Into Tech

Picking an MP3 player

I have tunes bought from the Apple site, but I also use Windows Media Player and have music that isn’t iTunes compatible. I would like to get an MP3 player that will let me play all my songs. I also want it to have a radio.
Meriel Whale

JS: I don’t know of any player that can handle music protected by Apple’s digital rights management (DRM) and also Microsoft’s. Apple has avoided supporting WMA (Windows Media Audio) and hasn’t licensed Microsoft’s DRM. Apple also hasn’t openly licensed its own FairPlay DRM so that companies such as Sony and Archos can use it. You must therefore go for one DRM or the other, depending on which is most important to you. You can rescue the incompatible tunes by burning them to disc in audio CD format then re-ripping them to WMA, AAC or MP3. However, this will lead to some loss in quality.

Choosing an MP3 player is partly a matter of taste, and it’s worth trying them in a shop to see which you like. Look at the 8GB iPod nano, even though it doesn’t play WMA files or have a built-in radio. Other 8GB models to look at include the Sony NWZA818, the Creative Zen (model 70PF216000115), and the SanDisk Sansa e280. All three can play WMA, protected WMA and MP3 files, and the Sony and Creative Zen models also play unprotected AAC files. The Sony has the best sound quality, beating iPods etc in a H-Fi World review. However, it does not have a radio, and the other two do. Since these players generally cost around £70 each at Amazon.co.uk, you could also get an iPod Shuffle and cover all bases for roughly the cost of an 8GB iPod nano. For the future, I’d suggest never buying any music files that include DRM.

Power on, or not?

My service provider told me that I would shorten the life of my router (Netgear DG824M Wireless) if I were to continue my practice of switching it off as a way of reducing our energy consumption. I had been in touch with their support staff over occasional brief interruptions in my broadband connection.
Graham Rooth

JS: I don’t know of any reason why turning a router off should shorten its life. On the other hand, I had two routers die in about three years: I turned them off and they never came back on. I now leave mine on all the time, and stand it on Blu-Tack legs to get some air underneath. Routers consume relatively little power - probably around 8-15 Watts - but you could measure yours with an energy monitoring plug.

Hard and soft firewalls?

I am using a broadband router which has a firewall built in. Is it still necessary to run a software firewall?
Steve Gorwits

JS: Yes. The firewall in the router should stop most probes, but if your PC gets a virus or Trojan from a USB drive, a program you have downloaded or some other source, the router will not stop it from calling out. And after it calls out, your router firewall will not block the response. You need a software firewall to control the programs running on your PC: not only malware but also legitimate programs that access the net without telling you.

Windows problems

Could you tell me why I keep getting “Internet Explorer cannot display the web page”? Also, is it safe to use Microsoft Updates, as I read that these were causing problems.
M Alderson

JS: There are a lot of reasons why IE might not display a web page, and Microsoft has a trouble-shooter. One reason not covered is that you might have a virus or browser hijacker, which can result from failing to install critical Windows Updates. These can sometimes cause some problems, but not as many as can be caused by not installing them.

A password password?

Hotmail now makes me enter my password twice. After the first time, the page refreshes and says my username or password is incorrect. If I retype my password, it lets me in.
Harry Annison

JS: This seems to be a recent Hotmail bug and it affects Mac and Linux owners with various browsers, not just Windows users. The trick is to bookmark the second page when it appears, and go straight to that page in future. The address will look something like bit.ly/2im8EV, and this may work for you.

Backchat

· Following our discussion of firewalls, “Bill Blagger” provided a link to firewall tests. The results are exaggerated because if a firewall fails the first test, it doesn’t get to take the others. But Comodo and Online Armor come through as the best free firewalls.

Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

The world might be spinning toward a recession but Apple is riding high, reporting record third quartet profits of $1.07 billion on revenue of $7.46 billion. This compares with profits of $818 million on much lower revenues of $5.41 billion for the same time last year. So just what helped those profits jump?

Apple said it shipped 2.49 million Macs in Q3, up 41% in units and 43% in revenue growth against the same period last year. It also flogged 717,000 iPhones - up from 270,000 last year - and 11.01 million iPods, up 12%.

A couple months ago, when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) released its latest stats on “piracy,” it’s VP of anti-piracy, Neil MacBride, gave me a call to discuss my earlier complaints about the organizations methodology. Needless to say, we did not see eye-to-eye, and the phone call did little to resolve our differences. I’m still hopeful that eventually the BSA will recognize that it’s doing more damage to its own position by publishing obviously bogus numbers. So, with the organization releasing another bogus stat today, it’s time to explain why it’s wrong and misleading.

Today’s report is an attempt to get the government involved in protecting BSA member companies’ business model, by claiming that the US is losing out on $1.7 billion in tax revenue due to “pirated” software. And, of course, it comes with a lovely quote from Mr. MacBride: “The most tragic aspect is that the lost revenues to tech companies and local governments could be supporting thousands of good jobs and much-needed social services in our communities.” And the BSA is even so kind as to quantify what that (not really) lost tax revenue could do: “For example, the lost tax revenues to state and local governments — an estimated $1.7 billion — would have been enough to build 100 middle schools or 10,831 affordable housing units; hire 24,395 experienced police officers; or purchase 6,335 propane-powered transit buses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Except that this is almost entirely incorrect and it’s relatively easy to show why:

1. The report counts every unauthorized piece of software as a lost sale. You have to dig through separate PDFs to find this info, but when you finally get to the methodology it states:
   

   
   The software losses are based on the piracy rate and equal the value of software installed not paid for.
   

   That’s a huge, and obviously incorrect assumption. Many of the folks using the software likely would not have paid for it otherwise, or would have used cheaper or open source options instead.

2. The report makes no effort to count the positive impact of unauthorized use of software in leading to future software sales. This is something that even Microsoft has admitted has helped the company grow over time. But according to the BSA’s report, this doesn’t matter.
3. The report also proudly notes: “Software piracy also has ripple effects in local communities.” However, “ripple effects” are easily disproved as double or triple counting the same dollar. Using ripple effects like that inflates the final number by two or three times. In the link here, Tim Lee explains this (in reference to an MPAA study done by IPI, but it applies here to the BSA study done by IDC as well):
   

   
   If a foreigner gives me $1, and I turn around and buy an apple from you for a dollar, and then you turn around and buy an orange from another friend for a dollar, we haven’t thereby increased our national wealth by $3. At the beginning of the sequence, we have an apple and an orange. At the end, we have an apple, an orange, and a dollar. Difference: one dollar. No matter how many times that dollar changes hands, there’s still only one dollar that wasn’t there before.

   Yet in IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefited by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.
   

   This is a huge fallacy that the BSA an IDC refuse to acknowledge. When I discussed it with them in May, they insisted that they only wanted to talk about piracy rates, not the loss number. I wonder why…

4. Next, if they’re going to count ripple effects in one direction, it’s only fair to also count them in the other direction. That is, they complain that:
   

   
   Lost revenue to technology companies also puts a strain on their ability to invest in new jobs and new technologies. For example, the $11.4 billion in piracy losses to software vendors and service providers in the eight states would have been enough to fund more than 54,000 tech industry jobs.
   

   But what they don’t acknowledge is the ripple effects in the other direction. That is, if (going by their assumption, remember) every company that uses an unauthorized copy of software had to pay for it, that would represent $11.4 billion in money that all of those other companies could not use to fund jobs at those companies. What about all of those jobs?

5. The BSA/IDC stat on lost tax revenue also miscounts on the point above, since it includes the lost income tax revenue from those 54,000 lost jobs, but does not count the equivalent income tax revenue from those other jobs. In fact, in the fine print, the report notes:
   

   
   “Employment losses are calculated from revenue losses, and only apply to employment in the IT industry, not IT professionals in end-user organizations. Tax revenue losses are calculated from revenue losses (VAT and corporate income tax) and employment losses (income and social taxes).”
   

   In other words, the income tax losses only count one side of the equation and totally ignore the lost income tax revenue from the lost jobs on the other side of the equation. Oops.

6. It seems likely that the eventual tax benefits of the unauthorized use of software is most likely to greatly outweigh the lost tax revenue elsewhere. That’s because the use of software within industries is a productivity tool that increases overall productivity and output, which would increase taxes beyond just the income taxes of the employees. The study, of course, ignores this point.
7. Worst of all, the report seems to assume that direct software sales are the only business model for the software industry, ignoring plenty of evidence from companies that have adopted business models that embrace free software — generating billions of dollars for the economy (and in taxes). And that’s what this really comes down to. It’s a business model issue. If others started adopting these business models as well, there wouldn’t be any “losses” at all.

Oh, and just for good measure, the report also falsely claims that: “What many don’t realize or don’t think about is that when you purchase software, you are actually purchasing a license to use it, not the actual software.” That’s not exactly true and goes directly against a recent court ruling that said the opposite and goes through a detailed explanation for why a piece of sold software is a sale with restrictions, rather than a license, using previous court precedents.

Most of these points have been made to the BSA and IDC in the past, and both organizations chose not to address them. The fact that they’re continuing to use these obviously false numbers and methodology to now push for the government to prop up an obsolete business model should be seen as troubling not just for the dishonesty of it, but for the negative impact it will have on the software industry and our economy as a whole.

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DNS fix zoned out

After reading articles about the net’s latest security problem, I made sure I installed the Microsoft update. Result: I could not access any web pages until I rolled my computer back, at which point everything was fine.
Jane Knight

JS: The bulk of this week’s mailbox came from Zone Alarm users who lost their internet access following last week’s Windows Update. The update was part of a netwide security effort led by Microsoft, Cisco and Sun to deal with a fundamental design flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS) discovered by Dan Kaminsky. The DNS translates memorable names (eg, doxpara.com) into the numbers used to route traffic (eg, 66.240.226.139). Anyone who can control that can send visitors to almost any site they like. Basically, hackers could take over the web.

The project involved patching or upgrading many of the net’s DNS servers and routers as well as server and PC operating systems, and it went astonishingly well. Zone Alarm seems to have been the only major failure, and the company quickly produced a patch. If you don’t have that, a workaround is to set Zone Alarm Internet Security to “medium”.

However, Zone Alarm users should uninstall Windows Update KB951748 from Windows XP, restart their PC, apply the Zone Alarm patch from
download.zonealarm.com then reinstall the update. KB951748 can be uninstalled using the Add or Remove Programs applet after ticking the box at the top that says “Show updates”.

The problem could affect products from more than 80 vendors and potentially all operating systems. Kaminsky has put a DNS checker on his website so that people can find out if their DNS server is vulnerable.

Replacing Zone Alarm

I’m concerned that Zone Alarm had all these problems while other firewalls seemed to cope OK. Are there any other free personal firewalls you can recommend?
Sally Taylor

JS: The DNS fix randomises the source port used for DNS queries: it seems the Zone Alarm firewall assumed they’d come from only one port. That may well be a one-off problem, and if you’re otherwise happy with the product, you may not gain anything by switching. This is particularly true if you have the paid-for version rather than the cut-down free version.

However, I prefer the Sunbelt-Kerio Personal Firewall for Windows XP. This starts as the full product but turns off its advanced features after 30 days, and nags you unless you pay for it. Comodo and Jetico also offer decent free firewalls. The final choice is partly a matter of taste.

Printer quest

I am looking for a very light portable printer to replace an old Canon BJC80 for conferences and fieldwork. Is there anything new out there cheaper than the new Canon Pixma iP100?
Dan Rigby

JS: Not that I know of. Sadly, all the Canon BJC ultraportable printers seem to be unavailable, and the Canon Pixma iP90v and iP100 look like the best alternatives. They’re about the same size as the BJC but heavier - it weighs 4lbs instead of 3lbs. HP has rivals such as the OfficeJet H470 Mobile Printer but at similar prices. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Corporate iPhone?

I’d like to get an iPhone to access my work emails. Unfortunately the IT department only supports BlackBerrys.
Richard Hickson

JS: Try asking if they support anything besides BlackBerrys. If they support Microsoft Exchange “push email” and synchronisation features, then these work with devices that have ActiveSync This includes some Windows Mobile, Nokia and Palm Treo phones, and the new iPhone 3G. If they support non-BlackBerry devices via BlackBerry Connect, this works with some Windows Mobile, Nokia and other phones, but not the iPhone, at the moment. However, IT departments generally like to eliminate variations, because standardisation simplifies support and therefore saves money. If they only support BlackBerrys, it might not make financial sense to change to the system to support a single iPhone.

Backchat

· Jane McNicol wanted to move her iPod libraries to a new PC. On the Ask Jack blog (blogs.guardian.co.uk/askjack), Doctor reminded her that “if you do not intend to use your old PC, remember to de-authorise that machine as Apple will only allow you to have five machines authorised at any one time”. He also mentioned Xilisoft’s iPod Rip, “a brilliant piece of software that will transfer all your files from your iPod into your iTunes library” (xilisoft.com/ipod-rip.html).

Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

There’s a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard’s HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.

It’s a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it’s “what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be”.

But it’s quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it’s heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)

The Mini-Note’s Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.

HP knows this, of course. But it’s pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.

Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista’s Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.

The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything’s smaller, but that’s fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus’s 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.

The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .

HP’s website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you’d expect it to cost a lot more.

Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made

Cons: Slow processor; big power brick

View the HP2133 Mini-Note here

I’m here in Berlin at the big Sony Vaio bash and, in between beer steins and sausages, I thought I’d share a few first impressions of some of the new features you’ll be seeing on the new notebooks.

Isolated keyboard
Boy, does this make a difference to typing or what? We’ve seen these on the MacBooks but now Sony has decided to roll isolated keyboards across most of the new Vaio lines. You know when you’re on a typing roll: thoughts are flying and, for once, your fingers are keeping up, getting faster and faster? And then, of course, you look up after 3 minutes of furious bashing to read back your wonderful prose and are greeted with text that looks like a small bird flew in the window and spent a minute walking around your keyboard. That’s what this passage looked like a few minutes ago. I took 5 minutes out with the new keyboard and I have to admit that it made a big difference. The number of usual errors dropped off dramatically and, even when you mis-hit the intended key, there’s less chance of hitting the one beside it. Typing is also a lot quieter, more tactile and it just looks a whole lot better too.

Apple has finally sued clone maker Psystar. This was widely expected, so the most surprising part is that it took so long. Psystar, of course, is the company that came on the scene a few months back claiming to sell Apple’s operating system on non-Apple hardware. At first, many people thought it was a hoax, but then Psystar actually started showing machines. Then the question turned to whether or not this is legal. While some say that this is almost certainly the end for Psystar, the company has insisted that what it’s doing is perfectly legal. That may be quite debatable, but if this does go to court, it could put to the test the question of just how enforceable end user license agreements (EULAs) really are. Apple’s EULA prevents buyers from putting its OS on a non-Apple machine — but as we’ve pointed out, even Apple has been known to ignore this provision. While chances are Apple will prevail, if Psystar is willing to put up the fight, it has the potential to limit the power of click-through agreements. Update: This just gets better and better. Not only is Apple suing, but it’s demanding that all Psystar machines that have already been sold need to be recalled.

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Whenever we point to problems with e-voting systems, there are always some who respond by pointing out (correctly) that there are problems with the old paper ballot system as well, and the e-voting system must be better. Not so far. Jose Luis Campanello writes in to let us know that a study in France found that when compared to traditional paper ballots e-voting systems showed more errors. There were definitely voting discrepancies in both cases, but it was significantly more noticeable with e-voting systems. The study also found that it wasn’t just an issue of pollworkers being unfamiliar with the e-voting machines that led to so many problems at e-voting stations. That’s because the problems didn’t get better as pollworkers became more familiar with the machines — and there wasn’t a correlation between sites where there were more complaints concerning how to use the machines and the discrepancies. Once again, we’re left wondering why we’ve been so quick to rush into e-voting when there’s so much evidence that it’s neither accurate nor reliable?

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Unlike last month’s awful ruling in a French court, costing eBay millions, a US court has correctly recognized that eBay should not be found responsible for auctions of counterfeit goods. This case involved Tiffany Co., who wanted eBay to be held liable for others selling fake Tiffany goods on eBay auctions. The court sided with eBay on every single charge, and smacked down Tiffany over and over again in the ruling. It noted that eBay is not responsible for the actions of its users, and Tiffany is wrong to suggest that eBay has the responsibility to monitor the auction site for infringing auctions. eBay does take down such counterfeit auctions when made aware of them, and that is all that the company is required to do. The court specifically points out that the Supreme Court had already rejected the idea of a “reasonable anticipation” standard that would have made eBay liable, even though Tiffany tries to suggest otherwise. The court also notes that eBay didn’t infringe on Tiffany trademarks in mentioning Tiffany in advertisements for the site. This is an excellent overall ruling, and nearly the complete opposite of the terrible French ruling.

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The MPAA has probably been the worst of the various Big Copyright industries in terms of the level to which their studies exaggerate the negative impact of unauthorized copying, while totally ignoring any positive impact. For example, it likes to widely cite a study (which it paid for) that triple- and quadruple-counts “losses” by noting the ripple effects. At the same time, it totally ignores the same positive ripple effects (the ones that cancel out the negative ones, and may even outweigh them). Of course, a big part of this is the claim that an unauthorized copy is a “lost sale.”

Now it appears that Macrovision, the big DRM company that supplies DRM to movie studios has cooked up its own study trying to support the MPAA in this argument, claiming that lots of people are copying DVDs and that most of them would buy the DVDs they copy otherwise. However, the LA Times’ Jon Healey does an excellent job pointing out the many significant weaknesses in the study, starting, of course, with the fact that it was paid for by Macrovision, with a clear intent in the results. And while Macrovision hypes of the fact that many people in the survey said they would have bought the DVDs they copied, it ignores the fact that the majority of folks they spoke to said the DVDs they made copies of were ones they already legitimately owned.

Even then, the results really aren’t as significant as Macrovision would like you (or, rather, Hollywood) to believe. As Healey notes, the study completely ignores the positive impacts of being able to make a copy of a DVD. In fact, the most common reason for making a copy was for perfectly legal time-shifting or back-up purposes from DVDs they legitimately own. In other words, being able able to make those copies is a valuable part of the DVD. Take that away and people will buy fewer DVDs because you’ve made them less valuable. But, of course, that doesn’t show up anywhere in the results, because that’s the last thing Macrovision wants people thinking about.

While the study also hypes up the fact that more TV shows are being copied via DVD, it ignores the fact that this is probably quite beneficial. Since TV shows are ongoing experiences, you want more viewers — and if a copy of a DVD gets someone new hooked on the show, they’re more likely to start watching it on TV or to buy a future DVD. But, again, that’s not mentioned at all. Either way, props to Healey and the LA Times for digging into the numbers a bit and not just parroting the press release findings, like many other news sources.

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