All Things News

Straight from Slyck News: “The RIAA charges that AllofMP3.com is an illegal service and infringes on their member company’s copyrights because they have yet to see any of the fees collected by the Russian music store. AllofMP3.com has quickly become one of the most successful music stores online, namely because of its ability to sell music for less than 10 cents per download. The addition of a DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) environment has also helped bolster this service as one of the few viable alternatives to P2P networking – at least in the eyes of the file-sharing community.

AllofMP3 countered the music industry’s claim, stating the service is completely legal in Russia as all necessary fees have been forwarded to the Russian royalty collection firm, ROMS. From there, AllofMP3 feels it is the responsibility of ROMS to divvy up the royalties to the copyright holders. AllofMP3 has managed to obtain a certain level of de facto legality, as the Russian authorities have yet to successfully force the site off line.

AllofMP3’s argument has not impressed the music industry, or the RIAA. The December 21 lawsuit argues that 11 million songs were allegedly pirated, and seeks damages totaling $150,000 per violation. That’s a $1.65 trillion lawsuit – a value slightly less than the Gross Domestic Product for the United Kingdom in 2005…

…”AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York,” an unnamed “senior company official” stated. “This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.”

The big question of course will be whether AllofMP3, or Media Services, will show up at any legal proceeding based in New York. Although Media Services has legal counsel based in the United States, the tone of the statement suggests a very defiant approach. A representative of Media Services told Slyck.com that a decision on their future legal tactics has yet to be formulated – pending the review of a yet unreceived $1.65 trillion complaint.”

Straight from Slashdot: “According to this article on Endgadget, the AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player. According to the accompanying video, a source release for the program will be made available in January. Time to get that $200 Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive?”

Straight from United Press International: “DAYTON, Calif., Dec. 20 (UPI) — The U.S. Army awarded a $15 million contract for the development of a new type of lightweight composite armor based on nanotechnology. The pact awarded to the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) this week will lead to new materials that can be used in vehicles and body armor.

“This is not a ground-level academic study project,” UDRI engineer Brian Rice said. “We are actually working with two Ohio companies to create a product that, if it tests out well, could show up in Iraq next year.”

Armor Holdings and TPI Composites are also involved in the project, which is under the auspices of the Army Research Laboratory. Rice said Dayton would be working with the two companies specifically on an armor package for Humvees and armored vehicles.

UDRI is home to one of the leading ballistics labs in the United States.

Rice said the planned armor “will be even stronger than existing armor, but also lighter, to reduce the top weight of the ‘up-armored’ vehicle.”

He also assured that engineers would be looking into reducing the flammability and flexibility issues inherent in many composite materials as an improvement in body armor.

UDRI said in a statement that the research would also likely lead to advances in protective materials for police and firefighters as well as other civilian applications such as vehicles, rail cars and wind-turbine blades.”

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Straight from Yahoo News: “PORT ARTHUR, Texas – In the middle of Joshua Bush’s forehead, two inches above his eyes, lies the evidence that prosecutors say could send the teenager to prison for attempted murder: a 9 mm bullet, lodged just under the skin.Prosecutors say it will prove that Bush, 17, tried to kill the owner of a used-car lot after a robbery in July. And they have obtained a search warrant to extract the slug.

But Bush and his lawyer are fighting the removal, in a legal and medical oddity that raises questions about patient privacy and how far the government can go to solve crimes without running afoul of the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

“It’s unfortunate this arguably important piece of evidence is in a place where it can’t be easily retrieved,” said Seth Chandler, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “You have to balance our desire to convict the guilty against the government not poking around our bodies on a supposition.”

Investigators say that Bush was part of a group of gang members who broke into a used car lot and tried to steal vehicles. According to police, Bush tried to shoot businessman Alan Olive, and when Olive returned fire, a bullet struck the teenager and borrowed into the soft, fatty tissue of his forehead.

Prosecutor Ramon Rodriguez said gang members who took part in the robbery identified Bush as one of those involved. When he was questioned about a week later, Bush admitted taking part in the robbery but not the shooting, police said.”

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Straight from 1P Start: “Here’s a little more salt on the already oozing, pussing wound that just won ’t seem to close for Sony. SEGA announced today that Virtua Fighter 5 wil be coming to the Xbox 360 towards the end of summer 2007. But, PS3 owners will be able to play the game first when it’s released in February 2007.”

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Straight from Slashdot: “BLAST, the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, is about to be launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. BLAST is a 2700 kg telescope with a 2 meter primary mirror that hangs from a 1.1 million cubic meter balloon floating at an altitude of 38 km that will study the star formation history of the universe. It will float west at nearly constant latitude for about 14 days until it is (hopefully) located over McMurdo again and will be terminated and recovered. Real time position and flight track is available from the CSBF. Watch the launch live via a crappy webcam link. Three of the graduate students working on the project have photo blogs of much of the prep period, and specifically Don’s blog should have launch photos soon (bandwidth to/from McMurdo is at a premium). BLAST made it on Slashdot in the past, when it launched from Sweden in June 2005, and indirectly with an interview with Prof. Barth Netterfield and George Staikos. Yes, the flight computers still run Slack, and yes, we still use kst for data viewing and analysis. There is a Discovery Science show about BLAST and high-altitude balloons, and a future documentary film being made as well.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $1.5 million and kick in thousands more in customer refunds to settle lawsuits brought by California and Texas over music CDs that installed a hidden anti-piracy program on consumers’ computers. The settlements, announced Tuesday, cover lawsuits over CDs loaded with one of two types of copy-protection software — known as MediaMax or XCP. Although it’s great to see this as a victory for consumers, I can’t help but wonder about the next wave of DRM schemes.”

Straight from Gamepro: “When it was announced in spring 2005, the Sony PlayStation 3 was going to be the greatest thing to hit home gaming since a hedgehog named Sonic. Then came the delays. By the time the PS3 arrived, it was six months late, and Nintendo’s cheaper and more innovative Wii had stolen much of its thunder. At $599 for the 60GB model, the PS3 is twice the price of the original PlayStation 2, yet research firm iSupply — which describes the PS3 as having supercomputer qualities–estimates that Sony still loses more than $200 per unit.Thanks to manufacturing delays, Sony shipped an estimated 150,000 units for the North American launch, or less than half the number it had originally planned. And the PS3 was incompatible with more than 200 PlayStation and PS2 games, though Sony is addressing that problem through online updates.”

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Straight from Popular Mechanics: “The plan is part of a program — in slow development since the 1990s, and now quickly coalescing in military circles — called Prompt Global Strike. It will begin with modified Tridents. But eventually, Prompt Global Strike could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal. One candidate: the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, which is designed to hit Mach 5 — roughly 3600 mph. The goal, according to the U.S. Strategic Command’s deputy commander Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler, is “to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes.”"

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Straight from Ars Technica: “Harrison saved his most interesting comment for last. In discussing the future of the PS3, he stressed that developers are not currently using the machine to its full capacity. In fact, he stated that the current crop of games are using “less than half” of the machine’s power, and that “nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability.” Of course, it is common at the beginning of a new console’s life for games to not make full use of the power of the hardware: it takes some time for developers to learn the best tricks and techniques for squeezing every last bit of calculating power from any new platform. But to claim that nobody could ever make full use of the system’s power, ever, seems a bit hyperbolic. Some developers, at least, will be wanting to tap the full power of the Cell, such as IBM’s high-end customers in the HPC market. Some of this knowledge is bound to leak over to the game development world.

The major reason Harrison wants to hype up the “unlimited” potential of the PS3’s architecture is to downplay comparisons between games running on Sony’s console and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The two systems are not completely dissimilar: they both contain a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz, both have similarly-clocked GPUs, and both come with 512 MB of RAM. The 360 adds two additional cores running simultaneously, whereas the PS3’s “Cell” architecture eschews the extra cores in favor of seven smaller “Synergistic Processing Units” (SPUs) that act as vector processors with a separate instruction set and a tiny amount of on-board memory. Whether or not two extra cores are equivalent to seven SPUs is a matter that has not yet been adequately resolved: many have argued that the Cell architecture has more theoretical potential power, but whether this will translate into significantly better-looking games is still unknown. Many games still don’t take full advantage of the Xbox 360, either, and as the two heavyweights battle it out, it will be fascinating to watch what developers on both sides can accomplish. Still, in the end it is more about whether or not the games will be fun, and thus the race is on to sell as many systems as possible in order to create a larger market to encourage widespread third-party developer support.”

Straight from Techdirt: “Few of the RIAA’s estimated 20,000 lawsuits against file traders have seen the inside of a courtroom, as the majority of users, fearing legal fees or a loss, settle out of court. The RIAA of course anticipates this, so many of their cases consist of little more than an IP address, which as we’ve discussed frequently isn’t specific evidence of individual guilt. This half-assed discovery process has led to a number of suits being dropped, and it caused the RIAA some PR grief last summer when they decided to sue a PC-illiterate Long Island mother of five for sharing music. Already $24,000 in debt before her trial even began, Patricia Santangelo became an Internet celebrity of sorts by deciding to actually fight the record industry. Her story gained traction when she lost her first lawyer and proclaimed she’d fight the RIAA by herself — leading to a flurry of legal donations from RIAA-loathing groups and individuals the world over. Last summer we wondered if the RIAA would eventually cut their losses in this case and run; instead they began investigating her children, ultimately filing suit against the kids after getting the daughter and a neighbor to admit to using Kazaa under oath.

Today the RIAA dropped the lawsuit against Santangelo herself, though Santangelo’s first lawyer Ray Beckerman confirms for us the suit against her children now moves forward — after her first battle drained the family coffers. Obviously forcing cash-strapped American moms to pony up tens of thousands of dollars to force the industry to do their homework is absurd, and as we’ve noted there’s no real punishment for when the RIAA screws up. Even better, the RIAA is trying to have this case dropped in such a way that they won’t be held financially liable (despite basically admitting they sued the wrong person), and so the door’s held open in case they want to sue Santangelo for the same thing down the road. Of course it’s important to remember it’s perfectly fine to share music illegally if your father is a wealthy music industry executive.

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Straight from Digg: “Many 60GB PS3 auctions are ending at $600 or below. PS3 supply is severely constrained, it’s the busiest retail week of the year, and no one is interested in buying PS3s. People are selling them on Ebay are losing money just to get rid of them. When your recently launched product is being dumped at a loss, it’s time to panic.”

eBay search link 

Straight from Cheap Ass Gamer: “For the most part, I liked the racing in Motorstorm, but the lack of options, activities, and variety in this game severely limited my enjoyment of the overall game. In stark contrast to Project Gotham, Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, and many other racing games, there is nothing for the player to do outside of the single race type offered. There is no car customization, purchasing, upgrading or anything of the sort. There isn’t even a way to change the player’s name from “Player”, so that’s how it appears on the race results screen. Customizable soundtracks are also noticeably absent, and since the game has, with the exception of a few songs, a generic sounding hard-rock soundtrack, I found myself turning off the music completely after a few hours. Of course musical tastes vary, but nobody doesn’t like customizable soundtracks.”

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Straight from Slashdot: “Wired is pointing out a recent Gear Factor blog entry that highlights a new skyscraper in the works which will be solar-powered, and what’s more will rotate with the sun. From the article: ‘The completed tower will offer 200 expensive apartments for people who want to spend lots of money to screw up their circadian rhythm. Singh said they want to build many more such towers, with one for every time zone.’”

Straight from Slashdot: “Shortly before the release of ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension’ in 1984, physicist Carl Sneider of U.C. Berkeley wrote a surprisingly interesting essay on the physics behind the movie. Since the essay is not widely available on the web and I could only find it in plain text, I posted a more readable HTML version on my site. Among the more interesting points Sneider makes are that the oscillation overthruster is the result of decades of research instead of the usual laboratory accident, and its development corresponds surprisingly well with the evolution of particle physics from the 1930s to the 80s.”

Straight from Engadget: “How easy is it to digitally clone an electronic passport? Very. Using an RFID reader purchased on eBay, white-hat hackers from DN-Systems consulting recently demonstrated to the BBC how they can download British e-passport data to their computer and then write it to a new, blank RFID chip to create a perfect digital clone. Sure, the hack requires access to the software used by border police, but apparently, this is already out in the wilds. Astounding, huh? Yeah, but it’s not new. This is the same hack we’ve seen repeatedly demonstrated in Germany, the US, The Netherlands, Ireland, etc. What’s notable here is the lack of incredulity imparted by the spokesman for the UK Home Office who said, “It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip.” Identify theft, maybe? True, British e-passports unlike those issued by other countries, do not (currently) store fingerprint scans in the chip and the encryption is just one aspect of the passport’s overall security. However, with these mechanisms also circumvented, shouldn’t our government officials be just a tad concerned?”

Straight from Gizmodo: “I admit, I don’t like flying, but book me on United’s new “First Suite” service and I’ll literally be on cloud 9. In addition to your own 15.4-inch LCD, the service has seats that come with their own iPod connector so geeks like me can keep their player juiced on those long inter-continental flights. Once you get sick of your iPod, you can sample up to 50 XM Radio channels free of charge using the complimentary noise-canceling cans. There’s even a universal power plug for your laptop. Ironically, my favorite feature has nothing to do with tech. Instead it’s the seat, which transforms into a 6-foot, 6-inch bed. Finally a bed big enough for us tall folks.”

Straight from Bare Knuckle Politics: “Dec. 25, 2006 – Jan. 1, 2007 issue – It may sound unreal, given the daily images of carnage and chaos. But for a certain plucky breed of businessmen, there’s good money to be made in Iraq. Consider Iraqna, the leading mobile-phone company. For sure, its quarterly reports seldom make for dull reading. Despite employees kidnapped, cell-phone towers bombed, storefronts shot up and a huge security budget—up to four guards for each employee—the company posted revenues of $333 million in 2005. This year, it’s on track to take in $520 million.

The U.S. State Department reports that there are now 7.1 million mobile-phone subscribers in Iraq, up from just 1.4 million two years ago. Says Wael Ziada, an analyst in Cairo who tracks Iraqna: “There will always be pockets of money and wealth, no matter how bad the situation gets.”

Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it’s doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to a report by Global Insight in London. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 percent last year and projects 13 percent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 percent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all.

How? Iraq is a crippled nation growing on the financial equivalent of steroids, with money pouring in from abroad. National oil revenues and foreign grants look set to total $41 billion this year, according to the IMF. With security improving in one key spot—the southern oilfields—that figure could go up.”

Straight from BBC News: “The lawsuit was filed in New York on behalf of Arista Records, Warner Bros, Capitol and UMG recordings. They are suing Moscow-based Mediaservices, which runs Allofmp3.com and another music site, allTunes.com. The record labels say the sites are selling songs without permission. But Allofmp3.com argues it is paying royalties to a Russian licensing body.”