[JackSpratts]

Why Apple Must Tell Its Story

With Fortunes So Tied to Jobs, Marketer Needs to Lay Out Succession Plan
Michael Bush

The connection between Apple and Steve Jobs is unlike any other brand and CEO relationship in corporate America, maybe the world. The unflappable, black turtleneck-wearing founder is viewed as the public face of Apple, and the driving creative force behind every cool gadget it releases. In fact Jobs so epitomizes the brand that even the Mac guy in the Mac vs. PC ads is clearly meant to evoke the founder

So when Mr. Jobs catches a cold, Apple sneezes. And that's why the rumors and innuendo swirling about his health are particularly serious for Apple. It started with blogosphere buzz in June after Mr. Jobs -- who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004 -- appeared extremely thin, bordering on frail, while introducing the latest version of the iPhone.

Once word started circulating that he may be ill, Apple stock took a considerable hit, dropping more than $10 a share. And when Mr. Jobs was absent from last week's quarterly earnings conference call, the questions started again -- and the stock fell again.

The irony, of course, is that in the age of transparency, new media and blogs, the notoriously tight-lipped Apple is one of the few companies that manage to get away with a we-don't-have-to-respond approach to media relations. But in light of the recent questions surrounding Mr. Jobs' health, some argue it's time to start telling its life-after-Jobs story.

"The difficulty they have is the very real possibility that in Steve Jobs, Apple has created a person that cannot be replaced," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst, Enderle Group. "It's one thing to have a PR campaign that talks about life after Jobs, but would a PR campaign convince you that there would be life on earth if the sun went out?"

Opacity

But if you're thinking that the company will open up to address Mr. Jobs' health and maybe its succession plan, don't hold your breath.

"If Apple decides to tell that story it's going to be when they decide to tell that story, not when the rumor mill asks them to," said a former Apple employee. "Apple has always been very private about anything related to employees. And when someone like the CEO is involved I think they are going to be even more so."

And Apple isn't offering much of a peek under the kimono. "Steve loves Apple, serves as its CEO at the pleasure of Apple's board and has no plans to leave Apple," said Steve Dowling, director-corporate PR for the company. "Steve's health is a private matter, and as you know, Apple does have a succession plan but it's confidential for obvious reasons."

But where does that leave Joe Investor if even Mr. Enderle, who follows the company more closely than most, doesn't believe the company has a credible succession strategy or is creating one?

"After being booted out of the company once, Steve Jobs probably isn't really excited about the board creating a solid plan to replace him," Mr. Enderle said. There's no doubt Mr. Jobs would have his hands involved in a succession plan as it's common knowledge that nothing gets done at Apple without his OK.

No disclosure needed

Michael Gartenberg, VP-research director at Jupiter Research, thinks Apple should not launch a PR or media relations campaign to explain itself. "Everything the company does is put under a microscope and I guess people make stock purchases based on such information. Perhaps this is the downside of that relationship, but I certainly don't feel that means they need to disclose anything other than his ability to run the company as CEO."

Mark Hass, CEO of Manning Selvage & Lee, said when a company is so closely tied to its CEO "you almost need to have a marketing crisis plan in place" should that individual decide to leave or step down.

Even so, Mr. Hass doesn't know if it's the right time to start introducing other executives within Apple to the public or talking about a succession plan. "The brand's success is so closely tied to him that you don't want to necessarily mess with a formula that's working unless you need to," he said. "If it's not broken, don't fix it."
http://adage.com/article?article_id=129926





Flipping Web Sites, Selling the Niche
Abha Bhattarai

Dave Hermansen did not own a bird or a cage when he bought bird-cage.com, an online store, for $1,800 three years ago. He simply saw a Web site that was “very, very poorly done,” and begged the owners to sell it to him. He then redesigned the site, added advertising and drove up traffic. Last December, he sold it for $173,000.

Mr. Hermansen, 30, is among the latest wave of entrepreneurs who, like the day traders and real estate investors before them, are looking to make a lot of money without much effort.

They use little more than home computers and free software to buy Web sites that appeal to a small and specific niche. Then they fix up the sites with hopes of reselling them for far more than they paid.

But while their dreams are fueled by high-profile Internet deals — Condé Nast’s $25 million purchase of Wired News, People.com’s acquisition of Celebrity Baby Blog and, most recently, a deal this month between Guardian News and Media and the owner of PaidContent for a reported $30 million — these entrepreneurs have smaller ambitions for their sites. Many end up settling for just hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

“Everyone with a site is saying, ‘If I can get it to the right value, I’m out,’ ” said Gene Alvarez, vice president for research at Gartner, a technology consulting firm. “I call it the burger-flipping model: You build up volume, you build a community and then you try to sell it while it’s still hot.”

Some Web sites begin as labors of love. Take Celebrity Baby Blog, which Danielle Friedland, the creator, has said she created after reeling off facts during the 2004 Golden Globes “about who was pregnant with twins or had recently given birth.” Four years later, People.com bought the Web site after it noticed an unfulfilled niche: “a very passionate community of young moms,” said Fran Hauser, president of People Digital.

Ms. Hauser said she would not comment on the sale price. Industry insiders speculate it was in the low millions.

Most flippers aim a bit lower. They troll the Internet for sites that, according to Mike Lyon, an investment banker at Arbor Advisors, are “undervalued property” — poorly designed, with little visibility on the Web.

While there is no data on how many people flip Web sites, the number of sites sold on eBay has doubled over the last three months, the company said. At SitePoint’s marketplace, a similar forum where users can auction off Web sites, sales have quadrupled in the last year, said Matt Mickiewicz, a founder of the site.

The changing economics of the Web have made it easier to find and exploit niche communities on the Internet. The Internet boom of the 1990s spawned companies like Pets.com that were Web versions of brick-and-mortar stores. They required stockpiling products and shipping them to customers. But that model came crashing down with the Web bust of 2000.

Since then, building niche Web sites and small-scale online stores has become cheap and easy. Free software, advertising systems like Google’s, and “drop shipping” services that allow Web site owners to handle products through a third-party supplier, have lowered the cost of doing business.

Instead of selling goods and services, analysts said most flippers are looking into the easiest way to make a quick buck, by tapping into specialized advertising.

Philip Kaplan, who captured attention with a Web site that rejoiced in the unraveling of the dot-com bubble, now helps sites secure online advertising through his company AdBrite. He said in an interview that he has been encouraging site owners to “carve out a focused niche.”

“All of our advertisers are saying, ‘We want this niche or that niche,’ ” he said. “They never say, ‘We want to advertise on a site about nothing.’ ”

Mr. Hermansen, of bird-cage.com, says he is always looking for areas on the Internet with high search volume and little competition.

“Once I found the bird niche, I knew it was where I wanted to be,” he said.

Before bird cages, Mr. Hermansen owned — and sold — niche Web sites about paintball, remote-control toys and electric scooters. In 2005, he quit his job as a draftsman to flip Web sites full time.

“It used to be that if you had a site worth a million dollars, you’d hire an investment bank or a broker to sell it,” Mr. Mickiewicz, of SitePoint, said. “But if you had one that generated less than that, you’d just have to sit on it. Now you can sell anything for any sort of profit, whether it’s $20 or $220,000.”

The average selling price of Web sites on eBay was $78 last month. There, sites for sale range from online stores specializing in gift baskets and patio grills to message boards and forums devoted to the online game World of Warcraft and deep sea fishing. The marketplace at SitePoint offers sites about chicken recipes, bonsai trees and hiking stories. “Low-maintenance content sites” like blogs, online communities and directories are the most popular, Mr. Mickiewicz said, adding that a Web site’s selling price is generally one to three times the value of its annual revenue.

Peter T. Davis, who calls himself a “Web property developer,” said he owns about 20 Web sites, including message boards about model railroads and coin collecting.

Mr. Davis said he generally holds onto Web sites for at least a few months before flipping them. Sometimes, though, the process is much quicker — like the time he bought a forum about day care centers for $1,500 and sold it six hours later for $3,500.

“I used to make my own Web sites and sell them, but then I realized, ‘Hey, this is much easier than making them,’ ” he said. “It’s as simple as buying a Web site from someone and making it more attractive. It’s about creating value where there was none.”

Creating the value, though, is the tricky part. Many Web site flippers said they begin by tweaking a site’s template and making other superficial changes like adjusting fonts, colors and type sizes. After that, they manipulate a Web site’s structure, coding and presentation so it shows up more prominently in Web searches.

In an era when Web use is increasingly search-driven, making sure people find your site makes all the difference, Mr. Hermansen said. “Once you beef up traffic, everything else just happens,” he added.

Consumer protection groups warn potential buyers. Traffic generators and click fraud can easily exaggerate Web site traffic. Web site owners can inflate revenue statistics and tamper with search engine rankings.

“It’s an increasing law enforcement challenge,” said Lois C. Greisman, associate director for marketing practices at the Federal Trade Commission. “It’s hard to measure fraud on the Internet, but this is just a variation on the classic get-rich-quick scheme.”

Last year, Mr. Hermansen said he did something he had wanted to do for years: he bought a parrot, Sunny. Earlier this month, Mr. Hermansen and his brother, Mike, set up a warehouse and started manufacturing and selling their own line of bird cages.

Now Sunny lives in one of the cages in the Hermansens’ warehouse and is the mascot for their newest Web site, Innovative Cages.com. Mr. Hermansen said he has found yet another Internet void to fill: “the high-end, high-priced luxury cage niche.”

“Of course,” he added, “the eventual goal is to sell the site for a good chunk of money.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/te...gy/29flip.html





Expensive

$1,000 Spray Makes Electronic Gadgets Completely Waterproof

Technology Could Help Emergency First-Responders

A new $1,000 spray claims to protect notebook computers, iPods, cell phones and other electronic gadgets from liquid, making them completely waterproof.

The spray, called Golden Shellback Splash Proof Coating, is one thousandth of an inch thick.

Sid Martin of the Northeast Maritime Institute, which created the product, said the spray forces the water to roll off electronic gadgets like water off a duck's back or "just like after you waxed your car," KPIX-TV reported.

A reporter tossed a Blackberry in a tub of water and it continued to play.

"Not only is it still working, but we are still getting audio from the iPod Touch in the connected speakers," the woman said. "You really don't see much of a coating or feel much of a coating."

Martin said the technology could be used for emergency first-responders, bio-medical devices and historic preservation.

The product should be available to the public later this year.
http://www.local6.com/technology/17011560/detail.html





The Hole Trick

How Skype & Co. Get Round Firewalls

Peer-to-peer software applications are a network administrator's nightmare. In order to be able to exchange packets with their counterpart as directly as possible they use subtle tricks to punch holes in firewalls, which shouldn't actually be letting in packets from the outside world.

Increasingly, computers are positioned behind firewalls to protect systems from internet threats. Ideally, the firewall function will be performed by a router, which also translates the PC's local network address to the public IP address (Network Address Translation, or NAT). This means an attacker cannot directly adress the PC from the outside - connections have to be established from the inside.

This is of course a problem when two computers behind NAT firewalls require to talk directly to each other - if, for example, their users want to call each other using Voice over IP (VoIP). The dilemma is clear - whichever party calls the other, the recipient's firewall will decline the apparent attack and will simply discard the data packets. The telephone call doesn't happen. Or at least that's what a network administrator would expect.

Punched

But anyone who has used the popular internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.

Naturally every firewall must also let packets through into the local network - after all the user wants to view websites, read e-mails, etc. The firewall must therefore forward the relevant data packets from outside, to the workstation computer on the LAN. However it only does so, when it is convinced that a packet represents the response to an outgoing data packet. A NAT router therefore keeps tables of which internal computer has communicated with which external computer and which ports the two have used.

The trick used by VoIP software consists of persuading the firewall that a connection has been established, to which it should allocate subsequent incoming data packets. The fact that audio data for VoIP is sent using the connectionless UDP protocol acts to Skype's advantage. In contrast to TCP, which includes additional connection information in each packet, with UDP, a firewall sees only the addresses and ports of the source and destination systems. If, for an incoming UDP packet, these match an NAT table entry, it will pass the packet on to an internal computer with a clear conscience.

Switching

The switching server, with which both ends of a call are in constant contact, plays an important role when establishing a connection using Skype. This occurs via a TCP connection, which the clients themselves establish. The Skype server therefore always knows under what address a Skype user is currently available on the internet. Where possible the actual telephone connections do not run via the Skype server; rather, the clients exchange data directly.

Let's assume that Alice wants to call her friend Bob. Her Skype client tells the Skype server that she wants to do so. The Skype server already knows a bit about Alice. From the incoming query it sees that Alice is currently registered at the IP address 1.1.1.1 and a quick test reveals that her audio data always comes from UDP port 1414. The Skype server passes this information on to Bob's Skype client, which, according to its database, is currently registered at the IP address 2.2.2.2 and which, by preference uses UDP port 2828.

Step 1: Alice tries to call Bob, which signals Skype.

Bob's Skype program then punches a hole in its own network firewall: It sends a UDP packet to 1.1.1.1 port 1414. This is discarded by Alice's firewall, but Bob's firewall doesn't know that. It now thinks that anything which comes from 1.1.1.1 port 1414 and is addressed to Bob's IP address 2.2.2.2 and port 2828 is legitimate - it must be the response to the query which has just been sent.

Step 2: Bob tries to reach Alice, which punches a hole through Bob's Firewall.

Now the Skype server passes Bob's coordinates on to Alice, whose Skype application attempts to contact Bob at 2.2.2.2:2828. Bob's firewall sees the recognised sender address and passes the apparent response on to Bob's PC - and his Skype phone rings.

Step 3: Alice finally reaches Bobs computer through the hole.

Doing the rounds

This description is of course somewhat simplified - the details depend on the specific properties of the firewalls used. But it corresponds in principle to our observations of the process of establishing a connection between two Skype clients, each of which was behind a Linux firewall. The firewalls were configured with NAT for a LAN and permitted outgoing UDP traffic.

Linux' NAT functions have the VoIP friendly property of, at least initially, not changing the ports of outgoing packets. The NAT router merely replaces the private, local IP address with its own address - the UDP source port selected by Skype is retained. Only when multiple clients on the local network use the same source port does the NAT router stick its oar in and reset the port to a previously unused value. This is because each set of two IP addresses and ports must be able to be unambiguously assigned to a connection between two computers at all times. The router will subsequently have to reconstruct the internal IP address of the original sender from the response packet's destination port.

Other NAT routers will try to assign ports in a specific range, for example ports from 30,000 onwards, and translate UDP port 1414, if possible, to 31414. This is, of course, no problem for Skype - the procedure described above continues to work in a similar manner without limitations.

It becomes a little more complicated if a firewall simply assigns ports in sequence, like Check Point's FireWall-1: the first connection is assigned 30001, the next 30002, etc. The Skype server knows that Bob is talking to it from port 31234, but the connection to Alice will run via a different port. But even here Skype is able to outwit the firewall. It simply runs through the ports above 31234 in sequence, hoping at some point to stumble on the right one. But if this doesn't work first go, Skype doesn't give up. Bob's Skype opens a new connection to the Skype server, the source port of which is then used for a further sequence of probes.

Skype can do port scans. Here it suceeds on port 38901 and connects through the firewall.

Nevertheless, in very active networks Alice may not find the correct, open port. The same also applies for a particular type of firewall, which assigns every new connection to a random source port. The Skype server is then unable to tell Alice where to look for a suitable hole in Bob's firewall.

However, even then, Skype doesn't give up. In such cases a Skype server is then used as a relay. It accepts incoming connections from both Alice and Bob and relays the packets onwards. This solution is always possible, as long as the firewall permits outgoing UDP traffic. It involves, however, an additional load on the infrastructure, because all audio data has to run through Skype's servers. The extended packet transmission times can also result in an unpleasant delay.

Use of the procedure described above is not limited to Skype and is known as "UDP hole punching". Other network services such as the Hamachi gaming VPN application, which relies on peer-to-peer communication between computers behind firewalls, use similar procedures. A more developed form has even made it to the rank of a standard - RFC 3489 "Simple Traversal of UDP through NAT" (STUN) describes a protocol which with two STUN clients can get around the restrictions of NAT with the help of a STUN server in many cases. The draft Traversal Using Relay NAT (TURN) protocol describes a possible standard for relay servers.

DIY hole punching

With a few small utilities, you can try out UDP hole punching for yourself. The tools required, hping2 and netcat, can be found in most Linux distributions. Local is a computer behind a Linux firewall (local-fw) with a stateful firewall which only permits outgoing (UDP) connections. For simplicity, in our test the test computer remote was connected directly to the internet with no firewall.

Firstly start a UDP listener on UDP port 14141 on the local/1 console behind the firewall:
local/1# nc -u -l -p 14141

An external computer "remote" then attempts to contact it.
remote# echo "hello" | nc -p 53 -u local-fw 14141

However, as expected nothing is received on local/1 and, thanks to the firewall, nothing is returned to remote. Now on a second console, local/2, hping2, our universal tool for generating IP packets, punches a hole in the firewall:
local/2# hping2 -c 1 -2 -s 14141 -p 53 remote

As long as remote is behaving itself, it will send back a "port unreachable" response via ICMP - however this is of no consequence. On the second attempt
remote# echo "hello" | nc -p 53 -u local-fw 14141

the netcat listener on console local/1 then coughs up a "hello" - the UDP packet from outside has passed through the firewall and arrived at the computer behind it.

Network administrators who do not appreciate this sort of hole in their firewall and are worried about abuse, are left with only one option - they have to block outgoing UDP traffic, or limit it to essential individual cases. UDP is not required for normal internet communication anyway - the web, e-mail and suchlike all use TCP. Streaming protocols may, however, encounter problems, as they often use UDP because of the reduced overhead.

Astonishingly, hole punching also works with TCP. After an outgoing SYN packet the firewall / NAT router will forward incoming packets with suitable IP addresses and ports to the LAN even if they fail to confirm, or confirm the wrong sequence number (ACK). Linux firewalls at least, clearly fail to evaluate this information consistently. Establishing a TCP connection in this way is, however, not quite so simple, because Alice does not have the sequence number sent in Bob's first packet. The packet containing this information was discarded by her firewall.
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/securi...atures/82481/0





Malwebolence
Mattathias Schwartz

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.

Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”

/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.

But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.

Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman. Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.

Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment deprived its subjects of more than just privacy. Two of them, he says, lost their jobs, and at least one, for a time, lost his girlfriend. Another has filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Fortuny in an Illinois court. After receiving death threats, Fortuny meticulously scrubbed his real address and phone number from the Internet. “Anyone who knows who and where you are is a security hole,” he told me. “I own a gun. I have an escape route. If someone comes, I’m ready.”

While reporting this article, I did everything I could to verify the trolls’ stories and identities, but I could never be certain. After all, I was examining a subculture that is built on deception and delights in playing with the media. If I had doubts about whether Fortuny was who he said he was, he had the same doubts about me. I first contacted Fortuny by e-mail, and he called me a few days later. “I checked you out,” he said warily. “You seem legitimate.” We met in person on a bright spring day at his apartment, on a forested slope in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants, looking like an amiable freelancer on a Friday afternoon. He is thin, with birdlike features and the etiolated complexion of one who works in front of a screen. He’d been chatting with an online associate about driving me blindfolded from the airport, he said. “We decided it would be too much work.”

A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”

“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”

In the days after the Megan Meier story became public, Lori Drew and her family found themselves in the trolls’ crosshairs. Their personal information — e-mail addresses, satellite images of their home, phone numbers — spread across the Internet. One of the numbers led to a voice-mail greeting with the gleeful words “I did it for the lulz.” Anonymous malefactors made death threats and hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Then came the Megan Had It Coming blog. Supposedly written by one of Megan’s classmates, the blog called Megan a “drama queen,” so unstable that Drew could not be blamed for her death. “Killing yourself over a MySpace boy? Come on!!! I mean yeah your fat so you have to take what you can get but still nobody should kill themselves over it.” In the third post the author revealed herself as Lori Drew.

This post received more than 3,600 comments. Fox and CNN debated its authenticity. But the Drew identity was another mask. In fact, Megan Had It Coming was another Jason Fortuny experiment. He, not Lori Drew, Fortuny told me, was the blog’s author. After watching him log onto the site and add a post, I believed him. The blog was intended, he says, to question the public’s hunger for remorse and to challenge the enforceability of cyberharassment laws like the one passed by Megan’s town after her death. Fortuny concluded that they were unenforceable. The county sheriff’s department announced it was investigating the identity of the fake Lori Drew, but it never found Fortuny, who is not especially worried about coming out now. “What’s he going to sue me for?” he asked. “Leading on confused people? Why don’t people fact-check who this stuff is coming from? Why do they assume it’s true?”

Fortuny calls himself “a normal person who does insane things on the Internet,” and the scene at dinner later on the first day we spent together was exceedingly normal, with Fortuny, his roommate Charles and his longtime friend Zach trading stories at a sushi restaurant nearby over sake and happy-hour gyoza. Fortuny flirted with our waitress, showing her a cellphone picture of his cat. “He commands you to kill!” he cackled. “Do you know how many I’ve killed at his command?” Everyone laughed.

Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site. Trolls had flooded the site’s forums with flashing images and links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive user to claim that she had a seizure.

WEEV: the whole posting flashing images to epileptics thing? over the line.

HEPKITTEN: can someone plz tell me how doing something the admins intentionally left enabled is hacking?

WEEV: it’s hacking peoples unpatched brains. we have to draw a moral line somewhere.

Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing lights was justified. “Hacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,” he told me. “Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.”

“So the message is ‘buy a helmet,’ and the medium is a bat to the head?” I asked.

“No, it’s like a pitcher telling a batter to put on his helmet by beaning him from the mound. If you have this disease and you’re on the Internet, you need to take precautions.” A few days later, he wrote and posted a guide to safe Web surfing for epileptics.

On Sunday, Fortuny showed me an office building that once housed Google programmers, and a low-slung modernist structure where programmers wrote Halo 3, the best-selling video game. We ate muffins at Terra Bite, a coffee shop founded by a Google employee where customers pay whatever price they feel like. Kirkland seemed to pulse with the easy money and optimism of the Internet, unaware of the machinations of the troll on the hill.

We walked on, to Starbucks. At the next table, middle-schoolers with punk-rock haircuts feasted noisily on energy drinks and whipped cream. Fortuny sipped a white-chocolate mocha. He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.

“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”

“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”

“What do you mean? What did I do?”

“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

On Monday we drove to the mall. I asked Fortuny how he could troll me if he so chose. He took out his cellphone. On the screen was a picture of my debit card with the numbers clearly legible. I had left it in plain view beside my laptop. “I took this while you were out,” he said. He pressed a button. The picture disappeared. “See? I just deleted it.”

The Craigslist Experiment, Fortuny reiterated, brought him troll fame by accident. He was pleased with how the Megan Had It Coming blog succeeded by design. As he described the intricacies of his plan — adding sympathetic touches to the fake classmate, making fake Lori Drew a fierce defender of her own daughter, calibrating every detail to the emotional register of his audience — he sounded not so much a sociologist as a playwright workshopping a set of characters.

“You seem to know exactly how much you can get away with, and you troll right up to that line,” I said. “Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn’t be done?”

Fortuny was silent. In four days of conversation, this was the first time he did not have an answer ready.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about it.”

Sherrod DeGrippo, a 28-year-old Atlanta native who goes by the name Girlvinyl, runs Encyclopedia Dramatica, the online troll archive. In 2006, DeGrippo received an e-mail message from a well-known band of trolls, demanding that she edit the entry about them on the Encyclopedia Dramatica site. She refused. Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death. DeGrippo, alone and terrified, sought counsel from a powerful friend. She called Weev.

Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.

We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.

“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”

And it was, for that night and the next, at least. The car’s plush chamber accentuated the boyishness of Weev, who wore sneakers and jeans and hung from a leather strap like a subway rider. In the front seat sat Claudia, a pretty college-age girl.

I asked about the status of Weev’s campaign against humanity. Things seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and hacking.

“We’re waiting,” Weev said. “We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.”

“How do you know it’s not you?” I asked.

“If it were me, I would know,” he said. “I would receive a sign.”

Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”

“I was just thinking of Kali!” Claudia said with a giggle.

Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online commenters, Weev said he “dropped docs” on Sierra, posting a fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats. Weev says he has access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers. About a month later, he sent me mine.

Weev, Claudia and I hung out in Fullerton for two more nights, always meeting and saying goodbye at the train station. I met their friend Kate, who has been repeatedly banned from playing XBox Live for racist slurs, which she also enjoys screaming at white pedestrians. Kate checked my head for lice and kept calling me “Jew.” Relations have since warmed. She now e-mails me puppy pictures and wants the names of fun places for her coming visit to New York. On the last night, Weev offered to take me to his apartment if I wore a blindfold and left my cellphone behind. I was in, but Claudia vetoed the idea. I think it was her apartment.

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

So far, despite all this discord, the Internet’s system of civil machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam “will destroy the network.” The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.

That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?

Several state legislators have recently proposed cyberbullying measures. At the federal level, Representative Linda Sánchez, a Democrat from California, has introduced the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to send any communications with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.” In June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass, humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and millions create false identities. “While Drew’s conduct is immoral, it is a very big stretch to call it illegal,” wrote the online-privacy expert Prof. Daniel J. Solove on the blog Concurring Opinions.

Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message. A broader answer is persistent pseudonymity, a system of nicknames that stay the same across multiple sites. This could reduce anonymity’s excesses while preserving its benefits for whistle-blowers and overseas dissenters. Ultimately, as Fortuny suggests, trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously. “People know to be deeply skeptical of what they read on the front of a supermarket tabloid,” says Dan Gillmor, who directs the Center for Citizen Media. “It should be even more so with anonymous comments. They shouldn’t start off with a credibility rating of, say, 0. It should be more like negative-30.”

Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and not be required to help.” Weeks later, after talking to his friend Zach, Fortuny began considering the deeper emotional forces that drove him to troll. The theory of the green hair, he said, “allows me to find people who do stupid things and turn them around. Zach asked if I thought I could turn my parents around. I almost broke down. The idea of them learning from their mistakes and becoming people that I could actually be proud of . . . it was overwhelming.” He continued: “It’s not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I’m trying to save them.”

Weeks before my visit with Fortuny, I had lunch with “moot,” the young man who founded 4chan. After running the site under his pseudonym for five years, he recently revealed his legal name to be Christopher Poole. At lunch, Poole was quick to distance himself from the excesses of /b/. “Ultimately the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards,” he said. “All we do is provide a general framework.” He was optimistic about Robot9000, a new 4chan board with a combination of human and machine moderation. Users who make “unoriginal” or “low content” posts are banned from Robot9000 for periods that lengthen with each offense.

The posts on Robot9000 one morning were indeed far more substantive than /b/. With the cyborg moderation system silencing the trolls, 4chan had begun to display signs of linearity, coherence, a sense of collective enterprise. It was, in other words, robust. The anonymous hordes swapped lists of albums and novels; some had pretty good taste. Somebody tried to start a chess game: “I’ll start, e2 to e4,” which quickly devolved into riffage with moves like “Return to Sender,” “From Here to Infinity,” “Death to America” and a predictably indecent checkmate maneuver.

Shortly after 8 a.m., someone asked this:

“What makes a bad person? Or a good person? How do you know if you’re a bad person?”

Which prompted this:

“A good person is someone who follows the rules. A bad person is someone who doesn’t.”

And this:

“you’re breaking my rules, you bad person”

There were echoes of antiquity:

“good: pleasure; bad: pain”

“There is no morality. Only the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

And flirtations with postmodernity:

“good and bad are subjective”

“we’re going to turn into wormchow before the rest of the universe even notices.”

Books were prescribed:

“read Kant, JS Mill, Bentham, Singer, etc. Noobs.”

And then finally this:

“I’d say empathy is probably a factor.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/ma...3trolls-t.html





Yale Students' Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls, Opens Pandora's Box
Ryan Singel

"Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."

Those are the words of "AK-47" -- a poster to the college-admissions web forum AutoAdmit.com. AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters.

Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi connection. Yet a year after the lawsuit was filed, little else has been resolved -- and legal controversies have multiplied. The women themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers -- two of whom are now themselves being sued -- are not talking to the press. Legal experts are beginning to wonder aloud if there's any point in pressing the messy lawsuit.

"You have good lawyers putting their time in on the case, and in a policy sense, they are achieving something, says Ann Bartow, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. "But in a victim sense -- assuming you think of the women as victims -- it's not clear what this is going to achieve."

The AutoAdmit controversy began even before one of the women, identified in court documents as "Jane Doe I," started classes in the fall of 2005, the lawsuit alleges. Doe I was alerted in the summer to an AutoAdmit comment thread entitled "Stupid Bitch to Attend Law School." The thread included messages such as, "I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly" and a reply claiming "she has herpes." The second woman, Jane Doe II, was similarly attacked beginning in January 2007.

Both women tried in vain to persuade the administrators of the AutoAdmit.com site to remove the threads, according to the lawsuit. But then the story of the cyber-harassment hit the front page of The Washington Post, and the law school trolls became fodder for cable news shows. Soon after, the female law students, with help from Stanford and Yale law professors, filed the federal lawsuit in June 2007 seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

The Jane Doe plaintiffs contend that the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers.

"We have never had such a way to lie and distort facts about people -- to spread lies and distortions in a way that is attached to them," says Bartow. "And you can game it to come up on the front page of Google."

Bartow believes the problem lies in technology outstripping the law and our cultural responses. George Washington University Law Professor Daniel Solove, who's been thinking about the issue long enough to have written a book called The Future of Reputation, agrees. He says the law needs to change.

"The internet isn't a radical-free zone where you can hurt people. But on the other hand, we can't have everyone rushing to the court, because the court is a blunt tool," Solove says. "We need something to help shape norms -- there needs to be some kind of push back against the notion that the internet is a place where you can say what you want and screw the consequences. That's not what free speech is about."

Since libel lawsuits are mostly about clearing one's name, Solove finds himself lamenting the lost ritual of duels, which he describes as an elaborate nonjudicial way of settling disputes that rarely actually got to the shooting phase.

"We don't have any middle-ground dispute resolution processes in society anymore, and courts aren't a good way to vindicate these non-monetary harms," Solove says. "I think we need something else."

One idea gaining traction among legal thinkers would be DMCA-like legislation permitting victims of defamation to issue take-down notices, asking ISPs and websites to remove false and damaging user posts. If the service complies, it would be immune to any legal action.

But that regime hasn't worked entirely well with copyright -- false DMCA notices have been used by everyone from the Pentagon to the psychic Uri Geller to remove content from YouTube.

Jason Schultz, the acting director of the Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, says it would be a mistake to bring that regime to bear on controversial speech online.

"I think you run the risk of too much take-down," Schultz says. The hurdles and expenses of a court fight act as useful checks on those who would suppress speech, he adds. "I think you need procedural hurdles in place since we are talking about a constitutional right."

Even relying on current liability law, the AutoAdmit case has trod on dangerous ground.

The lawyers for the two women originally named one of AutoAdmit's administrators, Anthony Ciolli, then a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania, as a defendant -- even though Congress intentionally shielded electronic service providers from responsibility for what their users post online.

Ciolli's former lawyer, Marc Randazza, says Ciolli never wrote anything defamatory, and was named in the lawsuit simply for leverage, in an effort to get the site owner to change how disturbing material was handled on AutoAdmit.

"As an attorney, I found it really offensive that Ciolli was being held hostage to these people's demands on a third party," says Randazza.

Solove is not nearly as sympathetic.

"Part of reason people were so upset with Anthony Ciolli was that they believe he stuck to his guns and defended things on free speech grounds," Solove says. "People want to see some sort of contriteness."

After months, the Jane Does finally dropped Ciolli from the lawsuit, but that did not satisfy Ciolli, who filed his own lawsuit in March 2008, accusing the women and their lawyers of improperly listing him among those who made the rude comments.

The women's lawyers -- Yale's David Rosen and Stanford's Mark Lemley -- declined repeated requests for comment.

A federal judge ruled in January that the attorneys could serve subpoenas on ISPs and webmail providers. Using that power, the lawyers have unmasked some -- though not all -- of the AutoAdmit posters.

Now they're asking the judge to give them additional time to try and determine the identities of the remaining defendants, who are currently being sued under their AutoAdmit handles: among others, PaulieWalnuts, Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey, The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah, Patrick Bateman and HitlerHitlerHitler.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/ne...8/07/autoadmit





Google Says "Complete Privacy Does Not Exist"

In a submission to court Google is arguing that in the modern world there can be no expectation of privacy.

Google is being sued by a Pennsylvania couple after their home appeared on Google’s Street View pages. The couple’s house is on a private road clearly marked as private property.

“Today’s satellite image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist,” says Google’s submission.

“In any event, the Plaintiffs live far away from the desert and are far from hermits.”

The couple are suing Google for US$25,000 in damages, saying that the value of their property has been damaged and say they have suffered “mental stress”.

This is not the first time Google’s Street View has got the company in to trouble. The EU is arguing that people’s faces should be blurred out of images displayed.

The Street View program aims to photograph every street in the world and place the photographs online. A team of specially converted cars with cameras mounted on the roof are in constant action around the world.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/81523,...not-exist.aspx





Opposed to Wiretap Amnesty? Run a TV Ad for Six Bucks
Sarah Lai Stirland

If you're one of the thousands of voters angry over the Democrats' cave on domestic spying and telecom amnesty, a new online grassroots movement is now making it easy to buy a local ad on MSNBC, CNN and several other networks, for less money than you'd think.

The grassroots group Get FISA Right has created a 30-second spot critical of the surveillance bill passed by Congress earlier this month. It's placed the spot with a Los Angeles startup that buys ad time in bulk from cable providers and resells off slivers to individuals willing to pay for airtime in markets around the country.

The mashup means anyone who supports the repeal of the controversial law can pay online with a credit card to run the advertisement in any of eight cable TV markets around the country. By August 15, 22 markets will be available. The cost of spots varies from six dollars for placement on CNBC between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. in Cleveland, for example, to $1,856 to run on CNN in New York City between 6 p.m. and midnight.

The wiretap protest movement started life as a group on Barack Obama's social networking site My.BarackObama.com. The group was dedicated to deterring Obama from voting for a measure that legalized President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and granted retroactive legal immunity to the phone companies that cooperated with the spying when it was illegal. Membership swelled to more than 24,000 ahead of the July vote, but it still failed to deter Obama from supporting the unprecedented expansion of U.S. domestic spying powers.

Determined to keep the debate alive into the next Congress, GetFisaRight is using SaysMe.TV to bring their message to television, 30-seconds at a time.

It's a first for online activists: A netroots invasion of a medium traditionally dominated by deeper pockets like special interest political groups, official political campaigns and corporations. Spots have already been purchased in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Supporters can choose which markets and what time they want the ad to run. SaysMe.TV then submits the ad to the cable company, which takes up to two weeks to approve, making sure that it conforms to the cable network's standards, FCC regulations and federal electioneering law. SaysMe.TV then sends the purchaser of the ad an e-mail 24 hours before the ad runs to tell them exactly what time the spot will appear.

"The value of these ads is that they expose this issue to people who haven't otherwise heard about it," says Jon Pincus, the chief organizer of the effort. "In the aggregate, this effort as a whole has value."

Pincus teamed up with SaysMe.TV and other activists on the group's Wiki to create the 30-second ad.

The point, he says, is to build up enough political clout to change thedebate in races where candidates are running with significant online support. He also hopes to influence Congress and the next administration to revisit the issue of amnesty and domestic spying.

"We care about this issue, we're not going away, we expect things to change, and we expect Congress and the administration to get FISA right," Pincus says.

The group had also encouraged community activists to attend the "listening sessions" organized by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee this month. The sessions were designed to gather grassroots feedback to build the party platform that will be voted on during the convention in August -- though it seems unlikely that the Democratic party will add opposition to a bill it already passed as a plank in its platform.

Now Pincus and other group members are figuring out how to most effectively use the new TV tool.

Pincus says he envisions running anti-amnesty ads in his hometown of Seattle, where Democratic challenger and netroots favorite Darcy Burner is running for Congress. Burner was against the telecom immunity legislation, and Pincus says that running some ads might help to publicize that fact and turn out supporters for her.

Lisa Eisenpresser, SaysMe.TV's CEO, calls her service a "vending machine" for cable TV slots. And unlike direct political contributions, there's no spending limit for TV ads -- though she says that the company reports customers' payment information to the Federal Election Commission whenever an ad promotes a particular candidate.

SaysMe.TV and Spotrunner, a similar service, make the most sense for issue groups such as Pincus' FISA group, rather than for political candidates, says Phil de Vellis, a senior associate and vice president for the Democratic political advertising firm Murphy Putnam Media. That's because political candidates still want to generally rely on the expertise of professionals with demographic and voting data to wring the most bang out of their advertising bucks.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...p-of-demo.html





New Video Surveillance Technology 'Recognizes' Abnormal Activity

BRS software can establish 'normal' on-camera activity – and alert security staff when something unusual occurs
Tim Wilson

The problem with video surveillance cameras is that, usually, there are too many of them for one security staffer to monitor. In a typical large enterprise setup, a single officer might be monitoring dozens -- even hundreds -- of cameras simultaneously, making it impossible to immediately recognize suspicious activity.

"To be honest, it's sheer luck if a security officer spots something in an environment like that," says John Frazzini, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and IT security consultant. "If you get a security manager alone behind closed doors, a lot of them laugh about what a waste of money it is."

Frazzini recently signed on to serve as president of a new company -- Behavioral Recognition Systems, or BRS Labs for short -- that aims to stop that waste. BRS Labs, which is launching both its business and its technology today, has received 16 patents on a new video surveillance application that can convert video images into machine-readable language, and then analyze them for anomalies that suggest suspicious behavior in the camera's field of view.

Unlike current video surveillance gear -- which requires a human to monitor it or complex programming that can't adapt to new images -- BRS Labs's software can "learn" the behavior of objects and images in a camera's field of view, Frazzini says. It can establish "norms" of activity for each camera, then alert security officers when the camera registers something abnormal in its field of view.

"It works a lot like the behavioral software that many IT people use on their networks," Frazzini says. "It establishes a baseline of activity, and then sends alerts when there are anomalies. The big difference is that, until now, there was no way to do this kind of analysis on video images, because the data collected by the cameras wasn't machine readable. We had to invent a way to do that."

The BRS Labs software can establish a baseline in anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on how much activity the camera recognizes and how regular the patterns of behavior are. "If you're monitoring a busy highway, where traffic comes and goes frequently on a regular basis, [the software] learns very quickly," Frazzini says. "If you're monitoring an outdoor fence line when the camera sees only three or four actions all day, it will take longer."

Once the software is operational, it can "recognize" up to 300 objects and establish a baseline of activity. If the camera is in a wooded area where few humans ever go, it will alert officers when it registers a human on the screen. If it is monitoring a high fence line, it will send an alert when someone jumps the fence.

"The great thing about it is that you don't need a human to monitor the camera at all," Frazzini says. "The system can recognize the behavior on its own."

Because there are so many possible images that might cross in front of the camera, the BRS Labs technology will likely create a fair number of false positives, Frazzini concedes. "We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept," he says. "We could be wrong."

Overall, however, the new technology should save enterprises money, because security officers can spend their time diagnosing alerts and less time watching their screens for anomalies. And the system is more accurate than human monitoring, he says.

"What we've seen so far is enterprises spending billions on video surveillance equipment, but having a lot of trouble proving a [return on investment]," Frazzini says. "What we're doing is helping them to get more out of that equipment."

The BRS Labs technology will be generally available in September. Pricing hasn't been finalized -- early implementations have ranged anywhere from $1,500 to $4,500 per camera.
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=160068





Face Swapper Software Protects Privacy
Mark Frauenfelder

Kevin Kelly writes about software created by Dmitri Bitouk and Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University that "de-indentifies" people in photos to protect their privacy.

Face swapping software finds faces in a photograph and swaps the features in the target face from a library of faces. This can be used to "de-identify" faces that appear in public, such as the faces of people caught by the cameras of Google Street View. So instead of simply blurring the face, the software can substitute random features taken from say Flickr's pool of faces. A mouth here, an eye there.

Face Swapper Privacy (Conceptual Trends and Current Topics)
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/29...r-softwar.html





Citizens Use YouTube to Keep Gov't in Check

Watching the watchers
Nick Heath

Citizens are used to CCTV surveillance but a parliamentary group says that cameras are being turned on governments to keep them in line.

"Sous-veillance" will see video sharing sites such as YouTube used by citizens to shine a spotlight on things such as deadly hygiene lapses in hospital wards and uncollected rubbish, according to the European Information Society Group (Eurim).

The vision of the "public monitoring the state" and shaming them into action using cameraphones is one of several key ways that Eurim says technology can be used to transform government and empower the public.

Its report says: "New web applications such as YouTube or Patient Opinion enable people to monitor the state and to be heard. People can easily post videos of dirty hospital wards, of uncollected rubbish or of pot holes in the road, to a world-wide audience.

"Sous-veillance might transform political engagement due to its ease of use, by engaging even the time-poor majority and extending citizenship beyond the usual special interest groups."
http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/...9266049,00.htm





Bill Would Ban Kids from Facebook, MySpace in Libraries
Ledyard King

Congress is considering a bill that would bar children who use computers in public libraries from accessing Facebook and other social networking websites without parental permission.

Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, the Illinois Republican who sponsored the measure, says the proposal would keep sexual predators from contacting minors who are using a library computer.

But the American Library Association says Kirk's bill is yet another attempt by the federal government to interfere with library users' privacy and free speech.

"If people in a community do not feel confident that their privacy will be protected, they cannot use the library as it was intended, for intellectual pursuit," said Emily Sheketoff, who heads the association's Washington office. "It will intimidate them."

It's the latest in a series of battles the association has been fighting with Congress over the past decade. Some highlights:

•In 2000, lawmakers required libraries receiving federally discounted Internet service to install devices to filter out obscene material. Libraries sued, but the Supreme Court upheld the law.

•A year later, following the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, giving federal authorities more power to track the books and videos library patrons borrow and the websites they visit.

Despite objections from the American Library Association, the act was renewed in 2006 without significant changes, other than a requirement that authorities take extra steps in justifying their need for the records.

Supporters of the law note that two of the 2001 hijackers bought their plane tickets using a public computer at a New Jersey college library and that other members of the plot surfed the Internet using a computer at a public library in Delray Beach, Fla.

Earlier this year, a federal magistrate judge in Atlanta ruled the FBI did not violate the privacy of a Pakistani national in 2006 by logging onto the same computer the Pakistani has used and looking up which websites he had visited. Agents said the man was part of a terrorism plot.

•In 2007, the American Library Association helped persuade Congress to reopen several Environmental Protection Agency libraries the Bush administration had closed. The closures "created a serious obstacle to the public's ability to gather information about key environmental issues," according to the association.

•Kirk's bill, the Deleting Online Predators Act, died in 2006 but gained new life this year.

Kirk says that as more children flock to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, "we've seen a corresponding increase of online sexual predators" targeting those children.

But library officials say the legislation — while tackling a legitimate problem — takes the wrong approach in trying to keep kids safe from online predators.

Rather than outlawing certain sites, the American Library Association supports preparing kids and parents to deal with online threats at the library, home or anywhere else.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/te...omputers_N.htm





Scrabulous Barred to North American Users
Heather Timmons

“Boycott Hasbro!”

The rallying cry started early Tuesday after fans of Scrabulous, an online knockoff of the classic board game Scrabble, woke up to find that their game had been abruptly removed from Facebook.com, the social networking site.

To make matters worse, people who tried to download the official Hasbro version of Scrabble found that it did not work either. The authorized game had been the victim of “a malicious attack” on Tuesday morning, its developer said — an attack that came right on the heels of the sudden disappearance of Scrabulous.

Electronic Arts, the video game company that wrote the online Scrabble program for Hasbro, said it was investigating the apparent hacking of its application, and pointed no fingers for the moment. “We’re working with our partners to have Scrabble back online and ready to play as soon as possible,” the company said.

The demise of Scrabulous was sudden but not wholly unexpected. The game, a favorite time-waster among cubicle dwellers, was created by two brothers in Calcutta. On July 24, Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to Scrabble, sued them for copyright infringement. On Tuesday, the brothers made Scrabulous unavailable to Facebook users in Canada and the United States, citing legal pressure.

The backlash was instant. Bloggers denounced Hasbro, howls of protest flooded message boards, and new Facebook groups were created with names like “Down with Hasbro.” Although some people spoke up to defend Hasbro’s rights, most people jeered at the company, calling it everything from “short-sighted” to “technologically in the dark” to “despicable.”

“You didn’t have the smarts or initiative to come up with as good a product at the boys did, so your alternative is to mess with the superior product?” said one typical comment on Facebook. “Do you think that the thousands of folks who were enjoying this superior application will now come running to your inferior product? Hmmmm.... BOYCOTT HASBRO!!!”

Hasbro, for its part, was keeping a stiff upper lip. It issued a statement on Tuesday inviting fans to try out the “authentic” game of online Scrabble, introduced this month by Electronic Arts.

But on Tuesday, people who downloaded Electronic Arts’ “Scrabble Beta” were greeted with a message that said, “We’ll be back up shortly.” On Tuesday afternoon, Electronic Arts said that technical problems had caused the crash; by early evening the company said that its game had “experienced a malicious attack this morning, resulting in the disabling of Scrabble on Facebook.”

Scrabble Beta had attracted about 15,000 daily users and mixed reviews, including criticism from Facebook reviewers for its “pathetic” upload time. The companies said they were trying to address such issues.

“In deference to the fans, we waited in pursuing legal action until Electronic Arts had a legitimate alternative available,” Hasbro said in its statement. Hasbro’s public relations department did not respond to calls and e-mail seeking further comment.

Scrabulous, created by the Indian software developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, had attracted more than half a million players a day worldwide on Facebook. But Hasbro sued the brothers last week in New York for “clear and blatant infringement” of its intellectual property, so they decided to pull the plug.

“In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in U.S.A. and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice,” the brothers said in a statement.

While Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, Mattel owns the rights everywhere else. For now, Scrabulous remains available to Facebook users outside North America.

Both Hasbro and Mattel introduced Facebook versions of Scrabble to compete with Scrabulous this year, but neither one attracted the users or praise of Scrabulous. The Agarwallas put the game on Facebook in 2007, and it quickly became a hit, attracting millions of users.

Scrabulous fans have been vehement in supporting the Agarwallas, and thousands have already signed petitions vowing not to buy Mattel or Hasbro products if Scrabulous is removed.

By Tuesday evening, Scrabulous fans had organized new protests and petitions. A user group, Scrabble Boycott, called on Facebook members to refuse to play the official version of Scrabble. “Wait this out,” the leader of the group urged.

Brad Stone contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/te...0scrabble.html





'Scrabulous' Gets a Nip-Tuck, Returns as 'Wordscraper'
Caroline McCarthy

In the high school cafeteria of Facebook apps, Scrabulous is like that girl who gets in trouble for showing too much skin, only to throw on a hoodie and be let back into the principal's good graces. Sort of. The game has effectively returned, but with a redesigned board, a few original play options, a different points tabulation system, and a new name, Wordscraper.

Props to Adam Ostrow of Mashable for picking up on this one early.

The Facebook application Scrabulous had been taken down by its creators earlier this week when Hasbro, the game manufacturer that owns the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, pointed out that Scrabulous was a near copy. Few disagreed with the allegation, but many loyal Scrabulous fans wondered why Hasbro couldn't have struck a deal instead of insisting upon a shutdown, especially as the "real" Scrabble game on Facebook succumbed to technical difficulties.

The reason for Scrabulous' extreme makeover has its roots in some pretty gray legal matters: the real problem wasn't that it ripped off Scrabble, but that it ripped off Scrabble so blatantly. The colors of the board were the same, the list of rules led to a Wikipedia entry for Scrabble rules, and the two names were similar enough for Hasbro to cry foul.

On Wednesday I spoke to Pete Kinsella, a partner at the Faegre & Benson law firm who specializes in intellectual property, and he gave me his take on the gritty details. "Copyrights are not supposed to protect board games," Kinsella explained. "What copyrights protect is the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself."

Returning as Wordscraper is a way for its creators to keep the game running while avoiding legal complaints. In effect, it's just different enough.

"I think there's a very fine line to walk in this one, and the question is whether Scrabulous went over the line or not in mimicking the colors or everything else," Kinsella assessed (keep in mind that we had this conversation before the advent of Wordscraper), "or whether they could've designed a generic version of the game with the same points system and scoring system, and that would've fallen out of Hasbro's copyrights."

So will this end the legal spat? Maybe. If Kinsella's analysis proves accurate, this is probably enough to keep Hasbro's lawyers away. Many other games on Facebook bear strong-but-not-too-strong resemblances to board games like Battleship and Risk, but so far haven't encountered the same corporate scrutiny.

"The law allows people to design around things, and particularly when there isn't patent protection, the law has great incentive to design around things by making things somewhat different," Kinsella said.

Or, for a less digital example, think about all those detergent bottle logos that look suspiciously similar.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10003366-36.html





Facebook 'Stabbing' Game Removed
Mark Sweney

A Facebook game that lets users 'shank' each other - street slang for stabbing - has been removed following complaints from anti-knife crime campaigners.

The virtual "shank" appears as an icon within the Facebook Superpoke! application.

Superpoke! allows users to send virtual actions to other users such as smile, wink, take part in the Tour de France or send a bouquet.

Although the application consists of mostly humorous actions, some of the options, such as smack, slap and shank, have darker connotations.

When the knife icon is sent to a Facebook friend they receive a message saying that they have been "shanked".

The application, made by US firm Slide for Facebook users, has now been removed from the social networking website.

Superpoke! and Facebook came in for criticism in today's Sun. The uncle of Rob Knox, the Harry Potter actor who died after being stabbed in May, told the paper that the application "incited violence".

Anti-knife campaign group Urban Concepts condemned the shank application, branding it "appalling".

"The story refers to an application called Superpoke! made by Slide," said a spokeswoman for Facebook. "Slide have actually removed the 'shank' option from Superpoke!."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...ebook.facebook





China to Limit Web Access During Olympic Games
Andrew Jacobs

The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, that China had agreed to provide full Web access for foreign news media during the Games. Mr. Rogge has long argued that one of the main benefits of awarding the Games to Beijing was that the event would make China more open.

“For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet,” Mr. Rogge told Agence France-Presse just two weeks ago.

But a high-ranking Olympic committee official said Wednesday that the panel was aware that China would continue to censor Web sites carrying content that the Chinese propaganda authorities deemed harmful to national security and social stability. The panel acquiesced to China’s demands to maintain such controls, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not the designated public spokesman for the International Olympic Committee.

It was not immediately clear if China had provided special Internet links for overseas journalists working at the press center in the Olympic Village. But Chinese officials, speaking about the Internet restrictions on Wednesday, said they would not allow foreign journalists to visit Web sites that violated Chinese laws.

In its negotiations with the Chinese over Internet controls, the Olympic committee official said, the panel insisted only that China provide unregulated access to sites containing information useful to sports reporters covering athletic competitions, not to a broader array of sites that the Chinese and the Olympic committee negotiators determined had little relevance to sports.

The official said he now believed that the Chinese defined their national security needs more broadly than the Olympic committee had anticipated, denying reporters access to some information they might need to cover the events and the host country fully. This week, foreign news media in China were unable to gain direct access to an Amnesty International report detailing what it called a deterioration in China’s human rights record in the prelude to the Games.

“We are quite stunned by the decision, but we will survive this mess,” the official said. Sandrine Tonge, the media relations coordinator for the committee, said it would press the Chinese authorities to reconsider.

Chinese officials initially suggested that any troubles journalists were having with Internet access probably stemmed from the sites themselves, not any steps that China had taken to filter Web content. But Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, acknowledged Wednesday that journalists would not have uncensored Internet use. “It has been our policy to provide the media with convenient and sufficient access to the Internet,” Mr. Sun said. “I believe our policy will not affect reporters’ coverage of the Olympic Games.”

Mr. Sun said foreigners using the Internet in China would be subject to the same laws under which censors blocked access to a wide range of Web sites thought to be detrimental to stability. China has long maintained that its laws governing Internet access do not amount to censorship and are similar to restrictions on pornography or gambling sites in many countries.

The restrictions were the latest in a string of problems that have tarnished the prelude to the Olympics, which open Aug. 8. China struggled to contain ethnic unrest in Tibetan areas this spring. The global torch relay that China organized to promote the Games was disrupted by protests. Air pollution in Beijing has remained severe despite efforts to reduce it.

In recent months, human rights advocates have accused Beijing of stepping up the detention and surveillance of those it fears could disrupt the Games. On Tuesday, President Bush met with five Chinese dissidents at the White House to drive home his dissatisfaction with the pace of change. Mr. Bush, who will attend the opening ceremonies in just over a week, also pressed China’s foreign minister to ease political repression.

The White House also urged China to lift its restrictions on the Internet. “We want to see more access for reporters, we want to see more access for everybody in China to be able to have access to the Internet,” the White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said Wednesday.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, introduced a resolution on Tuesday urging China to reconsider what he said were its plans to force international hotel chains to track electronic communications by its guests. At a news conference, he introduced redacted documents that he said were provided by the hotels requiring them to install government software to monitor Internet traffic during the Olympics.

Concerns about media access to the Internet intensified Tuesday, when Western journalists working at the Main Press Center in Beijing said they could not get to Amnesty International’s Web site to see the group’s report on China’s rights record.

T. Kumar, Amnesty International’s Asia advocacy director, said he thought the government hoped it could dissuade reporters from pursuing stories about human rights issues by blocking their access to Internet-based information. “This sends the wrong message not only to journalists but to anyone on his or her way to the Olympics,” he said.

It was not clear how hard Olympic committee officials pushed for open access to the Internet during negotiations with the Chinese, which dated from to the decision to award Beijing the Games in 2001, or why Mr. Rogge, the Olympic chief, promised that the news media would have uncensored access during the Games when officials working for him were aware that China would keep at least some of its censorship policies in place.

Kevan Gosper, press chief of the International Olympic Committee, was quoted by Reuters on Wednesday as saying that I.O.C. officials had agreed that China could block sites that would not hinder reporting on the Games themselves. “I also now understand that some I.O.C. official negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games-related,” he told Reuters.

The senior Olympic committee official said the committee pressed hardest for unfiltered access to sites that sports reporters would need to cover athletic competitions. He said such sites included some that had been blocked in China in the past, including Wikipedia, but did not include political sites run by groups that the Beijing government considers hostile, like the spiritual sect Falun Gong.

Jonathan Watts, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, said he was disappointed that Beijing had failed to honor its agreement to temporarily remove the firewall that prevented Chinese citizens from fully using the Internet.

“Obviously if reporters can’t access all the sites they want to see, they can’t do their jobs,” he said. “Unfortunately such restrictions are normal for reporters in China, but the Olympics were supposed to be different.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/sp...s/31china.html





IOC to Probe Apparent Internet Censorship
Nick Mulvenney

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will investigate apparent censorship of the Internet service provided for media covering the Beijing Olympics, press chief Kevan Gosper said on Tuesday.

China, which has promised media the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, loosened its regulations governing foreign media in January last year.

Despite these new regulations, which are scheduled to expire in October, foreign media in China have complained of continuing harassment by officials and Human Rights Watch released a report earlier this month saying China was not living up to its pledges.

Attempts to use the Internet network at the Main Press Centre to access the website of Amnesty International, which released a report on Monday slamming China for failing to honour its Olympic human rights pledges, proved fruitless on Tuesday.

Gosper said the IOC would look into anything that interfered with reporters doing their jobs in reporting the Games.

"All of these things are a concern and we'll investigate them but our preoccupation is that the media are able to report on the Games as they did in previous Games," he told Reuters.

"Where it's not happening, we'll take the matter up with BOCOG and the authorities immediately," he said, referring to the Beijing Olympic organisers."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said media should be able to access the Internet as usual but he also conceded that sites related to Falun Gong, the spiritual movement China considers a cult, would be blocked.

"As to sites related to Falun Gong, I think you know that Falun Gong is a cult that has been banned according to law, and we will adhere to our position," Liu told a news conference.

He suggested that difficulties accessing certain websites could be the fault of the sites themselves.

"There are some problems with a lot of websites themselves that makes it not easy to view them in China," Liu said.

"Our attitude is to ensure that foreign journalists have regular access to information in China during the Olympic Games."

The Games officially open on August 8 but the Athletes' and Media Villages are up and running and the Main Press Centre and International Broadcast Centre are already teeming with some of the more than 20,000 media accredited to cover the event.

"As I've said before, this is a country that does have censorship within its media, but we've been guaranteed free access, open media activity for media reporting on the Olympic Games at Games time," Gosper said. "We are now in Games time."

Gosper also said that there had been complaints that the Internet service provided for media was too slow.

"We're looking into that and we've tracked that information into BOCOG immediately because free access to the Internet also means normal speed," he said.

But Gosper, making his first tour of the press centre since his arrival from Australia, said he was pleased with how things looked with just 10 days to go.

"The build-up is always nervous but so far, so good."

(Additional reporting by Lindsay Beck, Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/200807...a-566e283.html





China Eases Internet Restrictions for Journalists
Andrew Jacobs

The Chinese authorities, bowing to criticism from Olympic officials, foreign journalists and Western political leaders, have lifted some of the restrictions that blocked Web sites at the main press center for the Games, although other politically sensitive sites remained inaccessible Friday.

The government made no announcement about the partial lifting of its firewall, and it was unclear if the change would be temporary. The International Olympic Committee also sought Friday to counter statements by its top press official, who had suggested that IOC negotiators had quietly acquiesced to the government’s restrictions.

Giselle Davies, a spokeswoman for the IOC, said the contradictory versions of events were the result of a misunderstanding, and she stressed that the committee has always been adamant about unfettered Internet access for the 20,000 foreign journalists who will be covering the Games.

The loosening of restrictions, however limited, came after senior IOC officials spoke with China’s Olympic organizers on Thursday and urged them to reconsider their decision to ban some politically provocative sites. Critics said even a partial ban violated the host country’s pledge to provide uncensored Internet access to journalists, a promise that helped Beijing win the right to hold the Games.

Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee, declined to confirm whether there had been a change in policy. “We are fulfilling a promise to provide good working conditions for reporters covering the Olympic Games,” he said in a telephone interview. “Internet access is sufficient and convenient.”

Access to sites the government normally blocks expanded throughout the day Friday. The first sites unblocked included those of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Radio Free Asia and the Chinese language service of the BBC. By early evening, reporters at the press center could read about topics that have long been taboo here: Taiwanese independence, jailed Chinese dissidents, and the 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square. Other sites, particularly those that mention Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, remained off limits.

Until now, the Chinese authorities had remained resolute that their Internet restrictions would not hamper coverage of the Games. And Mr. Sun has repeatedly said that visiting reporters should not expect access to Web sites containing information that is “in breach of Chinese law.”

T. Kumar, Asia advocacy director for Amnesty International, said he was pleased that previously blocked sites were available, but he was skeptical they would remain so. “We urge the International Olympic Committee to exert pressure on China so that those attending the Games — and ordinary Chinese citizens — can enjoy freedom of expression and movement,” he said.

Although the conflict over Internet access for journalists seems to have been defused for now, it remains unclear how the so-called misunderstanding between the IOC and the Chinese government went unaddressed for so long.

In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Kevan Gosper, the chief of the IOC press commission and a former Olympic runner from Australia, maintained his position that high-level IOC colleagues had bowed to China’s Internet restrictions. He accused the organization of secretly agreeing to the policy change and then continuing to publicize the idea that China would not censor the Internet for reporters covering the Games.

“It has dented my reputation quite seriously,” Mr. Gosper said. “People take me at my word, so I expect the information I am giving to be consistent.”

Juliet Macur contributed reportingfrom Beijing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/sp...02beijing.html





Those Privacy-Hating Chinese Communist Tyrants
Glenn Greenwald

Associated Press, yesterday:

Foreign-owned hotels in China face the prospect of "severe retaliation" if they refuse to install government software that can spy on Internet use by hotel guests coming to watch the summer Olympic games, a U.S. lawmaker said Tuesday.

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., produced a translated version of a document from China's Public Security Bureau that requires hotels to use the monitoring equipment. . . . .

Brownback said several international hotel chains confirmed receiving the order from China's Public Security Bureau. The hotels are in a bind, he said, because they don't want to comply with the order, but also don't want to jeopardize their investment of millions of dollars to expand their businesses in China.

Rocky Mountain News, October 11, 2007:

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest. . . .

The secret contracts -- worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- made [Qwest CEO Joseph] Nacchio optimistic about Qwest's future, even as his staff was warning him the company might not make its numbers, Nacchio's defense attorneys have maintained. . . .

Nacchio planned to demonstrate at trial that he had a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., to discuss a $100 million project. According to the documents, another topic also was discussed at that meeting, one with which Nacchio refused to comply.

The topic itself is redacted each time it appears in the hundreds of pages of documents, but there is mention of Nacchio believing the request was both inappropriate and illegal, and repeatedly refusing to go along with it.

The NSA contract was awarded in July 2001 to companies other than Qwest.

USA Today reported in May 2006 that Qwest, unlike AT&T and Verizon, balked at helping the NSA track phone calling patterns that may have indicated terrorist organizational activities. Nacchio's attorney, Herbert Stern, confirmed that Nacchio refused to turn over customer telephone records because he didn't think the NSA program had legal standing.

In the documents, Nacchio also asserts Qwest was in line to build a $2 billion private government network called GovNet and do other government business, including a network between the U.S. and South America.

For my podcast show later today, I spoke with Tim Shorrock, the investigative journalist who has become the leading expert on the enormous, sprawling and rapidly growing consortium between the U.S. Government and private corporations (including the telecom industry) with regard to how intelligence, surveillance and defense activities of the U.S. Government are now carried out. The vast bulk of America's surveillance state and intelligence activities (budgeted at roughly $70 billion each year) are now outsourced to and performed by these private corporations. The precise financial dynamic which Sen. Brownback is impotently protesting in China -- that corporations are highly incentivized to assent to and enable all government spying lest they lose extremely lucrative government contracts (and, conversely, that they're eager to cooperate with the Government in order to receive more contracts and become further integrated in government activities) -- is exactly the dynamic that drives America's surveillance state.

Indeed, it was that very substantial profit motive -- as the Rocky Mountain News article above illustrates -- that led American telecoms in the U.S. not just to acquiesce to, but eagerly embrace, the Bush administration's desire to spy illegally on their customers' telephone and email communications. Those who agreed to help the Government break the law received far more of the billions and billions of dollars of government surveillance and defense contracts, while Qwest -- by refusing the Bush administration's requests for illegal spying -- was punished by being frozen out of this private-public consortium.

More inanely still, Sen. Brownback is specifically outraged by the intrusive spying activities in which the Chinese Government plans to engage with regard to the telephone and email communications of foreign visitors. From yesterday's AP article:

"These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government," Brownback said at a news conference. . . .

Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department issued a fact sheet warning travelers attending the Olympic games that "they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations" in China.

"All hotel rooms and offices are considered to be subject to on-site or remote technical monitoring at all times," the agency states. . . .

"If you were a human rights advocate, if you're a journalist, you're in room 1251 of a hotel, anything that you use, sending out over the Internet is monitored in real time by the Chinese Public Security bureau," Brownback said. "That's not right. It's not in the Olympic spirit."

Brownback and other lawmakers have repeatedly denounced China's record of human rights abuses and asked President Bush not to attend the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing.

Brownback was introducing a resolution in the Senate on Tuesday that urges China to reverse its actions.

That's the same Sen. Sam Brownback who voted last year to enact the Protect America Act, which "allow[ed] for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts. It contain[ed] virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or email, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans' private communications up to this administration." And it's the same Sen. Brownback who also voted for this year's FISA Amendments Act, which empowers the U.S. Government to tap directly into the U.S. telecommunications systems in order to monitor international emails and telephone calls with no individual warrant required.

The idea that the U.S. can exert meaningful leverage on China's surveillance behavior is laughable for reasons wholly independent of what the U.S. Government itself does with regard to spying on its own citizens. Nonetheless, to watch U.S. Senators like Sam Brownback actually maintain a straight face while protesting China's warrantless spying on the email and telephone communications of foreigners, and lamenting that private companies feel unfairly pressured to cooperate with China's government spying out of fear of losing lucrative business opportunities, is so surreal that it's actually hard to believe one is seeing it. How many days do we have to wait before we get to read a righteous Fred Hiatt Editorial condemning China's Communist tyrants for their outrageous spying intrusions? Maybe Jay Rockefeller can co-sponsor Brownback's Senate Resolution condemning China's surveillance activities and demanding that they stop it at once.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ina/index.html





Video Websites 'Must Vet Content'
BBC

YouTube has been criticised by MPs, who say it must do more to vet its content.

In a review of net safety, the Culture, Media and Sport select committee said a new industry body should be set up to protect children from harmful content.

It also said it should be "standard practice" for sites hosting user-generated content to review material proactively.

YouTube's owners said the site had strict rules and a system that allowed users to report inappropriate content.

The committee also wants a rethink on how best to classify video games - but there is disagreement over who should run the new ratings system.

MPs say the same body which gives age ratings to films - the British Board of Film Classification - should be in charge, but the games industry supports its own voluntary code.

Effective

In its report, the committee said that some websites it had monitored as part of its review had a "lax" approach to removing illegal content.

It said it was "shocked" that the industry standard for removing child abuse images was 24 hours.

Google, the firm which owns YouTube, said it was confident the video-sharing site was safe for children.

"We have strict rules on what's allowed, and a system that enables anyone who sees inappropriate content to report it to our 24/7 review team and have it dealt with promptly," said a spokesman.

A direct link from every YouTube page makes the process easy, he added.

"Given the volume of content uploaded on our site, we think this is by far the most effective way to make sure that the tiny minority of videos that break the rules come down quickly," he said.

The committee acknowledged that the volume of content on sites such as YouTube - which has 10 hours of videos uploaded every minute - made it unrealistic to watch every video before it went online.

But, it said that the practice of removing clips only after they are flagged up by users was not working either.

Dark side

Self regulation had resulted in an "unsatisfactory piecemeal approach which lacks consistency and transparency," the committee concluded.

While it recommended the creation of an industry body responsible for policing the web, it stopped short of making regulation mandatory.

The body - likely to be known as the child internet safety council - will be set up later this year.

"The internet has transformed our lives and is overwhelmingly a force for good. However there is a dark side and many parents are rightly anxious," said committee chairman John Whittingdale.

A clip of a gang rape on YouTube was used as one example of the "dark side" of the net.

Other sites which promote extreme diets, self-harm and suicide were also cited.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7533543.stm





ISPs Crucial to Child Pornography Blocks
Fran Foo and Andrew Colley

THE Federal Government's internet service provider-level web filtering regime could kick off in earnest next year.

The Government yesterday released the findings of its much-anticipated report on a service provider-level web filtering trial conducted in Tasmania by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

The trial was conducted within parameters set out in June 2007 by the previous government, when Helen Coonan was communications minister.

Enex TestLab was awarded a tender in January to conduct the closed trials, which were completed in June. They were held at Telstra's broadband lab without input from the telco, the authority said.

Twenty-six ISP-based web filtering products were submitted for review but only six made the final cut.

The results were mixed. Most filters could not identify illegal or inappropriate content - as defined by the authority - using most non-web protocols.

This meant content delivered from a channel such as instant messaging would be permitted.

Between 88 per cent and 97 per cent of illegal and inappropriate content that should have been blocked was blocked, the report said.

The authority said tests undertaken showed an improvement over older technologies used in a 2005 trial. "The median rate of successful blocking was improved from the previous trial," it said.

A spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the next step would be to assess the performance of the filtering products in a live pilot in the second half of the year.

"The next step is a test with a number of ISPs and internet users," Senator Conroy said.

The findings were welcomed in some quarters, but service providers were cautious.

Child Wise chief executive Bernadette McMenamin said her child-protection organisation supported the Government's move to filter the web but only under strict guidelines.

"We totally support the Federal Government's filtering plans but it must not go beyond child pornography. If adult content gets blocked as well, that wouldn't work," Ms McMenamin said.

"As a child protection agency we want ISPs to block child pornography but not any other form of pornography," she said.

ContentKeeper, a Canberra firm that took part in the trial, said ISP-based web filtering was good but "there are always going to be ways to bypass filters, such as using anonymous proxy servers".

ContentKeeper chief executive Geoff Wood said ISP-level filtering was only one piece of the puzzle. "Parents must do all they can to keep their children safe on the web."

Service providers have in the past resisted calls to take part in ISP-level filtering, citing concerns that they will be placed in the position of policing the internet.

Greg Bader chief technical officer with Perth-based iiNet, said the company was prepared to consider the federal Government's expression of interest.

"If it's something consumers want, we're happy to be a part of it," he said.

The need to remove illegal and offensive content from the internet had grown alongside its shift into the mainstream, he said.

The blacklist-based filtering technology removed the risk that service providers would be called on to censor the internet.

"The key here is there are various levels of filtering. No one on earth can disagree that anything illegal could and should be filtered, but the question is who decides what is filtered.

"ISPs are not in a position to be gatekeepers of what's legal and not legal and what's good or bad content," he said.

Australia's peak internet industry body the Internet Industry Association, said it was in discussions with ISPs to develop a uniform approach to the federal policy.

Association chief executive Peter Coroneos said it was becoming harder for ISPs to distance themselves from the debate as providers overseas were helping to regulate internet content.

The industry could end up facing more onerous regulations if it did not take an active role in Labor's attempt to deliver on its election promise.

"It's fair to say there is still some concern about the policy, but you have a really stark choice here: you either co-operate or you don't. If you don't, you can't complain about the result afterwards," Mr Coroneos said.

Labor's policy still drew fire from some service providers, which argued it was hopelessly unworkable and technically flawed.

Internode regulatory affairs manager John Lindsay said the ACMA trial demonstrated minor improvements to filtering technology but failed to address key areas such as additional costs for service providers.

The test results, he said, indicated that the technology would cause major network degradation if it were to be effective. It was also very easy for users to circumvent, he said.

"We are really pleased to see the Government cares about this stuff. We'd just really love it if the Government could come up with some sensible options rather than politically pragmatic options," Mr Lindsay said.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
Sascha Segan

Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about sex on Usenet. A few years later, on a Mac SE in a college basement, I met friends I still have today. We "spewed" about our teenage lives in ways that would be familiar to any MySpace blogger circa 2008, but that were radical, strange, and comforting in 1993. We made faraway friends, burned yearbooks to CDs and mailed them to Finland with way too many stamps. We were the first Net kids, really.

In a way inconceivable in today's Web-fragmented marketplace, Usenet was where you went to talk. Conceived back in the idealistic, non-profit days of the Internet, it was—well, it is, but it mostly was—a series of bulletin boards called "newsgroups" shared by thousands of computers, which traded new messages several times a day.

On the text-only Usenet of my memory, nobody knew whether you were a dog, or a kid, or Finnish—only what you wrote. There wasn't the obsession with photos and video that overruns today's social networking sites. Yeah, I know that sounds like "get off my lawn you darn kids" crotchetiness, but there's something really nice about just talking to people and not caring what they look like.

Serious conversations went on in forums like comp.sys.atari.8bit; more frivolous chatter appeared in groups whose names started with "alt," a freewheeling free-for-all that nobody owned, nobody managed, and nobody policed. It was a more innocent time on the Net, before most of the spammers, the crooks, or even the general public showed up. People hewed to a loosely agreed-upon set of net.manners enforced by self-appointed cops. The society worked—at least for a while.

Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership. While different people hung out in different groups, everyone accessed the same group list and there was plenty of cross-fertilization. Control came down to a bickering cabal of scattered IT administrators who generally preferred to leave well enough alone. Compared to chat systems like IRC (and later, instant messaging and texting), Usenet encouraged thoughtful, long-form writing with lots of quotation and back-and-forth.—Next: Usenet's Decline >

Usenet has been dying for years, of course. Some people date Usenet's decline as early as 1993, when millions of AOL users dropped into what was previously a geek paradise. As the '90s went on, the eye candy of the Web and the marketing dollars of Web site owners helped push people over to profit-making sites. Usenet's slightly arcane access methods and text-only protocols have nothing on the glitz and glamour of MySpace.

The Web also gave Usenet a new life through the mid-90s as a searchable database of questions and answers, via DejaNews and Google. But searchability also killed off some of Usenet's social functions. More chaotic and ad-hoc groups functioned through a sort of security in obscurity; as long as nobody bothered to click on them, nobody would know what people were talking about. With Google Groups, every word you wrote became enshrined and eternally searchable.

Meanwhile, as multimedia became popular over the past ten years, Usenet started to become a way for pirates and pornographers to distribute massive quantities of binary files in a decentralized, untraceable manner; in other words, it became a proto-BitTorrent. That was likely when Usenet became truly doomed. Newsgroups had exchanged code along with text for years, but by the late '90s the "binaries" groups began taking up huge amounts of space and Net traffic, and since Usenet libraries reside on each ISP's server, service providers sensibly started to wonder why they should be reserving big chunks of their own disk space for pirated movies and repetitive porn.

It's the porn that's putting nails in Usenet's coffin. AOL dropped Usenet in 2005, but many other large ISPs kept carrying newsgroups. Now major providers are dropping the full alt. hierarchy, and even Usenet entirely, as part of a New York State government crusade against child pornographers who've been using the alt.binaries groups to distribute their wares. Dropping all of Usenet to lose alt.binaries.videos.of.criminal.acts is definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but at the same time I don't have much pity for the binaries crowd. Usenet is a hideously inefficient way to distribute binary file—you end up making thousands of unused copies on various servers and encoding your files in inefficient ways. And way too much of the binaries traffic consists of piracy and warez.

It's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums boards on tech-support Web sites. Obviously, people lead lives, converse, and learn on the Internet far more broadly than they did in 1993. But give me a moment's nostalgia for a Net that had one place to go, that everybody knew about, but nobody owned.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326848,00.asp





Lawsuit Over E-Vote Machines Dismissed
Martin Griffith

A judge has dismissed a citizen activist's lawsuit against a leading provider of electronic voting machines, saying no proof was offered that they malfunctioned.

In her complaint, filed in 2006, Patricia Axelrod of Reno claimed her vote in the 2004 general election was not counted because of a defective machine made by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems. The same machines have come under fire in California.

But in a ruling issued earlier this month, Washoe County District Judge Jerome Polaha said state statutes cited by Axelrod gave her no standing to sue the company over an alleged lost vote.

The judge further said the alleged lost vote fails to constitute a "property interest," as Axelrod claimed, and that Sequoia's machines have not been shown to have malfunctioned.

Sequoia vice president Michelle M. Shafer hailed the ruling.

"Since the inception of this matter, it has been Sequoia's belief that the claims asserted had no basis in either fact or law," she said Sunday. "The court's dismissal of the lawsuit confirms this belief."

Axelrod, who acted as her own counsel, said she was undecided whether to appeal the ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court.

'Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, you're going to have reason to doubt the outcome of this year's election," she said Sunday. "The very same machines used in Nevada have been decertified for use by the state of California."

Last August, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified voting machines made by Sequoia and another company but said they could regain certification if they meet several new conditions.

Bowen's action came after University of California computer experts found voting machines sold by Sequoia and two other companies were vulnerable to hackers and that voting results could be altered.

Sequoia criticized the study, calling it "an unrealistic, worst-case-scenario evaluation."

The state of Nevada was the first in the nation to use electronic voting equipment with a voter-verified paper audit trail, using Sequoia machines.

Nevada election officials have said they're monitoring developments in California and working on election security and other issues.

Axelrod said she found her 2004 vote was neither registered nor counted after she accessed her voting record on the county Registrar of Voter's Diebold Election Management System computer.

She said she doesn't trust touch-screen technology and wants a return to paper ballots.

In March, Polaha dismissed Axelrod's claims against other defendants in the lawsuit, including Diebold, the state of Nevada and Washoe County.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Microsoft to Build on Auto Unit

Sync technology creator hires Detroit native to boost connectivity in cars
Bryce G. Hoffman

Detroit may be struggling to sell cars, but Microsoft Corp. sees nothing but room to grow in its push to wire them.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software company today will announce a massive new investment in its automotive business unit and tapped a Detroit native to lead the charge.

"We're doubling down. We're going to increase the headcount and operating expenses by 30 percent this year," said Tom Phillips, a 16-year veteran of Microsoft who will replace Martin Thall as the head of the company's automotive division. "We know that things are tough for the auto industry, but it's the perfect time to make this investment. There are new customers coming into the market, and they are looking for new experiences."

Microsoft works closely with a number of car companies to bring computer connectivity and infotainment to the automobile. The most visible fruit of those efforts is Sync, the product of Microsoft's collaboration with Ford Motor Co. that debuted last year and has already given the Dearborn automaker a much-needed boost with younger car buyers. It allows motorists to control their cell phones, music players and navigation systems with voice commands.

Phillips, who is currently the chief technical officer of Microsoft's specialized devices and services group -- a post he will continue to hold in addition to running the automotive operations -- told The Detroit News that Sync is just the beginning.

"There are a lot of technologies that are two to three years out that are going to provide even more connectivity and innovation," he said.

"There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives. It hasn't really evolved that much."

Microsoft announced one today, saying it is now making its "Live Search" technology available to automakers. Using it, they will be able to develop in-car systems that allow drivers to search for nearby businesses.

Despite a deepening downturn in the United States, Phillips said the auto market is too big for Microsoft to ignore. The company already dominates desktop computing. He said the 820 million cars in the world are the next great frontier to conquer.

"Even if you get a 10 percent or 20 percent market share, you've got an enormous scale," he said.

Ford welcomed Microsoft's new investment in automotive research and development.

"Ford and Microsoft working together to deliver Sync has been a great experience and demonstrates what can happen when the power of two iconic brands comes together," said Jim Buczkowski, director of electrical and electronics systems engineering at Ford. "Ford Sync has proven to be a tremendous differentiator for us in the marketplace and working with Microsoft has been the key element in setting the industry benchmark for connectivity."

Ford recently passed the 200,000-unit sales milestone and is on track to deliver one million Sync-equipped vehicles by the end of next year. More importantly, Sync has dramatically increased Ford's appeal to younger drivers, according to company survey data. And it has helped Ford increase the average transaction price of its entry-level Ford Focus sedan by $1,000 over the past year.

"Clearly, the customers are recognizing the value and they are willing to pay for it," said Ford Americas President Mark Fields.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll...807290374/1148





With Security at Risk, a Push to Patch the Web
John Markoff

Since a secret emergency meeting of computer security experts at Microsoft’s headquarters in March, Dan Kaminsky has been urging companies around the world to fix a potentially dangerous flaw in the basic plumbing of the Internet.

While Internet service providers are racing to fix the problem, which makes it possible for criminals to divert users to fake Web sites where personal and financial information can be stolen, Mr. Kaminsky worries that they have not moved quickly enough.

By his estimate, roughly 41 percent of the Internet is still vulnerable. Now Mr. Kaminsky, a technical consultant who first discovered the problem, has been ramping up the pressure on companies and organizations to make the necessary software changes before criminal hackers take advantage of the flaw.

Next week, he will take another step by publicly laying out the details of the flaw at a security conference in Las Vegas. That should force computer network administrators to fix millions of affected systems.

But his explanation of the flaw will also make it easier for criminals to exploit it, and steal passwords and other personal information.

Mr. Kaminsky walks a fine line between protecting millions of computer users and eroding consumer confidence in Internet banking and shopping. But he is among those experts who think that full disclosure of security threats can push network administrators to take action. “We need to have disaster planning, and we need to worry,” he said.

The flaw that Mr. Kaminsky discovered is in the Domain Name System, a kind of automated phone book that converts human-friendly addresses like google.com into machine-friendly numeric counterparts.

The potential consequences of the flaw are significant. It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to an impostor site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The user might have no clue about the misdirection, and unconfirmed reports in the Web community indicate that attempted attacks are already under way.

The problem is analogous to the risk of phoning directory assistance at, for example, AT&T, asking for the number for Bank of America and being given an illicit number at which an operator masquerading as a bank employee asks for your account number and password.

The online flaw and the rush to repair it are an urgent reminder that the Internet remains a sometimes anarchic jumble of jurisdictions. No single person or group can step in to protect the online transactions of millions of users. Internet security rests on the shoulders of people like Mr. Kaminsky, a director at IOActive, a computer security firm, who had to persuade other experts that the problem was real.

“This drives home the risk people face, and the consumer should get the message,” said Ken Silva, chief technology officer of VeriSign, which administers Internet addresses ending in .com and .net. “Don’t just take for granted all the things that machines are doing for you.”

When Mr. Kaminsky, 29, announced the flaw on July 8, he said he would wait a month to release details about it, in the hope that he could spur managers of computer systems around the world to fix them with a software patch before attackers could figure out how to exploit it.

Last week, however, accurate details of the flaw were briefly published online by a computer security firm, apparently by accident. Now security experts are holding their breath to see whether the patching of as many as nine million affected computers around the world will happen fast enough.

“People are taking this pretty seriously and patching their servers,” Mr. Silva said.

Major Internet service providers in the United States this week indicated that in most cases, the software patch, which makes the flaw much more difficult to exploit, was already in place or soon would be.

Comcast and Verizon, two of the largest providers, said they had fixed the problem for their customers. AT&T said it was in the process of doing so.

But the problem is a global one, and the length of time required to fix it could leave many Web users vulnerable for weeks or months. And there are millions of places around the world where people might find themselves vulnerable to potential attacks, ranging from their workplaces to an airport lounge or an Internet cafe.

Individuals and small companies with some technical skills can protect themselves by changing the network preferences of their computer settings so that they use the domain name servers of a Web service called OpenDNS (www.opendns.com).

Some computer systems are immune to the flaw. About 15 percent of domain name servers in the United States and 40 percent in Europe, including those at major Internet providers like America Online and Deutsche Telekom, use software from a Dutch company called PowerDNS, which is not vulnerable.

Still, much of the Internet remains vulnerable. “I’m watching people patch, and I realize this is not an easy thing to do,” Mr. Kaminsky said in an interview.

The flaw, which Mr. Kaminsky stumbled across in February, had been overlooked for more than two decades. The eureka moment came when he was idly contemplating a different security threat. He suddenly realized that it would be possible to guess crucial information about the protocol that domain name servers use to convert the numerical Web addresses.

Mr. Kaminsky worried about his discovery for several days and then contacted Paul Vixie, a software engineer who runs the Internet Systems Consortium and is responsible for maintaining a widely used version of software for domain name servers, known as BIND. Almost immediately, software engineers who looked at the vulnerability realized that Mr. Kaminsky had found a significant weakness.

In March, Microsoft held the secret meeting at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Sixteen representatives from security organizations and companies, including Cisco, talked about ways to combat the potential threat.

But after several delays while vendors fixed their software, Mr. Kaminsky went public.

For Mr. Kaminsky, the discovery and his subsequent warning to the Internet community were the culmination of an almost decade-long career as a security specialist. He was spotting bugs in software for Cisco and contributing to a book on computer security while still in college.

“I play this game to protect people,” he said.

He thinks that it is necessary to publish information about security threats to motivate system operators to protect themselves. Otherwise, “You don’t get to tell the river you need more time until it floods,” he said.

He said that he had initially hoped to give the Internet community a head start of a full month to fix the problem, but his plan was foiled when technical details were briefly posted online last week. “I would have liked more time, but we got 13 days and I’m proud of that,” he said.

The new flaw has sharpened the debate over how to come up with a long-term solution to the broader problem of the lack of security in the Domain Name System, which was invented in 1983 and was not created with uses like online banking in mind.

While Mr. Kaminsky is being hailed as a latter-day Paul Revere, Internet experts like Bruce Schneier, a member of the insular community that guards online security, said flaws like this were a routine occurrence and no reason to stay off the Internet.

“If there is a flaw in your car, it will get fixed eventually,” said Mr. Schneier, the chief security technology officer for British Telecom. “Most people keep driving.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/te...gy/30flaw.html





Project to Rebuild Internet Gets $12m, Bandwidth
Anick Jesdanun

A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a "clean-slate" approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969.

On behalf of the government, BBN Technologies Inc. is overseeing the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, a network on which researchers will be able to test new ideas without damaging the current Internet.

The $12 million in initial grants from the National Science Foundation will go to developing prototypes for the GENI network.

To test these prototypes, the Internet2 organization is contributing 10 gigabits per second of dedicated bandwidth, so researchers won't have to worry about normal Internet traffic interfering with their experiments. National LambdaRail is offering another 30 gigabits per second of capacity, though it won't be dedicated to GENI at all times.

The bandwidth is thousands of times faster than standard home broadband connections — enough to run 30 high-quality movies into your home simultaneously.

Craig Partridge, chief scientist at BBN Technologies, said the commitments amounted to an important endorsement of GENI by two organizations that run ultra-high-speed networks for universities and other researchers to conduct data-intensive projects.

Construction on GENI could start in about five years and cost $350 million. Congress still has to approve those funds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080730/...3RQ 2Ny1k24cA





'Hijacked' SF Passwords Made Public
Jennifer Guevin

Only days after the city of San Francisco regained control of its computer network after an alleged hijacking, a new vulnerability has come to light--this time brought on by the city itself.

The San Francisco district attorney's office has apparently made public nearly 150 usernames and passwords used by city officials to gain access to the city's network. The list was submitted to the court as Exhibit A in a case against Terry Childs, a 43-year-old network administrator for the city who was arrested July 13 on four felony charges of tampering with the city's computer network.

Co-workers accused Childs of setting a "time bomb" that would sabotage the network the next time it went down, either for maintenance or due to a power outage.

Childs had effectively taken the city's network hostage by locking administrators out and refusing to give up the passwords needed to regain access. In a secret meeting with Mayor Gavin Newsom earlier this week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Childs handed them over directly to the mayor.

Later in the week, the DA's office reportedly filed a court document to argue against a reduction of the $5 million bail set for Childs, who is being held in the county jail. Exhibit A of the document contained the usernames and passwords used by nearly 150 employees to get into the city's virtual private network. And despite saying the passwords pose an "imminent threat" to the city's computer network, they are now of public record.

A source tells InfoWorld that a second password is needed to gain access to the VPN. Still, giving up these so-called phase one passwords is hardly recommended security policy.

And here I thought we San Franciscans were supposed to be good with this computer stuff.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10000342-83.html





'Pentagon Hacker' Loses Extradition Appeal
AP

Britain's top court refused Wednesday to stop the extradition to the U.S. of a British hacker accused of breaking into Pentagon and NASA computers -- something he claims to have done while hunting for information on UFOs.

Gary McKinnon, 42, faces charges in the United States for what officials say were a series of cyber attacks that stole passwords, attacked military networks and wrought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer damage.

The decision by Britain's House of Lords -- comparable to U.S. supreme court judges -- was his last legal option in this country, but his lawyer said she would appeal his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

"The consequences he faces if extradited are both disproportionate and intolerable and we will be making an immediate application to the European court to prevent his removal," Karen Todner said after McKinnon's appeal was rejected. "We believe that the British government declined to prosecute him to enable the U.S. government to make an example of him."

McKinnon's lawyers alleged that an American official had told him he would be forced to serve a lengthy sentence in the United States if he fought against his extradition, something they say amounted to an unlawful threat.

The five Law Lords were unanimous in deciding McKinnon had failed to prove his case.

McKinnon's supporters say they want him freed -- or at least tried in Britain.

Prosecutors allege that McKinnon hacked into than 90 computer systems belonging to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA between February 2001 and March 2002, causing $900,000 worth of damage.

McKinnon has acknowledged accessing the computers, but he disputes the reported damage and said he did it because he wanted to find evidence that America was concealing the existence of aliens.

He was caught in 2002 after some of the software used in the attacks was traced back to his girlfriend's e- mail account.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe....ap/index.html





Hacker Vows to Fight Extradition
BBC

A Briton accused of hacking into top-secret military computers has vowed to fight extradition to stand trial in the US after losing a court appeal.

Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon could face life in jail if convicted of accessing 97 US military and Nasa computers.

He has admitted breaking into the computers from his London home but said he was seeking information on UFOs.

Mr McKinnon says he will take his case to the European Court of Human Rights after losing the Law Lords appeal.

Mr McKinnon, 42, first lost his case at the High Court in 2006 before taking it to the highest court in the UK, the House of Lords.

He was arrested in 2002 but never charged in the UK.

The US government claims he committed a malicious crime - the biggest military computer hack ever.

The authorities have warned that without his co-operation and a guilty plea the case could be treated as terrorism and he could face a long jail sentence.

'Moral crusade'

Mr McKinnon, now living in north London, told BBC Radio 5 Live he was "pretty broken up" by the Law Lords' ruling, although he had expected the outcome.

He admitted he had been "misguided" in what he did, but said he believed at the time that he was acting in the public interest.

"It felt like a moral crusade," he said.

However, Mr McKinnon said he did not accept US claims that he caused damage to their systems. Instead he said he maintained a "quiet presence" and actually highlighted security problems.

"I'm extremely sorry I did it, but I think the reaction is completely overstated. I should face a penalty in Britain and I'd gladly do my time here," he said.

"To go from, you know, perhaps a year or two in a British jail to 60 years in an American prison is ridiculous."

A statement by solicitors for Mr McKinnon, who was not at the Lords to hear the judgement, said their client was "neither a terrorist nor a terrorist sympathiser".

"His case could have been properly dealt with by our own prosecuting authorities. We believe that the British government declined to prosecute him to enable the US government to make an example of him.

"American officials involved in this case have stated that they want to see him 'fry'.

"The consequences he faces if extradited are both disproportionate and intolerable."

'Critical systems'

Mr McKinnon's lawyers also claim he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay if he is treated as a terrorist.

Mr McKinnon, a former systems analyst, is accused of hacking into the computers with the intention of intimidating the US government.

It alleges that between February 2001 and March 2002, he hacked into dozens of US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense computers, as well as 16 Nasa computers.

Prosecutors say he altered and deleted files at a naval air station not long after the 11 September attacks in 2001, rendering critical systems inoperable.

Mr McKinnon, who is currently unemployed, has admitted that he accessed computers in the US without authority.

But he has said he is merely a computer nerd, whose motives were harmless and innocent. He denies any attempts at sabotage.

He said he wanted to find evidence of UFOs he thought was being held by the US authorities, and to expose what he believed was a cover-up.

Repatriated

The Law Lords were told by Mr McKinnon's lawyers that extraditing him would be an abuse of proceedings.

US authorities had threatened him with a long jail sentence if he did not plead guilty, they said.

If the case was treated as terrorism it could result in a sentence of up to 60 years in a maximum security prison, should he be found guilty on all six indictments.

With co-operation, he would receive a lesser sentence of 37 to 46 months and be repatriated to the UK, where he could be released on parole and charges of "significantly damaging national security" would be dropped.

A Home Office spokesman said Mr McKinnon would have 14 days in which to seek appeal at the European Court of Human Rights.

If a hearing is granted, Mr McKinnon's extradition would be halted until the European verdict.

"If refused, arrangements for surrender to the USA will be put in hand," she added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/7533916.stm





A Photo That Can Steal Your Online Credentials

By placing a new type of hybrid file on Web sites that let users upload their own images, researchers can circumvent security systems and take over Web surfers' accounts
Robert McMillan

At the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas next week, researchers will demonstrate software they've developed that could steal online credentials from users of popular Web sites such as Facebook, eBay, and Google.

The attack relies on a new type of hybrid file that looks like different things to different programs. By placing these files on Web sites that allow users to upload their own images, the researchers can circumvent security systems and take over the accounts of Web surfers who use these sites.

"We've been able to come up with a Java applet that for all intents and purposes is an image," said John Heasman, vice president of research at NGS Software.

They call this type of file a GIFAR, a contraction of GIF and JAR, the two file types that are mixed. At Black Hat, the researchers will show attendees how to create the GIFAR while omitting a few key details to prevent it from being used immediately in any widespread attack.

To the Web server, the file looks exactly like a .gif file, however a browser's Java virtual machine will open it up as a Java Archive file and then run it as an applet. That gives the attacker an opportunity to run Java code in the victim's browser. For its part, the browser treats this malicious applet as though it were written by the Web site's developers.

Here's how an attack would work: The bad guys would create a profile on one of these popular Web sites -- Facebook, for example -- and upload their GIFAR as an image on the site. Then they'd trick the victim into visiting a malicious Web site, which would tell the victim's browser to go open the GIFAR. At that point, the applet would run in the browser, giving the bad guys access to the victim's Facebook account.

The attack could work on any site that allows users to upload files, potentially even on Web sites that are used to upload banking card photos or even Amazon.com, they say.

Because GIFARs are opened by Java, they can be opened in many types of browsers.

There is one catch, however. The victim would have to be logged into the Web site that is hosting the image for the attack to work. "The attack is going to work best wherever you leave yourself logged in for long periods of time," Heasman said.

There are a couple of ways that the GIFAR attack could be thwarted. Web sites could beef up their filtering tools so that they could spot the hybrid files. Alternatively, Sun could tighten up the Java runtime environment to prevent this from happening. The researchers expect Sun to come up with a fix not long after its Black Hat talk.

But researchers say that while a Java fix may disable this one attack vector, the problem of malicious content being placed on legitimate Web applications is a much larger and thornier issue. "There will be other ways to do this, with other technologies," said GIFAR developer Nathan McFeters, a researcher with Ernst & Young's Advanced Security Center.

"In the long term, Web applications are going to have to take control of the content," McFeters said. "It's a Web application issue. The Java attack that we're currently using is just one vector."

He and his fellow Black Hat presenters have entitled their talk The Internet is Broken.

Ultimately, browser makers will have to make some fundamental changes to their software too, said Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer with White Hat Security. "It's not that the Internet is broken," he said. "It's that browser security is broken. Browser security is really an oxymoron."
http://whois.domaintools.com/211.142.116.205





DIY

Band Leaks Track to BitTorrent, Blames Pirates
Ernesto

When we reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band’s response to it, we hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research we found out that the track wasn’t leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band.

When BuckCherry found out that their latest single had leaked on BitTorrent, they didn’t try to cover this up, or take the file down. No, instead, they issued a press release, where they stated: “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

This is strange to say the least. Not only because their label, Atlantic Records, is known to release (and spam) tracks for free on BitTorrent sites, but also because the press release was more about promoting the band than the actual leak. Without any hard evidence, we suggested that this leak may have been set up to get some free promotion and publicity, which BuckCherry seems to need.

Out of curiosity, we decided to follow this up, to see if this was indeed the case. With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme - who happens to live in New York - an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

Epic fail….

Unfortunately Klemme only replied once, and ignored all further requests to comment on this issue. However, the press release, sent out by Atlantic Records and BuckCherry, seems to be a promotional stunt. It could be that the manager acted on his own, and that the band and the record label were not not in on this, but that’s less plausible.

Klemme has been caught with his pants down, and he will probably think twice before he tries to pull off a stunt like this again. A song doesn’t leak by itself and pirates don’t have some sort of superhuman ability to get their hands on pre-release material. No, most leaked movies, TV-shows and albums come from the inside so blaming pirates is useless.

Of course, it’s great that BuckCherry can get some free promotion for the band using BitTorrent, and we encourage everyone to promote their band or movie via this great system too. But wouldn’t it be more constructive if bands embraced the technology and admitted it, instead of playing the injured party and giving the protocol a bad image, just to boost their own? There’s a great opportunity here, don’t waste it.
http://torrentfreak.com/band-leaks-t...irates-080731/





The Pirates Can't Be Stopped

A teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning.
Daniel Roth

From: Ty Heath [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 7:02 p.m.
To: it <it@mediadefender.com>
Subject: pm webserver

The 65.120.42.146 pm webserver has been compromised […]
As a side note, please do not ever use the old passwords on anything.

The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family's suburban home. The place was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor and crowded the desk near his father's Macs and his own five-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over the office, and soon enough he'd start taking over the computer networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in MediaDefender's firewall, he started poking around on the company's servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of the largest media companies on the planet: News Corp., Time Warner, Universal.

Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the company to stop the film's spread online. Island Records counted on MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony, its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches.

MediaDefender's main stalking grounds are the destinations that help people find and download movies and music for free. Sites such as the Pirate Bay and networks like Lime Wire rely on peer-to-peer, or P2P, software, which allows users to connect with one another and easily share files. (See what movies, television shows, and music are most downloaded.) MediaDefender monitors this traffic and employs a handful of tricks to sabotage it, including planting booby-trapped versions of songs and films to frustrate downloaders. When the company's tactics work, someone trying to download a pirated copy of Spider-Man 3 might find the process interminable, or someone grabbing Knocked Up might discover it's nothing but static. Other MediaDefender programs interfere with the process pirates use to upload authentic copies. When Ethan hacked into the company, at the end of 2006, MediaDefender was finishing an exceptional year: Its revenue had more than doubled, to $15.8 million, and profit margins were hovering at about 50 percent.

Ethan and I had first started talking over an untraceable prepaid phone that he carried with him. He eventually agrees to speak in person, as long as I protect his identity. (Ethan is a pseudonym.) We meet after school, in a bookstore that he says is near his house. He hands me a flash drive containing documents that I was later able to independently verify as internal, unpublished information belonging to MediaDefender. He also pulls out a well-creased sheet of paper bearing my name, the first five digits of my Social Security number, a few pictures of me, and addresses going back 10 years. "I had to check," he says. Then he asks me about another Roth he has been researching; it turns out to be my brother. "I was just starting to dig in to him," he says. "There's a lot there." Ethan is a handsome kid, with broad shoulders and a preppy style, and is unfailingly polite, cleaning up the table after I buy him a coffee and patiently walking me through the intricate details of Microsoft security procedures.

Ethan explains to me that the Christmastime break-in didn't proceed very far. While logged into MediaDefender on one computer, he chatted on another with some hacker friends to see if they knew anything about the firm. But the conversation quickly shifted to other exploits the group wanted to pull off on that cold evening—cell-phone hacks, fake pizza deliveries, denial-of-service attacks—and Ethan moved on.

In the spring, however, he decided to explore the company again. Over the next few months, Ethan says, he figured out how to read MediaDefender's email, listen to its phone calls, and access just about any of the company's computers he wanted to browse. He uncovered the salaries of the top engineers as well as names and contact information kept by C.E.O. and co-founder Randy Saaf (with notations of who in the videogame industry is an "asshole" and which venture capitalists didn't come through with financing). Ethan also figured out how the firm's pirate-fighting software works. He passed on his expertise to a fellow hacker, who broke into one of MediaDefender's servers and commandeered it so that it could be used for denial-of-service attacks.

Ethan continued to log in to MediaDefender about twice a week throughout the summer of 2007. Usually, he'd head down to the basement office after his S.A.T. prep classes. After a while, his friends grew tired of hearing about his stunts inside Monkey Defenders, as he began to call the company. And eventually, he himself got bored. So in September, he decided to give the entire thing up, but not before he and a few fellow hackers pulled a prank: They grabbed a half-year's worth of internal emails and published them on the same file-sharing sites prowled by MediaDefender. A comment posted with the messages read, "By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contains [sic] information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking P2P users, and disrupt P2P services.... We hope this is enough to create a viable defense to the tactics used by these companies." It was signed MediaDefender-Defenders.

A few days later, Ethan and his friends put more material online. One file contained the source code for MediaDefender's antipiracy system. Another demonstrated just how deep inside the company they had gone. This file featured a tense 30-minute phone call between employees of MediaDefender and the New York State attorney general's office discussing an investigation into child porn that the firm was assisting with. (MediaDefender refused to comment for this story.) The phone call makes clear that the hackers had left a few footprints while prowling MediaDefender's computers. The government officials had detected someone trying to access one of its servers, and the hacker seemed to know all the right log-in information. "How comfortable are you guys that your email server is free of, uh, other eyes?" an investigator with the attorney general asked during the call.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, we've checked out our email server, and our email server itself has not been compromised," the MediaDefender executive said.

But, of course, it had.

"In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders," Ethan tells me. "It wasn't like, 'I want to hack those bastards.' But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I'm going to destroy them."

And so he set out to do just that: a teenager, operating on a dated computer, taking on—when his schedule allowed—one of the entertainment world's best technological defenses against downloading. The U.S. movie industry estimates that it loses more than $2 billion a year to file sharers; the record industry, another $3.7 billion. "Piracy," intoned Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America trade group, to Congress in late 2006, "is the greatest obstacle the film industry currently faces." Instead of figuring out whether there is a way to make online distribution work—to profit from downloading—the industry has obsessed for years with battling it. Yet it took only a few months for Ethan to expose just how quixotic that fight has become.

From: Randy Saaf
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:24 p.m.
To: [various MediaDefender employees]
Subject: Fw: .edu filtering

Team Universal is curiouse [sic] if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether .edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down. They want to see if their lawsuits are getting students to stop using p2p (take a moment to laugh to yourself). Let me know if anyone has any ideas.

When Saaf co-founded MediaDefender in 2000, Napster was at the height of its popularity. The file-sharing service was wildly popular on college campuses, where students used speedy broadband lines to amass huge music collections. The Recording Industry Association of America, the music-business trade group, considered Napster to be its No. 1 problem. Saaf thought he had a way to contain it. He invited Cary Sherman, then an R.I.A.A. executive and now its president, to drop by the startup's cramped Claremont, California, offices. As soon as Sherman walked in, he heard a yet-to-be-released Madonna track blaring from a set of speakers. "He was shocked," says Ron Paxson, one of the company's co-founders. "We showed him how we could block it from getting out onto the internet."

Over the next few years, the firm grew as downloading flourished and terrified entertainment execs turned to it for help. The content-wants-to-be-free chant of the internet generation began reverberating in the nightmares of music moguls—and then of executives further and further up the entertainment industry food chain. As broadband speeds increased and data storage got cheaper, it became easier and faster for anyone with a passing interest in pop culture to trade larger files like TV shows, movies, and software.

The technology for trading them also kept improving. When the record industry shut down Napster in 2001, a drove of oddly named services took its place: Ares, eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa. In 2002, a lone programmer working at a table in his dining room invented BitTorrent, a technology that made file sharing even faster and more efficient. Within a few years of its creation, BitTorrent activity accounted for nearly 20 percent of all internet traffic. Between 2002 and 2006, the file-trading audience nearly doubled, with an average of more than 9 million people sharing files at any given time, according to BigChampagne, a company that monitors P2P traffic. The firm estimates that more than 1 billion songs are traded each month, a number that has more or less remained constant as the trading of feature films and TV shows has exploded.

Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. "While downloads occur on a vast scale," they wrote, "most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded." Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought. "Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase."

Still, the entertainment industry believes it knows a bad guy when it sees one and has reacted to file sharing exactly as a character in one of its thrillers or shoot-'em-up games would: with a full-frontal, guns-a-blazing assault. For the past few years, the R.I.A.A. has employed MediaDefender's competitor, MediaSentry, to trace people uploading music so that the trade group can sue them. The R.I.A.A. and the M.P.A.A. have worked to get government on their side: In 2007, the organizations lobbied to water down a California bill designed to crack down on pretexting—the practice of using false pretenses to get personal information about someone. The M.P.A.A. argued that laws against pretexting would cripple its antipiracy efforts by imperiling "certain long-employed techniques to obtain information." In November, the groups lobbied the House of Representatives in support of a bill to make federal funding for universities partially contingent on how effectively they rid their campuses of file sharing.

"This is not Napster," says Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul who heads the Weinstein Co., a MediaDefender client. "Online piracy has got to be stopped. The biggest spear in the neck of the pirates will be (a) being vigilant, (b) prosecuting, and (c) in a way, making fun of them, finding a way to say, 'That's not cool—that's anything but cool.' If you had people who the young people respect in this industry—Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Shia LaBeouf—if these guys did public service announcements that said, 'Don't steal, stealing's not cool,' I think you can go a long way toward stopping this." Weinstein says that if Democrats maintain control of Congress and gain the White House, he'll flex whatever political muscle he has acquired by being a major donor to achieve one thing: "Tougher, more stringent piracy laws." Does he see any use for P2P systems? "No."

Certainly, the few attempts that entertainment companies have made to accommodate downloaders have come across as halfhearted and have turned out dismally. Five major movie studios—Sony, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Universal—sank $150 million into a cumbersome film-downloading service called Movielink, rolled out in 2002. In August, they unloaded the unit to Blockbuster for $6.6 million, after concluding that few consumers had the patience to master a technology that didn't match the ease or quality of that being offered by the pirates. NBC and News Corp. are optimistic about Hulu, a site that offers new and archived TV fare, but the shows contain unskippable ads and can't be downloaded, a disadvantage in this era of DVRs and iPods. All this comes after years of the music industry's blundering around for solutions. "The music companies were put on earth to make the video companies seem like visionaries," says Michael Gartenberg, research director of analysis firm JupiterResearch.

So the entertainment business lives by the motto "If you can't join them, beat them." As with all wars, of course, escalation most benefits the arms merchants. In 2005, the music portal ArtistDirect purchased MediaDefender for $42.5 million, making Saaf and his remaining co-founder, Octavio Herrera, multimillionaires at age 29. To retain the two men, ArtistDirect paid them an additional $525,000 each and gave them easy-to-hit bonuses that would keep their income at about $700,000 a year each. And the clients continued to come, even though those inside MediaDefender could see they were losing ground.

From: Jonathan Perez [MediaDefender]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 6:33 p.m.
To: [various MediaDefender employees]
Subject: Sicko Torrents Results 6/22

Attached are today's internal testing results for Sicko. Our overall effectiveness did improve. However, we still have no presence on Pirate bay which is a site they are likely watching as it was mentioned in the AdAge article they referenced.

>From: Ethan Noble [Weinstein Co.]
>Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 10:41 a.m.
>To: [various Weinstein employees]
>Subject: Re: Piracy—this is a real
>problem
>
>This is AdAge's main story today and
>they talk about ThePirateBay.org
>having [Michael Moore's Sicko] so I
>did a quick search and there are a
>couple of copies of the film on there
>right now. MAYBE and HOPEFULLY
>those are our guy's 'fake' versions…

Before Ethan started toying with MediaDefender, the company's biggest problem was a tall 29-year-old Swede named Peter Sunde. He and two partners run the most popular file-sharing site, the Pirate Bay. It draws about 25 million unique visitors every month; dozens of new movies, games, and TV shows pop up each hour. The R.I.A.A.'s international counterpart refers to the site as the "international engine of illegal file sharing." The Pirate Bay doesn't host any of the actual content; it just lists it and supplies the BitTorrent files that let people connect with each other in order to share their libraries.

Sunde lives in a tranquil suburb of Malmö, Sweden, once the country's shipbuilding capital. Today, he's dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt embroidered with a mushroom from the videogame Super Mario Bros. He opens the MacBook Pro in his living room and starts reading a recent email from an attorney representing Prince and the Village People: " 'The owners of the Pirate Bay willfully and unlawfully exploit and misappropriate both Prince's and the Village People's intellectual property and infringe on their rights of publicity,' blah, blah, blah. 'Regardless of Pirate Bay's wishful thinking and erroneous public-relations position on its website that U.S. intellectual property laws are inapplicable,' blah, blah, blah, 'the Swedish government may not be able to protect you.'

"I was reading this yesterday, and I started laughing so hard," Sunde says, swiveling in his chair. "They're going to reach our company? We're not even a company." The partners run the site more as a hobby: There is no registered trademark and minimal overhead. The Pirate Bay is basically just the domain name and a website. Sunde then reads me the reply he is about to post. "For fuck's sake," it begins, "get your facts straight," and becomes more insulting from there.

Sunde is a bit of a philosopher when it comes to what his site does. As he sees it, the Pirate Bay is simply delivering a service to consumers, giving them the entertainment they want when they want it. He motions to the home theater he has rigged up: "Just look at this. I have my own cinema. When I watch a movie, I'd rather be here with a blanket and a girlfriend than at the cinema with a lot of people that are annoying. And that has nothing to do with file sharing. The technology is here for us, so why shouldn't we do it?" As far as Sunde is concerned, Hollywood should stop attacking him and start listening. According to him, consumers don't care about how Hollywood wants to schedule its releases—movie theaters first, then pay-per-view, and so on. They want the content when and where it's convenient and comfortable. Is that so hard to understand?

Sweden is a file sharer's heaven. Its laws protect internet service providers from being sued for what passes through their networks, which gives them little incentive to turn downloaders over to groups like the R.I.A.A. or the M.P.A.A. The country is one of the most wired in the world, with high-speed-internet penetration as high as 75 percent in some areas and an average broadband speed that's nearly five times faster than that of the U.S. And as a rule, Swedish authorities have never been that interested in going after a bunch of websites that didn't seem to be doing anyone any real harm.

Nonetheless, Hollywood tried lobbying Sweden to do something about the Pirate Bay. In May 2006, partly at the prodding of the M.P.A.A., 52 Swedish police barged into multiple locations, including the Stockholm offices of the I.S.P. run by Sunde's partners, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. Police confiscated 186 pieces of computer equipment and hauled in Svartholm and Neij for questioning. Sunde, who was at home in Malmö, learned about the raid from an email. He quickly downloaded the entire site to his home computer—source code, images, everything—finishing just as the last server was shut down in Stockholm. Three days later, he had the site back up and running, and soon thousands of supporters were turning up at pro-Pirate Bay rallies throughout the country. (The Swedish police have yet to bring charges, though the lead investigator promised in the fall to do so by the end of January—nearly two years after the raid, a delay highly unusual in Sweden.)

Sunde could handle the cops—one of the country's top attorneys immediately signed on to defend the Pirate Bayers. MediaDefender and the rest of the antipiracy firms presented a trickier problem. Even as police officers were preparing their blitz, the Pirate Bay guys were trying to figure out who was already attacking them online. Users complained in message boards and chat rooms that certain files failed to download fully and some that did were pure garbage. Sunde and his partners eventually traced some of the files back to a few hundred IP addresses—the series of numbers assigned to any device connected to the internet in order to identify it.

First, Sunde started blocking IP addresses from servers that appeared to host fake or corrupted files—MediaDefender had thousands of such computers hidden in server farms around the world—and then he blocked all the IP addresses originating from MediaDefender's headquarters. If MediaDefender wanted to search to see whether a client's files were accessible through the Pirate Bay, well, they'd just have to do it from home. Finally, Sunde started messing with his enemy: When MediaDefender tried to upload a torrent—the vital file that coordinates the download process—to the Pirate Bay, MediaDefender would get a notice that there had been a database error, requiring it to start the process over again. As far as the folks at MediaDefender could tell, the problem was with the Pirate Bay and not with the fact that its IP addresses had been detected. It would spend the rest of the day trying and trying to complete the upload. Sunde had managed to turn one of MediaDefender's tricks back on itself.

But for Saaf and Herrera, the Pirate Bay was just one of many problems. The two men had always been technically savvy, but now they were vastly outnumbered by the swarm of pirates and programmers collaborating to improve file-sharing technology. MediaDefender's IP addresses were exposed so quickly that the company was forced to buy new banks of numbers each month; at one point it considered using its employees' home connections to get fresh IP numbers. MediaDefender's year-over-year cost of doing business jumped 28 percent in the first quarter of 2007. Even worse, its parent company was dealing with the fallout from an S.E.C. inquiry into its accounting practices. To placate the government, ArtistDirect had restated its earnings, which triggered a clause that put into default the $46 million in debt the company had taken out to pay for MediaDefender.

Saaf and Herrera couldn't afford to have the wheels come off their division, which accounted for two-thirds of ArtistDirect's revenue. Worried about the efficacy of its piracy countermeasures, executives sent flurries of emails about how to stage-manage product demonstrations. In one instance, Universal Music Group was in the middle of negotiating a contract renewal worth more than $3.5 million with MediaDefender and wanted to test how effective the firm's tactics were. MediaDefender tried to persuade Universal to use a downloading program called µTorrent, which had been prone to falling for MediaDefender's tricks. In a note to Universal, Saaf hailed µTorrent as "the most popular" in the industry. A month earlier, when µTorrent developers appeared to be fixing the hole that MediaDefender had exploited, one of Saaf's underlings sent out an email asking if MediaDefender's engineers had come up with a plan B. "Randy will ask you very soon, so I'm just trying to preempt a shitstorm," he says.

From: Jonathan Lee [MediaDefender]
Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 9:26 a.m.
To: Octavio Herrera, Randy Saaf, Ben Grodsky, Jay Mairs
Subject: Fw: hahahha

We have such a lovely fan base.

----- Original Message -----
>From: David White
>Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2007 6:04 a.m.
>To: sales@mediadefender.com
>Subject: hahahha
>HAHAHAHAHAHA Digg got your site
>killed, thats what you guys get for
>trying to entrap people. MUSIC AND
>VIDEOS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE!!!!!
>quit trying to trap people downloading
>and suing then [sic], MEDIA
>DEFENDER SUCKS […]
>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>HAHAH

At some point, MediaDefender's clients were going to notice that Saaf was getting schooled by a bunch of amateur coders and by "the douche," as Saaf referred to Sunde in an email. The solutions devised by Saaf and his programmers were invariably ferreted out by the file-sharing community. In early July, a user at Digg, a heavily trafficked social-bookmarking site, put up a link to an item showing that MediaDefender was behind a new online video site called MiiVi. Bloggers accused the company of running a honeypot to trap pirates who were uploading protected content. Saaf quickly pounded out an email to his senior staff: "This is really fucked," he wrote. "Let's pull MiiVi offline." Ethan says he was behind the leak that led to the Digg post, and of course, he kept up his forays until that weekend in mid-September when he decided to show off his work.

After the company's internal affairs were made public, Saaf and Herrera spent the next few weeks trying to reassure everyone in the entertainment business that their antipiracy efforts were still effective. At a digital music conference held in L.A.'s Roosevelt hotel in early October, the men walked the halls, collaring colleagues and clients to explain what had happened and how they intended to bounce back from the hack. One way was with cash: Within weeks, the company shelled out $600,000 in service credits and another $225,000 to pay for legal advice.

Reading the purloined MediaDefender emails on the computer screen in his Malmö living room, Sunde realized there might be another method he could use to fight back against MediaDefender. The messages made it clear that Saaf and Herrera had put considerable energy into trying to degrade his work. Sunde called a lawyer to ask whether MediaDefender's actions were legal in Sweden. Then Sunde emailed the Swedish inspector who had raided the Pirate Bay's office—who else knew the operation better?—and informed the inspector that he wanted to bring charges against MediaDefender's clients: Sony, Universal, Atari, and others. Not only had they paid a company to break the Pirate Bay's terms of service—which forbid companies from tracking usage, logging IP addresses, or doing anything disruptive—but MediaDefender had created code specifically for hacking into the Pirate Bay's system. "As long as what you're doing is legal, why should you be attacked by someone using illegal methods?" asks Sunde. The Swedish police have yet to press charges.

Of course, as with many a popular movie, the underdog always mounts a comeback. And recently, some other pirates have also chosen to fight instead of run. After the M.P.A.A. filed a lawsuit against several websites in 2006, the file-sharing portal TorrentSpy countersued for illegal wiretapping, saying the trade group had amassed evidence by hiring a hacker to obtain internal documents. (A judge dismissed the countersuit; TorrentSpy is considering an appeal.) And Sunde is heading up an initiative in the file-sharing community to develop a more secure, less traceable version of BitTorrent. The new protocol, tentatively called SecureP2P, got a boost through Ethan's work: Because programmers were able to view the blueprints for MediaDefender's technology, they will be able to design an even more effective countertechnology.

From: Randy Saaf
Sent: Wednesday, May 2, 2007 1:11 p.m.
To: [various MediaDefender employees]
Subject: digg story on hd dvd crack

Look how ape shit the digg community went over the hd dvd crack code post getting pulled from the site.
http://digg.com/news/popular/24hours

People sure love their pirated movies

However Saaf and his crew intend to mount a comeback, it's clear that the war against downloading is escalating. "Hollywood is not burned out on silver-bullet technologies the way music is after years of defeat," says Eric Garland, C.E.O. of BigChampagne. "It's just 1999 for video, and the gold rush may be on now." In December, the ratings giant Nielsen announced its plans to enter the piracy-fighting business with a new service that would place traceable fingerprints on copyrighted media.

Perhaps, though, the entertainment business has it wrong. Downloaders aren't thieves; they're just rabid fans. But for the industry's perspective to change, it would have to trample long-held business practices. Hollywood would have to toss out its ability to stagger the opening of films across different media. It would also have to abandon technologies like the encryption used on HD-DVDs to prevent them from being copied or even played on certain machines. (A hacker cracked the encryption in January 2007.) And record labels would have to stop suing downloaders and continue to find other sources for revenue, like ringtones. But for the most part, the Weinsteins of the world see fighting as the only way forward.

"What should a police department do when it turns out there's been a burglary?" asks Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal and the chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy. "Should the police department give up, close its doors, and say this is an impossible task? No. That's silly.

Still, a few months after the MediaDefender-Defenders played their prank, there was a sign that some in Hollywood might be shifting their thinking. A new independent movie called Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth showed up on one of the file-sharing sites in November. The film's producers had no idea it had even been pirated; all they knew was that suddenly its popularity was skyrocketing. Their websites received 23,000 hits in less than two weeks, and the film's ranking among the most-searched-for movies on the internet movie-tracking site IMDB went from 11,235 to 15. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Eric Wilkinson, the film's co-producer, wrote a fan letter to the site responsible for driving traffic to the pirated film: "Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download.... People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the Net!" He requested that fans buy the DVD as well and added, "In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. you have helped put this little movie on the map!!!! When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the Net myself!"

When I try reaching Wilkinson, though, I'm told that the producer is not available. Instead, the movie's director, Richard Schenkman, returns the call. "Eric was clearly being sarcastic," Schenkman says about the offer to upload the film. "That's why he put in the exclamation points." I tell him his partner certainly sounded enthusiastic about file sharing. "Look, I have mixed feelings about this," Schenkman replies. "As a filmmaker, I love that people love the movie and have seen the movie. But as a person who literally has a hunk of his own life savings in the movie, I don't want to be ripped off by people illegally downloading the movie. Some of these downloaders want to believe they're fighting the man. But we're all just people who work for a living." He acknowledges, however, that DVD sales of the film increased after the leak, and that people have even been pledging money on a site the filmmaker set up to accept donations in markets where the DVD isn't for sale. "I'm not saying I have the answers," Schenkman says.

Meanwhile, Ethan has moved on to other companies. He and his friends have a few targets in mind that don't happen to be in the entertainment industry. He told me he'd also like to quit the business altogether but hasn't been able to give up the rush it brings. No doubt, other kids are hunkering down over their keyboards to see if they can't replicate the MediaDefender-Defenders' work. And some pirate is finding new ways to disseminate the material. Eventually, Hollywood will no longer be able to continue fighting its enemies at the expense of its customers. If they can't beat them, they'll finally have to join them. That is, if they want to keep having customers.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-market...092007ab#page1





No Film Distributor? Then D.I.Y.
John Anderson

When “Bottle Shock” played at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it appeared to possess that mix so tantalizing to well-heeled indie distributors.

It had a name cast, including Bill Pullman and Alan Rickman. The director came with a track record and a critically acclaimed short film. And the story, about a small American winery that triumphed over its French competitors in a blind tasting in 1976 and changed the world’s view of California wine, was an accessible one for audiences who flocked to “Sideways” a few years back.

But “Bottle Shock” found no love among distributors in Park City, Utah. So the director, Randall Miller, is opening the film himself next week in 12 cities. With their hopes for conventional movie deals increasingly dead on arrival, more and more indie filmmakers are opting for a do-it-yourself model: self-distribution, once the route of the desperate, reckless or defiant, has become an increasingly attractive option for movies otherwise deprived of theatrical exhibition. “Ballast,” “Wicked Lake,” “The Singing Revolution” and “Last Stop for Paul” are among the indies currently or recently taking the maverick route.

The motivations can be complicated. For example, John Turturro’s “Romance & Cigarettes” was self-distributed late last year, having been left to languish after its producer, United Artists, was sold. In other cases it’s simply a matter of distributors’ tastes differing from those of the filmmakers.

But increasingly, indie filmmakers find themselves caught in a glutted marketplace with too few theaters to handle all the movies, and the basic laws of supply and demand have depressed the prices they can fetch. In 2007, even with the big Hollywood studios trimming their offerings, about 600 films were released in the United States; five years earlier that number was nearly 450, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

While the orphan-indie route may not be the way a moviemaker dreams it will happen, do-it-yourself is better than a straight-to-DVD release — and certainly better than outright oblivion.

By going their own way, Mr. Miller (whose directing credits include “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School” and the upcoming “Nobel Son”) and his wife and co-writer, Jody Savin, retain the DVD and other rights to their dramatic comedy. They also get to control how their movie is rolled out and marketed.

The downside? “An enormous amount of work, an enormous amount of stress, no sleep and lots of people I’ve come to know and love who have given me millions of dollars,” Mr. Miller said.

But Mr. Miller and Ms. Savin said they felt they had little choice. With the rash of prominent distribution houses recently shuttered or placed in figurative foreclosure — including Paramount Vantage, Picturehouse, Warner Independent and ThinkFilm — options for the indie filmmaker are evaporating.

What remains is the slim chance of being picked up by one of the surviving “mini-majors” like Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight or the Universal-owned Focus Features, or finding themselves at the mercy of smaller distributors. While many are well regarded, most offer small cash advances (if any) in exchange for most of the rights (DVD, TV, international release), but don’t usually spend the kind of money necessary to assure public awareness and ticket sales. This, in turn, virtually precludes entree to the racks at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster, outlets without which a film’s post-theatrical existence will be one of obscurity.

“You‘ve got to have the phone numbers,” said Tom Bernard, the longtime co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. “Self-distribution is good, it can work, but filmmakers who are so innovative in making movies have to channel some of that into learning how the marketplace works.” He said major pitfalls were “carpetbaggers” and “middlemen” who may agree to represent a movie at a place like Sundance, but gravitate to the easy sale and leave their less fortunate filmmakers high and dry.

“We’re in the business of discouraging people from self-distributing,” said Gary Palmucci, general manager of the venerable Kino International, which will be releasing “Momma’s Man” on Aug. 22. That film, by Azazel Jacobs, came out of Sundance this year with the all-important buzz, and had a deal with ThinkFilm until that company’s money problems scotched it. Mr. Palmucci said Mr. Jacobs might have chosen self-distribution, but wisely didn’t because the cards are stacked: the enormous expense of opening a film in major markets like New York, the average filmmaker’s unfamiliarity with the logistics of booking a movie, the hassles in collecting money from exhibitors on time.

To help navigate the sometimes treacherous world of film distribution, Mr. Miller and Ms. Savin hired Dennis O’Connor, a former top marketing executive at Picturehouse, to serve as a consultant. Freestyle Releasing of Los Angeles has been engaged, for an upfront fee and a small percentage of the gross, to handle the physical distribution of the movie (moving prints, booking theaters, etc.). And the publicity on the film is being orchestrated by Mr. Miller, Ms. Savin and Mr. O’Connor, with others enlisted by Mr. O’Connor from among the ranks of distribution veterans.

For the possibly lucrative DVD market, “Bottle Shock” has separate deals with Fox Home Entertainment and the all-important Netflix, both of which have helped in the marketing (which ensures them a better return later). Mr. Miller also negotiated his own deals with airlines and with advertising outlets, and has worked out his own price for prints. Most significant, he raised most of the money for filmmaking and prints and advertising through private investors.

“Wealthy people are really into wine,” Miller said, laughing. “You couldn’t do this with a horror movie.”

But most indie filmmakers won’t be able to raise the $10 million Mr. Miller raised for “Bottle Shock.” Instead they will have to use more cost-effective ingenuity.

The established distributors have regular circuits in which they play their films, media outlets through which they advertise and audiences they court religiously. A self-distributed movie like “Ballast,” which is cast with African-American nonactors and is about down-and-out characters (and opens at Film Forum in October), is compelling its champions to think outside the art-house box and explore new frontiers and demographics, like black churches and Southern audiences. (The movie, which won cinematography and directing prizes at this year’s Sundance festival, had a tentative deal with IFC Films before the director Lance Hammer decided to release the film through his own Alluvial Film Company.)

“At one time distributors were paying so much money they could do anything they wanted, maybe consult respectfully with the filmmakers but essentially do what they wanted,” said Steven Raphael, a consultant on the movie. “But now there’s no money and filmmakers get resentful, so they’re taking back control.”

Neil Mandt, the director, producer and star of “Last Stop for Paul,” a comedy about two men traveling around the world sprinkling the ashes of their dead friend, had a prospective deal with Magnolia Pictures. But the distributor was interested only in a DVD release. Mr. Mandt passed.

“I will be the first to admit that I never imagined that the movie would connect as well as it did when it won a prize at 45 festivals,” Mr. Mandt said. “That’s a crazy number. Despite that, we never were approached by another company for a domestic distribution deal again.”

“Last Stop for Paul” opens next week in New York, and Mr. Mandt hopes a successful opening will lead to a larger rollout. “If all of this goes as planned,” he said, “maybe in another year we will make our money back.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/movies/30self.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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