Security Views/Or. Bill Hancock
all pending federal legislation involving privacy issues (complete with links to the Library of Congress’s Thomas site).The CDT site provides a wealth of news and analysis in a well-designed, graphics-rich format. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s Web site provides news and analysis of legislation and events that affect cyber-liberties.
Music Security? For online music distributors, the problem is security: record companies don’t trust it, and consumers don’t want it. In early May, 1999, at the RealNetworks Conference & Exhibition’99, representatives of several of the leading companies in the online music market addressed this issue. Rick Fleishman, senior director of product marketing at Liquid Audio, summed up the problem this way, “For security to work, your grandmother should not notice that there is security This is not a technical problem.” Indeed, technical differences have become less relevant in recent months, as the various music players on the market have become able to play each others’ formats. RealNetworks announced new products that let people record digitally from CDs, download music from the Web, and manage their music collections directly on their PCs. Signing on to that announcement were a pair of partners who used to be direct competitors: Liquid Audio and a2b Music, a division ofAT&T. The new RealJukebox and MP System technologies could put RealNetworks at odds with the record companies it is hoping to entice online by making it easier for consumers to copy and distribute music. Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks, repeatedly stressed throughout the conference that he hopes to push the record industry toward online distribution. Liquid Audio’s Fleishman echoed this sentiment, saying that the current choices of independent artists and sample tracks has not been enough to ignite largescale sales of digital downloads. “Most of what’s going on is promotional, people giving away tracks”, he said. Fleishman also said that many of the means for security are already available. Liquid tries to protect tracks in several ways. One
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method is adding a watermark, so that every copy of a song will carry the name of the person who originally downloaded, making piracy easy to track. Liquid can also encrypt tracks so they can only be played by a particular computer. However, this can drastically limit a formats mobility. “The killer app is the replacement of the Walkman by a digital alternative”, said Jack Oswald, CEO of RPK Security, a company with software the encrypts multimedia streams. Many users have a home stereo, a portable device, and a car stereo, he said, and like to be able to take music easily from one to the other.According to studies, he said, half of all music listening is done in mobile environments, such as in cars, public transportation, or jogging.The next big step in security, he said, will be the ability to tie a music download to a particular user, rather than a particular machine. There have been a number of encouraging developments lately. Microsoft’s latest player, Windows Media Technology 4.0, supports music downloads, including MP3. Earlier this week, Universal Music Group, a unit of Seagram, announced that it was joining with several partners to come up with its own system for secure downloads. Andrew Milne, vice president of development at a2b, said that what is happening in digital music now is similar to the early days of radio. It took years for an infrastructure to develop that assured that artists got paid when their music was broadcast, he said. “The technology to tie all the pieces together is now catching up”, he said.
ISPs and VPNs Are At Odds With Each Other Once upon a time, service providers went out into the world to build network services based on the Internet protocol (IP). But customers were concerned that shared IP networks were inherently unreliable and insecure. So the service providers decided to build houses-called virtual private networks (VPNs) and IP security services-‘where customers could safely communicate and transact their business. However, they