NEW YORK (Reuters) - It may be about time to hoe out that old library card. Hoping to draw back readers, libraries have vastly expanded their lists of digital books, music, and movies that can be downloaded by their patrons to a computer or MP3 player — and it doesn't cost a cent, unlike, say, media from Apple Inc's (AAPL.O)iTunes or Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O).

In Phoenix, for instance, branches have banded together to create a digital library that currently has about 50,000 titles of e-books, audiobooks, music and videos that can be "checked out" from anywhere.

Once discovered, says Tom Gemberling, the electronic resources librarian for the Phoenix Public Library, the program often proves wildly plain.

Not long ago, Gemberling visited a local trailer park to converse in about the program to 100 or so seniors — who regularly travel the roads touring in their recreational vehicles.

"They were cheering and screaming by the end," he said. "They were so excited. They're RVers, so they can go anywhere on the road, find a computer, go into the Phoenix Public Library catalogue, download a book and wanton it while they drive down the highway."

Available in thousands of libraries across the country, the programs work like this: First you need a library card, access to the web, and some easily downloadable software — the Adobe Digital Editions, the Mobipocket Reader or the OverDrive Media Console.

At that point, just browse around the library's website, select some titles, add them to a digital book bag and sound with a click the download button. If the title isn't available, it can be placed on hold in quest of downloading later.

Depending on the library and title, the item remains on your computer for one to three weeks before disappearing, significance you don't have to bother with returning a book, CD or DVD to the actual library.

FROM PHONES TO PALMS

One of the main distributors to libraries is OverDrive Inc, based in Cleveland, which has deals with publishers including HarperCollins and Random House during the time that with praise as music labels like Alligator Records.

David Burleigh, OverDrive's director of marketing, says the guests now has an inventory of in a circle 100,000 titles, works with about 7,500 libraries and has racked up millions of downloads of its media player and digital check-outs.

"We besides know we are touching only a small percentage of each library's patrons. Everyone we talk to is like 'Wow, you do that?"' he says. "It's a like this nice secret, that we of course don't want to be kept secret."

Although it depends on publisher permission, books can usually be transferred from a desktop computer to any number of mobile devices.

Sony Corp's (6758.T) Reader, SanDisk Corp's (SNDK.O) Sansa, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's (005930.KS) Blackjack, Palm Inc's (PALM.O) Treo 700wx, Motorola Inc's (MOT.N) Q, Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Zune, iRiver's 510, Hewlett-Packard Co's (HPQ.N)iPAQ, Dell Inc's (DELL.O) Axim, Creative Technology Ltd's (CREA.SI) ZEN, AT&T Inc's (T.N) Cingular Smartphone, and Apple's iPhone and iPods can all be used with the downloads, depending upon the body the title and the library.

"People like the portability of it," Jim McCluskey, collection development assistant manager despite Washington State's Sno-Isle Libraries, which will soon be offering iPod compatible downloads.

While having a collection of books and music available for downloads helps libraries keep up with changes in technology, McCluskey said, it carries other advantages, too.

"A lot of our libraries are cramped for space," he notes. "Material that doesn't take up shelf capacity and is available 24/7 — that's really attractive for libraries."

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

LAS VEGAS–Speaking before a packed audience, researcher Dan Kaminsky explained the stimulus in having everyone patch their systems: virtually everything we do on the Internet involves a Domain Name System request and therefore is vulnerable.

Expectations ran running high near the front of Wednesday morning as Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for IOActive, had revealed little about his DNS vulnerableness up till then. That didn't stop others from trying to figure it out. But that actually helped Kaminsky in the end; it meant during his speech, he was able to skip the what and go directly to the why.

Security researchers always thought it was hard to poison DNS records, but Kaminsky said to think of the process as a race, with a good guy and bad guy each tiresome to get a unknown number transaction ID. "You can get there first," he said, "but you can't cross finish line unless you have the secret number."

The controversy is why would someone bother? Well, Kaminsky talked about how deeply embedded DNS is in our lives. Kaminsky said there are three ages in computer hacking. The first was attacking servers (for example FTP and Telnet). The second was attacking the browsers (for example Javascript and ActiveX). We're now about to take down the third side age, where attacking Everything Else is possible.

We know that if we type a name.com into a browser, the DNS resolves it to its numerical address. But what we don't realize is that same process occurs when we send e-mail or when we log onto a Web site. These furthermore require DNS lookup.

Kaminsky then detailed by what means various security methods on the Web can be defeated if one owns the DNS. For example, if a site wants to establish a Trust Authority Certificate with the Certificate Authorities, they use e-mail to confirm the identity of the requester. He furthermore said that it's possible to poison Google Analytics and even Google AdSense, which likewise rely on DNS lookup.

Prior to the patch, the bad guy had a 1 in 65,000 chance of getting it because the transaction ID is based, in part, on the port number used. With the patch, the chances decrease to 1 in 2,147,483,648. Kaminsky said it's not perfect, but it's a good enough start.

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

Not only will MMO developer Cryptic be unveiling Official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas; they're also bringing out the big fire-arms for their presentation: Leonard Nimoy, aka Mr. Spock. This — coupled with their GenCon sponsorship announcement earlier this week — has us convinced that Cryptic is really going conducive to the throat when it comes to scoring the nerd vote.

It's desultory what part (other than fan service) the 77-year-old actor will play during the sport's onstage reveal, a great deal of less to what rank he'll potentially be involved with Star Trek Online — perhaps a sound acting reprisal of his career-making role? It certainly wouldn't be the first time Nimoy has lent his talents to a videogame, having served as the narrator in Sega's delightfully odd Dreamcast game Seaman.

The Official Star Trek Convention kicks along tomorrow, August 6, with the Star Trek Online announcement coming the final day of the show, August 10. Fans can experience what all the fuss is about either in person or by watching the live stream of the event on Cryptic's Star Trek Online site.

The current system for getting royalty payments to musicians in the United States is seriously hampering the introduction of new, innovative music distribution models, and that problem is not going to get any better in the era of the digital download, leading music experts said Thursday.

As consumers abandon CDs for Internet-based downloads, the industry is filling the gap with new licensing models, but many of the most innovative models are being done internationally, like ISPs abroad bundling unrestricted music downloads in with Internet service, Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), related during a panel at the American Bar Association's lasting a year meeting.

"That will expand, but it's hard to do here because we don't have a system of royalty rates" that supports it, Sherman said. The U.S. needs to embrace a percentage rate mode of building rather than cents-based system, he said.

Distribution of music is not going away, said Bob Kohn, chairman and chief executive of RoyaltyShare, which offers Web-based royalty processing and reporting solutions for the entertainment industry. "It's now becoming a data management problem."

One organization that handles the data is SoundExchange, which governs the music industry's royalty rates. Sherman slammed SoundExchange for delaying payment and using a reporting classification that is inaccurate and turns over data in an untimely fashion.

The become calm of that information is "getting better every year" but it has a long way to go, Sherman said.

A company that has battled SoundExchange over royalty rates is Internet radio station Pandora, which says it and many other Web-based stations will have to shut down if the government does not lower the royalty rates handed down last year by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB).

Pandora has been on Capitol Hill several times to plead its case and a affix a number to of bills have been introduced on the issue, but in that place has been no major movement.

Fred Koenigsberg, general counsel for the American Society of Composers, Artists, and Publishers (ASCAP), also had little sympathy for Internet radio stations like Pandora.

When there are congressional hearings on royalty rates and representatives from new media testify, they maxim two things: we like the ASCAP model; and we wish on account of artists to believe payment, Koenigsberg said.

"The problem is, when you sit down with them, all of a sudden their great desire [to pay the artists] seems to evaporate," he said.

In rejecting the CRB's royalty rate decision, Internet radio stations are saying "we don't like the result of services we asked you to set up," Koenigsberg uttered.

Internet radio claims the CRB's decision unfairly targets Internet radio because rates for satellite and cable broadcasts are considerably less expensive.

In May, a U.S. district court ruled that AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo must pay a percentage of their music-oriented revenues to ASCAP after the three companies were unable to agree forward the rates owed to songwriters. In total, ASCAP said, the payments owed by all three companies could equal $100 million.

Not getting that royalty check "affects the whole food chain" of people in the music industry, said Amaechi Uzoigwe, co-founder of independent record label Definitive Jux.

"The RIAA has taken its lumps, but is not getting its kudos" for taking a stand against the illegal use of copyrighted material, Uzoigwe said. "There has to have being a symbiotic relationship" between the label, the artist, and the technology used to distribute the material.

"It's harder and easier to be a musician these days," said Mark Fischer, a principal with Fish & Richardson. It's easier to prepare your hands put on affordable equipment to create music, but it's harder to find an audience for it, he said.

In the future, we'll see a much more de-centralized, smaller minstrelsy assiduousness, Fischer predicted. Though he is not in favor of it, Fischer sees many more compulsory licenses, clearinghouses, and the need to bring ISPs to the table.

The ISPs "role in this is worthy of a multi-hour discussion," Fischer said, especially when it relates to Net neutrality.

Sherman acknowledged that ISPs "sometimes do stupid things" but warned that Net neutrality is a "more complicated outcome than people give it take upon credit for."

"We bring forth to make sure [ISPs] have an incentive to innovate," Sherman said. "Be careful before you legislate gone [their incentive] for business development."

"It's about embracing technology," related musician and drummer Omar Hakim, who has worked with artists like Madonna, David Bowie, and Miles Davis. "The keyword is survival. We are married to technology, and technology does drive a lot of the decisions" in the music industry.

When Hakim started his career in the late 70s, Roger Linn had just introduced his drum machine, and Hakim's drummer colleagues were grumbling about how the device was putting people out of be in action.

"I went thoroughly and bought myself a drum machine and added 'drum programmer' to my business card," he said. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

After all the back and forth over whether Google's acquisition of DoubleClick would be anti-competitive or an invasion of our privacy, the search engine giant on Thursday released new details about how the online advertising company will be integrated into Google.

Specifically, Google unveiled four new enhancements to its advertising platform.

With frequency capping, advertisers be pleased be able to control the number of times a user sees an ad so they are not faced with the same ad every time they sign on to a particular Web site, Google said.

Google will also collect for use advertisers with data on how many people have seen their ad campaign and the average number of people who explore their ads. The meeting of friends also promised improved ad quality, and information on "view-through conversions" — or how many people actually visited a certain Web location because of its ad.

How is Google doing this?

"We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network," Rajas Moonka, senior business product manager, wrote in a blog post.

"With one click, users can opt out of a single cookie for both DoubleClick ad serving and the Google content network," Moonka said. "If a user has already opted out of the DoubleClick cookie, that opt-out will also automatically apply to the Google content network."

Google has updated its privacy government through more tidbits related to the DoubleClick acquisition, he said.

Originally published at AppScout.

The developers of Firefox have unveiled an experimental project, Snowl, designed to gather all your inbound communications, whether they're in the form of email, RSS, Twitter, or social network updates. The interface will be try based, let you prioritize messages, and take advantage of the browser. In fact, the prototype is a Firefox extension.

The prototype is limited to two message source types: RSS and Twitter feeds. It offers two views of the feeds: A three-panel email-style view with preview, and a "river of news" view, based on a concept popularized by RSS developer Dave Winer. This second view resembles a three-column continuous newspaper layout.

The Snowl team is low testing the waters and looking for feedback, as well as considering adding features like more message sources such as twinkling messaging, a response mechanism, and an API for developers.

More information is available on the project at Mozilla Labs station, and you can download the prototype implementation from the Firefox Add-ons location.

The developers of Firefox have unveiled an experimental project, Snowl, designed to gather all your inbound communications, whether they're in the form of email, RSS, Twitter, or social network updates. The interface will be search based, let you prioritize messages, and take advantage of the browser. In fact, the prototype is a Firefox extension.

The prototype is limited to two communication source types: RSS and Twitter feeds. It offers two views of the feeds: A three-panel email-style view with preview, and a "river of news" view, based on a concept popularized by RSS developer Dave Winer. This second view resembles a three-column continuous newspaper layout.

The Snowl team is still testing the waters and looking for feedback, as well as considering adding features like more communication sources such because instant messaging, a response mechanism, and an API for the sake of developers.

More accusation is available on the project at Mozilla Labs site, and you can download the prototype implementation from the Firefox Add-ons site.

LONDON (Reuters) - An eccentric British millionaire has impose his entire life up for sale on the Internet — including his title of Lord of the Manor of Warleigh — in the hope of converting his assets into cash.

David Piper, a hotelier who made headlines six years ago after advertising for a wife to become his "lady of the manor," wants to sell his west of England existence attached the auction place eBay and move to London to be closer to his children.

He is selling two hotels, two Bentleys, a collection of paintings and his title of Lord of the Manor — which he bought along with a expanded rank for one million pounds ($2 million).

"This sale is brought about while the present lord has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer," the advertisement for the sale explains.

"For sale as a whole or in part… Can include David, the existing eccentric lord of the manor, physically as well to a suitable purchaser."

Piper, who is well known in his hometown of Plymouth for his antics, is hoping to raise up to 4 million pounds, although he estimates that the total value of the estates was as much viewed like 6 million before property prices fell.

More than 100 bids have been received so far, with the common offer standing at 1.3 million pounds. Bidding closes on August 11.

Piper's move follows that of Ian Usher, a British-born man living in Perth, Australia who earlier this year auctioned off all his selfish effects, including his home. He ended up raising much less than he had hoped — barely making $380,000.

Piper's attempt six years ago to find a bride ended in minor disaster. More than 2,000 young women answered his advertisement in the International Herald Tribune newspaper and he chose a 32-year-old American divorcee to try out to subsist his lady.

She arrived with her two young children, but fled the manor after only a few days, unable to go through with the union.

As part of his new venture, Piper said he was offering to introduce whoever purchased his life to some of the women whose applications he turned down.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

SAN FRANCISCO–As you might expect, inquire engine marketers aren't crazy about how the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft power struggle has played out.

It's not that they disapprove of Yahoo remaining independent of Microsoft. It's correct that Google's search market share, at nearly 70 percent in June, has only grown stronger during its rivals' kerfuffle. Online marketers here Wednesday at the RBC Capital conference said Google's dominance limits their options to deliver on search ad campaigns.

"We always obtain a need for multiple sources of quality traffic and we don't conceive that emergency going away as Google's share increases," Will Margiloff, CEO and founder of Innovation Interactive, an online marketing agency, said during a panel canvassing. "Complexity is good, consolidation is bad."

Another online marketer on the panel put it analogous this: "In the last 10 years, I've seen a dramatic decrease of competition between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and that's increased the importance of success onward Google. When our clients come to us to talk about search, what they really mean is, 'Let's talk about Google.'"

It's no big surprise, but the current economic malaise appears to have marketers scouting even harder for the next viable competitor to Google. Online advertising spending is holding its own against other media in the downturn, but it's softening in some markets find to one’s mind real-estate or travel ads. And more than ever, marketers are focused on their return on investment for ads. That means they want to load up on performance campaigns like paid search and email campaigns, which can result in action, and spend less on brand ads that are harder to metre, executives said.

The union of power could be hurting also-ran Net giants, too. AOL reported a paltry 2 percent growth in quarterly ad sales on Wednesday, despite its investments to become a viable online ad venture. Google and Yahoo, in contrast, have shown double-digit ad growth in the second quarter.

To be sure, Internet marketing executives were hopeful about the performance of Google rivals, even while they downplayed their consequence. Marketers said that Yahoo, Ask.com and others are performing well for search ad campaigns. One marketing executive pointed to the fact that persons bestow more time on Yahoo than on Google of the same kind with a reason not to discount the Internet veteran, for example. Another highlighted Google's trouble gaining traction against Baidu in China.

"Google's certainly doing well, but it's good for all of us that others are doing well, too," said Russ Mann, CEO of Covario.

Internet marketing executives also talked about Yahoo's opportunity to combine data from display ads and search to present advertisers with full-service campaigns that are more measurable. Development of new auction systems and behavioral ads, through Yahoo's purchase of Blue Lithium and Right Media, could help the company improve the performance of display ads, one executive said.

Marketers will also have to get more sophisticated about spurring action, or "clicks" on their paid search ads, with the aim of boosting conversion rates of shoppers from 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Margiloff.

That will also avoid the bottom line of the search marketing agencies.

To wit: executives from online marketing agencies iCrossing, Innovation Interactive and The Search Agency said that their businesses were up slightly so far this year.

"There's not a de-acceleration of spending, but there's an intensified focus on return on investment," said Michael Jones, an executive from Internet marketing agency PepperJam.

Google is catering to advertising agencies with a repaired product called Google Insights for Search. The search giant introduced the new product on Wednesday.

Insights for Search is a free tool that taps Google's database of search results to unearth information advertisers covet. Google said the product was designed with marketers in mind.

"It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat chart to graphically display search volume and regional interest," Elan Dekel and Niv Efron wrote on the Google blog.

Lots of Analytics

Google is on an analytics roll. In June, the company updated Google Trends with numbers and the ability to download results to a spreadsheet. Google said it received good feedback from agencies and advertisers on how they're using the new version, from identifying new growth markets to optimizing Google AdWords campaigns.

Like Google Trends, Insights for Search lets advertisers and agencies type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as in health as the top related and rising searches. Users also have the potency to compare search-volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

Google offered the example of entering the term "apple." Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the top searches are associated with Apple, Inc. rather than the fruit.

Google Insights for Search allows users to filter this query with the "Food & Drink" head of predication, resulting in a dramatically deviating inspect of search-volume trends and related searches for the fruit. Users can also use the filter to compare search terms within the category.

"If you love Trends, we hope you'll fall in love all over again with Google Insights for Search," Dekel and Efron said. Users need a Google account to tap into the data and download results to a spreadsheet.

Optimizing Traditional Ad Campaigns

Traditional marketers could use Insights for Search to help measure the impact of traditional media campaigns, according to Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. Advertising agencies and advertisers could sift through the facts beneficial to brand terms, catchphrases, and words that appear in television, radio or magazine ads to see how superior they are in Google searches.

"Consumers might see an ad on TV or in a magazine and go online to search for more information. So you could use this as a tool to see if there's been a response to a traditional media campaign in a particular market. That's interesting feedback," Sterling said.

Advertisers can also gauge the potential claim for a product in a specified market. Conducting a search for "Apple" in the consumer-electronics category, for example, shows that the iPod touch seems to be a product with demand potential because of the way queries are arrayed. Advertisers could also search for terms like "hybrid cars" to see what specific regions and markets might hold potential buyers.

"There are some interesting queries you can make to determine expressions of interest people have not far from certain products or services in certain areas in addition to keyword research," Sterling said. "This is not a keyword-research tool because it doesn't give you variations on keywords, but it is one of the types of tools you would use to figure out what people are doing so you can optimize your campaign."