Slashdot has a short story about a project that would allow running a pirate radio without a real possibility for content owners to track the origin of the stream.
The project, which is explained in here, is based on P2P mechanism, so that each individual who listens the stream, will also rebroadcast the stream to other users. This method will reduce the bandwidth required from origin station to very minimum amount and also makes tracking the amount of listeners the station has, virtually impossible.
Here's a look at this week's charts. Or are these last weeks? So little difference that it's hard to tell some times. Software charts are pretty much the same as last week - only minor movements inside the chart. Padus Disc Juggler fell from the chart and was replaced by DivX 5 at tenth.
Loud Sound Disorder took the #1 spot on the MP3 charts this week with Bryan Edman and Dj Quesito following close behind. Long time number one, Blind Lesbians of Uganda fell all the way to the fourth position. 1djHallucinogen entered the chart at sixth.
Ok, finally we managed to complete our DVD to SVCD guide.. This one is easy-to-follow guide for creating SuperVCD backups from your DVD movies using familiar tools, such as TMPGEnc and SmartRipper. Style is almost identical with our previous guides, but this time we focus more on providing excellent audio quality (to support excellent video quality of SVCDs) with state-of-the-art tools, such as tooLame.
If you're into SVCDs, I recommend that you take a look at this one:
The guys from Intervideo gave us permission to publish two video technology articles, written by their employees, on our site. As you might know, InterVideo is the company who develops the WinDVD player.
So, thanks and credits go to InterVideo's guys, not to us :-) I hope you like these articles!
The people of our affiliate site Burnarchive.de are working on a freeware audio CD protection software. According to them it seems to offer quite high level of protection.
Nice way to piss off you friends if nothing else ;)
Translated from German with Babelfish
CCD LOCK is at present the probably most efficient Freeware copy protection for audio CD's. The program changes the TOC von CloneCD CloneCD-Images in such a way the fact that it copies and/or ribs to 95% is prevented. Contrary to the commercial copy protection procedures also the talk Book standard, which defines only one session for the "Compact Disc digital audio", is kept; this leads usually to fewer problems with plays on older CD Playern.
It looks like that the manufacturers of the latest generation of game consoles are very aggressive towards MOD-chip developers and manufacturers. They are of course protecting the interest of game developers because big game titles are one big factor in console’s success. On the other hand I dare to say that the amazing success story of the original Playstation was very much supported by the fact that MOD-chips and copied games were easily available.
One of the groups working on a mod chip for the Xbox has pulled the plug on its project following legal consultations. The group, Enigmah-X, had hoped to create the second XBox chip to go into circulation, following the release of the first working chip, the Xtender, for the system in May.
However, earlier this week their site was replaced with the following message: "After speaking to lawyers we feel that we must not do this project anymore. There are many other chips and methods for guys to play with anyway so have fun and good luck to everyone out there."
Microsoft is known to have looked into legal methods to shut down mod chip production in the past. However, only Sony has successfully taken on the creators of mod chips in court – the company forced Channel Technologies, the makers of the Messiah PS2 mod chip, to shut down its activities before the chip was commercially released.
New York -- Warner Music Group is lowering the suggested retail price (SRP) of its DVD-Audio titles by as much as 35 percent to make the releases a more attractive option for consumers.
A spokesperson for the label group told Medialine that its DVD-Audio SRPs will now largely range from $16.98 to $18.98, roughly in line with CD list prices of new releases.
Warner is maintaining its DVD-Audio release schedule of several titles per month in a variety of genres through the end of the year, the spokesperson added.
Microsoft issued yesterday a patch which blocks three security holes in Windows Media Player. Biggest hole would allow hackers to run any chosen code on victim's computer and this hole is categorized as critical.
Windows Media Player can be found from all Windows operating system versions and is tightly bundled with Internet Explorer, making the security hole's importance an enormous.
It is recommended that everybody would apply a patch to their WMPs immediately. Patch and more information can be found from here:
...as a sidenote, it doesn't matter whether you use WMP to watch movies or not, it is still installed on your computer and cannot be removed from modern Windows versions.
California congressman Howard Berman is currently preparing a bill that would ultimately allow copyright owners and their representative agencies, such as RIAA and MPAA, to block P2P networks by using technological weapons. Such weapons include denial-of-service attacks, flooding the networks with false files, jamming the networks by causing fake traffic peaks, etc.
Unsurprisingly, RIAA's spokesman already announced that they will support the concept of the bill. Tactics that the bill would allow copyright owners to use include sending fake download requests to file sharers and spoofing -- meaning that copyright owners would create fake files with desirable filenames and share those through P2P networks.
Internet giant Yahoo! announced today that it will scale down many of its streaming services, shutting down streaming video news service FinanceVision and Yahoo! Music.
Yahoo! began its streaming media experiments back in "crazy years" of late 1990s by purchasing Broadcast.com for a whopping $5 billion. Since then, company has acquired also one of the Net music pioneers, Launch.com, for much more moderate $12M back in 2001 and has spread its video streaming services to news, etc. Most of these business ventures have been supported by advertisements and as we (well, at least we who run websites) know, advertisements just don't pay the bills at the moment. Hence the shutdowns.
Yahoo! Radio rebroadcasted many traditional radio stations who don't have their own presence in the Net. Yahoo! said also that its Launch.com service wont be affected by the changes and also assured that Launch will stay its top priority in streaming markets.
Real has been very busy lately. Future plans include a new RealOne software, MPEG4 support, alliance with Sony and more.
So far this year RealNetworks has been very active—one might even say aggressively active. The company seems to be pursuing with Microsoft-like zeal a campaign to rule the world—or at least the world of Internet-delivered media. This spring RealNetworks made a number of announcements following on the heels of the fall 2001 release of its ambitious RealOne player/platform. Most of the announcements were obviously meant to prop up RealOne and keep its momentum going.
Among RealNetworks' announcements were those regarding the release of RealVideo 9, an initiative to integrate and support MPEG 4, a strategic alliance with Sony, the unveiling of two RealOne add-on tools (Enterprise Desktop and Desktop Manager) for customizing and managing the enterprise media experience, and the availability of some nifty third-party tools media content creation/authoring tools.
RealOne
A combination of browser, media player, and jukebox, RealOne appears to be a Microsoft-style bid to be all things to all people and thereby establish RealNetworks as the world's dominant media delivery platform. RealNetworks group enterprise marketing manager Janinne Brunyee says that RealOne is intended to make life easier for everyone by consolidating all media in one browser/player. But didn't we hear this same sort of rationale from Microsoft when they blew the competition out of the water with Windows and then again when they swept the competition under the rug with Internet Explorer?
According to a Red Herring's article, Microsoft has been developing a special version of XBox which would include Microsoft's UltimateTV.
UltimateTV has been one of the many not-so-successful Microsoft campaigns to conquer new market sectors. UltimateTV is ultimately :) a competitor for TiVo and ReplayTV. Also, the bundle would bring a static income flow to Microsoft from UltimateTV subscribers as well, since using UltimateTV costs $9.95 a month.
Anyway, Microsoft obviously sees this as a chance to boost both, not-as-successful-as-hoped products by bundling them into one unit. Let's see how it goes..
Website Tom’s Hardware has published a very nice article about making backups of CD’s and the copy protection schemes that try to prevent you for making a backup. The article has lots of basic information which should be very helpful if you are not already an expert on the topic. The article also reviews software titles BlindWrite, CloneCD and Clony XXL. The article also has very nice information about the various write modes of CD-R drives along with other slightly more advanced information and 4 different CD-R drives are also reviewed.
CDRW drive technology has been written about extensively elsewhere on the Internet. We decided to examine in more detail the process of making a back up copy of some of the more challenging current game and audio titles. Software publishers are supposed to follow published standards to which the data and audio CDs must adhere, given that it should be possible to back up almost any data CD using a typical CDRW drive, at least in theory. However, read on to find out what we discovered.
Some of the new, advanced protection schemes that commercial software products employ to protect their product rights fall outside of the established "Red Book" and "Orange Book" industry standards developed by Sony and Philips for data and audio CDs. Naturally, this can present quite a challenge for the typical CDRW drive user. The level of protection that these copy protections provide varies depending on the method and extent of protection that the software developer chooses. Some data CDs can be easily backed up using the most primitive of CDRW mastering software, while more advanced copy protections require more advanced and specialized back up software. Primitive copy protection schemes that do not employ sophisticated methods are based more on the theory of preventing casual unauthorized copying than anything else. On the other extreme, the "brute-force" methods employed by some software developers suggest a full throttle reaction to prevent all attempts at duplication.
On2 Technologies has announced that it will open-source its multimedia player and server products in addition to its open-sourced VP3 video technology. Company will also hand over the development maintenance responsibility to Xiph.org Foundation, the same body who controls the development of OGG Vorbis audio compression format.
Basically On2 and Xiph.org are trying to develop a complete multimedia suite that would compete against MPEG-4 and RealNetworks' and Microsoft's multimedia delivery products. It also offers a free alternative to those formats mentioned -- specially to MPEG-4 which licensing model is still in middle of chaotic negotiations between various patent holders and companies willing to license the technology.
Xiph.org will be sponsored by On2, who obviously hopes that growing interest towards the new multimedia suite will eventually increase sales of company's proprietary solutions which include more advanced video codec, VP5. Xiph.org estimates that it will take a year before the OGG bitstream can include both, OGG Vorbis audio and VP3 video. But then we should see a rival to the technologies that are based on heavily patented MPEG-4 technology (such as DivX and XviD).
U.S. second largest consumer electronics retailer, Circuit City, is phasing out its VHS selection in many of its stores and plans to increase significantly the DVD selection instead, says Friday's Washington Post.
Move comes after American consumers have adopted the digital format as their number one choice. VCR sales have declined during the last year while DVD player penetration is currently at 30 per cent and is rising rapidly.
U.S. number one consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy, is not going to drop VHS yet, but is going to increase the DVD selection dramatically while keeping the current VHS offering at current level.
Ok, we forgot to update the download charts in last week, so accurate comparisions can't be done this time. Some notable entries anyway; TMPGEnc's success was boosted by the new version released in this month and interestingly VCDGalaxy returns back to charts after a long absence.
In MP3 charts there are two totally new artists in the top 10: DJ T.J. debuts at #7 and ADreNaLiNe-DJ at #9. And here are the charts...
Librarian of Congress, James Billington, has set the new webcasting royalty rates and unfortunately it seems that the new webcasting rates are going to kill majority of independent web radio stations even that the rates were cut by half from those originally proposed by CARP(Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel).
Webcasters were hoping that LoC would have changed the royalty rates from flat fees to revenue percentage, which would have been more reasonable for small webcasters who now face a situation where their revenue is smaller than the royalty rates. New rates are set to $0.07 per performance per listener and those rates are applied retroactively from October, 1998 and first payments are due 20th of October, 2002. Same rates apply for Internet-only broadcasting and re-broadcasting of "real" radio stations. Various web broadcasters have already announced that they will shut down soon or have already shut down their broadcasts because of the rates.
U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee and Rick Boucher are seeking a legal action to change the outcome of the royalty fiasco where Librarian was forced to use "willing-buyer/willing-seller" method to determine the correct royalty rate without a possibility to consider that the current webcasting marketplace is already extremely flawed. Reps said in their joint press release: "We will be considering legislation to change the standard from "willing-buyer/willing-seller" for Internet radio to the traditional fair market formula used by other CARPs. In addition, we want to ensure that all future Carps must take into consideration small business concerns and allow effective participation of small, niche and noncommercial entities. We believe these standards will allow for the development of a viable Internet radio industry and ensure that artists, writers, and record labels are fairly compensated."
Name from the past, PlayMedia Systems, is here to haunt the MP3 community yet again. Company made its name well-known back in 1999, when it sued Nullsoft for using PlayMedia's code in their mega-popular MP3 player, WinAMP. This time, PlayMedia says that Napster can't be simply just sold to Bertelsmann, because it includes PlayMedia's technology.
Company filed documents to court on Tuesday, stating that PlayMedia created the MP3 playing technology used in original Napster client and also was partly responsible of the security features of still-under-development subscription service and its client. And according to PlayMedia, Napster's license doesn't allow Napster to sell its license to Bertelsmann.
So, to put it simply, company is trying to squeeze few bucks out of Big Boy, German media giant Bertelsmann.
RealNetworks has finally launched European version of its highly popular content subscription service, RealONE SuperPass. European content providers who have teamed with Real include BBC and UEFA(for our American readers: United European Football Association).
Monthly subscription fees are slightly higher than those in the U.S., ranging from $14.95 to $21.95 a month while American version costs $9.95 to $19.95. According to a News.com article on the subject, Real aims to target "countries where English is a dominant language, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Scandinavia". I'm just slightly interested to know where this mysterious English-speaking majority in Scandinavia lives or are they just hiding very, very well?-) Anyway, so their target audience is in the countries where virtually everybody understands English and where broadband connectivity is high. Real expects that sports will be the major force driving people to subscribe to its service, just like it has been in the U.S. where Real has various exclusive content deals with sports associations.
Philips has demonstrated the world’s first fully functional miniature optical disc drive using blue laser technology. Up to 1 Gbyte of data can be stored on a single-sided optical disc of just 3 cm in diameter, matching the size constraints of portable devices such as digital cameras, mobile phones, PDAs and portable Internet devices. This prototype illustrates Philips’ leadership in optical storage technology, which is driven by superb media robustness and the low cost per Mbyte of the storage medium, making it optimally suited for large-scale distribution of pre-recorded content.
Drastic size reduction
Recent advances in blue laser technology, and Philips innovations in the area of optical storage media and miniaturised opto-mechanics are the ideal ingredients for small form factor optical drives. The resulting high storage density can be exploited to reduce the disc size while still providing a high storage capacity (e.g. 1 Gbyte on a disc of 3 cm diameter, i.e. more than on a present CD ROM). To fulfil the stringent space requirements of portable devices, all dimensions need to be reduced, particularly the building-height. This issue is addressed by the drastically miniaturized optical system now demonstrated by Philips.
FullAudio announced yesterday that it has signed a deal with Bertelsmann Music Group in order to use BMG's music in its music subscription service MusicNow. Company also told that it has finalized its third round of funding and has raised $36M from investors so far.
FullAudio delivers music subscription services to radio giant Clear Channel's numerous websites and has now licensing deals with four major record labels (with all but Sony) just like its rival Listen.com has (Listen.com doesn't have licensing deal with Vivendi Universal yet).
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is tocrack-down on even more businesses using illegal software.
The BSA's decision to get tough with a "hard core of businesses" which think they are "beyond the law" follows hard on the heels of a report into the alleged global rise of software piracy.
In particular, the BSA wants to target those criminal organisations that are using increasingly sophisticated methods to distribute illegal software on the Internet.
Said Mike Newton, campaign manager for BSA in the UK: "This is a strong response from the European software industry, whose tolerance levels have been tested considerably with a growing piracy rate.
"Clearly ongoing education and public policy work is having an impact but we cannot ignore the fact that a hard core of businesses using pirated software believe they are beyond the law."
Last year the BSA undertook enforcement actions involving 6,500 European companies, but says this barely scratches the surface.
Last week the BSA claimed that global software piracy cost the industry almost $11 billion last year.
RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) and NMPA(National Music Publishers' Association) announced yesterday that they have reached an out-of-court settlement with AudioGalaxy, a P2P company which owns AudioGalaxy Satellite P2P software and the network.
RIAA, NMPA and the Harry Fox Agency sued AudioGalaxy in May over copyright infringements. Under the settlement, AudioGalaxy is required to obtain a permission from copyright owners before it can allow users to distribute music through its network.
Basically the settlement makes AudioGalaxy useless for P2P users -- when the changes will come in effect, the network will become a clone of something that Napster is at the moment: a central-distributed indie music software with no users using it.
1982 marks the year that the audio CD was born. It was on August 17 of that year that PolyGram produced the world's first mass-produced audio CD containing classical music: Claudio Arrau's rendition on the piano of various waltzes by Frederic Chopin. The first pop music CD by the same producer was ABBA's album "The Visitors." Starting with 376,000 "silver discs" in the first year, Universal Music, which is the successor to PolyGram, has now produced more than 1.8 billion CDs
Bayer developed the technology for compact discs together with Philips and PolyGram. A customized Makrolon® polycarbonate was the plastic starting material, which to this day - having been modified a number of times - acts as a base material for many electronic storage media.
In 1982, Sony introduced the first CD player in Japan. The world's first audio CD was Billy Joel's album "52nd Street" (Sony Music). The audio CD took off as soon as it was launched: in the USA alone 30,000 CD players and 800,000 music CDs were sold in the first year.
The Red Book - World Standard for Audio CDs
Philips and Sony worked almost simultaneously and initially independently on their own CD projects. Both companies started off with their own individual development programs, but finally agreed upon a common CD standard, which stipulates norms and specifications on data storage, error correction, etc., in the so-called Red Book (IEC-908). This standard has enabled every CD player and every CD-ROM drive to be able to play any audio CD.
The five major record companies have been hit with a class-action lawsuit charging that new CDs designed to thwart Napster-style piracy are defective and should either be barred from sale or carry warning labels.
The suit was brought this week in Los Angeles Superior Court by class-action specialists at the law firm Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach on behalf of two Southern California consumers.
It marks the first legal challenge of CD copy-prevention technology to "tackle the issue on an industry-wide basis," Alan Mansfield, an attorney representing the two named plaintiffs in the complaint, said Friday.
It also follows criticism from some members of Congress and from Dutch consumer electronics maker Philips, co-creator of the compact disc, that the anti-piracy CDs are technically flawed and could impinge on consumers' rights to copy music for their own use.
The suit names all five of the major record companies--Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment and AOL Time Warner's Warner Music.
I don't have any idea how much you guys know about the current situation in Europe, but since KPNQwest filed for bankruptcy last week, we've virtually been on the edge ever since. If KPNQwest's network goes down before they can find someone to buy it, it could cause some serious issues for Europeans trying to connect to the Internet and for the rest of the world serious troubles trying to connect sites located in Europe (KPNQwest's clients include Dell and HP).
Anyway, one big part of the network, called EBone, has been running on voluntary basis since last week and now they finally got an additional two weeks' funding to run the operation and pay salaries to the maintenance staff. I just thought you might want to send your hellos to these guys :-) Visit their employee site here.
New Scientist has an interesting article which reveals that super-popular Harry Potter movie which was released on DVD in May, doesn't have Macrovision copy protection at all.
Macrovision's video protection can be found from virtually all DVD discs and commercial VHS tapes. Protection mechanism basically messes up with video sync signal and makes the video signal "unstable" so VCRs and DVD-recorders (stand-alone ones) can't record the video signal. And selling such VCRs in the U.S. which would circumvent this copy protection is illegal.
Now, since market is full of small "black boxes" that remove the Macrovision signal for you Warner has obviously thought that it might actually be cheaper not to include the Macrovision on the disc and see how it effects on piracy. Adding Macrovision copy protection costs appx. $0.05 a disc. Macrovision is removed at least from USA and UK release versions of the DVD.
Alliance Entertainment, a privately held company which provides various online services in music sector, has agreed to buy one of the best-known old online music companies, Liquid Audio.
The financial terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the information came only week after Liquid Audio's shareholders called the company to put itself up for sale. Company made revenue of $135,000 in its first quarter and meanwhile lost a whopping $4.9M.
Liquid Audio has developed its secure music format and DRM system for years -- it was a pioneering company in this emerging area of business back in 1990s. Company provides secure tracks from major record labels to online retailers such as Amazon.com.
A German website PCWelt.de has done extensive testing with latest high speed 32-40x certified media. The conclusion is that current high speed media delivers unacceptable error rates. The tests have been done with latest Lite-On and Plextor drives.
Our buddy CiTay was kind enough to provide a translated summary about the test results.
We have previously reported about MP3 files as potential virus carriers and now another ‘safe’ format joins the group of potentially dangerous files. This time it’s the JPEG (.jpg) image format.
Antivirus companies warned on Thursday of a new virus that communicates through digital images, but security experts aren't sure how much of a threat this latest evolutionary branch of malicious code poses.
Dubbed the first "JPEG infector" by security company Network Associates, the W32/Perrun virus has two parts: infected JPEG images that contain the virus's payload and a viral program that extracts the code from the images and infects other JPEGs on the system as they are opened.
Because PCs have to be infected by the extractor virus before any code hidden in image files can affect them, the program is more a computer-science curiosity than a threat, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates' antivirus emergency response team.
"We are not saying that this is a problem," Gullotto said. "We gave it a low risk, but we haven't seen anything like this before." A digital image carrying code for W32/Perrun is easy to spot, he said, because the image is corrupted by the new code.
Two of the world's biggest record labels, Japanese Sony and French Vivendi Universal, are about to offer an alternative that music freaks have begged for a long time.
Two companies have finally understood, at least slightly, that they simply must offer a cheap and flexible alternative to P2P tools if they wish to fight Net piracy at all. Universal has announced that it has plans to launch a service in this summer which would offer single music tracks for download for $0.99 each and albums for $9.99 each.
Tracks will be sold through retailers like Amazon and Best Buy and according to Universal, certain tracks and albums will be released on the Net before they become available in CD format.
But definately the most encouraging fact is that the tracks will be in high quality and that Universal will allow users to burn the tracks to CD -- a practice that all the record labels have so far banned.
Sony has also announced that it will offer much more tracks for download and that those tracks can also be burned to CDs and that they will drop the price of one download to $1.49.
This is definately good news, it sounds like the companies have finally understood at least something how people want to get their music -- without stupid restrictions like banning the CD burning. Only problem is still the price; is $0.99 a pop low enough. But at least those -- and I know that there are many of those -- who want to get their music legally, can do so.
According to a study by IFPI, an international recording industry's lobbying group, professional CD piracy increased dramatically in 2001. Number of pirated CDs sold increased from 640 million in 2000 to 950 million in 2001.
IFPI claims that the main reason behind the trend is the fact that blank CDRs and fast CD burners have become cheaper and more widely available, so virtually anyone can setup a small CD manufacturing plant in their garage. IFPI estimates that the CD piracy is roughly split in half by professional CD manufacturing plants and "garage-piracy".
Our old buddies at Ahead Software have lauched a new website. The new site presents all Ahead products is professional fashion. Finally The Feurio! is also included in the Ahead software suite.
Also the website reveals new Ahead Software title: Nero VisionExpress
DVD is now the fastest growing consumer format ever and its hardly surprising. Premium quality video, surround sound audio, instant picture control, all in a format that is set to last a lifetime, DVD has surely arrived.
NeroVision Express guides you through the whole process of creating DVDs, VCDs and SVCDs in an easy and innovative way.
So imagine being able to take all your home movies or video recordings, and transfer them to DVD or CD in a few easy steps. Or what about the real time video capture from your digital camcorder in preparation for that ultimate movie creation? Well its all possible from NeroVision Express, the new video-authoring application from the creators of Nero, the Worlds most advanced CD/DVD Recording software.
Don’t rush downloading just yet since the demo version of VisionExpress is not online yet. When it is released, this website will be the first site to find it.
Owners of the $1,800 DVR-7000 device are experiencing a glitch, the company confirmed Tuesday. The problem doesn't affect the recording of discs, but it will prevent the players from functioning properly, according to Pioneer spokeswoman Amy Friend. Friend would not give further details on the nature of the glitch, but she said it could be corrected with a simple upgrade.
"The problem is not likely to impact the vast majority of customers...it could affect the playing of discs, but it's unlikely," Friend said. "It's a software programming issue and is corrected with an upgrade that we're distributing to dealers so they can get it to their customers."
Pioneer has sold 50,000 players in Japan and 9,000 elsewhere, mostly in Europe and North America, according to Friend. Sony's RDR-A1 recorders, which were manufactured by Pioneer, are also affected by the glitch. So far, Sony has only sold the player in Japan and has not set a ship date for the United States.
Friend added that for consumers who purchase the drive after June 10, the glitch in the players will already be fixed.
Net media giant Terra Lycos launched a co-branded version of Listen.com's Rhapsody service today, dubbed as Lycos Rhapsody.
Service offer is slightly different than the one what Listen.com currently offers -- you get a streaming radio version for free, you pay $5 a month for a version which has 50 commercial-free streaming radio stations and for $10 you get the same 50 channels, but also the ability to skip tracks and save tracks to your online "media library".
Lycos used to be a pioneering web portal in music biz back in last millennium and their Lycos Music service added with their web-based MP3 search engine and their acquired Sonique MP3 player made some nice features available to regular Net users a long time before other major service providers had anything similiar. Unfortunately Terra Lycos's financial problems virtually killed Sonique and lots of other creative features they used to have. But at least this deal will make sure that Listen.com has some major portal to back up their fight against major record label-backed subscription services, Pressplay and MusicNet.
Rhapsody currently has content from four major record labels and from various indie labels -- only major record label missing from its offering is currently Vivendi Universal.
Just wanted to post a little note to mention that it's been now three years since we opened our site to public in 1999. Since that we've seen Internet bubble to burst, tons of sites to disappear and digital multimedia to become an everyday thing for most of the Net users.
In three years, we've seen our site to grow from a small MP3 site to a quite a big digital multimedia portal. Currently we have appx. 3M page impressions a month, almost 20,000 registered members and we've served over 3.5M software downloads during the last three years.
Anyway, I would just like to thank all of you for making this site what it is today. Hopefully the next years will be as interesting as the last three years have been.
The brand new open source web browser Mozilla 1.0 did get quite a bit of attention from the media. Generally the feedback has been very positive.
The release of Mozilla 1.0 was reported by most tech news sites including BetaNews, CNET News.com, evolt.org, eWEEK, ExtremeTech, Geek.com Geek News, IDG.net, internetnews.com, Internet Week, LinuxMAX, Linux Today, MacSlash, MozillaNews, NeoWin.net, Slashdot, The Register, vnunet.com, WinInfo and ZDNet News. More mainstream news sites are also taking notice. BBC News has an article and smh.com.au (the online edition of The Sydney Morning Herald) reported on Mozilla a few days ago.
Taking a slightly different approach, PC Magazine marks the release with an interview with Mitchell Baker while ITBusiness.ca talks with Mike Shaver. Meanwhile, kuro5hin has an opinion piece about the release.
Mozilla 1.0 scored 7 out of 10 in CNET's review, which describes Mozilla as "the best free alternative to Microsoft IE." Meanwhile, eWEEK's analysis notes that "Mozilla makes it possible for any developer or company to customize the browser to be whatever they need it to be." NewsForge also discusses Mozilla's customizability. In addition, there's a Slashdot piece on the Mozilla 1.0 reviews.
StreamCast Networks is tuning up the current version of its Morpheus software amid delays in launching the next generation of its file-swapping service.
The company said it will release on Monday an update to its Morpheus Preview Edition software that offers instant messaging that connects with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), among other features. Dubbed Morpheus 1.9, the software will be based on the Gnutella architecture, according to the company. It was not yet available through the Morpheus site midday Monday.
StreamCast, formerly known as MusicCity, previously had licensed its technology from the Netherlands-based Kazaa BV. It switched to the open-source Gnutella technology after an unexpected, temporary shutdown of its service.
The Morpheus update comes against a backdrop of frustration over delays of its 2.0 software and mounting legal headaches. In December, StreamCast told people using its software that it was close to releasing version 2.0, which will support Windows XP. But the company has yet to launch the new Morpheus.
SHEFAYIM, Israel, June 4, 2002 – Hexalock, Ltd., a leader in CD-ROM copy protection technology and digital rights management solutions announced today the release of version 2.0 of its CD-ROM Copy Protection Product Line. Introduced, as version 1.0 In September 2001, the product line has undergone extensive testing and utilization with key publishers which has resulted in this major product upgrade.
"Based on the excellent results and feedback from content owners and publishers, with version 1.0, we fine tuned the product to fully meet their needs, and significantly upgraded product functionality as well," said Eyal Cohen, Chief Technology Officer, HexaLock, Ltd. "Product testing with Version 2.0 has shown outstanding copy protection results against the latest copying/"cloning" software and hacking tools while at the same time providing excellent compatibility with all CD drives tested. Full test results can be found at our website www.hexalock.com."
HexaLock CD-ROM copy protection is easily implemented by publishers via the use of a Software Development Kit (SDK) or Auto Lock Utility and requires no hardware modifications or quality assurance procedure changes at Authorized Replicators. "It was essential that we maintain the ease of use and integration characteristics of our products as we upgraded these utilities to version 2.0," said John Stevens, Vice President, Business Development, HexaLock, Ltd. “We are pleased that we were able to accomplish these objectives while at the same time providing our customers with world-class copy protection."
Here's a look at last week's charts. The most surprising move came from ReMPEG2 which entered the software charts at number four. Apart from that the software chart is pretty much the same as last week.
Blind Lesbians continue to dominate the MP3 charts. Besides that.. pretty much the same as last week. Summer time, and people taking it easy?
It was good while it lasted -- and it didn't last too long this time. The movie site Film88 which we wrote about yesterday has already been taken down by MPAA's international arm, MPA.
Apparently the operation was run from Iran, but as Iran's net connections aren't really in the top league, the site was physically hosted in Netherlands. And MPA had already contacted site's Dutch ISP and asked them to close the site -- and they did.
So, now we're just waiting for the site's next reincarnation in some other physical location -- Sealand, anyone?
Our statistics server crashed last night and we decided to change to a new statistics software. Currently we're importing our old logs to the new system and because of this, our main site is performing extremely slowly -- within one month, we get appx. 2-3GB of log files (excluding images, downloads, etc).
We apologize for any incovenience this may have caused to you.
In slightly surprising move, Microsoft has posted an article on their website basically opposing MPAA's and RIAA's suggested hardware copy-protection mechanisms.
Microsoft says its worried about suggested copyright bill's (Fritz "MPAA's pet" Hollings' bill that is dubbed as Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act or CBDTPA) effects on consumers' privacy and also to future software and hardware development. This is quite a radical opinion from Microsoft, who has a long history of not-so-consumer-privacy-friendly decisions. But if the Beast is on our side against Even Bigger Beast, that's always a good thing :-)
Microsoft also goes so far in the article that they suggest recording and movie industries to actually offer a competitive digital distribution model to fight the Net piracy. This is something that most of the analysts have suggested for years, but for these companies this somehow doesn't seem to be an option.
But this is definately good news to "us", digital media freaks. Microsoft, despite having their own legal problems, still has huge amount of power within U.S. politics and its opinions simply cannot be ignored as it represents a huge portion of software industry.
The notorious website that was forced to shut down earlier this year, Movie88.com, is back. Guys have moved their servers from Taiwan to Iran to avoid MPAA and "dumb" American laws that prevented them from offering latest box office hits for $1 a piece.
Site has rebranded itself as Film88, but the content is still pretty much the same. You can stream all the latest movies using your broadband connection and paying $1 a pop. Movies available include Harry Potter movie, etc.
It is interesting to see how MPAA will try to shut down this site -- U.S. and Iran don't have too good relationships and American entertainment is generally viewed as one of the main sources that drive societies away from Islamic religion. And by blocking a whole country from the Internet because of one site shouldn't really be an option that anyone with commercial interests would be able to do.
Gracenote said yesterday that RealNetworks has agreed to implement Gracenote's CD recognition technology, CDDB, to its RealOne media player's all versions.
Earlier RealOne's Windows version had the Gracenote's technology in it, but the new deal extends the reach to PDAs (such as Nokia's 9210 Communicator), integrated devices such as car stereos and to Real's developer kits.
An amazing open-source project has just made the big milestone of the first official stable release 1.0. Mozilla is now ready to challenge the Internet Explorer – it’s time for the browser war II.
Mozilla is a free, open-source and fully featured WWW browser software. It comes with Mozilla browser, mail & news client, an IRC client and Mozilla Composer for making HTML web pages. This makes it a very complete solution for utilizing the Internet. Mozilla is the first piece of software that is fully able to replace the Internet Explorer and Outlook Express by Microsoft. Changing to Mozilla is a very simple process as all email settings and mails can be imported from outlook
Can Mozilla challenge really challenge Microsoft’s products? It is possible. Mozilla has the features that users need and want. Mozilla’s user interface is very pleasing to the eye (the modern theme) and it seems very usable and easy to use as well. It does do all the tricks of IE and OE but really doesn’t have any serious benefits that would raise Mozilla above the Microsoft product. One edge that Mozilla has is the fact that Microsoft software is constantly probed for weaknesses that could be exploited with virus or other damaging purposes – Mozilla does not have this problem yet. On the other hand Internet Explorer is integrated to the operation system and partially always resident in the memory, so it does start up faster and consumes less RAM.
While rest of the world is way ahead in digital TV revolution, American consumers are still waiting. And will wait, if its up to Hollywood to decide. Well, now Hollywood and group of consumer electronics companies have finalized a proposal which would eventually cause DeCSS-like situations in States.
Proposal, made by Broadcast Protection Discussion Group(or BPDG.. Does anyone else have this weird feeling about these acronyms and how all the most complicated ones involve some satanic Hollywood/music industry plans to take over the world?-), suggests that government should force all electronics manufacturers to include a feature in their products that would store digital TV transmission in encrypted form once it hits consumers' TV receivers.
Hollywood hopes that this -- pretty insane, IMHO -- idea will prevent people from posting movies and TV series to Internet. The idea is to watermark all the content that is received from digital TV broadcast on-the-fly. This content would then be stored in encrypted format wherever consumer wants to move the content to -- TiVo, PC, etc. But it would be opened only by the TV set/digital receiver that received the original signal (at least that's how I understood the idea).
The latest and the greatest by the fruit company. Here's the hype:
Welcome to QuickTime 6, featuring MPEG-4, the next-generation of the most advanced digital media technology on the Internet. This latest release of Apple’s cutting-edge digital media software for both Mac and Windows-based computers delivers unparalleled quality for creating, playing and streaming audio and video content over the Internet.
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MPEG-4 File Format (.mp4): Since the QuickTime file format is at the foundation of MPEG-4, QuickTime 6 supports .mp4 files as first-class citizens. So with QuickTime 6, you can author professional-quality, ISO-compliant MPEG-4 audio and video files that can be played back not only by QuickTime 6, but by any other MPEG-4-compliant player.
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MPEG-4 Video: The high-performance MPEG-4 video codec included in QuickTime 6 provides the highest quality results across a wide spectrum of data rates — from narrowband to broadband and beyond. This revolutionary codec offers compression times and video quality that rival those of the best proprietary codecs, yet it provides interoperability with other MPEG-4 players and devices.
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AAC Audio: AAC is the new standard in professional audio. It provides more efficient compression than older formats such as MP3, yet delivers quality rivaling that of uncompressed CD audio. The QuickTime AAC codec builds upon new, state-of-the-art signal processing technology from Dolby Labs, and brings true variable bit rate (VBR) encoding to QuickTime.
Napster has filed, as everyone already expected after it sold its assets to German Bertelsmann, for Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
The decision doesn't mean that company has vanished, but instead it gives company protection from its creditors until company restructures. Its assets were valued at $7.9M and it has liabilities of over $100M, including hefty bill to its attorneys caused by the lengthy war against RIAA and music companies which began in late 1999.
Here's a look at last week's charts. The top four is exactly the same as last week, but after that there are some pretty big changes. VirtualDub climbed to fifth and WinMX fell completely from the top ten, along with Blaze Media, and AC3Dec. CDEx, PowerDVD, and ALLnONE frontend are the new entries in top ten this week.
Blind Lesbians of Uganda continues at the top of the MP3 chart, while Loud Sound Disorder climbed from fourth to second. A couple of other changes in position as well, but nothing major really.