Content – Page 53 – Digital-Lifestyles

iTunes Illegal Declares Norway Consumer Watchdog

iTunes Illegal Declares Norway Consumer Watchdog Norway has declared iTunes to be illegal because it doesn’t allow songs downloaded from the online music store to be played on any other equipment except their own, today’s FT reported.

This is the first time, worldwide, for action like this to have been successful, despite bodies in other countries threatening the same, including France.

The decision by the Norwegian consumer watchdog, which the FT describes as “powerful” is based on Apple’s restrictive approach breaking their consumer protection laws.

Apple have until the 1 October deadline to make their FairPlay DRM schema available to other technology companies or face fines, or ultimately have the service shutdown.

iTunes Illegal Declares Norway Consumer Watchdog The original complaint was made by Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor to the Norwegian Consumer Council. He told the FT that “he was in negotiations with pan_European consumer groups to present a unified position on iTunes’ legality.”

Worrying news for Apple, especially when they hear that Germany and France have joined Sweden and Finland. When added together, this comprises more than 100m European consumers.

PCMover Vista: Transfer Your PC Life To Vista

Avanquest Software, makers of the old-faithful LapLink, have launched PCMover to help people transfer all of their PC data from previous versions of Windows on to Vista.

PCMover Vista: Transfer Your PC Life To Vista Getting a new machine with a new operating system is both a joy and a pain. The joy is the shiny new OS you have to play with and the likelihood that it runs considerably faster than the previous machine. The pain, is trying to make sure you’ve remembered all of the little bits of data tucked away in forgotten corners, and usually having to reconfigure all of your settings back to the way you had them on your previous machine.

That’s where PCMover comes in.

The software digs deep into your current version of Windows (going back to Win95), rummages around and gathers all files, settings and programs, including those held in the registry, for transfer to a new Vista-equipped machine.

It has mind-settling features such as not overwriting any pre-installed software on the new PC, or alter the old PC in any way and if you feel it’s all gone horribly wrong, there’s an undo function.

The available options to carry out the transfer are extensive. The package comes with a custom USB 2.0 lead which “includes a chipset that allows for a simultaneous, bi-directional flow of information between PCs,” that they tell us enables a faster transfer.

PCMover Vista: Transfer Your PC Life To Vista Beyond this, you can choose from a wired/wireless network for top speed, or resort to a USB 1.1 or a parallel cable. There’s also an option to use removable media such as a CD-R or DVD-R.

With the forthcoming release of Vista at the end of the month, there’s likely to be a number of supporting applications to help people switch.

Thomas Koll, Chairman and CEO of Laplink Software feel that they are in a strong position, as he was more that happy to share, “Because our competition can’t move software programs, they don’t offer the same total migration solution that we do.”

PCmover Vista is available now at the SRP of £49.99 from their online shop, or if you like to collect boxes, from selected retail outlets.

Sky Anytime on PC: One Million Films In A Year

Sky Anytime on PC downloaded its one millionth film on the 14 January neatly marking its first year of operation.

The Sky Anytime on TV service is the renamed Sky By Broadband service, which delivers select Sky’s TV content over a broadband connection to a PC.

Sky Anytime: One Million Films In A Year

Figures for the film downloads could have been larger if Sky hadn’t had to pull the service back in September after their chosen DRM-restriction system, by Microsoft, was cracked.

We’re assuming that the million films that have been downloaded have been paid for, making it a pretty big bonanza, given the films are a wallet-emptying £3.95 each. Once subscribers have paid up, they’re given access to it for seven days, but are restricting to 48 hours viewing window after the first viewing.

Dawn Airey, BSkyB’s managing director of channels and services, was keen to say her piece about it … “We’re delighted that customers have taken to Anytime with such enthusiasm. Sky Movies is the UK’s most popular movie service and we’re able to use broadband to give customers more flexibility in how they watch. The fact that in this first year we’ve already seen 1m movie downloads is testament to customers’ willingness to embrace new technologies and get more from Sky.”

Sky report that the service has gained a quarter of a million registered users in its first year of operation.

Big Brother’s DRM Nightmare

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare Backstory
Forgive me. I forked over money to Channel 4 to become a paying Season Pass sucker for the Celebrity Big Brother live stream.

My dearest, a less-than closet BB fan, persuaded me to watch CBB on the launch night – something made all the more peculilar by the fact that I don’t watch TV anymore (apart from The Simpsons at 6pm on Channel 4, of course).

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare To be frank, by the end of the program I was grateful to her. The sight of the fantastic disdain of Ken Russell made it worthwhile in itself.

What got me reaching for my credit card was the sheer hilarity of seeing Jade Goody enter the house – post her journey through crowds of frantic screaming BB fans, proceeded by her 50-yard car drive and obligatory press photo pose – to a house with three grumpy, quiet people who didn’t jump up and down when they saw her enter. It couldn’t have been further from her expected truth.

Her face was priceless – well, I thought it was at least worth £5 to see it for a while longer, showing a mixture of confusion and pain.

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare It appeared that finally Endemol had got a quality production team behind this one, lead by an intelligent director.

Hence my giving money, enabling this rubbish to make huge profits for those concerned.

__Using DRM … it _does_ suck
Once I’d registered and paid for it, the first surprise was not to be sent a direct URL to access the stream. Instead the process is long and painful as you have to drag yourself through the Channel4 site to find the stream.

Here’s a run down of the hoops they get you to jump through …

*Deep breath now* –

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare Navigating through their home page to the CBB page; click on the “Watch 24/7” link; then the “Already own the pass” link. This pops up a new window with a form requesting sign up detail (despite the link being specific about already owning a pass).

After some searching you’ll notice, at the top of the window, a single word link for Login; which, once clicked, you’ll be asked for your email and password.

Finally the video player appears – hurrah!

Don’t be fooled, the agony isn’t over yet, this is where the DRM pain begins.

Despite having logged in a number of times already, you’re told that you do not have rights to play the content.

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare Clicking Yes takes you to yet another Web page, grandly entitled License Acquisition. Here you’re requested to login _again_.

Once you’ve bashed the keys in the right order, you’re requested to “wait a moment,” as the licence is “obtained”. Eventually you’re offered to click the Play button.

Finally, finally you get to the steam.

That’s bad enough to do once, but adding insult to injury, the worst of it is that each and everytime you want to watch a stream, you’ve got to go through this bullshit.

Summary – DRM Don’t Work
From the experience above you can see that the current version of DRM – Microsoft’s naturally – just doesn’t work for the consumer.

Big Brother's DRM Nightmare It’s not from lack of trying on their part either, Microsoft have been plugging away at their DRM solution for many years and, we have to assume, this is their latest as to get to view the streams, there’s a requirement to ‘upgrade’ your Windows Media Player to the latest version.

We also have to assume that Channel4/Endemol and Microsoft worked together to get the Big Brother streaming working. Say what you want about Big Brother, but it’s a high profile TV ‘event’, so important for them to have it working correctly.

Even after all of this effort, the end user experience is truly atrocious, so bad, that you feel anger every time to access the stream, and let’s not forget, people are paying for the privilege of being insulted like this.

With the difficulty of this process, it’s no wonder that people still try to get their content from file sharing networks to avoid DRM.

Walkit.com: Get Walking, Go Green And Lose Lard

Still in beta but already a big hit in the Digital Lifestyles office is the Walkit.com website, a mapping site designed for perambulating pedestrians keen to do their bit to fight global warming.

Currently covering a large chunk of London, the site helps walkers plot cross-town journeys in a similar fashion to London Transport’s Journey Planner.

Users simply type in the postcode or street name of their start and end points and a zoomable street map (based on Streetmap.com) is generated, with the walking route clearly marked in blue.

If the user hasn’t been specific enough with their addresses, the interface offers up a list of more precise locations, including road intersections.

Burning the lard
Once you’ve generated your walking map, an information strip tells you the total distance and how long it would take to complete the journey at slow/medium/fast walking rates.

Folks still battling a post-Christmas beast of a belly might find the column displaying how many calories you might expect to burn depending on fast you’re shuffling along useful.

According to their data, a fast walk from Brixton to Oxford Street would take 65 minutes and burn 347 calories – less than the calories in the two pints of Stella we’d need to drink to recover.

‘The Good Life’-loving, Tom and Barbara types can also feel extra smug checking out the ‘Co2 avoided’ column, which lists how much carbon dioxide the same journey would have created by car, taxi or bus instead.

Nearby tube and rail stations are also included onscreen as well as options to print the map, print or view written directions and email the route to a friend.

Clicking on the written directions automatically centres the map on that location, which is rather a nice touch.

Currently the system only produces the most direct route, rather than the ‘nicest’ route and the tech bods at walkit are looking into ways to include some pedestrian-only routes across parks, by rivers etc.

Another thing missing is the ability to plot routes involving multiple points: it would be great to plan an afternoon’s walking and have an instant readout of the miles walked and calories burned – and if there was a version that could be carried around on our Palm Treo, all the better!

Ken don’t care
Launched by a “tiny outfit” motivated by a desire to get more people walking, the walkit.com team deserve all the support you get, and with their much-publicised green agenda, you’d think ol’ Ken Livingstone, Transport for London and the Labour spin team would be scrambling to get onboard.

Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case with a faceless ‘Senior Customer Services Adviser’ at TfL only commenting that it would be, “counter-productive to invest public money in another journey planning tool specifically for walking”.

www.walkit.com

Samson Blinded: Extreme Jewish Blog Wins Award

Samson Blinded, a blog advocating an ultra-hard-line Israeli approach to Arab nations, received the 2006 People’s Choice Jewish and Israeli Blog Award in the Best Overall Blog category and scored the highest in six other categories including Best Jewish Current Events blog.

Samson Blinded: Extreme Jewish Blog Wins Award It’s written under a pen name, Obadiah Shoher, as Israeli law criminalizes racism and incitation. With this knowledge you have some sort of idea as to the views that are put across.

You’ll not be surprised to heard that it’s not a regular read for us, but we’ve given it a once over and Shoher does appear to have some fairly extreme views. We’re told that …

Shoher denies ethnic-blind democracy and argues for expulsion of Arabs
from Israel. He rejects democratic process dominated, he asserts, by liberal and Arab voters, and calls for violent opposition to police efforts at removing the illegal settlements.

On the even more worrying front, we understand that they call for nearly dismantling Israeli army and fully relying on nuclear response to counter possible Arab aggression. Nice!

Many Americans won’t like the cut of its jib either with excepts like this from the current site …

The US-sponsored civil war left over 1.5 million Afghanis dead. Their corpses cause no concern on the Capitol Hill. The fuss is about 400 detainees who are treated at Guantanamo a bit worse than under the Taliban and considerably better than under the Northern Alliance rule. Had they been killed instead of arrested, human rights activists won’t care.

Shoher isn’t just shooting in the dark. The book, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict has been downloaded by more than 170,000 people from 78 countries.

What they heck?
Now we all know that these Best-Of awards aren’t always worth the electrons that they’re written on. They’re often too easy to influence by getting readers to vote over-and-over again, and we would suspect that those with extreme views would have the kind of readers, nay followers, that might have the inclination to do this.

Here’s the reality – The Internet and blogs are for anyone who want to write anything – and that includes things that you might not like. `What’s important is peoples right to express themselves – and that should never be removed.

One thing that you can do is not link to it, thus depriving it of search engine ranking.

Find it at www.samsonblinded.org/blog

Pentax Announces T30 and M30 Cameras

Pentax Announces T30 and M30 Cameras Pentax have announced two new slim-line cameras, the T30 and M30, both sporting 7 megapixel sensors and face detection.

Pentax Optio T30
The slightly chunkier T30 shaves off 0.5mm from its predecessor, the T20, adds
3200 ISO sensitivity, Face Recognition AF and AE, and comes with the same 3.0-inch 230k pixels screen with touch display control.

In line with its consumer-friendly aspirations, the T20 boasts a host of Scene Modes and auto options, and comes with a run of the mill, 37.5 – 112.5mm (F2.7 – 5.2) 3x optical zoom.

We’re still not sure if we like touch-screen control systems or not but it does let people get all creative with a My Drawing mode, which lets users scribble directly on the image (using the supplied stylus) or add an illustration with the Stamp function.

Pentax cites a Digital SR (Shake Reduction) in the specs, but please note that this consists of nothing more than an ISO-boosting wheeze rather than real optical image stabilisation.

Pentax Announces T30 and M30 Cameras With Digital SR you may manage to grab a low light photo without blur, but odds on it’ll look like it’s been taken in a noise snowstorm (which rather sounds like a death metal concert).

The T30 is compatible with new SDHC memory cards, and comes with a handy feature that lets users recover images that have been accidentally deleted.

The T30 will be priced around $350 (£176).

T30 Specs
Sensor 1/2.5 ” Type CCD, 7.1 million effective pixels
Image sizes 3072 x 2304 to 640 x 480
Movie clips 640 x 480 @ 15 / 30fps, 320 x 240 @ 15 / 30fps with WAV sound and Movie SR
Color Mode Full Color, Sepia, Monochrome
File formats JPEG Exif 2.2, DCF, DPOF, PRINT Image Matching lll, QuickTime Motion JPEG
Lens 37.5 – 112.5mm (equiv 35mm), F2.7 – 5.2, 3x optical zoom
Image stabilization No
Digital zoom up to 4x
Focus TTL Contrast Detection AF
AF area modes 9-point AF, Spot AF, Auto Tracking AF changeable
AF assist lamp Yes
Focus distance Normal: 0.4m – infinity, Macro: 0.15m – infinity, Pan focus: 1.3m – infinity (wide) 5.3m – infinity (tele), Manual: 0.15m – infinity (wide) 0.4m – infinity (tele)
Metering TTL metering, Multi-segment, Center-weighted, Spot
ISO sensitivity Auto, ISO 64 – ISO 3200
Exposure compensation +/- 2EV in 1/3 EV steps
Shutter speed 1/2000 – 4 secs
Aperture F2.7 – 5.2
Modes Auto Picture, Program, Movie, Voice Recording, Digital SR
Scene modes Night Scene, Landscape, Flower, Portrait, Surf & Snow, Sport, Pet, Kids, Frame Composition, Food, Text
White balance Auto, Daylight, Shade, Tungsten Light, Fluorescent Light, Manual
Self timer 10 or 2 sec
Continuous shooting Standard, High Speed
Image parameters Digital Effect: Color Filter, Digital Filter, Fish Eye Filter, Brightness Filter, Frame Composite, My Drawing
My Drawing: Undo, Redo, Line Drawing, Stamp, My Stamp, Eraser
Flash Auto, Flash On / Off, Red-eye compensation, Soft flash, Range: 0.15 – 6.0m (wide) 0.4 – 3.0m (tele)
Viewfinder No
LCD monitor 3.0-inch TFT, 230,000 pixels
Storage SD / SDHC card compatible, approx 19.9 MB built-in memory
Power Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery D-L163
Weight (no batt) 120 g
Dimensions 95 x 57 x 19 mm

Pentax Announces T30 and M30 Cameras Optio M30

Coming in a pocket-unruffling 18mm body, the budget priced M30 follows on from last year’s M20 and serves up Digital Shake Reduction, Face Recognition AF and AE and Macro modes for getting up real close.

As with the T30, there’s “Face Recognition AF & AE” functions onboard which, as the name says, seeks out ugly mugs in the frame and endeavours to perfectly expose their gurning phizogs.

The camera comes with a slightly slower 3x zoom (F3.1-5.9) and offers a high quality movie mode, capable of churning out 640 x 480 pixels recording at 30 fps (frames per second), backed by a Movie Shake Reduction function.

The Optio M30 will be available from March for around $200 (£105).

M30 Specs

Sensor 1/2.5 ” Type CCD, 7.1 million effective pixels
Image sizes 3072 x 2304 to 640 x 480
Movie clips 640 x 480 @ 15 / 30fps, 320 x 240 @ 15 / 30fps with WAV sound and Movie SR
Color Mode Full Color, Sepia, Monochrome
File formats JPEG Exif 2.2, DCF, DPOF, PRINT Image Matching lll, QuickTime Motion JPEG
Lens 37.5 – 1145mm (equiv 35mm), F3.1-5.9, 3x optical zoom
Image stabilization No
Digital zoom up to 4x
Focus TTL Contrast Detection AF
AF area modes 9-point AF, Spot AF, Auto tracking AF changeable
AF assist lamp Yes
Focus distance Normal: 0.4m – infinity (whole zoom area) 0.6m – infinity (tele), Macro: 0.1 – 1.0m (wide), Super Macro: 0.05 – 0.4m, Pan focus: 1.4m – infinity (wide) 5.8m – infinity (tele), Manual: 0.1m – infinity (wide) 0.6m – infinity (tele)
Metering Multi-segment
ISO sensitivity Auto, ISO 64 – ISO 3200
Pentax Announces T30 and M30 Cameras Exposure compensation +/- 2EV in 1/3EV steps
Shuttter speed 1/2000 – 4 secs
Aperture F3.1-5.9
Modes Auto Picture, Program, Movie, Voice Recording, Digital SR
Scene modes Night Scene, Landscape, Flower, Portrait, Surf & Snow, Sport, Pet, Kids, Frame Composition, Food, Text
White balance Auto, Daylight, Shade, Tungsten Light, Fluorescent Light, Manual
Self timer 10 or 2 secs
Continuous shooting n/a
Flash Auto, Flash On / Off, Red-eye compensation, Soft flash
Range: 0.4 – 5.5m (wide) 0.6 – 2.8m (tele)
Viewfinder No
LCD monitor 2.5-inch TFT, 115,000 pixels
Connectivity USB
Storage SD / SDHC card compatible, approx 21.9 MB built-in memory
Power Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery -L163
Weight (no batt) 120 g
Dimensions 97 x 57 x 18 mm

Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl

Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl Although the home entertainment industry is more loved up than the Happy Mondays on a bagful of E about Video-on-Demand, a new report suggests there might be a bumpy ride ahead.

The media research bods at Deloitte reckon that video downloads are likely to “encounter some challenges in 2007” with customers expecting to suffer slow broadband downloading times, especially for customers downloading to their computers.

Igal Brightman, global managing partner at Deloitte commented that, “the unrelenting growth in Internet traffic during 2007 may overwhelm some of the Internet’s backbones: the terabit-capable pipes connecting continents.”

“The impact may be most noticeable in the form of falling quality of service,’ he added, warning the industry that it would only take an unexpected upsurge in video usage to turn the inconvenience caused by dropping access speeds into “full-scale consumer dissatisfaction.”

UK market still small
At the moment, the UK film download market in Britain is still relatively small, with media market and research analysis group Screen Digest, anticipating that the big moolah will eventually start rolling in, but not for a few years’ time,

Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl The company estimates that the UK market is set to be worth £2.6 million in 2007 (£400,000 up from last year), soaring up to £8.4 million in 2008, and hitting a badger’s nadger under £30 million by 2009.

The big payola, however, is unlikely to start being raked in until equipment and networks improve.

Slower than a sleepy sloth
Deloitte calculated that on a typical two Mbit/s DSL network, film downloads will crawl down the wire at a yawn-inducing one minute per minute for a film, so a three hour film would take 180 minutes or more to arrive.

When it comes to downloading high-definition video, punters can definitely put the popcorn on hold too, with an average film taking the best part of a day to slide down a one Mbit/s DSL connection.

Matters aren’t helped by the rise of other bandwidth-hogging applications like VoIP, e-mail and online gaming, and in high demand areas it may prove quicker to pop down to Blockbuster than wait for the film to download.