Analysts say connection-sharing trait of voice over IP services leave them vulnerable.

Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld

The growing popularity of Skype Technologies’ free Internet telephony software could soon pose the same kind of security challenges for companies that other peer-to-peer software technologies have created in recent years, according to security experts.

The warning comes after the disclosure this week of two critical flaws in Skype’s software, one of which could allow malicious hackers to take complete control of compromised systems.
(more…)

Hollywood mouthperson Dan ‘Jedi’ Glickman says his bosses, the owners of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), are, “fully committed to continuing working with the U.S. government to protect the rights of the U.S. motion picture industry in China”.

Phew! Now Dick and George W can rest easy, although Communist China’s leaders won’t be so happy.
Glickman (right) was recently replaced as the MPAA’s Pirate King by ex-Screen Actors Guild leader Bob Pisano. However, he’d continue to, “lead the motion picture industry’s voluntary rating system, the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) and its companion Advertising Administration,” said the MPAA.

(more…)

eXeem came into the file-sharing world like a lion. It was heralded as the great savior of BitTorrent - a new protocol that would decentralize vulnerable indexing trackers. During the early winter month of December, the MPAA on behalf it its member companies began its crusade against eDonkey2000 and BitTorrent indexing sites. One of the purported casualties of this campaign was SuprNova.org, the largest BitTorrent listing site.

SuprNova was never sued. Sloncek, the administrator of SuprNova, stated the current state of affairs in the eDonkey2000 and BitTorrent indexing world was too risky, and pulled the plug on December 19, 2004.

“SuprNova.org was more like a hobby that took most of my free time away. And now with current situation, there’s too much pressure and I don’t have the time for it.”
(more…)

“The advantage for content providers is that they have an outlet for distributing high-quality video instead of having to store and distribute such massive files themselves,” said Yankee Group analyst Nitin Gupta. But Gupta said that it could be a tough sell among film studios well aware of the reputation of file-sharing networks.

Former Naptser investor Bertelsmann AG is launching a new file-sharing service to address the intellectual-property issues that had plagued popular music-swapping services in the past.

Dubbed Gnab (or “bang” in reverse), the service will be offered by Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato AG later this year. It will combine a centralized Internet download platform with a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

Customers including ISPs, TV stations, and mail-order houses will be able to use the platform to distribute copyright-protected digital content such as music and movies.
(more…)

“The advantage for content providers is that they have an outlet for distributing high-quality video instead of having to store and distribute such massive files themselves,” said Yankee Group analyst Nitin Gupta. But Gupta said that it could be a tough sell among film studios well aware of the reputation of file-sharing networks.

Former Naptser investor Bertelsmann AG is launching a new file-sharing service to address the intellectual-property issues that had plagued popular music-swapping services in the past.

Dubbed Gnab (or “bang” in reverse), the service will be offered by Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato AG later this year. It will combine a centralized Internet download platform with a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

Customers including ISPs, TV stations, and mail-order houses will be able to use the platform to distribute copyright-protected digital content such as music and movies.
(more…)

For a few fearful minutes in late 2004, iMesh co-founder Talmon Marco thought Garth Brooks had sunk his company.

Marco was in New York, showing off the technology behind the new iMesh peer-to-peer music service slated for release this Tuesday. The software was supposed to identify and block virtually any copyrighted song being downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. But this time, a Garth Brooks song picked at random seemed to download without any problem.

Bracing himself while sitting in a conference room with a team of lawyers from the EMI Group record label, Marco pushed “play.” The song started, and it was indeed the country crooner’s voice. But it was quickly interrupted by a burst of noise. The file was a fake, a “spoof” planted on the file-swapping networks to discourage pirates, and it turned out that Marco’s software had correctly let it through its filter.

“That was a moment,” Marco said, shaking his head during an interview with CNET News.com last week. “I thought, ‘Of course, the one time it doesn’t work is the time it needs to work.’”

After a year of such near-disaster moments, skeptical record executives have finally declared themselves satisfied with the new iMesh, which will relaunch Tuesday as the first unregulated peer-to-peer network to turn itself into a paid music service. But now it faces an even tougher audience: 5 million iMesh users who are used to free music.

iMesh is the first of several “label approved” peer-to-peer networks hitting the market this year after long delays in their development. Mashboxx, created by former Grokster President Wayne Rosso, is also slated to go live this fall.
Via ZeroPaid

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The agreement settles a long-running dispute between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and the most powerful company under its jurisdiction. The settlement comes at a time when ICANN is under attack from China, Iran and other countries that want more direct control over the domain-name system that guides traffic around the Internet.

“It really hits the reset button on the relationship between VeriSign and ICANN and allows everybody to get focussed on more important things, like security and stability and the globalization of the Internet,” VeriSign Senior Vice President Mark McLaughlin said in an interview.

ICANN President Paul Twomey said the settlement shows that issues involving the domain-name system are best resolved within ICANN, rather than through an international bureaucratic body.
Via ZeroPaid

It sounded too Orwellian ever to succeed. In 2000, Korean cellular carrier SK Telecom introduced a service called “find friends” that lets others follow your every move, using a signal beamed from your handset. At the time, many wondered whether anyone would consent to such tracking.

But five years — and countless terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and other calamities — later, the service is taking off. “I used to be worried when my boyfriend didn’t answer my calls,” says Shim You Sun, a 25-year-old accountant who pays 11 cents each time she checks up on him. “Now I can rest assured that he is at work or busy attending a seminar.”
(more…)

It seems incredible but @ - email, that is - is already 34 years old!

“It’s difficult to pin down the exact origin of email, but in October 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson chose the ‘@’ symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email,” writes Google Paul Buchheit on the company blog.

Bucheit isn’t celebrating email, of course. He’s plugging gmail, as it’s known in most places except the UK
Meanwhile, “In late 1971, Tomlinson developed the first ARPANET email application when he updated SNDMSG by adding a program called CPYNET capable of copying files over the network, and informed his colleagues by sending them an email using the new program with instructions on how to use it,” says Dave Crocker on his Email History.

“To extend the addressing to the network, Tomlinson chose the ‘commercial at’ symbol to combine the user and host names, providing the naturally meaningful notation ‘user@host’ that is the standard for email addressing today. These early programs had simple functionality and were command line driven, but established the basic transactional model that still defines the technology - email gets sent to someone else’s mailbox.”
And to cap it off, “In 1993, the large network service providers America Online and Delphi started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet, beginning the large scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard,” adds Crocker.

Happy birthday, @ : )
Via p2pnet.net

This year’s Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) Five Technologies to Watch “truly illustrate the progress of technology in the digital age,” says the organization.

“They stood out in our extensive research process as the most likely to make the biggest splash in the consumer market in the year ahead,” says CEA president and ceo Gary Shapiro.

And here’s what the CEA suggests you keep your eye on >>> (more…)

Entertainment cartel functionary Tim Kuik, boss of the Dutch anti-p2p organization BREIN, says he and his crew are about to attack “dozens” of indexing sites.
“It appears the pseudo-revival of SuprNova.org, under the guise of NewNova.org, has spurred this latest action,” says Slyck, quoting from Holland’s NRC Handelsblad, and going on:

“NewNova.org is a virtual carbon copy of the old universal BitTorrent’ listing site. Sloncek, the administrator of SuprNova.org sold the site’s code to a “friend” who in turn established the new site. Over the course of the last two weeks, the site has enjoyed growing popularity. This growing popularity appears to have irked BREIN.”

Slyck says it looks as if NewNova.org will be BREIN’s primary target, followed by TorrentSpy.com, Snarf-it.org, MiniNova.com, Demoniod.com, with TripTorrent as a possible.
But, “MiniNova.com may escape legal action,” adds the story. “They are registered in the Netherlands; however this indexing site resides elsewhere.”
Via p2pnet.net

The US government is using an old FCC wiretap law to force hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet networks, “to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications, says the New York Times.

“The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers,” it says. “Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.

The order was issued by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, says the NYT. It extends the provisions of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act which requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access.
(more…)

Ray Beckerman, a lawyer representing victims being sued by the Big Music cartel’s RIAA, is looking for technically savvy allies to help guide judges who may have been misled by RIAA evidence.

“There’s a crisis in this country with the RIAA’s reign of terror,” he told p2pnet. “The RIAA is bringing massive secret lawsuits against unnamed defendants – ‘John Does’ - who never even know they’ve been sued. These lawsuits wend their way through the courts on an ex parte basis, which means only one side - the RIAA - is represented.”

He’s posted a riddle for techies on Recording Industry vs The People, a web page which among other things carries documents relating to the growing number of appeals by RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) victims.

In an RIAA case a federal judge said that a screen shot of defendant John Doe Number 7’s Kazaa shared files folder was enough to show copyright infringement because

“[RIAA] obtained “metadata” about the files that Doe No. 7 was disseminating, which often reveal who originally copied a particular sound recording from a CD to a computer disk (a process called “ripping”) and provide a type of digital fingerprint, called a “hash,” that can show whether two users obtained a file from the same source…. Using the metadata associated with the music filed that Doe No. 7 was offering for distribution on Kazaa, plaintiffs have determined that many sound recordings were ripped by different people using different brands of ripping software. Such information creates a strong inference that Doe No. 7 was not simply copying his or her own lawfully purchased CDs onto a computer, but had downloaded those files from other P2P users.”

Was the judge right or wrong?

The case was Elektra v. Does 1-9

Beckerman says judges are hearing things which, technically speaking, are simply not true and, “some of the judges may actually believe what they’re being told,” he says.

By the time a John or Jane Doe has been named by his or her ISP, and has been sued, “the judge has already been talking to the RIAA’s lawyers, in a complete vacuum, for several years,” says Beckerman, going on:

“I think it would be helpful, when I see an instance in which I think a judge may have been misled by the RIAA on technical issues, to present the judge’s findings to be vetted by the tech community.

“I believe the tech community is very much interested in these cases, is very alert to, and mindful of, the extreme danger these cases pose to freedom of expression, and to a climate of technological innovation, and is ready, willing, and able to help ensure that the courts proceed with integrity in these technical areas.”
Via p2pnet.net

We’re not too sure how Sprint’s new Samsung A940 will actually be ultimately the all that different from Samsung’s A970 on Verizon, but it does indeed share the same 176 x 220 262k color swivel display, 2.0 megapixel digital camera, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of flash memory, MicroSD slot, and EV-DO support. Looks like they’ll be asking $399.99 for this sucka.

Via www.engadget.com

Chabil Ha’ writes “CNET News is reporting on Napter’s learning curve. There are some interesting revelations about their dealings with the music industry.”

From the article: “We made one last effort to convince the labels that they should do a deal with us. A little-known underground product called Gnutella had just surfaced. It was a P2P file-sharing program that required no central server and no company to operate it. If the labels didn’t do a deal with us, and instead put us out of business, then Gnutella and its derivatives would become unstoppable. If we worked together now we could convert the market to a paid-subscription model. If we didn’t do a deal, chaos would ensue. The labels didn’t believe us and didn’t really understand what this Gnutella threat was.”
Via slashdot.org

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) won a temporary court order earlier this week to rein in the advertising practices of an Internet operation claiming “file-sharing is 100 percent legal.”

The FTC says the 100 percent legal claim is 100 percent false.

According to the FTC, MP3DownloadCity.com markets and sells a $24.95 “tutorial and referral service” that promotes the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) software programs to download digital music, movies and computer games.

Unlike a licensed subscription service, the site’s service does not provide its customers with a license to download and share copyrighted material. Instead, it instructs consumers how to use free P2P file-sharing software provided by others, such as Kazaa and Grokster.

“And best of all, people are not getting sued for using our software,” the site’s advertising stated. “Yes! It is 100 percent legal.”

The FTC notes that the site’s customers who use P2P programs to download copyrighted material, or who make it available to others, without the copyright owner’s permission, are engaged in copyright infringement and could face civil and criminal liability.
(more…)

WASHINGTON - Microsoft Corp., already under government scrutiny over its behavior toward competitors, told manufacturers of iPod-like portable audio devices that under a new marketing program they would not be allowed to distribute rivals’ music player software but pulled back after one company protested.

The Justice Department said that the incident was “unfortunate,” but that government lawyers decided to drop the issue because Microsoft agreed 10 days later to change the proposal. The government disclosed details of the dispute in a federal court document made available Thursday.

The disputed proposal described in the court document as a “draft specification” would have affected portable music players that compete with Apple Computer Inc.’s wildly popular iPod. The plan would have precluded manufacturers of those devices from distributing software to consumers other than Microsoft’s Windows Media Player in exchange for Microsoft-supplied CDs.

Legal and industry experts said Microsoft’s demands probably would have violated the landmark 2002 antitrust settlement between the company and the Bush administration. They expressed astonishment that Microsoft was not more careful, given its mandatory legal training for employees about antitrust rules and continued monitoring by the Justice Department and a federal judge over its business deals through late 2007.
(more…)

Big surprise. Six months after starting its music rental ‘service,’ Yahoo is doubling the price.

According to ZDNet, the decision, “reduces some of the pressure on rivals such as Napster and RealNetworks, which had seen their $15 a month services dramatically undercut by Yahoo’s initial $6.99 a month offer. Yahoo said it would raise its monthly price for the portable subscriptions to about $12 as of Nov. 1.”
(more…)

The public prosecutor of the German district Karlsruhe is afraid he might be crushed under the workload of (future) p2p-prosecutions presented to him by the German gaming industry:

“20,000 announcements are said to have been received against game downloaders, which take the work time of five lawyers and three particularly policemen turned off for the sifting. The processing of the document mountains will [take] at least six months to take up. “the treatment of heavier offenses could suffer in the future under this substantial additional expenditure”

The German gaming industry is using the Swiss firm Logistep and in the Netherlands, at least, this kind of outsourcing of p2p-police work to a non-EU third-party has been deemed unacceptable.
(more…)

That requirement could appear as an amendment to a draft digital-television bill currently scheduled for a committee vote on Thursday, said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. The existing bill calls for a “hard deadline” of April 7, 2009, by which all analog broadcasters must give up their piece of the spectrum and switch to all-digital transmission.

“Can we really afford to wait until 2009 to transfer this spectrum?” McCain said at a Tuesday morning policy event here hosted by the New America Foundation. “I don’t think so.”

The impetus for moving up the deadline, McCain has maintained, is that the television channels on which analog broadcasts operate are occupying valuable spectrum that emergency workers need to communicate with each other. The government plans to allocate a chunk of the freed-up spectrum for that purpose and to auction off the rest for billions of dollars to companies eager to deploy new broadband services.
Via ZeroPaid

The group filed suit after lengthy discussions with Google’s management about the company’s Print Library Project broke down, the AAP said on Wednesday.

As part of the project, Google is working to scan all or parts of the book collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. It plans to let people search the texts. The company also intends to sell advertisements related to such searches.

“The publishing industry is united behind this lawsuit against Google and united in the fight to defend their rights,” AAP President and former Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder said in a statement. “While authors and publishers know how useful Google’s search engine can be and think the Print Library could be an excellent resource, the bottom line is that under its current plan, Google is seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers.”
Via ZeroPaid

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - EBay Inc. (Nasdaq:EBAY - news), the world’s largest online auction site, on Wednesday posted a 40 percent rise in quarterly net profit and raised its outlook, but shares fell 6 percent as investors were looking for more.

The results were within the range of Wall Street expectations, driven by growth in its U.S. and German auction business and online payment business expansion. Heading into the year-end holidays, EBay also raised its outlook for the rest of 2005 and 2006, but also within investor expectations.

EBay shares fell $2.81, or 6.7 percent, in after-hours trade to $39.20 from the regular-session Nasdaq close of $42.01, erasing a nearly 4 percent gain ahead of the report.

Ten years after the auction site was founded by a Silicon Valley programmer, growth at eBay continues to rocket as the company expands beyond auctions into shopping, property rentals and, with its recent $4 billion purchase of Skype, Web-based phone calling. Overseas, 30 percent of
South Korea has an eBay Auction Co. account. One in five Australian adults do so.

EBay’s 37 percent quarterly revenue growth is comparable to Internet stock peer Yahoo, which had net revenue growth of 42 percent. But Google is expected to report revenue growth twice that level at 80 percent when it posts results on Thursday.
(more…)

When you think of firewalls, ZoneAlarm comes to mind. But few buyers look to Zone Labs for antivirus and complete Internet security products as they would Symantec or McAfee. The company hopes to change this and push itself further into the security industry for home users.

ZoneAlarm’s Internet Security Suite 6.0 seeks nothing less than to cover every home or office user’s security needs. While much of the application remains the same with basic firewalls and antivirus software, Zone Labs has added three new features.
(more…)

Over at What Do I Know, music fan Todd Dominey is talking about the fact that he’s dumping all his CDs and going entirely digital, storing his tunes on a 500GB hard drive. (Thanks, TUAW.)

His whole post is worth reading, but the sentence that hit home with me was this: “I can’t remember the last time I placed a CD in a real CD player.”

I can’t quite say that’s true in my case–my car has a six-CD changer that I use from time to time. But thinking about it, I’m struck by the fact that when I bought that car, less than two years ago, I was excited by the notion of having a CD changer, and plunked down a fair amount of money to get one. (And that was despite the fact that I’ve owned and used MP3 players since 1999 or thereabouts.) Today, that changer mostly sits there unused–there are probably cobwebs inside it. Why fuss with CDs when you can listen to an MP3 player that holds way, way more than six CDs’ worth of music and provides instant access to all of it, not to mention podcasts and other audio?
(more…)

“You can click, but you can’t hide.” This mantra has become well known throughout the eDonkey2000 and BitTorrent communities. Perhaps most well known was the demise of LokiTorrent in December of 2004, when this slogan gained notoriety in the file-sharing world. Since that time, the frequency of indexing servers going offline appears to have diminished.

Yet the MPAA, MPA, and its international allies do not appear ready to allow complacency to set in, as another eDonkey2000 indexing site has been forced offline. This time, The-FreeWorld has met its demise.
(more…)

It’s a founding member of the Big Four record label and Big Seven movie studio cartels which are currently trying to gain control of online p2p distribution by herding users into handy consumer corrals, closing down sites they don’t own, and by suing their own customers.

Now, “TSR Records, an independent music label, filed suit yesterday against Sony BMG Music Entertainment, accusing it of unfairly dominating radio play lists through the use of bribes to programmers and other illicit tactics,” says the New York Times.
(more…)

Broadband in the sky is practical, a UK experiment has confirmed.

“Trials using a 12,000 cubic metre balloon, flying at an altitude of around 24 kilometres for nine hours, have proved it can successfully operate a data rate link of 11Mbps,” says the BBC.

“Proving the ability to operate a high data rate link from a moving stratospheric balloon is a critical step in moving towards the longer term aim of providing data rates of 120Mbps,” the story has principal scientific officer Dr David Grace, saying.

The high-flying broadband project has been put together by the Capanina research consortium, led by the University of York.
(more…)

The MPDA (Motionless Picture Disinformation Association) is proud of its record in closing down BitTorrent sites.

It all looks good in lamescream media headlines but in real life, its efforts are about as noticeable as a fart in a thunderstorm and in fact, from a movie industry perspective, they’re doing far more harm than good.

The MPAA’s opposite number in the music industry, the RIAA (Rip-off Industry Association of America), has done a great job publicizing p2p file sharing, introducing it to millions of people who, without the RIAA’s sue ‘em all marketing campaign, would never have heard of it.

P2p and the p2p networks are here to stay and one of the primary applications is BitTorrent.

Yesterday, we featured a really good article on its creator, Bram Cohen. Written by Fortune senior editor Dan Roth, it offers insight into Bram himself, and on the process which brought BT to life.

What it doesn’t do, however, is explain what BT is.
You can read more on this here.

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