Warner Music enters social-networking content deal

Warner Music Group has signed a deal to allow its entire catalog to be played over the fast-growing social-networking music service LastFM, the innovative site that links music fans to new and old hits.

With more than 15 million active users per month, LastFM has earned glowing praise for its system which recommends songs by tracking a listener's music-playing habits and automatically linking them to fans with similar tastes.

The deal with Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, is the first with one of the major labels. The network's co-founder, Martin Stiksel, said LastFM is in talks with the other three major labels and content holders.

Warner, home to Madonna and Red Hot Chili Peppers, said the deal underscored its commitment to offering consumers unique ways to experience its music.

Stephen Bryan, who looks at business development for Warner Music Group, told Reuters that LastFM reflected a broader trend that showed the power of community-driven services.

"This will help us harness that power for consumers," he said.

LastFM was launched in 2002 but rose in popularity in 2005 when it developed a new method for connecting people with music and artists with listeners.

Music fans who sign up at LastFM can agree to link their digital media player, such as Apple's iTunes, for example, to LastFM's site, which then monitors the choice of music.

With this information, it can then recommend new or old songs, artists or local concerts, drawing from the choices of other fans who have similar tastes.

The network also provides a free, advertising-supported online personalized radio-streaming service which will play music from the hundreds of independent labels it has deals with.

"It is very difficult to keep up to date with all the new music that is coming out," Stiksel told Reuters in an interview. "Being confronted with too much choice can actually be daunting, and you go back to listening to the same old stuff.

"What we wanted to do was make music discovery very simple. This is the first major content deal we have done, and this is the official stamp of approval," he added.

The company said the service had also been popular with independent labels and artists who use it to target new fans.

LastFM said the deal would allow Warner's music to be offered over its service in the U.S. and Europe and would roll out in full over the next week.

LastFM's biggest markets are the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Turkey and Finland, where 8 percent of Finnish Internet users are LastFM users.

Amazon, TiVo partner to put downloaded videos on TV

Amazon.com, the online retail giant, and TiVo, pioneer of the digital video recorder, are teaming up to help downloaded movies and TV shows make the leap to television screens.

In a deal expected to be announced Wednesday, Amazon and TiVo will allow TiVo owners who shop on Amazon's digital download store, called Amazon Unbox, to send films and TV shows to their broadband-connected TiVo machines, and pause and fast-forward through them as they do a regular TV program.

The partnership gives Amazon an advantage over other download services like the iTunes Store, CinemaNow and a new service from Wal-Mart. Moving video files purchased on those sites from the PC to the television is tricky, generally requiring the setup of a home network.

Apple plans to start selling a device this month that will attach to a TV and pull in videos from a computer over a wireless network.

TiVo and Amazon will begin testing the new service on Wednesday and plan to make it available more broadly in the coming weeks to the 1.5 million owners of broadband-connected TiVos.

To activate the service, TiVo owners must register their machines on Amazon's site. With each purchase or rental, they will have the option to send a digital copy of the movie or show to their TiVos, in addition to downloading it to their PC.

There is no additional charge for the service, which is called Amazon Unbox on TiVo. The service will not work for satellite or cable TV subscribers whose set-top boxes run TiVo software.

Executives at Amazon and TiVo said bypassing the PC would open the digital download market to a more mainstream audience.

"Certainly there is a phenomenon of people watching short video clips on sites like YouTube," said TiVo's chief executive, Thomas S. Rogers. "But our research clearly shows that when it comes to full-length movies and television shows, for the real experience, it needs to be on the TV set."

Bill Carr, vice president for digital media at Amazon, said that the service would also provide a better experience than the video-on-demand stores offered by cable companies, mostly because its selection is greater and the Internet allows for easier browsing.

"As we know, a lot of people spend their time shopping and browsing for content they love on their PC, and the cable services don't allow you to do that," Carr said.

Amazon Unbox, which was introduced last September, received poor early reviews for its clunky software and slow downloads. Amazon says the average movie should take about an hour to download on a fast broadband connection, but users have reported longer waits.

Videos rented from the site must be watched within 30 days, and once a video starts playing it must be watched within 24 hours.

Most of the media companies that sell or rent TV shows and movies through Amazon Unbox, including CBS, Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers, will make them available to TiVo users. Others, including Sony, are not yet signed up but Rogers said he expected them to come aboard shortly.


Entire contents, Copyright © 2007 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

"The main thing is that there was very little impact on the general public, the servers were able to hold up against the attacks," said Zully Ramzan,

All Internet service providers would have to keep track of what their customers are doing online to aid police in future investigations under legislation introduced Tuesday as part of a Republican "law and order agenda."

Employees of any Internet provider who fail to store that information will face fines and prison terms of up to one year, the bill says. The U.S. Justice Department could order the companies to store those records forever.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, called it a necessary anti-cybercrime measure. "The legislation introduced today will give law enforcement the tools it needs to find and prosecute criminals," he said in a statement.

A second requirement, also embedded in Smith's so-called Safety Act (click for PDF), requires owners of sexually explicit Web sites to post warning labels on their pages or face imprisonment. This echoes, nearly word for word, an earlier proposal from last year that was approved by a Senate committee but never made it to a floor vote.

Even though both requirements are central to a Republican-led effort, neither data retention nor Web labeling are that partisan. A Senate committee approved a telecommunications bill that included Web labeling by a 15-7 vote in June. And Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, has been the most vocal proponent of data retention in the entire Congress.

Other bills in the Republicans' "law and order" agenda are related to terrorism, the death penalty, gangs, computer data breaches and drug trafficking.

The legislative fusillade marks the renewal of a political tussle that began in earnest last April, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called on Congress to target Internet providers with new regulations, which have been generally opposed by telecommunications companies and civil liberties organizations. CNET News.com was the first to report that the Bush administration has been pushing for such a rule privately since mid-2005.

Until this week, however, no formal bill had been introduced in the U.S. Congress.

Supporters of the proposal say it's necessary to help track criminals if police don't respond immediately to reports of illegal activity and the relevant logs are deleted by Internet providers. They cite cases of child molestation, for instance. Industry representatives respond by saying there's no evidence that Internet providers have dragged their feet when responding to subpoenas from law enforcement.

Details about data retention requirements would be left to Gonzales. At a minimum, the bill says, the regulations must require storing records "such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders."

Because there is no limit on how broad the rules can be, Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, or e-mail conversations indefinitely. (The bill does not, however, explicitly cover search engines or Web hosting companies, which officials have talked about before as targets of regulation.)

That broad wording also would permit the records to be obtained by private litigants in noncriminal cases, such as divorces and employment disputes. That raises additional privacy concerns, civil libertarians say.

The American Civil Liberties Union is skeptical of data retention and Web labeling. "It's going to be very difficult for Web sites to know whether they fit into this," said ACLU legislative counsel Marv Johnson, referring to the labeling rules. "And then when you throw in the 'sexually explicit materials' definition, does that include safe sex Web sites?"

"Preservation" vs. "Retention"
Currently, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention, or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on if a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, Internet providers are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency.

When adopting its data retention rules, the European Parliament approved U.K.-backed requirements saying that communications providers in its 25 member countries--several of which had enacted their own data retention laws already--must retain customer data for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years.

The Europe-wide requirement applies to a wide variety of "traffic" and "location" data, including the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time, and duration of phone calls, voice over Internet Protocol calls, or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the "content" of the communications is not supposed to be retained. The rules are expected to take effect in 2008.

Internet backbone at center of suspected attack

There are signs that hackers attacked key parts of the backbone of the Internet on Tuesday, but no damage seems to have been done, experts said.

The attack appears to have focused on the Domain Name System, which maps text-based domain names, such as "News.com," to the actual numeric IP addresses of servers connected to the Internet, and vice versa. Several key DNS servers saw traffic spike in the early morning on Tuesday, several experts said--a sign of an attack.

"It is an unusual large amount of traffic that is hitting DNS servers," said John Crain, chief technical officer at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which operates one of the main so-called root DNS servers. "We see large attacks on a regular basis, but this hit quite a few servers, so it was fairly large."

Yet the DNS servers were able to withstand the onslaught, Crain added. "It was irritating. It ruined my night's sleep. It was extraordinary in the fact that it happened to multiple systems at once, but this is not affecting Internet users," he said.

DNS serves as the address books for the Internet. There are 13 official root DNS servers, which sit at the top of the DNS hierarchy. These root servers get queried only if other DNS servers, like those at an internet service provider, don't have the right IP address for a specific Web site.

If part of the DNS system goes down, Web sites could become unreachable and e-mail could become undeliverable. But DNS is built to be resilient, and attacks on the system are rare. In 2002, a similar denial-of-service attack also failed.

"The main thing is that there was very little impact on the general public, the servers were able to hold up against the attacks," said Zully Ramzan, a researcher at Symantec Security Response. "The Internet in general was designed to even withstand a nuclear attack."

The barrage of data being apparently targeted at the DNS system started around 2.30 a.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday. Multiple root servers saw a traffic spike, but the "G" server, run by the U.S. Department of Defense, and "L," run by ICANN, seem to have gotten the brunt of it, Ramzan said. ICANN's Crain confirmed that impression.

While ICANN and Symantec didn't see any effect on the Internet at large, Internet service provider Neustar did see slow downs on the Net. "We would call it a brownout instead of a blackout. It was significant, but it did not take anything down," a representative for the company said.

The true cause of the traffic surge still needs to be determined, both Ramzan and Crain said.