The Times: Tech column - Movie downloads/e-voting
By David Rowan
Hollywood's relationship with the internet is rather like Jeffrey Archer's approach to investigative journalists: you might long affect to ignore an uncomfortable reality, you might even marshal armies of lawyers to deny it, but sooner or later that reality will nip you in the butt. So it is remarkable that, even as the Recording Industry Association of America serves bully-boy writs on the grandparents of small-time file-swappers, Disney, that most litigious of studios, is making its peace with the web and offering its film catalogue for on-demand downloads.
Disney's decision last week to join the Movielink consortium offering new and classic film downloads is a belated admission that technological progress will not go away, no matter how many lawyers you throw at it. Movielink, launched last November, has six of the top seven studios signed up, missing only Twentieth Century Fox (part of News Corporation, parent company of The Times), which has a distribution deal with the rival CinemaNow. Disney films such as Chicago and Monsters, Inc. will now join Movielink's 400 or so titles available for downloading at between £1.85 and £3.10 each. Yet though film fans now have an increasingly useful legal alternative to KaZaA and Morpheus, it will be a while before they can forget that walk to the video shop.
As more Brits move to broadband connections, it will make sense for studios to offer downloads of films for watching on computer screens. Security measures have reassured the studios that their works will be protected: Movielink customers can store a downloaded film on their PC for 30 days and, 24 hours after it is first played, it is deleted automatically. Even on a broadband connection it takes a few hours to download a title, but Movielink believes that customers will tolerate that in the knowledge that they will be getting the genuine item.
Perhaps. There are other drawbacks, too. You need hundreds of megabytes of spare disk space to store your movie, you can't use a Mac and if you try to enlarge the image (using a media player), picture quality suffers. You cannot even load the website if you live outside the US. And the lawyers haven't disappeared: Intertainer, a rival site, has filed an action against the studios alleging restrictive practices, and Movielink is being sued by USA Video over the latter's 1992 patent for online movie delivery. Some day this might all make a racy movie plot-but for now, hold the popcorn.
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MORE EVIDENCE emerges that electronic voting, seen by the Government as the solution to electoral apathy, is as dangerously insecure as this column has long suggested. A research team at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities, in America, has just completed an analysis of e-voting machines from Diebold Election Systems, 33,000 of which have been installed in the US. The team, which found the system's source code on a Diebold website, discovered "significant security flaws" that allow voters to cast multiple ballots with no way of tracing them, make it easy for administrators to alter the election's terms, and rely on smartcards that can be copied by a £65 card-programmer. Adam Stubblefield, of Rice University, comments: "Practically anyone, from a teenager up, could produce these smartcards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like."
Diebold says that its system is tested thoroughly and that the study focused on outdated software. But the report's conclusion - that "electronic voting places our very democracy at risk" - should make the British Government extremely cautious in its response to the Electoral Commission's report on recent UK pilots, out on Thursday.
(The Times, July 29 2003)
Hollywood's relationship with the internet is rather like Jeffrey Archer's approach to investigative journalists: you might long affect to ignore an uncomfortable reality, you might even marshal armies of lawyers to deny it, but sooner or later that reality will nip you in the butt. So it is remarkable that, even as the Recording Industry Association of America serves bully-boy writs on the grandparents of small-time file-swappers, Disney, that most litigious of studios, is making its peace with the web and offering its film catalogue for on-demand downloads.
Disney's decision last week to join the Movielink consortium offering new and classic film downloads is a belated admission that technological progress will not go away, no matter how many lawyers you throw at it. Movielink, launched last November, has six of the top seven studios signed up, missing only Twentieth Century Fox (part of News Corporation, parent company of The Times), which has a distribution deal with the rival CinemaNow. Disney films such as Chicago and Monsters, Inc. will now join Movielink's 400 or so titles available for downloading at between £1.85 and £3.10 each. Yet though film fans now have an increasingly useful legal alternative to KaZaA and Morpheus, it will be a while before they can forget that walk to the video shop.
As more Brits move to broadband connections, it will make sense for studios to offer downloads of films for watching on computer screens. Security measures have reassured the studios that their works will be protected: Movielink customers can store a downloaded film on their PC for 30 days and, 24 hours after it is first played, it is deleted automatically. Even on a broadband connection it takes a few hours to download a title, but Movielink believes that customers will tolerate that in the knowledge that they will be getting the genuine item.
Perhaps. There are other drawbacks, too. You need hundreds of megabytes of spare disk space to store your movie, you can't use a Mac and if you try to enlarge the image (using a media player), picture quality suffers. You cannot even load the website if you live outside the US. And the lawyers haven't disappeared: Intertainer, a rival site, has filed an action against the studios alleging restrictive practices, and Movielink is being sued by USA Video over the latter's 1992 patent for online movie delivery. Some day this might all make a racy movie plot-but for now, hold the popcorn.
++++
MORE EVIDENCE emerges that electronic voting, seen by the Government as the solution to electoral apathy, is as dangerously insecure as this column has long suggested. A research team at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities, in America, has just completed an analysis of e-voting machines from Diebold Election Systems, 33,000 of which have been installed in the US. The team, which found the system's source code on a Diebold website, discovered "significant security flaws" that allow voters to cast multiple ballots with no way of tracing them, make it easy for administrators to alter the election's terms, and rely on smartcards that can be copied by a £65 card-programmer. Adam Stubblefield, of Rice University, comments: "Practically anyone, from a teenager up, could produce these smartcards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like."
Diebold says that its system is tested thoroughly and that the study focused on outdated software. But the report's conclusion - that "electronic voting places our very democracy at risk" - should make the British Government extremely cautious in its response to the Electoral Commission's report on recent UK pilots, out on Thursday.
(The Times, July 29 2003)
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