Earlier this year we reported that MPAA President Dan Glickman is likely to be thrown out after his contract ends in 2010. Unlike his predecessor, Jack Valenti, who held the office for 38 years, the studio heads plan to ditch Glickman after just 6 years.

However, Glickman is not the only one to be critiqued by Hollywood’s bosses. Cnet reports that the MPAA has already fired three leaders of its anti-piracy operations. The MPAA’s general counsel Greg Goeckner has been told to leave at the end of the year, and their director of worldwide anti-piracy operations and the deputy director of Internet anti-piracy have also been fired.

Sources in the film industry said that the three were thrown out because the anti-piracy operations of the MPAA were unsatisfactory, and “lacked aggressiveness.” The MPAA’s anti-piracy division will not cease its activities though, but in addition to the layoffs it will remove the term ‘anti-piracy’ from its name and replace it with ‘content protection’.

Under their new name they will continue to go after the BitTorrent site isoHunt – whose owner they promised to hunt down for life – and other sites they believe are a cause of movie industry losses. Unlike the RIAA, the MPAA has refrained from going after individual downloaders, and thus far there has been no indication that this will change anytime soon.

Legal battles aside, the main task of the MPAA will be to lobby for tougher anti-piracy legislation, a role that is now mostly fulfilled by music industry trade groups such as the BPI and IFPI.

The current layoffs are most likely the result of the rapidly increasing piracy rate of movies. However, instead of changing their name and replacing a few heads, the movie studio bosses have to consider whether legislating and lobbying is the right move to beat piracy. Maybe they should consider adapting to the digital era by making it easy for consumers to download legally at reasonable prices.

This post has been written by Ernesto on October 17, 2009 couresy of torrentfreak.com.

Maybe you’ve read some of the stories this past week about how FriendFeed’s traffic is way down following their sale to Facebook. The stats don’t look good, as the site’s traffic may have plummeted as much as 30% following its peak just prior to the sale. But to anyone who has meaningfully used the site since its inception, you probably didn’t needs stats to tell you what should be obvious: FriendFeed has turned into a ghost town.

One of the most compelling things about FriendFeed has always been just how easy it was to have a conversation on the site. Someone posted an item, and within seconds, many had robust conversation threads updating in the speed of realtime beneath them. This also lead to the occasional trollish activity, but overall it was great.

But since the acquisition, those conversation threads have largely slowed to a crawl, or worse, don’t exist at all on many items. Previously, FriendFeed had committed to keeping the site running indefinitely despite their new jobs at Facebook. And it has remained running, but the site’s innovation, always its key attribute, has been completely halted. And perhaps as a vote of no confidence, previously rabid users are now largely staying away.

And that’s really too bad. One of the key things I used FriendFeed for was to get information. There was a great system in place that would allow interesting things to bubble up based on people commenting on and the liking of items. Not all of it was great (baby pictures, while cute, get in the way of information), but overall the system worked. It was crowd-sourcing at its finest. But that obviously doesn’t work too well when the crowd has vanished.

Sure, there are some items on the site that still garner a good amount of conversation and likes, but as a whole, my experience post-sale has been severely tainted.

So why not just move on to Facebook, you may wonder? Because while there are similarities between what Facebook does and what FriendFeed does, FriendFeed is still much better at it. Hopefully soon we’ll begin seeing the effects of the FriendFeed team at Facebook, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s still too slow to share, automatically imported items take forever to show up, the filtering system needs work (I want to be able to hide just a certain type of item from one friend, like I can on FriendFeed, rather than hiding everything), as does the relevance of the main stream.

That last item looks like it could be close as it would appear that Facebook Lite’s “View Top Stories” will soon make its way to Facebook proper. That’s a good step, but it’s basically FriendFeed’s “Best of day” area, and doesn’t do something like push recently liked stories to the top of the stream.

But more to the point, Facebook is an entirely different beast than FriendFeed. Facebook is still first and foremost a social network for people you know and want to connect with, FriendFeed was much more about information sharing and conversation. And that’s what I miss. There are plenty of others ways to get information on the web, but FriendFeed was like a playground for information. It was fast and fun.

And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users.

This week, one former FriendFeeder already left Facebook. He reasoning was that he didn’t want to telecommute anymore (he lives in Seattle), but he didn’t seem to mind doing it while he was still working on FriendFeed. Read into that what you will.

The bigger picture is that we see this happen all too often. A larger service buys a smaller one and proceeds to run the smaller one into the ground. Not on purpose, but because they have bigger goals for their own products. Google is particularly good at it. Jaiku, Dodgeball, you could even put Feedburner in there. Now we’re seeing Facebook do it too. The users are just along for the ride, helpless when this happens. They take our playground, and put glass on the ground. We can still play, but it’s not as fun. And eventually, everyone leaves with bloody feet — and doesn’t want to come back.

We should consider ourselves lucky that Twitter hasn’t agreed to be purchased yet, it could have very well suffered the same fate.

Look, I’m happy the FriendFeed team was able to get an exit that they clearly felt good about. And I realize that some services, no matter how innovative or how passionate their user base is, sometimes fade away. It’s just sad to see it go. It used to be my playground.

[photo: flickr/Alejandro Hernandez]

This post has been written by MG Siegler on October 17, 2009 couresy of techcrunch.com.

In spite of recent layoffs, Funcom seems to be moving forward steadily with The Secret World, offering a peek into the secret societies and a chance at the beta. The official site invites you to take the test to win beta access, and offers up a quiz asking "Which secret society do you belong to?"

The quiz is brief, a fun diversion that serves to give an overview of the three secret societies in The Secret World: the Illuminati (described as the notorious bad boys and girls of The Secret World), Templars (Crusaders, judges, the holy terror), and Dragon (manipulators and conspirators). Taking the quiz and giving your email address nets you an initiate kit, an invitation to join the forums, and a shot at a beta key.

So if you are looking forward to this upcoming game, rest assured that it seems to be delayed, but not dead.

This post has been written by Rubi Bayer on Oct 17th 2009 at 8:00PM couresy of massively.com.

A beautiful wooden radio from designers Solène Le Goff and Christophe Gouache. Solar and/or wind-up powered. [via Dude Craft]

This post has been written by Sean Michael Ragan on Oct 17, 2009 07:00 PM couresy of makezine.com.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Verizon_s_anti_iPhone_gets_its_first_commercial_Droid_Does’;

We knew Verizon Wireless would soon be throwing caution to the wind in an effort to sway uncommitted smartphone buyers towards Big Red, and it looks like the November-bound Motorola Droid will be VZW’s anti-iPhone. The spot, which launched tonight and can be view in its entirety after the break, is a 30 second clip that begins by mocking Apple’s cutesy music and iconic font typically seen in iPhone plugs. It reels off a number of things that the iPhone can’t do, and then abruptly goes into full-on tease mode by flashing glimpses of a robot-controlled future and a tagline that simply states: "Droid Does." No shots of the actual Motorola Droid (or Sholes, as it was known in the past) are shown, but a dedicated teaser portal has already been erected; through that, we’re told that the phone will boast Android 2.0 and a 5 megapixel camera. At this point, we’d say the gloves are definitely off — AT&T, have anything to say for yourself, or is the iPhone doing just fine on its own?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

This post has been written by Darren Murph on Oct 17th 2009 at 10:04PM couresy of engadget.com.

The historical preservationists at NIS America are attempting to save the increasingly endangered beast known as the "Universal Media Disc." You probably haven’t heard of the format — your parents most assuredly have. Though we currently live in an age of incorporeal digital software, the developer is attempting to re-release its eccentric dungeon dive, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? in a limited edition UMD format — provided enough PSP owners show interest in owning a tangible copy of the game.

If over 1,000 supervillains-in-training pre-order the UMD version of Badman by November 13, NIS will go through with actually producing them, shipping out to their respective buyers in mid-December. Seems like it’ll be a tough putt — but we’re sure there’s 1,000 fans of both obscure strategy games and tiny, plastic-armored discs tucked away in some pocket in the internet.

This post has been written by Griffin McElroy on Oct 17th 2009 at 11:00PM couresy of joystiq.com.

Today seems to be a day of contests! First we have the DDO stress test contest that’s going to be occuring tonight, and now we have another one for Second Life! A contest of summer style, no less! Who’s up for some virtual modeling?

It’s the summer, and Linden Lab is interested in seeing everyone’s summer attire — like swimwear, bright colors, and the things you generally wear on the beach. So interested, in fact, that they’re willing to lay L$10,000 on the whole deal via an Xstreet shopping spree.

This post has been written by Colin Brennan on Jul 27th 2009 at 8:00PM couresy of massively.com.

It sounds like something out of The Matrix: a giant, world-spanning electronic network where high-powered machines, some of them using GPUs to gain a speed advantage, run secret, rapidly-evolving software algorithms that battle it out for profits in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, attack-counterattack, that yields some $21 billion a year for the winners and can spell ruin for the losers. Except that it’s not The Matrix—it’s the stock and commodities markets, and the fact that these markets mainly consist now of computers trading against one another has been brought closer to the public’s attention by last month’s alleged theft of Goldman Sachs’ proprietary trading code.

The collection of computer-automated, high-speed trading technologies and techniques that are typically lumped under the heading of "high-frequency trading" (HFT) have been around for a while, but HFT has recently become heavily identified with the banking giant, Goldman Sachs, that dominates some aspects of it on the New York Stock Exchange. And as Goldman draws more media and congressional scrutiny, so will HFT. To prepare you for the high-frequency trading media onslaught, we’ll take a look at HFT and at a stock market that really isn’t what you thought it was.

If you look under the hood of the markets in 2009, you’ll find that the trading floor has been replaced by electronic networks, the frantic, hand-signaling traders have been replaced by computer systems, and all of moves in the trader’s dance—a thousand little tricks and techniques (some legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal) for taking regular advantage of speed, location, and information to generate profits—are executed hundreds of times per second, billions of times per day. And the whole enterprise is mainly powered by the same hardware from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, that Ars readers use for gaming.

The world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth

Press reports of trading days that end with big gains or losses are typically accompanied by shots of a trading floor where young traders are either euphorically throwing papers into the air (up days) or staring dejectedly at a stock ticker with hand pressed to forehead, shoulders slumped in defeat (down days). These guys, you think, are "the market," and if you looked up the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Investopedia you’d find nothing in the "Stocks Basics: How Stocks Trade" entry to disabuse you of this widely hold notion. "The NYSE is the first type of exchange… where much of the trading is done face-to-face on a trading floor," Investopedia declares, and it goes on to provide a description of how a floor-centered, face-to-face NYSE that hasn’t matched reality for about five years.

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange

Only about three percent of trading volume on the NYSE is actually carried out by means of traditional "open outcry" trading, where flesh-and-blood humans used to gather to buy and sell securities. The other 97 percent of NYSE trades are executed via electronic communication networks (ECNs), which, over the past ten years, have rapidly replaced trading floors as the main global venue for buying and selling every for of asset, derivative, and contract. So the ECNs are the markets in 2009, and those pit traders who pose for the cameras are mainly there for the cameras.

"Why don’t you know BATS?," Bernard Donefer, a finance professor and HFT expert at CUNY’s Baruch College, asked me rhetorically. "Because there’s nothing to look at. It’s based in Kansas; the computers are in Jersey City."

At the time that Donefer and I spoke last week, BATS was the third largest equity market in the world, behind the NYSE and NASDAQ, and it has been all-electronic since it began life in 2005. There has never been a floor that a CNBC camera crew could report from, so it’s essentially invisible to the general public. The NYSE and a few other exchanges keep hang on to their trading floors "mainly for branding purposes," Donefer told me.

The ECNs offer the advantages of speed, anonymity, error minimization, and audit trails. They’ve also "ported" many of the problems endemic to electronic networks—security vulnerabilities, the "garbage-in, garbage out" (GIGO) problem, and the problem of technology moving too fast for lawmakers, to name just three—from the Internet to the markets. But the problems with ECNs are a topic for another day. The real issue is that when the average retail investor gets an E*Trade account and tries to play the stock market, she typically has no idea that she’s going up against the market equivalent of IBM’s chess grandmaster-thumping supercomputer, Deep Blue.

This post has been written by Jon Stokes on July 27, 2009 11:12 PM couresy of arstechnica.com.

When Apple discussed the new features of the forthcoming iPhone OS 3.0, SVP of iPhone Software Engineering Scott Forstall said that the iPhone would be capable of streaming video and audio directly over HTTP. Apple also advertised HTTP streaming as a feature of QuickTime X, the update of its media architecture coming in Snow Leopard. What it failed to explain, at least publicly, is how this streaming would be accomplished. Fortunately, Apple submitted its proposed protocol last month to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the hopes that it will become a ubiquitous standard.

Apple identified what it considers a few issues with standard streaming, which generally uses the Real Time Streaming Protocol originally developed by Netscape and Real in the late ’90s. The biggest issue with RTSP is that the protocol or its necessary ports may be blocked by routers or firewall settings, preventing a device from accessing the stream. As the standard protocol for the Web, though, HTTP is generally accessible. Furthermore, no special server is required other than a standard HTTP server, which is more widely supported in content distribution networks, and more expertise in optimizing HTTP delivery is generally available than for RTSP.

Enter HTTP Live Streaming. The basic mechanics involve using software on the server to break an MPEG-2 transport stream into small chunks saved as separate files, and an extension to the .m3u playlist specification (.m3u8) to tell the client where to get the files that make up the complete stream. The media player client merely downloads and plays the small chunks in the order specified in the playlist, and in the case of a live stream, periodically refreshes the playlist to see if there have been any new chunks added to the stream.

This is in contrast to real-time streaming, as there would necessarily be a minimum latency of whatever duration the server slices the stream into (Apple refers to 10 seconds as an example). As the server encodes the video and slices it into 10 second clips, for instance, it creates or updates a playlist for the stream with the URL of the next clip. The client begins by downloading one or more of the clips, playing them in order. As one clip plays, the client begins downloading the next specified clip until it reaches a tag in the playlist that signals the end of the stream.

The protocol offers a way to specify alternate streams by pointing to separate playlists for each alternate stream. These generally would be of different quality and bandwidth requirements, so the client can request an appropriate stream for whatever network conditions allow. The client can also change to any of the alternate streams as needed, "such as when a mobile device enters or leaves a WiFi hotspot," according to Apple. So if your iPhone moves out of WiFi range and switches to 3G, the QuickTime player could request a lower bandwidth stream and begin downloading the alternate, smaller chunks instead.

Further, the protocol allows for the individual media clips to be encrypted so that broadcasters can limit access to paid subscribers, for instance. In this case, key files for decoding the encrypted clips are referenced in the playlist, and the client uses the key files to decrypt each one before playing. There is also a flag that broadcasters can set to disallow caching of individual media files as they are downloaded.

The only requirement is that the media must be formatted as an MPEG-2 transport stream, program stream, or audio elementary stream. Apple’s current implementation uses (unsurprisingly) H.264 video with AAC audio, though audio-only streams can use AAC, MP3, or the MPEG-2 elementary stream. The version of QuickTime in iPhone OS 3.0 is compatible with these formats, as is the version of QuickTime that will ship with Snow Leopard. Apple also has a beta version of a stream segmenter—currently only available to Apple Developer Connection members—to slice up a stream into individual files, create .m3u8 playlist files, and handle encryption and key generation.

Since the entire method works with standard HTTP transport and essentially any off-the-shelf software or hardware encoder can make the necessary MPEG-2 stream, it opens up streaming to nearly anyone. What Apple doesn’t say explicitly is that its protocol can negate the need for proprietary solutions such as Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight to deliver remotely hosted or encrypted content. And since neither of those are likely to appear on the iPhone anytime soon, it’s one of the few ways to stream live video reliably to Apple’s mobile platform.

Currently the standard is an Internet-Draft, and we’ve yet to see any evidence that others are ready to jump on Apple’s bandwagon. But given the issues Apple has identified with RTSP, the proprietary nature of other common solutions, and the inclusion of support for encrypted streams, it has potential to appeal to a width swath of content providers.

Further Reading:

• iPhone Reference Library: HTTP Live Streaming Overview
• The beta of Apple’s Stream Segmenter software, with documentation, can be downloaded from ADC if you have a valid ADC membership.

This post has been written by Chris Foresman on July 9, 2009 10:00 PM couresy of arstechnica.com.