Legal – Page 18 – Digital-Lifestyles

Cell Phone Porn On The Way Up

Cell Phone Porn On The Way Up Thrill-seeking mobile phone users around the world slapped out US$400 million on pornographic pictures and video in 2004 – an amount that is expected to rise to US$5 billion by 2010, according to a report by research group Strategy Analytics.

Surfers seeking saucy smut contributed to the fast growth of the adult entertainment sector on the World Wide Web.

Media industries were fast to take advantage of the new medium, with porn connoisseurs among the first to get high-speed Internet access for downloading X-rated films.

In the squinty-small screen of mobile communications, however, pornography might not do as well, with high telecommunications charges and tiny displays reducing the thrill.

“In 2010 we estimate that expenditure on mobile adult content will represent just 5 percent of total end-user spend on mobile content services,” said analyst Nitesh Patel.

“We expect services that are built around sports, music and media to perform better, because they appeal to a wider audience of users,” he added. In addition, there is value in offering news bulletins or a recently scored goal on a mobile screen.

Cell Phone P0rn On The Way Up The US$5 billion forecast for 2010 represents a huge upward shift from Strategy Analytics’ earlier predictions, with the company noting that adult entertainment businesses are aggressively building services and customers appear happy to shell out for them.

Playboy and rival Private Media Group have ramped up their offerings, and many mobile phone makers are busy implementing strategies to make sure no subscribers aged under 18 years will be able to access X-rated services.

Additionally, the growth in colour screens (one in every two phones sold in 2005, predicted to rise to four out of five by 2010) along with enhanced video capability is expected to increase the ‘value’ of mobile-delivered porn.

Elsewhere, anecdotal evidence from countries that have a technological edge shows a throbbing interest from consumers, with adult content registering over 23% of the traffic over South Korea’s SK Telecom in late 2003.

Lose friends The Apple Mac Way

Lose friends And Disenfranchise People The Apple Mac Way Even the most die-hard Mac hugger is having problems defending the company’s recent litigious spree, where Apple seems determined to become ‘The Man’ and use its corporate power to crush all before it.

We find this action particularly strange given the inevitable rise of competition in the portable digital media space. As we’ve saw at CeBIT, the Chinese and Taiwanese MP3-player producing companies have embraced design to good effect. Apple’s iPod crown for the future is now a lot less certain, and given this we’d have thought this would be a time they would be trying to maintain their current friends and make new ones. Instead they appear hell bent on irritating everyone.

First off, there was the case of the bloggers at Apple Insider, PowerPage and Think Secret, mercilessly pursued though the courts after they leaked snippets of Apple’s future plans to their excited audience of Mac users.

Wielding their big white shiny Apple Mac stick, the company successfully won a judgement from the Santa Clara County Superior Court forcing the bloggers to admit to their sources.

The court also granted Apple powers to root around the blogger’s e-mail records in their near-religious quest to track down the culprit.

A wave of international protests followed the ruling by Judge Kleinberg that the laws covering the divulging of trade secrets “outweighed considerations of public interest” with the Guardian newspaper arguing “Was Enron’s off-balance sheet funding structure a “trade secret”, for instance?”

Business Week was equally unimpressed: “Apple has the right to use the legal system to help it punish those who have misappropriated its trade secrets, or to identify employees or partners who may have broken confidentiality agreements.

Lose friends And Disenfranchise People The Apple Mac Way But going after the Web sites or forcing them to divulge their sources will put the company in the middle of a freedom-of-speech firestorm that will be a costly distraction for management, and could tarnish the Apple brand.”

Not surprisingly, the EFF was also deeply concerned about the ruling:

“We’re disappointed that the trial court ignored the Supreme Court’s requirement that seeking a journalist’s confidential sources be a ‘last resort’ in civil discovery,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Instead, the court asserts a wholesale exception to the journalist’s privilege when the information is alleged to be a trade secret.”

“This is a broad-brush ruling that threatens journalists of all stripes,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.

Writing in The Scotsman, long time Mac user Stewart Kirkpatrick was equally unchuffed, “In California at least, Apple has destroyed journalism by undermining the most vital tool of our trade: the ability to receive information without having to shop the person who told you.”

Meanwhile, Mac was busy flexing its bully boy corporate muscle in the UK, successfully squashing a smaller company holding prior rights on the iTunes.co.uk domain.

The company registered the name in November 2000 – four years before Apple launched its UK service – with the URL redirecting to their music search engine on CyberBritain.

Apple initiated the complaint because it secretly applied for a UK trademark for the name iTunes on October 27 2000. This application was confidential – known only by Apple, its filing agents and Her Majesty’s Patent Office – and was not published in the TradeMarks Journal until December 6 2000.

After being asked to issue a decision on a complaint through its Dispute Resolution Service, UK domain service registry Nominet has decided that the domain should be handed to Apple.

The owner of iTunes.co.uk, Benjamin Cohen, expressed his frustration. “I must admit that we were not expecting this decision by Nominet’s appointed expert. Apple chose to launch the UK brand of ‘itunes’ within the UK with the knowledge that we had owned the name for three years before their US launch and four years before their launch within the UK,” he said.

“We now face two decisions, whether to appeal to Nominet directly or refer the matter to the High Court. Both of these options are expensive and are not necessarily within the means of a small business. However, the recent High Court victory of Phone4U.co.uk against the major retailer, Phones4U – owned by the Caudwell Group – leads me to think that our case may be extremely strong.”

It’s clear that the Apple self-destruct PR offensive isn’t over yet, with The Register reporting the mysterious case of Google’s vanishing Mac OS X-style interface.

Designed as a tribute to all things Mac, a software engineer had replaced the main text navigation bar on the Google home page with a Mac OS X-style dock sporting a row of eight icons zooming and shrinking as the mouse hovered over them.

The coder was clearly so enamoured with Mac that he included a loving poem above the copyright notice on the Google page: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you”. (sickbag please!)

Sadly, it appears that litigious Apple don’t find anything funny these days, and the design promptly vanished off the Web completely with neither Apple nor Google offering any explanation.

It does seems strange that a company that prides itself for ‘thinking differently’ seems to have embarked on a mission to appear as unpleasant, as ruthless and as willing to crush the little fella as its Redmond neighbours.

With a scathing report in The Guardian concluding that Apple is effectively, “asking to be loathed and subverted”, some pundits are wondering why Apple should actively seek to alienate the people who are its fans and customers.

Put simply, such actions don’t make much business sense.

Google’s X Files disappear
Apple is ‘real loser’ in Think Secret battle
How Apple lost its groove
Nominet backs Apple iTunes domain claim
Blogger lawsuit peels Apple’s shine

Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 Legislation

Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 Legislation MP3-player supplier Jens of Sweden and Jonas Birgersson (founder of broadband supplier Bredband2) have reported the Anti-Piracy Agency to the Swedish Data Inspection Board (SDI).

The complaint to the SDI was precipitated by the Anti-Piracy Agency’s introduction of computer software enabling them to register thousands of Swedes on a daily basis (IP-numbers and surf behaviour on P2P-networks), register illegal behaviour and prompt the ISP’s to send warning letters or add them to the 136 complaint cases with the police.

Jens and Jonas have filed their complaint on the basis that it is illegal to archive information that purports to, and can be linked to, individual data (i.e. IP-numbers that can be linked to subscribers) and to try to link this to criminal actions.

Perhaps getting a little carried away, Jens and Bredband have labelled the authority’s “vigilante behaviour” to be “the equivalent of Stasi registration”.

The accusers see the current “witch-hunt” and the severe breach of personal integrity as a serious problem, which threatens the growth of digital media in the long run.

Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 Legislation Bredband2 has already received queries from the police based on the agency’s registrations.

“As society becomes ever-more digitised and everyday activities are increasingly being pursued over the Internet, individuals need strong integrity protection,” says Jonas Birgersson, CEO of Bredband2.

“We take our lead from the serious attitude of the former national telephone company, Televerket, regarding ‘tele-confidentiality’.

One of the cornerstones of a functioning society is faith in authorities and businesses, with the principles of transparency for authorities and integrity for individuals.

Is it right for a lobby organisation to undermine this by hunting and registering thousands of citizens every day – which they freely admit in their press releases?

Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 Legislation Besides, we think that terrorizing and persecuting the users is the wrong method. Instead, we should popularise and support all the great Swedish companies that develop unique digital services. Stop the witch-hunt and support the legal alternatives.”

Jens Nylander, founder and CEO of Sweden’s largest supplier of digital media players, Jens of Sweden was equally outraged:

“We have every opportunity for explosive growth, cheaper products and new jobs in the digital media, but that won’t happen until a handful of giant companies stops trying to tie down consumers to their own products and prices with heavy-handed methods.

The Anti-Piracy Agency’s method of spying on, secretly registering and threatening people may have been encouraged in the former East Germany, but must be banned in modern Sweden.”

In Sweden, the Data Inspection Board is responsible for enforcing the Personal Data Act of 1998, which heavily restricts the right of individual players to register citizens without their express consent.

Jens Nylander and Jonas Birgersson have contacted the Data Inspection Board, which encouraged them to register a formal complaint.

Jens Of Sweden Takes On Anti-MP3 Legislation The Swedish police have prosecuted 136 people for illegal file sharing after complaints from the AP-agency, and the agency has vowed to increase the number.

The complaint will be turned in within a week.

Jens of Sweden
Swedish Data Inspection Board
Bredband2

ASA Reports Bulldog DSL Not “The Ultimate Broadband Experience”

ASA Reports On Broadband Advert By Bulldog The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has dished out a mixed ruling on a complaint about claims made by Bulldog (owned by Cable & Wireless) for its 4Mbps broadband service.

Three complaints were made, but only in one instance was the complaint upheld. The challenged statements were:

“the ultimate broadband experience”
“the peak of speed”
“makes other broadband services look like dial-up”.

The ASA ruled that Bulldog’s claim that it offered the ‘ultimate broadband experience’ was misleading, but conceded that Bulldog was entitled to say it offered ‘the peak of speed’ and that it ‘makes other broadband services look like dial-up’ – at the time of the advert.

The company’s online promotion, run last summer, bigged up their services like Mohammed Ali in a boasting mood: ‘It’s the ultimate broadband experience. Makes other broadband services look like dial-up. … Bulldog 4 gives customers in central London the peak of speed and value.’

The ASA ruled that, at the time, it was not accurate to say that the service was the ultimate broadband experience, although it was the fastest available and Bulldog had been named Best Consumer Broadband ISP 2004 in the industry’s awards.

Bulldog seems to have become unstuck by the success of their own advertising, with customers instantly clambering for a piece of the ‘ultimate broadband experience’.

The rapid increase in customer numbers following the launch of the service significantly affected service quality, and complaints started to roll in.

The ASA ruled: ‘the severe customer service difficulties that all Bulldog customers had experienced after the appearance of the online advertisement and the significantly reduced speeds some Bulldog 4 customers had experienced meant the claim that the advertiser’s service offered “the ultimate broadband experience” was likely to mislead.’

Interestingly, the ASA said that much of the evidence for the poor service had come from Web forum discussions – and they confirm that this is the first time they’ve used this type of input.

Despite all the online moaning and service difficulties, the ASA ruled that Bulldog was still entitled to say that its service offered ‘the peak of broadband speeds’, as ‘many Bulldog 4 customers had benefited from the full speed 4Mbps service.’

The ASA concluded that, ‘because the advertisers were able to offer 4Mbps broadband, which was the fastest home broadband service available at the time, the advertisement appeared, the claim was justified.’

How times have changed. From August to 8Mbit from UK online.

The ASA also agreed with Bulldog’s assessment that, ‘if the starting point for broadband was 512kbps, it was approximately 10 times the speed of standard dial-up; the Bulldog 4Mbps connection was eight times the speed of a 512kbps connection’.

In other words, it agreed that that it was fair to say that Bulldog 4 made other broadband services ‘look like dial-up’.

The ASA continued with this Olympic-length sentence (take a deep breath before proceeding):

The Authority acknowledged the claim was likely to be seen by consumers as an expression of the advertisers” opinion about their services, but nevertheless considered that the severe customer service difficulties that all Bulldog customers had experienced after the appearance of the online advertisement and the significantly reduced speeds some Bulldog 4 customers had experienced meant the claim that the advertisers” service offered “the ultimate broadband experience” was likely to mislead.

The Authority asked the advertisers not to promise a service standard that could not be provided in future advertisements.

The lessons to be learnt for both Bulldog and other ISPs is that you’ve got to be able to walk the talk and ensure that you have the resources to cope with the results of your advertising campaigns.

Bulldog Broadband

Broadcast Flag “Crossed The Line”, FCC told by US Appeals Court

FCC Oversteps Their Authority on Digital TV, T.V. A US appeals panel has challenged new federal rules which require certain video devices to incorporate technology designed to prevent copying digital television programs and distributing them over the Internet.

US Appeals Judge Harry T Edwards delivered a slap across the wrists of the Federal Communications Commission by saying that that it had “crossed the line” with its requirements for anti-piracy technology in next-generation television devices.

The anti-piracy technology, known as the broadcast flag, will be required after July 1st for televisions equipped to receive new digital signals. Many personal computers and VCR-type recording devices will also be affected.

The broadcast flag would permit entertainment companies to designate, or flag, programs to prevent viewers from copying shows or distributing them over the Internet.

Two of the three judges on the District of Columbia Circuit panel said the FCC had not received permission from Congress to undertake such a sweeping regulation, and questioned the FCC’s authority to impose regulations affecting television broadcasts after such programs are delivered into households.

“You’re out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?” fumed Judge Harry Edwards. Judge David Sentelle was equally unimpressed: “You can’t regulate washing machines. You can’t rule the world.”

The groups challenging the FCC’s broadcast flag regulation include the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

They argue that the FCC has over-stepped its authority, that Congress should be responsible for making copyright law, and that librarians’ ability to make “fair use” of digital broadcasts will be unreasonably curtailed.

Although the judges’ comments are encouraging for opponents of the Broadcast Flag, doubts have been cast whether their opponents have the legal standing to challenge the rule in court.

Either way, we can expect to wait a few months before the court issues a ruling. In the meantime, activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation continue to offer consumers the means to get around the restrictions with their “HD PVR Cookbook,”.

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Federal Communications Commission

AllOfMP3 Face Heat from Russian Copyright Cops

JVC announces its 2005 DVD recorder line up Russian prosecutors are considering filing criminal charges against a Web site that offers cheap music downloads, the music industry’s global trade group has said.

The computer crimes unit of the Moscow City Police has submitted the results of its investigation into Allofmp3.com to the Moscow City Prosecutor’s office on February 8, according to the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Allofmp3.com and its principals are alleged to be involved in large-scale copyright infringement by offering music for sale without authorisation from rights holders in Russia and internationally.

The prosecutor has 30 days to decide whether to proceed with a criminal prosecution.

Unlike the market-leading iTunes online music store, Allofmp3.com offers music in the popular MP3 format without troubling itself with pesky digital rights management, leaving users free to copying and share files to their heart’s content.

Songs are offered on the Web site for a mere 5 cents each, compared with 99 cents from most services in the United States, and the site offers music from groups like the Beatles who are famous for refusing to allow their songs to be sold online.

However, the site claims on its Web site that it’s doing nothing illegal because they pay a fee to a copyright group that represents songwriters, the Russian Organisation for Multimedia and Digital Systems.

The Russian music market is ranked 12th in the world and was worth US$326.2 million in 2003.

In most countries, payments must also be made to artists and record labels, but Allofmp3 says it is exempt because of what it describes as a “loophole” in Russian law.

Igor Pozhitkov, Regional Director, IFPI Moscow says: “We have consistently said that Allofmp3.com is not licensed to distribute our members’ repertoire in Russia or anywhere else. We are pleased that the police are bringing this important case to the attention of the prosecutor. We very much hope and expect that the prosecutor will proceed with this case, which involves the sale and digital distribution of copyrighted music without the consent or authorisation of the rights holders.”

Allofmp3.com has apparently declined to comment.

This latest copyright wrangle is symptomatic of the global tangle of music rights, which are licensed differently in every country.

Such confusion – and the continuing availability of free MP3 files from file sharing networks continues to hinder the global roll-out of legitimate online music stores like iTunes and Napster.

Allofmp3.com

Burglar Caught on WebCam Jailed

A 19-year-burglar is now enjoying an eleven month stretch at Her Majesty’s Pleasure after he was photographed burgling a house by the owner’s Webcam.

Software engineer Duncan Grisby, 30, set up the movement-activated surveillance system following a previous burglary three years before.

The Webcam was set to start filming once it registered motion, with images of the hapless burglar being safely transferred from the computer to a remote server.

The Webcam captured every movement of Benjamin Park, 19, including a handy close-up when he stared straight in the Webcam before going on to steal the computer and other equipment worth £3,719 ($7,000, Euro 5,300).

When 30-year-old Mr Grisby returned from holiday this month, the pictures were handed over to police, who instantly recognised Park, a very naughty boy already on bail for an attempted burglary in Ely.

Police tracked down Park, who was already boasting 33 previous convictions for theft, to a block of flats in Cambridge, where he was arrested as he tried to leg it from the long arm of the law.

Travers Chalk, the chairman of the Cambridge bench, sentenced Park to 11 months in prison after he admitted the offences. “You have a record which is awful, dreadful,” the magistrate told him.

Understandably, Mr Grisby wasn’t too chuffed with what he felt was a lenient sentence for a serial burglar, saying, “It is a rather pathetic sentence to hand someone like that, a career burglar.”

Although photographs of the burglar in action have been published by the police, one piece of footage that hasn’t been available was the look on Park’s face when Det Sgt Al Page, who leads the Cambridge burglary squad, showed him the Webcam shots.

Burglar snared by computer Webcam (more pics)

Italian DJ Gets Huge Fine For Copied MP3s

DJ gets biggest ever fine for playing pirated MP3s A “well known” Italian DJ could be hit with a record-breaking fine of up to 1.4 million euros ($1.8 million, £968,000) for using thousands of pirate music files in a nightclub near Rome, police said on Wednesday.

Police in the town of Rieti, near Rome, said they raided a popular nightclub earlier this week as part of a king-size crackdown on piracy and seized 500 illegally copied music videos and more than 2,000 MP3 music files.

The get-tough operation, targeting radio stations and clubs around the region, was led by the Fiscal Police (Guardia Di Financa, that deal with financial crime), who also seized a large quantity of “audiovisual material” and software.

There are a lot of inaccurate reports floating around about this and we wanted to get the full story, so called up the FIMI in Italy. They told us that the copyright law in Italy dates back to 1941 but was most recently updated a year ago. Under the law the DJ was fined 100 Euro ($130, £69) per copied track, this figure was then doubled to 500,000 Euro. Only if the fine is not paid within 60 days, will it increase to 1.4m.

The reason for the doubling was unclear. Under Italian law, the precise details of the case are not made public until the case comes to court.

The DJ is free to appeal against the fine. Once the fine has been finalised, the money can be paid off monthly.

“For the MP3 files, which were kept on the DJ’s personal computer, the DJ has received a fine of 1.4 million euros,” Rieti finance police said in a statement (the fine is subject to administrative recourse). The DJ may also be subject to further criminal sanctions.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said the fine was the biggest ever slapped on an individual for unlawful music copying and the use of copyrighted music in the MP3 format.

“We are pleased with the fine imposed by the Rieti Fiscal police,” said Director of the Italian Recording Industry Association (FIMI) Enzo Mazza.

He continued, “This deejay was touring clubs and making money out of the music he played – while those who had invested time, talent, hard work and money into creating the music in the first place did not get a cent. We hope this precedent will serve as a deterrent for those who are thinking of doing the same.”

Seeing as venues already pay money to the collection societies for public dance licenses we find the size of this fine a little baffling.

It could certainly be argued that DJs can act as ambassadors for new music (and therefore the music companies) with some high-profile DJs having a considerable influence on the record buying public.

After all, why else would record companies ply DJs with endless vinyl/promos and other inducements in the hope of getting their tunes played?

Perhaps now that times are more lean for the record companies, they’re cutting back on the freebies.

It appears the line between theft and promotion can sometimes be a blurred one, and we’re not convinced that punishing DJs with such enormous fines is the way the record industry should be protecting their sales…

Industry Giants Stick it to Viagra Spammers

Pfizer and Microsoft go in hard with fake online Viagra sellers In a litigious pincer movement, Pfizer, makers of the anti-impotence drug Viagra, have filed lawsuits against two online pharmacies selling the drug, while Microsoft has sued the same two pharmacies and the firms that promoted the Websites via email.

It’s the first time Pfizer and Microsoft have teamed up for such an action in a move that should prove mutually beneficial: Pfizer’s civil suit may curb the illegal sale of generic drugs while Microsoft’s legal action is aimed at reducing spam.

“We want to take back our inboxes,” said Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft’s Internet safety enforcement lawyer. “Spam can lead to fraud, it can lead to identity theft and, in this case with Pfizer, it can lead to possible physical harm.”

Pfizer has taken action against CanadianPharmacy (cndpharmacy.com) and E-Pharmacy Direct (myepharmacydirect.com) for allegedly selling unapproved drugs – claimed to be Viagra – to U.S. citizens.

Despite their name, the exact whereabouts of the people behind CanadianPharmacy is unclear.

Kornblum said orders for cndpharmacy.com were received by a computer server in New York that relayed the information to a call centre in Montreal. The drugs were made in India and then mailed back to rumpy-pumpy seeking customers using a US freight forwarding company.

Pfizer took action after receiving complaints from shareholders who wrongly assumed that the company was responsible for the daily deluge of Viagra-related spam cascading into their inbox.

Levine said that Pfizer was also concerned about the safety of advertised products being sold online, although he conceded that he was yet to receive any reports from disappointed customers (or their partners).

In the notoriously nefarious world of Web identities, it’s open to question whether this action will succeed or not.

Dodgy Internet trading companies can move physical and virtual locations faster than Casanova on steroids, but many suspect that this legal move is more about firing a warning shot over the bow of Web based spammers.

With Viagra-based bulk emailing currently accounting for more than 14 per cent of all spam (Commtouch Spam Lab, 2004) we live in hope that this action may reduce the amount of emails bearing the title “VIAGRA”, “v1AGRA” AND “V*GRA” etc arriving in our in boxes.

But we’re not holding our breath.

Microsoft, Pfizer to tackle fake Viagra sales (Reuters)
Microsoft and Pfizer fight fake Viagra spammers (Guardian)

MPAA Wins Court Case Against BitTorrent Site, LokiTorrent

MPAA gets Heavy with BitTorrent Despite surviving last year’s pre-Christmas BitTorrent blitz, the LokiTorrent site was finally closed down by a Dallas court yesterday.

The Website’s operator, Edward Webber, put up a valiant fight, with its front page featuring a counter, detailing the amount of donations it had received towards its budget of $30,000 per month in legal fees.

The site’s homepage has now been replaced by a slightly distasteful back-slapping MPAA (The Motion Picture Association of America) notice boasting the caption, “You can click, but you can’t hide”.

It’s not unusual for file sharing sites to be closed down, but what’s really alarming file swappers, is that LokiTorrent has agreed to turn over the server’s user logs – and with over 750,000 registered users distributing more than 35,000 movies, songs and other items, this could leave thousands of users open to prosecution.

BitTorrent has become hugely popular in recent years because it can deliver large files faster than other file-sharing technologies. BitTorrent software has no built-in method for finding files, and users rely on tracker Websites such as LokiTorrent that act as directories.

These tracker sites compile links to digital goodies that are being shared online as “torrents,” the format used by the BitTorrent software. The links connect users to the Internet addresses of the people supplying copies of the file.

Although it’s notoriously difficult to trace users of swapping sites, the advent of broadband makes it considerably easier to track down heavy users, with a specific IP number often being associated with a particular connection for many months.

This latest prosecution is only part of MPAA’s aggressive anti-piracy strategy, with the company dishing out lawsuits like confetti. A second wave of lawsuits against BitTorrent tracker sites in the US has been announced, along with more lawsuits against individual file sharers.

They’ve also filed more notices asking Internet providers to shut down eDonkey servers on their networks and lawsuits against four Websites that sold file-sharing programs.

No matter how many lawyers get fat pursing piracy cases, it’s clear that they’re unlikely to put an end to the practice, with super-clever techie kids creating new technologies as soon as one becomes unworkable.