January 3, 2005
Volume 7, Issue 6
Ringing in the New Year with VoIP
Excerpted from CRN Report by Jennifer Hagendorf Folett
While cost savings and productivity improvements that stem from tying in remote workers will continue to drive voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) sales in 2005, other technologies linked to converged networking, such as video-over-IP (VidIP) and voice-over-wireless-LAN (VoWLAN), are also spurring adoption, solution providers said.
"We're looking at a three-fold increase in growth just on our VoIP business next year," said Doug Bowlds, vice president at AAC Associates, a Cisco Systems partner in Vienna, VA, whose IP communications division represents about one-quarter of its $15 million in revenue.
AAC Associates has seen widespread acceptance of VoIP among its education, local and federal government customers, Bowlds said. "We have a whole lot more success stories to point to." Growing interest in applications that add video to converged networks is also driving sales of IP telephony to customers that previously wouldn't consider moving to VoIP, Bowlds said.
"Video is helping us extend it to other areas. For example, police departments typically have stayed away from VoIP, but once we start showing what they can do when we add IP video surveillance, they start getting really interested," he said.
Bowlds said his biggest challenge for 2005 will be finding enough VoIP engineers to fill the open spots on his growing staff. He currently has 15 VoIP-specialized engineers and is looking to add 10 more during the next 12 months.
"You can't put an ad in the paper to hire a VoIP engineer. We'll be doing a lot of in-house training," he said.
While some solution providers see 2005 as a year to bulk up their IP telephony practices, others plan to jump into the market for the first time. "We probably will be investing this year to get involved in VoIP, adding people, getting people cross-trained," said Steve Thorpe, president of Adaptive Communications, a solution provider in Portsmouth, NH.
The BitTorrent Effect
Excerpted from Wired News Report by Clive Thompson
Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen's blazing-fast P2P software has turned the Internet into a universal TiVo. BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3.
More than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application. If any one of them misses their favorite TV show, no worries. Surely someone has posted it as a "torrent."
Broadband providers allow their users to download at superfast rates, but let them upload only very slowly, creating a bottleneck: if two peers try to swap a compressed copy of "Meet the Fockers" – say, 700 megs – the recipient will receive at a speedy 1.5 megs a second, but the sender will be uploading at maybe one-tenth of that rate.
Paradoxically, BitTorrent's architecture means that the more popular the file is the faster it downloads – because more people are pitching in. Better yet, it's a virtuous cycle. Users download and share at the same time; as soon as someone receives even a single piece of "Fockers," his computer immediately begins offering it to others.
You could think of BitTorrent as Napster redux – another rumble in the endless copyright wars. But BitTorrent is something deeper and more subtle. It's a technology that is changing the landscape of broadcast media.
"All hell's about to break loose," says Brad Burnham, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures in Manhattan, which studies the impact of new technology on traditional media. BitTorrent does not require the wires or airwaves that the cable and network giants have spent billions constructing and buying.
"Blogs reduced the newspaper to the post. In TV, it'll go from the network to the show," says Jeff Jarvis, president of the Internet strategy company Advance.net and founder of Entertainment Weekly.
The real value of the so-called BitTorrent broadcaster would be in highlighting the good stuff, much as the collaborative filtering of Amazon and TiVo helps people pick good material. Eric Garland, CEO of P2P analysis firm BigChampagne, says, "A next-gen broadcaster will say, 'Look, there are 2,500 shows out there, but here are the few that you're really going to like.'"
The major networks are watching the situation cautiously. They don't want to ignore the potential of the "peercasting" model, but they can't endorse it without knowing where their revenue will come from. The task for broadcasters is clear: take this new platform and mine it for gold, the way Hollywood, which squawked about VHS, figured out how to make billions off video rentals.
Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that, "The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We submitted a year-end report on the implementation of P2P PATROL (Peer-to-Peer Parents And Teens React On Line) to Senators Barbara Boxer, John Cornyn, Richard Durbin, and Gordon Smith, as requested.
We also plan to review "P2P Software Risks," the initial work product of the Consumer Disclosures Working Group (CDWG); and "P2P Revenue Engine (P2PRE)," the DCIA-sponsored project involving ten companies that we believe fully addresses the concerns of major music labels and movie studios regarding unauthorized content entered by consumers into P2P distribution.
We look forward very much to providing Congressional leaders with our assessment of the kind of database, or rights-holder registry, which will be necessary to make the P2PRE project a success with respect to protecting the rights and interests of entertainment content providers.
The DCIA's best practices leader, Elaine Reiss, organized CDWG during the summer, obtaining voluntary participation of leading P2P software developers and distributors from around the world, and mounting a good-faith effort engaging with qualified federal regulators to improve upon consumer communications as requested at the June 23rd P2P hearing chaired by Senator Smith.
Its goals are aligned with "systematically providing information in clear and understandable language," and CDWG would welcome ideas for "regularly and conspicuously" reminding users that their software is active, for example, as well as for simplifying end user license agreements (EULAs), so that the standardized disclosures regime and other consumer communications can be fully responsive to Congressional concerns.
Concern over abusers of P2P software programs who may enter "misnamed files containing pornographic content" is also shared by our young industry, which has been particularly proactive in responding to this issue and has taken a zero tolerance stance against child pornography.
The current Kazaa family filter, for instance, set at its maximum level and password-protected so that it cannot be circumvented by children, will return no pornographic images or videos, while leading commercial search engines will return hundreds of thousands of results for porn searches pre-pended with such innocent-sounding terms as Elmo, Baseball, or Sleeping Beauty.
The first two programs of P2P PATROL, related to law enforcement support and deterrence, were launched in May and August respectively. The third program, focused on education, was launched in November. At its core, the purpose of the education program is to provide tools enabling P2P users to recognize, remove, and report criminally obscene content inadvertently encountered online.
Recent P2P PATROL highlights include its Fall quarterly working session; launch of the www.P2Ppatrol.com consumer website; meetings and follow-up communications with representatives of State Attorneys General, the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC); plus planning for its Winter quarterly working session.
The P2P PATROL now involves representatives of federal and state law enforcement agencies as well as more than ten private sector companies and two trade associations.
All DCIA Members have agreed to participate in the law enforcement program. Altnet and Grokster have completed preparations, and Altnet has submitted an agreement for rolling-out the deterrence program. In addition, INTENT MediaWorks and RazorPop have launched and announced this program, meaning that certain P2P users of BearShare, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella, Kazaa, etc. already receive deterrent warnings. Options for an automated reporting tool developed by ASACP and RazorPop will highlight the Winter working session, after which sign-ups for the education program can begin.
As important as P2P PATROL is, however, we believe the industry needs to continue to have as its priority efforts such as the P2PRE project, which address issues of about-to-be-released copyrighted works, as well as published CDs and DVDs – in fact, all major entertainment content released in whatever formats – entered into P2P redistribution, not only by rights holders, but also by unauthorized software users.
Our prevailing view is that our still nascent industry's opponents continue to have as their priority the banning of P2P technology, whether through actions of Congress or the courts, and now clearly also have as their ultimate objective the annulment of the Betamax doctrine.
Currently their rhetoric has as its target audience the Supreme Court, in a wrongful attempt to pervert the judicial process by inaccurately implying that P2P, as a technology, is uniquely configured to serve as a conveyance for illegal child pornography – which is patently false.
P2P software is designed to be a highly efficient and very competitive distribution channel for rights holders who choose to use it. Peer-to-peer digital rights management technologies (P2P DRMs) work for rights-holder-entered works; such solutions as the P2PRE add the remaining elements necessary for P2P to be a fully licensed distribution channel. Now it's up to rights holders to embrace P2P.
We need lawmaker support overseeing progress in commercial development of authorized P2P distribution of copyrighted works.
Grid Computing 101
Excerpted from eWeek Report by Steven Vaughan-Nichols
Technically speaking, grid computing enables programs to be spread out over multiple computers via a network so that massive jobs can be done as efficiently as possible.
The component systems do not have to share the same architecture or operating systems. For example, with United Devices' Grid MP Enterprise, users can run grid applications across heterogeneous systems running 32-bit Windows and Linux on x86, AIX on POWER, and Solaris on SPARC.
In some ways, this may sound like old hat. Distributed computing projects, such as SETI@home, have long enabled users running everything from OS/2 to HP/UX to Windows 95 to tackle small parts of huge jobs.
With SETI and similar projects, the machines are dedicated to a single task. In a grid, resources can also be shared dynamically to address multiple problems.
"The goal is to create the illusion of a simple yet large and powerful, self-managing, virtual computer out of a large collection of connected heterogeneous systems sharing various combinations of resources," Viktors Berstis, an IBM software engineer, said in the IBM Redbook Fundamentals of Grid Computing.
To make this happen, a grid uses a program that works in concert with the various operating systems to coordinate the efforts of various machines. Typically, the program enforces a set of standards and protocols to establish how a system shares resources.
There are several ways to do this. One is when jobs are assigned by "scavenging." With this approach, idle machines signal the scheduler that they're available for more work. In another approach, "reservations," systems are pre-assigned to a schedule for efficient workflow.
Grids can share more than just processors; they also can share drive space for both greater storage room and more robust data availability. Usually this is done with mountable networked file systems, such as AFS (Andrew File System), that old Unix distributed storage favorite; NFS (Network File System); or DFS (Distributed File System). The grid software, in turn, can provide virtual storage with an overreaching file system that spans both drives and file systems.
A grid also can be used to set multiple computers to work on a single problem. In such cases, grids must support IPC (interprocess communication) between programs running on different systems. Typically, grids that support such activity borrow MPC (massively parallel computing) message-passing models.
To date, most grid systems, such as Sun Microsystems' N1 Grid Engine and DataSynapse's GridServer, have been proprietary designs. Recently, however, open-source approaches based on Linux systems have gained popularity.
Popular Telephony P2P Revolutionizes VoIP
Excerpted from Internet Telephony Magazine Report by Tom Keating
The first PBXs started at the Central Office (CO) using Centrex, and as its name implies, it was a "centralized" architecture located in the carriers' offices. PBXs then evolved to a CPE-based (customer-premise equipment) model, which again required a "centralized" PBX to host all the call switching/routing functionality.
And now with Popular Telephony's Peerio P2P (peer-to-peer) technology, the intelligence has moved from a centralized PBX down to the end-user's device — namely the phone itself, which is more than just an evolution — it's a revolution. This peer-to-peer technology turns the enterprise PBX market on its head.
Peerio implements a server-less and switch-less telecommunications system via portable middleware installed in embedded devices such as VoIP hardware-based phones as well as support for a soft-client.
Peerio is also protocol-agnostic, supporting SIP, H.323, and other standard and proprietary protocols. By eliminating routing through a centralized PBX, node, or switch Peerio achieves dramatic cost reductions.
BitTorrent Operator Bites Back at MPAA
Excerpted from InternetNews Report By Jim Wagner
LokiTorrent, a Web site that tracks and indexes BitTorrent files, says it's setting up a legal defense fund to fight a lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
The site's operators have collected most of the $30,000 needed to start defending themselves from the MPAA's lawsuit, according to a recent posting on the Web site.
The action was filed against LokiTorrent on December 14th. That same day, the movie industry association sent site operators a cease-and-desist order to stop them from hosting trackers that match BitTorrent users with copyrighted movies.
Lawsuits were also filed against the operators of BitTorrent trackers Centraltracker.org and Centraldownload.org. Edward Webber, owner of LokiTorrent, said it's only a matter of days before he's served a lawsuit specifically against him.
The $30,000, Webber said, will fund the first month's legal expenses in what will likely be a protracted court battle with the MPAA and its deep pockets in Hollywood.
"Personally, it's ludicrous to be suing a tracker for copyright infringement that hosts no copyright material," he said. "It's tantamount to suing the highway department for having roads that drug smugglers use. The random pirating of software just doesn't add up to being able to shut down the site."
Sites like LokiTorrent, which host forums that index the torrent files in use, have been under increasing attack by the content industry. Earlier this month, popular BitTorrent tracking site Suprnova.org – shut down its service. A similar site, Suprnova.com, according to the Web site, is a "100% Legal" BitTorrent tracker site, where visitors must register their name, e-mail address and pay a monthly fee to use the site.
LokiTorrent's site contains a "terms and conditions" disclaimer for all new site registrants, not taking responsibility for the torrents listed on its site, which are input by BitTorrent users. The disclaimer states users must gain "written permission of the copyright owners" before using any copyrighted material.
Coming Events of Interest
- Digital Hollywood at CES 2005 - Digital Hollywood will present a full program at the Consumer Electronics Show in the Las Vegas Convention Center North Hall, January 6th-8th.
The DCIA is proud to moderate "Next Generation P2P Music and Film - DRM, Paid for Pass-Along, and Other Distributed Computing Models and the Entertainment Industries" featuring Adrian Sexton, Executive Director, Business Development, Lions Gate Entertainment; Richard Conlon, VP Licensing, BMI; Derek Broes, Windows Client Strategic Relations & Policy, Microsoft; Marc Morgenstern, Vice President, Overpeer; Mark Ishikawa, Chief Executive and Technology Officer, BayTSP; Michael Weiss, President & CEO, StreamCast Networks, and Gerd Leonhard, CEO, ThinkAndLink.biz and Senior Advisor, Media Rights Technologies.
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P2P PATROL - Parents And Teens React On Line - The industry's anti-child-pornography initiative will hold its quarterly working session with private sector and law enforcement representatives in Dallas, TX on February 1st. For more information and to learn how you can contribute to P2P PATROL, please contact sari@dcia.info or call 888-864-DCIA.
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2005 Media Summit New York - Held at the McGraw Hill Building, February 9th–10th, this will be the premier international conference on motion pictures, television, cable & satellite, broadband, wireless, publishing, radio, magazines, news & print media, advertising and marketing. "Global Media + Technology Innovation = Communications Revolution" is this year's theme.
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The DCIA will hold its Winter General Meeting the evening of February 9th in conjunction with MSNY. Please contact Member Services leader Karen Kaplowitz at 888-890-4240 or karen@dcia.info for more information.
- Canadian Music Week - Headquartered at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, March 2nd-5th, CMW will be the largest music and entertainment convention in Canada with delegates representing music broadcasters, manufacturers, retailers and distributors, new media/Internet companies, recording artists, and musicians.
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