Sales of music via the internet and mobile phones proliferated and spread across the world in 2005, generating sales of US$1.1 billion for record companies - up from US$380 million the previous year -- and promising further significant growth in the coming year.

The findings are released today in IFPI's Digital Music Report 2006, a comprehensive review of the development of the digital music market internationally.

Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year - twenty times more than two years earlier - while the volume of music licensed by record companies doubled to over 2 million songs. Digital music now accounts for about 6% of record companies' revenues, up from practically zero two years ago.

What's Your Listening Style? [PDF]

The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence is one of the agency's most open branches. The in-house think tank sponsors studies on how to improve intelligence collection and analysis and publishes a respected journal, Studies in Intelligence. But since 2003, at least three unclassified CSI reports -- all critical of the agency -- have been withheld from the CIA's website. During that same time, the agency has placed online three other CSI reports, all of those relatively positive or neutral.

A tangled web woven at the CIA

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This could be the start of something big.

The radical Islamic party Hamas scored an overwhelming victory in Wednesday's Palestinian legislative elections, taking 76 out of 132 seats, deposing the former ruling party, Fatah, which won only 43.

The preliminary results, announced tonight by the Central Election Committee, were likened by Palestinians to an earthquake or a tsunami, ending more than 40 years of political domination by Fatah, the main political faction built by the late Yasir Arafat.

The surprising results put Hamas — considered to be a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union — in charge of the Palestinian political future and brought a to efforts to restart peace talks.

In Gaza City, a waitress said she was in shock. "I'm worried about the way this victory will affect how I can dress in public, and even if it will affect where I can work," she said.

Speaking of waiting tables, you might be interested in My Week As A Waiter:

I usually spend my nights on the other side of the table, not only asking the questions and making the demands but also judging and, I concede, taking caustic little mental notes. And it's been 20 years since I walked in a waiter's shoes, something I did for only six months.

But last week I traded places and swapped perspectives, a critic joining the criticized, to get a taste of what servers go through and what we put them through, of how they see and survive us.

If they put in a full schedule of four prime shifts a week, they might make $45,000 a year before taxes. Almost all of it is from tips. They wonder if diners realize that.

"Campers" are people who linger forever at tables. "Verbal tippers" are people who offer extravagant praise in lieu of 20 percent.

"It's amazing how unadventurous people are."

"Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed."

Washington Post coverage is here.

"We're telling people Islam is the solution," said Radi Johar, 29, who was passing out Hamas candidate pamphlets in the dirt street outside a crowded polling station.

Victory Ends 40 Years of Political Domination

Editor's note: On 22 January 2006, InsideDefense.com published 42 pages of material excerpted from a 127-page 18 January 2006 "draft working paper" version of the QDR. This is a selection (about 6% of the total QDR text) of those excerpts designated "key" by this editor.

You may also be interested in this Defense News article, QDR Boosts Special Forces; Draft Review Cuts No Major Programs from 23 January.

Here are some of the excerpts:

Future warriors will be as proficient in irregular operations, including counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, as they are today in high-intensity combat.

To achieve the future force characteristics for SOF and build on progress to date, the Department will:

* Further increase SOF capability and capacity to conduct low-visibility, persistent presence missions and a global unconventional warfare campaign.
* Increase (starting in Fiscal Year 2007) active-duty Special Forces Battalions by one-third.
* Expand Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs units by 3,500 personnel (33% increase) to provide increased support for SOF and the Army's modular forces.
* Establish a Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) composed of 2,600 Marines and Navy personnel to train foreign military units, and conduct direct action and special reconnaissance.
* Increase SEAL Team force levels to conduct direct action missions.
* Establish a SOF unmanned aerial vehicle squadron to provide organic capabilities to locate and target enemy capabilities in denied or contested areas.
* Enhance capabilities to support SOF insertion and extraction into denied areas from strategic distances.

The report calls for a new approach to the Transformational Satellite program: to "spiral develop" its capabilities instead of trying to field all of the expected technology at one time — and replan the satellite launches accordingly.

Key excerpts from the 18 January 2006 draft of the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review

Contracts valued at $5 million or more are announced each business day at 5 p.m. Contract announcements issued within the past 30 days are listed below.

DefenseLINK News: Contracts

In a nutshell:

1) To save money, DoD decides to close all DISA offices in the National Capital Region and relocate them to Fort Meade.

2) DISA polls its employees, looking for issues with the relocation. Half of the employees say they'd rather quit than move.

3) As an incentive to stay, DISA offers to let employees work from home up to two days a week.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

DISA Fights Turnover With Telecommuting

Decius wrote:
80% of the phone calls flagged by it would likely be flagged because of various prejudices.

Oh, no, not at all. You see, that's where the social network analysis comes in. These calls you monitor ... they aren't just randomly chosen. No, the calls that get routed to you have been carefully selected (by a computer, okay -- not to worry!) to be far enough away from you (on the positive repcap network) so as to not have too-strong ties. The negative repcap network comes into play, as well, so as to keep you from hounding your known enemies (and their friends). According to all available data, you are perfect for those calls.

Therefore, in this environment, to be a successful terrorist, it no longer works to keep a low profile. Instead, the goal is to be outrageously popular across an incredibly diverse fan base. This tends to insulate you from popular surveillance because no one passes through the filter when it comes time to select a listener for your calls. And then you're back to fighting against the professional eavesdroppers, which of course everyone knows is no challenge at all.

Of course, this has the side effect that real celebrities are sometimes mistaken for terrorists.

To compensate for the inability to find a suitable "lone listener" in the cases of suspected celebrities and real terrorists, these calls are automatically multicast to a wide audience in hopes that the collective efforts of the broader community will overcome any individual biases that may exist. Tuning in to these multicasts, which are an eclectic amalgam of amateur reality television, satellite radio, and fire/police/rescue scanners, becomes a major American pastime, largely replacing sitcoms, and thus finally unseating Ray Romano as the nation's most reliable evening entertainment.

Now, since every ten-year-old formally learned Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in preparation for the draft at age 16, another side effect of the Filter is that all of the underground rap is now in Arabic. This trend presages a larger cultural divide between the older generation and those who were kids during the draft era. After two decades, the authorities decided that actually going to DLI was optional; you could test out of it as long as you could pass the Lone Listener proficiency exam. This became increasingly common as the kids began teaching each other Arabic on the streets.

RE: Wired News: Mass Spying Means Gross Errors

At this year's CES, the real news was neither shiny nor tiny. The question in the air was what people will watch, listen to and do with these machines now that they are becoming interchangeable and interconnected.

Old-line media companies' fears can be lumped into three nightmarish categories:

¶ Business-model anxiety. Will paid download services undercut TV advertising?

¶ Creative anxiety. McLuhan is out. The medium is no longer the message.

¶ Control anxiety. The long tail is in. The career prospects for hit makers, gatekeepers and even fact checkers may well be in doubt.

The lesson here is that on MySpace there is no distinction between personal and mass media.

As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind

Would these new fees imposed by carriers alter the basic nature of the Internet by putting bumps and detours on the much ballyhooed information superhighway? No, say the telephone companies. Giving priority to a company that pays more, they say, is just offering another tier of service -- like an airline offering business as well as economy class. Network neutrality, they say, is a solution in search of a problem.

Any business practice that even vaguely resembles the airline industry should be met with a hefty dose of skepticism. Obviously, these telco spokespeople have some homework to do. Let me help:

Changes In Demand For Air Travel

Overall, passengers have become more empowered due to transparency in price and service information, and it appears that passengers are becoming more value conscious, demanding choice, and flexibility. However they are prepared to give up frills, choice or flexibility in return for lower prices. This is certainly very evident on short haul routes.

Making sense of the airline business

The key to survival, then, is an economic limbo dance that allows the carriers to keep seats as full as possible while driving costs as low as they’ll go — while knowing too much pressure on either end brings the risk of losing customers and scuttling your business. At this point, travelers are discovering that real, qualitative differences in service are ever harder to find on the shorter-haul flights that make up most domestic air traffic.

Even premium travelers have begun to flirt with low-cost options, and low-cost airlines have won at the expectations game, educating customers beforehand so they’re happy when they deplane.

This article by Hal Varian merits further study:

Differential Pricing and Efficiency, by Hal Varian

The classic prescription for economically efficient pricing---set price at marginal cost---is not relevant for technologies that exhibit the kinds of increasing returns to scale, large fixed costs, or economies of scope found in the telecommunications and information industries. The appropriate guiding principle in these contexts should be that the marginal willingness to pay should be equal to marginal cost. This condition for efficiency can be approximated using differential pricing, and will in fact, be a natural outcome of profit-seeking behavior.

Perhaps we should write to him and ask him to write about this topic in his next NYT column.

I found this data interesting:

Advertisers Climb On Board

Who really gets hurt by 'prioritization' of the Internet