Watchdogs: Copy-proof disc not owner-friendly
Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia's latest disc is the first general-release music compact disc to have copy protection built in, but at least one watchdog group says the system will serve only to annoy honest consumers. The disc, "White Lilies Island," has coding by Israeli company Midbar Tech that corrupts the table of contents and music tracks. Most regular CD players have technology to correct the errors, but CD drives in desktop computers cannot and they will not play the songs. The system is aimed at stopping the proliferation of MP3 versions of the disc, which can be traded easily over the Internet. Britain's Campaign for Digital Rights told the British Broadcasting Corp. that its experiments found the disc also won't play in the Sony Playstation 2, some DVD players and some CD players that are more than five years old. "All they are doing is annoying a lot of people who cannot do with it what they want to do, which is just listen to it," said Julian Midgley, a spokesman for the group.
House member wants better 'Whois' verification
Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., told the Internet's chief regulatory body Monday that it needs to mandate better verification of the names of people who register for online domains. Berman, ranking Democrat of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, said the current registration system leaves the door open for "malevolent registrants" such as scam artists, intellectual property thieves and even terrorists looking to move money around. Berman specifically mentioned the "Whois" database, which lists the owners of domain names, as an area where there could be improvement. Registrars currently do not have to verify the identities of their customers before putting them into the database, making it somewhat unreliable for law enforcement agents investigating the activity on certain domain names. Berman spoke at the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers meeting in Marina del Rey, Calif. The ICANN event runs through Thursday.
Comdex takes it down a notch
By all reports, this year's Comdex technology show in Las Vegas is a shrunken version of the bustling events of previous years. About 2,000 exhibitors are showing off their wares, at least 400 fewer than last year. And officials have said they expect as many as 150,000 attendees, about 30 percent fewer than last year, when the dot-com bust had not quite hit the industry. The nation's travel fears also are keeping this year's numbers down, officials said. There is one bright spot: Comdex officials said the show will introduce 390 new products this year, up from about 250 last year. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates opened the show Sunday night with a speech that said computers are still too difficult to use and repair, but the industry would eventually fix problems and allow users to forget about crashes, glitches and unwieldy software.
Microsoft's Xbox debuts Thursday
Amid a $500 million rush of television commercials and giveaway promotions, Microsoft introduces its Xbox video game system on Thursday with the intention of competing with traditional forms of entertainment, not just other gaming platforms. One Microsoft manager put it this way to the San Jose Mercury News: "We've been very successful in changing the way people work from 9 to 5. Now we have the way to change the way people play from 5 to 9." The Xbox, unlike its competition from Sony and Nintendo, is designed around the idea that gamers will want to play against people outside of their living rooms. Microsoft calls it "broadcast gaming," but competitors say it's not the right time for such advancements. "We believe they're making a mistake," George Harrison, Nintendo's senior vice president of marketing, told the Mercury-News. "If you're making the best game machine you can, at the most attractive price, consumers are willing to pay for the benefits they see right now, versus the future potential of modems." Sony's Playstation 2 is expected to be the best-seller this holiday season, with Xbox and Nintendo's Game Cube faring well, also.
Broadband usage slow to grow
The slowdown in consumer spending since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been potentially disastrous for the growth of broadband Internet services, reports USA Today. The Internet industry is hoping that the growth of high-speed online access would help to fuel a second high-tech boom, but so far, relatively high prices and scattershot development of fast networks have kept consumers away from broadband. Most broadband services -- including cable Internet access and digital subscriber lines from phone companies -- cost more than $40 per month, which is about double that for a dial-up service. Only 9.5 million households have broadband service, and the expansion of broadband networks slowed from 27 percent in the first quarter to 17 percent in the second quarter, according to research firm Jupiter Media Metrix.
E-mail spy tale makes debut
A multi-media espionage thriller that was rewritten after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is making its debut as Washington is quietly calling for the entertainment industry to support the war on terrorism. Toronto company Metamail Inc. help to create the tale "The Dark Nile" to promote the AOL Time-Warner film "The Mummy Returns," but after the attacks, the Mummy and the power-mad cult associated with him were recast as terrorists. Visitors to darknile.com can sign up to receive daily e-mails that now tell the story of a "beautiful CIA agent and a concerned scientist" fighting a group that wants to trigger an earthquake in Alaska. "Dark Nile" author Jesse Kornbluth, an editorial director at AOL, told Canada's National Post that he doesn't consider the rewritten story, which features pictures and multimedia links, to be propaganda. "I would describe this as a patriotic thriller," he said. "Propaganda is poor drama. (The Dark Nile) has to succeed as a drama or it doesn't work at all."
(Compiled by Joe Warminsky in Washington.)
