News written by Dave Horvath (August, 2006)

Plunking down your hard earned cash on Sony's upcoming next-gen console, the PS3 could, in fact, help cure many diseases that plague the world. Sony executives met with US Biologists in charge of the folding@home project. In this meeting, they agreed to use the cell processor within the PS3 to harness some of the processing power needed to help the folding@home project work.

For those who dont know, folding@home is a small program the uses an interconnected series of computers to share the work load of data processing to find legitimate possible protein combinations that could cure common diseases. The data distributed among many different computers and devices decreases the processing time needed to find possible solutions by an infintesimal amount. The small folding@home program can be downloaded to your PC or now your PS3 and process protein structures while the device is idle.

folding@home representatives say that a network of 10,000 PS3s armed with their cell processors could effectively do the work of a supercomputer, pushing out a mind numbing "thousand trillon" calculations per second. If this is acheived, the processing power would outnumber that of the world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L System which runs a miniscule 280.6 trillion calculations per second, in comparison.

In a leaked filing with the FCC, its been uncovered that Japanese hardware giant, Toshiba will partner with Microsoft on the upcoming "iPod killer". In the filing, it was discovered that Microsoft will release a 30Gb Zune with wireless internet capabilities before the end of this year.

Analysts predict the Zune will be direct competition to the market leading iPod in the digital music market. Microsoft hopes to take away a good portion of the market from it's rival Apple. They've also stated that the Zune's success will hinge on whether or not the unit will allow you to download music from the built in wireless.

No price has been released yet for the Zune, but if Microsoft's track record for competing prices holds true, consumers can expect to pay close to the same amount as they would for Apple's product.

Source:
BBC

A fairly new application called FairUse4WM has been generating buzz lately as it can single handedly and quite easily strip the DRM placed on Windows Media content for WM 10 and 11.

DRM encryption, as we all know is placed on certain files that prohibits its use on other devices and/or sharing the media file amongst others. Up until now, several applications have come and gone claiming they can successfully strip the DRM standard and allow subscription based videos for Windows Media to be used on several devices. Several websites, including yours truly, have tested the FairUse4WM application and found that it does in fact, very easily strip the DRM and allow said video to be transferred to another device.

Source
Engadget

Hardware manufacturer Plextor announced that it will release the world's smallest external DVD Writer, labelled the PX-608CU. In most of the digital manufacturers focusing on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it had seemed that the faithful DVD writer had fallen to the wayside.

Plextor comes out with their new drive to show that they still have some love left for DVDs. The drive measures a scant 1.6cm (just over 1/2 inch) and weighs a miniscule 250g (1/2 lb) but is feature packed to handle all the usual media, including dual layer, that consumers expect from such devices. Aimed at the laptop market and powered by a USB 2.0 interface, the device does not require it's own power source since it runs off the bus, thus making portability it's top priority.

Plextor has not disclosed pricing on this mini-burner but says expect it to hit their dealer floors by October.

Source:
The Register

US Federal District Court had been trying to go forth with a case of Arista Records v. Tschirhart, which brought up charges of illegal file sharing of songs owned by Arista. In a recent development, the user Tschirhart, knowing she would have had to hand over her hard drive for evidence, used a "wiping" software on the hard drive to clear any incriminating evidence off.

In response, Arista filed a pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(b) which basically states that the courts allow the strictest of punishment allowable by law due to the desctruction of evidence. The courts, in turn, approved the plaintiff's request if they can come up with a summary of damages within 30 days.

Arista claims that there were allegedly 200+ songs from their label on her hard drive and is set to pursue recovery of up to $150,000 per infringement.

By pushing the case into default, coupled with the fact that the defendant herself destroyed the evidence vital to the case, the judge awarded the ability to pursue the maximum damage reimbursement possible and felt that lesser punishment was not warranted.

In an unfortunate turn, it appears that the courts and Arista records are setting out to make an example out of one lowly file sharer.

Earlier in the week, Microsoft Senior Project Manager, Steve Riley had told an Australian audience that Windows Vista would not play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray media in the 32-bit architecture. This created quite a bit of buzz as some 90% of personal computers operate in the 32-bit scheme.

Since then, Microsoft has made an impressive attempt to shift blame of Vista's shortcoming onto content providers. Microsoft released a press announcement saying that the inability to play next-gen media on their new flagship product is not a fault of Microsoft development, but rather the fault of media providers not wanting to release for a 32-bit platform giving people the ability to access unsigned code which could in turn compromise their copyright protection schemes.

While this doesn't change the outcome of people wishing to play next-gen media in a next-gen operating system without purchasing a next-gen processor, it does show how effectively Microsoft can pass the buck and point fingers at others.

Source:
APC Magazine

In a Dutch court proceeding, a judge informed Internet provider UPC, a division of Liberty Global, that it is to release the name and contact information of a suspected file-swapper on their network.

While this normally would intrude on Dutch privacy laws (as well as similar laws worldwide), the Amsterdam judge stated that this ruling does not violate the laws if it meets two conditions. One being that they can prove, beyond reasonable doubt that the file swapping has taken place and two being that the person registered as the user is the same person actually committing the act.

Internet lawyers say that this is the first time that a court ruling has been granted to release private information about it's consumers. This could, in turn, mark a very serious turning point for people in the file-sharing community. With identities no longer being safe, organizations hell bent on stopping file-sharing could be armed with new ammunition to take down would be offenders.

Source:
Reuters

Internet conglomerate Time Warner Inc. has announced that AOL will begin offering movies and select television episodes for download on a paid and watch-for-free service. AOL is in direct negotiations with such studios as Twentieth Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group to bring you direct downloadable content for prices ranging from $9.99 to $19.99.

AOL Video is touted by Time Warner to be a one-stop shop for digital video media. Launching this month, AOL Video, while providing movies for a fee, will also provide free television episodes from companies such as Viacom Inc.'s MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central networks and A&E Television Networks.

Time Warner hopes this push will take AOL away from being a service that relies on it's subscriptions for revenue and into a mainstream money grabber.

Source:
Reuters

This past July, Lite-on had announced that it would release an internal Blu-Ray writer by August. It still has not shipped to stores, but they have serious guts by announcing their new external Blu-Ray writer dubbed the LX-2B1U.

Armed with the ability for single and dual layer writing capabilities on both BD-R and BD-RE media with blazing 2X speed, this little player should do it all. Additionally, it comes packed with the usual backwards compatability of DVD and CD responsibilities.

Lite-on hasn't released a price for either their internal which was supposed to be out by now or their new external that is said to be shipped "sometime around the beginning of 2007". Is it possible the going trend of over-priced next-gen hardware has them a bit embarassed? One can only speculate.

Source:
The Register

In an ongoing struggle for patent rights, it seems that mp3 hardware leader, Apple may be trying to lick it's wounds and hide in the corner. In an out-of-court settlement agreement between Apple and rival Creative Technologies, Apple has agreed to pay $100 million to end litigation over the patent dispute.

The two companies had submitted simultaneous lawsuits against each other when Creative claimed that Apple infringed upon it's patent for the iPod interface.

In the agreement, Apple is essentially paying for a software license for use of the interface in it's devices. In return, Creative will now be allowed to produce and sell products and accessories designed for the iPod.

Apple pioneer Steve Jobs had this to say, "This settlement resolves all of our differences with Creative, including the five lawsuits currently pending between the companies and removes the uncertainty and distraction of prolonged litigation".

Source:
BBC

A recent report issued by Screen Digest suggested that record labels should be warned against blaming piracy as the sole reason for suffering sales in the CD market. This study, administered in Europe, showed that there is a significant increase in Europeans who own a portable music player. With this incline of hardware, consumers are less focused on the purchase of CDs and more focused on services such as iTunes and Napster.

In 2006, online music purchases in Europe alone has reached 280m euros (£189m, $359m) and is expected to become a 1.1b euro (£744m, $1.1b) market by 2010.

Instead of focusing efforts on CD music markets, the record labels need to figure out a new and better way to deliver music to the consumers. With the rise of the online markets, its expected for the physical music market to continue to decline.

Source:
BBC

A federal judge in San Francisco has given the go ahead for video rental giant, Blockbuster on anti-trust claims against rival company Netflix who sued Blockbuster for alleged patent violation.

Netflix had asked the courts to postpone the anti-trust suit until the patent issues could be resolved. However it was written by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, rejecting the motions by Netflix saying that Blockbuster adequately pled it's claims and he sees no reason why Netflix would be harmed in any way by allowing both claims to happen simultaneously.

Judge Aslup wrote, "As a result of Netflix's purported monopolistic conduct, Blockbuster may be forced out of the market, which would cede to Netflix virtually complete control of the online-DVD market".

Blockbuster spokesman Randy Hargrove stated, "pleased with today's ruling and we remain intent on aggressively pursuing our antitrust counter-claims." While Netflix representative, Steve Swasey gave his own comments in saying the business will, "continue to defend our patents and business methods."

Source:
Reuters

A recent study performed by Datamonitor shows that close to 95% of UK households will have digital TV by 2010, as compared to 50% in the US and 66% in Germany. The company also says that Freeview will overtake satellite transmissions by 2008.

Even though recent interest has been piqued in the UK for HDTV by the broadcast of the World Cup, its predicted that UK households will continue to be behind the cuff on adopting HDTV as their standard. Its noted that most people in the UK don't see enough improvement in the standard to warrant the purchase.

Broadcasting regulator Ofcom shows that the UK is already the leader in digital TV viewing by as much as 70%, with the US being only 55% and no other European countries passing the 50% total digital population mark. Future growth is expected to be spurred by the hi-tech field producing more and more personal video recorders and TV on demand services.

Much like other places in the world, the UK will be forced to make the switch whether they like it or not once the government turns off the analog broadcasting. The town of Whitehaven is the first scheduled to be cut over in 2007, with others to be completed by 2012.

It seems like the people over at Philips have been hard at work at trying to 1-up the HDTV market by unveiling a working prototype of a 3-D television set. The WOWvx uses some rather unique technology to accomplish a three dimensional environment without the need of dorky polorized glasses.

Their 42" LCD screen improves upon an old movie trick of sending slightly different images to each eye to seem like our own stereoscopic view of life. But, instead of placing special glasses over the viewers eye to block out images not intended for left/right side, Philips simply places a lens over each one of the many sub pixels that make up the red/green/blue of LCD and plasma screens. These lenses cause light to be refracted at any one of nine angles, thus giving a realistic 3-D effect to the viewer.

The key to this technology is the many points of view. Earlier adaptations of this technology used only two points of view but were hampered by the viewer losing the effect if sitting at an angle to the television. With nine points of view, the viewer can by just about anywhere and still receive the desired effect, with only minimal transition effects.

As of right now, this technology is geared towards the commercial market such as casinos and advertisers at shopping malls. Philips admits that the technology isn't perfected enough to the level that would be expected by the consumer market.

California based flash memory manufacturer Sandisk announced that it will release a new 4Gb mp3 player to rival the popular iPod Nano.

With the price for the new 4Gb player said to be coming in at just under $250, in addition, Sandisk is reducing the prices of all it's existing players before the holiday season by as much as 30%.

Sandisk spokesman Eric Bone was quoted in saying, "The most costly ingredient in a flash-based (music) player is the flash memory. Since we make the flash memory, we essentially remove the middleman and pass that savings directly to the consumer."

Sandisk hopes to increase its market share on the portable music player market from 30% to 35%. Recent look at the NASDAQ will show that Sandisk has raised stocks $.90 while Apple stock has fallen 2%.

Source:
Reuters

Everyone's favorite copyright enforcer Macrovision is currently in the midst of a bloodmatch with longtime sparring partner Sima Products.

In 2005, Macrovision filed a lawsuit claiming that Sima's processors made it far too easy to circumvent copy protection schemes (DRM) applied to analog video. Macrovision had pioneered this copy protection standard by inserting "noise" into blank spaces left in analog signals. This noise would then give a less than stellar copy if left alone. Since Sima's processors are known to digitize signal, the copy protection scheme was inherantly stripped away as digital signal does not need the vertical blank spacing of an analog signal.

Macrovision disputed this as circumventing their copy protection and the Court agreed, issuing an injunction against Sima which was upheld in June.

Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro said, "Consumers should be outraged by today's decision. The devices Sima Products manufactures simply allow consumers to use digital techniques to make up for viewing artifacts in analog material—some from age or distortion, and some caused as a result of the use of distortive copy protection techniques. The legislative history of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is clear that passive analog measures that distort video signals are not 'technical protection measures.'"

In a press release earlier, Apple admitted that there has been unfair work environments in their factories in China which produce the iPod.

Apple has said that it's own investigation has shown the working conditions to be excessive, and is now only enforcing a "normal" 60 hour work week. They further went on to say that there was no report of enforced labor or the use of children in their factories.

A representative from Apple has said "Our investigation found that our top iPod manufacturing partner, Foxconn, complies with our supplier code of conduct in most areas and is taking steps to correct the violations we found."

Janek Kuczkiewicz, director of ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) has stated that he is not impressed by Apple's report.

Source:
BBC

Music company EMI has agreed to put music videos of it's signed bands preloaded on the Microsoft Zune when it's launched. Such British bands as Hot Chip and 30 Seconds to Mars.

After initial reports came out, many speculated that the Zune would not play video, however this new deal seems to prove that the Zune just may be an all around device. With the ability to download software, play video and music, Microsoft may have a contender to take the 70% share away from rival Apple.

Details on the Zune are still few and far between, however it has been said that the Zune will come with a hard drive and wireless access allowing it to download software and music on the fly.

Source:
BBC

Internet users everywhere enjoy the sometimes amazing, comical, thought provoking and often outrageous video clips available on YouTube. Looking to expand its current reach, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was quoted in saying "We're trying to bring in as much of this content as we can on to the site. What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube."

YouTube Inc. is currently in negotiations with the leading record labels to possibly post thousands of music videos available for mass consumption. They hope to bring a different service than the normal pay-to-play services like Apple's iTunes or AOL Music. Hoping to gear the site much like Yahoo Launch where users view videos within the web browser, however Chen is hopeful that YouTube's community feel will win the masses. YouTube currenly holds 60% of all video internet traffic, even rivaling Google Video.

The critical obstacle for YouTube is to get the record labels to fall into their business model to gain the rights to broadcast intellectual properties via their website.

Source:
Reuters

In a recent announcement following the Gamefest event in Seattle Washington, Microsoft has announced that it will roll out a new product entitled XNA Game Studio Express. Within this product, potential game developers can join what they're calling the Creator's Club

Members of the Creator's Club will pay a $99 yearly subscription fee and be granted access to a wealth of information and tools to help independent game developers, hobbyists and even the curious homebrew developer to create, design and share user-created games via Xbox Live!. Additionally, if a user so chooses to develop for Windows XP based PCs, tools will also be available for that and can be shared through other channels within the Creator's Club.

A Microsoft representative was quoted in saying the Creator's Club "...will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry."

User-created games will not be available for distribution to the public immediately, as Microsoft would like to test the service to monitor for potential hazards.

It seems like the movie studios have given up on internet piracy and decided to allow all people to copy to their hearts content without any ill effects. Well no, thats not the case, but in a revelation, it appears they just may be taking a step in a direction to meet the demands of consumers in a more convenient way.

It seems that DVD Copy Control Association, makers of CSS encryption standard are going to relax their controls over legally downloadable content and the ability to save the content locally. After reports of such on-demand movie download sites such as CinemaNow and Movielink have shown less than stellar profits, executives have begun to rethink their strategies.

A major complaint from consumers was that legally downloadable movies were restricted by the CSS standard in which they could only be played on the PC or Mac and were only playable on a TV set by some means of circumvention. Addressing this, the DVD Copy Control Association will make adaptations to the CSS standard to allow users to copy the movies onto a blank DVD.

This change could also influence local movie retailers such as allowing them to setup a kiosk with various movie titles within it. All a consumer would need to do is step up to the kiosk, pay a nominal fee for the movie while the kiosk burns a copy onto DVD. Movie libraries at local video stores could increase dramatically without the added overhead of stocking.

In ongoing efforts, copyright supporter Macrovision has dealt an interesting blow to TiVo users. Certain digital movies in which Macrovision has an intellectual stake in have been flagged with some curious limitations.

One TiVo user captured a screenshot showing that Macrovision has enabled a "24 Hours to Watch" protocol on a rather benign movie. What this means for consumers is that once you've begun watching a movie that you've saved to your TiVo device, you have 24 hours to watch till your heart's content until the movie will become unplayable.

Macrovision has 3 known standards they flag TiVo recordings with, those being Copy Never which does not allow a flagged broadcast to be saved to the TiVo, 7 Day Unlimited which expire after 7 days, but can be watched as many times as the consumer wishes within that trial period or 7 day/24 Hours which only allow the content to be stored for 7 days and watched for 24 hours before your TiVo box self destructs in a firey mess within your entertainment center.

Source:
Engadget

The British Broadcasting Corporation has announced that it will release a clip-on device for popular mobile MP3 players such as Apple's Ipod that will enable these devices to receive digital radio transmissions.

Plans are still in the early development stages and there has been no official release of when we can expect this device or what the price point will be, but there is some speculation that the product will be aimed at the market leading Ipod teaming up to support this device. No official comment has been made by either Apple or BBC on this relationship, but with Apples domination of the market, it only seems natural.

Source:
BBC

Computer manufacturer Acer announces that it will release its new Aspire 9800 to North American audiences sporting a next gen HD-DVD drive. Considering the usually inflated price of new technology, this laptop comes in at a reasonable $2,800. To compliment the HD-DVD functionality, it will also come equipped with Core Duo T2600, 2GB of RAM, Geforce Go 7600 graphics card, 240GB hard drive as well as its 20.1" monitor.

Choose your mobility wisely though as the laptop is said to push the scales at 17.2 lbs. Couple that with the necessary power supplies and carrying case and this laptop starts to resemble a desktop replacement.

No word yet on an exact release date.

Source:
NotebookReview.com

The Japanese media specialist Logitec is ready to ship what appears to be the world's first OS-X compatible Blu-Ray player for Apple's Macintosh computer systems. The 2x Blu-Ray Disk drive can write to BD-R and BD-RE media allowing the handling of both 25Gb and 50Gb disks.

Logitec's new drive, the LBD-A2FU2/WM will also support current formats such as DVD-RAM, DVD±R/RW, dual-layer DVD±R and CD-R/RW. To top it off, Logitec has graced it's potential supporters with the ability to interface by either USB 2.0 or Firewire.

The drive will ship with the new version of Toast 7 Titanium and is expected to cost in the neighborhood of ¥132,000 ($1,148/£614/€899). No word yet on international shipping.

Source:
Register