbed troops for the goods whenever they went out on patrol. "The kids provided security. No one attacked us when we were surrounded by children," Capt. Beaudin says. After hearing about this tactic at the dining hall, Capt. Ayers's men also wrote home requesting school supplies." Non-subscribers can read the WSJ article here

Instant messaging is everywhere nowadays, but people who use it may be surprised to know how trivial it is to listen in on their private conversations. Snoopers can use tools like tcpdump and aimsniff to tap into the contents of the messages. But with a little free software, IMers can be secure in the knowledge their conversations are, well, secure.

The buzz around VoIP, fiber to the home, wireless, WiMAX and all sorts of cool technologies would make you believe that we are seeing some sort of a telecom rebound. I call this chimera, a mirage and nothing but a pause between the continued downward spiral. Today, three bits of news caught my eye and they all portend to harder times ahead. Both Lucent and Nortel, are continuing to cut headcount, shipping them offshore, or simply giving their employees a pink slip. "The company is moving all development to India – no ifs, ands, or buts," a senior Lucent employee told Light Reading. "We're starting to drop like flies." Morgan Keegan & Company Inc. analyst Simon Leopold estimates that another 3,250 jobs, pushing Lucent's global headcount below 30,000, first for the erstwhile telecom leader. Lucent's former corporate parent AT&T continues to shed jobs like an old dog shedding fleas. Nortel says it is going to slash another 3200 jobs. Elsewhere, Wired Online reports that the bandwidth glut lives on, and cites a Telegeography report, when it reports that "the average prices paid for access to fiber-optic networks connecting European cities and linking U.S. cities have fallen 49 percent and 55 percent respectively." The article updates the previous bandwidth bazaar reports on this website. Looking for dark clouds instead of silver lining: the recent cuts in the credit ratings of baby bells, the VoIP price brawl and tight fisted consumer all add up to darker days for telecom industry. But then, I have been saying that!

Memo to all cameraphone fiends: taking pictures can bankrupt you! Oops, sorry, I already sent that one out. Forbes.com has a story which takes a look at the hidden and often surprisingly humungous cost of using camera phones.

After Daniel Goldstein got a camera phone, he couldn't wait to put the photos he shot into his computer to work with them. But unlike digital cameras that connect easily to a PC, his Panasonic phone had no cord to connect to transfer images. His only solution was to use the mobile network to send the pictures from his phone to the PC -- at 40 cents per picture. The New York University freshman wasn't happy. ''You buy something, you get excited about it, then there's this catch,'' says Goldstein, 18.

AT&T Wireless on Oct. 15 kicks off a promotion offering unlimited photo transfers for $4.99 -- compared with $15 for Sprint and $19.99 for 200 shots at Cingular.

Feedster's Scott Rafer isn't happy that the new Clusty search engine is hitting his site without a licensing agreement, in comments he's left at Welsh View. For its part, Vivisimio CEO Raul Valdes-Perez told SEW, "We did speak with Feedster...

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "In a letter to the White House, a leading US Senate Democrat, Diane Feinstein, expressed 'profound dismay' that the White House allegedly wrote a large portion of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's speech to Congress last week. 'His speech gave me hope that reconstruction efforts were proceeding in most of the country and that elections could be held on schedule. To learn that this was not an independent view, but one that was massaged by your campaign operatives, jaundices the speech and reduces the credibility of his remarks.'"

Last night on The Daily Show, there was an amusing exchange suggesting that tonight's Presidential non-debate was so predictable with its set of ridiculous rules that reporters could file their reports ahead of time. Of course, it looks like that's exactly what the Associated Press did. It's getting passed around in the blog world like crazy, (though Carlo gets the credit for sending it here): it's still well before the debates, and ABC News has posted some AP copy about the debate written in the past tense, as if it already happened. All they need to do is drop in some quotes, and voila: insta-journalism. Update: It looks like others, such as Yahoo are running an identical story, but with the proper tenses. I guess they're just supposed to flip 'em at some point. Update 2: ABC has now pulled the story, but someone has the text and screenshots, if you're interested.

Tim Bishop writes
"Om Malik has a very interesting article in Business 2.0 about the current trend of large companies acquiring small startups to obtain new technology or to fill out their product line. He tells the stories of the founders of Oddpost and Lookout, and how they built their products on a shoestring budget, then sold the products to big companies for a good return on their investment (and good jobs for themselves, in some cases). But he only gets the story half right. As Malik describes, a lot of entrepreneurs are finding that once they finish the first version of their product, it makes a lot of sense to sell their product or company to a larger company, instead of trying to become the next Microsoft or Google. However, that doesn't necessarily make it so. As he asserts, there are "massive new opportunities for entrepreneurs who can spot things the heavyweights need, develop them rapidly, and be willing to sell out quickly" and "to get ahead in the postbubble world: Build a company cheap. Flip It fast. Repeat." What the founders of Oddpost and Lookout both had in common was a desire to fix a problem they personally experienced, and a passion for the product that they were building, a passion that was transmitted to their early adopters. It's pretty hard to manufacture that passion for a product that is only being built to flip, and that passion is key to creating a great new product that someone will want to buy." Indeed, while it makes a good story, and the end result may look like what the article describes, it doesn't look like these products were "built to flip." There were plenty of companies during the boom years that were built to flip, but got no attention. Generally, the companies that do build with that in mind don't get far enough, as the products have nothing really to differentiate themselves. However, for the companies that do build up a strong and loyal following, when a large company with cash comes calling, it's often difficult to resist the offer.