The piracy problem on auction sites is so bad that the Software and Information Industry Association has said it was considering suing eBay.

The BSA warns consumers that buying pirated software can lead to software incompatibility and viruses, increased maintenance costs with no technical support, as well as identity fraud and privacy breaches.

“Although consumers may think they are getting a great deal when they buy software from unfamiliar sources online, it is more likely they will receive a substandard product with hidden cybersecurity threats that may expose them to identity theft and the loss of thousands of dollars,” the report says.

During the first half of this year BSA asked auction site providers to shut down more than 18,000 auctions in which 45,000 products, worth $22 million, were being sold, the report says.

(Credit:
BSA)

The trade group served more than 48,000 “takedown” notices related to BitTorrent files in the first half of this year and says BSA members lost an estimated $525 million in sales as a result of peer-to-peer piracy, according to a new BSA report called “Online Software Scams: A Threat to Your Security.”

One in five U.S. consumers who bought software online in 2006 reported problems, in a survey conducted by Forrester Research on behalf of the BSA. More than half received software that was not what they ordered; 36 percent said the software didn’t work; 14 percent realized immediately that the product was pirated; and 12 percent never received what they ordered, according to the survey.

Yahoo Music’s going to join Amazon.com in offering DRM-free MP3s, either for free as part of an advertising-supported service, or for sale on a per-download basis, according to anonymous record company executives cited in this AP story.

Ian Rogers, the exec in charge of Yahoo’s music service, has certainly thought long and hard about the future of the music industry, and Yahoo’s got tons of traffic (which it hasn’t done a very good job of monetizing, but that’s another story). I like the site’s search interface–it’s a lot better than Amazon’s, which mixes MP3 downloads and physical CDs with no rhyme or reason–and it’s the only major commercial music download site that offers lyrics.

What not to do: stay wedded to Windows Media Audio, require a subscription fee or online registration, or (worst of all) try and create yet another desktop application for playing music–we’ve got plenty of those already, and most
iPod users will stick with iTunes.

(Credit:
Screenshot)

Yahoo Music is the only major commercial download site that offers lyrics.

I’ll wait on the details before speculating further as to whether a revamped Yahoo Music will hit or miss.

commentary

The OSI needs a vibrant membership of those currently shaping the open source landscape. It’s possible that its current make-up doesn’t reflect this. Point well taken. But it’s equally possible – indeed, I’d say probable – that Bruce’s directorship wouldn’t change this. I like Bruce but aside from the occasional picketing he does, I can’t point to anything substantive he has done for open source in the past half-decade or so.

Despite these corporate affiliations, however, my own experience with the OSI board is that its board of directors is influenced by exactly one thing: the good of open source. I have never heard one statement from Michael Tiemann, Danese Cooper, etc. that smacks of corporate jingoism or otherwise is anything less than they would be saying if their employer were Richard Stallman (or Bruce Perens, for that matter). This is not a group of people voting with their paychecks.

Bruce claims that the OSI is over-represented with vendors and, populist that he is, wants to return power to the “people” (i.e., developers). I can appreciate this. I made the same point about the Linux Foundation when it was formed from the ashes of the FSG and OSDL.

But this is where Bruce’s candidacy loses some of its potency. To merit a board role, Bruce must show that he’s for more than he’s against, and he must show that he has actually done something for open source in the recent past. From his post we know that he’s against Microsoft joining the OSI, but this is a strawman, as is his fight against special (corporate) interests channeling the OSI’s energies. But tilting at strawmen isn’t enough to justify an OSI board role.

On license proliferation, I tend to agree with Bruce. But it’s not clear how he’d do any better, and it’s equally unclear why he can’t do more good as an outside agitator than as an insider.

Yes, the OSI’s board is overwhelmingly comprised of people who work for companies like IBM, Intel, Red Hat, etc. But so are Linux, Apache, etc. That’s the nature of the open-source beast in the 21st Century, for better or for worse. I think it’s for the better and suspect the communities I mentioned would concur.

But I’m a minority voice on this. Most of the OSI board members have been around long enough to have been burned by Microsoft at least a few times, and aren’t going to embrace Redmond anytime soon. Bruce’s suggestion to the contrary is a populist canard.

My primary question for Bruce, however, is this: “What has he done for open source lately?” Like some other early heavies in the open-source movement, he gets a lot of credit for a reputation built a decade ago, and that’s fine. However, one can’t rest on past laurels when campaigning for a present-day role./p>

Perhaps this would be a chance for Bruce to shine again. Perhaps. But my own personal view is that Michael Tiemann et al. better represent open source than Bruce does.

I have served on the OSI board for a few years now. In that time I have been frustrated by the board’s lack of corporatism, not its alleged predilection for corporate interests. Ask some of the open-source companies who have tried to get OSI to take positions favorable to them on attribution (badgeware) and other topics, and they’ll concur. The OSI is, if anything, not corporate enough. Bruce’s claim completely misses the mark here.

His suggestion that even Microsoft (gasp!) could be given a board seat is more egregiously wrong. I think I’m the only one of the OSI board who has ever seriously considered that an option, and it’s one that Microsoft’s recent actions have pushed me to reject. I don’t have anything against Microsoft other than what it does on a routine basis (Engage in practices designed to lock customers in, not liberate them). The day it changes these is the day I’d gladly welcome it in, were I still on the board (which I won’t be).

Bruce Perens wants to be an OSI board member. That’s fine. But he also seems to want to engage in scorched earth political campaigns to get there. That’s not so fine.

Blist is also part of another story at Demo: The rise of Flash applications. See also Spout, a killer Flash authoring environment, and Joggle, an AIR application that manages your photos, no matter where they are stored. The design and usability of these applications put many “traditional” software competitors to shame. And they’re all cross-platform.

Delver, a search engine with a strong social twist. It returns search results from people in your social circle, and ranks them according to relevance and strength of connection to you. It’s no replacement for Google, but if you want to ask all your friends for advice all at once–without bothering them–it’s killer. Delver uses your implicit social network, which is much smarter than requiring users to specify in advance who their friends are. Read: Damn clever: Delver makes search social.

Blist. This is the Flash- and Flex-based database I raved about yesterday. It is the database that FileMaker should have become by now–and it’s all online. It has rich features and a gorgeous front-end that’s simple when you want it to be yet also supports complex table design. Read: Blist: Awesome Web-based database.

Green Plug. This is an initiative to build the universal DC power supply. Key components: Devices tell the supply what voltage they need, and the supply shuts off power to a device when it indicates it’s fully charged. It’s greener that traditional power supplies and could be a lot more convenient for consumers as well. It’s a small step toward a revolution in power delivery for electronic devices, and the revolution is long overdue. Read: Demo goes green.

If you’re interested in predicting your own financial outcome, also see Voyant At Home (Read: Voyant tells you when you can’t retire.)

Ribbit makes a voice platform, aka Web telephony. It’s a powerful technology that will allow developers to do cool things with voice services, without dealing with traditional telephone switches and cantankerous phone companies. There’s a Salesforce application already. At Demo, the company showed off its own homegrown consumer application, Amphibian, a useful application that melds your mobile phone with your Web presence. Amphibian does new stuff like pull up the social network profile pages of people when they call you. Creepy. But cool. Read: Ribbit hops into Web telephony. See also, Toktumi, a business VoIP product I like a lot.

There was a good, but not earthshaking, lineup of products at this year’s Demo 2008 conference (see all stories). The show didn’t offer any new products to capture the hearts and minds of the general public or even a majority of the tech elite. There was no Pleo, no Moobella, no Palm Pilot–all products introduced at Demo in years past. But there were several very strong new ideas and products here. These are my top picks.

Good luck to you, Laura. Please stay in touch as I’d love to hear what you’re up to at Mashery.

I’ve known Laura for six years. She was the one who made SDForum relevant in open source. She was the one who brought Krugle to my attention. I’m certain she’ll continue to do what she does best at Mashery: raise awareness, build connections, and put lots more miles on her
car. (Buy, Laura, don’t lease. .

Laura Merling, former head of SDForum and vice president of Business Development at Krugle, today joins Mashery as its vice president of Sales and Marketing. Mashery makes it easy to deploy web services (as Reuters recently discovered with its Calais service, which used Mashery).

If you can see past the extremely odd prose style of this Ars Technica piece Friday by Ben Kuchera, there’s actually some potentially very interesting news there: Microsoft may be ready to truly reach out to the mass market with its
Xbox 360.

Update (Monday, 2:43 PM): This story has been modified to reflect correspondence from Microsoft this morning.

According to Kuchera, Microsoft may well be readying a new round of price cuts for the Xbox 360.

Microsoft said it does not comment on rumors.

Right now, the lowest-priced of the next-generation consoles is Nintendo’s
Wii, which runs $249. Sony’s
PlayStation 3 can be had for $399 for a model with a 40GB hard drive, and this fall it plans to introduce an 80GB model for that same $399 price.

If I hear from Microsoft with comment about this, dear readers, so will you.

Remember, just prior to E3, Microsoft lowered the price of the 20GB Xbox 360 from $349 to $299.

If the Ars Technica report is true, then, Microsoft could be the first to break the magic $200 barrier and such a move could go a very long way to helping the company reach its declared commitment to winning the console wars.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Now, writes Kuchera, courtesy of his source, “the mole,” Microsoft is planning to roll out new pricing on the entire line of Xboxes. For a console with no hard drive, the price could be $199; for one with a 60GB hard drive, it could be $299; and the high-end model, known as the Elite, with a 160GB hard drive, could go for $399.

Back in the old days when TVs and radios had tubes, it took a couple of minutes for a set to warm up before you could watch or listen. But even then, you could turn it off instantly. That’s not true with Windows PCs. Not only does it sometimes take seemingly forever for them to boot, but it can take several minutes for one to shut down. Even worse, if a program stops responding, you may or may not be able to shut it down. And even if it does terminate, it may take awhile.

I’m particularly annoyed at how Windows often fails to terminate programs that have crashed. In theory, pressing Ctrl Alt and Delete to bring up the Task Manager followed by clicking End Task should simply stop the program and return you to the operating system. But that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the program just hangs there forever, sometimes it quits after a random period of time and sometimes the entire computer just crashes. Imagine if you had a lamp in your house that was malfunctioning and the only way to turn it off was to turn off all the power to your house from the main breaker.

I can understand why it takes at least some time for a PC to boot from a power-off situation because the operating system and some software and drivers have to be copied from storage into memory. But I can’t understand why it takes more than a few seconds for the computer or one of its applications to shut down. I realize that sometimes there is a bit of housekeeping to do in the form of closing files but–give me a break–should that really have to take up to five minutes? And there have been countless times in my experience when it simply never shuts down, forcing me to hold the power button for several seconds. I’ve even had laptops that were so stubborn that I had to remove the battery to turn them off.

I haven’t raised this particular issue with people at Microsoft, but a couple of years ago- when I was researching a story for The New York Times on technology energy hogs, the standard response from folks in Redmond was to blame third party applications and drivers for the fact that Windows machines often fail to properly go to or wake up from from sleep mode. Third party applications may very well be to blame, but it’s no excuse. One of Windows strongest selling points is its ability to work with software and hardware from thousands of sources so it seems to me that a company with the resources and experience of Microsoft should have by now figured out how to handle errant programs and drivers.

And by the way, I’m not just talking about Windows XP and Vista. I’m having the same problem with
Windows 7, though, to be fair, the new operating system is still in beta so it’s possible that Microsoft could amaze and delight me by fixing this in the final version.

I do like many of the improvements in Windows 7 and appreciate that it boots a little faster and–at least on my machine–seems better at going to sleep and waking up. Now all I want is the ability to turn off the darn machine and terminate a misbehaving program without having to dedicate my entire afternoon to the task.

(Credit: Swagalicious)

The intention is to enable PC gamers to play games with the sound happening around them, and not directly in their ears. That enables longer listening time–less “listening fatigue,” to use industry parlance–and therefore longer gaming sessions.

Gamecom 777 headphones from Plantronics.

The headset is “open ear,” so you can hear some ambient noise while listening through the headphones. The surround-sound feature can also be switched off for regular listening via the inline control, and works with any device that has a native USB port. The headset is also designed to work with Skype, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger for VoIP calling.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET Networks)

Beginning later this month, peripherals maker Plantronics will start shipping its Gamecom 777 headset, which simulates 5.1 channel audio through just two channels–your left and right headphone speakers.

The Plantronics people pointed out the “hide-away boom,” which allows the mouthpiece of the headset to be tucked away into the headphones so they can be transformed from headphones to gaming headset. Fun side note: Plantronics said this was requested by focus groups because the mic often gets in the way of eating and drinking while gaming.

I got a personal demonstration at the Dolby Theater here in San Francisco (see photo), along with several other journalists.

Taking Dolby 3D glasses and Plantronics surround sound headset for a spin in the Dolby theater.

Here’s a way to have surround sound audio, but still keep it all to yourself.

We sort of knew it already: while Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, and Friendster were all founded in the U.S., social networking is a worldwide phenomenon. New statistics from ComScore show that sites like Facebook are growing rapidly across the globe, even as that growth slows down in their home country.

According to ComScore’s numbers, social-networking sites may be nearing a peak in North America. The industry’s foothold in the U.S. and Canada grew only 9 percent from June 2007, but in Asia it grew 23 percent, in Latin America 33 percent, and in Europe 35 percent. And social networks grew a whopping 66 percent in the Middle East and Africa. The 9 percent growth in North America meant that it was the only region of the world where the growth of social networks did not outpace the growth of the Internet-using populace as a whole, which ComScore pegged at 11 percent.

Facebook’s internationalization strategy has consisted of leaving the single site intact but allowing members to translate it into the local languages of their choice. MySpace, with its focus more on media consumption rather than communication, has launched several dozen localized editions of the site instead.

News Corp.’s MySpace, still the biggest social network in the U.S., is not doing quite as well internationally. Its unique visitors have gone up only 3 percent year-over-year, ComScore said.

MySpace representatives have said that the site’s aim is to gain a long-term foothold across the world, not to be a hot global fad. At the same time, it’s been engaging in high-profile marketing projects outside the U.S., and at this point it doesn’t seem to have produced results yet.

The fastest-growing site is, not surprisingly, Facebook, with a 153 percent increase in unique visitors noted. Most of that growth is international–its domestic growth was estimated at 38 percent. Hi5, a San Francisco-founded site with a big foothold in Latin America, grew 100 percent. Friendster, another Bay Area social network, grew 50 percent thanks to a renewed interest among Asian audiences. Growing at 41 percent is Google’s Orkut, at 32 percent is AOL’s Bebo, and at 19 percent is Skyrock, a France-based social network that remains extremely popular among the youth in its home country.

“Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year,” ComScore executive Jack Flanagan said in a statement from the company. “By increasing the site’s relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago.”

But why would I get an iPhone 3G when it doesn’t solve most of the problems I had with the original iPhone?

Well, it’s really just that my Treo 650 is almost dead.

Apple’s iPhone 3G

The third-party development problem is mostly solved. It’s still not possible for developers to create software that runs in the background, which is a serious limitation, but the current level of support is about 80% of what I’d like to see.

Of course, 3G is definitely there.

Okay, what’s changed?

I’ll be meeting with some friends early Friday morning at a location here in Silicon Valley where there’s an Apple store across the street from an AT&T store; we figure we’ll be able to get iPhones one way or the other.

And I’ll get right back on here to let everyone know what I think about it!

(Credit:
Apple)

The screen isn’t any better. It’s still far behind the screens on the Nokia 770/800/810-series gizmos, which offer 800 x 480-pixel resolution on a 4″ LCD. The iPhone’s 3.5″ LCD has just 40% than much resolution (480 x 320), which I consider barely adequate for web browsing.

And for all its shortcomings and its high price, the iPhone 3G is the best phone on the market right now for my needs, so that’s that.

Overall, it seems to me that with the premium price and market position of the iPhone, Apple ought to be including the best possible components, and it isn’t. Independent analysts have estimated that the manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G is much less than half of the revenue Apple receives from each sale, which is rumored to be well in excess of $500 or $600 depending on the model. That’s an unusually high profit margin in the cellphone business.

Well, the iPhone 3G still can’t act as a wireless modem. That’s less important for me than it used to be, however, since I have this snazzy Option 3G adapter for my MacBook Pro. I’d like to be able to use the iPhone for this purpose instead, but that would be just a backup plan.

My very first meaningful blog post here (after an introduction), from June 23, 2007, was titled “Why I’m not getting an iPhone”.

Storage capacity hasn’t improved; there’s still no memory-card slot. That still bothers me.

It crashes almost every day– sometimes more than once, especially when I’m out running errands. During my trip to Washington, D.C. last month, it crashed three to five times every day, and I need the phone the most when I’m traveling. Starting the Web browser causes a crash about 90% of the time. I’ve been using it for four years, and it’s been great, but it’s gotta go.

The original
iPhone couldn’t really do any more for me than my Palm Treo 650.
The iPhone couldn’t be used to connect my laptop to the Internet.
No voice-memo support.
No 3G networking.
Not enough storage capacity.
No native apps from third-party developers.
No high-res screen.

Let me review my reasons at the time:

Of course, it’s a free market; nothing sells unless it’s worth the price, and I’ve decided the iPhone 3G is worth the price.

Apple still hasn’t announced any kind of voice-memo functionality. Rumors say it’ll appear in the new iPhone 2.0 software load, or maybe later, but some such capability will likely be provided by third-party developers since all the necessary software hooks are present to allow it.

I’m not criticizing Apple for finding profitability in a market where other firms often lose money. Instead, I think Apple is missing an opportunity here– to compete more directly with other premium cellphone makers such as Vertu, Mobiado, and Prada/LG while repositioning the iPhone 3G more appropriately against similarly configured models from other makers.