Lo and behold, 2wire s media subscription service is Blockbuster

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The beginning of Blockbuster Video s convergence into the service it needs to be to survive in this evolving video market, has finally begun this morning with the announcement of its streaming media system and its player of choice.

Add to your growing list of Questions People Forgot to Ask, the one where DVR and streaming media device manufacturer 2wire is asked who, exactly, it expects to provide streaming media for that device. Two weeks ago, 2wire premiered its MediaPoint device, with the promise of providing a fully-converged experience of Internet video and local media on the television.

With a 2wire board member having just joined ATT as its new CTO , there was some speculation that MediaPoint may become a delivery vehicle for ATT s U-verse fiberoptic service. And with 2wire already supplying U-Verse with gateway equipment, there was some presumption that ATT would play into MediaPoint as well. ATT did announce its completion of the Total Home DVR service rollout, on the day after 2wire introduced the media to MediaPoint.

But a check of the back of the boxes reveals that U-verse s 2wire gateways are geared for coaxial, while MediaPoint is something else : an extender for whatever the viewer s existing broadband connection may already be.

So if not ATT, then who provides the streaming media? With Netflix already taken , who s left? This morning, 2wire provided the answer, for all those who were playing at home but failed to buzz in: It s Blockbuster, which also announced the premiere of its long-awaited -- and, some analysts say, already too late -- on-demand streaming movie service, a direct competitor to Netflix.

The charter member s offer is compelling: When customers pre-purchase 25 streaming movie rentals from their Blockbuster Video retailer for a package deal of 99, they receive the MediaPoint box free. Thereafter, each rental is 1.99.

The true test, however, given how close it already is to the holiday season, will be the availability of MediaPoint devices through Blockbuster retailers. Distribution of devices, as many gamers know, has been a perennial problem for movie rental establishments. This morning, all 2wire and Blockbuster are saying is that they promise to begin shipping in time for the holiday season. Given current shipping schedules, you d think that would mean sometime last week.

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Talks stalled over The Beatles on Apple s iTunes

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Paul McCartney this week released a new album on to iTunes, and he wants the Beatles entire music back catalog to be up there, too. But will Apple Inc., Apple Corps, and EMI ever be able to just Let It Be?

Paul McCartney still wants The Beatles legendary rock tunes to be available on Apple s iTunes, but talks have reportedly gotten bogged down. After a trademark dispute of several decades between Apple Inc. and Apple Corps, negotiations are now going on between Apple and EMI, the Beatles former record label.

I really hope it will happen because I think it should, McCartney reportedly said, in an interview with the BBC.

Although music from individual Beatles members McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the late John Lennon and George Harrison is already sold on iTunes, The Beatles is now one of the few major acts to be absent from Apple Inc. s music site, with the exceptions of AC DC, Kid Rock, and country singer Garth Brooks.

In order to seal a deal with Apple Inc., however, EMI must secure an agreement with Apple Corps, the group set up to manage the Beatles record catalog, to make the back catalog available in digital form on iTunes.

Back in March of this year, reports in the British media said McCartney had agreed to make the entire Beatles song catalog available on iTunes, under a 400 million deal involving royalty payments to McCartney, Starr, the families of Lennon and Harrison, and possibly to rights holders Michael Jackson, EMI, and Sony Corp. as well.

Last year, Apple Inc. and Apple Corps reached final settlement of a legal battle which started back in 1978, when Apple Corps filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple Computer. An initial settlement reached in 1981 made it difficult for Apple Computer to enter the music business later.

Times change, though. This year, Apple s iTunes claimed on several occasions to have become the most popular site on the Web for music downloads .

The Beatles music still isn t up there. But under the collective banner of The Fireman, McCartney this week launched a new, experimental album called Electric Arguments, which is now downloadable from Apple s site.
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DHS proposes funky fix for RFID security

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A proposal by the Department of Homeland Security attempts to address one potential security problem with RFID-chipped passports, but leaves more obvious problems hanging fire.

In an effort to detect attempts to clone the data stored on RFID chips used on US Passport Cards, DHS on Wednesday announced that it is recommending that manufacturers supplying these RFID chips include a unique identifier number, or Tag Identifier TID .

The TID would be used to ascertain when a chip s data has been cloned, as one would do to create a fake passport. If two passports with the same identifier number turned up at the border, one of them could be deduced as fake. That number would actually be the second unique number in the chip, since all a passport s RFID chip stores is a unique number that is indexed in a database. Currently the chips hold one unique number and one generic manufacturer code; that generic code is the one that would be replaced with a TID.

It s an identification model that works reasonably well with mobile phones and automobiles, but an identity document is a different creature. Conceivably, the ID number might help to determine whether, for instance, a hacker intercepting the snail mail has waved a reader near a State Department envelope and picked off the data without having to open the envelope -- with contactless technology, the envelope would not have to be opened. But the model may not help with other security issues RFID researchers, privacy activists, and anti-terrorism experts have flagged.

Some of their concerns apply to any common RFID-bearing item. For instance, since the chips themselves haven t much computational power, you can t do much to harden them from a security standpoint. Various cryptographic techniques have been advanced for hardening RFID chips, but those all cost money. The chips used in US passports are Electronic Product Code EPC Class One Generation Two chips, which operate in the 860-960 MHz band of the spectrum. Those cost about ten cents each, and are so non-hardened that observers have called them essentially wireless barcodes.

The numbers stored on an RFID are indexed a database on a presumably secure server, so by themselves, they wouldn t convey much information about the bearer. But simply knowing a chip s unique number can enable tracking of that chip s whereabouts. So if one keeps one s passport in one s possession at all times the way one s supposed to overseas, tracking the chip would mean tracking the passport holder.

But RFID-chipped passports may present a terrible attack surface simply by existing. RFID chips don t actively announce their presence, but inexpensive and widely available readers can sense them -- and can sense when there are a number of them gathered together.

One security professional who travels internationally and asked that he not be named suggests that if terrorists wanted to pinpoint the location of large groups of Americans a guided tour? a popular expat hangout? , the specific information on any one RFID chip would be far less useful than the simple ability to sense where a bunch of RFID chip carriers were grouped -- the very fact of their grouping may be information enough. Under those circumstances, grabbing the unique number s doesn t matter, since the specific ID data is unimportant; all that matters is the presence of the chips, and thus the targeted Americans.

Savvy owners of chipped passports or cards keep them in Faraday-cage wallets or sleeves. Faraday cages being what they are, not every kind of cage blocks every frequency, but the chips used in passports can be blocked fairly effectively...until you get to the TSA security checkpoint and your passport jacket sets off the metal detector.

It s unlikely that any scanning issues will be seriously addressed until DHS officials and security researchers can agree on what s possible with these chips. On the DHS site, the page explaining RFID chips claims that vicinity chips such as those used in travel documents can be read 20-30 feet away, while proximity chips must be just a few inches from the reader. The State Department, by the way, originally pushed for use of the relatively safer proximity chips; DHS however won the debate, and that s why your passport can be read by an official standing outside your vehicle.

However, those are generally minimum ranges, and variety of tests indicate that chips can be read at several multiples of that maximum distance. In fact, a paper released in late October by researchers at RSA and the University of Washington PDF available here found that the inexpensive chips used in US passports were readable at a whopping 50 meters.
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Electric Cloud Delivers Continuous Integration 2.0 to Ecli...

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New Version of ElectricCommander Features Preflight Builds and Tests for Scalable, Reliable Continuous Integration

Electric Cloud , the leading provider of software production management SPM solutions, today announced that a new version of its ElectricCommander SPM automation software features an integration with the Eclipse IDE Integrated Development Environment , enabling Eclipse and Java developers to make the agile best practice of continuous integration truly scalable and reliable.

ElectricCommander 3.0, available today, features preflight builds and tests accessible from the Eclipse IDE that can virtually eliminate broken builds and make continuous integration a reality for Java development shops.

Continuous integration is a well-known agile best practice that promises to speed development and improve quality, but it can actually slow development and hurt quality by introducing frequently broken builds. ElectricCommander 3.0 reduces broken builds with push-button preflight build and test functionality that catches errors early in the process, before they impact the productivity of the rest of the team. Through the Eclipse integration, ElectricCommander can deliver scalable, reliable continuous integration -- dubbed Continuous Integration 2.0 -- to Java developers.

Continuous integration is a powerful concept, but its usefulness has been limited because it just doesn t scale easily, especially under a heavy load, said Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud CEO. With software getting larger and more complex, this problem will only escalate. ElectricCommander delivers Continuous Integration 2.0 for Eclipse and Java developers with a touch of a button, enabling them to recognise the benefits of integrating early and often for faster development and better quality code.

What are preflight builds and tests ?

ElectricCommander automates and accelerates the software build-test-deploy process that follows the creation of new code, and a key new feature in ElectricCommander 3.0 is preflight builds and tests. Just as a pilot goes through a rigorous preflight check routine to ensure the plane is in top condition prior to takeoff, preflight builds and tests allow the developers themselves execute full builds and unit tests on production hardware prior to checking in their code changes. This provides feedback at the earliest possible moment and reduces the impact that an error will have on the rest of the team.

ElectricCommander 3.0 makes preflight builds truly push-button and easy for Eclipse developers to complete right from their IDE. It runs a clean source snapshot, overlays developer changes, and executes production build and test procedures across all targets, allowing developers the opportunity to commit only if they are successful. The ElectricCommander integration with Eclipse lets Java developers run self-service builds and preferably some tests, such as JUnit tests, across production-class machines, all before code check-in.

ElectricCommander supports Java or C development, with Ant or any another build utility. It features native, pinpoint reporting support for JUnit, NUnit, NCover, Javadoc, and other Java development tools.

ElectricCommander 3.0 is available immediately. For more information about Electric Cloud s solutions, please go to www.electric-cloud.com.


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MySpace and MTV s new revenue model challenges YouTube

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In teaming up with MySpace this week, is MTV owner Viacom deviating all that much from YouTube around user uploads of TV show clips? Like YouTube partners CBS, EA, and Universal Music, Viacom now stands to make money from online ads.

After starting a highly controversial lawsuit against YouTube last year, and then getting smacked by a boycott from angry YouTube users last summer, MTV owner Viacom is now adopting a new approach to video content through a deal unveiled with the MySpace social network and tech start-up Auditude.

With Viacom and the Google-owned YouTube duking it out in court, News Corp. s MySpace had been trying until now to keep copyrighted materials -- including videos -- off of its social network.

But as the new deal with Viacom s MTV and Auditude gets under way, MySpace users will be able to upload segments from MTV shows such as The Hills and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for viewing by others online.

Technology from Auditude will be used to detect the content to be aired online, as well as to tag it with an attribution layer. In addition to providing links for buying TV episodes, for instance, the attribution layer will give information to users such as the date a TV episode first aired.

Revenues from the video ads accompanying the uploaded MTV episodes will be be shared among MySpace, Auditude, and the video copyright holders.

But with the exception that content providers might get more control over which video appears online, the approach MySpace is now taking doesn t seem all that different from the strategy Google announced near the end of 2007, after being hit by a 1 billion lawsuit by Viacom in March of that year.

Viacom charged that YouTube did little or nothing to stop users from posting clips from Viacom-owned entities such as Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, mainly because those videos helped drive viewers to ads appearing on YouTube.

YouTube users then instigated a boycott against Viacom and its properties last summer, when as part of the legal proceedings, a federal judge ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a log containing the user login IDs and IP addresses of sources from which videos were downloaded, together with details about those videos.

YouTube users took the opportunity in July to consistently refresh a growing cache of anti-Viacom content on YouTube, with materials that included new videos exhorting people to band together in a boycott covering Viacom s Web site, MTV cable networks, Paramount films including the Indiana Jones film that premiered in May , and other Viacom-owned properties.

Under the strategy announced by YouTube after Viacom filed its suit, YouTube is supposedly first identifying video clips and then giving holders of the copyrights a choice between either 1 having the video taken down or 2 allowing YouTube to place ads on it in exchange for a chunk of the revenue. Then last month, YouTube started adding click-to-buy links for products -- like songs, books, and movies -- related to the content from partners that s available for viewing on the YouTube site.

YouTube s participating content owners in the plan include CBS Corp., Electronic Arts EA Inc., and Universal Music.
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Apple s iPod chief steps down, iPhone sales outlook follows suit

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Senior Vice President of Apple s iPod division, Tony Fadell has stepped down from his leadership position, and is being replaced by former IBM exec Mark Papermaster.

Fadell is regarded as the progenitor of the iPod ecosystem, bringing to Apple in 2001 the idea of a portable media player with its own dedicated online marketplace. Though The Wall Street Journal says he will be keeping a consultancy position, Fadell s Apple Bio has been removed .

Fadell s replacement, Mark Papermaster, was an architect of the PowerPC 630 chip in the 90s, and later was put in charge of the blade server division. IBM reportedly sued Papermaster for violating his agreement with the company by taking up employment with Apple.

As the departure of a portable device guru is greeted with the arrival of a chip design and server guru, the Mac rumor mill has begun to churn out speculation about the future of the iPod, the device responsible for Apple s current strength.

Meanwhile, the future of the iPhone looks to hold decreased production. This week, Apple reportedly cut its calendar fourth quarter outlook for iPhone production. Analyst Craig Berger said production of the device could drop as much as 40 from the last quarter, with even more coming in the following quarter. It is uncertain that this reduction is a scaling back of a previously increased production rate or the sign of decreasing demand.
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