Family Entertainment Blog

A revamped online file-sharing service aims to woo legions of music fans by offering unlimited, free song downloads that are compatible with iPods, and all with the blessing of major recording companies.
Qtrax, which makes its debut Sunday, is the latest online music venture counting on the lure of free music to draw in music fans and on advertising to pay the bills, namely record company licensing fees.

The New York-based service was among several peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that emerged following the shutdown of Napster, the pioneer service that enabled millions to illegally copy songs stored in other music fans’ computers. Qtrax shut down after a few months following its 2002 launch to avoid potential legal trouble. The latest version of Qtrax still lets
 

users tap into file-sharing networks to search for music, but downloads come with copy-protection technology known as digital-rights management, or DRM, to prevent users from burning copies to a CD and calculate how to divvy up advertising sales with labels.

Qtrax downloads can be stored indefinitely on PCs and transferred onto portable music players, however.

The service, which boasts a selection of up to 30 million tracks, also promises that its music downloads will be playable on Apple Inc.’s iPods and Macintosh computers as early as March.

That’s unusual, as iPods only playback unrestricted MP3s files or tracks with Apple’s proprietary version of DRM, dubbed FairPlay.

“We’ve had a technical breakthrough which enables us to put songs on an iPod without any interference from FairPlay,” said Allan Klepfisz, Qtrax’s president and chief executive.

Klepfisz declined to give specifics on how Qtrax will make its audio files compatible with Apple devices, but noted that “Apple has nothing to do with it.”

Apple has been resistant in the past to license FairPlay to other online music retailers. That stance has effectively limited iPod users to loading up their players with tracks purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, or MP3s ripped from CDs or bought from vendors such as eMusic or Amazon.com.

A call to Apple was not immediately returned Saturday.

Rob Enderle, technology analyst at the San Jose-based Enderle Group, said he expects Apple would take steps to block Qtrax files from working on iPods.

Last fall, the company issued a software update for its iPhones that created problems for units modified by owners so they would work with a cellular carrier other than AT&T Inc. As a result, some modified phones ceased to work after the software update.

The move prompted antitrust lawsuits on behalf of some consumers.

Qtrax users can also download music videos and comb through album reviews, lyrics and other features. The service guarantees that users will never download spyware, adware or bogus audio files often found on file-sharing networks.

As long as the DRM on downloads and advertising in the Qtrax application aren’t too obtrusive, the music service may appeal to computer users now trolling for tracks via LimeWire and other unlicensed services, Enderle said.

“This is a way to get the stuff for free and not take the risk of having the (recording industry) show up at your doorstep with a six-figure lawsuit,” he said.

NASA began fueling shuttle Atlantis for liftoff Thursday, even though bad weather threatened to delay the mission to add another science lab to the international space station.
Forecasters said there was a 70 percent chance that rain, clouds and possibly even a severe thunderstorm would keep Atlantis on the pad for yet another day. The space shuttle already is two months late in delivering the European lab, Columbus, to the space station.
Faulty fuel gauges grounded Atlantis in December. Engineers worked round the clock and through the holidays to fix the problem, which turned out to be a bad connector in the external fuel tank.

Although confident of the repair, NASA officials monitored Atlantis’ fuel gauges with more interest than usual, once liquid hydrogen started flowing into the tank well before dawn. NASA said at least three of the four fuel gauges must work properly once Atlantis’ tank is filled, in order for the launch to proceed. The gauges are part of a critical safety system to help ensure
 

that the main engines do not run on an unexpectedly empty tank during the 8 1/2-minute climb to orbit. They have performed erratically during countdowns for nearly three years and postponed several launches.

Columbus — a $2 billion high-tech laboratory — is the European Space Agency’s primary contribution to the space station. In the making for 23 years, the lab has endured station redesigns and slowdowns, as well as a number of shuttle postponements and two shuttle accidents.

It will join the U.S. lab, Destiny, already flying for seven years. The much bigger Japanese lab Kibo, or Hope, will require three shuttle flights to get off the ground, beginning in March.

The Europeans also are on the verge of launching their new cargo ship, Jules Verne. It’s scheduled to blast off from French Guiana in early March.

“There’s going to be a lot of pride, a lot of people with good feelings in their stomachs, when these things go up,” said Europe’s space station program manager, Alan Thirkettle.

The European Space Agency already has spent more than $7 billion on the station program and plans to invest another $6 billion by 2015, Thirkettle said.

Besides Columbus, Atlantis will drop off a new space station resident, a French Air Force general who will take the place of NASA astronaut Daniel Tani and get Columbus working. Tani will return to Earth aboard the shuttle, ending a mission of nearly four months.

NASA is anxious to get Atlantis flying as soon as possible to keep alive its plan for six shuttle missions this year. The space agency faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring the shuttles.

Retailers and publishers have fought hard to work their way up in the ranking of Google’s search results and refine the search features of their own websites to help users once they arrive. Now, Google is taking a greater role in helping users search within particular sites. And some of the same retailers and publishers are not happy about it.

This month, the company introduced a search within a search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites such as those of Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain web addresses or company names - say, Best Buy - rather than entering a request like “mobile phones”.

The results of the search are almost all individual company pages. Google tops those results with a link to the home page of the web site in question, adds another search box, and offers users the chance to let Google search for certain things within that site.

The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination website.

Analysts generally praise the feature as helping users save steps, but for web publishers and retailers, there are trade-offs. While the service could help increase traffic, some users could be siphoned away as Google uses the prominence of the brands to sell ads - typically to competing companies.

“Google is showing a level of aggressiveness with this that’s just not needed,” says Alan Rimm-Kaufman, a former executive with electronics retailer Crutchfield who is now an internet consultant.

Google’s aggressiveness, Rimm-Kaufman says, ignores a user’s desire to reach a specific destination and it costs those websites visitors.

Take, for instance, a situation last week, when users of Google searched The Washington Post and were given a secondary search box. Those who typed jobs into that second box saw related results for the Post’s employment pages, but the results were bordered by ads for competing employment sites such as CareerBuilder or Monster.com.

So even though users began the process by stating their intention to reach the Post, Google’s ads steered at least some of them to competitors. Similar situations arose when users relied on Google to search
While executives of the Times and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive declined to comment, plenty of others assailed Google over what they saw as a heavy handed approach.

Google said it had not received many complaints directly from companies, but some search-engine specialists pounced when the company announced its service.

Ann Smarty, a search-engine marketing consultant who originated the SeoSmarty.com blog, speculated that the new feature could mean bad news for sites.

Other search-marketing specialists echoed her sentiments, and brands began to follow.

“Eventually this could be a huge problem if Google starts throwing this out there to all brands,” says Pinny Gniwisch, vice-president for marketing of Ice.com, an online jeweller.

Gniwisch, who is also on the board of Shop.org, an online retail industry group, says Google’s new feature does not appear when users search for Ice.com, but he says he would object if it did.

“This is essentially giving the customer a way to leave a search for your site,” he says.

Donna Hoffman, from the University of California, Riverside, predicts internet users “will really like this because it’s probably a better way to search a site than going to the sites themselves”.

“But as consumers appreciate this more, there’ll be more and more outcry from companies,” Hoffman says. “Consumers who see advertisements on Google when they search the Post’s or the Times’s content might view the ads as carrying the endorsement of those news publishers.

“Why would I advertise on those other sites when I could just advertise on Google and piggyback on the equity of the other brands?”

Rimm-Kaufman says the new Google service also diminishes a web publisher’s role in helping users find potentially useful content.

“You may want to editorialise differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content,” he says. “This moves you further out of the loop.”

Retailers, he adds, should be even more wary of this feature, and not because they will lose sales to competitors whose ads appear in Google’s refined search results.

“More sophisticated retail sites have search functions that take into account a customer’s past behaviour to suggest certain items, as well as more accurate data on which items are in stock,” he says.

“Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search. So for them, this will be a benefit.

“For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.”

That is the route that Amazon has apparently chosen.

The retailer declined to comment, but last week Google’s search within search function did not appear when users entered amazon.com into the search box.

A Google spokeswoman says the company has honoured such requests from a couple of businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

“So we ask them to try it out and see if they want it removed,” the spokeswoman says. “We think it could be a really useful feature.”

A pair of hoax ads on Craigslist cost an American man much of what he owned.

The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sergeant Colin Fagan.

But Robert Salisbury had no plans to leave. The independent contractor was at Emigrant Lake when he got a call from a woman who had stopped by his house to claim his horse.

On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.

“I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury said. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.”

The driver sped away after rebuking Salisbury. On his way home he saw other cars filled with his belongings.

Once home he was greeted by close to 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch.

The trespassers, armed with printouts of the ad, tried to brush him off.

“They honestly thought that because it appeared on the internet it was true,” Salisbury said. “It boggles the mind.”

Jacksonville police and Jackson County sheriff’s deputies arrived but by then several cars packed with Salisbury’s property had fled.

He turned some license-plate numbers over to police.

Michelle Easley had seen the ad that claimed Salisbury’s horse had been declared abandoned by the sheriff’s department and was free to a good home.

“I can’t stand to see a horse suffer so I drove out there and got her,” Easley said. “The horse didn’t look abandoned. She is in good shape for being 32 years old.”

But it looked odd, so she left a note on Salisbury’s door explaining the ad. She then decided to call to make sure the ad was legitimate when the second similar ad appeared.

“I feel bad because I was a part of it,” Easley said. “It felt right to call the police.”

Fagan praised Easley’s honesty but said prosecution was likely for anybody caught with Salisbury’s property.

Items can be returned with no questions asked, Fagan said.

Detectives have contacted Craigslist’s legal team to try to trace the ad.

Meanwhile, Salisbury could not even relax on his porch swing.

Someone took it.

NEW YORK - Some workers are doing it at Dunkin’ Donuts, at Hilton hotels, even at Marine Corps bases.

Employees at a growing number of businesses are starting and ending their days by pressing a hand or finger to a scanner that logs the precise time of their arrival and departure — information that is automatically reflected in payroll records.

Manufacturers say these biometric devices improve efficiency and streamline payroll operations. Employers big and small buy them with the dual goals of keeping workers honest and automating outdated record-keeping systems that rely on paper time sheets.

The new systems have raised complaints, however, from some workers who see the efforts to track their movements as excessive or creepy.

“They don’t even have to hire someone to harass you anymore. The machine can do it for them,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO. “The palm print thing really grabs people as a step too far.”

The International Biometric Group, a consulting firm, estimated that $635 million worth of these high-tech devices were sold last year, and projects that the industry will be worth more than $1 billion by 2011.

Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, a leading manufacturer of hand scanners based in Campbell, Calif., said it has sold at least 150,000 of the devices to Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s franchises, Hilton hotels and to Marine Corps bases, who use them to track civilian hours.

Protests over using palm scanners to log employee time have been especially loud in New York City, where officials are spending $410 million to install an automated attendance tracking system that may eventually be used by 160,000 city workers.

Scores of civil servants who are members of Local 375 of the Civil Service Technical Guild rallied Tuesday against a plan to add the city medical examiner’s office to the list of 17 city agencies which already have the scanners in place.

The scanners have rankled draftsmen, planners and architects in the city’s Parks Department, which began using them last year.

“Psychologically, I think it has had a huge impact on the work force here because it is demeaning and because it’s a system based on mistrust,” said Ricardo Hinkle, a landscape architect who designs city parks.

He called the timekeeping system a bureaucratic intrusion on professionals who never used to think twice about putting in extra time on a project they cared about, and could rely on human managers to exercise a little flexibility on matters regarding work hours.

“The creative process isn’t one that punches in and punches out,” he said.

A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Matthew Kelly, said the system isn’t meant to be intrusive and has clear benefits over old-style punch clocks or paper time sheets.

The city expects to save $60 million per year by modernizing a complicated record keeping system that now requires one full-time timekeeper for every 100 to 250 employees. The new system, dubbed CityTime, would free up thousands of city employees to do less paper-pushing.

Another benefit of the system is curtailing fraud. Several times each year, New York City’s Department of Investigation charges city employees with taking unauthorized time off and falsifying timecards to make it looked as though they worked.

Other cities have embraced similar technology.

Cities as big as Chicago and as small as Tahlequah, Okla., have turned to fingerprint-driven ID systems to record employee work hours in recent few years. And the systems have been introduced into plenty of other workplaces without much grumbling by employees, especially those already used to punching a clock.

But the New York workers aren’t the first to fight it. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees complained vigorously two years ago after the city of Pittsburgh proposed installing fingerprint readers.

“We had a lot of questions, a lot of concerns, and so far they haven’t put it in,” said AFCME Council 84 Director Richard Caponi.

Jon Mooney, Ingersoll Rand’s general manger of biometrics, said the privacy concerns are unfounded. The hand scanners don’t keep large databases of people’s fingerprints — only a record of their hand shape, he said.

Still, union officials in New York said they are concerned that the machines could eventually be used not just to crack down on employees skipping work, but to nitpick honest workers or invade their privacy.

“The bottom line is that these palm scanners are designed to exercise more control over the workforce,” said Claude Fort, president of Local 375. “They aren’t there for security purposes. It has nothing to do with productivity. … It is about control, and that is what makes us nervous