Tuesday, December 09, 2003

The jukebox is your Net Inside the Universal Hilton hotel in Los Angeles' Studio City, a few attendees at this week's Music 2.0 conference found a surprising Wi-Fi connection to the Internet--through a jukebox playing in the hotel's lobby. The jukebox was operated by Ecast, a company that provides digital music systems for bars and other retail outlets, and the Net connection was part of an early test the company is running with Wi-Fi. Already a few bars, including a handful in San Francisco, are seeing their jukeboxes turned into Wi-Fi hot spots, as the company explores interest in the idea. This is no more than a proof of concept today. . . . . But if portable devices such as Apple's iPod gain Wi-Fi access in the future, as many believe is a natural next step, Ecast's jukebox-based Wi-Fi could be a way for bar patrons to instantly buy and download a song they hear on the jukebox. [CNET News.com - Front Door] Dunno whether she's still there, but Ecast, as I recall, is/was rle's outfit. 9:34:22 PM    comment []

Hey, thanks! The Linky Love. Although I don't have that kind of blog, I always enjoy sites like A Blog Doesn't Need a Clever Name or Scripting.com that provide me with daily short bites on all sorts of interesting things from around the web. They are sort of the petits-fours plates [Learning the Lessons of Nixon] I'm all conflicted about what this blog should be. But I like petits-fours, so maybe that's an okay way to think about what I'm doing here. More on this another time. Really. Right now, gotta get the kids going towards bed. 6:55:55 PM    comment []

Radar Love: The Best Gadgets for Catching Speeding Motorists. Mr. Roboto, by Brendan I. Koerner, in The Voice. 6:47:00 PM    comment []

Microsoft: No patches this month. The software giant announces that no security patches will be forthcoming this month. [CNET News.com - Front Door] 6:37:26 PM    comment []

Inspired by the story of President Bush and the fake turkey (was it really plastic?), here's Ward Sutton's comic suggesting Dubya's Phony Photo-Ops for the future. 3:46:39 PM    comment []

Terrorism prosecutions often fizzleFew cases result in long prison terms. By Rebecca Carr, Austin American-Statesman. A new study shows that while federal investigators have recommended the prosecution of an estimated 6,400 people on terrorism- related charges since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, fewer than 900 were convicted, and just a handful received prison sentences exceeding 20 years. The median sentence -- half got more time, half got less -- for someone convicted in the past two years of charges related to international terrorism was 14 days, according to the study released today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University in New York. Of the 184 people convicted over the past two years of international terrorism, 171 received no prison time or sentences of less than one year, according to TRAC. . . . It bothers me that we would round up whole bunches of people without an idea about whether they really are a terrorist, [Charles] Peña [director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute] said. It certainly is valid to ask whether the whole war on terror is successful. Federal sentences are determined by federal guidelines that are largely based on the offense. So, the vast majority of the offenses in the terrorism referrals could not have involved acts of "terrorism" in the true sense of the term because so many of the sentences were so inconsequential, said Neal Sonnett, a former prosecutor and former chairman of the American Bar Association's criminal justice section. . . . Jack King, legal consultant to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the study raises questions about the Justice Department's definition of a terrorist. Something funny is going on in the war on terror, King said. Half the people who are arrested get their charges dropped and almost no one is going to jail. That raises serious questions about what exactly they are calling terrorism and who they are calling a terrorist. (original url is http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/monday/news_f34d2 227460fe0580098.html ) 3:46:33 PM    comment []

How much is digital music worth? By John Borland, CNET News.com. Speaking at the iHollywood Forum's Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles Monday, executives on both sides focused on the 99-cent price tag that has become the market's standard for downloadable music. Critics say that that price needs to come down if mainstream consumers are to start buying in large numbers, making the Internet a serious factor in the record industry's bottom line. Record labels say they can't afford to go lower. There's very little money in this to begin with, said David Ring, vice president of Universal Music Group's eLabs division. A lot of people are already recognizing that we're going to have to sell a lot more singles at 99 cents in order for us to make money, and for artists to be able to make a living. Whatever the ongoing tensions, it's clear that the relationships between record labels and technology companies have improved immeasurably over the past year. Going into the holiday buying season, numerous services are for the first time offering digital music downloads or online subscription services with the blessing of the largest music companies. That--in theory--will help drive purchases of portable music players such as Apple's iPod or Samsung's Napster device. Music executives hope all of this will help spark consumers' interest in buying music online and offline, and boost industry revenue, which has fallen steeply over the last three years. 12:46:04 PM    comment []

The fastest way to get published: All machine needs is a manuscript. Churns out books while you wait. By Ho Anderson, Toronto Star. Prospective authors provide an InstaBook operator with a disk containing their manuscript; then the disk is fed into a machine and a fully bound and printed book pops out six minutes later. For $150 the writer gets one printed proof and 10 copies of the book. Says Di Marcantonio, "Anything you can conceive of putting into book form, InstaBook can handle it." Florida-based Victor Celorio, a former aspiring writer, invented InstaBook technology, and according to the InstaBook Web site, there are locations in the U.S., Italy and Mexico as well. http://www.instabook.ca/ http://www.instabook.net/ 11:45:54 AM    comment []

Music industry warns Kuro allies, by Bill Heaney, Taipei Times. Companies that invest in file-sharing or peer-to-peer Web sites and those that help them collect their monthly subscription fees should reconsider co-operating with the sites now that prosecutors have filed charges against Taiwan's largest on-line file-sharing site, Kuro.com.tw (???), the music industry warned yesterday. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry [IFPI] Taiwan calls for existing investors and potential investors to seriously consider their investments in unauthorized peer-to-peer network operators, IFPI Taiwan branch secretary-general Robin Lee told reporters yesterday. The IFPI, which represents 10 local and international record labels, has claimed that Kuro and similar sites infringe on their members' copyrights by allowing subscribers to share and download music files without paying royalty fees. . . . Kuro has 500,000 subscribers, according to the site's operators, each paying NT$99 per month to use the peer-to-peer service that allows them to find friends, share music and video files, and access a digital magazine. Companies that currently collect the monthly subscription fee for Kuro include big names such as President Chain Store Corp, Visa, Mastercard, FarEas-Tone Telecommunications Co and Taiwan Cellular Corp. (This follows File-sharing site calls suit futile, by Bill Heaney, Taipei Times: The nation's most popular file-sharing, or peer-to-peer, Web site yesterday tried to play down a criminal indictment launched against it by the Taipei District Public Prosecutors' Office, citing failed attempts to close similar sites in the US. Peer-to-peer sites have been prosecuted before and have been found not guilty, Philip Wang, spokesman for Kuro.com.tw, told the Taipei Times yesterday. Given this trend, even the US federal court is taking the position that the technology itself is no different from a Xerox machine. It is the user's behavior that infringes copyright, he said. Wang's comment goes to the heart of the peer-to-peer dilemma. While the technology itself may be neutral like a knife -- a useful tool for cutting vegetables that can also be used to kill -- site owners are allowing millions of people to copy movies, music and software without paying for it, which is crippling the entertainment industry, officials say. On Thursday, the prosecutor's office filed charges against Kuro's management team and one subscriber under the amended Copyright Law. 9:45:36 AM    comment []

Licence fees and GDP per capita: The case for open source in developing countries, by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, in First Monday. There is a strong case for free software (also known as open source or libre software) being deployed widely in developing countries. ... Further, this note argues that the controversy over total costs of ownership (TCO) of free vs. proprietary software is not applicable to developing countries and other regions with low labour costs, where the TCO advantage lies with open source, and the share of licence fees in TCO is much higher than in high labour cost countries. The note concludes with a table comparing license fees for proprietary software against GDP per capita for 176 countries. The table is fascinating, but you need to read the rest (it isn't long) for sufficient context, probably. Ghosh calculates effective costs of Windows and Office XP in numerous nations, based on differences in GDP. So, for example, in Albania, it is $15,196 (or 5.17 months of GDP per capita). This compares to $560 (and 0.19 months) in the United States, $48,011 (16.33) in VietNam, and $62,014 (21.09) in Nigeria. Ghosh also points out the covariance between effective price and BSA-reported piracy rates. Part of the argument is that in nations (like the U.S.) where labor costs are high, the initial outlay for a license is a small factor in total cost of ownership, whereas in many other nations, moving to open source would make a much greater difference in total cost. 6:56:51 AM    comment []

Mobile user undoes traffic ticket before the tow truck arrives!. Here's a terrific Smart Mobs story (albeit with a "mob" of two): Driver gets pulled over for expired tags, and while the officer is writing out the ticket phones a friend who renews his vehicle registration over the Web. The transaction is complete and the ticket invalidated before the tow truck arrives! Thanks to Cory and Boingboing! [Smart Mobs] 6:37:25 AM    comment []

The Next Reality Show: Bumpkins Join Jet Set. The success of Fox's "The Simple Life" all but predicts the next take: A show in which the lives of the rich and poor are swapped and transformed. By David Carr. [New York Times: Business] 6:26:05 AM    comment []

Pocket of Opposition to Vaccine Threatens Polio Eradication. Opposition to vaccinations against polio by some Islamic leaders in northern Nigeria has led to the spread of the disease to neighboring West African countries, By Lawrence K. Altman. [New York Times: Science] 6:21:56 AM    comment []