Author: Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?

Peppercoin Aiming for More Efficient Micropayments

The basic flaw with small monetary transactions, whether internet related or not, is that the processing charge levied by banks and credit card companies eats a big chunk of the value of your original sale.

The road to creating an efficient micropayment system is littered with the corpses of those who didn’t make it – ecash, digicash – weathered corpses stripped clean from their deaths in the late 90s.

Yet, deep down inside, we know that micropayments must work. Like the first farmer who experienced frustration when he tried to pay for some wood with a cow, only to be told “Sorry mate, I can’t change that – have you got anything smaller?”, we know there must be a way of making transactions more efficient.

Peppercoin, backed by the R in RSA, Ronald Rivest, have brought the micropayment system up to the 21st century, and have launched version 2.0 of their service. Peppercorn 2.0 is aimed at online retailers who shift low-priced digital content and physical goods, or offer subscriptions and pay-per-use services – so it won’t just be ringtones then.

The company has concentrated on making the experience as transparent as possible for the user, as customers can use their credit card to pay a merchant without having to register or create an account. Neither do they have to pre-deposit any money to get started – I can think of at least two micropayment systems from about 1997 that owe me at least US$3.

Merchants and vendors don’t even have to be web-based – one of the key applications of Peppercoin is in coin-op games. The new version of Golden Tee Golf (coming to a pub near you) will feature the Peppercoin system to provide cashless purchases. If I’m hearing you say big deal, then consider that punters spent US$350 million (€288 million) playing this one game last year alone. Peppercoin are well aware that when you allow people to use their credit card at point of sale, they will usually spend more.

The new service works by aggregating low-priced transactions across many consumers, merchants and payment providers, reducing the average processing fee for each individual sale. Customers pay by entering their credit card details online, or by swiping their card through a reader on the device they are paying to access.

Customer service is cleverly automated to keep costs down, with integrated bills and automated pre-dispute resolution dealing with most cases before expensive people have to get involved.

How efficient is the payment system? Peppercoins fees work out at about 10% of a US$1 transaction, which the company claims is 70% less than the usual card not present processing fee.

Peppercoin

UK Download Chart Launches September 1

The Official Chart Company has announced that legal music downloads will be getting their own chart from September 1 2004. “The rapid growth of legal download music sites has shown the music industry that downloading is the future,” they said in a statement.

It looks like they’ve finally cottoned onto the fact that there’s not much point in doing a singles chart if only eight people are buying them. iTunes UK has sold 450,000 downloads since launch, against the 500,000 CD singles that were sold during the same period.

Now that we have a number of high-profile legitimate music download sites in Europe, there’s finally somewhere to collect reliable data from. ITunes, Napster and MyCokeMusic.com and others will be providing metrics. Where’s Bleep, eh?

Since those sites are doing very good business by all accounts, it’ll be interesting to see what total sales numbers are. I personally can’t wait to see what effects demographic spread, the complete lack of content from some labels, and the fact that under-18s don’t have credit cards will have on the new chart. However, when The Beatles’ back catalogue finally comes online, the charts will be entirely dominated by those irritating mop-topped shriekers once again.

The number one downloaded track last week was the Pixies’ Bam Thwok, which is an iTunes exclusive. Happily this reinforces my point about the demographic skewing of the new chart: the last time the Pixies were number 1 was …. never, having last bothered the single-buying public in 1991 with a brief stint at 27.

The BBC is considering broadcasting the chart on Radio One. Surely they should be webcasting it?

The Official Chart Company

Sun’s Radical Java Update

Sun Microsystems, purveyor of all things Java have introduced the most significant update to their platform in five years.

Java2, Sun’s write-once-run-anywhere software platform, popular in everything from mobile phones to PCs to smart cards has gone from version 1.4 to version 5.0.

Previously known as Tiger (stripy mammal, now mostly employed to sell breakfast cereal), the new release hopes to address previous concerns related to speed and scalability. This release of the platform has over 100 new features, including updates to the language and metadata. The amount of memory required by the virtual machine and code has been reduced, and new management tools have been included to help developers and administrators keep track of resources, applications and services. The compiler and code interpreter have been tweaked, providing performance that exceeds C++ … in some applications.

Java was originally seen as a computing platform for small devices, but got a new lease of life with the world wide web as a way of adding interactivity to web applications on a variety of host machines. Recently, Java has received a second huge boost in the form of mobile phones – many modern phones incorporate a Java virtual machine so that games and applications will work across a range of mobile hardware.

Java2

Instat: Digital Set-top Box and PC TV Tuner Market US$3.8 billion in 2008

In-Stat/MDR are projecting that the worldwide market for digital tuners in set-top boxes and PC TV cards will be worth US$3.8 billion (€3.12 billion) by 2008.

PC TV cards are growing rapidly in popularity, due to PCs being more readily accepted as the entertainment centre of households. Many lifestyle PCs are being sold with cards preinstalled and preconfigured – and even if a PC doesn’t ship with one, the installation of a decent card will enable the owner to turn their PC into a fully functional PVR.

Consumers now expect their PC to be able to satisfy all of their entertainment needs, and television is an important aspect of this. A home entertainment computer without digital television will not be acceptable for much longer.

Motherboard manufacturers are also getting in on the act, and are producing boards with integrated tuners. Motherboards have always demonstrated a trend for integration – many features which previously required an expansion card, like 5.1 sound, RAID arrays, graphics accelerators and Bluetooth, are now built into some boards.

In-Stat predict that international growth (i.e. non-US) will be key, and that Europe will continue to lead the market for some time. Lifestyle PCs are remarkably popular in Europe, with many major brands such as Sony, HP and Shuttle doing well out of products aimed specifically it the entertainment niche. Asia is rapidly climbing into second place – will there be a time when Asia becomes the world’s largest entertainment market?

In-Stat

Hauppage

H.264 Codec Adopted for Next-Gen HD DVDs

The DVD Forum has ratified the new H.264 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) for inclusion in the forthcoming High Definition DVD platform.

The H.264 codec, formerly known H.26L, was was developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group (responsible of course, for the various MPEG formats) and the International Telecommunication Union, and has now been ratified into the MPEG-4 codec. The codec enables a variety of video content to be compressed for transmission and decompressed for playback in a highly efficient way.

Apple has already made an announcement to the effect that H.264 will be included in a release of its QuickTime platform next year.

“Apple is firmly behind H.264 because it delivers superb quality digital video and is based on open standards that no single company controls,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing in a statement.

H.264 is intended to be used on a number of platforms, and as such covers a wide spectrum of bandwidth requirements – from HD television to mobile phones. The codec is highly efficient, and has been demonstrated playing back 1920×1080, 24fps HD movies at up to half the data rate of MPEG-2. Less data means room for more channels – or better audio and video.

Don’t expect HD playback performance on your new mobile phone – Apple’s test detailed above required a dual processor G5 to do the playback. The new codec will be more suited to digital television broadcasts to phones and mobile movies with a much lower resolution.

How H.254 works – and it’s not too technical, either

MPEG resources on the internet

Man Charged For Google Adwords Extortion

Michael Bradley, a California resident who claims to have developed a program to generate fraudulent clicks on Google’s Adword service, was arrested at the company’s offices and charged with extortion.

Bradley had threatened to sell the software to spammers if Google did not give him US$150,000 (€123,400).

The fact that the software is designed to trick Adwords into registering more clicks, and therefore more revenue for the customer from Google, coupled with trying to extort money out of Google by then threatening to sell the software earned him a speedy arrest and freedom on a US$50,000 (€41,100) bond.

He’s pleading not guilty.

More about adwords

Mixing on Mobiles with Orange Fireplayer

Orange are launching a new service – Fireplayer, which allows users to download tracks and remix them by adding effects. Attendees at Glastonbury were the first to get their hands on the new service, and it launches to the rest of us on July 1st. Fireplay currently offers 20 tracks for remixing, but the company is hoping to expand the range to offer more choice.

Fireplayer is available as a free download from the Orange World portal. Your finished masterpiece than then be saved to your mobile as a TrueTone ringtone to impress/offend your friends/travelling companions.

Also launching on 1st July will be Orange’s new music service, the imaginatively titled Music Player, where subscribers will be able to download and listen to music directly to their mobile phones. Given that the service will launch with only 200 tracks will no doubt be somewhat of a hindrance to uptake. However, Orange see mobile music as critical to their future and have a history of successful innovation and so to expand the range of available music, they are conducting talks with all major labels. Tracks for Music Player are a proprietary format, but perhaps this is the beginning of music labels seeing mobile phones as a secure platform for content distribution?

Tracks for Fireplayer cost UK£3.50 (€5.25), music downloads for Music Player cost UK£1.50 (€2.25)

Orange

US Senate Passes Pirate Act Without Hearing

The US Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation (PIRATE) act has been passed by the voice vote in in the Senate on Friday. The act still has to be passed by the House and signed by George Bush, but already carries a US$2 million (€1.64 million) budget for civil lawsuits against violators in 2005.

The act allows the Department of Justice to sue alleged copyright infringers, in addition to those cases brought by the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA are naturally very pleased that they have some backup in the hundreds of cases they have bring launching.

“I commend the passage of these common sense proposals that offer flexibility in the enforcement against serious crimes that damage thousands of hard-working artists, songwriters and all those who help bring music to the public,” Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “These acts will provide federal prosecutors with the flexibility and discretion to bring copyright infringement cases that best correspond to the nature of the crime, and will assure that valuable works that are pirated before their public release date are protected.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rightly points out on their website that no money from any of these cases goes to the artists whose work is being infringed.

Orrin Hatch, a Republican Senator who is one of the sponsors of the act, has a related project up next, the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act. This act sets out to penalise companies for producing technologies that can potentially be used to pirate content – such technologies include CD writers and iPods. Aside from the obvious loss of personal freedom and backwards technological step, the EFF is concerned that the act could be misused – if your competitor manufactures something that you don’t like, say the iPod for example, then you can claim that it has the potential to infringe copyright.

The Department of Justice

The Electonic Frontier Foundation

AOL Buys Advertising.com

America Online Inc, the world’s largest distributor of disposable CDs and apparently also an interactive services company, has announced that it has signed an agreement to hand over US$435 million (€359 million) in cash for Advertising.com, the internet’s third largest advertising network.

Advertising.com plans and optimises online campaigns for more than 800 advertisers, and also works with some 1500 online publishers to bring them 110 million unique visitors every month. About 70% of all US internet users encounter Advertising.com’s work in the course of a month’s surfing.

This is AOL’s biggest deal since it merged with Time Warner, and shows that there may be some life in online advertising after the bubble burst after all. AOL, having ditched its broadband product and now staring at declining dial-up business, is understandably keen to drive growth in other areas, and believes that content and services are what it’s best at.

Jonathan Miller, Chairman and CEO, America Online, Inc., said, “Online advertising is showing very strong growth across the industry, and the acquisition of Advertising.com underscores AOL’s determination to strengthen its competitive position. Advertising.com has built a profitable, scalable and highly attractive business. This acquisition is a strategic move that will bolster AOL’s advertising business, building on the strides made in the past year.”

Advertising.com

Company Websites Spreading Spyware

Symantec are warning web surfers of a new trend in spyware and adware infections – visitors to a number of corporate websites are getting a bit more than they bargained for.

It’s claimed that organised crime groups in Eastern Europe are hacking corporate sites and installing code that takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer to install spyware and other unwanted applications on visitors’ PCs without their knowledge. Spyware can be used to harvest personal details about a computer owner such as bank details, whilst adware can be used to hijack browsers and display unwanted advertising to users.

Microsoft has not yet released a patch for the flaws, leaving millions of PCs open to infection. Although the browser flaw is well publicised, there is still some confusion surrounding how hackers are installing the script on web servers running Microsoft’s IIS service in the first place.

The ISC incidents site reports: “We still do not know how the IIS servers are originally infected with the JavaScript or the modification to the configuration files… The visitor’s browser is re-directed to the Russian URL listed below [Ed: Clearly we’re not showing this] where a known Trojan program (msits.exe) is downloaded, along with some additional malware. Again, if the user’s machine is updated with current AV software, this malware is detected and blocked.”

Without listing the companies responsible for spreading the infection, they state surprise that the unwitting culprits “include businesses that we presume would normally be keeping their sites fully patched.”

Free anti-spyware and anti-virus software:

Ad-aware

AVG anti-virus software

A browser with less security holes in it:

Mozilla 1.7