shurazero.com

The NAB said that the FCC’s own report contradicts claims that devices using white space spectrum do not interfere with services using adjacent spectrum channels.

“White spaces” are slivers of unused spectrum that sit between licensed broadcast channels in the 150MHz to 700MHz spectrum bands. The FCC tested several proof-of-concept devices this summer to see if companies can develop products that could use this spectrum without interfering with licensed spectrum services in these bands.

But incumbent spectrum license holders, such as TV broadcasters and cell phone operators, say wireless devices that access this unlicensed spectrum will cause interference in the neighboring spectrum bands.

The NAB, which has opposed the use of “white space” spectrum, said in a statement that it has filed a request for the commission to take public comments on a report that the FCC issued earlier this week stating that this spectrum could be opened up for unlicensed use without interfering with licensed spectrum holders. The report said that geolocation and sensing technologies were adequate in preventing interference. The FCC is set to vote on a proposal to open up this spectrum during its November 4 open meeting.

The NAB filed its request in conjunction with the Disney’s ABC, CBS, General Electric’s NBC, News Corp.’s Fox and other broadcasters.

In a report released earlier this week, the commission’s Office of Engineering Technology said that devices with geolocation and sensing technologies could be used without interference.

The National Association of Broadcasters has filed an emergency petition with the Federal Communications Commission in an effort to change the agency’s mind about supporting the use of “white space” spectrum.

These technology companies believe this spectrum, which is ideal for sending data wirelessly over long distances and penetrating through walls, can be used to enhance or create new wireless broadband services. And they say they can develop products and services that use this spectrum without interfering with services running on licensed spectrum in adjacent bands.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said this week that he will submit a proposal for the rest of the commissioners to vote on that would open up white spaces for unlicensed use. Several technology companies, including Motorola, Microsoft, and Google have been lobbying the FCC for more than a year to open up these channels, which would provide between 300MHz and 400MHz of unlicensed spectral capacity throughout the country that could be used by anyone.

I wish I’d had the Easy-2-Pick electronic luggage tag in hand Sunday night. I was just off a long-delayed flight that appeared to transport the entire population of Southern California to San Francisco. And wouldn’t you know it? Ninety percent of the seemingly millions of passengers jostling for their suitcases seemed to have the same black bag.

The pair also developed a less sophisticated, less expensive gizmo–a $4 strip that fits onto a suitcase and flashes LEDS in four different colors once it hits the carousel. The owner of the baggage sets the light combination.

(Credit:
Israel21C)

(Via Israel 21C)

The Easy-2-Pick, expected out this fall for $15 to $20, is a handheld device that lights up, beeps, and vibrates once your suitcase makes it onto the carousel and within 40 to 50 feet of where you’re standing. The heads-up gives you a chance to stand away from the crowd, possibly avoiding an elbow in the gut as you try to locate your lookalike bag.

The gadget comes courtesy of Israeli developer Yoav Ben-David and his partner, Zvi Kanor of American Express Travel in Tel Aviv. It consists of a circular receiver on a keychain and a credit card-size transmitter that goes around the handle of your baggage.

He’s peeved that Time Machine doesn’t appear to work with e-mail. “E-mail is everything, and Time Machine will not restore e-mail mailboxes. Restores everything else but that, and ought to restore either a single message or a whole mailbox, and it won’t,” he wrote on his Web site Wednesday.

Rush doesn't like the fact he can't back up his e-mail with Time Machine.

Apple declined to comment on Limbaugh’s issues, and Limbaugh never replied to Wednesday’s e-mail for comment on the issue.

(Credit:
Rushlimbaugh.com)

Rush Limbaugh provided a little more detail Wednesday on the
Mac issues that have been driving him batty (yes, more so) since he upgraded to Leopard.

But if he’s downloading e-mail to his desktop, that’s another thing. Can he not find the folder where those files are stored? Is there actually some problem with Time Machine’s ability to recognize e-mails as data? Who knows.

The bombastic radio host has been a Mac user for years, but on Tuesday he complained on his show about issues with six Macs that he runs on a network, without providing any details. The story made its way around the Mac community to a mixture of curious and hostile responses, and now Limbaugh has outlined his two main beefs.

However, Limbaugh doesn’t get into how he accesses e-mail on his Mac; for example, whether he’s reading it off the server or downloading the messages to his Mac. Most people in corporate-style setups read their e-mail off a server, and it’s sort of hard to expect a desktop backup system to back up files that aren’t actually stored on the desktop.

The first one is the Back to my Mac feature introduced with Leopard isn’t working on a regular basis. This is supposed to allow you to access files and applications that reside on a Mac running Leopard from any other Leopard Mac. He wouldn’t be the first to report problems with Back to my Mac, and Apple has been looking into compatibility issues with third-party routers.

Limbaugh’s more puzzling complaint, however, involves Time Machine. Time Machine was considered one of the more compelling reasons to upgrade to Leopard, as it’s designed to make backup and restoring files–which few people actually do–a much easier process. Most of the early complaints around Time Machine have involved the inability to use it wirelessly with MacBooks or MacBook Pros unless you buy Apple’s Time Capsule product, but that’s not what has El Rushbo up in arms.

Like anything on the Internet that has the possibility of making money, we’ll see people try to take advantage for their own gain. Spam has made e-mail unusable without serious filtering, and there are risks that gaming could go the same way. For now, it’s up to the providers to balance the development of their own economies.

Well, I can’t argue with (a), they are providing a service–just like maggots, I suppose–but I’ve always argued that (b) is total and complete BS.

GJ: I think these gold farms indicate that the game platform has the potential to engage more people in an Internet-driven economy. The gaming workers in China don’t have skills like English, software (development), or graphic design to participate in other forms of Internet-driven work, but they can communicate and navigate in a 3D game world whose tools and routines they are familiar with…So if more social and economic activities happen in an accessible 3D game world, people who don’t have access to other culture capital but (do have access to) gaming knowledge will be more likely to be included in global interaction.

There is a paradox of trying to succeed in a game by any means necessary versus the very point of playing the game. Gold selling is also contributing to both real and virtual economic development, providing jobs for people in less developed countries, and driving revenue into game companies, as more people look to advance their game play.

In a 2006 interview, documentary filmmaker Ge Jin discussed how gold farming is driving economic development in China.

For years, lowlifes like (gold seller) IGE have told us, in defense of their behavior, that they a) are just providing a service; b) don’t interfere with players’ enjoyment of the game.

Gold farming is an Internet-age phenomenon in which players in less developed countries collect and sell virtual gold (common to games like World of Warcraft) to wealthier gamers in the developed world. This enables gamers who have the means to buy virtual gold to get ahead in the games without actually having to accomplish much of the grunt work.

That, however, is likely to be the consequence of an extreme anti-gold-selling policy at Mythic Entertainment, the studio that developed Electronic Arts’ new MMORPG Warhammer Online, which is widely seen as World of Warcraft’s best competitor.

Call me a radical, but when launching a big-budget online game, it doesn’t strike me as a very good idea to risk alienating nearly a quarter of your user base right out the gate.

Having spent a bit of time playing WoW, I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of spam on the chat channels–especially when I was too much of a newbie to turn it off.

Wagner James Au takes the economic viewpoint that the consequences of gold farming don’t outweigh the risks.

An article titled “Why a War on Virtual Gold Sellers Makes No Sense” got me thinking about the motivations behind playing massive multiplayer online role-playing games and why virtual economies can be both helped and harmed by “gold farming.”

Mythic’s Mark Jacobs makes a very strong counterpoint that gold farmers are destroying the game experience.

Now, those old arguments aside, I can’t see how this new generation of pond scum (new and improved, with 25 percent more scummy action!) can argue that their constant spamming of chat channels doesn’t interfere with players’ enjoyment of the game (I’m waiting for the whole “Oh, you can always just turn off chat” argument).

Eduardo seemed too tentative to shoot; Adebayor was invisible; and the rest of the team seemed to mull around the fringes of the box, passing and passing and…passing. Not the best display, but at least it put the team five points clear at the top of the table and made up more ground on Manchester United’s goal differential.

Especially when it comes at the expense of Mark Hughes. I can’t stand that guy.

These are the “ugly” games you just have to win, even if they’re not pretty. Arsenal won. I wish it would have been prettier. But I’ll take the win regardless.

commentary

It was an ugly match, bookended with an excellent header from Senderos and then a finishing touch from Adebayor, but the rest of the 90 minutes were nothing to write home about.

OpenID is designed to facilitate single log-ins for multiple unaffiliated Web sites. Gradually, large sites like AOL and Plaxo have begun supporting the standard, but it remains a tool for the Web’s early-adopter set rather than the online community at large.

This is an area to watch.

On the flip side, sites that accept OpenID will have the option of displaying a “Sign in with your Yahoo ID” button.

As more major Web players start to sign onto OpenID–and more casual Internet users start using the standard–there will inevitably be security concerns raised. Since OpenID has no central repository for identity management, users can choose which sites they trust with their OpenIDs. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to always make the right decisions. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, an incident or two will likely surface that will call into question just what universal standards mean for privacy and personal security on the Web.

In one of the most significant moves yet in the growing push toward service interoperability on the Web, tech giant Yahoo announced Thursday that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 standard for a universal Internet log-in.

No matter what your views of Yahoo’s current stability may be, this is undoubtedly a big victory for OpenID. Not so long ago, the protocol was considered a dot-com/futurist pipe dream. OpenID was created by Web 2.0 guru Brad Fitzpatrick, who founded LiveJournal and was brought on board at Google last year as one of the most prominent players in its OpenSocial developer initiative.

Yahoo, which counts its registered users at 248 million worldwide, says that supporting OpenID will mean that OpenID-compatible accounts are available to a total of 368 million Web users. When Yahoo’s support of OpenID goes live, starting with a public beta launch on January 30, this will mean that a Yahoo ID can be consolidated into an OpenID account that will be valid at all partner sites.

But recently, fueled by debate over social-networking interoperability, universal standards have been one of the most buzzed-about subjects in Web 2.0.

(Credit:
Research in Motion)

Frank Gilman, the chief technology officer for Los Angeles law firm Allen Matkins, was forced to deal with the outage Monday afternoon. “What surprised me was the apparent lack of a solid business continuity plan on RIM’s part to ensure reasonable connectivity,” he said via e-mail, of course. “A company that is marketing devices that increase the mobility of professionals should have systems and contingencies in effect to avoid an outage of that size and duration.”

All e-mail messages sent to or from a BlackBerry in North America must at some point in their journey travel through RIM’s network operations center (NOC) in Canada. The company tried to use that to its advantage in its patent dispute with NTP, noting that since such a critical part of the service lies in Canada, RIM should be exempt from U.S. patent claims. That didn’t take.

As frustrating as the outage may have been, it’s not like the U.S. economy ground to a halt Monday afternoon as millions of e-mails about sales presentations and reminding the people on the fourth floor to empty the refrigerator on alternate Fridays went undelivered.

Still, RIM still needs to come clean about what caused the problem if it wants to keep people hooked on its service. I’ve seen the thumb wheel and the damage done.

“Once again, RIM apologizes to its customers for any inconvenience.” The company said it would share further details once a more in-depth investigation is completed.

It’s amazing how dependent people have become on their mobile devices. CrackBerry addiction is an old story, but it keeps surfacing every time people are forced to go more than 10 minutes without access to their e-mail. Local television stations in San Francisco all teased the BlackBerry outage on their 11 p.m. newscasts as a near-disaster, since we don’t have weather events out here to keep people watching the local news.

Those promises are usually only worth the paper they’re printed on, however, as the process of actually accounting for and proving damages as a result of an outage can be extremely difficult. Given the degree to which many large businesses–not to mention U.S. government staffers–rely on the BlackBerry service, perhaps RIM’s larger customers will start thinking about negotiating such an agreement when it comes time to renew the service.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that expansion efforts at RIM’s NOC may have been to blame for the outage. The problem isn’t that the servers are in Canada; they could be anywhere. It’s just that everything has to go through the one location. In theory, as long as you have enough redundant backup systems and plans, that shouldn’t be a problem. But every now and then, it is.

Representatives for AT&T and Verizon told several media outlets Monday that from what they understood, all wireless carriers in North America that work with RIM were affected. The last time an outage of this magnitude occurred, in April, RIM blamed a database problem that snowballed when the backup “failover” process didn’t work as planned.

Users of BlackBerrys such as this 8820 model couldn't get their precious, precious e-mail for about three hours yesterday.

The company is blaming “a problem with an internal data routing system within the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had been recently upgraded,” according to the statement. RIM has been upgrading its capacity as demand for the BlackBerry continues to grow, and usually there isn’t much of a problem during one of those upgrades. This time, something apparently went wrong.

In the immortal words of Cinderella’s Tom Kiefer, you don’t know what you got, till it’s gone.

Update 2:15 p.m. PST: No sooner do I post this than RIM goes and issues an explanation for the outage. Read on for the details…

I’m sure that far more BlackBerry-related disasters are averted that never come to light. But RIM has an advantage over other service providers in that few people sign service-level agreements (SLAs) with RIM for the BlackBerry service. SLAs are basically promises from hosted service providers to maintain a certain level of uptime, which is usually 99.999 percent or so.

Monday’s widespread BlackBerry outage–the second major one in the past 12 months–left Research In Motion customers stranded and cut off from the rest of the world, sort of like what happened to the ’80s glam metal band after Long Cold Winter. The Internet’s equivalent of a snow day left reams of e-mail messages undelivered for about three hours Monday, according to RIM, which either still hasn’t figured out exactly what caused the problem, or isn’t willing to disclose the cause just yet.

Update 2:15 p.m. PST: RIM sent out a statement after waiting for me to post this blog, just to make sure we could test our own update procedures.

While coverage of the outage just goes to show how mobile devices like the BlackBerry really are becoming the next wave of personal computing, it also points out that the entire system has a single point of failure: RIM itself.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval)

Broes is a former manager at Microsoft and Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that made news for bundling its Altnet P2P application into Kazaa. So he knows something about approaching the studios with a disruptive technology. He said the past friction between Hollywood and Silicon Valley was due to a lack of understanding of each other’s businesses.

After spending three days at the Digital Hollywood conference, where I spoke with dozens of entertainment executives as well as tech CEOs, it’s easy to spot what’s going on: studio executives are more comfortable with online video and clip-playing gadgets than in the past. The entertainment sector also needs help figuring out how to make money from digital. On the other side, the geeks seem less dismissive of studio’s copyright concerns and are much impressed with the film industry’s glamor and riches.

Lynda Keeler, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and chief of Sony Pictures Digital Group, said the techies are known for their willingness to work hard for options and equity–the possibility of a future payday. In Hollywood, she said, people want their money upfront. She remembers interviewing for a position with a venture fund after spending most of her career in entertainment. She asked the VC execs if they would like to speak to her lawyers.

(Read my related blog: Advice for techies who want to star in Hollywood)

“In the Hollywood culture, it’s about the lawyers. It’s an arm wrestle at a table. The (two industries) have a very different understanding of how to structure a deal.” — Lynda Keeler, former Sony Pictures exec

The new alliances, however, could still prove fragile. Tech entrepreneurs still complain that it takes too long to close licensing deals. The Studios continue to chafe when the whiz kids build services around their films or TV shows before they obtain rights–ala YouTube. And nobody can overlook the vastly different and often conflicting ways each side does business.

Indeed, the film industry has begun galloping into the digital age.

The emergence of online video has begun enticing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to Hollywood, and unlike an earlier migration during the dot-com era, the film industry is rolling out red carpets.

Despite their differences, it’s clear both sides see a profit in working together.

“Fan Rocket was a natural,” Broes said. “We are a motion picture company that doesn’t have a lot of technical experience and we’re not in a position to be bringing in engineers on staff and start building things. The folks at FanRocket and Danny Kastner, their CEO, immediately got what I was trying to accomplish. We took off from there. VooZoo is only a first step in a larger strategy”

“They said, ‘Lawyers? We only use lawyers for term sheets,” recalled Keeler, who now runs online retailer, Delight.com. “In the Hollywood culture, it’s about the lawyers. It’s an arm wrestle at a table. The (two industries) have a very different understanding of how to structure a deal.”

“The new group descended so quickly on Los Angeles,” said Philip Lelyveld, a former Disney executive who is now on his own as an entertainment-technology adviser, and has been a member of Hollywood’s tech community for over a decade. “It’s been in the last six or seven months where we suddenly saw a huge (spike) in activity. The reason for that is people are seeing startups built around content are suddenly becoming economically viable. The studios have also made their content more available. In some cases, they have made it clear that there are things that can be done with content that were still in dispute a few years ago.”

Derek Broes is Paramount’s senior vice president of worldwide business development and the person assigned to find new ways for the studio to profit from its content. Lelyweld says Broes is among the group driving Hollywood’s technology welcome wagon. To launch Paramount’s VooZoo service, which allows Facebook users to send famous scenes from the studio’s film library to friends, Broes got help from FanRocket, a developer of social-networking and media sites.

“I include myself in this,” Broes said. “Back then it was almost like, ‘Hey, look, give me your content. Look at all these people I have. I’ll put ads around it and it will be hugely popular.’ Well, they don’t understand that the studios have certain restrictions in their business and have previous windows occupied by previous agreements. It wasn’t a lack of wanting to go out and make money in a new way. It was just limitations of a legacy business that are now beginning to change.”

Paramount Pictures executive Derek Broes is helping build bridges between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Broes asked why the technology couldn’t be used for ads. Instead of showing Facebook users a commercial with actors, why not replace an actor’s face with a viewer’s. “If I can actually star in my own commercials, I’m going to watch them, Broes said.”This is where the advertising community has completely failed at adjusting and adapting and being creative.”

News Corp. and NBC Universal launched Web video-portal Hulu in March. Earlier this month, the top movie studios agreed to allow Apple to offer flicks via iTunes the same day they’re released on DVD. Two weeks ago, Warner Bros. Television announced it was bringing back the WB channel, the TV network shuttered 18 months ago, as an online-only play. According to one Warner Bros. executive, “the TV network of tomorrow won’t be found on TV.”

Although she did not attend, Keeler said she heard that the much-publicized party thrown last month in Los Angeles by TechCrunch was a huge hit. “It was a mash of tech guys and beautiful women,” Keeler said. “It showed the two tribes can get together…the children that come from this union are going to have it all, the good looks of Hollywood and the smarts of the valley…but it’s going to be a painful pregnancy.”

As for whether the geeks and movie people can get along, there’s no doubt, according to Keeler, the former Sony executive.

Broes also said that for any of the new online ad models to work, corporate America must embrace new technologies. During a panel session at Digital Hollywood, Broes singled out the face-mapping system developed by start-up Big Stage. The company uses photos of a person’s face to create a digital avatar and then computers manipulate the image to change facial expressions.

In the initial report, Verizon found that 73 percent of the data breaches were the result of outside sources, with only 18 percent from insider threats. Of the outside sources, 39 percent were attributed to business partners. But that’s an average.

“If it’s someone using or abusing a legitimate level of access granted to them for the purposes of a security breach, they don’t need fancy hacking tools to get access to these systems. They just need anti-forensics tools to cover their tracks on the way out,” he said.

The goal of the two reports, Sartin said, is to give detailed insight into how data breaches occur, so that companies can address the problems within their specific industry.

Sartin also outlined a scenario in which organized crime members go to “individuals inside the call centers and support centers and say, ‘Hey, if you need money’ or ‘If you hate your job, we’re your solution. Just give us access to the data. Better yet, just give us the data. Give us the keys to your customers, and we’ll make it worth your while.’”

Tech industry attacks are similar to those seen in financial services.

Sartin suggests that retail and food and beverage, which includes restaurants and grocery stores, are the polar opposite. In both retail and food, less sophisticated attacks are used and are often the result of a compromised third-party vendor.

(Credit:
Verizon Business)

The attacks on the financial industry tend to be sophisticated, Sartin said. A majority come from outside hackers, although a healthy amount could also be attributed to insiders who have been granted access to the data.

Verizon Business investigators will often see a dozen restaurant chains citing the same problem and the same complaints from their customers, Sartin said. “You’ll see that they have the same fraud patterns and the same fraud spend (illegitimate purchases), all within the same time frame. So it’s compelling circumstantial evidence that it’s the same perpetrator doing the same things we’ve seen elsewhere. And we can get good insight into how they did it. It always suggests that it was a vendor.”

“The nature of the threat being faced by each of these industries is somewhat unique,” said Bryan Sartin, co-author of the report and director of investigative response for Verizon Business security solutions. Verizon Business is the company’s unit dedicated to enterprise and government customers.

In retail and food, the establishment may own the user name and password to the computer system, but someone else actually provides the point of sale (POS) service for them. In environments that rely upon external support, Sartin said, “we also see more and more where these third parties are specifically misusing that level of access granted to them.”

The other 18 percent of attacks noted in the June data target manufacturing, hospitality, government, entertainment, education, and “other.”

The new report drills down within four key industries: financial services, tech, retail, and food and beverage. The four constitute 82 percent of all the attacks in the original Verizon report.

Risks factors for data breaches vary industry to industry and defy a “cookie cutter” approach to security, according to a report released Thursday by Verizon Communications.

The new report (PDF) builds on data released in June. The initial report spanned four years and included more than 500 forensic investigations involving 230 million compromised records.

But on Monday, Qtrax was more than 12 hours late launching its music service. A day earlier, the big record companies made news by contradicting Qtrax. They said the company was not authorized to sell their music.

Services, such as Imeem and Last.fm, which only stream songs, offer music from all four major labels, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, The EMI Group, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

The issues with Qtrax illustrate two things. First, the labels have clearly signaled that they are willing to give ad-supported music a try–just not with downloads. Secondly, Qtrax executives should know better than to announce deals when they don’t have ink. Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz told CNET News.com on Sunday that the company had agreements, but acknowledged that they just weren’t signed.

What was once an eagerly awaited debut is turning into a fiasco for the New York-based start-up, which has tried for more than a year to get off the ground.

After interviews with managers at Qtrax and the record labels, it appears that a bit of both occurred.

At first blush, Qtrax seemed like a good idea.

Meanwhile, SpiralFrog, one of the best-known services and one that enables people to download to a PC and a handful of portable devices (but not the
iPod), has been toiling in the sector for nearly two years and has managed to land a music deal with only one top label: Universal.

As Qtrax struggles with licensing deals, the big record companies are partnering with a growing number of ad-supported sites that stream songs to listeners but don’t allow the music to be downloaded to computers or digital music players.

Perhaps actress Kelly Preston said it best in the movie Jerry McGuire: “It’s not ‘Trust my handshake.’ It’s make the sale. Get it signed. There shouldn’t be confusion about that.”

Qtrax is close to getting signatures from Universal and EMI, said the source but, “Qtrax spoke too soon.”

But everybody knows that without signed contracts, there is no deal.

Executives there wooed reporters by promising to corral illegal file sharing. They built an interface on top of the Gnutella network where millions of songs are pirated. They pledged to offer users a legal way to download and share music.

How this public relations nightmare affects Qtrax’s prospects for the future is unclear. But don’t believe the old adage that all publicity is good publicity. As it stands, the debacle undermines Qtrax’s competence, if not its integrity.

Previously, Qtrax had succeeded in striking agreements with at least two of the record companies as the start-up was preparing to ramp up. But sources with knowledge of the deals said those deals have expired.

But how did Qtrax get mired in this mix up? Is the company a victim of a misunderstanding? Were executives overly confident when boasting to reporters that they had signed the top labels?

Qtrax managers said they had convinced the big record labels that it could turn file sharing into a cash cow for them. They said all four of the most powerful labels were on board.