Uncategorized – Page 7 – Digital-Lifestyles

Windows Media 10 beta Announced Wednesday

Microsoft will be rolling out the beta programme for their Windows Media Player 10 application today, with the emphasis on portability and DRM.

One of WM10’s new features will be easy synchronisation of media libraries with portable devices – something that iPod users have enjoyed since iTunes was released. WM10 needs to be able to see portable devices as a disk drive in order to perform synchronisation, but many modern players behave like this when connected to a Windows machine.

For devices that run Windows Media Centre Portable OS, such as the Creative Lab’s offering detailed yesterday, Microsoft have developed the Media Transfer Protocol to automatically synchronise files between the two.

Synchronisation is not straightforward for Microsoft as many different manufacturers provide a range of disparate hardware – something that Apple, with two basic iPods, does not have to worry about.

WM10 will also feature the new Janus DRM technology, allowing subscription music sites like Napster to employ seamless licensing across devices.

Many of the new features of WM10 will of course be dormant until portable devices supporting them start to appear later in 2004.

Windows Media

Japanese Consumers Protest at Broadcast Flag

Japanese television viewers have begun complaining to broadcasters over the sudden removal of editing and copying freedoms they’re experiencing now that the country’s version of the broadcast flag has been rolled out on digital terrestrial and cable channels.

NHK and and the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters launched the broadcast flag on 5 April, limiting viewers to a single copy of programmes carrying the signal. As programmes can only be copied once, no editing can be performed either. Within a week NHK and other broadcasters had received 15,000 complaints and enquiries.

This move also means that Japanese consumers will not be able to remove adverts from programmes they have recorded for archiving, or make a backup in case an offline recording is destroyed.

Furthermore, viewers have to insert a user identification card, B-CAS (from the company who manufactures them, BS Conditional Access Systems), into their digital televisions in order to watch broadcasts.

It’ll be interesting to see the scale of protest when America’s broadcast flag system rolls out in just over a year and a month – whilst not requiring an ID card to access broadcasts, the flag will tell all new television sets what can and can’t be done to a signal – right down to preventing any copying whatsoever.

Japan Times coverage

Slashdot debates the issue

RIAA Sues Yet More People

As part of its programme to deter the public from sharing music, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has just launched legal action against another 493 people.

The RIAA has already settled 486 cases, for and average US$3000 (€2486) each. That represents an income of about US$1,458,000 (€1.2 million) – not a bad return, really.

These new actions are “John Doe” cases as the RIAA doesn’t know who they are prosecuting – their identities will be revealed when the courts issue subpoenas.

However, it doesn’t seem that the RIAA’s action against users of P2P applications like Kazaa and Overnet is having much success. Although the RIAA has now sued 2,947 people peer-to-peer client usage is increasing. Research firm BigChampagne claim that 9.5 million people were logged in to P2P networks in April this year, up from 7.4 million concurrent users six months previously.

What’s wrong with the music industry in one long sentence – Thanks to Simon for sending me this link

Cannes: Film Makers Meeting to Discuss Piracy

One of the major topics on the agenda this year at the Cannes Film Festival is the growing problem of piracy. A group of 16 executives and studio heads from around the world got together along with the French Minister of culture last night to encourage directors and actors to adopt their anti-piracy message before it’s too late. They are keen to get directors on board because they’re the major victims of the crime.

The think tank is seeking solutions for film piracy, and has come up with three major points:

Firstly, the recognition that downloading films is illegal, and it’s dangerous for the industry (well, you’ve got to start somewhere).

Secondly, that the public need to be educated that downloading is wrong – Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA has already been speaking on university campuses in America. “We need copyrights that are more stern and the political will to enforce them. We need to educate and change behaviour. Too many think that it is risk free so ‘I can do it too’.”

Thirdly, the group recognised that the industry needs to be technologically savvy to be able to combat piracy. Indeed Renaud Donnedieu, the French Minister of Culture and Communication announced: “The President of France is ready to translate such a plan into concrete action and intends to announce a statement next week addressing prevention, repression, communication and positive action.”

Film Festival website

Are There Really 1.67 million Illegal Movie Downloaders in the UK?

The British Video Association (BVA) has surveyed 16,000 people between 12 and 74 and extrapolated that there are 1.67 million illegal film downloaders in the UK, as they believe that 4% of the population are indulging in the practice.

We think this gives an inaccurate picture. The entire population doesn’t have internet access, and downloading all of Kill Bill Volume 1 on a dialup is frankly insane, limiting this kind of piracy to broadband subscribers. Ofcom estimates that there are around 4 million broadband homes out there – so perhaps 4% of them are downloading, making it roughly 160,000 pirates (which we feel is more accurate), or perhaps 25% of broadband subscribers are pirates (which we doubt).

The BVA goes on to estimate that this downloaders cost the video industry £45 million (€) in lost revenue. A quick calculation on the back of an HP48 shows that this is roughly two full price DVDs per downloader – yet the BVA goes on to say that the average downloader grabs some 30 films and TV episodes a year. Since many downloaders like to collect and share files for kudos, we suspect the picture in the UK is of around 160,000 pirates downloading 30 films.

Interestingly, according to the survey, the average downloader is under 35, male, and lives in the south of England – presumably because broadband is more prevalent there and not because they’re more prone to thieving.

The BVA’s report

Dis/located Drama – Mobile Bristol in Queen Square in Bristol

1831 Riot! – “an interactive play for voices” played in Queen Square in Bristol until 4th May. The play is the latest fruit of the Mobile Bristol project – a collaboration between HP Labs, the University of Bristol and the Appliance Studio, which is working to overlay a wireless ‘digital canvas’ on the city and to explore the social and creative possibilities enabled by such a fabric.

Queen Square is the largest square in England outside London, dating from the early 18th century and recently restored to genteel, leafy tranquility following the removal in 2000 of a dual carriageway driven diagonally across the square in 1936. It was also the scene of some of the most significant events of the 1831 riot in Bristol – which was instrumental in the eventual passage of the 1832 Reform Act significantly increasing the number of men who had the vote and starting Britain on the road to universal suffrage.

The current production is a specially commissioned piece which attempts a documentary style, fictionalised recreation of some of the key events of the riot which took place in and around the square. To experience the drama you visit a stand on one side of the square to pick up a small backpack containing a GPS enabled iPaq, a large pair of stereo headphones and an A4 flyer providing a brief explanation of the project, but woefully little background on the riots themselves. You are then free to wander the square at will until you have exhausted the experience, your enthusiasm or your stamina.

On the morning that Richard Higgs and I visited it was bright, sunny and warm. As we strolled around the square different segments of audio were triggered as we moved between different areas. The effect was most like tuning in to the middle of an afternoon play on Radio 4, with similar production values and the same instantly identifiable style – a somewhat ironic choice for a riot. Even knowing the nature of the beast there was a strong tendency to try and construct a coherent story of the events from the fragments available, which was far from easy – perhaps appropriately for a riot.

Despite wandering around the square side by side we often found that what we were hearing at any given time differed – sometimes due to a simple time lag and sometimes due to hearing different segments on different visits to the same area. Our movements clearly triggered some, but not all, of the changes to what we were hearing and it was hard to distinguish such changes from simple scene changes within a segment.

The headphones were large, well padded and effectively blocked out external noise – this made it difficult to conduct the intermittent conversation with which we peppered our walk. It also had the strange effect of divorcing us from our surroundings much like listening to music on a Walkman or an iPod, which seemed at odds with the very idea of interactive locative media. I would have been happier with something that allowed the mundane noises of the square on the day to bleed into the authored experience rather than trying to cut them out.

Although we were left feeling that full the potential hadn’t quite been realised, it is early days for this kind of experience design and 1831 Riot! is a valiant and at least partially successful attempt to paint something interesting and worthwhile on the digital canvas.

Bristol Wireless

FCC Requires Firewire in Set-top Boxes

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) directive which came into force this month, requires cable operators to provide a Firewire (IEEE1394) -enabled set-top box to customers who require them. The FFC have long been promoting interoperability between STBs and other equipment, and this looks like another step down that road.

According to an HP paper on the subject (linked below) “The distributed set top architecture becomes more compelling when multiple devices, interconnected by a 1394 cluster/backbone network, can access an access network gateway simultaneously.”

Using the Firewire interface, customers will be able to connect their STB to a range of other devices, such as PVRs or Firewire enabled PCs and Macintoshes. Customers will be able to capture MPEG2 streams to for storage elsewhere – provided it’s within the 4.5m reach of a 1394 cable.

A Firewire interface doesn’t mean that customers will just be able to rip content – anything coming through that port can still be protected by DRM measures, IEEE1394 is just an interface after all. However, the inclusion of a Firewire port does allow the distribution of protected content to other devices around the home.

HP’s report on Firewire and set-top boxes

The Text-Message Enabled Chandelier

The beautiful Swarovski SMS-enabled chandelier Swarovksi, an Austrian crystal group famed for their chandeliers (where else do you get yours anyway?) have demonstrated a chandelier that displays text messages sent to it from mobile phones.

The chandelier, called “Lolita” (oh no – that’s going to do strange things to the search engines) uses strings of LEDs hung in crystal cylinders. The rows of LEDs are then switched on and off in sequence to create a scrolling dot-matrix effect – rather like an extraordinarily posh and expensive version of those displays you get in cab office windows.

Swarovski

Stream Ripping Gains Popularity

We never did it of course, but many people remember sitting by their cassette radio as a child, waiting to tape favourite songs off the charts to a fresh C90. Stream ripping is basically a 2004 remix of that old Sunday evening tradition, and it’s providing music sharers with a “new” way to acquire content – and it’s untraceable.

Stream ripping applications allow users to capture multiple streams all day, amounting to several thousand songs. In fact, one program, StationRipper will record 300 streams simultaneously and make a separate MP3 for every song played. It will even skip broadcast tracks that you’ve already recorded.

We tried StationRipper this morning as a bit of reaseach and found it almost unbelievably easy to use. It works best with Shoutcast, but you can access any radio station stream you have a URL for.

One feature that particularly impressed us was the ability to buy whatever music was being played in a stream – simply click on the station and then the buy button: StreamRipper takes the track details to Amazon and presents you with the album featuring the track, if it’s found.

Greg Ratajik wrote StationRipper after he saw the limitations in other programs like StreamRipper32, and estimates that the program has been downloaded over 350,000 times.

Whilst not quite as user friendly as many P2P packages, and with many of the problems associated with recording traditional radio stations (lower broadcast quality, DJs prattling over the top of music), programs like StationRipper present a convenient way of time-shifting internet radio broadcasts.

Acquiring music from ripping radio streams is untraceable, unlike logging onto P2P networks and downloading tracks. The radio station will have a listener’s IP number, but since users aren’t required to log into most stations, it’s extremely difficulty to ID them. Besides, they have no way of telling if someone is listening to a stream or archiving it.

But is it legal? Stream ripping software has lots of non-infringing uses, so it looks like the programs have nothing to fear … yet. It’s really up to what the user then does with the music – if they are using it as a way to acquire music without paying, or then go onto to share streams or tracks that they have ripped, then that’s illegal.

Stream ripping applications go to further demonstrate that if labels insist on crippling music with restrictive and untrusting DRM, then inventive consumers will find ways to defeat it until they get a fairer system.

StationRipper

Shoutcast

Police Seize 200 Computers in Anti-Piracy Raid

Law enforcement agencies in 11 countries have seized 200 computers in raids on piracy networks around the world. No arrests have been made yet, but charges are expected to be brought.

The 120 synchronised raids were targeted at illegal operations in 27 US states and also in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and the UK. The raided groups are suspected of distributing games and films as “warez”. The US Customs Department estimated (and we suspect this is a real finger in the air guess) that the 100 participants identified were responsible for 95% of all pirated material online. We think that is highly unlikely.

The raids, part of Operation Fastlink, were described by US Attorney General John Ashcroft as “the most far-reaching and aggressive enforcement action ever” against online piracy. Amongst the equipment seized were 30 file servers. Looks like someone won’t be downloading that copy of Half Life 2 they were hoping to.

John Malcolm, chief of antipiracy operations for the Motion Picture Association told the Associated Press: “Today is a good day for creative artists. Without copyright protection and enforcement, piracy will dramatically and deleteriously impact the future of the American film industry.”

ZDNet on the story