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"You chose Unix as your network computing platform because you knew you were in it for the long haul," Sun said in an ad that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. "You'd expect your IT partner to show the same kind of commitment."

"Unfortunately, our friends in Blue have a problem with licensing contracts that could make things very expensive for anyone running AIX. Fortunately, Sun is ready to help."

Sun has certainly made a commitment to one side.

• RIAA member
• GPL violator
• DMCA wielder
• Freedom hater
• DRM purveyor

• http://www.jabber.org.au
• http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid/13 152
• http://www1.hurgh.org:81/
• http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_Grou ps.htm

Because I have insominia...

http://www.jabber.org.au/

http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid/13 152

http://www1.hurgh.org:81/

http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_Grou ps.htm

And to prove I'm not karma whoring.... I'll post anonymously.

I dare say it sounds like they just might be transfering more spectrum to private corporations...

You are correct sir! I read yesterday (here), among other things,they are looking to unload some spectrum from military use into the private sector. To the consternation of the military, of course. I love when Bush uses the military for photo ops and then screws them on benefits and crap like this.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Estimated ppl online in 2002: About 600 million. 350K*365/600M = 0,22 1CD rips per person per year. Granted, lots and lots of people are on modem and would be flatlined at 0 CDs. However, knowing how some people with broadband downloads dozens of rips each year, I don't think the number is that far from the truth. Particularly if you count any traffic with a public IP address, such as University and College campuses.

Kjella

...When it comes to secure computing, this is one industry that actually keeps it on the front burner...

I beg to differ. Credit card fraud runs in the billions of $ every year. One article claims the losses will be about (2002 figures) "$285 million over the holiday season in the United States." And that's just about 1 month's worth. Credit cards are anything but secure. Since consumers don't see the cost of the fraud directly, most are barely aware it exists. Of course, the cost is passed on in the form of higher fees and interest.

Merchants (and their employees) don't help matters any either. On all my cards, in the signature block, I put "Please ask for ID". (I've checked with Discover and they have no problems with that, BTW). Rarely do I get asked for ID.

Then there are merchants, such as the USPS, which won't accept the card without an actual signature. Don't need to show ID (I tested this), but it must have a signature or they won't accept it. It's an actual federal rule (I checked), so the clerk isn't doing anything wrong. Maybe it's just me, but I would trust a driver's license MORE than a signature with nothing to compare it too.

That's not entirely correct, either. He's talking about "bank interleaving" -- multiple banks on the same module all communicate through a single bus, so there's no benefit to having two banks read at the same time, as only one can return the data.


Normal RAID works this way too. There's only one SCSI/IDE bus, so they can't read at the same time, because only one can return the data.

Here's how you get a benefit:

(Memory here has a latency of 2 clock cycles)

1: Controller issues Read A to Chip A - Chip A begins fetching data.

2: Controller issues Read B to Chip B - Chip B begins fetching data

3: Chip A presents data

4: Chip B presents data

This is interleaved reading. Serial reading would be

1: Controller issues Read A to Chip A

2: Controller waits, knowing Chip A is busy

3: Chip A presents data

4: Controller issues Read B to Chip A

5: Controller waits

6: Chip A presents data

The above interleaved read saved 2 clock cycles - the read latency - because it issued two reads to two chips.

The above example could be substituted for RAID by replacing "Chip" with "Drive", and of course, increasing the latency by about 10,000. There's only one SCSI bus - only one set of data lines - so each SCSI clock, only one drive can return data on the bus. RAID helps because the latency for returning data is (much) larger than the SCSI clock, so scattered accesses get latency benefits. It also doesn't help a ton because you don't read single bytes from drives that often, and so the latency benefit is offset by the fact that the bus is constantly busy.

See here, , or here for more info.

Basically, if the bus cycle time is much much less than the access latency (i.e. if the number of wait states is much much greater than 1), you'll win out with interleaving if your access pattern is pretty staggered. In any case, you will rarely lose out.

Let's not forget that Billy Tauzin was one of the two Congressmen involved in the Tauzin-Dingell bill, which was previously covered on Slashdot. If you recall, this was the bill that would make it legal for the Baby Bells to offer DSL over their own lines, but not open their lines to other providers, such as Covad.

Tauzin is unfortunately pretty much in the pocket of telecom and marketing companies. If you don't agree with this seemingly pro-spam legislation, call your congressional representatives today!

The Internet.com Story has a reference to the actual bill, but I doubt many folks followed it.

For me, the senate floor analysis was the most interesting. According to that, the effect of the bill would be $21 Million, assuming that they get 5% more companies to pay. This strikes me as optimistic, but what can I say.

Federal law already says you can only demand taxes from companies with a "nexus" in the state. This bill tries to "clarify" that a nexus includes service and support, as well as related companies that share a trademark name.

The legality of the law seems open to question, since some companies purposefully define their mail order and on line units as separate companies to avoid having a nexus in a state.

At most this bill will have a minor effect on a few companies. It is not a major change to sales taxes on internet companies.

Sorry, Jon, these are old ideals here. With Global Services' "On Demand" initiative, we consolidate and migrate servers and applications onto new IBM and Sun gear and turn the keys back over to the company. However, the servers are now bugged to report utilization back to IBM, and IBM bills the customer based on average utilization instead of the cost of the box. No more of the typical "SO jobs" you used to always hear about where IGS just hires away failing IS divisions to revamp them.

README

Oh, and PWC's consulting arm became part of IGS last summer.

README2

The ITAA predicts hiring will be flat for the next 12 months.

uh, whatever akamai uses, which i would presume is (mostly) cheap comoddity x86 hardware with some highly-customized linux-y setup.

Thanks!

Don't worry, the new Privacy Czar will make sure that everything is OK. After all she used to work for Double-Click so she must know all about Privacy.

PayPal is also X.com. Once upon a time, X.com was a person-to-person payment service like PayPal, but they merged back in 2000. Yeah, it does seem a little suspicious at first, but it seems it is legit (as legit as PayPal is anyway).

I googled for Kaleidoscope java and found some very cool toys plus the one I wanted.

Consider teaching them how to search for their own interests, a la "teach a man to fish..."

This thread is full of way too much fun to be restricted to kids.

On the other hand, vote swapping sites have been ruled sort-of-legal. This may offer a way to 'back-door' a more fair election system, until enough sensible people are elected to fix it directly.

I wrote an Open Source Applet that simulates the scrolling green code seen in the matrix. You can get it at JavaBoutique. Enjoy- Scott

here

Check out this article which describes his company doing exactly what he is complaining about having done to him. I call 'Prior Art'

Actually, they may have. Tivo holds 20-odd patents covering many aspects of its DVR technology... see this , this and this, for example. They've tried to enforce them, too.

And what Tivo hasn't patented, SonicBlue/Replay probably has. Granted, SonicBlue won't exist much longer, but someone is bound to buy the patent rights, and they'll probably try to enforce them.

There are more indepth articles about this here and here. The latter article discussed the motivation for the move in a little more depth:
"This is only going to help AMD and Fujitsu become as stronger competitor and move up in market position," said Krewell. "They are in better shape to challenge Intel because they appear as one stronger brand, rather than as two lesser brands."

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. All this recent activity might be in the spirit of shoring up the Google brand and business image before an IPO...

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. It's nice to see that they let them keep the word 'Google' in the name - I guess Google is trying to keep web developers on its side.

Read this and try forming opinions other than "Sun sucks" or "Go JBoss, you rock".

I love JBoss. I use it daily. I even contributed some patches to it back in the 2.4.4 days. I like
Sun stuff. I use it daily. The company I work for is a Sun iForce Partner (we're also and MS partner, in case you think I'm realy biased). I look at this issue, and read the above article (which I was pointed to on the JBoss forums, ironically) and I see two sets of people acting incredibly childish. I won't say the two companies or organizations, because I know there are people on both sides of this issue that don't share these opinions. So Sun won't certify JBoss? Big woop. I'll still use it. So will most of the developers I work with. And we'll still use it for dev and then port to BEA or OC4J because it's easy to do (Websphere bites and is incredibly hard to port to...yet certified!). If JBoss "goes beyoind J2EE" and doesn't support the standard anymore (J2EE 1.4 in the future, it complies to 1.3 as far as I can see), I will stop using it.

Period. End of story. I'll use OC4J...not open source but free for development and certified. It's also easy to use.

I don't give a rat's ass about AOP, or even JMX or micro-kernel crap. I care about writing EJB's (Session not entity...we've discovered Apache OJB),JSP's and servlets to the J2EE standard that are easily moved from one app server to another. I care about using the latest features of the spec. As soon as I can't do that, I'll stop using that server. If JBoss goes to far beyond J2EE they will lose. If they don't like the current spec, maybe they should get involved with the JCP to affect some change, like Apache.

As for Sun folks thumbing their nose at JBoss, perhaps they should remember that without JBoss, there would be hundreds of thousands less J2EE developers out there and likely .Not would be much more prevelant. They should also thank JBoss for technical innovations like drag and drop deploy of .ear's and hot deploy (is anyone at IBM reading this?), which has been picked up BEA and Oracle to varying degrees because of the competition.

Given that, and the exchange in the above article, maybe I'll switch to Jonas or OpenEJB (or another Open Source server if it exists).

This whole thing is ridiculous. Stop whining and start working to beat out .Net

Highlights:

• Sun is miffed because JBoss supports J2EE 1.3, but doesn't seem anxious to move to 1.4.
  
• JBoss isn't happy with Sun taking this public.
  
• Sun wants "well under $1 million" for the licensing.
  
• Sun wants to be the "seal of approval" for J2EE servers
  
• JBoss believes anyone can claim J2EE compatibility even if they are not certified.
  

Bluff, shmuf.. Sun is scared of JBoss and what it might mean if vendors don't want to play ball with their J2EE 1.4 spec. This article claims JBoss doesn't need Sun's testing nor does it want it.

how many internet users in New Zealand, here is the figures:(emphasis mine)

Population: 3.8 million
Internet users: 1.3 million
Projection for 2004: 1 million

Is there anything to do with all these ill-made policies that cause the decline in no. of internet users in NZ? I wouldn't doubt it. :)

The U.S. Copyright Office should not be used as an substitute yet uber-patent office. By adding any sort trivial addition to a mechanical device to lay a DMCA claim, one can create in effect a de facto patent protection of a commercial device, but with a much longer or unlimited term, and with a free ride of enforcement by the U.S. Government. This is clearly not what Copyrights are intended to protect.

Imagine an automotive company wishes to force people to purchase only tires manufactured by themselves. They first attempt to force consumer choice by patenting the idea of round tires, but the US Patent Office rules (correctly) that their design has not unique and denies the application. All the MBA's in upper management are crushed.

"Fear not," their lawyers cry, "we'll get something better...we'll get you protection -- and not for a patent's measly 20 years. No we'll give you 120 years of protection...AND the U.S. Government will investigate violations and enforce this 'uber-patent' for you."

"But How?" cry the hopeful executives grateful disbelief.

"But won't our better priced competitors just put the same dime's worth magic in their tires and we'll be back where we started?" wails a VP from under the table of the conference room where they've all gathered.

"...Patents?..." offers a hopeful senior manager.

"But the car's owner...isn't he already the, um, owner of the car and can do what he wants with his property?" worries the CEO aloud. "Isn't he allowed to buy from the competition? Won't we have to forced him to signed a service contract or something that say he must make all future purchases from us."

--

For those concerned that 120 years isn't long enough, a company needs only every 119 years just to change the "Quality Verification Tag" and get a whole new Copyright to fend off any and all competition -- for literally until the end of time (or at least the end of the DMCA)." Disney's aspirations ain't go nothin' on Lexmark.

Those who help create the U.S. Constitution wrote in Article I, section 8,

"Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..." [Note: though already clear, emphasis added]

And I quote:

Warby -- who is the chief information officer at Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union -- believes that the terms for the end user license agreement (EULA) for Microsoft's Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and XP Service Pack 1, might well put the credit union in violation of new federal privacy laws... To use the "auto update" feature, according to the Microsoft Windows 2000 SP3 license, "it is necessary to use certain computer system, hardware, and software information..." By using these features, users authorize Microsoft or its designated agent to access and utilize the necessary information for updating purposes."

Full article can be found here.

Sad, but true.

They are busy with their demands that Verizon
provide the name of a user who may have downloaded some music which may be
copyright and they are busy with their allegations about KaZaA music service,
a company which has the good sense to challenge the operation of the RIAA.

In the same manner it used in the Napster trial,
the RIAA is making wild assertions that gullible media, public and even legal
authorities appear to be accepting as fact. So far at least, it has managed
to give the impression that everyone apart from its members are to blame
for a slump in music sales. It can't be them - it must be those evil people
using the Internet.

No doubt the RIAA was emboldened by the judgment
against Napster and this gives it the feeling it can flex its muscles at
the world at large.

There is little doubt that Napster was guilty
of copyright infringement but only directly in so far as they themselves
copied music; that Napster had knowledge that users were infringing copyright
but only in so far as they could ascertain that copyright applied to certain
tracks; that they were guilty of contributory copyright infringement but
only in so far as they encouraged users to infringe copyright, and that they
were guilty of vicarious copyright only in so far as their income was dependent
on the use of copyrighted material.

That they themselves copied music from CD into
digital form is not clear. That they knew users were making illegal copies
is true, but the means of policing such action was beyond them if they had
no list of copyrighted works or any other means of checking. That they encouraged
others to infringe copyright is also probably true, but again the exact extent
of this and its influence on users is impossible to gauge. That its income
was dependent on copyright infringement is an accepted fact but again the
exact extent of this is impossible to determine.

For the record, Napster did not store music
on its own servers - it simply held the databases of music tracks that could
be accessed from users' own systems. The software they offered for peer-to-peer
copying between systems was also standard, although some minor enhancements
were made to improve the copying of large MP3 files. Providing something
as a legitimate use means it cannot be banned on the basis of possible
illegal use.

Findlaw.com has an archive of documents related to the trial and they
make very interesting reading. Time and time again, there are assertions
that Napster caused a slump in record sales but none of the many witnesses
- and there were many because the RIAA has deep pockets - presented any more
than circumstantial evidence.

How bad were the lies and distortions? The
response by Peter S Fader of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
provides an interesting rebuff to many of the witnesses. (You can find it
here.)

For example, one music storeowner near Syracuse
University in New York attributed a steep decline in music sales to the use
of Napster. He forgot to mention that in the time period to which he referred,
he had changed his emphasis from CDs to vinyl records and had moved to a
new store which was outside the main local shopping area. He later reluctantly
agreed that perhaps these were significant factors in his drop in income
and that perhaps he was making an assumption about Napster.

In a survey commissioned by the RIAA, the results
to open-ended questions (i.e. those with no specific choices) were interpreted
with a strong bias towards that association. This survey also concentrated
on college and university students then attempted to generalise the results
and paint a grim picture. More thorough surveys by other researchers indicated
that these "financially challenged" students were not typical Napster users
because more than 50% of users were over 30. Scattered through the various
submissions are all kinds of assertions that Napster was taking large numbers
of customers away from legitimate enterprises. Not one of these submissions
produced any incontrovertible evidence that showed a direct connection between
the use of Napster and a decline in music sales.

Several musicians who had been either ignored
or badly treated by record companies saw Napster as highly beneficial. Some
submissions are included in the Findlaw archive but other such as Janis Ian,
with 25-years in the recording business, chose to make their own public statements.
Janis's two postings can be found here.
She notes that Napster created a lot of interest in her work, far more than
before Napster arrived on the scene.

Other artists also commented on this phenomenon,
a point that dovetails nicely with numerous surveys - including some from
the RIAA itself - that showed consumers used Napster for sampling different
music. A shock horror tale in one pro-RIAA trial submission was that only
25% of the surveyed users went out and bought the CDs for at least 1 in 4
of the tracks they downloaded. Oddly enough, that corresponds well to the
idea of sampling. What a pity the same survey did not ask about deletions
of downloaded music too, because a large number of deletions within a few
days of downloading would further confirm this sampling.

Various surveys also supported these claims.
A survey by Jupiter Communications in July 2000 concluded that Napster users
were 45% more likely to have spent more buying music than non-users. This
survey was of 2200 online music fans and it found that the only people who
were not likely to increase their music purchases were 18 to 24 year old
"cash-strapped, computer-savvy users".

Jupiter Communications was certainly not alone
in these findings. The consensus was that Napster let people listen to music
that they would not otherwise made the effort to consider. As a result, musical
tastes spread. Another report mentioned that it made it easy to rediscover
artists or to find additional material by them. Both cases meant an increase
in sales of CDs and of vinyl records. There were several comments - of course
from people outside the RIAA - that Napster looked far more likely to increase
music sales than diminish them.

Another reason that students used Napster was
that it let them access one or two good tracks on an otherwise forgettable
CD. I am sure that we all have CDs that fall into that category. The attitude
of the RIAA seems to be that consumers must buy the rubbish in order to get
the few small jewels.

The fact that music sales were declining just
as the use of Napster was increasing presented the RIAA with the perfect
scapegoat, so absolving the music industry of blame and saving it the effort
to think there might be other reasons behind the slump.

After Napster died, the RIAA spouted the same
assertions about online music, whether or not such opinions were false, ill-founded
or unrepresentative.

Here's a typical pronouncement published by DC.Internet during February 2002. "The
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is blaming online piracy
and CD burning as the major culprits for a 10.3 percent slide in 2001 music
sales. According to RIAA data, total U.S. shipments dropped from 1.08 billion
units shipped in 2000 to 968.58 million in 2001. ... Coinciding with the increase
in copying music, the study found that ownership of CD burners has nearly
tripled since 1999: in 2001, two in five music consumers owned a CD burner
compared to 14 percent who owned one in 1999."

At the same time the RIAA declared the rise
in sales of blank CDs was further proof of music piracy, and that blank CD
sales should be curtailed.

Let's dispose of this whole nonsense about CD
burners and blank CD sales quickly and then move back to the more important
issues.

Computer security is not something that the
RIAA is very familiar with, judging by the number of times its own Web site
has been hacked.

Blank CDs are used to back-up computer data.
When one blank CD costs about the same price as one diskette but stores
about 460 times the amount of data, is faster to record and takes far less
space than the equivalent thousands of diskettes, it would be stupid not
to use CDs for backups. The RIAA was quite adamant that the 10% drop in
CD sales in the USA in 2001 as compared to sales in 2000 was purely due to
music piracy but this assertion has to be very seriously questioned.

Firstly, if the RIAA is correct, it would follow
that the general interest in music was unchanged and that attendances at
concerts would be about the same as previous years. They weren't. According
to MTV's reports on the web, concert attendances dropped off by about 15%
in 2001 and revenues were down. The average ticket price rose by about 7%
during the year but as usual it is difficult to say if this deterred ticket
buyers or generated the best possible revenue in a bad situation.

An article in the Miami Herald of March 2002 provides a more balanced
commentary about the slump in music sales than the RIAA's rants. It attributes
a lot of problems in the industry to the fact that the record companies were
under attack from many directions - the government was threatening investigations
into payola, the companies were suffering the excesses of the technological
boom and bust, costs were rising and recording artists were in revolt about
the terms and conditions of their contracts with the record companies.

The terms and conditions are normally that artists
are contracted to produce a certain number of CDs in a certain time - but
it is the companies which dictate what music is acceptable to be marketed
and the manner in which a CD will or won't be marketed. For all this, the
artists receive 10 to 20 percent of the profits of the sale, but only after
the record companies charge them for promotional and marketing costs. Janis
Ian has in fact described the situation as being like indentured slavery,
and it is therefore no wonder that some artists were very pleased with using
Napster to get their music more widely known.

According to the same Miami Herald report,
sales of Latin music were up by 9% in 2001 but "In Latin America itself,
riddled with economic hardship and rampant piracy, mid-2001 sales fell about
20 percent." At least someone made the connection between personal wealth
and piracy.

For a further commentary about issues within
the music industry that were contributing to its slump, try this article
which also provides a far better analysis of the situation that the RIAA's
allegations. This gives an indication of the tone of the piece: "Given the
slight dip in CD sales despite so many reasons for there to be a much larger
drop, it seems that the effect of downloading, burning, and sharing is one
of the few bright lights helping the music industry with their most loyal
customers. "

One obvious factor that seems to have been ignored
by the RIAA is the nature of the music being released by the record companies.
Let me throw some names at you ... Sex Pistols, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd,
Rod Stewart, Moody Blues, Brian Ferry, Genesis, Elton John and Cliff Richard.
If you are old enough to remember them you will probably like some of them
but dislike others. That is not the point; the point is that they co-existed
on the music charts in the late 1970s and this kind of variation is a far
cry from the kind of music that has been dominating the charts.

The current number of "revivals" or modern versions
of old songs suggests that the music from the 60s, 70s and 80s had something
that is seriously lacking in modern music. Perhaps the record companies
should spend time figuring out just why this is so.

The RIAA's claims that piracy has caused a worldwide
slump in music sales are questionable. By virtue of its population size,
the figures for the USA distort the total picture. The claims also ignore
the fact that US music sells across the world - so if US music is unappealing,
sales will be down everywhere.

To refute the RIAA's claims, CD sales in the
UK actually increased by 5% in 2001 and in France by a similar amount. (The
BBC News report here has the usual comment about piracy but mentions
this very important point only as a final comment.) I would not be at all
surprised if the influence of US music on the UK and French was somewhat
less than for other countries - or that the locally produced music in 2001
was rather more appealing than US music.

To label all US music as unappealing is quite
unfair. Latin and Country music sales have been quite good - probably because
they offered variety, positive energy and far broader appeal than mainstream
pop.

The possible causes of a decline in music sales
go further than these reasons.

Potential music consumers today have far more
choice in their form of entertainment than just listening to music. They
also have other things on which to spend their money and in many cases, they
have less money to spend than they did a few years ago.

Computer games continue to improve and they
are a big leisure activity. Games cost money that might otherwise be spent
on music. Further, games have audio and there is little point playing a
CD if the game's audio will drown out the music.

DVD sales continue to be good and the availability
of "home cinema" systems with DVD player and high quality audio has made
this a popular pastime. Entertainment has become more visual, at least for
those with time to sit and enjoy it. Music videos themselves have increased
the emphasis on the visual aspect of music.

In the USA the price of movie tickets compared
to CDs shows a dramatic difference, with movie tickets reportedly less than
half the price of a CD. Recent reports also say that movie attendance figures
are very high.

Finally, mobile telephone use is on the increase
especially among teenagers who might otherwise buy music CDs. Music might
be aimed at this demographic but most of them are still reliant on pocket-money
and probably have to pay their own mobile phone charges. Little wonder then
that they cannot also afford CDs when some of them rack up bills equivalent
to the GDP of a small country.

The RIAA is under threat from a number of directions
and it is fighting, on behalf of its members, for continued monopolistic
existence. They are under attack from increasing diversions in entertainment
and for the would-be music buyers' money. And they are also under attack
from a new medium that threatens to drastically change the way that music
is distributed and to reduce their control.

They are also seriously concerned about copyright
law and fear that as copyrights expire they will lose significant profits
and, even more importantly, their control over music distribution.

Since the RIAA started raising a fuss with Napster,
the US copyright laws have been changed and the period for which copyright
applies has been extended. Depending on your source you will find that this
is either the eleventh or fifteenth extension of copyright period in about
forty years. One report also indicated that many of these extensions have
occurred as various Walt Disney characters were nearing the end of their
copyright. (For more details see here).

Those with an interest in extending copyright
are more organised and have much deeper pockets than those opposed to change,
and so can finance a greater amount of pro-extension lobbying than those
who are opposed.

In 1998, an extension to the copyright laws meant
that period would last 70 years after the death of the creator, while works
owned by corporations were extended to 95 years. The RIAA is pleased with
this decision because we would otherwise been nearing the time when certain
music from about the early 1950s - the early days of rock and roll - would
have moved to the public domain. Anyone would have been free to publish
it and equally free to take the profits.

This 1998 extension to copyright period was
challenged but in mid-January of this year (2003) the court upheld the earlier
ruling and the RIAA and its cohorts were able to relax in the comfort that
their various treasure chests would not be released to the public. Don't
forget though, when the RIAA was fighting Napster, this outcome was far from
certain.

Cynics among us look at the notions behind the
copyright law and shake our collective heads. The US law was first introduced
in 1790 for a 14-year period with the aim of encouraging creativity and ensure
that the artists or thinkers could enjoy the profits of that creativity.
Extension of the copyright period is only in the interest of groups like
the RIAA because it means they can rely on older material and can minimise
any efforts to find new talent.

The battle for copyright is not yet over because
European authorities do not kowtow to American interests quite so easily.
EU copyright protection lasts only 50 years, as opposed to 95 in the US,
and so music recordings from the 1950s are becoming public domain in Europe.
The 1950s were a boom in popular music with rock and roll exploding and a
big jump in the number of records being released. Elvis Presley's first
record appeared in 1956 and Chuck Berry's first just two years later.

US music distribution companies have indicated
that they will start to fight CD imports, declaring that the import of European
CDs would be an act of piracy and that customs agents have the authority
to seize these imports.

Make no mistake, the RIAA is under attack from
many different directions, some legislative, some social, some from their
artist "slaves" and others from technology. Loss of control of the music
business would mean a dramatic loss of profit for these companies and it
is for those reasons they are currently embarking on a scare campaign about
music piracy around the world.

Again, European authorities are not impressed
by this blathering. According to a recent BBC report here, the European Commission has only outlawed commercial
(i.e. for profit) piracy but has decided not to criminalise people who download
music from the Internet for their own use. Needless to say the RIAA, and
its international counterpart the IFPI, are up to their normal tactics and
alleging - on no proven basis - that this will cause losses of 4.5 billion
euros annually.

In the bigger picture, these organisations are
out to police everything on the web that just might be somehow related to
the copyrighted works that they jealously guard.

In July 2002 a bill was introduced to the US
House of Representatives to permit the owners of material under copyright
to hack into any computer that accesses or uses a peer-to-peer file transfer
service to see if it was holding any illegal copies of the material. It
was described as vigilante justice in the 21st century. I think I know how
commercial enterprises such as banks would view such intrusions!

It appears that they need no "due cause" which
is what even the various law enforcement agencies require for any similar
search activity.

Using similar wild claims about piracy destroying
their business, the RIAA and IFPI are embarking on what amounts to a marketing
campaign to protect their backsides. Unfortunately the assertions are getting
lots of press attention, and there is a danger of the old problem that if
a lie is repeated often enough it gets accepted as truth.

In their latest moves the RIAA and other are
trying to persuade legal authorities to hold ISPs responsible for any illegal
material that is stored on their servers. (For example, see this report). I am
not certain if the ISPs will be required to call out the rottweilers (i.e.
the RIAA) or to decide if a music file is public domain, copyright but authorised
or copyright and illegal, and then act as judge and jury to decide the form
of punishment.

As I have argued earlier, the ISPs should not
be held responsible because it is not their problem if a user wishes to risk
prosecution for whatever crime. I am waiting for the day when ISP operations
can be fully automated and there is no need for any middle-person who currently
provides a ready and easy target for legal authorities and those who pretend
they are legal authorities.

Already the RIAA has managed to convince a
US court into demanding that Verizon hand out the personal details of a user
who is supposed to have copied music files. I know of no other legal situation
where a middle party has been obliged to provide these details to someone
who believes that they may have been a victim of some crime.

Fortunately Verizon is already objecting to
this demand

This Verizon case was discussed in an Australian
article, which went on to blame music piracy for a drop
in CD sales (yet again) and make the typical kind of claim that we have already
seen from the neo-Luddites. "The finger of blame is pointed at the internet,
as industry officials cite a corresponding increase in broadband adoption
as proof that increasing numbers of people are stealing music and movies."

The truly sad thing is that the RIAA is not
acting in the interests of consumers or even their musical artists. It is
only protecting its members, but a lot of influential people are swallowing
the story hook, line and sinker.

on one of the talk shows about the econonmy (being unenmployed means way too much time to listen to talk shows). Apparently the sucking sound has a sucking sound of its own. The fear of outsourcing places like India and Russia is places even cheaper than they are, like China. They mentioned Hungary (Eastern Europe being relatively cheap) losing production of the Xbox to China(even cheaper). See here.

So much for a secure 2003.

This is a perfectly valid attempt by the record companies to fight for their survival. In fact, I applaud it because, for once, they are not resorting to the courts or the coercive power of the state to crush the "criminals" who share music. Instead, they are playing a technological game in our arena, on our own turf. This is simply a variation of the way a.s.t used to invade newsgroups by flooding the channel with bogus trolls.

And since they are playing our game, we can strike back the same way. We can institute the equivalent of killfiles (if we know the IP of these bogus sharers), or, even better, we can add audio fingerprinting to P2P networks to filter out the bogus files. That sounds like a good open source project.

So long as they try to play this game with us, they can't win.

More of this on here and here and here

...because we all know the people who are huge into 50's music, seniors, are also massive pirators.

I guess it may be their last post, but this operation has always been kind of a "phoenix", rising from the ashes. (Or perhaps soiling themselves with said same.)

Here's why:
DirecTV DSL, a subsidiary of Hughes, which is in turn owned by General Motors, was formerly known as Telocity until Hughes purchased them in July 2001.

In my part of the country, the switch to the corporate entity Telocity occurred at about the same time as Northpoint bankruptcy forced a CLEC switch from Northpoint to Covad for some customers of Megapath. In October 2000, Megapath had purchased the assets and customer base of an ISP. Megapath kept the business customers of that ISP and spun off their residential customers to Chicago-based Telocity.

And the name of that ISP? Formerly-St. Louis-based Phoenix Networks, founded by a guy named Peter Roberts, who evolved a one-man network integration business into a rapid-growth internet service. Of course that Phoenix should not to be confused with Phoenix the BIOS that has the legal team that is making Phoenix the superlative web browser change it's name, none of which is happening in Phoenix.

Dizzy yet? I know I am. Hope I got at least the broad strokes right. Anyway, I'm glad I got off that Merry-Go-Round during what seemed to be a weekend-stay at MegaPath, though I supported a few friends throught the multiple changes that followed. Maybe the ride finally is coming to a stop.

The largest reason for dark fiber is the emergence of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing aka DWDM. In simple terms, it allows one fiber to carry many times the normal bandwidth by combining different wavelengths of light at the source and splitting them out at the destination.

This isn't that the bandwidth isn't necessary. It isn't corporate profiteering. Its simply VCs investing in infrastructure without realizing that technology advances would soon render it useless.

I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass.

You are full of FUD. Jupiter is a partner of internet.com sites(millions of visitors a day) and sites like Thecounter.

One of Verisign's services is telephone wiretapping. A telco can outsource their wiretapping function to Verisign, which then takes care of transmitting the calls to law enforcement or other wiretapping customers.

The way Verisign does this uses their control of the Signalling System 7 network, which controls phone call routing and which they bought a few years ago by acquiring Illuminet.

The basic concept is that Verisign alters the routing for the tapped phone so that all calls to and from it route through some Verisign tapping facility. Phone numbers today are somewhat "portable", which requires a DNS-like database lookup for every call. Change the database, and calls are rerouted.

This approach avoids the need to tap into the voice path at end offices. But there's a side effect. Because it changes the routing for the voice path, it has to change the time of flight, based on speed of light lag.

A useful tapping test for a phone is thus to measure its round-trip time to a nearby phone. Normally, local call latency is a few 8Khz sample times, under 1ms. But a round trip to Northern Virginia from a West Coast phone would add about 30ms of latency.

Using a short section of hose at each end to get the phones to feed back around the loop gives you a quick read on latency. If you hear a high-pitched whine, latency is normal; if you hear a low-pitched growl on a local call, the routing is nonstandard and something funny is going on.

Echostar's going it alone, and that's been known for a while. They broke up their relationship with Starband earlier this year, then went to court over who owned the customer database.

at Internet.com to read, which gives the fossil pda at least a useful feature listen to your mp3 collection.

Or it's broken, here's another one. News searching on Google is your friend.

I thought @home already folded!

I think Epicentric and webMethods want to be "heard". There is no chance anyone is going to pay them any royalty for using SOAP. Here is a followup article about this snag.

Slightly OT, but about your parenthetical statement:
TFTs are the name for a specific type of LCD screen, also known as active-matrix screens. They are more expensive than passive-matrix displays, but they are generally regarded as bieng much better.

So, TFT is a more specific name, but LCD would be more accurate. See the webopedia for their definition of TFT.