Several new music reviews were added to muziqnet today.

LHK & ALEX MORAN - Groove Asylum Vol. 1 - Camouflage Recordings
CHRIS LUM - My Philosoph EP - Tilted Records
DEMARKUS LEWIS - Why Me - Blu�m
DIRTY VEGAS - Ghosts - Credence
FRANCOIS K featuring BARBARA MENDEZ - Awakening - Wave
CPEN - Broken/Hi-Tek - Straylight

Go there now:
REVIEWS…

Coming soon to a computer near you – Hollywood Hackers.

Watch as they rifle through your files, dismantle your network, and delete all those songs and movies you can’t prove have a legal right to exist on your hard drive. Hope the special effects don’t include the accidental destruction of your data when your computer becomes a stunt double in Hollywood’s latest blockbuster attempt to protect its copyrighted material.
California Congressman Howard Berman introduced his “Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention” Act in the House of Representatives Thursday. If the bill passes, copyright owners could – at least conceptually – employ a variety of technological tools to prevent the illegal distribution of their copyrighted works over a P2P network such as Kazaa or LimeWire.

Security experts said the bill’s wording is too vague and wonder exactly what sort of “technological tools” will be permitted. They also fear that approval of the bill could result in a multitude of clumsy and ill-conceived “hack” attacks that could have widespread, system-damaging effects on both file traders and those who have never downloaded a single song from a file-trading server.

“Basically, Berman is going to legalize all of the antisocial Internet activities that we have been trying to stamp out for the last decade,” said Paul McNabb, chief technical officer of security firm Argus Systems Group.

While not specifically prohibited in the bill, Berman insists that media companies will not be allowed to unleash viruses or other malicious code or destroy personal, non-pirated files.

“Contrary to widespread, if uninformed speculation, our legislation is narrowly crafted, with strict bounds on acceptable behavior by the copyright owner,” Berman said in a statement. “It gives copyright creators a very limited safe harbor from liability when they use technological tools for the narrow purpose of thwarting P2P piracy. It does not allow copyright owners to send viruses through P2P networks, destroy files, hack into the personal files of P2P users, or indiscriminately block lawful file-trading.”

The tools Berman specifically suggested that companies might use include “interdiction” – flooding a P2P file server with fake requests in order to slow or stop the system; “spoofing” – providing slews of corrupt, damaged or incomplete files to P2P servers; and “redirection” – faking the location of files to force traders to perform many futile system-resource-wasting searches.

But media companies wouldn’t be limited to just those options.

“The bill is pretty vaguely worded so it’s hard to know what Hollywood might do,” security researcher Richard Smith said.

Smith guessed that, at minimum, media companies could overwhelm P2P servers with “ghost files,” tying up the servers’ resources as people try to download files that don’t really exist.

“Another possibility would be to overload someone’s computer by repeatedly requesting the same illegal file to be downloaded,” Smith added.

Denial-of-service attacks, flooding servers with many requests for nonexistent files in order to crash or dramatically slow network performance, is specifically permitted under the bill. But P2P networks are created on the fly from whatever computers are logged on at any given time, so experts fear that innocent bystanders could also be smacked in a service attack.

“Berman is opening the door to massive denial-of-service attacks against perceived pirates, without the attacker having to get prior authorization to launch the attack,” Argus’ McNabb said. “This could have devastating effects on computers on the same network or in the line of fire.

“For instance, if everyone on your block has a cable modem, and someone is thought to be a pirate, a denial-of-service attack against that perceived pirate could take the entire neighborhood cable network down.”

Security experts also wondered how Hollywood would come up with a battalion of skilled hack attackers. Would the pirate-battling forces be unassuming programmers, now ordered to come up with malicious programs to foil file traders? Or would Hollywood soon be hiring real hackers?

“If you hire average programmers and set them to work coming up with ideas on how to punish a pirate, you’ll eventually get into trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t strictly control them,” said George Smith of virus information site Vmyths.

“There is no set definition of a ‘virus’ in the Internet mind, so it is easy to imagine a corporate programmer convincing his bosses and the legal department that his copy protection scheme is not a virus, only to find that when it gets into distribution and is taken apart by someone in the industry the first time it swats an innocent, it is labeled as something very bad.”

Hackers said that very few of their skilled colleagues would consider taking pirate-persecuting jobs.

“I don’t think Hollywood has a hell of a lot of support within the hacking community, so finding real talent might be a bit tough,” hellNbak, a member of hacker laboratory Nomad Mobile Research Centre said. “That being said, there are always those who will, if the price is right, offer help and training.”

Security experts also agreed that the Berman bill could serve as encouragement to a whole new class of criminals, drawn from the lowest common denominator of the computer underworld.

Under what security consultant and author Richard Forno calls the “Hollywood Hacking law,” computer criminals could probably make the case that any malicious programs they wrote and released were actually intended to scour the Net to enforce copyrights.

“What a wonderful cover-your-arse law this will be for script kiddies and other cyber-cretins,” Forno said.

Forno also wondered whether network administrators and computer owners would eventually be penalized for running secure systems.

“Will having a firewall – or implementing strong system security practices or being a good system administrator – become illegal and prosecuted as circumventing copyright controls under the existing Digital Millennium Copyright Act? If Hollywood can’t easily inspect your system in their quest for copyright enforcement and world control, are you now a criminal suspect?”

“Be afraid.” Forno added. “Be very afraid.”

2 new DJ Mixes added to the download section. Check ‘em out:
DJ Placid - Acid House Mix
Description: All the way old skool Acid.
Version: 1.0 Filesize: 19.74 MB
Added on: 13-Jul-2002 Downloads: 3
Rate resource | Details

DJ Placid - Deep House Mix
Description: Deep House Mix
Version: 1.0 Filesize: 33.66 MB
Added on: 13-Jul-2002 Downloads: 1
Rate resource | Details

Legislation meant to thwart unauthorized downloading on certain peer-to-peer networks will still allow major media companies to offer file-trading through their own systems.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-California) introduced his much anticipated peer-to-peer legislation in the House of Representatives on Thursday.

The proposal would give copyright owners, from Hollywood studios down to independent musicians, the legal go-ahead to employ a variety of technological measures that would stop computers hooked up to decentralized networks from trading. That would be bad news for users of Gnutella and Kazaa. In the interim, it would allow companies like Overpeer, which floods decentralized networks with bogus files, to flourish. In the long run, it also would make any system that doesn’t have a central location – and most open-source networks don’t have a central location – vulnerable to attack.

Individuals affected by copyright owners’ attacks would feel the effects of the legislation immediately, as their systems could be assaulted with no notice.

If the attack was somehow a case of mistaken identity, recourse would be difficult. Individuals would have to petition the Attorney General for a private investigation. After the initial request, the agency would have four months to look into the matter.

The unprecedented breadth of technology the copyright industry could use was welcome news to those in the music industry who have battled peer-to-peer networks since 1999.

“The current landscape for online music is dangerously one-sided, with the peer-to-peer pirates enjoying an unfair advantage,” said Hilary Rosen, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. “It makes sense to clarify existing laws to ensure that copyright owners – those who actually take the time and effort to create an artistic work – are at least able to defend their works from mass piracy.”

The five major record labels have struggled to launch their online music subscription services – MusicNet and Pressplay – over the last year, blaming the availability of networks that allow people to download music for free.

Along with making it open season on individual users, open-source programs and decentralized networks, the bill also gives a free pass to chat applications run by the very media companies that would most benefit from open-source networks being shuttered.

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger – which each have specific file-trading options built into their systems that enable millions of users to trade their share without fear of electronic attack – will continue to flourish. The recording industry and movie studios have largely ignored those three chat applications, which have financial ties to the major record studios and movie studios, in their litigation and anti-piracy activities.

“What this bill has said is that what is good enough for the Internet isn’t good enough for AOL,” said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF is providing legal support to StreamCast Networks, the company that distributed the Morpheus file-trading software, in its legal battle with the Recording Industry Association of America. “This is hands-off for AOL’s network. It’s not a coincidence that AOL is a division of Time Warner.”

America Online, which distributes AIM, is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. Yahoo signed a licensing agreement with the recording industry, giving it permission to create audio webcasts of popular music. Microsoft has developed a rights-management technology that several studios and record labels use to protect their products.

Not every messenger company escaped the legal wrath of the copyright industry. Aimster, which allowed AIM users to share files before the ISP created its own file-trading chat application, lost its domain name and teeters on financial ruin after facing a series of infringement lawsuits.

The spotty nature of litigation and selective targeting of companies has even supporters wary.

The Association for Competitive Technology, a trade organization representing information technology companies, including Microsoft, praised the spirit of the bill but offered tempered support for its specifics. It will continue to support the bill as long as it protects instant messaging products, ACT president Jonathan Zuck said in a letter to Berman.

Despite the popularity of file-trading applications, instant messenger programs may actually pose a bigger threat to record companies and movie studios concerned about curtailing downloading. At its height, the Napster network handled just under three billions files a month, where AIM has one billion files a day zipping across its system.

In his now infamous speech last March, Michael Green, the head of the Grammy organization, denounced file-trading as a threat to the music industry. He then announced that three students had downloaded over 6,000 files in three days at the behest of the National Academy of Recording Artists (NARAS).

It appeared to be a dramatic moment, until The New York Times reported that two of the three students hadn’t used file-trading applications like Gnutella and Kazaa. Instead, they used AIM to download their music.

File-trading networks have little recourse with this legislation, as most have few resources in Washington, D.C. Like Napster before it, the companies must appeal to users, hoping to shroud themselves in a blanket of swappers who’ll flood the halls of Congress with e-mails and letters demanding the government keep its hands off their computers.

While Napster unsuccessfully battled the record labels through federal district and appeals court, the company set up a website that allowed its users to communicate with their representatives. Today, Sharman Networks put out a similar call.

“We urge all users and supporters of technology innovation to contact Congress and voice strong opposition to this entertainment industry effort to gain exemption from the law and take malicious action against consumer’s privacy and other rights,” said Sharman Networks, the company that distributes the Kazaa file-trading application, which can be attacked under the Berman bill.

For some reason the muziqnet.com SQL tables become corrupted (’nk_session_info’ and ‘nk_referer’). This doesn’t sound like anything important, except this caused the site to be down for 3 days. The only thing users could read was ‘Session initialisation failed’. It’s all fixed now!

June 12, 2002 - Music piracy is exploding, with the volume of illegally copied CDs rising nearly 50 percent last year, a trade group reported Tuesday.

The record 950 million units would make illegal music an industry worth $4.3 billion, almost three times the size of the market for portable CD players themselves.In its annual report on music piracy, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said that 40 percent of all CDs and cassettes sold worldwide last year were pirated copies – and 99 percent of all online music files are unauthorized or illegal.

The trade group said music piracy supports and even encourages organized crime, and stunts investment, economic growth and job creation.

At a news conference in Washington, IFPI Chairman Jay Berman called on governments around the globe to do a better job of putting illegal CD copying houses out of business and adopt more stringent laws to enforce copyright protection of songs on the Internet and elsewhere.

“It is time for governments to prove, with tough actions and not just words, that copyright piracy has no place in the development of modern economies,” he said.

The increasingly urgent rhetoric from the IFPI and the closely affiliated Recording Industry Association of America, which represents big U.S. record labels, is getting attention in Washington and in courthouses internationally.

Congress is debating a bill that could require electronics device makers, such as the recordable CD drives in most new personal computers, to adopt new technologies to prevent replication of copyrighted materials.

Meanwhile, the recording industry has won several key battles over Internet music sites, such as its well-publicized shutdown of Napster Inc. last year.

But from music-related Web sites to hometown bands, many in the music industry are starting to grow wary of the recording industry’s battle with a problem that has no easy solution – if it is a problem at all.

Case in point is the recent new release from rapper Eminem.

Copies of the “The Eminem Show” were reportedly available on the Internet even before the CD hit record stores over Memorial Day weekend. Yet stores still sold record numbers of the CD in a record amount of time.

Critics of big recording companies say the success of the Eminem release is proof that online piracy doesn’t hurt record sales, but may in fact encourage them.

Interscope Geffen A&M Records and Eminem vehemently disagree, with the bad boy rapper claiming he would personally maim anyone he discovered was illegally copying his music using the Internet.

“The Eminem experience suggests certainly that a significant portion of people engaged in online music aren’t doing so at the expense of buying,” said Sean Baenen, managing director of Odyssey, a San Francisco Internet research firm. “We know from our research that people who are most likely to (use) online music are the same people who are most likely to buy records, tapes and CDs in the store.”

Meanwhile, many musicians claim the recording industry itself – with its stringent royalty fees, high-priced CDs and mediocre marketing for marginal acts – is a bigger problem than pirates.

“There’s a genuine concern about piracy in the industry . . . but the bottom line is that there are a lot of people that are still making a ton of money,” said Ray Benson, front man for Austin, Texas band Asleep at the Wheel.

Benson said the music industry and consumers might be better off if record companies paid less attention to piracy and more attention to mending relationships with artists and consumers.

“The lock is off the henhouse door and everybody is stealing eggs,” he said. “But the fact is, record sales are still growing exponentially.”

According to the IFPI, music piracy a problem with two fronts.

Primarily in foreign markets, the problem is with duplicating houses that pump out illegal copies of CDs for sale at shops and on the streets. According to the trade group, as much as 90 percent of all CDs sold in China and 65 percent of those sold in Russia are illegal copies. About 60 percent of CDs sold in Mexico are illegal copies.

The second front, and a more ambiguous problem, is with the Internet. IFPI estimates there are more than 200,000 Web sites where music fans can download 100 million unauthorized song files. Most song on the Internet are unauthorized, IFPI Chairman Berman admitted, because recording companies so far have offered little themselves to Internet users.

Asked about the growing number of music sites where musicians post and often encourage downloads of their songs, Berman said those sites and artists represent a “very, very small percentage of what’s out there.

“The majority of music on the Internet is unauthorized,” he said. “It’s put there by people who, by virtue of the fact that the technology makes it possible, can compress songs . . . send them around the world and immediately become international distributors of music.”

On the Web:
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

The Space Synthesizer software plugin is now available in version 1.1b. The Space Effect 1.0 and Flex FX 1.0 Plugin Package are sold with the Space Synthesizer (a total of 7 plugins) and the bundle is available for $39 from http://www.mhc.se/software/plugins
The Space Synthesizer v1.1

Here is a copy of Mathew Herbert’s philosophy of making music. Certainly an interesting way to do things. - 909

PERSONAL CONTRACT FOR THE COMPOSITION OF MUSIC
[INCORPORATING THE MANIFESTO OF MISTAKES]

1. The use of sounds that exist already, subject to article 2, is not allowed. In particular:
a. No drum machines.
b. All keyboard sounds must be edited in some way: no factory presets or pre programmed patches are allowed.2. Only sounds that are generated at the start of the compositional process or taken from the artist’s own previously unused archive are available for sampling. The use of, ordering and manipulation of noise-sound/found-sound is to be held as the highest priority in composition.

3. The sampling of other people’s music is strictly forbidden.

4. No replication of traditional acoustic instruments is allowed where the financial and physical possibility of using the real ones exists.

5. The inclusion, development, propogation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged. Furthermore, they have equal rights within the composition as deliberate, conscious, or premeditated compositional actions or decisions.

6. The mixing desk is not to be reset before the start of a new track, for the specific purpose of applying a random eq and fx setting across
the new sounds. Once the ordering and recording of the music has begun, the desk may be used as normal.

7. All fx settings must be edited: no factory preset or pre-programmed patches are allowed.

8. Samples themselves are not to be truncated from the rear since extra audio and recording information is often heard at the end.

9. A notation of every sound, its source and a full description of all technical equipment used per track to be taken and made available at a future date.

10. Remixes must be completed using only the sounds provided by the original artist including any packaging the media was provided in.

MATTHEW HERBERT 27-11-00

Shareaza is the top of the range P2P file sharing application that’s built entirely from user suggestions and comments. It has everything. And it’s totally free: no ads, no spyware, no bundled crap. We’re giving it away. You simply won’t get more for less anywhere else.
Grab the latest version now at www.shareaza.com, or read on to see what’s new. Once again it’s been less than a week since the last version, and once again we’ve managed to pack a whole load of new goodies into version 1.3: Powerful bandwidth shaping / throttling capabilities give you absolute control over how your Internet connection is used. Restrict bandwidth use per connection, with individual controls for each connection type and upstream/downstream traffic. And these actually work, too. Plus you can see it all graphically in real-time using Shareaza’s fully configurable performance and bandwidth graphing system. This is possibly the most advanced bandwidth control mechanism available in P2P software today (so it fits well next to Shareaza’s most advanced IP security system).

Brand new host browsing feature allows you to see the shared files available on a particular Gnutella host, and download the ones you want. All from within Shareaza’s comprehensive search interface, so you can filter and sort files to find what you’re looking for faster. Just right-click any connected host or search result and choose Browse Host.

Shareaza supports host browsing through the new host browsing specification, which has not yet been added by all other Gnutella software. But that’s okay, because Shareaza also supports browsing older BearShare nodes through an automatic translation system. Files are all displayed in Shareaza’s unified results interface, so you can take advantage of both systems today. Finally, if you don’t want other host browse-enabled users to be able to list your shared files, simply turn it off in Sharing options!

Support for OGG Vorbis files (.ogg): This new (and open) audio format is fast becoming an alternative to mp3s and the closed Media Player formats. Shareaza now fully supports .ogg files, recognises them as audio and extracts information such as title/artist/album as well as length calculation and nominal bitrate / quality. Another first! We’re also supporting Monkey’s Audio APE files, which is another new free format. Shareaza supports and decodes the widest variety of file formats in the P2P world, resulting in richer searches and more power. (This version also has improved support for variable bitrate / VBR mp3 files, with accurate length calculation, average bitrates and variable marking).

Bandwidth Boost command for downloads lets you selectively remove the bandwidth limits for specific files. Great for prioritising downloads that you want ASAP ahead of those that can wait. A new Show All Sources mode for downloads displays download sources/locations that are not currently being used, as well as active transfers. You have full control over the source list, and can individually add / remove / access / disconnect / browse each source. Or, turn “show all sources” off and let Shareaza do it all for you!

Search window upgrade including automatic sorting, and much improved file grouping. Files which can be downloaded from more than once source now show all the relevant information without having to look at each source individually. You can see a summary of the rating (availability) icons, an average of the individual host speeds, and a superset of all metadata available on that file from every host, eg bitrate/time/title/etc.

Download integrity verification ensures the files you download are what you think they are, and are free from corruption. The finished file is verified against the SHA1 Shareaza was expecting, and the results displayed in the downloads window. Potentially unsafe files are also marked red in the library, and an extra warning message is displayed before opening them.

Generate magnet: and gnutella: links in bulk easily with a new library management feature. You can easily export custom lists of file links in magnet or gnutella protocol format, complete with optional HTML formatting.

Improved support for GWebCache discovery services, including the ability to advertise new services and browse cache statistics on the web. And all new GGEP support, to handle the next generation of Gnutella extensions and improvements. We’re already supporting hashing/HUGE encapsulated in GGEP, and browse host availability status with more to come.

There are also countless other enhancements which have been suggested by Shareaza users. If you’ve got an idea you’d like to see, send it our way and we’ll give it full consideration. No ideas go unheard, and in fact not too many go unimplemented either!

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Internet service provider EarthLink Inc. on Monday launched a service for its users to download digital music, working with privately-held subscription service FullAudio.

Atlanta-based EarthLink said its Digital Music Center will offer downloads of up to 50 songs per month for $9.95 or 100 tracks per month for $17.95. The company also announced a partnership with MusicMatch to offer custom jukebox software for customers’ PCs. FullAudio has licenses to music from four of the five major music labels and offers more than 75,000 tracks in total. Songs can be played back with or without an Internet connection, FullAudio said, and can be synchronized with up to three PCs.

EarthLink also said customers will be able to buy albums directly from Amazon.com Inc. through its music player.