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British Pop Stars Form Group to Demand More Power Saturday, October 4, 2008 1:30 PM LONDON -- Some of Britain's biggest music stars announced Saturday they are banding together to demand greater control over their music in the digital age. Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Kaiser Chiefs are among more than 60 founding members of the Featured Artists' Coalition. The group says it wants musicians rather than record labels to retain control over the rights to their music. It says new technology is rapidly changing the music industry, and artists are often left out when their songs are distributed over the...

MAURICE SKLAR MINISTRIES Buy Postage Seven Signs of the Times Maurice Sklar Mar 12 2007 05:21PM 1. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes...

Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July, hoping going digital will help him connect better with a younger audience. The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook. The Catholic Church said it decided to use technology to connect to the estimated 225,000 young Catholics expected to attend the World Youth Day (WYD)...

WASHINGTON (AP) - For months, TV viewers have been told by government, by industry and by the media that if they already subscribe to cable, there's no need to worry about the coming transition to digital broadcasting. So cable customer Doris Spurk was surprised to learn that thanks to the transition, she would have to rent a converter box for $5.95 per month, per television set, plus pay for a $60 service call to install it. With five televisions in her home, the conversion would increase her bill by 75 percent. "It really ticks us off," the 63-year-old central Florida...

SAN FRANCISCO – Most people gave up on their vinyl music collection two decades ago, when compact discs all but nudged LPs off store shelves for good. If you held onto any favorites, DJ equipment maker Numark Inc. is looking to breathe new life into them with a USB-equipped turntable. It can pipe the tunes of yesteryear into your computer, where you can store them in digital form – or load them onto a media player and take them on the road. The Numark TTX USB ($399) is a sturdy, DJ quality turntable with well-fashioned components and nice styling. Nothing...

"What's shocking about the report isn't what it covers (or that Ars is cited in footnotes 126 and 211), but what it leaves out: it doesn't contain a single extended discussion of the fact that the US has been slipping in a worldwide broadband rankings throughout the decade. That hugely significant fact doesn't mean that the current approach isn't working or that the US is becoming a Luddite paradise, but it does suggest that there are other approaches to be considered, approaches that have proved successful in real-world conditions. As broadband continues to be a key driver of economic opportunity...

Digital photo frames containing malware have been found, heads up! http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3807 http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3787

LAS VEGAS - Best Buy Inc.'s chief executive said Tuesday that he is "very nervous" about being able to supply customers with the millions of digital TV converter boxes needed ahead of the shutdown of most analog TV transmissions in 13 months. "I think it's one of the biggest risks our industry has," vice chairman and CEO Brad Anderson told an industry audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Full-power television stations will turn off their analog signal on Feb. 17, 2009, after which they will broadcast in digital only. Viewers who receive their signals through an...

Hey fellow FReepers. My camera, the Canon Powershot A540 has decided to bite the dust after 13 months. I strongly suspect abuse by spouse and possibly being used as a hand grenade by a 1 year old. So, I need a new camera. $200 top budget. Will be used to take pics of kids. Lots of indoor shots. Lots of outdoor shots. Maybe even some action shots. What I want. 7MP. 3x zoom, but prefer 4x or better. Here is where my language will say what I mean, but not in proper "camera" world terms. I want the flash to...

Border broadcasters fret over digital switchFree stations in Mexico may mean many viewers won't convert sets By SUZANNE GAMBOA Associated Press Dec. 21, 2007, 11:39PM WASHINGTON — Broadcasters along the U.S.-Mexico border fear they will be at a competitive disadvantage when the U.S. switches to digital television in 2009 because residents can still pick up Mexican stations on old TVs. On Feb. 18, 2009, tens of millions of televisions that are not equipped to receive digital signals will no longer be able to receive programming. People in the U.S. with old televisions will have to buy converter boxes or subscribe...

When Adele Rothman bought her 16-year-old son a car in 2003, she made sure to pick one that had OnStar, the onboard communications and safety system. What the Scarsdale, N.Y., resident didn't know was that the OnStar system in the car was already doomed to die. The federal government decided in 2002 to let cellular carriers shut down analog cell phone networks, used by Rothman's Saab and about 500,000 other OnStar-equipped cars, after Feb. 18, 2008.

Best Buy said today it has stopped selling analog televisions and pulled all remaining stock from its shelves, signaling the end of an era as consumers increasingly move toward digital products with flat-panel and high-definition screens.

On Feb. 18, 2009, tens of millions of televisions that are not equipped to receive digital signals will become useless pieces of furniture. The government is spending $5 million to let owners know so they can do something about it -- not enough, critics say. . . . John Kneuer, chief of the federal agency tasked with ensuring a smooth digital transition, told the Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday that the government will be leaning heavily on broadcasters. . . . Some committee members were clearly worried. A poll released in January by the Association of Public Television Stations indicated...

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think they aren't expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies. The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions - "Does your institution expel violating students?" - shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become.

Emerging digital technologies to move money instantaneously and anonymously open up new possibilities for criminals and terrorists, while regulatory and law-enforcement agencies are limping far behind. On May 3, at the release of the 2007 Money Laundering Strategy, the U.S. Treasury spokesperson was pleased to note: "Focusing on well-established money laundering methods and emerging trends identified in the Assessment, we have created a robust strategy for combating money laundering, deterring criminals, and addressing areas vulnerable to exploitation." Yet the latest digital advances open to criminals and terrorists -- mobile phones or other mobile devices to secretly transfer money globally, or...

Calls Hour 2, April 7 - 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment (Iowa National Guard), "Ironman" Battalion Hour 2, April 14 - 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 34th Infantry Division, "The Red Bulls," Hour 2, April 14 - Soldiers from Camp Victory, who are a part of the Multi National Corps, Iraq. "Americans will open their hearts and help if they know where and how to do it. That’s what we’re going to accomplish with Operation Komando." - Kim Komando. Now it's your turn to show your support for the troops working to protect our freedoms. They need everyday items...

I know there are some FReepers out there who know how to capture "stills" or freeze frame from digital video footage. I need to put together a series of photos for a 25 year anniversary "retrospective" musical performance. The goal is to try to capture some "action shots" of these musical performances from 25 yr. history of video footage and work them up into a Powerpoint presentation which we can project onto the auditorium theater wall for the upcoming 25th anniversary shows (3 shows in one weekend). Do I need to have any special software to do this video capture...

Songs sold through the iTunes music store can only be played on its iPod player, because of music industry demands, Jobs wrote in an essay posted on Apple's Web site today. If it were up to Jobs, Apple and all other digital music vendors would offer music in an unprotected format -- like that on CDs -- that could be played on any device on the market, he said.

This is a digital image of the moon, which was then overlayed onto another digital image of a star filled night sky. Click the following link to read the photographer's description and to get the hi-res 1600 x 1200 image. It makes a fantastic desktop wallpaper. http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,16822681

this New York Times photograph of a crowd of Lebanese refugees: This is probably nothing. If it’s photo manipulation, it’s certainly an incredibly mundane example, and I can’t think of a reason why anyone would do it. I’m tossing this to the lizardoid community for comment from the other photoshop geeks out there, without rendering any judgment yet. In other words, I am not saying this is a definite fake; I know we’ve got quite a few experts at digital manipulation among our readers, and I’m sincerely asking for their opinions. But look at the image of the man in...

New digital media features are boosting the CD and DVD burning capabilities of Macintosh computers, and are quickly and quietly transforming the rest of the electronics landscape as well. Last week, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sonic Solutions (Nasdaq: SNIC) debuted a new technology, Toast 7 with Blu-ray Disc support, the first ever application of that kind for the Mac. The optical disc recording technology provides Mac users with the ability to store up to 50 GB of data on a Blu-ray recordable or Blu-ray rewritable disc. By Gene Koprowski

Glenn Maxwell vividly recalls the only whale-watching cruise he ever took, two years ago off Puerto Vallarta. As waves rocked the boat, he says, scores of the giant mammals leapt clear of the water. Alas, Maxwell's memories of his Mexican adventure are better than his snapshots. Knowing a photo opportunity when he saw one, the Detroit computer programmer took dozens of pictures with his $500 Olympus digital camera. But each time he pressed the button, the camera paused, the whale flopped back in the ocean, and, Maxwell says, "I only got sky or sea."

WASHINGTON--An estimated 4 million subscribers to Internet phone services like Vonage could see new fees on their bills under a plan approved Wednesday by federal regulators. The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously at its monthly meeting here to require all voice over Internet Protocol services that connect to the public-switched telephone network--as opposed to using peer-to-peer technology, like Skype--to contribute to the Universal Service Fund. The $7.3 billion fund, which has been a feature of U.S. policy for more than 70 years, subsidizes telephone service in rural and low-income areas. It also runs a controversy-plagued program called E-Rate that provides...

FORT BELVOIR, Va., June 13, 2006 – A system initially adopted to help the Army Corps of Engineers detect invasive vegetation growing in coastal waterways is giving warfighters an edge in the global war on terror. "Buckeye," a digital imaging system that's installed on an aircraft, gives ground commanders a bird's-eye view of the area in which they're operating, Army Capt. Jed Richards, research and development coordinator for the Army's Topographic Engineering Center here, told American Forces Press Service. Featuring a high-quality digital camera with an extra-large focal frame, Buckeye "looks" nearly straight down from an aircraft and captures images...

MetroSource News 02:28:54 Satellite Recording Ban Capitol Hill Battle Brewing Over Satellite Radio Broadcasts (Washington, DC) -- Fearing a wave of illegal distribution of copyrighted music, lawmakers on Capitol Hill will consider legislation that would effectively ban all recording of satellite radio programming. The "Perform Act" circumvents the Audio Home Recording Act, which gives consumers the right to record material for private, non-commercial purposes, by requiring satellite broadcasters to either install equipment that prevents their programs from being recorded, or provide compensation to artists and performers to cover potential financial losses due to illegal distribution of their material. The Recording...

A vision system that helps soldiers plan a route through the chaos of the battlefield will undergo tests on both sides of the Atlantic. The system, called Primordial Soldier, will provide soldiers with a real-time picture of where troops are in relation to each other and a digital rendering of the route they should follow. It is about to undergo trials with US special forces and has been bought by the UK arm of MBDA Missiles. MBDA plans to carry out conceptual research on the system to learn how using such technology affects a soldier's decision-making capability in the field....

DOHA (AFP) - The Arab world is lagging behind in the digital revolution, with Internet users making up less than four percent of its population, according to participants in a telecommunications development conference in Doha. "The Arab presence on the Internet is almost zilch ... not more than a few websites providing information or personal sites," said Syrian Telecommunications and Technology Minister Amr Salem. This is due to technical factors, notably "the absence of an Arab portal, which means connections on the network have to go through Europe or the United States, pushing up costs," he said. Salem said other...

CHICAGO, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- A Muslim terrorist places a bomb inside a mosque in Iraq. The bomb detonates, obliterating most of the building. But American military personnel, sifting through the debris, just moments later, find a doorknob with the scoundrel's fingerprints on it, from a door he opened to enter the facility. The prints are collected with digital technology, and sent via a wireless network, locally, in Iraq, and then across the globe via satellite to the Army's Biometric Fusion Center in Clarksburg, W. Va., near Washington, D.C. There, Army agents, working with FBI counterparts, scan the prints, and...

Kelly Wilson (left), Lynelle Johnson and Genna Griffith send their regards to troops at the "Love Our Troops" pavallion Feb. 7 on Times Square. Sgt. 1st Class Eric Reinhardt • Printer-friendly version New Yorkers send world’s largest digital Valentine to troops February 9, 2006 NEW YORK CITY (Army News Service, Feb. 9, 2006) – Operation Love Our Troops, billed as a “Guinness Book of World Records” attempt to create the largest digital Valentine for America’s troops, took center stage Feb. 7 in Times Square. The campaign has already received more than 10,000 messages from around the world since it...

WASHINGTON -- Legislation requiring U.S. broadcasters to abandon their analog spectrum, opening up the "beachfront" spectrum to next-generation wireless services and emergency response agencies, is headed to U.S. President George Bush to be signed into law. Late Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a large budget reconciliation bill that included a deadline of February 17, 2009, for broadcasters to stop broadcasting analog signals and move to digital television (DTV). The House approval came after the U.S. Senate in December amended other parts of the House-approved budget reconciliation bill conference report. The final bill includes up to $1.5 billion in...

TOKYO : Japan's Konica Minolta, one of the world's leading photographic equipment manufacturers, said on Thursday it would stop making all cameras because the market had become too competitive. The company plans to slash 3,700 jobs or about 11 percent of its global workforce by 2007 under a restructuring package that will also see part of its business making high-end digital cameras sold off to Sony. Konica Minolta will also gradually stop making camera film by 2007 to focus on its more profitable optics and medical imaging activities. "In today's era of digital cameras... it became difficult to timely...

Reshaping Nikon's Film Camera Assortment As the film camera market shrinks and the popularity of compact digital cameras increases, demand for products that offer advanced features and extra value is growing rapidly. Additionally, the demand for high performance digital SLR cameras is also steadily increasing as customers shift from film SLRs or upgrade from compact digital cameras. With film cameras accounting for an ever smaller percentage of Nikon's total sales volume, the company has decided to concentrate its vast resources toward those business categories that continue to demonstrate the strongest growth. Consequently, as Nikon focuses more on the digital camera...

CHICAGO, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- The "digital home" came of age in the last year as global revenues from sales of Internet-related products surged past the $100 billion mark for the first time, experts tell United Press International's The Web. According to new research from the Boston-based consultancy Strategy Analytics, a survey on the connected home devices, MP3 players and portable games consoles powered retail revenues to $118 billion in the category, a growth rate of 25 percent. This year promises to be another record year, according to the study, with revenues forecast to exceed $150 billion. By Gene Koprowski

Digital’s venerable VMS just keeps going and going and going.... 01/09/2006 By Keith Parent and Beth Bumbarger MASS HIGH TECH : JOURNAL OF NEW ENGLAND TECHNOLOGY New Englanders old enough to have worked in the region’s computer industry in the halcyon days of the mid-to-late 1980s participated in one of the great entrepreneurial periods of our nation’s history. Those were the days of the Massachusetts Miracle, when technology titans such as Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), Wang Laboratories, Data General and Prime Computer Inc. employed tens of thousands of high-tech professionals in what then Gov. Michael Dukakis described in a famous...

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Leading PC and consumer electronics companies announced they are developing a specification for a next-generation PC digital display interface that is also compatible with high-definition TV signals. Penned the Unified Display Interface (UDI), the standard is expected to replace the aging VGA analog standard and provide guidelines to ensure compatibility with the DVI standard. UDI will be also be compatible with HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), the standard digital interface for High Definition TVs (HDTVs) and advanced CE displays. UDI will be able to use High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) technology widely deployed in HDMI-compatible products today....

BLURRY snaps could be a thing of the past with the development of a digital camera that refocuses photos after they have been taken. The camera could be useful for action shots taken by sports photographers or for CCTV surveillance cameras, which often produce fuzzy shots due to poor lighting. In an ordinary digital camera, a sensor behind the lens records the light level that hits each pixel on its surface. If the light rays reaching the sensor are not in focus, the image will appear blurry. Now, Pat Hanrahan and his team at Stanford University have figured out how...

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U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will push for an earlier transition of analog television spectrum to emergency response organizations, saying the April 2009 deadline proposed in a Senate draft bill could cost lives during crises. Many people in the New Orleans area died after Hurricane Katrina because police and other emergency responders did not have the radio spectrum they needed in order to communicate with one another, said McCain. He and other backers of a digital television (DTV) transition say the upper 700-MHz spectrum would allow for powerful, long-range wireless signals that emergency response groups could use to better communicate...

(10/17/05 - WASHINGTON) - Congress is zeroing in on early 2009 as the time for the country to make the switch to digital television broadcasts, a move that will give viewers sharper pictures and better sound. A Senate bill would set a firm deadline of April 2009, according to a draft proposal obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The draft of a House bill would end analog transmissions on Dec. 31, 2008. In addition to working out a compromise on the date, lawmakers must decide whether to keep a Senate provision calling for the federal government to pay for converter...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has embarked on a massive effort to create a secure digital driver's license system by early 2008 but some experts warn that the plan may be hugely expensive and lead to chaos. Congress passed the Real ID Act last May and gave states three years to implement it. It laid out minimum national standards for licenses, which will have to include a digital photo, anti-counterfeiting features and machine-readable technology. States will have to verify all documents presented to support license applications, such as birth certificates, Social Security cards and utility bills, with the issuing...

Imagine you're a happy-go-lucky conglomerate of Hollywood media companies. Faced with some tweaks to your business model that you'd rather not contemplate, your members have conceived of an ingenious alternative: compelling tech companies to implement shoddy copy-protection on every digital AV-enabled computer in the land. Let's call this cunning plan the "Broadcast Flag." Your "Broadcast Flag," while undoubtedly quite brilliant and only slightly delusional, has been running into a few problems recently. First, after it was torn to shreds by techies in its drafting committee, you had to shout more than usual to get the FCC to adopt it. Whereupon...

A new way to stop digital decay Sep 15th 2005 From The Economist print edition Computing: Could a “virtual computer”, built from software, help to save today's digital documents for historians of the future? WHEN future historians turn their attention to the early 21st century, electronic documents will be vital to their understanding of our times. Old web pages may not turn yellow and brittle like paper, but the digital documents of today's culture face a more serious threat: the disappearance of computers able to read them. Even a relatively simple electronic item, such as a picture, requires software...

FCC moves up TV tuner mandate WASHINGTON-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and frequent critic of the TV broadcast lobby, will introduce a bill next Tuesday that will set the hard date for the completion of the digital TV transition at Jan. 1, 2009. McCain's move will pre-empt the current chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who said earlier this week that he is preparing a similar bill, but did not give a timeframe for introducing his bill. continued below The McCain bill will be similar to legislation known as the...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - For years, disposable cameras have been a magnet for last-minute photographic whimsy, encouraging all manner of embarrassing pictures from weddings and other social events. Watch out: There's now a disposable video camera. The $29.99 pocket-sized digital video cameras are able to capture up to 20 minutes of video and sound. CVS Corp. stores, which has exclusive rights to sell them, will process the camera for $12.99 and return a DVD; users also can e-mail video and video greeting cards. Pure Digital Technologies Inc. developed and designed the camera with just three buttons. One starts and stops...

Aiming to please photography enthusiasts, Microsoft is enhancing current and upcoming versions of its Windows operating system to allow users to more easily work with RAW image files, which take information directly from the camera's image sensor to better preserve color and detail. The software maker is working with digital imaging companies Adobe Systems, Canon, Fuji Photo Film (Fujifilm), and Nikon to provide RAW support in the next version of its Windows operating system, codenamed Longhorn, it announced this week. Microsoft is also enhancing the digital imaging capabilities of its current Windows XP software by giving users a tool to...

Last week, when not inciting mob murder in the Middle East, liberals were whimpering about iPods. Though once chic, the New York Times said, the Apple digital music players are quickly becoming passé -- ironically, much like the New York Times. As it turns out, a pretty good indication of inherent coolness is the Times’ disapproval. In addition to opposing iPods, the Times opposes -- brace yourselves -- the Rolling Stones. I know you can’t always get what you want, but with the Times you never get what you want. Under the words “Old and Overscheduled,” writer Henry Fountain reports...

A PROPOSAL FOR A SYSTEM TO REPLACE ORDINARY RECORD MERCHANDISING - copyright 1983 by Frank Zappa - Ordinary phonograph record merchandising as it exists today is a stupid process which concerns itself essentially with pieces of plastic, wrapped in pieces of cardboard. These objects, in quantity, are heavy and expensive to ship. The manufacturing process is complicated and crude. Quality control for the stamping of the discs is an exercise in futility. The system is subject to pilferage (as, in some instances, pressing 'over-runs' have been initiated, with the quantity pressed above the amount of the legitimate order removed from...

Court Blocks U.S. Rules for Anti-Piracy TV TechnologyBy Ted Bridis The Associated Press Published: May 6, 2005 WASHINGTON (AP) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday threw out new federal rules to require anti-piracy technology that would have limited how consumers could record and watch their favorite television programs in the future. The three-judge panel for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia determined the Federal Communications Commission had exceeded its authority when it announced it would require such technology in digital televisions and other consumer electronic devices sold after July 1. "This opens up the...

The end of analog TV Will America’s favorite technology really go dark next year? By Michael Rogers Columnist Special to MSNBC Updated: 5:16 p.m. ET April 24, 2005 Depending on the outcome of discussions in Congress, television as we know it may end at exactly midnight Dec. 31, 2006. That’s the date Congress targeted, a decade ago, for the end of analog television broadcasting and a full cutover to a digital format. If enforced, that means that overnight, somewhere around 70 million television sets now connected to rabbit ears or roof-top antennas will suddenly and forever go blank, unless their...

When Lucasfilm Ltd's Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith comes to cinemas this year, audiences will see the first Star Wars movie shot using Fujinon E Series digital cinema-style lenses, which brought new levels of efficiency and flexibility to filmmaker George Lucas and his crew. The HAe3x5 (5-15 mm) and HAe10x10 (10-100mm) E Series zooms were used to capture Revenge of the Sith, the final instalment of the Star Wars saga, along with E Series prime lenses (with nine fixed focal length lenses on the set) and C Series HAc13x4.5B-10 (4.5-59mm) lenses. Star Wars: Episode III marked the...