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A new research has suggested that as seawater becomes more acidic because of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolving in the oceans, an unexpected side effect is taking place in the form of sounds traveling farther underwater.The research has been conducted by marine chemists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, US.

Conservative projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the chemistry of seawater could change by 0.3 pH units by 2050.

Keith Hester and his coauthors calculate that this change in ocean acidity would allow sounds to travel up to 70 percent farther underwater.

This will increase the amount of background noise in the oceans and could affect the behavior of marine mammals.

Ocean chemists have known for decades that the absorption of sound in seawater changes with the chemistry of the water itself.

As sound moves through seawater, it causes groups of atoms to vibrate, absorbing sounds at specific frequencies. This involves a variety of chemical interactions that are not completely understood.

However, the overall effect is strongly controlled by the acidity of the seawater. The bottom line is the more acidic the seawater, the less low- and mid-frequency sound it absorbs.

Thus, as the oceans become more acidic, sounds will travel farther underwater.

According to Hester’s calculations, such a change in chemistry will have the greatest effect on sounds below about 3,000 cycles per second.

This range of sounds includes most of the “low frequency” sounds used by marine mammals in finding food and mates. It also includes many of the underwater sounds generated by industrial and military activity, as well as by boats and ships.

Such human-generated underwater noise has increased dramatically over the last 50 years, as human activities in the ocean have increased.

The MBARI researchers say that sound already may be traveling 10 percent farther in the oceans than it did a few hundred years ago.

However, they predict that by 2050, under conservative projections of ocean acidification, sounds could travel as much as 70 percent farther in some ocean areas (particularly in the Atlantic Ocean).

This could dramatically improve the ability of marine mammals to communicate over long distances. It could also increase the amount of background noise that they have to live with.

Bharat Heavy Electricals said on Tuesday it got a 9.9 billion rupees contract ($211 million) for setting up a thermal power plant in the western state of Rajasthan.

Although Brits admit that they would like to live till the age of 82, a majority of them doubt whether they would be able to make it, according to new survey.The average life span for a man in the UK is 77, and 81 for women.

A poll of 2000 people showed that British men believed that they would die at 72, and women thought that they would live up to 75.

Just three per cent of Brits actually looked forward to getting old, while 43 per cent admitted that they dreaded it, reports British tabloid The Sun.

Nearly 79 per cent feared that they would loose their intellectual faculties, and doubted remaining mentally agile.

Another 63 per cent were concerned about loss of mobility, and 44 per cent feared being put in a home.

For more than a third of people, exercise was the key to live longer.

On the other hand, 21 per cent said that giving up bad habits like smoking and drinking was the key to longevity, while another 21 per cent believed that the secret lied in healthy eating.

When asked about their priorities in later years, health was more important than happiness.

The survey showed that just one in five over 55 wanted to be happy with the majority, 31 per cent, preferring to be mentally active or in good health.

A Chinese herbal remedy called horny goat weed is a promising alternative to Viagra for impotent men, Italian researchers said on Monday. The herb has long held a reputation as a natural aphrodisiac. The lab experiments, which did not look at whether the plant actually increases desire, could lead to new drugs to help men get erections, said Mario Dell’Agli, a researcher at the University of Milan, who led the study.

Prisoners allowed to order out restaurant food

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian prisoners are set to be allowed to order meals from any restaurant they choose after a trial run during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan was deemed a success, a senior security official said on Saturday. The state-run Al Ahram newspaper reported that prison authorities have been placing orders with restaurants and then handing them to prisoners about to break their fast.

Driver with one million pounds in fines nabbed

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Transport authorities in Brazil have caught up with a speed-loving Brazilian driver who clocked up nearly $2 million (1.1 million pounds) in fines, local media reported. Police intercepted the driver of a 12-year-old car in Sao Paulo at the spot he most frequently committed infractions, the O Globo daily said on Thursday.

Saturday night thiever says sorry to victims

BERLIN (Reuters) - A thief in Germany, plagued by guilt after robbing a kiosk, went back days later to deliver a note of apology and pay compensation to the victims. Police said the business in Kamen, near the western town of Unna, was broken into Saturday night and looted of cigarettes and alcohol, suffering looses of about 4,300 euros.

Man drowns in election publicity stunt

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A publicity stunt by an underdog in the race to be governor of Bangkok went badly wrong when her campaign manager drowned as they bathed in a canal to highlight the plight of residents who have no access to clean water. Candidate Leena Jangjanya said 32-year-old Thirasak Sitanont drowned on Thursday as she and other staff were showing journalists the rashes they got from washing in the filthy water.

Move over priests-Nepal state names “living goddess”

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Nepal’s new Maoist-led government has appointed a 6-year-old girl as a “living goddess” in a town near Kathmandu, for the first time snapping the link between the ancient ritual and the ousted monarchy. For centuries, the head priest of the Nepali monarchy appointed the “Kumaris” in several towns in the Kathmandu valley. But with the abolition of the monarchy in May, that position has also disappeared.

David Blaine survives “Dive of Death”

NEW YORK (Reuters) - David Blaine’s “Dive of Death” wasn’t, after all — the magician and showman ended up alive on Wednesday night after his 60-hour stunt of hanging upside down in Central Park. Blaine, 35, had dangled from a cable attached to a large scaffold structure built high over the park’s Wollman Rink since Monday, except for regular breaks for water and medical checks during which he was upright for periods of a few to several minutes each.

Turkish transsexual singer faces army accusations

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A popular Turkish transsexual singer who infuriated the country’s powerful armed forces by questioning a military campaign against Kurdish separatists told a court on Wednesday she would rather die than be silent. Bulent Ersoy is on trial on charges of “turning the people against military service” in a case that has raised concerns about free speech in the European Union candidate, where criticising the armed forces is taboo.

Lamb-eating sea eagles upset Scottish farmers

LONDON (Reuters) - Sheep farmers in remote northwest Scotland are furious about a sea eagle reintroduction programme, saying the huge birds of prey are damaging their livelihoods by killing 200 lambs in the past year. The Scottish Crofting Foundation said some crofts, small farms producing mainly lamb or beef, had seen lamb numbers fall over the past five years because of the sea eagles’ diet.

Sri Lanka government wants to grow its own marijuana

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka’s government wants to grow its own marijuana. Facing a lack of the fresh weed for use in traditional Ayurvedic medical preparations, the government ministry responsible wants to be excepted from laws that have made marijuana illegal on the Indian Ocean island since the 1890s.

People across the world think the U.S.-led “war on terror” has not weakened al Qaeda and many believe it has actually strengthened Osama bin Laden’s network, a poll for the BBC World Service said on Monday.

The poll of almost 24,000 citizens found people in 22 out of 23 countries surveyed thought attempts to counter al Qaeda since its September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States had not weakened it.

The predominant view was that neither side was winning, the BBC said.

“Despite its overwhelming military power, America’s war against al Qaeda is widely seen as having achieved nothing better than a stalemate and many believe that it has even strengthened al Qaeda,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which helped carry out the research.

Kenya — which experienced deadly al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassy in 1998 and on an Israeli-owned hotel in 2002 — was the only country where a majority thought al Qaeda has been weakened.

In the United States, only 34 percent believed al Qaeda had been made weaker with 26 percent reckoning the “war on terror” had had no effect and 33 percent thinking it had made the militants stronger.

The majority U.S. perception was that neither the United States nor al Qaeda were winning.

More than 40 percent of citizens in France, Mexico, Italy, Australia and Britain believed the “war on terror” had strengthened al Qaeda.

While the majority of people questioned had negative views of al Qaeda, more citizens in Egypt and Pakistan had mixed or positive views of the group than negative feelings.

The poll, conducted by GlobeScan with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, involved 23,937 people in 23 countries between July and September 2008.

Chelsea, Valencia and Lazio shook things up in England, Spain and Italy by climbing to the top of their respective leagues.

Chelsea replaced Arsenal as Premier League leaders after Arsene Wenger’s men were stunned at home by unfancied Hull City, while Valencia moved above Villarreal in the Primera Liga on goal difference.

Lazio capitalised on Inter Milan’s 1-0 defeat by city rivals AC Milan to establish a one-point advantage in Serie A. The lead also changed hands in the Bundesliga.

ENGLAND

Arsenal were knocked off the top of the Premier League by Chelsea after suffering a shock 2-1 home defeat by Hull City.

Goals by Geovanni and Daniel Cousin stunned the Gunners after they had gone ahead through an own goal.

Chelsea moved top with a 2-0 win at Stoke City while Liverpool are keeping pace with the frontrunners thanks to a Fernando Torres brace in a 2-0 win at Everton.

Manchester United began to climb the table after a slow start, although they needed a controversial Cristiano Ronaldo penalty to set them on the way to a 2-0 defeat of Bolton Wanderers. Wayne Rooney was also on target.

Chelsea and Liverpool both have 14 points, one ahead of Aston Villa who climbed to third with a 2-1 defeat of Sunderland. Arsenal have 12 points.

Tottenham Hotspur are bottom with no victories from six games after a 2-0 defeat at Portsmouth.

SPAIN

Two second-half goals from David Villa and one from Joaquin put Valencia top of the Primera Liga when they came from behind to beat Deportivo Coruna 4-2.

Valencia have 13 points from five games, with Villarreal second on goal difference after they defeated newly promoted Sporting Gijon 1-0.

Champions Real Madrid are a point adrift in third place after grabbing a 2-1 away win over 10-man Real Betis with an injury time goal from Ruud van Nistelrooy.

Barcelona also snatched victory in stoppage time when Lionel Messi converted a penalty deep into injury time to seal a 2-1 win over cross-town rivals Espanyol.

Crowd trouble forced the referee to halt the derby for several minutes after a flare was thrown from the upper stands and landed near fans below.

ITALY

Striker Ronaldinho headed in the only goal in AC Milan’s derby against Inter Milan, handing the champions their maiden Serie A defeat under new coach Jose Mourinho.

Lazio seized the top spot by beating Torino 3-1 away with a strike by forward Goran Pandev and a double from Argentine Mauro Zarate.

Napoli are also flying high in second place after they won 1-0 at Bologna with a late German Denis goal.

Last year’s runners-up AS Roma recovered from a poor spell of form to beat Atalanta 2-0, while Juventus were held to a goalless draw at Sampdoria.

Lazio lead the standings with 12 points from five games, one ahead of Napoli. Udinese are third, level on 10 points with Inter who dropped to fourth. AC Milan moved up to sixth.

FRANCE

Seven-times champions Olympique Lyon extended their lead to five points with a 2-1 win over Nancy after France striker Karim Benzema scored his sixth goal in seven league games.

Lyon top the table on 19 points from seven games, with surprise package Toulouse second five points back and Olympique Marseille in third, a further point adrift.

Toulouse, who have not won a significant title since 1957, moved into second by winning 1-0 at Valenciennes courtesy of a goal in added time by Andre-Pierre Gignac.

Marseille had to be content with a 1-1 draw at Le Mans on Saturday and have now gone five matches without victory in all competitions.

The former European champions claimed they should have been awarded a second goal on a header by Mamadou Samassa but the referee ruled the ball had not entirely crossed the line.

GERMANY

The Bundesliga’s two Champions League teams had wildly contrasting fortunes on a weekend when the last two unbeaten records in the division fell.

Bayern Munich slipped to ninth place, five points behind new leaders Hamburg SV, when Juergen Klinsmann dropped his most creative players and then, predictably enough, saw the team lose 1-0 at Hanover 96 in a dour game.

Werder Bremen enjoyed a frantic 5-4 win at home to 1899 Hoffenheim, who came back from 4-1 down to draw level at 4-4 only for the 10-man home side to snatch a winner through the outstanding Mesut Ozil.

The sixth round of matches began with leaders Schalke 04 losing 1-0 at Cologne on Friday night and finished with VfL Wolfsburg, the only other unbeaten team before the weekend, going down 2-1 at Karlsruhe.

Hamburg are the new leaders with 13 points after they won 1-0 at home to Borussia Moenchengladbach. Bayer Leverkusen are second on 12 points, Werder third with 11.

NETHERLANDS

Groningen registered their third win this season beating 10-man Feyenoord 3-1 to go on top of the Dutch league. They are a point ahead of PSV Eindhoven and NAC Breda.

PSV created a number of chances against bottom side Volendam but had to wait until the 73rd minute before Stijn Wuytens broke the deadlock.

NAC scored four first half goals to beat Heerenveen 4-2, while Ajax Amsterdam hit three after the interval to brush aside Vitesse Arnhem.

Steve McClaren’s Twente Enschede beat Graafschap Doetinchem 3-0 to climb to fourth two points behind the leaders.

Racing sled dogs are considered to be the ultra-athlete canine for their ability of covering 1,100 miles from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, sometimes in just nine days, during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Now, a new research sheds light on how they do it.The study led by Dr. Michael Davis at the Oklahoma State University’s Centre for Veterinary Health Sciences has focused how these dogs are capable of running continuously, despite heavy blizzards, temperatures as low as -40 Celsius F, and winds up to 60 mph.

The most striking feature of these canines is their ability to rapidly adapt to sustained strenuous exercise in 24-48 hours.

Conditioned dogs display most of the metabolic changes that are found in human endurance athletes during their first day of exercise, including depletion of muscle energy reserves, increases in stress hormones, evidence of cellular injury (such as to proteins, lipids and DNA), and oxidative stress.

However, with subsequent consecutive days of exercise at the same intensity, these changes are reversed. Within four days after exercise begins, the metabolic profile of the dogs returns to where it was before the race began, despite their sustained, strenuous exercise. When human ultra-athletes become fatigued, they stay that way until a period of recovery that may take a full day.

These dogs also have enormous aerobic capacity.

While the untrained sled dogs have an average aerobic capacity of 175 ml/kg/min VO2 max (ratio of volume of oxygen to body weight per minute), the aerobic capacity of the fully conditioned sled dogs is estimated to be about twice that (300 ml/kg/min).

The running dog’s high-fat diet is converted to energy in the liver, and used as fuel in the initial stages of exercise. Preliminary data suggests that this process is a desirable trait intended to efficiently support exercise in the racers.

The mechanisms that make these four-legged athletes premiere in performance is still unknown.

Davis theorizes that it may involve the regulation of extremely thin membranes in the muscle fibres and changes in the cells that are responsible for the body’s energy production.

“These are one-of-a-kind athletes. What we learn from them will undoubtedly tell us a lot about human performance as well,” he said.

The findings will be presented at part of the American Physiological Society’s (APS) conference.

Most teens listen to their music on digital players, but Cory Cadlik, who is blind, had to ask for help when he wanted to buy songs for his iPod from the online music store iTunes.

To Cadlik, a self-described tech “geek,” that was too frustrating to tolerate.

“For me to be as tech savvy as I am, and not be able to do something … I hated it,” said Cadlik, 17, of Medway, Mass. “I had one iPod. I got rid of it.”

On Friday, Cadlik was making plans to get his iPod back after Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley reached agreement with Apple Inc. to program iTunes to make it accessible to anyone with software that blind people use to read the Internet.

Tony Olivero of the National Federation of the Blind demonstrated the technology at a press conference at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. Olivero navigated through iTunes, guided by a voice that called out whatever he slid the mouse pointer over, including file commands and the movie, music and TV titles iTunes sells.

Cadlik planned to test out the new iTunes this weekend by sampling some hard rock from bands like Breaking Benjamin and Chevelle.

“You had no access before,” Cadlik said. “When then this came out … I said, ‘Wow, this is great, this is awesome.’”

Under the agreement, Apple must make iTunes accessible to all systems by next June.

Providing equal access to online stores is required in the same way supermarket aisles must be a certain width to accommodate people with disabilities. But major gaps remain in the online retail world for blind consumers.

Coakley said a lot of industries are working to make the Internet more accessible because they know it’s good business to give more people a way to buy your product. Coakley said she hopes the move by Apple inspires more copycats.

“Apple is the leader, they’ve become the industry standard,” she said. “Other companies that compete will have to or want to do this.”

Spokespeople for Apple did not return e-mails or calls for comment.

The new iTunes can be read on a Macintosh, though people with PCs must buy “screen access software” to make it work. It’s pricey, retailing for around $1,000. John Olivera of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind said discounts are available around the U.S., and the commission has purchased a substantial amount of the software and is supplying it free in his state.

As fun as movies and music are, Olivera said the state approached Apple primarily because of the increasing popularity of iTunes U, which provides lectures and other educational content from colleges and universities. Schools were posting class material there, and that created problems for blind students.

Apple worked with Coakley voluntarily, but at least one other case over online accessibility for the blind wound up in court.

In August, retailer Target Corp. agreed to pay $6 million in damages to plaintiffs in California who were unable to use its Web site as part of a class action settlement with the National Federation of the Blind.

Target and the NFB agreed to a three-year relationship during which the advocacy group will keep testing the site to make sure it is accessible to the blind who use technologies such as screen-reading software. The NFB said it would certify the site through its own certification program once the improvements are completed.

From a report released Sept. 22 by Standard & Poor’s Market, Credit and Risk Strategies

The credit crunch has been with us for more than a year. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) started cutting rates on Sept. 18, 2007, and fiscal stimulus provided a boost to second- and third-quarter gross domestic product, yet there are few signs that the combined efforts of the U.S. Fed and Treasury are making headway at putting the credit crunch to rest.

Financial market participants are still waiting for clear signs that monetary and fiscal policy stimuli have established an environment where the U.S. economy can grow its way out of its housing and credit problems. Furthermore, there are scant signs that the stimuli now in place will enable the economy to avoid a recession that would further complicate the dynamics of credit crunch and contagion.

What handful of key economic and market variables can be tracked over the next 6 to 12 months to best help us gauge whether or not U.S. policymakers are winning the war against the credit crunch?

S&P’s recovery checklist

Standard & Poor’s Market, Credit and Risk Strategies (MCRS) has created a short checklist of economic and market variables and identified the general developments to track. We will continue to monitor and report on these crucial metrics in the months to come:

1. Real estate values — must stabilize or edge higher

2. The rate of existing and new home sales — must rebound

3. Credit conditions — must ease up substantially

4. Crude oil prices — must continue to decline, and then stabilize

How are things tracking now?

1. Real estate values: encouraging

2. The rate of existing and new home sales: less encouraging

3. Credit conditions: discouraging

4. Crude oil prices: encouraging

Let’s take a closer look at the checklist items:

1. Real estate values

First and foremost, real estate values must at least stabilize and preferably, edge higher. This will relieve anxieties surrounding residential mortgage-backed securities that — rightly or wrongly — are widely perceived to be a large collateral stake for the entire U.S. financial system. On this front, there is very good news: The average sales price of an existing single-family home has tentatively bottomed since February. Prices of existing single-family homes are currently holding at levels comparable to prices last seen in fourth-quarter 2007&mdashand before that, first-quarter 2005. The average selling price of a single-family home rebounded to $256,800 in June 2008, according to monthly data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That is the highest price recorded since August 2007, just after the start of the credit crunch. Continuation of this trend is vital to the stability and recovery of the credit markets.

2. The rate of existing- and new-home sales

The rate of existing- and new-home sales must rebound to a level that gradually clears away the massive inventory of homes offered for sale in the U.S. The sales-volume trend for existing homes — seasonally adjusted annual rates (SAAR) — has been depressed to the 5 million-unit level since October 2007 because of the credit crunch. This is less than encouraging, considering that the current inventory of 3.9 million single-family homes offered for sale is more than double the 1.9 million average level of inventories seen between 1993 and 2004, according to NAR data. A modest rebound in sales, even to as few as 5.5 million units SAAR, would be encouraging.

Since we also want to see home prices remain stable, or preferably edge higher from current levels, upticks in housing affordability will have to come on the mortgage interest rate front. After rising from a low of 5.8% in early May to as high as 6.6% in mid-July, conventional 30-year fixed-mortgage interest rates have been inching lower in recent weeks as fears of FOMC tightening subside. Conventional 30-year fixed interest rates in a range of 6% to 6.25% should support transaction volume and accelerate reductions in the housing overhang.

3. Credit conditions

Credit conditions need to ease up substantially before the liquidity-starved U.S. economy can resume trend-like gross domestic product growth. Considering the drastic repricing of credit risk that has occurred in the last year, it is a wonder that the broad economy has not followed the homebuilding industry into deep recession. The normalization of credit-risk spreads would help prop up the U.S. housing finance market specifically, and the U.S. economy generally. We are looking for signs that global credit markets are reacting to early signs of stability in U.S. housing by compressing risk spreads.

– Three-month London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) spread over Fed Funds

At minimum, we want to see 3-month LIBOR fall below a spread of 50 basis points (bps) on overnight federal funds versus the current spread of 80+ bps, as shown in chart 3. In a credit-contagion-free world, the fed fund-LIBOR spread would normally fall within a range of 12 bps to 25 bps, but we will take anything below 50 bps as a sign of improving credit conditions.

– Five-year USD swap spread

We also want to see 5-year USD interest rate swap spreads return to a range of 60 bps to 70 bps, versus the 95 bps spread seen today. The 60-bps-to-70-bps range represents the middle ground between the credit risk apathy range of 30 bps to 55 bps seen between 2003 and mid-year 2007, and the post-credit crunch range of 70 bps to 100 bps witnessed since July 2007.

4. Crude Oil Prices

To round out our credit crunch checklist, it would be very helpful if the price of crude oil were to keep declining and then stabilize in the neighborhood of $100 per barrel. This would help prop up the value of the U.S. dollar in the global currency market, ease commodity-driven inflation concerns within the Federal Reserve, and help underpin the consumer-driven U.S. economy, all of which would help ease credit crunch anxieties in global financial markets.

A premature housing-bottom signal?

The unprecedented decline in recent times of U.S. real estate valuations has dealt a severe blow to the balance sheets of leveraged global financial institutions. This occurred as market mechanisms quickly repriced longstanding assumptions about credit risk spreads, market volatility, and the overall credit quality of asset-backed securities in general. Not only has this prompted a great deal of risk aversion in how financial intermediaries conduct business with their client firms, but it also has precipitated a great deal of suspicion among investment-grade financial institutions in terms of counterparty risk, as reflected in the exceptionally wide fed fund-LIBOR spreads. None of this has been good news for the near-term growth prospects of the U.S. economy.

While the past year’s escalating rate of residential mortgage delinquencies and defaults has been priced into the credit markets for many months, along with declining home prices, early signs of housing stability are not yet alleviating stress in the credit markets, thereby narrowing spreads. The credit markets sooner or later will have to take notice if the average selling price of an existing single-family home remains stable, or better yet, continues to rise. When this occurs, we may quickly find ourselves checking off the other items on our credit crunch checklist. If, however, it turns out that the average selling price of an existing single-family home is only prematurely signaling a bottom for housing, keep your powder dry and put this checklist in the file cabinet for the balance of 2008.

This report was prepared by Standard & Poor’s Market, Credit and Risk Strategies group, which is analytically and editorially independent from any other analytical group at Standard & Poor’s, including Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services.

A security hole in Adobe Systems Inc software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com Inc’s video streaming service.

The problem exposes online video content to the rampant piracy that plagued the music industry during the Napster era and is undermining efforts by retailers, movie studios and television networks to cash in on a huge Web audience.

“It’s a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly,” said Bruce Schneier, a security expert who is also the chief security technology officer at British Telecom.

The flaw rests in Adobe’s Flash video servers that are connected to the company’s players installed in nearly all of the world’s Web-connected computers.

The software doesn’t encrypt online content, but only orders sent to a video player such as start and stop play. To boost download speeds, Adobe dropped a stringent security feature that protects the connection between the Adobe software and its players.

“Adobe is committed to the security of all of our products, from our players to our server software. Adobe invests a considerable amount of ongoing effort to help protect users from potential vulnerabilities,” it said in a statement.

Adobe said it issued a security bulletin earlier this month about how best to protect online content and called on its customers to couple its software security with a feature that verifies the validity of its video player.

An Amazon spokesman said content on the company’s Video On Demand service, which offers as many as 40,000 movies and TV shows on its Web site, cannot be pirated using video stream catching software.

However, in tests by Reuters, at least one program to record online video, the Replay Media Catcher from Applian Technologies, recorded movies from Amazon and other sites that use Adobe’s encryption technology together with its video player verification.

“Adobe’s (stream) is not really encrypted,” said Applian CEO Bill Dettering. “One of the downfalls with how they have architected the software is that people can capture the streams. I fully expect them to do something more robust in the near future.”

HOW IT WORKS

The free demo version of Replay Media Catcher allows anyone to watch 75 percent of anything recorded and 100 percent of YouTube videos. For $39, a user can watch everything recorded.

One Web site — www.tvadfree.com — explains step-by-step how to use the video stream catching software.

Amazon.com’s Adobe-powered Video On Demand service allows viewers to watch the first two minutes of a movie or TV show for free. It charges up to $3.99 to rent a movie for 24 hours and up to $14.99 to download a movie permanently.

Amazon starts to stream the entire movie during the free preview — even though it pauses the video on the Web browser after the first two minutes — so that users can start watching the rest of the video right away once they pay.

“It’s the traditional trade-off, convenience on the one hand and security on the other,” said Ray Valdes, analyst at research group Gartner.

However, even if a user doesn’t pay, the stream still sends the movie to the video catching software, but not the browser.

Amazon’s Video On Demand is the Web retailer’s answer to declining sales of packaged movies and TV shows and the growth in demand for digital content that can be viewed and stored on the Internet.

Unlike Amazon, videos from Hulu.com, NBC.com and CBS.com are already free although the TV programs are interrupted by commercials. However, the stream catching software separates the commercials and the program into two separate folders, so people can keep the programs without the advertising.

Hulu.com, a video Web site owned by News Corp’s Fox network and General Electric’s NBC Universal, was the big networks’ answer to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site where many users began uploading TV shows and other content owned by media companies.

The networks scrambled to post videos on their own sites in a bid to capture another stream of advertising revenue from a growing audience, but they have struggled with how best to show commercials which fund the programing when played on the Web.

YouTube, which started the online video boom before being bought by Google Inc for $1.65 billion in November 2006, has also struggled to cash in on its popularity even though its user base continues to mushroom.

DESTROYING BUSINESS MODELS

One possible solution would be to protect the video with a digital rights management (DRM) system. A Seattle-based company called Widevine Technologies has a DRM system that can encrypt online videos using Flash.

“The fundamental problem here is that Adobe’s lack of technology is not allowing the business models to be preserved,” said Widevine Chief Executive Brian Baker.

The lack of content protection, according to Baker, threatens all the business models used today to fund video on the Web.

Apple Inc, which sells movies and television shows at its online iTunes store, uses its own DRM technology called FairPlay, but it only works for video bought on iTunes.

Forrester analyst James McQuivey said he doesn’t believe the video stream catching technology will entirely derail the advertising-supported business model used by the networks for online video.

“It’s too complicated for most users,” said McQuivey, noting that file-sharing services like BitTorrent already exist but only a small percentage of people use them.

“People want something easy to find and easy to use.”