Agriculture Site Shuts Down
Rooster.com, a Web site that provided commodity prices, news and other services to farmers, closed Monday citing an inability to raise money to maintain operation.
The company opened its Web service in May 2000 after receiving start-up funds from Cargill, Cenex Harvest States Cooperatives and DuPont. In addition to agriculture news, the site aimed to be an electronic trading place for farm supplies and commodities.
On Monday, the company's home page carried a notice that said, "We regret to inform you that effective today, Rooster.com will cease operations. In this tough economic climate, we were unable to secure additional funding."
The notice also said Rooster.com had over 30,000 registered users.
SAP Cuts 300 US Jobs
German software maker SAP said it would cut 300 jobs in the United States, due to a slowdown in American business.
The job cuts amount to about 7 percent of its 3,800 U.S. workers and about 1 percent of its worldwide work force of 26,500, said SAP spokesman Bill Wohl.
About a third of the reductions will take place among employees of SAP's Americas Unit, headquartered in Newtown Square, Pa., and will include staff in sales, marketing, product management and other areas, Wohl said.
SAP's software is used by businesses to track inventory, customer relationships and product life cycles. The company also runs an Internet portal called mySAP.com where businesses and their customers and suppliers can collaborate.
Game Console Holiday Sales on Track
Microsoft and Nintendo each plan to ship more than 1 million of their flagship game consoles to U.S. stores this holiday season, meeting previous expectations.
Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube, both released last month, are being touted as two of the hottest holiday items. But the fierce competitors' success may depend on whether they have enough consoles on hand to meet shoppers' demand.
Nintendo of America, based in Redmond, Wash. will ship 1.3 million GameCubes by the end of December. It will continue to replenish stores with 120,000 consoles a week through March, spokesman George Harrison said Monday.
Microsoft, also based in Redmond, said late Sunday it had already shipped 1.1 million Xbox units and plans to ship another approximately 300,000 units before the end of the year. The software giant, which is making its first real foray into hardware with Xbox, has not said how many units will be available after the holiday season.
Video Phones Sweeping South America
Consumers in Brazil and all over South America are seeing their options increase, costs for long-distance calls decreases and the region's former telecommunications monopolies open up to competition.
Now, technology that routes calls over the Internet by converting voice into data packets promises to further cut customers' costs.
That's good news for consumers--they won't need any special equipment or wiring modifications to make voice-over-Internet calls--but it's a potential kiss of death for the region's traditional carriers.
In Brazil, a price war between carriers Embratel and Intelig has already slashed long-distance prices by as much as 65 percent.
Latin American carriers have seen revenues fall, or at best stall over recent years, a result of a 1998 recession and slow recovery, but also because of increasing competition, privatization, price wars and new technologies.
Most dramatic has been the fall in revenue from long-distance traffic, once the cash cow of state telecoms monopolies from Argentina to Venezuela.
Voice over Internet will account for 10 billion minutes of international traffic in 2001, surpassing 6.2 billion minutes last year, estimates Washington-based telecoms research company TeleGeography Inc.
Customs Department Targets Technology Terrorist Could Want
The U.S. Customs Service has identified about 100 key technologies, weapons and equipment that terrorists would be interested in obtaining and is asking businesses to help prevent the material from falling into the wrong hands.
The list has been shared with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Defense Department.
Customs officials wouldn't describe the new list, but cited items that have previously been sought by nations or groups seeking to manufacture biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
For example, one chemical used to produce dyes and inks is also a key ingredient for making mustard gas, Customs spokesman Dean Boyd said. High-speed timing devices called "krytrons'' are used in photocopiers and civilian lasers, but are also ideal for triggering nuclear warheads.
Dispute Resolution Firm Blames WIPO For Procedures
eResolution, one of the world's four arbitration bodies which are authorized to decide ".com," ".net" and ".org" domain name disputes under ICANN's rules, has announced that it is pulling the plug on its dispute resolution service. It criticized a process which it believes unfairly favors trade mark owners.
The Canadian company publicly attacked WIPO, the best known of the four dispute resolution providers. In a statement, eResolution said the rules of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have created a "forum-shopping phenomenon." According to the statement:
"The ICANN system was originally meant to allow for fair competition between accredited dispute resolution providers. But the accreditation as provider of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a United Nations agency which contributed the draft of the UDRP [the rules] and whose purpose is to enhance the protection of intellectual property, tilted the
balance from the outset.
"The system gave complainants, who invoke intellectual property rights, the privilege to choose the provider. And statistics were soon released, and later confirmed, showing that complainants tended to win significantly more often with some providers, notably WIPO, than with others, notably eResolution, creating a perception of bias from which the system never recovered."
DVD Trade Group Files Appeal
The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) has filed an appeal in the California Supreme Court in one of a number of cases over the anti-copying system that comes with DVDs.
The DVD CCA is a not-for-profit corporation with responsibility for licensing CSS (Content Scramble System) to manufacturers of DVD hardware, discs and related products. On Nov. 1, the DVD CCA lost a case in California's Court of Appeals over the posting on a Web site of the source code for DeCSS, a program that decrypts CSS-protected discs, enabling copying and distribution of DVD movies. The court ruled that an injunction against Andrew Bunner and others was in breach of their Constitutional rights to freedom of speech. It said that DeCSS is "pure speech."
The DVD CCA is now arguing that the decision is inconsistent with a separate ruling of last week in which a New York district court upheld a ruling against Eric Corley, publisher of hacker magazine 2600, that forbids him posting or linking to the controversial DeCSS. The appeal to the Supreme Court also argues that the Court of Appeal erred in failing to protect trade secrets from unlawful dissemination.
KazaA Can't Comply with Amsterdam Court Decisions
A Dutch file sharing service called KazaA, one of a number of services which picked up where Napster left off, has said that it cannot comply with an Amsterdam district court's ruling of last week. The court said that it has 14 days to stop its users from sharing copyright protected material or else it will face fines of up to 100,000 guilders per day.
KaZaA BV operates exactly the type of service which the music and movie industries feared most in the wake of Napster. With Napster, users of the service had to visit the Napster site to find and access the music files which were available on the computers of other Napster users. Its opponents knew that by getting a court order to shut down Napster' server, the swapping could not continue. Unlike Napster, KaZaA and similar services are decentralized, meaning that there is no server
which can be shut down to stop them. They also enable the sharing of various file types, not just MP3 files.
Once users have downloaded the free peer-to-peer software from the KaZaA site, they don't need KaZaA to continue operating. Accordingly, the company has argued that it has no idea who its users are or what files they are swapping. The software has to date been downloaded 20 million times.
French Groups Appeal Yahoo Decision
Two French humanitarian groups have filed an appeal against a decision last month by a San Jose, California district court in favor of Yahoo, which effectively said that the U.S. portal could ignore a ruling by a French court ordering it to block access to auction sites selling Nazi memorabilia.
The League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA) and The Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) filed their appeal on Tuesday in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. These groups won their original case against Yahoo! in France but were then sued by Yahoo! in the United States, resulting in a declaratory judgment on Nov. 7 to the effect that the French order was not enforceable in the United States.
Shortly after bringing the lawsuit in the United States last December, Yahoo! voluntarily changed its policy and now prohibits the sale of Nazi memorabilia on its auction site.