Slashdot Mirror

||Plazm|| writes: "Here is an article on CNet's News.com that talks about some ISPs, such as Adelphia and @Home, teaming up with record companies to crack down on not only copyrighted music trading but also other media such as movies. It goes on to talk about the rise of bounty hunter hiring by record labels to track down media pirates. It's good to see ISPs like Verizon reject such pressure from big label companies. But can they hold out forever?"

mickeyreznor writes: "I came across this interesting article in the Washington Post. Apparently AOL is trying to pull the same kind of stunts that got Microsoft in trouble with the DOJ. I'm not sure where I stand on this whole issue, but it seems to be a very interesting situation. Seems like we're going to have an all-out corporate war in the upcoming months." With news that the number of internet users is shrinking, AOL needs a way to bring in new subscribers -- and the DOJ's pressure on Microsoft appears to have opened a door.

jeffsenter writes "AOL is investing 100M USD in Amazon. CNET story. AOL and Amazon began partnering in 1997. AOL plans to integrate Amazon into its shopping channels further and Amazon will promote AOL as its exclusive ISP. The deal did not include purchases of advertising by Amazon from AOL as many such partnerships do." The money part I'm actually not that interested in - what I do think is interesting that given AOL's size and mass, the partnership of they and Amazon is going to be a pivotal one, complimenting each other very well.

krugdm writes "According to this article, Palm is expected to announce that it will be modifying its OS to run on faster ARM processors instead of the current Motorola Dragonball processor."

At this moment, there's an office somewhere in Waggener Edstrom with its lights on and a fresh pot of coffee. Microsoft's PR firm is racking its brains working on strategy and tactics for their phone calls tomorrow. As of right now, hundreds of thousands of wormy Microsoft machines are throwing packets at the Bush White House (and missing -- see below). Bill Gates really, really doesn't want Sunday papers editorializing about how shoddy and dangerous his security flaws are. Will billg be the hero or the goat? Slashdot, in its fine tradition of laughing in the face of overworked netadmins, is running a contest. Walk a mile in Waggener Edstrom's shoes, predict the Times's headlines, and win yourself a T-shirt.

Waggener's goal is to minimize the PR damage that the worm will cause. This is potentially a very damaging story for them. Not so much because it underscores the dangers of an insecure, monocultural environment monopolizing our vital networks. Not even because of the embarrassing and ironic nature of the worm. More because it involves a hot button political topic -- Bush and, allegedly, China -- which the average reader will be interested in and might even almost understand.

So what's their battle plan?

Well, first Waggener will try to predict the yield. Our guesstimates as of right now, 11:36 PM EDT Thursday evening, are that it's a dud -- whitehouse.gov is still accessible and my IRC server hasn't gone down. This is probably because whitehouse.gov simply sidestepped its IP address (the stupid worm author hardcoded it instead of using DNS): White House dodges Web worm.

But at least 196,000 machines were infected. You'd think something would happen. Maybe a router will crash and Delaware will fall off the map. Who knows?

Second, Waggener will have an overall strategy. This might range from overhyping the potential danger ("turn off your computers! prepare for Armageddon! oh it didn't happen -- we saved you") to distraction with trivia ("we are pleased with the judges' verdict last week. look over there!"). How will the firm modify our reality?

Third, Waggener will use different approaches on different audiences. Reporters from different tech publications will talk to different handlers, and hear different things. Keep in mind which way these publications lean when you predict what their reactions will be.

Here's the contest. OSDN will be giving away four Slashdot T-shirts (or some other ThinkGeek shirt) to the four readers who most accurately predict newspaper headlines about the "Red Code" worm.

The newspapers of record we're using are the Washington Times and the New York Times. The categories are:

Headline on the Washington Times news story, Saturday morning
(label it: "WT News") Headline on the New York Times news story, Saturday morning
(label it: "NYT News") Title of the Washington Times editorial, Sunday morning
(label it: "WT Ed") Title of the New York Times editorial, Sunday morning
(label it: "NYT Ed")

Type up four guesses and submit them in a comment below. If your guess for any of the four is the closest in its category, you win a T-shirt!

For example, if our contest had been to predict headlines about global warming on July 19, and you'd said:

"WT News: Bush Visits Europe, Says Many Words Correctly
NYT News: Bush Promises Called Into Question
WT Ed: Good News on Global Warming
NYT Ed: Clueless on Global Warming"

...then you'd win, because you guessed the NYT editorial title correctly.

So put on your corporate-PR "spinning" caps, get out there and make us proud!

The Small Print:

1. Top headline only, you don't have to predict subheads or whatever.
2. In case of two stories/headlines, we pick the biggest one, our discretion.
3. Up to four guesses to a post, one for each headline (post early, post often, but slow down cowboy!).
4. One T-shirt to a person.
5. Ties go to the f1rst p0st.
6. No posts after the paper's out, of course (print or electronic, whichever's first) - first edition print is the goal.
7. No OSDN/VA Linux employees or relatives eligible.
8. You must either be logged in when you post or include one email address in your comment; email is how we'll contact you for your snail-mail address. Spamarmor it if you like, as long as we can read it.
9. If for some crazy, absurd reason one of the papers doesn't run a story/editorial about this at all, we'll go looking for a "similar" paper's story/editorial and pick its headline. We're thinking L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, that kind of thing. If the papers actually run stories today (Friday), well, darnit that wasn't much of a contest was it? We'll still look for editorials on Sunday.
10. All judges' judgments are final.

MadCow-ard writes: "C|Net has an article on the EFF pushing ahead with the countersuit to open the way to Dr. Felten to publishing the SDMI hack. RIAA has back peddled from their original threats, and now claim "hey, we never were going to sue him, so lets just drop the whole thing". It seems they prefer scare tactics to going up against free speech in a court room. Fear has more leverage because 'anything' could happen. The best part is the EFF and Felten are planning a victory dinner at $250 a head!" The recent legal filings are available, if you want to read the maneuvering. In a nutshell: both the RIAA and EFF think the RIAA made a mistake by threatening Felten, and want to negate it or capitalize on it respectively.

altek writes: "CNET has an article describing a worm that has taken down over 12,000 MS IIS webservers." Bill Kendrick points to another CNET story, which reports that the worm will "cause every infected computer to flood the Whitehouse.gov address with data starting at 5 p.m. PDT," writing "Time to shut down all those IIS servers before the Internet gets flooded."

Slow Internet service due to all those extra packets of malice may not be the worst effect: As sp1n writes: "It appears that due to the way the worm formats its HTTP request and the semi-random way it seeks out vulnerable systems, it is also causing Cisco 67x DSL routers, widely deployed by Qwest, using firmware prior to 2.4.1, as well as some others, such as 3Com LanModems, to crash -- recoverable only by a power cycle. I have yet to see any news outlet cover the affect this is having on DSL service. Qwest's Interprise networking department confirmed they are receiving reports from all 14 states in their territory. Some routers running pre-2.4.1 firmware are crashing even though the web admin is disabled. This has become a huge support nightmare for every ISP in the region."

altek writes: "CNET has an article describing a worm that has taken down over 12,000 MS IIS webservers." Bill Kendrick points to another CNET story, which reports that the worm will "cause every infected computer to flood the Whitehouse.gov address with data starting at 5 p.m. PDT," writing "Time to shut down all those IIS servers before the Internet gets flooded."

Slow Internet service due to all those extra packets of malice may not be the worst effect: As sp1n writes: "It appears that due to the way the worm formats its HTTP request and the semi-random way it seeks out vulnerable systems, it is also causing Cisco 67x DSL routers, widely deployed by Qwest, using firmware prior to 2.4.1, as well as some others, such as 3Com LanModems, to crash -- recoverable only by a power cycle. I have yet to see any news outlet cover the affect this is having on DSL service. Qwest's Interprise networking department confirmed they are receiving reports from all 14 states in their territory. Some routers running pre-2.4.1 firmware are crashing even though the web admin is disabled. This has become a huge support nightmare for every ISP in the region."

fantazem writes: "I was just browsing news.com and found this rather interesting article just posted. The article basically explains that Macrovision along with unnamed labels have released thousands of CD's with a new form of copy protection." This is a follow-up to this article. Whitfield Diffie noted that the identity of the restricted CDs can be ascertained by polling a large enough sample of CD-buyers; a good way to avoid these defective products. Anybody bought one yet?

090h writes: "AT&T Wireless has started the tests of their GPRS 'always on' services in the Seattle area, according to this press release from Reuters on C|Net's News dot Com. GPRS is the first system in the States to offer simultaneous and always-on voice & data services to a cell device. As well as speeds greater than 56 Kpbs. (much better than 19.2 we currently see on CDPD, but still a far cry from 3G and the ability to have multimedia content delivery.)" Pricey, though -- $50 covers just 1MB of data. When will unmetered low-earth satellite coverage get here instead?

Richard and many other people sent in news about Dmitry Sklyarov, a programmer at Russian software company Elcomsoft, who was arrested after giving a talk at Def Con 9 in Las Vegas titled "eBook Security: Theory and Practice." Elcomsoft publishes a program to remove restrictions from encrypted PDF files, which has severely annoyed Adobe Corporation. Adobe was apparently responsible for the arrest, charging that Elcomsoft is violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by publishing the software and giving the presentation at Def Con. (The presentation, by the way, is great - he compares the claimed features of ebook protection schemes with their actual features.) Also at Def Con 9: Hacking for Human Rights.

PacketMaster writes: "A U.S. Federal Circuit Court today ordered a lower court to reconsider its ruling on this this patent -- detailing downloading software over a network or the Internet. The full story at news.com details this on-going battle. This latest ruling indicates that the courts consider the patent, filed by a company called E-Data in 1985, a valid patent. E-Data's plan is to charge a license fee for all data downloaded over the Internet. The main companies standing against this patent are Intuit and AOL/Time-Warner's Compuserve division." Yes, E-Data would like to collect on every software download.

CBNobi writes: "CNet has an article (which is also located at ZDNet) describing this year's MP3.com Summit, held at San Diego, CA. Compared to last year's gathering, things seemed to settle down a lot. "There's no room for small companies to do big things anymore," said Michael Robertson, MP3.com's 34-year-old CEO." I liked the last sentence, which pretty much sums up the state of things - everything innovative in the music world has been crushed by lawsuits.

CBNobi writes: "CNet has an article (which is also located at ZDNet) describing this year's MP3.com Summit, held at San Diego, CA. Compared to last year's gathering, things seemed to settle down a lot. "There's no room for small companies to do big things anymore," said Michael Robertson, MP3.com's 34-year-old CEO." I liked the last sentence, which pretty much sums up the state of things - everything innovative in the music world has been crushed by lawsuits.

jchristopher writes "The government asked an appeals court to issue an order moving the Microsoft case back to the trial court as soon as possible today. According to this Cnet article, such an order could hint at an injunction blocking the distribution of Microsoft's Windows XP. "

CBNobi writes: "CNet's News.com has an article about book publishers' attempts to block the public from accessing free material from - where else - libraries. Publishers fear their copyrighted materials will be freely distributed in a digital form." Nice article. We've covered this before, but it isn't going away - publishers want a pay-for-use library system so that you won't go there to escape high prices elsewhere.

CBNobi writes: "CNet's News.com has an article about book publishers' attempts to block the public from accessing free material from - where else - libraries. Publishers fear their copyrighted materials will be freely distributed in a digital form." Nice article. We've covered this before, but it isn't going away - publishers want a pay-for-use library system so that you won't go there to escape high prices elsewhere.

Hiawatha writes: "Looks like Microsoft has peeled off one of the states." The article is kinda interesting, it talks about how New Mexico's attorney general is all on Microsoft's side now against the remaining states. It's amazing that after years of abusing its power, Microsoft is just gonna walk over this. *sigh*.

Masem writes: "Articles at CNET and CNN say that Judge Patel has ordered Napster to remain offline until they can offer 100% blockage of copyrighted songs by the plaintiff record companies. Napster officials said that they can guarentee 99% complience, but Patel says this is not good enough. Napster is arguing that this order violated the appeals court's ruling, and are appealling it."

webNazi points to this story at CNET, writing: "With over 250 GPS monitoring stations installed over the last ten years, the monitoring stations will provide continuous data--for 50 years or more--about otherwise imperceptible shifts in the Earth's crust. The network is so precise it can record as little as 0.04 inches of distortion of the ground or movement along a fault."

The European Union is considering anti-trust action against Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal ran a column today about the Windows XP registration process, which is apparently news to a lot of people who don't read enough Slashdot. IBM says Microsoft is arrogant. Microsoft's XP Beta program is a little more open than they thought. And finally, and most amusingly, one of the threat letters being sent out by the BSA on behalf of Microsoft was sent to (wait for it...) OSDN. Okay, no more Microsoft submissions today, please.

Khelder writes: "RF tags have been getting smaller and smaller. Now Hitachi has made ones small enough to put into paper money, according to this article on CNET news. As the article says, 'Though the chip requires a reader unit to work, its size carries big implications for the future of identity technology.'" I can think of lots of other cool uses for a chip this size, especially once they're programmable with a little desktop box, but do you really want a record in place every time you pay with cash?

friday2k writes: "As seen on news.com Metricom finally files for chapter 11. This is too sad. Anyone know of good alternatives out there?" Nooooo! Don't do this to me! The story says, "the company intends to keep the wireless Internet service up and running for the time being," so perhaps all is not lost. Even though it's a little pricey at ~$70/month, and only works in a few cities, Metricom's Ricochet is absolutely the best wireless Internet service I've ever used. Their coverage maps have been accurate and they have always treated Linux users decently (unlike this sorry bunch). I hope a decent company buys Metricom, figures out a way to make money with the system, and bring it to the rest of the U.S., even the rest of the world. Meanwhile, all I can do is plaintively echo friday2k's question: Anyone know of good alternatives out there? (Even 19.2KBPS would be okay with me if the service is Linux-friendly and has good nationwide coverage.)

Your recommended daily dose of insanity. FattyBoeBatty writes "Napster has been sued again, but this time it's by a company that makes meditation music -- and for once it's not about copyrights. They're afraid that without their company's warning labels, unsuspecting Napster users will be lulled to sleep by the tranquil melodies and will fall asleep at inopportune times (i.e. driving, operating heavy machinery, etc.)" A bunch of people submitted this story about Clonaid, a group of people wearing tin-foil hats who want to clone a human (and whose leader will give speeches for a measly $100,000). Finally, Hacky writes: "Security Service MI5 once planned to recruit a team of specially-trained gerbils as a secret weapon to sniff out spies, it has been revealed."

Everyone and their brother sent in this unsurprising news: the Appeals Court handling the Microsoft anti-trust case has overturned the break-up decision. A few story URLs: CNet, BBC, ABC, AP, Reuters, MSNBC. The decision is available in .pdf format. A brief summary: the Findings of Fact (Microsoft's conduct, etc.) are still in place, but Judge Jackson's evaluation of those facts and the penalty he imposed are thrown out. A new District Judge will examine the case, starting from the Findings of Fact. Update 2h later by J : Dan Gillmor's analysis is good. So is this Washington Post column, which is insightful except it doesn't go far enough. It also shows MS CEO Steve Ballmer's attitude even before today's ruling: "Is there any limit to what you think you can put into the operating system at all?" "...as a matter of law, no, I don't think so..."

ksw writes: "CNET has this story about the proposed .eu tld. So all we need now is the EU-Parliament's blessing and we're on our way. I wonder what their take on squatting will be......." I'm not quite sure how this is going to play out ... The European government has no particular authority to simply order that new domains be created in the root servers.

Erbo writes: "CNET reports that Microsoft has decided to drop Smart Tags from Internet Explorer 6.0, the version that will be packaged with Windows XP. They may be resurrected later, though, so don't yank those META tags out of your pages yet. Smart Tags are still part of Office XP, too."

dublin writes: "C|Net's News.com reports that the recent US Supreme Court decision granting freelance writers stronger control over distribution of their work (a la RIAA) will result in the removal of large chunks of archived internet content from a large number of sites. The article reports that this will eliminate about 8-10% of the content at large publishers' sites. Will this marginalize freelance writers in favor of staff flacks more interested in the company line than the truth, concentrating even more power in the hands of the media moguls? What are the implications of that much content disappearing down the memory hole without a trace?" I bet a lot of lawyers are recasting boilerplate for future contracts about now, too.

Homer Simpson writes: "IBM will announce on Monday that it has developed the world's fastest silicon transistor. They claim to have refined their silicon-germanium chip-manufacturing technology to produce transistors that are far thinner than existing ones. This will allow information to travel faster while using a lot less power. The new transistor can operate at 210Ghz (yikes!) using a measly milliamp of electrical current (80% faster than todays technology while using half the power)." Reader Geheimnis points out an announcement on IBM's site about this as well.

ncc74656 writes: "CNET has this story about Revo Networks and its Admail system. Unlike most spam, which gets sent to you as a separate (and filterable) message, Admail would modify all of your incoming mail by attaching spam to it. Want to read your email? You're stuck getting the ads as well. It's being pitched to ISPs and webmail providers, as it can be applied to both webmail and POP3 accounts. And you thought you had enough spam clogging your mailbox already ..." Of course, most if not all of the free webmail services do add a line of spam to the top or bottom of all messages sent ...

WeaselOne writes: "Okay, it's on the record. This Cnet story cites an Aberdeen analyst as confirming that the Red Hat database will, in fact, be PostgreSQL. Also has some interesting stuff about why they didn't just partner with Great Bridge."

RadioheadKid writes: "An article at Cnet news discusses the implications of the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments. According to Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, "People don't realize what a disaster this could be." It appears that the treaty may not make it to ratification, but "we can't assume it will die of its own accord," Stallman said. "We have to stop it." One of the examples of the implications of this treaty is US based web sites having to comply with the narrow laws of countries like China or Morocco." Quite an informative article about the current state of the treaty. CPT has a set of pages with lots of background information on the treaty.

RadioheadKid writes: "An article at Cnet news discusses the implications of the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments. According to Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, "People don't realize what a disaster this could be." It appears that the treaty may not make it to ratification, but "we can't assume it will die of its own accord," Stallman said. "We have to stop it." One of the examples of the implications of this treaty is US based web sites having to comply with the narrow laws of countries like China or Morocco." Quite an informative article about the current state of the treaty. CPT has a set of pages with lots of background information on the treaty.

Ant wrote to us regarding coverage of the .com dead - the Net Cemetery. It's a fun piece, which gets into the problems of covering and reviewing a medium that's changing everyday. If you're into wandering through the .com wasteland, you should also check out Ghost Sites, which does a great job of "museumifing" (sounds like transmorgify) the same type of sites.

wrinkledshirt writes: "Bill Gates has finally spoken his mind on the GPL here. Interesting that he calls the GPL a PacMan-like entity considering that's how many of us view him and his company, but I digress ..." According to Gates, GPLd software "makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or Sendmail or the browser could never happen." Or the development of a full Free operating system either, I guess. Perhaps he should issue a company memo to the folks running Microsoft's stats.zone.com, who seem to be using GNU/Linux and Apache happily without donating MS Office to the FSF. Wacka wacka.

amyandjake writes: "Dan Parisi (sucks.com) wins a courtroom battle to keep Michaelbloombergsucks.com instead of giving it to Bloomberg." I'll admit that I used to consider the dot-sucks domains to have few redeeming qualities, but the efforts to take them away have helped change my mind about them. Bloomberg can spare a few dollars to register danparisisucks.com, can't he?

Arthur Phillip Dent writes: "News.com is running a story about IE6 being the first browser to implement the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) standard. Bad news for Doubleclick et. al., that is unless it's just /.ers using the features! This will get real interesting if lusers' using it with sites that do not post P3P policies (and thereby blocking sites from setting cookies, for example) creates any kind of unrest/discussion about the exchange of marketing data for content and functionality." One thing no one writing about IE6 seems to note: Microsoft has carefully arranged their MSN cookie setting technique to avoid being blocked by their own browser - they bounce people through msn.com to log in to any Microsoft property, so it's always a "first-party" cookie being sent/placed.

dizgusted writes: "DigitalConvergence, fine purveyors of the infamous CueCat, are back with CueTV. URLs will be encoded in TV programs. A free gadget, again from Radio Shack, will send them to a PC where a browser can load the page. Now one can be mesmerized by two devices simultaneously. More here." The article's a few weeks old, but apparently within the week is when these devices will show up at Radio Shacks.

Michael Paci sent us linkage to a pretty good article on CNet where win2k and OSX duke it out on a variety of categories like ease of installation, UI, and hardware support. It's an interesting report and better written then most of the stuff that you'll see like this.

(H)elix1 writes: "I'm sure /. is about to be hit with this, but CNET just released a story about a web bug detector plug-in for IE called Bugnosis by the Privacy Foundation. An interesting toy, but the thing that grabbed my attention was the Web Bug Gallery. It would seem our beloved slashdot has them as well. Course, so did CNET, but that is a different story...." I think improved cookie-handling is much more useful in preventing tracking, but this is interesting because it provides visible feedback about tracking efforts.

elliotc writes: "As free Internet access comes to an end, the last remaining players, Juno and NetZero, are uniting (no pun intended) to form United Online. The combined company hopes to stay alive in the face of AOL, MSN, and Earthlink and to further marginalize smaller companies."

blenderking sent in this Wall Street Journal story about Microsoft's new "Smart Tags" - auto-linking to Microsoft websites in any web page you visit. "From the article: "In effect, Microsoft will be able, through the browser, to re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave and go to a Microsoft-chosen site -- whether or not that site offers better information." My web site is about margarita recipes....what is Microsoft going to do...offer a visitor to my site a better recipe on their site?" Another reader sent in a CNET article on the same subject.

andres32a writes: "AOL-Time Warner and Microsoft talks over including AOL in the upcoming Windows XP have broke down. Get the scoop here." There's also a similar BBC article - this is a follow-up to this previous slashdot story, which reported that AOL and Microsoft had reached a deal. My guess: they're still going to reach a deal. AOL has too much to lose if their software isn't pre-installed, it was their key to success in the first place. And Microsoft has too much to lose if AOL moves over to a Netscape-based client.

hammy writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is running this story about the results of a survey demonstrating that users of music downloading programs (ala Napster etc) actually buy more music. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to any of the Slashdot crowd but it's nice to see a formal survey that supports our intuition. Makes many of the RIAA arguments ring a little hollow." Meanwhile, Napster is being sued yet again. That's gratitude for you.

where_is_my_mind writes: "IBM, NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi agreed to join forces to speed up development of Linux apps. Check it here." Another submitter sent in a Japanese story which said they were specifically working on building banking applications.

ActualClient writes: "According to an article on CNET certain tech-savvy satellite TV customers are able to receive their TV shows days before they are actually aired. This has been going on for a while, the TV networks paying little attention, but now these people are taking it a step further and distributing these episodes online. Recently, season finale episodes for NBC's 'Frasier' and Fox's 'The Simpsons' were distributed along with the last-ever episode of UPN's 'Star-Trek: Voyager,' all viewed hours before they were aired locally. There is no end to what people will pirate(and I personally don't mind that one bit)."

jeffsenter writes "CNET and the AP have stories on IBM's latest major advance of HD density. "Technically called antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media and informally referred to as "pixie dust" at IBM, the innovation introduces a thin layer of the element ruthenium onto the disks inside hard drives where data is stored."" I knew it. Everyone told me through was no pixie dust in computers - but The Truth shall set you free!

T.Hobbes writes "There's an interview with the president's advisor on technology, Floyd Kvamme, at news.com. Some of it is just general political pr, though he does touch on (and dodge, at times) touchy tech issues (privacy, copyright, censorware, carnivore, ..). " He doesn't seem to be as mentally broken as the man he advises. But (and I know you liberatarians will scream) his stance on to many issues is that "The Industry Will Sort it Out". Of course they will. And then we will all have to go start a new planet just to prevent the the glorious self regulated industry from implanting chips in our asses to know where we are, what we are doing, and with who.

spblat writes "News.com reports that Palm, Inc. is in a bit of a spot. A hardware glut, a portal that's losing money, an OS licensing model that doesn't generate enough revenue, oh my! Could this be the beginning of the end for Palm?" Apparently people aren't buying as many Palms now that the economy has slowed down. To say nothing of the fact that many Wince devices are better. Still waiting to see the latest Sony Clie to see if PalmOS can catch up.

The NYTimes had an article this morning about MusicNet, a new venture of Real and the record industry to provide pay-per-listen music to the masses. (Read the AP version if you don't want to register with the Times.) Meanwhile, CNET reports that SDMI adjourned from their most recent meeting without picking any technologies to go forward with - an admission that they are all thoroughly broken, by the team led by Professor Felton, who spoke yesterday at Stanford.