Show Sectior) Wednesday July 23 2003 Page! The Herald Journal Sit back wait for the show SCO tries to firm up By Matthew Symo SAN JOSE Calif (AP) — Shares of the SCO Group Inc surged more than 11 percent Monday after the lawsuit T company said it has registered a copyright on Unix software that it claims has been illegally transferred to the free and popular Linux operating system Lindon Utah-base- d SCO said the move strengthens its S3 billion lawsuit against' International Business Machines Corp and its attempts to extract licensing fees from commercial Linux users! “With more than 24 million Linux servers running our software and thousands more running Linux ever day we expect SCO to be compensated for thebenefits realized by tens of thousands of customers" said ' SCO CEO Dari McBride “Though we possess broad legal rights we plan to use these carefully and judi- A ransitions are never easy In particular migrating a large group of people from one system to a new one poses more than a few challenges If you were an AT&T Broadband Intv-ncustomer then you recently completed an intriguing migration to et breach-of-contra- Comcast Internet Services I found it interesting how much publicity and marketing effort Comcast invested in its customers’ transition I received dozens of post cards and phone calls not to mention the radio ads and television news stories that cheerily but firmly reminded me to download and install a transition application on my machine in the weeks approaching the official switch' Most fellow customers I’ve talked to had a relatively easy time of it Everyone received a new com- - castnet ciously” - Even if SCO is not successful its licensing campaign is casting doubts on Linux whose popularity is based on its low cost and similarity to industrial-strengt- h Unix software Linux is widely seen as a competitor to Microsoft Corp dominance in servers SCO formerly a Linux distributor itself did not invent Unix which was developed in the 1960s at AT&T's Bell Labs After a series of deals SCO purchased the intellectual property rights in the 1990s Linux was first developed in the early 1990s by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds as a Unix variant that can run on inexpensive desktop computers Torvalds essentially gave the software away on the condition that any improvements also be freely distributed SCO sued IBM in March for trans- ferring Unix code to Ljniix Later SCO sent 1500 letters to companies that run Linux warning they could be held liable if the operating is V found to violate its intellectual prop- erty rights IBM dismissed the lawsuit as base less and there are few sign that companies are abandoning Linux ' V systems Two major companies are known to have Unix licensing agreements with SCO: Sun Microsystems Inc' and Microsoft Intellectual property attorneys said SCO's copyright registration is not a significant move though it could now start suing infringing companies for software piracy On Monday SCO also announced a licensing program that will shield commercial Linux users from liability Details on pricing will be announced within a few weeks McBride said Shares of SCO jumped Si 37 to $1332 in Monday trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market' ail address but at least Comcast has the courtesy to the new account to forward for thenext 12 months broadband cable users Long-tim- e will have noted a marked contrast from when AT&T Broadband took over the controls from Home a couple of years ago' The notable cable Internet pioneer Home sadly went bankrupt after virtually carving out the market from nothing At that ' time AT&T owned the infrastructure while Home controlled the services and marketing systems AT&T refused to bail out its own customer and over the course of a few days the business conveniently landed in AT&T’s lap AT&T scrambled to cobble together a service package! initially failed to provide continuous service to its newly acquired customers and with little warning immediately divorced Home customers from their many accounts Personally primary I never forgave AT&T for its hardball tactics and slipshod preparations for the transition and I’m not a bit sur- prised they decided to bail out of our market Here’s hoping Comcast keeps up the good customer relations they've started (a competitive rate cut would certainly be welcome) A transition of another sort involves an even larger group of consumers and an increasingly draconian governor However this transition has been occurring for several years and has reached a level of acrimony and desperation that could threaten die foundations of several industries Of course I’m speaking of popular music consumers the recording ' industry and their respective struggles to come to grips with the online file sharing phenomenon In a dramatic change of tactics the recording industry now targets individuals rather than the systems that enable file sharing While they’ve already initiated several hundred lawsuits against high volume traders they really intend to intimidate enough people into squirreling away their collections so that it makes downloading songs a fruitless or at least a painfully slow endeavor Of course the hardcore file sharing community will continue to develop methods of circumventing the industry’s methods of identifying file swappers Already applications are on deck that promise online anonymity It will be interesting to see if con- Sumer backlash develops My personal backlash takes the form of seeking out wholly independent or local artists that rely on pay for performance and appreciate reasonable compensation for their work Whether that particular trend takes hold is anyone’s guess but the best show may be where the battle for die bands goes from here Photo illustration by Brent StevensHeraW Journal ail ail Matthew Syme is an Internet Project Manager at a local technology company and a budget consckxie technophtte C ct OK it's wrong but h ow wrong? By Pat Bohm Trestle features writer images — on their own computers to be accessed by other individu- als Various programs and services such as KaZaA Grokster and Morpheus enable individuals to share files through computer webs Known as peer-to- 'peer (P2P) networks they have no central computer that tracks all the " files being shared or the Internet addresses of those sharing the files Rather there are a number of servers that help match up particu- lar music files with those seeking them Music files he said can be very ' large so that copying or down- How-loading them is burdensome ever “ripping" or converting a full-siz- e music file into a com- pressed digital file an MP3 makes it manageable And with the larger capacity of current computers many music fans just keep their music in the computer's memory without ever burning (recording) it onto a CD An older program — Napster — exemplified a flaw file-shari- ng very body agrees it’s wrong to download Interfrom the music net without paying for it but few expect to quit doing it A few ' weeks ago Orrin Hatch caught the nation's attention when he said if other means failed to stop illegal downloading “I’m all for destroy- ing their machines If you have a few hundred thousand of those I think people wodld realize the ' ' seriousness of their actions” While the ethical dimension of downloading music for free has ' dominated discussion many peo- know not do how the technical pie part is accomplished David Mertl 20 a computer science major at Utah State University explained that file sharing is a currently pop- ular way to obtain music over the Internet Individuals open files — a file is any digital body of infor- matron and can be text music or ' that Mertl sees in all the current programs as well: Participants’ Internet addresses are available “The Napster flaw — actually all of them — is when you talk on the Internet you need to have the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of file sharers” But because Napster employed a central server to link those with music files and those who wanted to download them the company was charged with copyright infringement and shut down Cur- rent P2P programs don’t have the defect of a central server Thcy employ a decentral- ized network of servers But IP addresses are still available Partic- ipating in a program automatically means the partici- pant’s IP address is known If they weren’t individuals couldn’t “find" the files that others are offering to share “If you’re sharing files that’s automatically not private” Mertl file-shari- file-shari- ng file-shari- See PIRACY on C12 Movie pirates won’t care for the new D1 -- 66 By Pater Svensson AP technology writer NEW YORK — It’s sure to draw tire attention of movie pirates and I don’t mean the kind played by Errol Flynn: a DVD player that also sup-ports the most popular format for movies swapped on the Web The appeal of downloaded movies has been limited by the fact that nobody really wants to watch them on a computer The living room TV is the preferred viewing option but it’s been largely Out of bounds since movies in the DivX format only play on computers Enter V Inc’s Bravo Dl the first player sold in the United States that claims to play DivX movies Tinseltown need trot fear though The $1991)1 isn’t much of a threat Before 1 explain why a short primer Pirates use DivX because movies grabbed straight from DVDs (after has been their thwarted) are too big to download DivX software compresses the file whilemaintaining much of the image quality cppy-protecti- The Dl will appeal to mostly people who want to compress digital home videos and burn them onto CDs that can be shown on their TVs Problem is there are several versions of DivX For each different compression settings can be used V Inc a small Fountain Valley Cklif company that otherwise el makes TVs claims the Dl plays only the latest two versions DivX 4 and 5 and only if certain settings are used during the video recording process So if you’re a digital director who likes to edit your own movies and produce them in either of those two DivX formats the Dl might befor you Fans of pirated movies on the other hand will be disappointed flat-pan- I show pirated movies the Di isn't it But it’s sure to have successors and a dear winner may emerge from the wide variety of settings used for DivX movies making movie piracy almost as convenient as music pira- because the vast majority of such films circulate online in the earlier DivX 3 format I did find four movies however in DivX 4 and 5 on KaZaa the prime venue for illeswapping of copyrighted files gal ' I used a computer’s CD burner to transfer those movies to CDs and popped them into the Dl Result: three froze after a couple of minutes and one wouldn t play at all Legal DivX 5 movie dips down- loaded from DivXcom which sells the encoding software played fine and looked excellent Sigma Designs Inc which makes the player's decoding chip said files 6n KaZaa are inconsistently compressed Their own testing has pro-- cy' The D 1 meanwhile will appeal mostly to people who want to com--predigital home videos and bum them onto CDs that can be shown on ss theirTVs It has another interesting distinction — it's by far the cheapest player with a Digital Video Interface flat-pan- el Product review ty i duced mixed results in playing them back The Dl did play movies encoded MPEG-- 1 y in the much format but so do a lot of other DVD players It also plays standard DVDs which are encoded in lower-qualit- MPEG-- 2 and copy-protect- port which can be used to connect to some digital projectors and TV sets That means that digital data from a DVD can be transferred directly to the display withoutfirst being con- - ' verted to a lower-qualianalog signal I hooked up an LCD projector to the DVI port started up “The Lord of the Rings’’ and saw every hair in ' the wizard’s beard For those with a home theater system the high-en- d Dl is a cheap way to get excellent DVD playback ed For those looking for a way to http:wwwvincLi8 http:wwwdivxcom |