Brokekid.net

(via wired.com)

LOS ANGELES — The record industry opened a new front in its war against online piracy on Tuesday by surprising hundreds of thousands of Internet song swappers with an instant message warning that they could be “easily” identified and face “legal penalties.” About 200,000 users of the Grokster and Kazaa file-sharing services received the warning notice on Tuesday and at least 1 million will be getting the message within a week, according to music industry officials.

The copyright infringement warnings, which were sent by the Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of the major record labels, said in part: “It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer…. When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: DON’T STEAL MUSIC, either by offering it to others to copy or downloading it on a ‘file-sharing’ system like this. When you offer music on these systems, you are not anonymous and you can easily be identified.” (Wired)

(via cnn.com)

LOS ANGELES, California — Anyone who thinks they can control the Internet received an object lesson during the past week.

It all started when Madonna literally lent her voice to a popular antipiracy technique. Warner Music Group had audio files purporting to be her new songs uploaded onto peer-to-peer file-sharing services. Anyone who downloaded the decoys, however, heard nothing but the pop star swearing at them. But since then, the pithy profanity has taken on a life of its own.

Some observers thought Madonna was smart to fight piracy with its own tools. Others perceived a thrown gauntlet — hackers soon defaced Madonna’s Web site with an equally profane retort along with several downloadable files of the then-unreleased songs. The defacement also carried a marriage proposal to Morgan Webb, an associate producer and on-air presenter at TechTV who had nothing to do with the prank.

A third group saw a creative opportunity. “What the f— do you think you’re doing,” Madonna’s now-infamous phrase, is turning up in dozens of remixes and the computer-aided musical collages known as cutups or mashups. (CNN)

(via fortune.com)

Steve Jobs loves music. But as with a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley, his musical tastes are a little retro. He worships Bob Dylan and is the kind of obsessive Beatles fan who can talk your ear off about why Ringo is an underappreciated drummer.

So Dr. Dre, the rap-music Midas whose proteges include Snoop Dogg and Eminem, is the last person you’d expect to see huddled with Jobs, for hours on end, at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. No, they weren’t discussing whether John or Paul was the more talented Beatle. Rather, Steve had invited Dr. Dre up from Los Angeles for a private demonstration of Apple’s latest product. After checking it out, Dre had this to say: “Man, somebody finally got it right.” (Fortune)

(via wired.com)

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a slick and easy-to-use song download service on Monday that some experts said breaks down the barriers to online music distribution. At a big launch event in downtown San Francisco, Jobs showed off Apple’s new iTunes Music Store, which makes more than 200,000 songs from all five major music labels available at 99 cents a download.

“The Apple online music store is going to be the hottest way, we think, to acquire digital music,” he told the crowd of 200 press, musicians and executives from the music and computer industries. Dressed in his trademark jeans and turtleneck, and looking fashionably stubbly, Jobs said the service strikes the right balance between the convenience of downloading music over the Net and the need for the industry to get paid. The service, he said, allows Apple to refashion its controversial mantra from a couple of years ago, “Rip, mix, burn,” into the much more music industry-friendly “Acquire, manage and listen.” Built into iTunes (and already dubbed “Buy Tunes” by wags), the service is being hailed by musicians, analysts and executives as a breakthrough in online music distribution. (Wired)

(via nytimes.com)

Friday’s Times carried a front-page picture of a skull, with a group of Iraqis gathered around it. The skull was of a political prisoner from Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the grieving Iraqis were relatives who had exhumed it from a graveyard filled with other victims of Saddam’s torture. Just under the picture was an article about President Bush vowing that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, as he promised.

As far as I’m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam’s tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken. The thing about Saddam’s reign is that when you look at that skull, you don’t even know what period it came from his suppression of the Kurds or the Shiites, his insane wars with Iran and Kuwait, or just his daily brutality.

Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.’s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don’t think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way. (The New York Times)

(via pcworld.com)

Cisco Systems is offering a new mobile telephone for use with its IP Communications systems and voice-over-IP technology, the company said Monday. The Cisco Wireless IP Phone 7920 connects to an organization’s IP network through wireless access points using the common 802.11b wireless communications protocol, and is being marketed for organizations with mobile workforces such as hospitals, retailers, and universities, Cisco said. With the announcement, Cisco threw its hat in with a handful of other companies that are pioneering the development of mobile phones that rely on wireless LANs rather than traditional cellular networks to communicate.

Also on Monday, SpectraLink, in Boulder, Colorado, announced two mobile wireless handsets: the NetLink E340 Wireless Telephone and the NetLink i640 Wireless Telephone. Like the Cisco 7920, the SpectraLink phones use the 802.11b protocol to connect to wireless LANs and access voice-over-IP networks or circuit-switched PBX (private branch exchange) interfaces, according to SpectraLink.

In addition, mobile computing device maker Symbol Technologies has sold a number of wireless handsets under its NetVision brand since 1999, including a wireless handset and a combination bar code scanner and handset. The Symbol phones interoperate with other telephony gateways, including those from Mitel Networks and Nortel Networks, in addition to those from Cisco. (PCWorld)

(via nytimes.com)

Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.

Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States. Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner. (The New York Times)

(via washingtonpost.com)

First came the news that officials in Alabama may have to put President Bush on the ballot as a write-in candidate. It turns out Alabama isn’t the only state scrambling to figure out what it needs to do to ensure that the president’s name will appear on the state ballot next year.

The GOP’s unusually late nominating convention — it does not begin until Aug. 30 — is the problem. Bush is not scheduled to accept his party’s nomination until Sept. 2, 2004. That falls after the deadline for certifying presidential candidates not only in Alabama, but also in California, the District of Columbia and West Virginia. There are bills in the Alabama legislature to move its deadline from Aug. 31 to Sept. 5. But if, for some reason, they don’t pass, the president would be forced to run there as a write-in candidate. (Washington Post)