Category: Things that matter

Portable music players loaded primarily with legal music

(via Ars Technica)

A recent study by the marketing research company Ipsos Insight shows that more than 70% of all music on portable music players is acquired through legal means, and that the percentage of legal music is growing. Nearly half the music on players is ripped from the users’ own collections, and roughly one-quarter is from legal pay-to-download services. So despite claims from Microsoft that most people steal music, it appears that most music is legally acquired.

A new study by global market research firm Ipsos indicates that as many as one in five Americans over the age of 12 now own portable MP3 Players and one in 20 own more than one. And interest in viewing music videos, photos, TV shows and even full-length movies from these devices is especially strong among younger consumers who have experience downloading music.

. . .

Nearly half of music downloaders own a portable MP3 player (48%), and these owners use their devices an average of 12 hours per week. Younger downloaders use their MP3 Players more often (average of over 16 hours per week among teens), but have less digital content stored on their devices. Overall, there is an average of 700 songs or files stored on a U.S. music downloader’s MP3 player.

Existing CD collections continue to be the primary source of MP3 Player content among music downloaders. Nearly half (44%) of the content stored on MP3 players is ripped from the owner’s personal CD collection, and another 6% is ripped from others’ CD collections. Fee-based downloads (25%) and files obtained from file sharing services (19%) are also common sources of content.

So things aren’t quite as bad as the recording industry would have you believe.  I’m guessing the poor sales recently have more to do with most music sucking rather than with everyone on the planet stealing.  But that’s just my cynical view of life.

[tags]Portable music players, Music downloads, Music fans aren’t pirates[/tags]

Guide to net neutrality

(via LifeHacker)
With all the buzz going on about ‘net neutrality, it might be good to actually understand what it means and why it matters.  So if you don’t already have all the necessary information on what the whole net neutrality issue is, read up on the How Stuff Works Network Neutrality Primer.

The net neutrality debate is divided into two camps: Fighting against net neutrality are the telecom companies and cable providers, who provide Internet access to consumers. Opposing them are content providers like Google, Amazon, and non-profits like MoveOn.org and the National Religious Broadcasters. But what are they fighting about?

. . .

Defeating net neutrality would give telecom companies the ability to charge content-providers (like Google, eBay and Amazon) to use their bandwidth and, in essence, have access to their subscribers. Not only would the content providers have access to the telecom subscribers, by paying they would have preferred access — higher bandwidth and better delivery of their content. At the heart of this strategy is the telecoms’ claim that they need revenue to make necessary updates to Internet infrastructure. Emerging technologies and media require improvements, they say, and the money has to come from somewhere.

Those in favor of regulation worry that telecoms will abuse their control and punish companies that won’t pay up. Catherine Yang of “Business Week” explains that, “The network operators could block consumers from popular sites such as Google, Amazon, or Yahoo! in favor of their own. Or they could degrade delivery of Web pages whose providers don’t pay extra. Google’s home page, for instance, might load at a creep, while a search engine backed by the network company would zip along.”

. . .

Two main voices have emerged, each supporting one side of the issue. Confusingly, both organizations’ mission is to “save the Internet.” HandsOff.org, or “Hands off the Internet,” is in favor of the telecoms. In favor of Net Neutrality is SavetheInternet.com. Consider each of their positions in their own words (for a more exhaustive representation of their purposes and goals, visit their Web sites).

There’s a large chunk of what the article covers, but there’s more to learn.  The primer explains what net neutrality is, why it matters, and what some well-known “experts” are saying about the issue.

[tags]Network neutrality, How Stuff Works, LifeHacker[/tags]

Man with bomb parts boards plane – all involved point fingers

(via boingboing)

Given how many people go through all the airports here in the US, I think it’s totally understandable that sometimes, some people get through screening that shouldn’t. When it does happen, though, I think figuring out what went wrong and trying to fix it beats playing the blame game. Unfortunately, in Houston, the blame-game appears to be the more notable part of the story.

Houston police and the federal Transportation Security Administration disagree over who is responsible for allowing a man with what appeared to be bomb components board an aircraft at Hobby Airport last week.

Although the FBI eventually cleared the man of wrongdoing, police officials have transferred the officer involved and are investigating the incident while insisting that the TSA, not police, has the authority to keep a suspicious person from boarding a flight.

“Our job is not to be the gatekeepers,” police Capt. Dwayne Ready said. “That burden falls squarely on the airline and TSA to make that final decision.

. . .

The report states that a man with a Middle Eastern name and a ticket for a Delta Airlines flight to Atlanta shook his head when screeners asked if he had a laptop computer in his baggage, but an X-ray machine operator detected a laptop.

A search of the man’s baggage revealed a clock with a 9-volt battery taped to it and a copy of the Quran, the report said. A screener examined the man’s shoes and determined that the “entire soles of both shoes were gutted out.”

No idea what the real story is here. Hopefully someone figures it out, works on clarifying procedures, and we don’t hear about this kind of snafu again (because it doesn’t happen, not because no one reports it next time…). I should mention that I may be picking up the wrong side of the story anyway:

The incident gained enough attention at higher levels of the TSA that the FBI was asked to investigate. The TSA issued a statement saying its screeners “acted in accordance with their training and protocols.”

FBI Special Agent Stephen Emmett in Atlanta said agents there investigated the passenger.

“It was looked at and deemed a non-event,” Emmett said, declining to give further details.

So maybe the bomb-parts thing is just an erroneous part of the report.

[tags]TSA, Air travel safety[/tags]

Sleep more or be fat

(via boingboing)
I think this research has been discussed before.  But maybe I’m wrong.  It certainly seems easy enough to figure out – after all, we already know stress can lead to obesity, and not getting enough sleep certainly is stressful.

Research by Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick has found that sleep deprivation is associated with an almost a two-fold increased risk of being obese for both children and adults.

. . .

The research reviewed current evidence in over 28,000 children and 15,000 adults. For both groups Professor Cappuccio found that shorter sleep duration is associated with almost a two-fold increased risk of being obese.

Now I can tell my wife I need sleep to lose weight.  Not that she’ll stop abusing me for wanting to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, but I’ll have research to back me up, at least.

[tags]Sleep deprevation, Sleep related obesity, Tired = fat?[/tags]

A serious look at Sen. Stevens Internet argument

Ed Felton has taken the time to reconsider Sen. Stevens argument that the Internet is a series of tubes.  He has re-written Sen. Stevens comments as what was likely intended instead of what came out of the Senator’s mouth.  Then, Felton takes the time to explain why the argument is still wrong and the errors in Sen. Stevens’ examples.

From the lowliest blogger to Jon Stewart, everybody is laughing at Sen. Ted Stevens and his remarks (1.2MB mp3) on net neutrality. The sound bite about the Internet being “a series of tubes” has come in for for the most ridicule.

I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a meeting, and he sounds a bit agitated. Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking in an unscripted setting? For most people, it’s pretty depressing. We misspeak, drop words, repeat phrases, and mangle sentences all the time. Normally, listeners’ brains edit out the errors.

. . .

In particular, let’s look at the much-quoted core of Stevens’ argument, as transcribed by Ryan Singel. Here is my cleaned-up restatement of that part of Stevens’ remarks:

. . .

His examples, on the other hand, seem pretty weak. First, it’s hard to imagine that NetFlix would really use up so much bandwidth that they or their customers weren’t already paying for. If I buy an expensive broadband connection, and I want to use it to download a few gigabytes a month of movies, that seems fine. The traffic I slow down will mostly be my own.

Second, the slow email wouldn’t have been caused by general congestion on the Net. The cause must be either an inattentive person or downtime of a Senate server. My guess is that Stevens was searching his memory for examples of network delays, and this one popped up.

Third, the DoD has plenty of reasons other than congestion to have its own network. Secrecy, for example. And a need for redundancy in case of a denial-of-service attack on the Internet’s infrastructure. Congestion probably ranks pretty far down the list.

The bottom line? Stevens may have been trying to make a coherent argument. It’s not a great argument, and his examples were poorly chosen, but it’s far from the worst argument ever heard in the Senate.

I snipped out big parts of the write-up, but the main thrust of the article is here.  In the end, it looks like Sen. Stevens was trying to make a good argument but lacked sufficient understanding to do so.  But in doing so, he let us in the geek community know how the fight for and against ‘net neutrality will be argued.

[tags]Network neutrality, Sen. Stevens, Internet, Series of tubes[/tags]

RFID passports (finally) coming soon to the US

(via Engadget)
The US State Department appears to finally think it is ready to issue e-Passports to Americans. Privacy advocates, security specialists, techie-weenies, and sensible people everywhere object, but in typical government manner, the State Department doesn’t care. “Nyah, Nyah!” appears to be the message.

Here’s the gist of it:

They’ll have radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and are meant to cut down on human error of immigration officials, speed the processing of visitors and safeguard against counterfeit passports.

Yet critics are concerned that the security benefit of RFID technology, which combines silicon chips with antennas to make data accessible via radio waves, could be vastly outweighed by security threats to the passport holder.

Making RFID tags usable but not abusable is a tough problem (right up there with solving Fermat’s last theorem, honestly). The technology will likely speed border checks and such, but by the very nature of the technology, they will be abusable and likely very insecure.

“Basically, you’ve given everybody a little radio-frequency doodad that silently declares ‘Hey, I’m a foreigner,'” says author and futurist Bruce Sterling, who lectures on the future of RFID technology. “If nobody bothers to listen, great. If people figure out they can listen to passport IDs, there will be a lot of strange and inventive ways to exploit that for criminal purposes.”

. . .

“The basic problem with RFID is surreptitious access to ID,” said Bruce Schneier security technologist, author and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a technology security consultancy. “The odds are zero that RFID passport technology won’t be hackable.”

. . .

In May, researchers at the University of Tel Aviv created a skimmer from electronics hobbyist kits costing less than $110. The equipment was small enough to fit into a briefcase or be disguised in any manner of luggage or clothes that could hide the 15-inch copper tube antenna.

The antenna boosts the read-range from a few inches to a few feet. To extend the range of surreptitious access much further, a second piece of equipment is needed to fake the RFID reader into sending a “read” signal, which is then relayed via radio waves to the skimmer’s reader near the targeted RFID chip.

. . .

U.S. passports are issued for ten years, which means the RFID chip technology of those passports, along with their vulnerabilities, will be floating around for a decade. Technology would have to “stop cold” Schneier of Counterpane says for improvements in skimming and hacking equipment not to occur.

Schneier has talked about this before in his Crypto-Gram newsletter.

In 2004, when the U.S. State Department first started talking about embedding RFID chips in passports, the outcry from privacy advocates was huge. When the State Department issued its draft regulation in February, it got 2,335 comments, 98.5% negative. In response, the final State Department regulations, issued last month, contain two features that attempt to address security and privacy concerns. But one serious problem remains.

It’s still a hard problem to solve, and none of the security experts I trust have bought in to the project yet. Until I see someone like Schneier say “This is well done, with measures which should prevent unauthorized access.” I’m not liking it. Oh, and a little hint – it’s not likely any such expert will say any such thing any time soon.

[tags]RFID passports, e-passports, Identity theft[/tags]

University-funded music subscription services failing

(via Freedom to Tinker)
The Wall Street Journal online provides some excellent details on how music services for students funded by colleges are failing. More importantly, there’s a lot of information on why these services are failing with the college crowd.

As a student at Cornell University, Angelo Petrigh had access to free online music via a legal music-downloading service his school provided. Yet the 21-year-old still turned to illegal file-sharing programs.

The reason: While Cornell’s online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. “After I read that, I decided I didn’t want to even try it,” says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Ithaca, N.Y., school

I doubt most techies are surprised by this insite. We want movable bits. Free downloads to the hard drive are nice, but if we can’t move those bits to our portable MP3 players, burn them onto CDs to listen to in the car, or move them onto other computers we use, then we’re not so interested in those particular bits. Instead, we’ll find other places to get the bits in a format that lets us do what we want.

To stop students from pirating music, more than 120 colleges and universities have tried providing free or subsidized access to the legal subscription services over campus networks in the past few years. About 7% of all four-year schools and 31% of private research universities provided one of the legal downloading services, according to a 2005 survey of 500 schools by the Campus Computing Project, a nonprofit that studies how colleges use information technology

. . .

Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.

There’s also the problem of compatibility: The services won’t run on Apple Computer Inc. computers, which are owned by 19% of college students, according to a 2006 survey of 1,200 students by the research group Student Monitor. In addition, the files won’t play on Apple iPods, which are owned by 42% of college students, according to the survey.

Hmmmmmm. Non-portable bits, disregard for 1/5 of the student body, and extra charges to get the format students want? Well color me surprised! I can barely fathom why the services aren’t doing well.

There is also little consensus among administrators about how successful the services have been in eliminating piracy. Although some say complaints from the recording industry have dropped sharply, no one can tell if that’s because fewer students are engaging in illegal file-sharing or if the industry simply doesn’t want to go after schools that are spending money to combat the problem. “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project’s director.

I buy this thought. I think most of the recording industry’s attacks on its own customers has been nothing more than a strong-arm tactic to get people to buy protection from the recording industry. Seems the mob might get a bit upset at the recording industry moving into their turf.

Here’s the kicker. What are students using for their music if not the freely available services? Oddly enough, it’s not the illegal services – Itunes seems to be the big daddy service, just like everywhere else. Imagine that – people will pay, if you make an effort not to screw them for staying legal.

Some schools that don’t offer free downloads dismiss the subscription services as too costly for the results they achieve, especially because so many students now buy music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. “We were not in a position to offer an alternative to iTunes,” says Lev Gonick, the chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “The alternatives looked like they had more sizzle than steak.”

More sizzle than steak. I like that comment. And it seems about right.

[tags]MP3, Music downloads, Recording Industry[/tags]

Phishers getting more clever

(via Schneier’s security blog)

In an effort to fool more people, phishers have taken to using man-in-the-middle attacks.  In the past, if you thought a site was a scam or an email was a phishing attempt, you could enter bogus login information, see a success message, and know that the setup was a fake.  Now Washington Post has an article about phishers putting up a fake site and passing login credentials on to the real host site (in this case a bank, but also sometimes ebay, paypal, Amazon, and more) and using the response to determine what you see in response.  So if you enter bogus information, you will get a “Bad login” response from the fake host.  If you enter real information, you’ll end up forwarded to the real login success screen on the real host and the phisher will have a confirmed account.

The site asks for your user name and password, as well as the token-generated key. If you visit the site and enter bogus information to test whether the site is legit — a tactic used by some security-savvy people — you might be fooled. That’s because this site acts as the “man in the middle” — it submits data provided by the user to the actual Citibusiness login site. If that data generates an error, so does the phishing site, thus making it look more real.

By the way – Mr. Schneier predicted this last year (and really, it was a pretty obvious next step for phishers to take – I predicted it, too, but I’m not smart enough for anyone to listen to me).

[tags]Phishing, Online security, Computer fraud[/tags]

More net neutrality discussion

Ed Felton is one of the good guys.  And he’s a bright cookie, too (perhaps I’m mixing metaphors).  So when he speaks about net neutrality, I read it with the expectation that what he says is better than what I would come up with on my own.  With that in mind, I looked at his latest net neutrality article and saw his the commentary by others on this topic.
First, Felton highlights the end paragraph from his net neutrality paper (the first link above).:

There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing and letting the situation develop further. The present situation, with the network neutrality issue on the table in Washington but no rules yet adopted, is in many ways ideal. ISPs, knowing that discriminating now would make regulation seem more necessary, are on their best behavior; and with no rules yet adopted we don’t have to face the difficult issues of line-drawing and enforcement. Enacting strong regulation now would risk side-effects, and passing toothless regulation now would remove the threat of regulation. If it is possible to maintain the threat of regulation while leaving the issue unresolved, time will teach us more about what regulation, if any, is needed.

With this starting basis, he then writes on a response by Bill Hermann, from the Public Knowledge blog.  Essentially, Hermann writes that Felton’s wait and see recommendation is not smart.  If we wait too long, he argues, the topic will no longer be highly visible, and getting policy-makers to see things our way will be harder and more likely to fail.  This sounds well-reasoned to me.  I can certainly see the point, and after reading Hermann’s article, I’m starting to think maybe he is thinking better about this than Felton.  Then, however, Felton puts up part of the rebuttal to this from Tim Lee over at The Technology Liberation Front.

Lee’s response is extremely well-written, I believe.  And after reading it, I start to feel swayed back to Felton’s way.  Of course, since I’m not as good about thinking these things through carefully, I find myself writing about others far more often than writing my own commentary.  Lee points out how many times laws and regulations have been put in place to stop big business from taking industries over only to have those laws bent, twisted, and modified over years and years.  In the end, these bastardized laws then become the things which support big business controlling what was once off-limits and erecting barriers to entry to stifle competition.

So let’s say Herman is right and the good guys have limited resources with which to wage this fight. What happens once network neutrality is the law of the land, Public Knowledge has moved onto its next legislative issue, and the only guys in the room at FCC hearings on network neutrality implementation are telco lawyers and lobbyists? The FCC will interpret the statute in a way that’s friendly to the telecom industry, for precisely the reasons Herman identifies. Over time, “network neutrality” will be redefined and reinterpreted to mean something the telcos can live with.

But it’s worse than that, because the telcos aren’t likely to stop at rendering the law toothless. They’re likely to continue lobbying for additional changes to the rules—by the FCC or Congress—that helps them exclude new competitors and cement their monopoly power? Don’t believe me? Look at the history of cable franchising. Look at the way the CAB helped cartelize the airline industry, and the ICC cartelized surface transportation. Look at FCC regulation of telephone service and the broadcast spectrum. All of those regulatory regimes were initially designed to control oligopolistic industries too, and each of them ended up becoming part of the problem.

. . .

Finally, it’s important to note that the iron triangle goes both ways: once you pass network neutrality regulations, repealing them will be very difficult. This follows from the same iron triangle analysis he used above—if the telcos figure out how to use the rules to their advantage, they’ll lobby just as hard against repealing them. (just look at the legal fight to liberalize cable franchises) Which means that no matter how competitive the broadband market gets (and there could easily be dozens of wireless broadband providers a decade from now) the regulations will likely stay on the books.

All in all, a very compelling argument for waiting to see what happens.  As noted above, if laws are pushed through to protect ‘net neutrality, we are probably just as likely to find ourselves wanting, but unable, to repeal or change them in the future as we are to be satisfied with them and be happy we have them.  So protect your ‘net rights – don’t do anything about them until you have to.

[tags]Net Neutrality, Internet regulation[/tags]

On the importance of backups

This story at Security Awareness for Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless offers insight into the value or good backups and the importance of testing everything that affects the backup routine.

A Toronto advertising firm had a really good systems administrator who was religious about backup. For years, they had been in good shape. He even tested the restore/recovery process from time to time as part of their disaster planning. Smart.
As part of their growth, the ad firm moved into new larger facilities a few blocks away. The architects coordinated with the techs to make sure wires were put in the right place, phones, VoIP, 1Gig backbone… all the stuff modern companies have when they do things right.

Then, the company moved. All the typical stuff that happens during a move happened. Testing was done on everything that was moved. All was good.

Continue reading “On the importance of backups”

Senator Ted Stevens doesn’t get the ‘net

(via boingboing)

Any of you techies wondering who you have representing you? Have you thought about who it is kowtowing to the telecomm companies who are trying to make the Internet a communication structured controlled by big media and big business?

Sadly, it’s people like this who are “working for” citizens in this country.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially…

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Yes, you read that right. Senator Stevens (R-Alaska) received an internet which took 5 days to travel via the Internet to him. And the reason for this, he thinks, is because the tubes that make up the Internet were blocked by other companies pushing through things not of interest to him. Because of this, cable internet providers, DSL providers, and other such companies should be allowed to charge the companies which send internets over the Internet so they can assure the senders that their internet will be received promptly.

I have no complaints about people not understanding the technology I deal with every day. But to explain something of which you have no concept and use that as the justification for dry-raping consumers while deep-throating big business is just not right. Learn about something before spewing this crap, and then at least support bad law because you understand the implications.

[tags]Net Neutrality, Big business, Raping consumers[/tags]