[JackSpratts]

F.D.A. Tracked Poisoned Drugs, but Trail Went Cold in China
Walt Bogdanich

After a drug ingredient from China killed dozens of Haitian children a decade ago, a senior American health official sent a cable to her investigators: find out who made the poisonous ingredient and why a state-owned company in China exported it as safe, pharmaceutical-grade glycerin.

The Chinese were of little help. Requests to find the manufacturer were ignored. Business records were withheld or destroyed.

The Americans had reason for alarm. “The U.S. imports a lot of Chinese glycerin and it is used in ingested products such as toothpaste,” Mary K. Pendergast, then deputy commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration, wrote on Oct. 27, 1997. Learning how diethylene glycol, a syrupy poison used in some antifreeze, ended up in Haitian fever medicine might “prevent this tragedy from happening again,” she wrote.

The F.D.A.’s mission ultimately failed. By the time an F.D.A. agent visited the suspected manufacturer, the plant was shut down and Chinese companies said they bore no responsibility for the mass poisoning.

Ten years later it happened again, this time in Panama. Chinese-made diethylene glycol, masquerading as its more expensive chemical cousin glycerin, was mixed into medicine, killing at least 100 people there last year. And recently, Chinese toothpaste containing diethylene glycol was found in the United States and seven other countries, prompting tens of thousands of tubes to be recalled.

The F.D.A.’s efforts to investigate the Haiti poisonings, documented in internal F.D.A. memorandums obtained by The New York Times, demonstrate not only the intransigence of Chinese officials, but also the same regulatory failings that allowed a virtually identical poisoning to occur 10 years later. The cases further illustrate what happens when nations fail to police the global pipeline of pharmaceutical ingredients.

In Haiti and Panama, the poison was traced to Chinese chemical companies not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients. State-owned exporters then shipped the toxic syrup to European traders, who resold it without identifying the previous owner — an attempt to keep buyers from bypassing them on future orders.

As a result, most of the buyers did not know that the ingredient came from China, known for producing counterfeit products, nor did they show much interest in finding out.

China itself was a victim of diethylene glycol poisoning last year when at least 18 people died after ingesting poisonous medicine made there. In the wake of the deaths, and reports of pet food and other products contaminated with dangerous ingredients from China, officials there announced that they would overhaul the regulation of food, drugs and chemicals.

Beyond the three incidents linked to Chinese diethylene glycol, there have been at least five other mass poisonings involving the mislabeled chemical in the past two decades — in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Argentina and twice in India.

“This problem keeps coming back,” said Dr. Joshua G. Schier, a toxicologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And no wonder: the counterfeiters are rarely identified, much less prosecuted.

Finding a way to keep diethylene glycol out of medicine, particularly in developing countries, has confounded health officials for decades. “It is preventable and we have to figure out some way of stopping this from happening again,” said Carol Rubin, a senior C.D.C. official.

In a global economy, ingredients for drugs are often bought and sold many times in different countries, sometimes without proper paperwork, all of which increases the risk of fraud, the authorities say.

The Panama poison passed through five hands, the Haitian poison six. In both cases, the factory’s original certificate of analysis, attesting to the contents of the shipment and its provenance, did not accompany the product as it moved around the world.

“Where there is a loophole in the system, a frailty in the system, it’s the ability of an unscrupulous distributor to take industrial or technical material and pass it off as pharmaceutical grade,” said Kevin J. McGlue, a board member of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council.

Uncovering that deception can be difficult. “It’s impossible to get anyone to do the trace-backs,” said Dr. Michael L. Bennish, co-author of a 1995 medical journal article on a poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh.

One reason, Dr. Bennish said, is the clout of local manufacturers. “We tried to follow up as amateur Sherlocks, investigators, but you don’t go down to the wholesale market and ask questions,” he said. “You are going to get your fingers burnt.”

A Crisis in Haiti

By the end of June 1996, the F.D.A. knew it might have an international crisis on its hands. A poison had found its way into fever syrup in Haiti, and the F.D.A. wanted to know if more of the same might be heading to the United States or, for that matter, to any other country. But to learn that, the agency needed to find the manufacturer.

This was not just any poison. Virtually every young poisoning victim who showed up at the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, died.

Labeled pharmaceutical-grade glycerin, the toxic syrup was mixed into thousands of bottles of fever medicine. For months, parents gave it to children, then watched them die, in agony, from kidney failure. No one suspected the medicine until much later.

Officially, at least 88 children died, nearly half under the age of 2. But those 88 were only the ones doctors remembered or for whom hospital records could be found.

The F.D.A. traced the poison to a German broker, Chemical Trading and Consulting, but the company’s records were not much help. “They cannot trace glycerine lots to their manufacturer,” David Pulham, an F.D.A. investigator, wrote on June 30, 1996.

Chemical Trading had arranged for a Dutch company, Vos B.V., to sell 72 barrels of the suspect syrup to Haiti, records show. The agency dispatched an investigator, Ann deMarco, who made an unsettling discovery: sitting in Vos’s warehouse near Rotterdam were 66 more barrels labeled glycerin, all containing lethal concentrations of diethylene glycol.

“Some of this second shipment has been sold,” Ms. deMarco wrote in a memorandum on July 4, 1996. Although the missing barrels had gone to an industrial user, not a drug maker, the F.D.A.’s worries grew.

Ms. deMarco learned that another broker, Metall-Chemie, a German trader, had arranged for Vos to buy the barrels from Sinochem International Chemicals Company, a giant exporter in Beijing owned by the Chinese government.

But Metall-Chemie also did not know the manufacturer, and one of its officials predicted that the F.D.A. would have trouble finding that out. “It is difficult to get any information from Chinese traders,” Ms. deMarco wrote.

More complete shipping records would have identified who made the poison. But in this case, records provided few clues.

“The original source of the material had been obliterated on documents and product containers,” Ms. deMarco wrote to senior F.D.A. officials. “One trader referred to this practice as ‘neutralization.’ I was advised that neutralization is a common practice among traders in order to protect their business interests.”

With no paper trail, American officials turned to Sinochem for help.

Initially, they took an indirect approach. In July 1996, the American Embassy in China contacted the company and asked for a list of Chinese glycerin makers, without saying that it was investigating the Haiti poisonings. Sinochem, however, “would not reveal the names of actual manufacturers in order to prevent the prospective foreign customer from bypassing Sinochem,” an embassy official reported to Washington.

In early August, American officials asked Sinochem representatives specifically about the origin of the Haiti poison. “They want to investigate further and were unable (or unwilling) to give the name of the manufacturer at this time,” the officials reported.

Federal investigators sought help from senior Chinese drug regulators, who promised to help find the manufacturer, but said it “will take time,” records show.

When another month passed without any word from either regulators or Sinochem, the embassy tried again. Chinese regulators said they had done nothing to find the factory, according to a confidential State Department telegram from September 1996.

Sinochem did finally offer the manufacturer’s name: the Tianhong Fine Chemicals Factory in the city of Dalian in northeastern China. But Sinochem “refused” to provide an address, saying it was illegible. A telephone number would have to suffice, it said.
That, too, was unproductive. When American investigators called the plant manager, Zhang Gang, they were told he was not available. Send a fax, they were told. That did not work either. “The phone was always busy,” investigators reported.

Finally, they got Mr. Zhang on the phone, but he, too, refused to give out his factory’s address. He said that tests had found no signs of diethylene glycol, adding that “there had been no cases in China of poisoning resulting from the ingestion” of glycerin contaminated by diethylene glycol, investigators wrote.

After months of trying to trace the poison to its source, United States investigators were at a dead end.

“The Chinese officials we contacted on this matter were all reluctant to become involved,” a State Department official wrote in late September 1996, saying that drug regulators and the plant manager had insisted on communicating only on the telephone “to avoid leaving a paper trail.”

He added, “We cannot be optimistic about our chances for success in tracking down the other possible glycerine shipments.”

The following May, Mr. Pulham, who was part of the original F.D.A. investigative team in Haiti, tried to revive the investigation. “Is it possible to block-list all Chinese pharmaceutical products until we gain cooperation?” he asked.

The suggestion went nowhere. Five months later, Ms. Pendergast of the F.D.A. wrote her memorandum, imploring investigators to keep digging.

“China is turning into one of the major bulk pharmaceutical producers in the world,” she wrote. “Unless they have an open, transparent and predictable system for dealing with problems and other countries, it is going to be rough sledding in the years ahead.”

On Nov. 17, 1997, federal investigators once again questioned Sinochem officials. They denied any wrongdoing, saying that two certificates of analysis showed that the suspect shipment was safe, pharmaceutical-grade syrup. But when the F.D.A. asked to see them, Sinochem refused.

“The officials were not willing to explain why they could not provide the copies,” an American official reported at the time.

Chen Liusuo, who handled the glycerin sales, strongly disputed the F.D.A.’s account. In an interview with The Times, Mr. Chen said Sinochem cooperated. “We gave them everything they wanted,” Mr. Chen said, adding that the agency was satisfied.

“The product we sold was glycerin,” he said. “It passed through three or four companies after us. To find the problem you need to look at every link in the supply chain.”

A Chinese government official familiar with the F.D.A.’s inquiries said the Americans’ frustration might have stemmed from their misunderstanding about who regulated chemical companies, which led them to seek help from the wrong officials. “This was a truly tragic event, and we expressed our sadness and sympathy,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

At the end of 1997, a year and a half after the F.D.A. began tracing the poisonous shipments, one of its investigators, Ted Sze, finally got inside the Tianhong chemical plant in Dalian. But glycerin was no longer made there, and Mr. Sze had no records to inspect. The plant manager, Mr. Zhang, told investigators that he had received no complaints about his products and that his company had not produced the poison.

Mr. Sze, now retired from the F.D.A., said in an interview that he had no choice but to accept the manager’s word and clear the company of wrongdoing. “By the time I went there, the plant was already shut down,” he said. “The agency can only do so much.”

The Experts’ Recommendations

The United States may not have gotten what it wanted from China, but the Haiti crisis did bring together health groups to search for ways to stop diethylene glycol poisonings. At a workshop in Washington in February 1997, health experts recommended that certificates of analysis be improved to allow users to “trace the product back through every intermediary, broker and repackager to the original manufacturer.”

The workshop participants also called for better testing of drug ingredients and asked governments to tighten oversight of drug manufacturing.

The next year, the World Health Organization offered many of the same recommendations. And a 1998 article in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, warned that failure to strictly follow the guidelines could cause poisonings “even in countries where quality control procedures are usually strictly applied.”

Much of this had been said before, yet the poisonings have continued.

Just as the JAMA article was being published, three dozen children began dying of acute renal failure at two hospitals in Delhi, India. A local drug maker had unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into acetaminophen syrup, much as the Haitian pharmacist had.

The drug maker was prosecuted, but according to interviews and government records no progress had been made in identifying the supplier of the poison.

“My experience as an investigator tells me that many of these things will not be proven,” said Dr. M. Venkateswarlu, the drug controller general of India.

Finding counterfeiters often means pursuing leads across foreign borders, and no international authority has the power to do that. Dr. Howard Zucker, who helps to oversee drug issues for the W.H.O., said individual countries must conduct their own trace-back investigations.

But if the United States could not do that on behalf of Haiti, poorer, less influential nations would have little chance of tracking down counterfeiters.

After the Haiti poisoning, a more accurate, less expensive test for diethylene glycol was developed, but last year’s case in Panama shows that suppliers and governments do not always use it.

And as long as counterfeiters do not fear prosecution, the poisonings are likely to continue, experts say.

Dr. Mohammed Hanif, a prominent physician in Dhaka, Bangladesh, said the foreign suppliers of diethylene glycol were never prosecuted for the deaths of thousands of children from 1982 to 1992. “The traumatizing memories of those days still torment me,” said Dr. Hanif, who wrote a paper about the deaths from toxic medicine.

In Argentina, a court official said no one had been prosecuted for supplying the diethylene glycol that ended up in a health supplement, killing 29 people in 1992.

David Mishael, a Miami lawyer, knows the difficulty of assigning blame in these deaths. For 10 years, Mr. Mishael has unsuccessfully pursued legal claims in the United States and Europe against European traders that helped to arrange the shipment of toxic syrup to Haiti. “You can imagine the cost,” said Mr. Mishael, who is representing Haitian parents whose children died from the fever medicine.

He said Dutch authorities assessed a $250,000 fine against Vos, which tested the counterfeit syrup, found it impure and did not alert anyone in Haiti. But given how many died, he called the size of the fine “a joke.” A lawyer who represents Vos, Jeffrey B. Shapiro, declined to comment.

A few children survived after being flown to the United States by humanitarian groups. One of them, Faika Jean, was 2 months old at the time and nearly died en route. Now 11, she has learning disabilities as a result of the poisoning, said her father, Wislin Jean.

Ms. Pendergast, now a private lawyer and consultant, said China had the most to answer for. “Everybody else is just reacting to initial failures,” she said. “It needs to take steps to protect not just its own consumers but also consumers all around the world.”

After The Times reported in May that the Panama poison had been made and exported by Chinese companies as 99.5 percent pure glycerin, Chinese regulators said they would reopen their investigation of the incident. Three weeks later, the officials acknowledged some “misconduct” in how Chinese companies labeled the toxic syrup.

But most of the blame, they said, rested with a Panamanian importer who changed the paperwork to make the syrup look safer than it actually was.

The F.D.A. disagrees, saying the deception began with Chinese companies falsely labeling a poisonous product glycerin. “If the drums had been 99.5 percent glycerin, the deaths in Panama would never have occurred,” the F.D.A. said in a statement.

A Dissatisfied Customer

The F.D.A.’s Haiti investigation never did find more counterfeit glycerin from China, despite a global hunt. But its concerns, it turns out, were not unfounded.

In 1995, the same year babies began to die in Haiti, 284 barrels of a chemical labeled glycerin arrived in New York on container ships. Although the chemical was not intended for use in drugs, it was labeled 98 percent pure. An official with the company that bought the barrels, Dastech International, of Great Neck, N.Y., would later say, “It smelled like glycerin, it looked like glycerin.” But after one of its customers complained, Dastech took a closer look.

Although the chemical was labeled 98 percent pure glycerin, Dastech said in court records that the syrup actually contained sugar compounds — as well as diethylene glycol.

The exporter was Sinochem. Claiming that it was fleeced, Dastech tried to get its money back from the broker who arranged the sale, court records show.

It never did.

Reporting was contributed by Jake Hooker from Beijing, Hari Kumar from New Delhi, Anand Giridharadas from Mumbai, and Julfikar Ali Manik from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/health/17poison.html





In Latest Scare, China Finds Fake Veterinary Drugs
Ben Blanchard

Almost one-fifth of veterinary drugs tested in China in the first quarter were not up to standard, the Ministry of Agriculture said on Thursday, unveiling a long list of fake products.

Still, that one-fifth figure is a slight improvement over the same period of last year, the ministry said, putting a positive spin on the announcement.

"Although more of the veterinary drugs tested were up to scratch, there remains a problem with the illegal production and sale of fakes," it said in a statement posted on its Web site (www.agri.gov.cn).

"There is especially a glaring problem with underground dens selling fakes," the ministry added, vowing tougher action.

It published a five-page list of problem drugs it had found, saying some claimed to be made by companies that don't exist, some falsely claimed to have government approval, while others had been banned long ago.

Others were just undisguised fakes.

"We will keep taking proactive measures, striking hard against the illegal behavior of the production and sale of fake and shoddy veterinary drugs, raise standards and guarantee the safety of food made from animals," the ministry said.

Fresh scandals involving substandard food and medicines are reported by Chinese media almost every day, and the issue has burst into the international spotlight since tainted additives exported from China contaminated pet food in North America.

The Beijing Evening News said that a former official with the food and drug regulator, Cao Wenzhuang, had gone on trial charged with accepting 2.34 million yuan ($307,100) in bribes and dereliction of duty. He pleaded innocent.

Cao's former boss, watchdog head Zheng Xiaoyu, was sentenced to death in May for corruption. He has appealed.

The government has been trying to reassure consumers.

Earlier this week, the agriculture ministry said tests of fruit, vegetables, meat and fish in major cities showed that more than 95 percent of products were up to standard.

Yet it admitted to a few problems. Malachite green, a cancer-causing chemical used by fish farmers to kill parasites, was found in some samples, as were nitrofurans, an antibiotic also linked to cancer, the ministry said.

Public fears about food safety grew in China in 2004 when at least 13 babies died of malnutrition in Anhui after they were fed fake milk powder with no nutritional value.

($1=7.620 Yuan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...28277720070621





Asian Cinema, Swimming in Crime and Cuteness
Dave Kehr

HORROR is over, gangsters are losing ground, and the coming thing is camp comedy dressed up in electric pink.

At least those are a few conclusions that can be drawn from sampling this year’s edition of the New York Asian Film Festival, which begins Friday at the IFC Center in the West Village. (On July 5 the festival moves to Japan Society, where it will present several titles as part of the society’s “Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Films.”)

Now in its sixth year, the scruffy, fan-fueled Asian Film Festival continues to serve as a reliable road map of the new directions in Asian popular cinema. Let the uptown art houses take the latest, made-for-export costume epics, like “Curse of the Golden Flower” or “House of Flying Daggers.” The Asian Film Festival, which seems to run largely on the energy of its chief programmer, the film journalist Grady Hendrix (with sponsorships this year from the video label Dragon Dynasty and Midway Games, among others), has little use for such elevated fare. The house specialty is the disreputable genre film, made for the Asian domestic market with a fast buck in mind.

Asian genre films of course have been building a steady following in the West ever since the Hong Kong cinema broke out of Chinatown theaters during the 1980s and introduced filmmakers like John Woo and Tsui Hark. In the years since, Hong Kong has faded as the primary supplier of popular entertainment in East Asia, done in by financial woes and the suspicions of Beijing, while South Korea has emerged as the epicenter of Asian pop culture, both in film and in music.

South Korea remains the primary creative force this year, although the genre that led its renaissance — the brooding, violent crime film — seems to be in serious decline. Even at last year’s festival the genre seemed to be achieving a classical fullness with Kim Jee-woon’s stylish and philosophical “Bittersweet Life,” starring the matinee idol Lee Byung-hun as a soulful enforcer right out of Jean-Pierre Melville. But this year’s crop betrays dissatisfaction with idealized gangster heroes and a distrust of the form’s romantic roots.

“Cruel Winter Blues,” a 2006 film by the newcomer Lee Jeong-beom, picks up a plotline that was used to different effect in Takeshi Kitano’s 1993 Japanese film “Sonatine.” Sol Kyung-gu, the star of one of the founding films of Korean crime cinema, Kang Woo-suk’s 2002 “Public Enemy,” returns, older but wiser, as a respected elder hoodlum who thinks of nothing more than murdering the man who killed his boyhood friend; he takes a younger mob recruit with him (Jo Han-seon) and sets out for the small southern town where his enemy’s mother lives, the plan being to integrate himself into the community and strike when his nemesis pays a visit. But these two refugees from Seoul are soon lulled by the rhythms of village life, to the point where they seem to have forgotten their reasons for being there. As in all self-respecting noirs, the past will not stay past, and they must eventually face up to the task at hand, leading to a finish that is more poignant than cathartic.

Song Kang-ho, the sad-sack comedian who saved Seoul from a mutant sea creature in “The Host,” brings his comic diffidence to the gangster spoof “The Show Must Go On,” directed by Han Jae-rim. In a story influenced by “The Sopranos” and “Analyze This,” Mr. Song plays a “wholesale produce distributor” whose real interests run to include nightclubs and strip bars. His business isn’t going so well, and neither is his marriage; his wife is threatening to leave him and to take their daughter along.

For a spell, the picture coasts along on the familiar, formula gag of juxtaposing humdrum reality with the powers and privileges of a gangster’s life, as in a nicely underplayed scene that finds Mr. Song’s character summoned for a parent-teacher conference. Told his daughter isn’t doing well, he stuffs a wad of bills in the teacher’s hand and tells him to “look out for her.” But the violence increases and the tone darkens, until there is very little comedy left in the lonely, desperate character Mr. Song has become.

If Korean gangsters are softening up, their Hong Kong counterparts are turning into feral killers, red in tooth and claw. One of the few Category 3 (adults only) films to be released in Hong Kong since its return to mainland control, “Dog Bite Dog” is a viciously Darwinian drama about a boy raised to be a street fighter in Cambodia who is smuggled into Hong Kong Harbor to carry out an assassination. The violence is not of the stylized, exhilarating variety pioneered by John Woo (whose 1992 “Hard Boiled” will have a special screening at the festival), but of the sticky, sweaty, close-up gore of the new breed of American horror films.

Asian films have mostly been free of the curse of self-consciousness that has now turned practically every American movie into a winking takeoff on itself (like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” pictures). But while Hong Kong has not yet succumbed to a camp sensibility (Johnnie To’s “Exiled,” which will receive one showing in the festival but is set to open theatrically in New York on Aug. 24, is absolutely straight, sincere, classically constructed and one of the best Asian films in years), South Korea and, with even greater enthusiasm, Japan, have thrown themselves into the postmodern cauldron of self-parody and scrambled styles.

Perhaps as a reaction to half a century of Japanese industrialized cuteness — the “Hello Kitty” empire is only the tip of a pink rhinestone iceberg — films like the Korean “Dasepo Naughty Girls” and the Japanese “Memories of Matsuko” turn sentimental sweetness back on itself, using digital technology to create coloring-book worlds filled with Disneyesque animated birds, Day-Glo environments that seem less real than a dollhouse and characters so saccharine that they make the French “Amélie” (clearly an inspiration for “Matsuko”) look like a Kubrick film.

Japanese horror, on its last legs since Hollywood raided its talent, receives a sardonic send-off in Sion Sono’s “Exte,” a curdled spoof that puts the genre’s curious obsession with long, limp black hair to its ultimate use: Death takes the form of evil hair extensions, infiltrating human bodies through open orifices and multiplying therein. Who else can confront this scourge but a plucky young hairdresser, played by “Kill Bill Vol. 1’s” Chiaki Kuriyama?

A self-conscious cuteness is also at the base of Park Chanwook’s “I’m a Cyborg but That’s O.K.,” this Korean director’s first film since “Lady Vengeance.” Mr. Park has put his revenge trilogy behind him (“Oldboy,” “Lady Vengeance,” “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”), and is starting on a new path with this wildly experimental, unclassifiable film.

Executed with Mr. Park’s usual attention to the tiniest details of visual style, it is a sort of “David and Lisa” story in which a suicidal young woman (Lim Su-jeong) whose ability to communicate with the vending machines she believes to be her fellow beings leads her to a mental institution. There she meets and, after much effort, opens herself up to a no-less-disturbed young man, a skinny kleptomaniac (the hugely successful pop singer Rain).

The actors are attractive, the rainbow colors abound, the other inmates reveal their lovable eccentricities, a magnificent score by Mr. Park’s regular composer, Jo Yeong-wook, swells in surround sound, and yet the film is no endearing fable of nonconformism like “King of Hearts” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but something ambivalent and disquieting. Happiness, Mr. Park suggests, is only another way of filtering out reality — insanity with a smile — but no less essential for that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/movies/17kehr.html





Police Smash Global Pedophile Ring

700 People Arrested; 31 Children Rescued

Police smashed a global Internet pedophile ring, rescuing 31 children and rounding up more than 700 suspects worldwide, authorities said Monday.

Some 200 suspects are based in Britain, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center said. The ring was traced to an Internet chat room called "Kids the Light of Our Lives" that featured images of children being subjected to horrific sexual abuse.

The investigation involves agencies from 35 countries and lasted 10 months.

The host of the Web site, Timothy David Martyn Cox, 27, of Buxhall, who used the online identity "Son of God," admitted to nine counts of possessing and distributing indecent images, authorities said.

After his arrest in September, authorities were able to infiltrate the chat room and collect evidence on the other members.
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/13519573/detail.html





Q&A: How Police Cracked Online Porn Ring

A technology expert explains how police broke up a global online porn ring—and why their methods should be a deterrent to future networks.
Ginanne Brownell

British police spent months infiltrating one of the world’s largest online child porn rings. They arrested its ringleader, Timothy Cox, at his Suffolk home last September, then assumed his online identity to gather evidence on the Web site’s members. Their global investigation—dubbed Operation Chandler—led them on a trail stretching from Australia to North America and Europe, netting over 700 suspects around the world and rescuing 31 abused children. Yesterday, they finally made the case public after Cox was convicted of distributing indecent images and sentenced to jail for an indeterminate period—meaning he will be incarcerated until he is no longer considered a threat to children.

Cox was the ringleader of a chat room called “Kids the Light of Our Lives,” which allowed users to trade and watch live images of children being abused through file sharing and video streaming. “No investigation has rescued so many young and vulnerable people from a group of hard-core pedophiles,” says Jim Gamble, who heads Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP). There have been several other indictments, including the jailing last week of a man from Manchester who will serve seven years for child rape and a British music teacher, jailed in April for persuading young girls to strip in front of Web cams. Bill Thompson, a technology expert who teaches courses in electronic media at London's City University, spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Ginanne Brownell about the technology that led to these arrests. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: How did police find this ring?
Bill Thompson: In 2005 the cops in Canada arrested someone in Edmonton. Following that they were able to infiltrate two chat rooms in the U.S. that were being used. They found out about Timothy Cox because he was part of that community of pedophiles. You often hear about how police can tap our e-mails and look at what sites we are visiting, but often they get a lucky break in one case and that leads them to other people. So this was human intelligence.

How did they find all the others who were involved?
Well from what we can understand by reading between the lines—the police do not, of course, want to give too much away—they arrested him when he was away from his computer; they then went to his home and logged on as him and pretended to be him for 10 days. They gathered IP addresses and whatever details they could get to allow them to trace back to the others. So what that implies to me is that what this guy had set up was a private chat room running on his computer—he was administering it. It was not a public Web site, it was a piece of chat-room software, so you needed to know it was there, you needed to know the IP address, you needed to know a username and password. It would not be indexed by Google or anyone like that, not visible to the outside world. And from hints in what the police were saying, I suspect that once people made contact they were not actually sharing files directly from the chat room, they were sharing files by using things like instant messaging file transfer, peer-to-peer programs, Skype. Nearly every interactive program from MSN or whatever allows you to move files around. What people would do was establish contact through his chat room and trade images. They have not said that, but it is a strong implication that that is what was going on.

How do people find these sites if they are password protected?
I suspect it is different for different people. Some people maybe go to Google and are searching for images and find stuff of younger and younger children. They eventually find a Web site which offers child abuse. There is an e-mail address, someone who will then check you out before letting you know the full details. And the checking out is that you have to have stuff to trade. So you provide images of child abuse to them, which is a criminal act, and then once you are into the site there will be levels of access, levels of privilege. You become more and more trusted over time. One of the great things about this sting operation is it will worry everyone. Because anyone who is in one of these communities now is going to say, “Well actually one of the people I am talking [to] could now be a police officer. Maybe I have actually made a mistake.” So it could well have a significant deterrent effect. It will stop people trading because they will no longer trust the people at the other end.

Is this the first time where the police did what they did—went on masquerading as a suspected perpetrator?
It is the first time I have heard about them doing this. That does not mean it is the first time it has been done. [The police] may have decided to go public as a strategy, a tactic. It is an obvious thing to do.

Did advances in technology on the Web have anything to do with this?
In this context, no. Nothing that was done on this operation could not have been done 10 or 12 years ago. What changed I suspect is that police now are more clued up on how to do it.

Is this going to make it trickier for pedophiles?
Yes, it will. Say I am interested in trading child abuse. Now I am going to look at ways for doing identity verification for the person on the other end of the line. So for example with Web cams, if I have been talking to you for six months and I ask you to come up on your Web cam and you won’t, I know there is a policeman there. You can imagine well-organized groups will start using technologies which will make it harder for police to take over someone’s identity. There will be more done on the part of these people to keep themselves more secret. That is unfortunate, but it also means it will be harder to [be] accepted into the circle. The end result should be fewer images being traded by fewer people—but then the hardened people who have been doing this for some time will be harder to track down.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19314724/site/newsweek/





Kid likes kiddie porn

Student Accused of Downloading Porn on School Computer
AP

A 16-year-old student at Morgan School has been charged with hacking the school's computer security systems and downloading child pornography.

Clinton, Conn. police said the illegal Internet activity was spotted and the student was caught as a result of continuing surveillance by technology administrators.

Police said the boy, whose name has not been released, admitted downloading a program he found on the Internet that allowed him to bypass the firewall that limits Internet activity at the school.

Police said the boy was caught by experts who were monitoring activity on the computer.

The school computer and a second computer seized at the student's home have been taken to the state police technology forensics laboratory for examination, police said.

The student has been released to his parents' custody and is charged with computer hacking and possession of child pornography.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...06-19-07-57-36





Police Struggle to Come Up With File-Sharing Countermeasures
Hiroomi Yamamoto and Hiroki Ando

The exposure of investigation information from a senior policeman's private personal computer highlights the fact that police countermeasures against such a risk have stayed one step behind the problem, which is caused by computer viruses affecting Winny file-swapping software.

As many police officers still copy confidential information onto their private PCs as reference data for work, the police are being pressed to review the way such information is controlled.

On Wednesday, when information emanating from a private PC owned by a 26-year-old senior policeman of Kitazawa Police Station was found to have been compromised, the Metropolitan Police Department held a meeting to discuss the problem.

At the meeting, senior officers from the organization's criminal investigation, organized crime, public safety and other departments reconfirmed that measures to prevent similar exposures should be thoroughly implemented.

In March last year, when cases surfaced in which police information was accidentally placed online due to Winny-affecting computer viruses, the MPD issued officers instructions signed by chiefs of the Administration Bureau and the Personnel and Training Bureau.

Officers were urged not to use their private PC to store investigation information; not to take work PCs out of the office without permission; and not to record investigation information using privately-owned recording media.

Simultaneously, the MPD made all officers submit written pledges saying they would not use PCs with Winny installed.

In March this year, the MPD reviewed the situation: Division bosses interviewed officers to confirm they had not used Winny on their private PCs, and officers submitted printouts of their PC screens to prove that Winny was not installed.

The MPD has repeatedly taken such measures.

However, in the latest case of information being compromised, it was found that in addition to the officer from Kitazawa Police Station, several of his superiors, including a 32-year-old sergeant--the officer's direct superior--had violated the internal rules.

A senior police investigator pointed out that the latest case was caused by police customs, saying "I've often distributed copies of my deposition of interviews with suspects to younger colleagues. As my superiors at the time praised my documents as quality work, I instructed younger police officers to use them for reference."

Police officers in their 20s who do not have a great deal of investigative experience look upon interview depositions and other documents written by long-serving senior colleagues as job manuals.

Within the police force, it has been customary for junior officers to receive such documents from senior colleagues, and to refer to them when preparing their own paperwork.

About 10,000 pieces of information, such as documents and graphics, were compromised by the officer in question, including records of interviews with suspects and procedural documents related to past crimes.

The pattern of the latest incident is almost identical with that of a recent case in which secret information on Aegis destroyers belonging to the Maritime Self-Defense Force was exposed. In this instance, data stored on a magneto optical disk, originally part of an internal document, were distributed to a large number of other SDF personnel.

A senior MPD official said, "The senior policeman in question may have used the data in the PC as reference for his work, or some other purpose."

To prevent information being compromised, the National Police Agency has developed software that automatically encodes data when it is copied onto a PC.

Data files made with police officers' government-issued PCs cannot be read by other PCs unless they have the encoding software installed. Thus investigation data cannot be copied onto any kind of media.

The NPA instructed police forces nationwide to introduce the software in April, and it is likely the project will be completed by the end of this fiscal year, which ends March 31.

However, not all police officers are given government-issued PCs. As of April 1, about 198,000 PCs were being used for police work nationwide, but about 26,000 of these were privately owned.

Though the number of private PCs in police-related workplaces has decreased by about 51,000 from last year, police sources said it will be the end of this fiscal year at the earliest before all police officers have government-issued PCs.

Problems in the latest case were compounded because by the senior policeman in question told his superior he had only one PC at home, when he actually had two.

A senior MPD official pointed out that the internal measures have limits saying: "The inspection is based on voluntary reporting. Because superiors don't visit the homes of all officers, we can't do anything if an officer lies."
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national...15TDY03004.htm





Focus of Video Games Shifts to Lure More Casual Players
Doreen Carvajal

Critics may fume about violent killer video games, but top manufacturers are starting to beat some of their swords into beauty tips.

By fall, software developers will start introducing offerings aimed at nudging players to bond with Grandma, balance their hormones and eat their peas.

Ubisoft, the French manufacturer known for its top-selling Rayman game and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, is betting on a vocabulary-building exercise game called My Word Coach.

Also in the works is My Life Coach, which will be packaged with a pedometer and a portable Nintendo DS player that analyzes walking and rewards exercise and a hearty breakfast with game play.

Konami, the Japanese manufacturer of rough-and-tumble sports titles like Pro Evolution Soccer, is poised to offer a beauty care guide on DS consoles. The game player dispenses customized advice based on the player’s basal body temperature and hormone balance.

Those steps reflect an intensifying effort to attract a global mass market for portable video games, which are expected to hit $10 billion in sales this year, according to DFC Intelligence, a game research company in San Diego.

The strategic shifts in the game industry come as critics and government authorities are growing impatient with violence in video games. The justice ministers of the European Union vowed last week to press for stricter regulations on the sale of “killer games” to children

“These companies are doing this not because they want to make a better world to live in,” said Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, an assistant professor with the Center for Computer Games Research in Denmark who recently founded his own company, Serious Games Interactive.

Nintendo, he said, has shown that there is room for growth in the market for casual gamers with its popular DS hand-held consoles, which are easily operated with a stylus, and its new Wii, which mixes video games, physical movement and human interaction. “Wii has had a huge impact and so has its game Brain Age, which basically showed all the game industry that you don’t have to have great graphics,” Mr. Egenfeldt-Nielsen said.

Some top manufacturers recently created special departments to chase after family players, even using their own mothers as testers, as one game developer, Igor Manceau, said.

“When my mother played our game she was fine and had fun,” said Mr. Manceau, who is developing My Word Coach for Ubisoft from the company’s Canadian studios in Montreal. “But she needed me there to go through the game and select each one. So we started to focus on accessibility after that.”

The casual market has largely been dominated by companies like PlayFirst, publisher of Diner Dash, and PopCap, which develops simple and addictive games like its popular Bejeweled puzzles.

But in recent weeks, the bigger manufacturers have started to demonstrate their interest, including Skype, which announced that it would soon start a casual games portal that would give game developers access to Skype’s two million registered users.

Electronic Arts, in Redwood City, Calif., was the latest game developer to move into casual gaming by hiring Kathy Vrabeck, former president of Activision’s publishing unit, to head a newly created division, EA Casual Entertainment.

“With the creation of this new division you’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more about lighter entertainment forms for families,” said Tiffany Steckler, a spokeswoman for Electronic Arts in Europe. In Japan next month, the company, known for its FIFA soccer games, is introducing a wine guide game for DS players called Sommelier, part of a series that will include Sake and Bartender.

The company is also planning to bring out in August a karaoke-style game, called Boogie, for Wii players. The game allows users to sing and dance along with cartoon characters.

Some game developers are braced for a reaction from hard-core gamers who are already worrying in blog postings about whether their interests will be eclipsed by mass market forces. “It’s not about moving from our core franchises,” Ms. Steckler said. “This is about continuing to bring these franchises along and adding others.”

But clearly, game developers are desperate to reach out to those teaming masses. Ubisoft has been testing its new easy-play games in special labs in France and Canada after conducting hundreds of interviews to determine why some people were reluctant to play video games.

“The reason was always the same,” said Pauline Jacquey, who was recently named by Ubisoft to head the company’s new casual games division. “They thought they were losing their time because the game didn’t give them any value.”

As a result of the research, Ubisoft began exploring games with a purpose. My Life Coach, developed with a behaviorist, will advise players on nutrition and antismoking strategies without being judgmental, executives say.

Ubisoft’s goal is to double sales in the category to 20 percent of the company’s annual revenue, which amounted to more than $900 million last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/te...y/18games.html





Foundation With Real Money Ventures Into Virtual World
Stephanie Strom

For the first time, one of the nation’s largest foundations is venturing into virtual worlds to play host to activities and discussions and explore the role that philanthropy might play there.

The foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is sponsoring events in Second Life, the online world.

The goals are to gain insight into how virtual worlds are used by young people, to introduce the foundation to an audience that may have little exposure to institutional philanthropy and to take part in and stimulate discussions about the real-world issues that it seeks to address.

“This is not just some fad or something new and interesting that we’ve grabbed onto,” said Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur’s president. “Serious conversations take place there, people are deeply engaged, and that led us to think that maybe a major foundation ought to have a presence in the virtual world as well.”

Second Life says it has more than seven million members, about one-third of them Americans. Each member uses a virtual self, known as an avatar, to navigate the virtual world.

The MacArthur foundation, perhaps best known for the so-called genius grants it hands out each year, has given the Center on Public Diplomacy of the University of Southern California $550,000 to stage events in Second Life, including discussions of how foundations can address issues like migration and education.

In one such event today, Mr. Fanton, whose avatar in Second Life is known as Jonathan MacFound, is going to discuss the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds with Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, the company that produces Second Life.

In an interview, Mr. Fanton said MacArthur planned to eventually open an office in a virtual world and make grants through it that will become actual grants in the real world. “We’re still figuring out how to do that,” he said. “All of this is a learning experience.”

Mr. Rosedale said making grants in the virtual world offered a way for foundations to explore concepts and develop programs before rolling them out. “You can start things very cheaply in Second Life, play with them and let them germinate, and then put more behind them if and when they take off,” he said.

Charities and other nonprofit groups are also beginning to migrate into the so-called metaverse, seeking ways of attracting new donors and hoping to educate a broader audience about the issues they address.

Adventure Ecology, a British group, staged a virtual flood in Second Life to show what global warming might bring, and a psychiatry professor at the University of California, Davis, created a way for his students to experience in Second Life what a person with schizophrenic hallucinations experiences.

“It’s a wonderful awareness-building tool,” said Beth Kanter, a nonprofit consultant. “You can walk someone through an experience there or sit down with them to discuss the work you’re doing in a way that you can’t in the real world or on the Web.”

The American Cancer Society has had success in raising real money with virtual walkathons in Second Life. Randal Moss, the society’s manager of innovation-based strategies and futurist, established an avatar in Second Life in 2004 — “It looks pretty much like me, maybe a little bit more muscular, with a little better haircut,” he said — and quickly noted that another avatar, named Jade Lily, was holding a silent auction to raise money for a charity.

His avatar, R. C. Mars, talked to Jade Lily and persuaded her to head a virtual Relay for Life, as the cancer society’s walkathons are known. A few hundred avatars did that walk in 2005, raising $5,000. This year’s walk has raised $82,000 at a cost of $4,200 — and it will not take place until the end of next month.

The benefits go beyond dollars. “We benefit by increasing brand awareness,” Mr. Moss said. “We’ve opened an office in Second Life, and through that, we will provide health information, link back to our Web site and provide space for community-based support groups to meet.”

More than 30 nonprofits have opened offices in a virtual business incubator in Second Life called the Nonprofit Commons that is operated by TechSoup, a group that helps other nonprofits with technology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/us/22virtual.html





During Intermission, Cellphones Are Brandished in a Promotion
Andrew Adam Newman

Typically you are told to turn off your cellphone before a performance. But at a recent Saturday matinee of “Spring Awakening,” the Broadway musical that garnered eight Tony Awards last week, the audience was told to do just the opposite.

“Win Your Chance to Come Backstage!” said a flier inserted into the Playbill, which encouraged theatergoers to send the text message “bdway spring” to a five-digit number before the end of intermission.

After the show, Becky Mitchell, 18, received a text message that she had won, and she bounded onto the stage with Alyssa Navia, 19, a friend from Boston College, where both are freshmen. “This is my first Broadway show,” said Ms. Mitchell, who wore a rugby shirt and Ugg boots. “This is fantastic.”

The production’s company manager, John E. Gendron, showed them the trapdoors in the stage from which, only minutes before, two actors had risen from a dry-ice ground fog.

But what the play’s producers hope to make magically appear in the future are audiences. At the performance, 62 people sent text messages, which included their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, in hopes of winning the contest. All of their information went into a database that will be used to pitch Broadway tickets and other promotions.

In exchange, contestants were sent a ring tone of a popular song in “Spring Awakening” and a photograph from the show to use as wallpaper on their phones. Both of the souvenirs are potential conversation starters with friends, whom the producers think of as would-be ticket buyers.

“Those are numbers talking to numbers talking to numbers,” said Damian Bazadona, president of Situation Marketing, who is working with the producers and the owner of the theater, Jujamcyn Theaters, on the pilot program. “A year or two years down the road, that’s how you’re talking to markets.”

Americans sent 18.7 billion text messages in December 2006, nearly double the 9.7 billion that were sent the previous December, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade group. While various companies have tried to beat a path from consumers’ phones to their wallets, theater promoters, weary of phones ringing infuriatingly during denouements, have held back.

Until now.

“There’s a tendency for Broadway not to be an early adopter, but that’s changing,” said Jordan Roth, vice president of Jujamcyn, which owns five theaters in New York, including the Eugene O’Neill Theater, where “Spring Awakening” is being staged. “Most producers now are really looking for new ways to communicate with our audience.”

The musical’s producers are sharing data with Jujamcyn, which is signing up participants for Broadway Phone, its wireless service for ticket deals and show information. Since the production draws young audiences with its themes of adolescent angst, it was chosen for the maiden cellphone effort. “But our goal is to expand what we’re doing to many shows,” Mr. Roth said.

As for whether this will result in more ringing during performances, Mr. Roth said that it has not been a problem, but that the promotion might not suit every production. “Will it interfere with the show?” he said. “Yeah, that is one of the things that is open for discussion.”

About 8.5 percent of audience members have been sending text messages in the 14 contests that the production has done so far, but organizers expect participation to reach 10 percent.

For a similar promotion with a tour of the rock-oriented theatrical production Blue Man Group, an average of 16 percent of audience members sent text messages, Mr. Bazadona said.

In a tour that covered 60 cities in 90 days, about 50,000 people sent text messages. “This means that each night, 16 percent of the house is leaving the theater with Blue Man Group somehow represented on their mobile phone,” Mr. Bazadona said.

At the Eugene O’Neill Theater that afternoon, the two students were enjoying their behind-the-scenes access when Stephen Spinella, who plays several characters in the musical, strode onto the stage on his way out of the theater. He asked Ms. Mitchell what she had done to win the contest.

“I texted,” she replied. “One of my favorite things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/bu...18theater.html





The Fine Print

While shopping for 78 records I came across one of the Victor Talking Machine Co. discs. This particular record was just another recording of Ave Maria, a single-side printing which, according to this page, was manufactured before 1909.

What caught my attention was the disclaimer on the back. There has been plenty of criticism of the record companies, under the flag of the RIAA, using numerous tactics that border on criminal to maintain their grip on anyone who listens to music. Most prevalent is the ongoing attempts to sue online music traders ("pirates") and get as much money out of them as possible without actually letting the courts get involved.

Only recently have some of these lawsuits actually proceeded into the courts, and I think to date the record companies have yet to win any of them. Anyone not familiar with the recent history of events is invited the peruse through Recording Industry vs. The People.

But don't get me wrong, the laws against copyright violations are indeed on the books. This is the probably the only situation in my lifetime where there's been a real reason to bring jury nullification back. While I'm sure my colleagues and friends would denounce their association with me if I were to walk out of a convenience store with a lifted pack of gum, not a single one of these people would hesitate to ask me to copy a song for them.

After all it was just pushed into their home via radio waves, and they have the right to record this song for their own personal use, so why can't they copy it from someone else? It appears that a significant portion of the population doesn't see anything wrong with copying music, and I have a feeling that we're just around the corner from a paradigm shift in the way copyrights are handled.

But enough of this, back to the particular Victor record.

The old Victor records had a label on the back of them stating the terms of usage. After all, you don't own the record you just paid for, you simply have a license to use it.

The label defines a price for this particular record - one dollar. I saw some similar records for sixty cents, but I purchased a record labeled one dollar. Using an inflation calculator we see that this record would cost $21.65 in 2006 (assuming the record was punched in 1906, 1907, or 1909). That's $22 for a single song.

But I didn't pay $22 for this record; I didn't even pay $1! But that's fine, it's old, scratched, and certainly not worth used what it was worth new.

Here's where it gets interesting. According to this sticker on the back of the record, "No license is granted to use this record when sold at a less price." So I purchased this record, but I do not have a license to play it. "All rights revert to the undersigned in the event of any violation."

The label doesn't provide any information on what I'm supposed to do with an unlicensed copy of Ave Maria. I could contact the Victor Record Company, but they sold assets to RCA, which was acquired by General Electric, which was sold to BMG, which merged with Sony. So do I contact Sony and inform them I have an unlicensed copy of Ave Maria? I'm sure they'd tell me to delete the mp3 off of my hard drive.

However, admitting I have an unlicensed copy of a record will certainly put me at risk of a lawsuit. Then I'd have to find an "expert" to testify in court that the unlicensed track is indeed embdded into this molded piece of plastic, and not stored on a hard drive. They'd probably drag the case through court, scour my hard drive, then drop the lawsuit and sue the antique junk store that sold me the record. After all, they were distributing unlicensed copies of music, which is clearly in violation of the law. "Any sale or use of this record in violation of any of these conditions will be considered as an infringement of our United States patents (...) and any parties so selling or using this record, or any copy thereof, contrary to the terms of this license, will be treated as infringers of said patents, and will render themselves liable to suit.
http://www.natch.net/stuff/78_license/





Piracy Beyond P2P: One-Click Hosters

Sicko, Hostel 2, the new Fantastic Four flick: You can get all those summer blockbusters via BitTorrent. Of course, there is a small chance that you actually might get in trouble for doing so, which is why more and more people turn to so-called “one-click” hosting sites instead, where all these movies are readily available for download as well.

One-click hosting has become a huge business during the last few years. The two market leaders RapidShare.com and Megaupload.com claim to each transfer more than a hundred terabyte of data every single day. Rights holders are slowly waking up to this trend — and suddenly realize that this is the cruel revenge of the market place for their file-sharing lawsuits.

Most one-click hosters have a fairly simple business model: They allow their users to upload a file without prior registration. Users in return get a link that they can forward to their friends or publish on their own website. Downloaders have to click through to the hosting website to access the file.

Paying members get access to the files they want right away, all other users have to wait in line. RapidShare makes its users wait up to a few hours until they can access their next download. This experience can be so time-consuming and frustrating that you would think no one in their right mind would use services like this. Or, as FON founder Martin Varsavsky recently put it:
“I have had a hard time understanding the massive popularity of these sites as they are much harder to use than Azureus. If anything they show that while people are not willing to pay for video content in iTunes or in cash, they seem to have not problem in paying for it in sweat.”

And in sweat they pay: Megaupload, RapidShare & Co. are hugely popular. The admittedly not too accurate Alexa index lists them as number 13 and 18 of the most popular sites on the web. Megaupload claims to have 1.5 million unique visitors per day. A RapidShare spokesperson told me that their site transfers a couple hundred terabytes of data on a daily basis. The company claims to have 1500 terabytes of hard disk space and 110 gigabits connectivity available for their customers.

There is also a huge ecosystem around each of the bigger one-click hosters. Indexing sites like Link.io list thousands of videos, applications, magazines and other files. There are tons of specialized tools and download managers available as well. Some are officially sanctioned by the hosters, others are meant to circumvent the restrictions imposed on free accounts. There are even some bizarre websites that offer paid accounts to make better use of your free RapidShare account.
http://newteevee.com/2007/06/17/one-click-hosters/





Steal This Film II Wants You

While sequels are all the rage in Hollywood, online file sharing, erm, not so much. So reactions in Tinseltown might be, how shall I say, ‘mixed’ when the new sequel to file sharing documentary Steal This Film (Google Video) is eventually released.

In the meantime, the producers are asking fans to join the League of Noble Peers and capture their own “15 frames of fame” by contributing video statements:

Express yourself to the full extent of your capabilities, using costume, mask or avatar, from Second Life or ‘real’ life, whether you’re young or old, drunk or sober — you are a Peer and we want to hear from you.

My contribution will be to suggest that they rename the project for release to Steal This Film II: Electric Boogaloo, but I digress. The sequel will include star turns from the likes of Mininova’s Erik, The Pirate Bay’s Brokep and Bram “BitTorrent” Cohen himself according to Ernesto at Torrentfreak.
http://newteevee.com/2007/06/07/stea...you/#more-1368





France Bans Blackberry Use by Officials

Government fears U.S. snooping, threat to state secrets

Blackberry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful — and now a threat to French state secrets.

French government security experts have reportedly banned — with mixed success — the use of BlackBerries in ministries and in the presidential palace -- for fear that they are vulnerable to snooping by U.S. intelligence.

“The risks of interception are real. It is economic war,” daily Le Monde quoted Alain Juillet, in charge of economic intelligence for the government, as saying. With BlackBerries, there is “a problem with the protection of information,” he said.

Juillet’s office confirmed that he spoke to Le Monde but said he would not talk to other reporters. Officials at the presidential Elysee Palace and the prime minister’s office were not immediately available for comment.

Le Monde said information sent from BlackBerries goes through servers in the United States and Britain, and that France fears that the U.S. National Security Agency can snoop.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19330478/





Appeals Court Says Feds Need Warrants to Search E-Mail
Luke O'Brien

A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision (.pdf) that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.

"This decision is of inestimable importance in a world where most of us have webmail accounts," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upheld a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using "Smiling Bob" ads that have gained some notoriety.

The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional reach when it demanded e-mail records from his internet service providers. Under the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act (SCA), the government has regularly obtained e-mail from third parties without getting warrants and without letting targets of an investigation know (ergo, no opportunity to contest).

But a district court held that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing the feds to secretly seize e-mail without probable cause warrants. Under the SCA, the government is required to get warrants for any e-mails that have been stored on third-party servers for less than 180 days. (the SCA came into effect long before the days of eternal Gmail storage.) After that, it can use an administrative subpoena or a different court order, provided it notified the target of the investigation. (the feds missed their legally mandated deadline for notifying Warshak by nearly a year.) To make matters more complicated, the government argued that the definition of "electronic storage" in the statute meant the feds only needed warrants when e-mail had yet to be opened or downloaded.

"The DOJ reading of the statue in practical terms is that any e-mail you have opened it can obtain without a warrant," Bankston said. But the district court ruled that the Fourth Amendment holds otherwise. And the appellate court affirmed the lower court's decision, agreeing that e-mail users have a reasonable expectation of privacy, regardless of how old their correspondence is and where it is stored. From the decision:

"In considering the factors for a preliminary injunction, the district court reasoned that e-mails held by an ISP were roughly analogous to sealed letters, in which the sender maintains an expectation of privacy. This privacy interest requires that law enforcement officials warrant, based on a showing of probable cause, as a prerequisite to a search of the e-mails."

To reach its decision, the court relied on two amici curiae that presented compelling arguments for shoring up current privacy law with respect to e-mail. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation (together with the ACLU and the Center for Democracy and Technology) and a coalition of internet law professors argued that e-mail is a vital form of communication in today's world and its privacy must be safeguarded under the constitution lest society's ability to engage in unfettered debate and discussion be eroded.

From the EFF amicus brief (.pdf):

"This case must be considered in the context of one overriding fact: millions of Americans use email every day for practically every type of personal business. Private messages and conversations that once would have been communicated via postal mail or telephone now occur through email, the most popular mode of Internet communication. Love letters, family photos, requests for (and offerings of) personal advice, personal financial documents, trade secrets, privileged legal and medical information—all are exchanged over email, and often stored with email providers after they are sent or received. These myriad private uses of email demonstrate society’s expectation that the personal emails sent and received over the Internet and stored with email providers are as private as a sealed letter, a telephone call, or even papers that are kept in the home."

From the internet professors' brief:

"E-mail has become so indispensable that it must be reasonable for us to expect that it is private. One who looks at our e-mails obtains a detailed view into our innermost thoughts; no previous mode of surveillance exposes more. When we compose private and professional e-mails, embed links to Internet sites in some, and attach documents, pictures, sound files and videos to others, we rely on the privacy of the medium. Society does not make us rely at our peril but rather accepts as reasonable our expectations of privacy in e-mail."

Because of the secrecy in which SCA investigations have been conducted, it's impossible to say how widespread this kind of government snooping into e-mail has been. "We don't know how often [it's happened]," said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who submitted one of the briefs. "The only way to find this out is if the ISPs told us or the government told us. The information is not reported to Congress."

Bankston suggested that the practice was widespread: "It is absolutely routine. It is and has been the Department of Justice and presumably local law enforcement's standard practice for obtaining e-mails over the last 20 years."

There have been no previous constitutional challenges of the SCA, likely because ISPs don't want to cause trouble and targets of investigations don't know that their e-mail is being read. "This demonstrates the importance of judicial review," Freiwald said. "You don't ask an agency to set its own governing rules."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...s_court_s.html





White House Aides' E-Mail Records Gone
Charles Babington

E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday.

The Bush administration may have committed "extensive" violations of a law requiring that certain records be preserved, said the committee's Democratic chairman, adding that the panel will deepen its probe into the use of political e-mail accounts.

The committee's interim report said the number of White House officials who had RNC e-mail accounts, and the number of messages they sent and received, were more extensive than previously realized.

The administration has said that about 50 White House officials had RNC e-mail accounts during Bush's presidency. But the House committee found at least 88.

The RNC has preserved e-mails from some of the heaviest users, including 140,216 messages sent or received by Bush's top political adviser in the White House, Karl Rove. However, "the RNC has preserved no e-mails for 51 officials," said the interim report, issued by committee chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

The 51 include Ken Mehlman, a former White House political director who reportedly used his RNC account frequently, the report said.

"Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails," the report said, "the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."

Republicans said there is no evidence that the law was violated or that the missing e-mails were of a government rather than political nature.

The records act requires presidents to assure that "the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance" of their duties are "adequately documented ... and maintained," the report said.

White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters he would not "respond specifically" to the committee's findings but said the RNC e-mail accounts "were designed precisely to avoid Hatch Act violations that prohibit the use of government assets for certain political activities." He added, "the RNC has had an e-mail preservation policy for White House staffers."

Congressional Democrats are investigating whether White House officials used RNC e-mail accounts to conduct overtly political, and perhaps improper, activities such as planning which U.S. prosecutors to fire and preparing partisan briefings for employees in federal agencies.

Waxman's committee is contacting numerous federal agencies to determine whether their records "contain some of the White House e-mails that have been destroyed by the RNC," the report said.

In a statement, Waxman said the panel's findings "should be a matter of grave concern for anyone who values open government." He said the committee will investigate "who knew about the violations of the Presidential Records Act, why they did not act earlier, and what e-mails can be salvaged from RNC, White House, and agency computer systems."

The committee's top Republican, Tom Davis of Virginia, criticized the report, saying the panel should obtain more conclusive evidence before accusing the RNC and White House of wrongdoing. The evidence thus far, he said, "simply does not support the report's breathless conclusions."

Tracey Schmitt, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said the report appears to present Democrats' partisan spin as fact.

"Not only have we been clear that we are continuing our efforts to search for e-mails, but there is no basis for an assumption that any e-mail not already found would be of an official nature," she said.

The report especially criticized Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general, for actions when he headed the White House Counsel's office. There is evidence that under Gonzales the office "may have known that White House officials were using RNC e-mail accounts for official business, but took no action to preserve these presidential records," the report said.

Snow said of the claim: "That's an allegation. We'll respond to it in due course."

The report said the House committee may need to issue subpoenas "to obtain the cooperation of the Bush Cheney '04 campaign." It said the campaign acknowledges providing e-mail accounts "to 11 White House officials, but the campaign has unjustifiably refused to provide the committee with basic information about these accounts, such as the identity of the White House officials and the number of e-mails that have been preserved.

Eric Kuwana, the Bush-Cheney campaign's counsel, said the requested documents "have no articulated connection" to the panel's investigation "and very well may be the type and nature of political documents that are specifically exempt from the Presidential Records Act."

The House committee report said Rove's RNC e-mail account carried 75,374 messages to or from people with government, or .gov, accounts. It said the RNC has preserved 66,018 e-mails sent to or from former White House political affairs director Sara Taylor, and 35,198 sent to or from deputy director Scott Jennings.

"These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies," the report said.

It said the White House counsel in early 2001 "issued clear written policies" instructing staffers "to use only the official White House e-mail system for official communications and to retain any official e-mails they received on a nongovernmental account." Recent evidence "indicates that White House officials used their RNC e-mail accounts in a manner that circumvented these requirements," the report said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061800876.html





How to Lose the P2P Race
p2pnet.net news

"P2P (peer-to-peer) video only accounts for about 10% of file swapping right now, but it's growing at triple-digit rates," says Eric Garland.

Quoted in by Investors.com, he's the ceo web tracking research firm Big Champagne and, "more than 9 million people log on to a P2P network worldwide each day, and that grows each year despite intense efforts by the entertainment industry to shut down the ones that operate illegally," the story has him saying.

It goes on, "it's going to get even tougher to stop the flow. In addition to P2P networks, numerous Web sites have surfaced that offer enough video content to fill a movie rental store.

"These Web sites essentially are search engines like Google, but focused on video. They don't host the content but provide an Internet link that connects users to wherever the content is located, on a central server or someone's personal computer."

Investors.com also says according to "analysts," the corpulent entertainment industry, "will never be able to stop to flow of unauthorized copyrighted content across the Web" and, "Rather than trying to stanch the flow, the entertainment industry should do a better job at cashing in on the trend, they say.

"You can throw a police force at it, but it will still exist," says Stan Rogow, "a producer and writer with a string of Hollywood shows and movies to his credit," adding:

"It's just a new method of distribution."

Hoisting their non-Broadcast Flags

The entertainment cartels claim they have hundreds of sites distributing 'legal' music and movies. In fact, there's only a handful, and not one of them is successful.

iTunes is going great guns! - you say. But in truth, compared to what's happening in the real, independent online world, iTunes doesn't even register.

There is, however, an ever-increasing number of brand new sites going online, thanks to the efforts of independent innovators and creators hoisting non-Broadcast Flags.

MyBloop is one.

"Users can upload, and share, an unlimited number of files, listen to music, create playlists, back up files ---- and there's nothing to download or install," p2pnet posted in a Q&A with one of the founders. "They have total control of personal data and can keep private information from prying eyes, promises the group."

Britain's TV Links is another.

"Who are you?" - its FAQ asks, answering, "Commoners."

"Is this site legal?" - it goes on. "Don't make me call my lawyer."

But, emphasising the point made in Investors.com, "We provide links, nothing is wrong with that," it says, continuing:

Money? Register? Nope.

We do NOT support downloading - do NOT ask us for it, do NOT mention it.

In Toronto, Canada, Wassim has just opened TV Kalendar to organize tv show torrents and episode information.

"What's behind it?" - p2pnet asked him

"There are calendars available online that display show info and air dates, explained, going on:

After a long day at school, the last hassle one needs is having to track down what episode was actually missed (sometimes those number "sXXeYY" screw you over so you need to use episode info), and then having another couple of windows open with different torrent sites, AND having to chose a torrent based on seeder/leecher ratio, right language, and making sure it wasn't submitted by one of the "associations".

Enter html://www.tvkalendar.com.

Wassim, who's at the University of Toronto reading neuroscience and French, is also working on a sister site dedicated solely to anime, which'll organize both raw and fansub torrents, as well as animes uploaded to YouTube.

It'd pay the cartels to throw in the towel when it comes to trying to sue the P2P communities into toeing the corporate line. They'd be much better off working with them: that way everyone would benefit and the entertainment industry would start winning, instead of losing, customers.
http://p2pnet.net/story/12532





Xerox Rolls Out New Document Search Engine
Stephen Singer

Xerox Corp. on Wednesday introduced a "smart" search engine that it says will help users perform more relevant Internet searches.

Called FactSpotter, the software capitalizes on an increasingly popular field known as semantic searches that improve Internet research by analyzing the meaning of a question and a document to match the two for the best answer.

Developing the search engine is similar to understanding how brains process information, said Frederique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics research at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble, France.

"Many words can be different things at the same time. The context makes the difference," she said. "The tricky things here are not the words together but how are they linked."

For example, a semantic search could help a user who wants to know who President Abraham Lincoln's first vice president was. Common searches using keywords "Lincoln" and "vice president" would not likely answer the question.

But asking the question in a semantic search would yield the answer: Hannibal Hamlin.

Segond, whose background is in math and linguistics, said the Stamford-based Xerox has been working on the project for four years. FactSpotter was introduced at a technology briefing at Xerox's research center in Grenoble and will be launched next year as part of Xerox Litigation Services.

FactSpotter promises to help researchers cut the amount of time required to find information by returning a specific portion of a search document that is relevant to the query.

"There's this explosion of content," said John Kelly, president of Xerox Global Services North America. "This is meant give you access to that."

The new product will first be offered through Xerox Global Services, a $4 billion annual business that provides document management and consulting services. Kelly would not say how much revenue Xerox expects from FactSpotter.

Naveed Yahya, chief investment officer at Fischer Investment Group in Pittsford, N.Y., said the product will not likely have an immediate impact on Xerox's bottom line, "but it helps them become a leader in the field," he said.

FactSpotter will initially be used to help lawyers and corporate litigation departments plow through thousands of pages of legal documents. Xerox also expects the technology to eventually be used in health care, manufacturing and financial services.

It's part of a growing field in which researchers are trying to adapt to a computer the complex workings of the brain.

Dr. Riza C. Berkan, chief executive of privately held hakia.com in New York, which is indexing enormous amounts of Web-based information to provide improved Internet searches, said researchers are using principles of human thought as it relates to language.

"All searches today are at the tip of iceberg. The bottom of the iceberg is when you ask the complicated questions," he said.

Peter Norvig, director of research at dominant Internet search engine Google, said his company is seeking ways to better interpret queries and the pressure is on to keep improving search engines.

"Most people are satisfied most of the time," he said. "We've got to keep making it better."

Google also offers customers the ability to do custom searches, which Norvig said is another way to perform semantic searches.

Shares of Xerox closed at $19.16, down 12 cents, Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...06-20-17-22-21





Google and Utility to Test Hybrids That Sell Back Power
Felicity Barringer and Matthew L. Wald

Google and Pacific Gas & Electric have unveiled their vision of a future in which cars and trucks are partly powered by the country’s electric grids, and vice versa.

The companies displayed on Monday six Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrid vehicles modified to run partly on electricity from the power grid, allowing the vehicles to go up to 75 miles on a gallon of gas, nearly double the number of miles of a regular hybrid. They also modified one vehicle to give electricity back to the power company.

The highly unusual test takes the hybrid, which is now familiar on American roads, a step further by using extra batteries to hold energy made and distributed by a power company. The technology is eagerly awaited by energy experts and environmentalists, but is not yet ready to go commercial because the additional batteries are not yet durable enough.

Google’s philanthropic foundation, Google.org, headed by Larry Brilliant, led the conversion and announced that it would be investing or giving away about $10 million to accelerate the development of battery technology, plug-in hybrids, and vehicles capable of returning stored energy to the grid.

Speaking on a sun-splashed dais in Google’s parking lot to an audience well shaded by one of its new solar arrays, Mr. Brilliant described the vehicle designed to give energy back to the grid as “a bit of a science project.”

But some observers, like the Stanford professor Stephen Schneider, who was one of the authors of the recent United Nations report on climate change, said that just getting this embryonic technology demonstrated by a company with Google’s heft was a victory in itself. “These guys have clout with hundreds of millions of young and middle-aged people,” he said, adding that what was necessary to jump-start a new type of car was a combination of reliability, affordability and “cool.”

The six vehicles are used by Google employees near the company’s Mountain View headquarters, and sit under a carport with a roof of solar cells. The cells are connected to the power grid, so they make energy whether the cars are charging or not. Dan Reicher, Google.org’s director for climate change and energy initiatives, said the carports were meant to demonstrate a switch from fossil fuels to solar power.

Google is using batteries from A123Systems of Watertown, Mass., a company that sells an aftermarket kit to convert the Prius to a plug-in vehicle.

The Prius that has been converted to allow two-way flows of electricity is a more speculative project. PG&E, the utility serving Northern California, will send wireless signals to the car while it is parked and plugged in to determine its state of charge. It can then recharge the batteries or draw out power.

The transactions will be tiny, a few kilowatt-hours at a time, worth a few cents each, but if there were thousands of such vehicles, a utility could store power produced in slack hours until it was needed at peak times, said Brad Whitcomb, PG&E’s vice president for customer products and services.

Some researchers say that utilities pay billions a year to power plants to stand by, ready to produce extra power or to provide small quantities of energy to maintain the frequency of the system at precisely 60 cycles a second. Plug-in hybrids could fill those roles, annually earning thousands of dollars each, some experts say.

But if a car gave all of its energy back to the grid, it would be left to run on gasoline, giving up the environmental benefit.

A plug-in hybrid can lower emissions of carbon dioxide and smog-causing gases. It can go three to four miles on a kilowatt-hour, experts say. If that electricity came from natural gas, that may mean under a quarter-pound of carbon dioxide is emitted each mile. In contrast, a car that gets 20 miles a gallon on unleaded gas emits about a pound of carbon dioxide each mile.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/te...9electric.html





I.B.M. to Show Stream Computing System
Steve Lohr

I.B.M. is introducing a high-performance computer system that is intended to rapidly analyze data as it streams in from many sources, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision making in fields as diverse as security surveillance and Wall Street trading.

The company plans to demonstrate the system, called System S, at a conference of Wall Street technology managers today. The announcement, analysts say, is a significant step in the commercialization of the emerging technology of stream computing.

Early this month Google acquired PeakStream, a start-up in stream computing, and industry analysts say its software could help Google improve its video search functions.

Stream computing is an effort to deal with two issues: the need for faster data handling and analysis in business and science, and the growing flood of information in digital form, including Web sites, blogs, e-mail, video and news clips, telephone conversations, transaction data and electronic sensors.

The conventional approach to computer analytics and data mining is to collect data, store it in a database program and then search the database for patterns or ask it questions. It is an effective approach, but also tightly structured and often time-consuming.

In stream computing, advanced software algorithms analyze the data as it streams in. Text, voice and image-recognition technology, for example, can be used to determine that some data is more relevant to a particular problem than others. The priority data is then shuttled off into a program tailored to work on complex, fast-changing problems like tracking an epidemic and predicting its spread, or culling data from electronic sensors in a computer chip plant to quickly correct flaws in manufacturing.

I.B.M. deems its System S research project ready to make its way into the marketplace. The planned announcement to the Wall Street group is the beginning of its effort to find industry partners.

The initial system runs on about 800 microprocessors, though it can scale up to tens of thousands as needed, I.B.M. said. The most notable step, researchers say, lies in the System S software, which enables software applications to split up tasks like image recognition and text recognition, and then reassemble the pieces of the puzzle into an answer.

Nagui Halim, director of high-performance stream computing at I.B.M. labs, said System S was a new model of computing that offered greater flexibility and speed. The approach, he said, was less machinelike than in conventional systems. “It’s a computing system that can morph and adapt to the problems it sees,” Mr. Halim said.

As I.B.M. moves toward developing a business in this area, it says it can either sell stream computer systems to customers or stream computing as a pay-for-use service over the Internet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/te...19compute.html





Yahoo's Woes Run Deeper Than Semel

Investors welcome co-founder Jerry Yang as the new chief executive of the No. 2 search engine, but can he save Yahoo? Fortune's Adam Lashinsky weighs in.
Adam Lashinsky

The market cheered Terry Semel's departure Monday as chief executive of Yahoo. But when investors take a deep breath, however, they might realize that getting rid of just one guy may not actually cure the company's ills.

Yahoo's stock rose 3 percent early in the day on rumors of Semel's departure and then rose nearly another 5 percent in after-market trading on the news. The stock changed hands after hours at around $29.50, still down 32 percent from the January 2006 price of $43 - the peak during Semel's tenure.

But are the changes at Yahoo enough? First, there is Semel's replacement, company co-founder Jerry Yang.

The 38-year-old Yang hardly represents an injection of fresh blood, as Semel himself did when he was hired in 2001. As Rob Cox, of the Web site breakingviews.com, wrote wittingly of Yang's appointment: "He hasn't spent the past few years in an ashram. As a director, and, presumably, as chief Yahoo, he's been involved in Semel's strategic decisions."

That's an understatement, actually. Yang has been a permanent presence at Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500) for its entire history, preferring not to have an operating role but willing to play emissary to various Yahoo constituencies.

Semel out as Yahoo! CEO

That Yang hasn't been willing to step up until now certainly could be viewed as a sign that he's finally ready. But one wonders if simply watching first the zany Tim Koogle and then the Hollywood operator Semel has prepared Yang to be a chief executive of an 11,000-person company.

Steve Jobs ran Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) before being fired and then returning. Bill Gates ran Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) for decades. Yang's entrepreneurial zeal, much praised in favorable press reviews Monday, is rather beside the point.

Yahoo subtly drove home one salient point about Yang: He's an engineer. Google (Charts, Fortune 500) famously is run by engineers. Google has beaten the pants off Yahoo in the technology department.

Yahoo hasn't been run by entrepreneurs.

On the contrary, Semel, who increased Yahoo's presence in Los Angeles and hired the television executive Lloyd Braun (a culture clash from start to end), is an entertainment guy who surrounded himself with entertainment guys. (Will Semel acolytes Jeff Weiner and Toby Coppell, both promoted to new positions recently, stick around?) In announcing the move, Yahoo chose to quote the one director on its board with serious technology chops, former Cisco (Charts, Fortune 500) executive Ed Kozel.

No word from supermarket magnate Ron Burkle or airline vet Gary Wilson or videogamer Bobby Kotick, the board's "presiding director." Message: Yahoo will get its technological house in order under its new engineer-CEO.

Yahoo CEO wards off criticism, eyes growth

It's also puzzling that investors ignored what essentially was a negative pre-announcement from Yahoo, which said Monday that second-quarter results would settle toward the low end of its previous projections. And for the worst of reasons: Weakness in display advertising, Yahoo's bread and butter business. The quarter is nearly over - it ends June 30 - so Yahoo left little mystery that relatively speaking, it wasn't a good one.

So what will Jerry Yang actually do as CEO? He says he doesn't want to sell the company. Fair enough. Yahoo clearly wasn't interested in selling to Microsoft, and if it had been, deal-guy Semel would have gotten it done. Yang could clean house, but promoting former CFO Sue Decker to president is another sign that Yahoo plans to stay the course Semel set.

Had Yahoo's board not replaced Semel immediately, or had it named Yang an acting CEO, it's possible investors could have inferred that the company was planning a truly radical move, like killing Panama (the ad-search platform) and reverting to syndicating search ads from Google. That idea is blasphemy in Sunnyvale - huge acquisitions of Inktomi and Overture plus a massive investment in Panama would be wasted - but everyone knows it'd be an immediate shot in the arm for Yahoo.

Where to meet the next Steve Jobs

From my discussions with the dissatisfied foot soldiers - and a few officers - who've left Yahoo in recent months, one of the chief criticisms is that Yahoo is focusing so much energy and resources on search advertising that the rest of the business is starving. Decker in particular, a former Wall Street analyst who insists on delivering on bottom-line promises to investors isn't likely to reverse this trend.

Last summer, just after the first time Yahoo's new ad-search platform was delayed, Yahoo held a one-day show-and-tell extravaganza at a swanky San Francisco hotel. The good times were right around the corner, Semel and his management team seemed to be saying.

Benjamin Schachter, a UBS analyst who has been bullish on Yahoo's stock for a regrettably long time, wrote Monday night: "This move means that 2007 will be a turnaround year and we will not likely see the results until next year."

Unfortunately, that's what everyone thought last year.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/19/tech...yahoo.fortune/





Report: Most Parents Would Support Federal TV Limits
AP

Two-thirds of parents said they are very concerned about sex and violence the nation’s children are exposed to in the media, and there would be broad support for new federal limits on such material on television, a survey says.

Yet the report, released today by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, found that two in three parents said they already closely track their children’s television viewing and use of the Internet and video games.

Only one in five parents conceded they should do a better job — about the same fraction who said their own children see a lot of inappropriate material. Most said they, as well as their children’s teachers and friends, have far more influence over their children than the media do.

"They’re feeling more in control of it than I would have thought," Vicky Rideout, who directed the Kaiser study, said in an interview. "There’s a common assumption they feel overwhelmed, behind the curve when it comes to their kids and the Internet, like they’re at a technological disadvantage. We didn’t find that in this survey."

Kaiser, which conducts health policy research, released its study at a time of intensified public focus on the impact of violence, sex and adult language used on television, the Internet, music, video games and the movies.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court invalidated a Federal Communications Commission prohibition against accidentally broadcast profanities.

In April, the FCC issued a report to Congress saying lawmakers could regulate television violence without violating the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

The Kaiser study found that two-thirds of parents said they would support new limits on television content. The question did not specify what the rules might be, though it mentioned that some have proposed restricting the sex and violence that could be shown during the early evening.

"Clearly there’s a need for both the industry and our public servants to consider how to make this better," Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, said in an interview. The council is critical of violence and sex in the media.

Jim Dyke, executive director of TV Watch, a coalition that includes some television networks and opposes government control of TV programming, said parents are doing a better job of controlling their children’s viewing habits.

"If parents can make these decisions and enforce these decisions, why should the government," he said.

While about half said they are very concerned that their own children see too much violence and sexual material, that was down from more than six in 10 who expressed such worries in a 1998 Kaiser survey. Black and Hispanic parents were more likely than whites to voice that concern.

About three-fourths rated exposure to inappropriate material as one of their top concerns as a parent, or a big worry. Television and the Internet were most frequently cited as the leading sources of angst.

While two-thirds said they closely watch their children’s media use, 18 percent said they should do more while another 16 percent said such monitoring is not necessary. Of those who said they need to do more, most said they haven’t because media exposure is too widespread or they were too busy.

The report also found:

—One in four said the media are mainly a negative influence on their children, about a third said they are mainly positive and slightly more than that said they have little impact.

—Three in four with children 9 or older who use the Internet at home said they know a lot about what their children do online. Most said they have checked their children’s e-mail, profiles on social networking sites like MySpace, and the Web sites they visit.

—About four in 10 who own televisions with V-chips — which can block certain television shows — were aware they had the technology. Of those, nearly half said they have used it.

The Kaiser survey of 1,008 randomly chosen parents of children age 2 to 17, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It was conducted last Oct. 2-27 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, a private firm.
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updat...e=news_updates





Australia Announces Vast National Broadband Plan

Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Monday announced a 2.0 billion dollar (1.68 billion US) plan to provide fast and affordable Internet access across the vast country.

Howard said Optus, the Australian offshoot of Singapore telco Singtel, had been awarded a 958-million-dollar contract to build a broadband network in the bush with rural finance company Elders.

The joint venture, known as OPEL, would contribute a further 900 million US dollars to provide broadband of at least 12 megabits per second by June 2009.

"What we have announced today is a plan that will deliver to 99 percent of the Australian population very fast and affordable broadband in just two years' time," Howard said.

An expert group will also develop a bidding process for the building of a fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) broadband network, funded solely by private companies, in major cities.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan said wireless was the best option for rural Australia because it was impossible to install cables which would reach every farm and property across the country.

"It's been specially developed for rural and regional areas, where (with) fixed broadband you've got to actually run a fibre optic," she said.

Senator Coonan said the broadband speed of 12 megabits per second could "scale up" to very fast speeds as the technology evolved.

"It will be able to go much faster, up to 70 megabits a second and of course our new high-speed fibre network will be able to go up to 50," she said.

But the opposition labour Party attacked the plan, saying it was too little, too late ahead of this year's election and provided country people with a second-rate service.

"The government proposes a two-tier system -- a good system for the cities, they say, and a second-rate system for rural and regional Australia," labour leader Kevin Rudd said.

labour has proposed spending 4.7 billion US dollars to build a national fibre optic network which would cover 98 percent of the population.

The National Party, which is part of Howard's ruling Liberal/National coalition, welcomed the proposal but said it would continue to push for FTTN technology in regional areas.

Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said the fact that Australia was a vast country with a small population meant it would always be playing catch-up with other countries when it came to broadband.

"We'll always be catching up, always, because we are 20 million people in a country (the size) of the United States without Alaska," he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technolog...18999327.html#





New WiFi Record: 237 Miles
David Becker

A Venezuelan techie apparently has set a new record for longest WiFi link. Networking guru Ermanno Pietrosemoli established a wireless connection between a PC in El Aguila, Venezuela, and one in Platillon Mountain, a distance of about 237 miles, mostly using off-the-shelf equipment and a few hacked parts.

The previous record was 193 miles, between a balloon and an Earth-bound PC, which rather cuts down on the risk of signal-bouncing obstacles.

Pietrosemoli notes in the project description that one of the benefits of doing this kind of work out in the Latin American boonies is you don't have to worry much about signal interference.

And yes, I now feel a whole new kind of stupid for not being able to get a reasonable signal between home office and bedroom.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/0..._record_2.html





Blogger Learns How to Monetise Hate
Stephen Hutcheon

The man known on the internet as "the world's most hated blogger" is cooling his heels at an undisclosed location near Sydney, working on a way to climb back out of the very deep hole he now finds himself in.

In his first interview since arriving in Australia last week, Casey Serin says he's pressing ahead with plans to pay off his mounting debts and resurrect his reputation which hit the skids after a series of property plays went disastrously wrong.

His predicament is but a blip on the radar of reckless behaviour that would have gone unnoticed but for the fact he began blogging about it.

The blog - iamfacingforeclosure.com (or IAFF, for short) - started as a cautionary tale to warn other would-be investors of the pitfalls of property speculation. But it unexpectedly turned its author into the punching bag of the World Wide Web.

He has been mocked, pilloried, hounded and harangued in a way that would have driven most others to abandon their blogs, disconnect their computers and head for the hills.

The critics, who call themselves "haterz", have turned their pursuit of the 24-year-old American into a blood sport in which they vie with one another to pour industrial-strength vitriol onto their quarry and derail his efforts to redeem himself.

Currently there are about eight known blogs plus a Wikipedia-like collaborative site called Caseypedia targeting the aspiring entrepreneur.

And each day the haterz pepper his blog posts with snide comments, gratuitous advice and fill his inbox with invective, accusing him of cheating, lying, slacking off and deserting his wife.

"And the wily parasite finds a new host ...," commented one of the haterz after Serin revealed he had flown to Australia on a one-way ticket paid for by a supporter and was camped out as the guest of another.

Perversely, this flood of negativity is not all bad news for the Uzbek-born former web developer.

"I don't dislike notoriety because I feel that any exposure is good exposure as long as you leverage it properly," he said over a soy latte in Sydney.

"Leveraging" is one of Serin's two favourite words. The other is "monetise". He uses them a lot. And although he didn't say it in as many words, what Serin is doing is leveraging his notoriety so that he can monetise his blog and other projects.

The ads in Serin blog currently earn him between $US2000 ($2373) and $US3000 a month, a figure he hopes to be able to boost up to $US4000 by July. And that all depends on keeping his audience, which requires him to stick his head up from time to time so he can get whacked.

"That [income from the blog] is a really good thing for me because I'm able to have some income and pay for expenses as I'm working on higher leveraged things, like working on a book," he says.

He admits that it does get a little freaky at times when the haterz try to derail his business dealings, dig up personal details, or threaten to hit him with class action suits.

And he's become particularly protective of his wife, Galina, who has asked not to be dragged in to her husband's increasingly bizarre world.

"All I'll say [about Galina] is that we are talking. It's not like I ran away as some people are painting it as. I didn't leave her penniless," he said responding to reports that he left his wife with just $US300 in the bank.

Serin's story is a tragic tale of how one young man plunged into the real estate market thinking he could make a quick killing by "flipping" properties - buying low, selling high and pocketing the profit.

But Serin's execution was so inept that he soon found himself with $US2.2 million in borrowings and saddled with eight properties, most of which he had purchased with 100 per cent loans.

Some he paid too much for, some needed more extensive repairs than first thought and this was all happening as the property market began to soften.

USA Today is one of many media outlets that have used Serin to illustrate reports about the bursting of the US property bubble. The newspaper called him the "poster child for everything that went wrong in the real estate boom".

Adding to Serin's potential problems is that he admits to having falsified details to obtain some of the loans - loans that are known as "liar loans" because many borrowers were also fudging figures.

"The stuff I did is technically mortgage fraud, but it's not officially called that until someone prosecutes me and proves that that is indeed mortgage fraud," Serin explains. "It wasn't like I was trying to rip the banks off and steal money. I was trying to build a business. I made a lot of mistakes and now I'm trying to unravel this whole mess."

The banks have now foreclosed on six of the eight properties and Serin is waiting to see the final tally that he is going to be asked to repay.

In person, Serin presents as a likeable fast talker with an indefatigable desire to become a successful entrepreneur.

Although he has the looks of a Californian surfie, he actually spent the first half of his life about 2000km from the nearest beach. He emigrated from Uzbekistan - once part of the Soviet Union - to the US in 1994 with his parents and four siblings.

Serin is careful not to sound like he's boasting about his recklessness and when I ask him to smile for the camera, he says he doesn't want to appear to be too smug or happy. But he obliges with a slight grin.

Ultimately Casey Serin realises that his reputation is such that no one in their right mind is going to employ him in a "normal" job. So his only hope is, as he puts it, to use the publicity he's getting to earn an income - in other words to monetise that publicity.

I ask him how he wants this to end.

"I'd like to be known for a really creative comeback story," he says. "Because I have so many odds against me I want to to be able to show people that no matter how down you are or how big a hole you're in there's always a way out. You just have to stay positive."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/blogg...19071972.html#





Antitrust Complaints Prompt Changes to Vista
Stephen LaBaton

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of Vista is anticompetitive, lawyers involved in the case said today.

The settlement, reached in recent days by state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft, averted the prospect of litigation over a complaint by Google that Vista had been designed to frustrate computer users who want to use software other than Microsoft’s to search through files on their hard drives.

Google had made its complaint confidentially as part of the consent decree proceedings set up to monitor Microsoft for any anticompetitive conduct after it settled a landmark antitrust lawsuit five years ago that had been brought by the states and the Clinton administration.

The federal government and the states were planning to file a joint status report by midnight on Tuesday in the consent decree proceedings that outlined the changes Microsoft would be making to Vista. State and federal lawyers were exchanging drafts of the report this evening. They said they had reached agreement on a remedy, although there was still some disagreement over the report’s language. The disagreement reflected tensions between the Justice Department, which initially sided with Microsoft in the dispute, and some of the states, which have supported Google and advocated a more aggressive stance.

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, said this evening that he had not decided whether Connecticut would sign on to the settlement, although most of the other states were comfortable with the agreement. He said that he was continuing to press the Justice Department to permit Google and other competitors of Microsoft to participate in a hearing on the matter next week. He added that as a result of pressure from the states, the Bush administration had taken a position closer to that of the states that found merit in Google’s complaint.

“The Justice Department has moved and so has Microsoft,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Executives at Microsoft and Google declined to comment before the report was filed with the court. Google has sought to keep a low profile in the dispute, in part because the Federal Trade Commission has recently opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google’s proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, an online advertising company.

Lawyers involved in the proceeding said the changes to Vista would allow consumers to decide which desktop search program they want to use, and that selecting software from Google or some other company would no longer slow down the computer as it does now. They said that as part of the settlement, Microsoft would let Vista users know how to change their desktop search program. But the settlement would not require Microsoft to make all the changes that Google had sought.

The settlement closes another contentious chapter in the long-running antitrust proceedings involving Microsoft, which have been marked by tension between federal and state prosecutors.

In a letter sent to state prosecutors early last month, Thomas O. Barnett, the Justice Department’s top antitrust lawyer, had urged the rejection of Google’s complaint, state officials said. Google had circulated a white paper outlining its complaint to federal and state prosecutors a few weeks earlier.

But the Justice Department reversed course after state attorneys general reacted angrily to Mr. Barnett’s letter and said they would proceed against Microsoft without the Justice Department. The change in position was a rare recent instance in which the Justice Department’s antitrust division toughened its position in response to pressure from the states.

State officials said they were angered by Mr. Barnett’s letter in large part because before he joined the Justice Department, he had been the vice chairman of the antitrust department at Covington & Burling, a law firm that represented Microsoft and played a central role in settling the antitrust case. While at Covington, Mr. Barnett did not work on the antitrust case, although he did represent Microsoft in other matters.

During his first year at the Justice Department, and for several months as the head of the antitrust division, Mr. Barnett avoided working on any Microsoft matters. Officials said he has worked on the case since he received permission from government ethics officials. But state officials said his letter supporting Microsoft was the first time they knew of his involvement in the case.

Desktop search programs have become popular as the volume of information stored on personal computers has multiplied. The big money in the fight between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo is over advertising revenues from Web search engines. But desktop search programs help to build loyalty toward a particular search company.

Google maintained that its desktop search program, available as a free download, was slowed by an equivalent feature that is built into Vista. When the Google and Microsoft search programs run simultaneously, their indexing programs slow the operating system considerably, Google contends. As a result, Google has said that Vista violated Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement, which prohibits Microsoft from designing operating systems that limit the choices of consumers.

Microsoft has replied that Vista was in compliance with the consent decree and that the company had already made many modifications to the operating system, including some that had been sought by Google. In a recent interview, Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel at Microsoft, said that the new operating system was carefully designed to work well with software products made by other companies, and that an independent technical committee had spent years examining Vista for possible anticompetitive problems before it went on sale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/te...20softcnd.html





Google says Vista Search Changes not Enough
Ken Fisher

As we reported yesterday, Microsoft's "capitulation" to Google's antitrust complaint isn't as much a capitulation as the mainstream media was reporting. We inspected Microsoft's joint filing and found that Microsoft is not going to allow a complete override of the default search service in all Explorer windows, and that the company also rejects Google's concerns about performance.

In response, Google said yesterday that the remedies don't go far enough. Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement, "We are pleased that as a result of Google's request that the consent decree be enforced, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have required Microsoft to make changes to Vista."

Nevertheless, Drummond said that "Microsoft's current approach to Vista desktop search clearly violates the consent decree and limits consumer choice," and the proposed remedies "are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers."

Google did not elaborate on its expectations, although they are not difficult to piece together. Google had argued that it should be possible to disable Vista's search entirely, and Microsoft has not accommodated this demand. Search still runs, and OEMs and third-party software companies have not been given a way to schedule or disable it.

Furthermore, Microsoft did not make it possible to change the search defaults in a universal way, instead keeping its search system as the default throughout most of Windows Explorer. In short, Vista's search boxes will by and large return Vista's own search results if you type text into them and hit return. Microsoft's changes appear to mostly involve links to the "default" third party program, not a drop-in replacement.

Google's disappointment was only partly echoed by California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who called the remedy a step in the right direction. "This agreement—while not perfect—is a positive step towards greater competition in the software industry. It will enhance the ability of consumers to select the desktop search tool of their choice," he said.

At this stage, it's unclear what recourse either Brown or Google has to change Microsoft's plan. Thomas O. Barnett, assistant Attorney General and head of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, said in a statement that the agreement reached between Microsoft and the DOJ "resolve[d] any issues about desktop search under the final judgments."

The DOJ and all 17 state attorneys general agreed with Microsoft's proposal. "Plaintiffs are collectively satisfied that this agreement will resolve any issues the complaint may raise under the Final Judgments, provided that Microsoft implements it as promised," according to the joint filing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ot-enough.html





Don't Wait for Vista SP1, Pleads Microsoft
Dan Warne

Proceed with confidence: Windows boss Steven Sinofsky and his winged henchmen.
Microsoft has launched a "fact rich" program to help customers understand why they should "proceed with confidence" in rolling out Vista across all their PCs.

"Some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release," the company said in a newsletter.

"To help partners and customers get the real story, Microsoft has created a comprehensive set of fact-rich materials illustrating how Windows Vista is ready today and tomorrow."

Despite the "fact-rich" materials being designed for both "partners and customers", the link supplied by Microsoft goes to a website which is available only to computer makers who are prepared to sign up to a non-disclosure agreement.

Microsoft Australia has promised to look into whether it's possible to get a publicly disclosable set of materials.

Without knowing what's included in the fact-rich program, it's difficult to know why people should proceed with confidence.

What we do know, however, is that Vista service pack 1 is, in the company's own words, designed to address "deployment blockers and high impact issues", suggesting that until the release of SP1, you will have to contend with ... deployment blockers and high impact issues. Hardly the basis for proceeding with confidence.

The company put out a call for beta testers to start testing SP1 back on 23rd January -- before Vista was actually released to home users.

In that announcement, the company said that service pack 1 won't won't be released until the "second half of this year", which could mean December 31, and there have been informal suggestions that it may ship even later than that.

No wonder the company needs a "fact-rich program" to convince people why they should "proceed with confidence" -- its own announcements must have given plenty of business IT managers shaky legs.

As one Slashdot reader put it back in January: "If they have known 'high impact issues' they should delay initial release one more time. This is supposed to be a stable commercial product."

SP1 is no minor update. Although Microsoft won't officially comment on its contents, we do know that Microsoft is at some point going to provide a complete replacement for the Windows kernel, moving from version 6.0 to 6.1 -- the same kernel found in Windows Server 2008 (codenamed Longhorn).

Microsoft's "fact rich" program announcement coincided with an embarrassing double-backflip today on its policy banning users from running home versions of Vista under virtual machines like VMware. It had planned to loosen the reigns, but pulled the announcement at the last moment.
http://apcmag.com/6458/dont_wait_for...eads_microsoft





AT&T Launches Cell-To-Cell Live Video
Dave Carpenter

AT&T Inc. on Tuesday launched what it said is the first service letting callers share live video between cell phones.

The new AT&T Video Share service won't apply to the iPhone, which uses an older network. AT&T has an exclusive deal to offer service for much-anticipated Apple Inc. device.

But the launch of the video service adds to the company's momentum as it gears up for the June 29 introduction of the iPhone, which it called a "game-changer" for the telecommunications industry.

Video Share was introduced in three markets -- Atlanta, Dallas and San Antonio -- to start with and will be available elsewhere in late July.

It works only on the company's 3G, or third-generation, wireless network and requires a Video Share-capable phone, AT&T said. The company said it will offer Video Share service packs for $4.99 and $9.99 a month, depending on included minutes. Without a plan, the service costs 35 cents a minute.

New AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson told a telecommunications industry trade show in Chicago that the new service has the potential to expand rapidly beyond wireless-to-wireless.

"You should expect this to quickly reach the other two screens, and that's the PC and the television," he said at NXTcomm.

"Imagine watching television when a notice pops on the screen that a daughter or granddaughter would like to initiate a Video Share call, then immediately switching the television screen to accept the video and audio," Stephenson said. "With our powerful IP-based network and flexible IMS platform, these scenarios will eventually be reality."

Speaking just two weeks after taking the helm at San Antonio-based AT&T on June 3, he touted wireless as key to the future of the company and the industry, and said the migration from fixed service to wireless is accelerating.

AT&T hopes to benefit from that trend with the rollout of the iPhone. The combination cell phone, iPod and wireless Web device will be sold at stores owned by Apple and AT&T.

Stephenson said the company is "gearing up for this big-time," including adding hundreds of staffers at its 1,800 retail stores for the expected rush.

More than 1 million people have signed up for more information about the iPhone, he said, and nearly 40 percent of them are not AT&T Wireless customers.

"I really believe this is going to be a game-changer, not only for us but for the industry at large," he said.

Stephenson, formerly AT&T's chief operating officer, took over the top jobs following the retirement of Ed Whitacre Jr., who led the company for 17 years.

AT&T shares rose 23 cents to $40.24 Tuesday.
http://www.newsday.com/technology/wi...logy-headlines





Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW
Clive Thompson

Recently I logged into World of Warcraft and I wound up questing alongside a mage and two dwarf warriors. I was the lowest-level newbie in the group, and the mage was the de-facto leader. He coached me on the details of each new quest, took the point position in dangerous fights and suggested tactics. He seemed like your classic virtual-world group leader: Confident, bold and streetsmart.

But after a few hours he said he was getting tired of using text chat -- and asked me to switch over to Ventrilo, an app that lets gamers chat using microphones and voice. I downloaded Ventrilo, logged in, dialed him up and ...

... realized he was an 11-year-old boy, complete with squeaky, prepubescent vocal chords. When he laughed, his voice shot up abruptly into an octave range that induced headaches and probably killed any dogs within earshot. Oh, and he used "motherfucker" about four times a sentence, except when his mother came into his bedroom to check on him.

I still enjoyed questing with him -- he was a terrific World of Warcraft player. But there's no doubt that hearing each other's voices abruptly changed our social milieu. He seemed equally weirded out by me -- a 38-year-old guy who undoubtedly sounds more like his father than anyone he recognizes as a "gamer." After an hour of this, we all politely logged off and never hooked up again.

I had just experienced the latest culture-shock in online worlds: The advent of voice. Games that were governed by text are now being governed by chat, and it is subtly changing the feel of our virtual universe.

There are good reasons why so many multiplayer online games are launching with voice-chat software. Partly it's to welcome newbies, who often find that old-school text-chat is simply too complicated. Also, voice chat makes pell-mell action easier to handle: If you're running a guild raid with 50 people, it's much easier to bark orders than to type them out (which is why voice chat has long been popular on first-person shooters on Xbox Live).

But many players are now discovering that voice tweaks the social environment -- and sometimes kills off part of what made their favorite world so much fun.

After all, one of the great things about virtual worlds was that they were, well, virtual. You could adopt a brand-new persona, and leave your dull, dreary existence behind. Outside are the suburbs and your shift at Chick-fil-A; online is a land of snowcapped mountains where you sit astride a cat-like mount, while stars rain around you.

This lovely shift in identity was true even if you weren't a hard-core "role player." When I log on to World of Warcraft, I don't try to seriously pretend I'm a medieval person. I happily text-chat with fellow players about 21st century stuff like music, Lost, our jobs. But somehow this social activity never breaks the "magic circle" of the game, the sense that we're in a different place with different rules. Maybe it's because text-chat is inherently abstract; it's something that happens in our heads, in a sort of ludological backchannel of our minds.

But voice has much higher emotional bandwidth. It conveys a lot of identity: Your voice instantly transmits your age, your gender and often your nationality -- even your regional location too. (I can tell a Texan accent from a Minnesotan, and you can probably tell I'm Canadian by my nasal "oots.") With voice, the real world is honking in your ear.

This is particularly a problem for women, because often women thrive in MMOs precisely by downplaying their sexual identity. When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players -- particularly younger men -- could hear their voices. ("They got hit on a lot," Malone says.)

Meanwhile, shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.

"Throw up a (Ventrilo) server, the girls stop talking completely, the shy people shut up mostly and all that is left are the 12- to 18-year-old guys, and it becomes a locker room," as one poster complained on a sprawling, superb debate on the Terra Nova blog.

Yet here's the thing: You can't deny that voice chat can bring a huge amount of positive social good, too. Dmitri Williams, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, did a study of World of Warcraft players for one month. The results? Those who used text-only chat experienced "drops in trust and happiness" amongst their fellow players; those who used voice chat did not.The fatter emotional signal of voice apparently helps cement online relationships. Indeed, some guilds won't even let you participate anymore unless you use voice chat, because text-only chat seems shifty.

And even I have to admit, voice chat will eventually allow for some awesome tricks. Imagine logging into World of Warcraft, realizing one of your friends isn't there -- and being able to call them on their real-world mobile phone.

Ultimately, this is about intimacy -- how much of ourselves we're willing to give away to strangers. Personally, I enjoy being able to construct identities carefully in text; that's because I grew up with text as my main online mode. It's possible that the impending generation of gamers will simply find voice chat more natural, in the same way that teenagers today happily blog about their personal lives and post pictures and videos of themselves. They regard personal revelation not as an incursion of privacy but a marker of authenticity.

Or maybe this will become a permanent culture clash, a sort of existential civil war in the game-o-verse. Perhaps gamers will demand their favorite online world create separate "text only" or "voice only" shards. This is one issue about which it's hard to shut up.
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualw...frontiers_0617





Censors Ban 'Brutal' Video Game
BBC

British censors have banned a violent video game from the UK for the first time in a decade.

The video game Manhunt 2 was rejected for its "unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying", the British Board of Film Classification said.

It means the Manhunt sequel cannot be legally supplied anywhere in the UK.

The parents of a Leicester schoolboy who blamed the original game for the murder of their 14-year-old son said they were "absolutely elated".

The original Manhunt game was given an 18 classification in 2003.

Manhunt 2, for PS2 and Nintendo Wii consoles, is made by Rockstar Games.

The company has six weeks to submit an appeal.

The last game to be refused classification was Carmageddon in 1997. That decision was overturned on appeal.

David Cooke, director of the BBFC, said: "Manhunt 2 is distinguishable from recent high-end video games by its unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone.

"There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game."

'Morally irresponsible'

The original Manhunt game caused huge controversy and was blamed for the murder of Stefan Pakeerah.

The boy was stabbed and beaten to death in Leicester in February 2004.

His parents believe the killer, Warren LeBlanc, 17, was inspired by the game.

Stefan's mother, Giselle Pakeerah, had condemned the sequel, branding the gaming industry "morally irresponsible".

"We have been campaigning against these games for a long time and the BBFC made the right decision," she said.

Police said robbery was the motive behind the attack on Stefan in Stokes Wood Park on 26 February 2004 - and not the video game blamed by Stefan's parents.

Manhunt's maker Rockstar North has always insisted its games are geared towards mature audiences and are marketed responsibly.

Leicester MP Keith Vaz, who campaigned with the Pakeerahs against the original version of Manhunt, praised the decision to ban Manhunt 2.

He said: "This is an excellent decision by the British Board of Film Classification, showing that game publishers cannot expect to get interactive games where players take the part of killers engaged in 'casual sadism' and murder."

Do you have any experiences of this game? Have you played it? Send us your comments using the form below.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/6767623.stm





EU Examines Search Engines and Privacy Issues

European data protection officials are expanding their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy.
Paul Meller

European data protection officials are expanding their examination of the impact search engines have on privacy, after initially targeting Google Inc. last month, European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx said in an interview late Wednesday.

A panel of European data protection officials called the Article 29 Working Group decided Wednesday to request information from Google's rivals amid concerns that search engines are holding onto information about the people who use them for too long, Hustinx said.

Hustinx, a senior member of the working group, declined to name the companies. However, they are believed to include Yahoo Inc., Lycos Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live.com.

The working group will make a general assessment of the state of European citizens' privacy in relation to search engines at its meeting in October or December, he said.

"We will issue a generic paper from which national data protection authorities can address players in their jurisdictions," Hustinx said

Google does present specific problems, he added, because so many of its services pose a possible threat to privacy. He mentioned Google Earth and Gmail, Google's Web-based e-mail service. Compiling information about people from the various different Web services could compound the threat to privacy, he said.

Google has already replied to the letter it received from the working group last month.

"The use of the Internet the way Google is doing it could introduce tremendous privacy problems. We will study the company's response to our letter very carefully," Hustinx said.

"If the picture they give is not accurate or not justified we might find ourselves on a collision course," he said, but he added, "That's not my sense at the moment."

In Google's response, the company offered to shorten the time it keeps Web searches to 18 months from two years.

The company also promised to look at shortening the lifespan of cookies it deposits on computers. Google presently stores cookies, including ones that remember what language a person speaks, for 30 years.

Google's cooperation impressed Hustinx until now. "I welcome a big company that is investing in privacy. This isn't just window dressing," he said, echoing comments he made at a data protection conference last month in Amsterdam.

Broadening its examination beyond Google is an obvious next step, according to Danny Sullivan, who writes for searchengineland.com.

He compared the cookie policies of Google, Windows Live and Yahoo and found that Yahoo stores the data for as long as Google while Windows Live stores the information for 14 years.

However, Windows Live deposited far more cookies on computers than Google and Yahoo. Using a clean version of Windows Internet Explorer 7, Sullivan set it to reveal all cookies. Windows Live left 14 cookies as soon as he did a search; Yahoo left six, while Google left just two.

"Both Google and Yahoo have 30-year cookies. So where's the letter for Yahoo from the Working Group? And isn't 14 years from Microsoft excessive?" Sullivan wrote.

Yahoo and Microsoft both say they take privacy very seriously.

"Microsoft has a long-term commitment to providing customers with control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information. While we have not received formal communication from the Article 29 Working Party, we recognize that online search is creating legitimate concerns about privacy and are actively engaged with data protection authorities around the world to ensure that our practices meet the highest standards when it comes to protecting privacy," Microsoft said in a statement.

"Our users' trust is one of Yahoo's most valuable assets. That's why maintaining that trust and protecting our users' privacy is paramount to us. Our data retention practices vary according to the diverse nature of our services," Yahoo said.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...s/article.html





Coming to America: The EU Privacy Directive
Patrick Lamphere

The Senate is finally getting around to pushing a national data breach law out of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (thanks, TJX! ). This represents a major change in how the federal government views the privacy of personal information, shifting away from a mix of self-regulation, state laws and industry-specific requirements (HIPAA, GLBA) toward a comprehensive national policy. The road to this point has been long, but it's worth examining to understand what's ahead.

The EU Privacy Directive

Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995, on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (aka the EU privacy directive), was implemented to standardize the requirements for the protection of personal information across all the countries that make up the EU. The directive defines personal data in an extremely vague manner:

Any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity; [...]

It then requires organizations that do business in the EU or with EU citizens to observe the following key points:

• Only the minimum personal data needed should be collected, and it should be retained for the minimum time necessary.
• Consent must be given by the person to which the data refers to collect and process the data.
• The directive attempts to reconcile the right to privacy with the right to free expression by carving out an exception for journalistic, artistic or literary expression.
• The subject has the right to know whom is keeping and accessing their personal data, and the right to examine the data and to have the data removed or changed.
• Personal data must be kept secure and protected from disclosure.
• Breaches of the directive may be enforced by member states.
• Each member state must set up an authority to monitor and implement the rules of the directive.
• Transfers of data to third countries must be limited to only those countries that ensure an adequate level of protection.

This last point brought the EU and the U.S. into conflict, because the U.S. had no comprehensive data protection law. After two years of negotiation, on May 31, 2000, the EU voted to approve the U.S. Safe Harbor principles.

Safe Harbor

The Safe Harbor framework was developed and implemented by the Department of Commerce to ensure an "adequate level of protection" for EU citizen data held by U.S. companies in accordance with the principles of the EU privacy directive. The program allows companies to "self-certify" annually. This list is then published and maintained by the Commerce Department. The principles of Safe Harbor are as follows:

• Individuals must be notified that information is being collected, to whom it is disclosed and the reason for its disclosure.
• Individuals must be given a choice to opt out of data collection.
• Transfers to third parties must follow the above two principles, or the company can require contractually that the third party comply with the principles of safe harbor.
• Individuals must be able to access the information about them and be able to correct, amend or delete information that is incorrect.
• Organizations must take reasonable steps to ensure the security and integrity of information.
• Organizations must have an "available and affordable" recourse mechanism for investigation of claims, procedures to verify that the company is adhering to the Safe Harbor principles and an obligation to remedy problems, including "sanctions sufficiently rigorous to ensure compliance by the organization."

Enforcement of Safe Harbor is left to private organizations that offer certifications based on the principles, civil lawsuits and, in certain industries, federal regulators (for example, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Trade Commission enforce the Safe Harbor framework with respect to airlines).

History of state laws

Of course, Safe Harbor principles don't apply to U.S. companies holding the personal data of U.S. citizens, so individual states started to address the issue of privacy, mainly by focusing on data breaches.

California was the first to enact a breach disclosure law in 2003. The main requirements of the law are that companies must notify customers if their unencrypted personal information "was, or is reasonably believed to have been, acquired by an unauthorized person." This notification can be by mail, e-mail or press release to statewide media. California also set down a much more stringent definition of personal information:

• An individual's first name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements, when either the name or the data elements are not encrypted
• Social Security number
• Driver's license number or California Identification Card number
• Account number, credit or debit card number, in combination with any required security code, access code or password that would permit access to an individual's financial account

A majority of other states have followed California's lead and passed breach disclosure laws of their own. Unfortunately, the requirement for disclosure and definition of what constitutes personal information varies by state, making compliance difficult for firms that do business nationwide.

The Identity Theft Prevention Act

Into this convoluted environment, five bills were introduced in the Senate and two in the House addressing privacy breach disclosure. So far, Senate Bill 239 (the Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act of 2007) and Senate Bill 1178 (the Identity Theft Prevention Act) have been passed out of committee and on to the Senate floor.

While the two acts differ, the key points are the same. First, they both preempt existing state laws in order to clear out the confusion that exists currently. Second, they apply to any and every entity that stores personal information, with the only exception being for national security. While S.239 is strictly concerned with breach disclosure, S.1178 goes much further, requiring organizations to do the following:

1. Ensure the security and confidentiality of such data.
2. Protect against any anticipated threats or hazards to the security or integrity of such data.
3. Protect against unauthorized access to, or use of, such data that could result in substantial harm to any individual.

Both bills also create a national definition of what constitutes personal information. S. 239 defines it fairly narrowly as:

Any name or number that may be used, alone or in conjunction with any other information, to identify a specific individual, including any—

a) name, Social Security number, date of birth, official state- or government-issued driver's license or identification number, alien registration number, government passport number, employer or taxpayer identification number

b) unique biometric data, such as fingerprint, voice print, retina or iris image, or other unique physical representation

c) unique electronic identification number, address or routing code

d) telecommunication identifying information or access device

S.1178 uses a definition more in line with California's. It defines personal information as an individual's name, address or telephone number combined with a Social Security number; financial account number (such as a credit card number); a state driver's license or ID number; or the username and password or PIN to access accounts for financial services.

These differences will most likely be ironed out by the Justice and Commerce committees as they pass through those venues.

Disclosure requirements

Both bills require notification of the FTC, the credit bureaus and consumers in a timely manner. S.1178 defines that period as no more than 25 business days since discovery, and both bills allow law enforcement to delay disclosure if it would interfere with an investigation.

S.239 has some straightforward and Draconian penalties -- $1,000 per day per person’s data breached. S.1178 makes violation of the law an unfair or deceptive act under 15 USC § 57 and allows judges to "grant such relief as the court finds necessary to redress injury to consumers or other persons, partnerships and corporations resulting from the rule violation or the unfair or deceptive act or practice, as the case may be." (In other words, don't break the law, and if you do, don’t annoy the judge.)

Sound simple? Not so fast

So far, all pretty straightforward. But then it gets interesting. First, both bills have a clause for enforcement by the states. That's right, they're letting the states act as pit bulls:

SEC. 9. ENFORCEMENT BY STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL.
(a) IN GENERAL -- Except as provided in section 8(c), a State, as parens patriae, may bring a civil action on behalf of its residents in an appropriate state or district court of the United States to enforce the provisions of this Act, to obtain damages, restitution, or other compensation on behalf of such residents, or to obtain such further and other relief as the court may deem appropriate, whenever the attorney general of the State has reason to believe that the interests of the residents of the State have been or are being threatened or adversely affected by a covered entity that violates this Act or a regulation under this Act.

Since I've never met an AG that didn't want to be governor (at least), and since identity theft is a hot-button topic with the electorate, this provision will ensure that the law is enforced with great gusto.

S.239 punts the administration of the law to the Secret Service. S. 1178 goes much further and requires the FTC to set up an "Information Security and Consumer Privacy Advisory Committee" to "collect, review, disseminate, and advise on best practices for covered entities to protect sensitive personal information stored and transferred." However, the bill specifically prohibits "regulations that require or impose a specific technology, product, technological standards, or solution." What does this mean? Most likely the establishment of an entity similar to California's Office of Privacy Protection, to define best or recommended practices.

The biggest change I see, however, is that these bills openly repudiate the long-held position of the U.S. government that, as the FTC's workbook on Safe Harbor puts it, "Self-regulatory initiatives are an effective approach to putting meaningful privacy protections in place."

In other words, we've finally come to realize that self-regulation by industry hasn't worked. The states have stepped in, creating the same situation of conflicting regulation that led to the creation of the EU privacy directive. The only question now is if the law that comes out of Congress will be a small step strictly focused on breaches, such as S.239, or whether we take the bigger step of forming a permanent committee under the FTC to monitor privacy as outlined by S.1178. Either way, the U.S. is finally moving away from the fractured environment of the past and toward a comprehensive privacy strategy.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...intsrc=kc_feat





Bush, Senate Head for Showdown on Domestic Spying
Thomas Ferraro

President George W. Bush headed toward a showdown with the Senate over his domestic spying program on Thursday after lawmakers approved subpoenas for documents the White House declared off-limits.

"The information the committee is requesting is highly classified and not information we can make available," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in signaling a possible court fight.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the subpoenas in a 13-3 vote following 18 months of futile efforts to obtain documents related to Bush's contested justification for warrantless surveillance begun after the September 11 attacks.

Three Republicans joined 10 Democrats in voting to authorize the subpoenas, which may be issued within days.

"We are asking not for intimate operational details but for the legal justifications," said Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. "We have been in the dark too long."

Authorization of the subpoenas set up another possible courtroom showdown between the White House and the Democratic-led Congress, which has vowed to unveil how the tight-lipped Republican administration operates.

Last week, congressional committees subpoenaed two of Bush's former aides in a separate investigation into the firing last year of nine of the 93 U.S. attorneys.

Bush could challenge the subpoenas, citing a right of executive privilege his predecessors have invoked with mixed success to keep certain materials private and prevent aides from testifying.

Bush authorized warrantless surveillance of people inside the United States with suspected ties to terrorists shortly after the September 11 attacks. The program, conducted by the National Security Agency, became public in 2005.

Wartime Powers

Critics charge the program violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants. Bush said he could act without warrants under wartime powers.

In January, the administration abandoned the program and agreed to get approval of the FISA court for its electronic surveillance. Bush and Democrats still are at odds over revisions he wants in the FISA law.

"The White House ... stubbornly refuses to let us know how it interprets the current law and the perceived flaws that led it to operate a program outside the process established by FISA for more than five years," Leahy said.

Interest in the legal justification of the program soared last month after former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified about a March 2004 hospital-room meeting where then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to pressure a critically ill John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to set aside concerns and sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program.

With top Justice Department officials threatening to resign, Bush quietly quelled the uprising by directing the department to take steps to bring the program in line with the law, Comey said.

Leahy noted that when Gonzales, now attorney general, appeared before the panel on February 6, he was asked if senior department officials had voiced reservations about the program.

"I do not believe that these DoJ (department) officials ... had concerns about this program," Leahy quoted Gonzales as saying. Leahy added, "The committee and the American people deserve better."

(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...38137520070621





Judge Gives Go-Ahead to Lawsuit Against Bush's Bank Transfer Spying Program
Michael Roston

A federal judge in Chicago last week rejected a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed against a Belgium-based bank transfer clearinghouse that collaborated with an anti-terrorism spying program led by the US Department of Treasury. The judge's decision will allow two plaintiffs to press their case that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) violated the Fourth Amendment and financial privacy rights of bank customers throughout the United States when it collaborated with president George W. Bush's so-called 'Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.'

"I don't think any corporate entity should be given a blank check to spy on Americans whether it's their telephone conversations or their financial transactions," said Steven Schwarz, the lead attorney for the case's two plaintiffs, in a Tuesday morning phone call with RAW STORY. "Maybe that's how they do it in other countries, but we have one set of rules, and nobody gets carte blanche to shred the Constitution."

SWIFT facilitates $6 trillion a day in financial transactions among thousands of banks in hundreds of countries. In June 26, 2006, articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal, SWIFT was revealed by the media to have turned over considerable information its database to the US Department of Treasury. Schwarz alleged that the government initially had filed a more limited subpoena for information.

(Note: Counterterrorism expert Victor Comras wrote just after the revelation that the US government's monitoring of SWIFT transactions first was noted in 2002 in United Nations publications.)

Schwarz explained to RAW STORY why the action undertaken by SWIFT in assisting the government's program allowed an alarming fishing expedition to take place.

"You can think of SWIFT as gatekeeper, like if they have the keys to a warehouse," he said. "The government wants to get in and take a lot of specific items in there. SWIFT says 'Sorry, it's too hard to show you around, and give you this or that, why don't you just take a look around and take whatever you want.'"

James F. Holderman, the Chief Judge in the Federal Court for the Northern District of Illinois, agreed with Schwarz's argument that SWIFT appeared to have carried out an overbroad surrender of information to the US government.

"Unfettered government access to the bank records of private citizens [is] constitutionally problematic," the judge wrote in his decision, in which he allowed two of the four complaints to continue to be considered.

The banking cooperative defended itself in a statement released to Bloomberg News last week.

"SWIFT complies with lawful obligations in the countries where it operates and will vigorously defend itself against the plaintiffs' remaining allegations," said a spokesman in the article written by Andrew Harris.

Another attorney working on the case, Carl Mayer, warned that the banking consortium has great deal at stake in the case.

"SWIFT faces billions in damages after this week’s ruling," he said in a statement released to the press by the plaintiffs. "Federal bank privacy laws provide for $100 in damages for each illegal disclosure of customer records."

While agreeing that the government's financial spying program was most alarming to large, offshore institutional investors, Schwarz argued that his plaintiffs were not billionaires and all Americans should be worried about the financial privacy implications of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.

"Our plaintiffs are average Americans with checking accounts and credit cards," he said of Ian Walker and Stephen Kruse, who were named in the suit. "We're alleging that basic routine transactions were vacuumed up in a big data mining program. Some people may be fine with it because they think it may help catch a terrorist, but I think just as many people are uncomfortable with having their records sifted through in that manner."

Judge Holderman approved a 'change of venue' request by SWIFT to move the case to the federal district court in Virginia. If Schwarz's case holds up in the new district court, which is known for being more conservative and pro-government in its orientation, he said he'll begin his discovery process about three months from now.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Judge_...inst_0619.html





Subpoenas Issued over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping
By bean

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to subpoena documents from the Bush Administration related to the government’s admitted eavesdropping on Americans’ overseas emails and phone calls without getting court approval. In a 13-3 vote, the Committee decided to authorize chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to issue subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program.

Nearly any request is going to be met with tough resistance from the White House, and the confrontation over the documents “could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.” The subpoenas have long been expected from the Judiciary Committee. If the Administration decides to ignore the subpoena, the Committee can find the President or Attorney General in contempt, ask for a full Senate vote and then force a U.S. attorney to prosecute. Typically, compromises are reached before a full vote is taken in the Senate. Bush could also challenge the subpoenas, citing a right of executive privilege his predecessors have invoked with mixed success to keep certain materials private and prevent aides from testifying.

Leahy issued the a statement after the vote which asked, “Why has this Administration been so steadfast in its refusal? Deputy Attorney General Comey’s account suggests that some of these documents would reveal an Administration perfectly willing to ignore the law. Is that what they are hiding?” He also stated, “We are asking not for intimate operational details but for the legal justifications. We have been in the dark too long.”

Though the NSA operated the wiretapping program, which did not comply with the law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that regulates intelligence wiretapping inside the States, the subpoenas do not cover that secretive agency. The House Judiciary Committee has also threatened to subpoena the NSA documents. In a hearing last month, Principal Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury refused the committee’s request to turn over the papers, but refused to assert executive privilege in doing so.
http://www.lawbean.com/2007/06/21/su...s-wiretapping/





U.S. General Laments Google Earth Capability
Kristin Roberts

The head of U.S. Air Force intelligence and surveillance on Thursday said data available commercially through online mapping software such as Google Earth posed a danger to security but could not be rolled back.

"To talk about danger is, if I may, really is irrelevant because it's there," said Lt. Gen. David Deptula, deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

"No one's going to undo commercial satellite imagery," he told reporters in Washington.

Deptula cited Google Inc.'s Google Earth, which gives Web users an astronaut's view of the earth and allows them to zoom down to street level. He said it had provided anyone with a credit card the ability to get a picture of any place on earth.

"It is huge," he said. "It's something that was a closely guarded secret not that long ago and now everybody's got access to it."

Asked if the U.S. military might try to implement restrictions or blackouts on imagery of some areas, Deptula said he was not aware of such an attempt.

"I don't want to speak to specifics, but not that I'm aware of," he said.

Instead, governments are trying to mitigate the effect through camouflage, concealment and deception, he said, providing no other details.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...40694720070621





Cyber Attack Hits Pentagon Computers

The Defense Department took as many as 1,500 computers off line because of a cyber attack, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Few details were released about the attack, which happened Wednesday, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the computer systems would be working again soon.

Gates said the Pentagon sees hundreds of attacks a day, and this one had no adverse impact on department operations. Employees whose computers were affected could still use their handheld BlackBerries.

During a press briefing Gates said: "We obviously have redundant systems in place. ... There will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences."

He said the Pentagon shut the computers down when a penetration of the system was detected, and the cause is still being investigated.

When asked if his own e-mail account was affected, Gates said: "I don't do e-mail. I'm a very low-tech person."

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman, said Defense Department systems are probed every day by a wide variety of attacks.

"The nature of the threat is large and diverse, and includes recreational hackers, self-styled cyber-vigilantes, various groups with nationalistic or ideological agendas, transnational actors and nation-states," Peppler said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...s/4910162.html





ACLU Gives St. Louis Residents Video Cameras to Monitor Police Conduct in High-Crime Areas
Christopher Leonard

The American Civil Liberties Union launched a program Wednesday to give free video cameras to some residents of high-crime neighborhoods to help them monitor police after years of misconduct complaints.

The ACLU of Eastern Missouri began working on the project last year after television crews broadcast video of officers punching and kicking a suspect who led police on a car chase.

"The idea here is to level the playing field, so it's not just your word against the police's word," said Brenda Jones, executive director of the ACLU chapter.

The ACLU has given cameras and training to about 10 residents in north St. Louis, a high-crime, low-income part of the city that members said is plagued by police misconduct. The group hopes to expand the program to 50 to 100 residents.

Police spokesman Richard Wilkes declined to comment when asked how the program might affect police relations with the public.

"We don't have any opinions or feelings about it one way or another," Wilkes said. "Hopefully it records positive interactions between the police and the community."

Former police Sgt. K.L. Williams is overseeing the training, teaching residents how to videotape officers from a safe distance without interrupting arrests or searches.

"The citizens are not there to interfere with any police contacts," Williams said.

ACLU spokesman Redditt Hudson said the program will also include free workshops to teach residents about their rights when approached by police.

Project organizers have worked closely with police to make sure they are aware of the program's goals, Jones said.

The ACLU declined to release the names of people participating in the video monitoring.

Police conduct was highlighted in January 2006, when Edmon Burns was arrested after officers in suburban Maplewood noticed a man in a van acting suspiciously. They pursued him into St. Louis as the chase was broadcast live on television. It was not clear from the video whether Burns resisted officers.

Three of the officers were from Maplewood, and one was from the St. Louis Police Department.

Burns, 33, had a long criminal record. He was treated at a hospital and released.

The FBI investigated and handed the case over to the Justice Department, which concluded last month that there was insufficient evidence to charge the officers with violating civil-rights laws. Prosecutors said their decision was not an exoneration of the officers.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...copcams20.html





Wiretap Charge Dropped in Police Video Case
Matt Miller

A case that attracted nationwide attention has ended with the dropping of a felony wiretapping charge against a Carlisle man who recorded a police officer during a traffic stop.

Cumberland County District Attorney David Freed said his decision will affect not only Brian Kelly, 18, but also will establish a policy for police departments countywide.

"When police are audio- and video-recording traffic stops with notice to the subjects, similar actions by citizens, even if done in secret, will not result in criminal charges," Freed said yesterday. "I intend to communicate this decision to all police agencies within the county so that officers on the street are better-prepared to handle a similar situation should it arise again."

Freed's decision came a week after a story in The Patriot-News caused a storm of criticism over Kelly's May 24 arrest by a Carlisle police officer on the wiretapping charge, which carries a penalty of up to seven years in prison upon conviction.

Kelly's father, Chris, called the withdrawal of the charge "fantastic." "That's what should have happened to begin with," he said.

District attorneys in two other midstate counties said they don't have policies regarding how police should deal with similar situations.

Police officers usually confer with his office before filing charges if they encounter cases that "are a little out of the ordinary," Perry County District Attorney Chad Chenot said.

"We handle these on a case-by-case basis," Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. said. "The facts are always different."

Kelly was arrested under a Pennsylvania law that bars the audio recording of anyone's conversation without consent. Taking pictures or filming without sound in public settings is not illegal.

Brian Kelly said he spent 26 hours in the county prison after his arrest. He was released when his mother posted her house as security for his $2,500 bail.

According to the police and Brian Kelly, he was arrested after a pickup truck in which he was riding was stopped by an officer on West High Street for alleged traffic and equipment violations.

Kelly said he filmed the incident and was arrested after obeying the officer's order to turn off and surrender his camera. The wiretap charge was filed after the officer consulted a deputy district attorney.

The Patriot-News received more than 100 e-mails, phone calls and other communications from across the area, state and country in response to a June 11 story on Kelly's arrest. None of those messages supported the arrest, and several sharply criticized Pennsylvania's wiretap law, which is among the most stringent in the U.S.

Freed and other law-enforcement authorities also reported receiving e-mails and calls critical of the decision to charge Kelly.

Freed said he withdrew the charge after reviewing evidence in the case and state court rulings regarding application of the wiretap law.

Even in voiding the charge, Freed praised Carlisle police for their "hard work and cooperation" in the investigation of the Kelly case. He said the officer who charged Kelly acted in a "professional manner."

The law itself might need to be revised, Freed said.

"It is not the most clear statute that we have on the books," he said. "It could need a look, based on how technology has advanced since it was written."
http://blog.pennlive.com/patriotnews...d_in_poli.html





WFLZ Draws Ire From Britney Spears Over Billboards
FMQB



Britney Spears is threatening legal action against Clear Channel's WFLZ/Tampa over billboards for the MJ Morning Show that feature a picture of Spears with a shaved head. The billboards utilize a rather unflattering paparazzi photo of the bald singer along with a picture of the morning show host, and they are headlined, "Total Nut Jobs," "Shock Therapy" and "Certifiable." The MJ Morning Show airs on several stations across Florida, and the billboards, which first appeared in May, advertised the program in Tampa, Jacksonville and Clearwater.

TheSmokingGun.com posted photos of the billboards as well as a copy of Spears' legal letter that was sent to Clear Channel Communications, in which Spears' lawyer calls the ads "outrageous to the extreme." The letter calls for immediate removal of the billboards and implies that Spears will sue for damages if Clear Channel does not comply. The letter also notes that Spears' likeness "has a multi-million dollar value" and therefore she is entitled to "substantial damages."

The letter concludes, "We demand the immediate removal of the billboards, confirmed by documentary evidence and verified under penalty of perjury. We also demand an inventory of all Clear Channel billboards in any location containing [Spears'] photo... If Clear Channel continues to ignore the reasonable demands being made on [Spears'] behalf... it does so at its peril."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=425323





Citing Supreme Court Precedent, 11th Circuit Reverses Major Copyright Ruling
R. Robin McDonald

In a decision called "curious" by an intellectual property expert, a federal appellate panel in Atlanta has reversed its circuit's 6-year-old opinion in a major copyright case, declaring the ruling's mandate on behalf of freelance photographers to be "moot."

In doing so, the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded freelance writers' copyrights in a way that limited the copyright claims of freelance photographers.

The panel's June 13 ruling in Greenberg v. National Geographic Society II, 97-03924-CV, reversed a separate panel's 2001 opinion, Greenberg v. National Geographic Society I, 244F.3d1267. That decision had been authored by 11th Circuit Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr., a noted copyright expert whose formal 11th Circuit portrait depicts him holding a copy of "Nimmer on Copyright," the definitive work on copyright law. Judges Gerald B. Tjoflat and R. Lanier Anderson III joined Birch in the 2001 ruling.

In reversing Greenberg I, the second appellate panel sidestepped a precedent which binds panels to an earlier circuit decision addressing the same issue of law unless it has been overturned either by the entire 11th Circuit or by the U.S. Supreme Court.

By declaring Greenberg I moot, the new panel -- Judge Rosemary Barkett, Senior Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch and David G. Trager, a visiting U.S. district judge from the 2nd Circuit in New York -- also resolved a long-standing conflict with the 2nd Circuit created by the Birch opinion. Trager wrote the Greenberg II opinion for the new panel.

Both cases deal with The National Geographic Society's placement of its entire magazine library on CD-ROM and selling it as "The Complete National Geographic."

In the 2001 case, Birch found that National Geographic infringed the copyright of Florida freelance photographer Jerry Greenberg. Sixty-four of Greenberg's photos had appeared in issues of the National Geographic. One of those published photos also was included in an animated photo montage designed exclusively for the CD-ROM.

But in nearly identical cases in New York that were brought against National Geographic by other freelance writers and photographers, 2nd Circuit judges have taken the opposite tack.

In Greenberg II, Trager asserted that the new 11th Circuit panel on which he sat had authority to overturn Greenberg I if an intervening Supreme Court case overruled a prior panel decision, or if "the rationale the Supreme Court uses in an intervening case directly contradicts the analysis this court has used in a related area, and establishes that this Court's current rule is wrong."

The intervening ruling on which Trager rested Greenberg II was the Supreme Court's 2001 opinion in New York Times v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 233.

In Tasini, the high court found that the Times' sales of its published news articles to online databases such as Lexis and Westlaw infringed the copyrights of its freelance writers whose contracts had never contemplated the advent of digital databases.

This week, Lawrence Nodine, a partner at intellectual property boutique Needle & Rosenberg, called the Greenberg II ruling "curious" for several reasons.

"Leave out for a second, the sitting 2nd Circuit judge," he said. "The rule is that you are bound by previous panel decisions of the circuit that should only be reversed en banc."

While an appellate panel would have authority to reverse a previous panel if there were a Supreme Court decision "on point," Nodine suggested that Tasini was based on a different set of facts.

And dicta -- any explanatory commentary included in the high court opinion that does not directly address the facts of the case under review -- "ought not entitle the panel [in Greenberg II] to disregard the previous decision," Nodine said.

"Whether or not the [Greenberg II] panel could reverse without an en banc [hearing] is a very interesting question."

For a decade, the Greenberg and Tasini cases have pitted publishers against freelance photographers and writers -- all of them seeking to define copyright law in the digital age. At stake are royalties and fees that publishers could be forced to share with freelancers whenever they reproduce and sell those freelancers' previously published works in merchandise designed for computer access.

As Birch noted in 2001 during oral argument in Greenberg I, "All this is about who gets the money, whether you [publishers] can get the money or have to share it with some author."

Florida lawyer Norman Davis of the Miami firm Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, who represents Greenberg, insisted that Tasini "has no relevance whatsoever to Greenberg I" and was not a proper basis for reconsidering and then mooting the Birch opinion.

Davis added that his client has not decided whether to ask the 11th Circuit to reconsider Greenberg II en banc.

In an appellate brief in Greenberg II, Davis suggested that the 2nd Circuit's rulings in other National Geographic cases "set up a conflict" with Birch's 2001 opinion "through the misapplication of Tasini" and argued that "any resolution of the conflict between the two circuits should be left to the Supreme Court."

National Geographic Society executive vice president Terrence B. Adamson -- a former Atlanta attorney who was a key assistant to then-Attorney General Griffin B. Bell and remains President Carter's longtime personal lawyer -- said he was "pleased and quite delighted" by Greenberg II.

"This is a very important case," he said. "It wasn't that we were selling a lot of product, but it is our archive. There are now almost 120 years of National Geographic. It's our whole history and archive of what this organization has been about."

The CD set, Adamson asserted, is not a new use of formerly published issues. "It's the same use. ... because the practice had been for 40 to 50 years to do microfilm and microfiche, which everyone understood" and which required no additional royalty payments to freelancers. "It's the same result if you put it on CD-ROM, or DVD."

The Tasini case was one of the most widely watched copyright cases to reach the Supreme Court in years. Freelance authors of articles previously published in newspapers and magazines, led by Jonathan Tasini, brought claims of copyright infringement against publishers and owners of electronic databases that had made the articles widely available via the Internet.

A federal district court found for the defendant publishers but was reversed by the 2nd Circuit, which ruled in favor of the writers. In a 7-2 opinion issued June 25, 2001, the high court affirmed the 2nd Circuit's appellate ruling.

Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg determined that electronic and CD-ROM databases containing individual articles from multiple editions of magazines, newspapers and other periodicals could not be considered "revisions" or revised editions of the previously published issues.

"[T]he Databases reproduce and distribute articles standing alone and not in context, not 'as part of that particular collective work' to which the author contributed, 'as part of ... any revision' thereof or 'as part of ... any later collective work in the same series,'" she wrote, citing federal copyright law.

Under the terms of Section 201(c) of the 1976 revisions to the Copyright Act of 1909, Ginsburg wrote, "A publisher could reprint a contribution from one issue in a later issue of its magazine, and could reprint an article from one edition of an encyclopedia in a later revision of it, but could not revise the contribution itself or include it in a new anthology or an entirely different collective work. ...

"If there is demand for a freelance article standing alone or in a new collection, the Copyright Act allows the freelancer to benefit from that demand; after authorizing initial publication, the freelancer may also sell the article to others," she noted.

"It would scarcely preserve the author's copyright in a contribution as contemplated by Congress," Ginsburg concluded, "if a print publisher, without the author's permission, could reproduce or distribute discrete copies of the contribution in isolation or within new collective works. The publishers' view that inclusion of the articles in the databases lies within the 'privilege of reproducing and distributing the [articles] as part of ... [a] revision of that collective work,' is unacceptable."

The majority in Tasini also dismissed an analogy offered by publishers that digital databases were akin to microfilm and microfiche reprints, which have not prompted copyright infringement claims.

Ginsburg noted that databases "do not perceptibly reproduce articles as part of the collective work to which the author contributed or as part of any 'revision' thereof. ... We would reach the same conclusion if the Times sent intact newspapers to the electronic publishers."

The Greenberg cases stem from The National Geographic Society's creation of "The Complete National Geographic" -- a 30-disc CD-ROM set containing complete reproductions of every issue of National Geographic published in the magazine's history. Four of those issues included photos by Greenberg, who had reclaimed his copyrights from the National Geographic Society after publication.

"The Complete National Geographic" was powered by copyrighted software programs and included -- in addition to the magazine reproductions -- an animated montage of photos set to music and a Kodak commercial. The National Geographic registered a separate, and new, copyright for the CD-ROM set in 1997.

In Greenberg I, Birch -- writing for the panel -- stated that "common-sense copyright analysis compels the conclusion" that the National Geographic, in collaboration with a software company, has created "a new product ... in a new medium, for a new market that far transcends any privilege of revision or other mere reproduction" envisioned by federal copyright law.

Birch specifically dismissed arguments offered by National Geographic lawyers that the CD-ROM sets were merely a republication of a pre-existing work no different from converting the magazines to microfilm.

"[T]he critical difference, from a copyright perspective, is that the computer, as opposed to the machines used for viewing microfilm and microfiche, requires the interaction of a computer program in order to accomplish the useful reproduction involved with the new medium," Birch wrote. "These computer programs are themselves the subject matter of copyright, and may constitute original works of authorship, and thus present an additional dimension in the copyright analysis."

On remand, a district judge in Florida, using Greenberg I as a guide, awarded Greenberg $400,000 in 2004, three years after Tasini.

After the Tasini ruling, National Geographic again appealed, resulting in last week's ruling.

In Greenberg II, Trager, joined by Kravitch and Barkett, sided with his home circuit, which since Tasini has rejected claims against National Geographic by other freelance writers and photographers.

Like the 2nd Circuit, Trager acknowledged that Tasini had not addressed the issue directly. But he suggested that the high court had given "tacit approval" to microfilm and microfiche as non-infringing.

"Under the Tasini framework, the relevant question is whether the original context of the collective work has been preserved in the revision," Trager wrote. "Clearly, the replica portion of the ["Complete National Geographic"] preserves the original context of the magazines, because it comprises the exact images of each page of the original magazines."

But in direct contrast to Greenberg I, the Trager opinion asserted that software programs embedded in the CD-ROM did not alter "the original context of the magazine contents."

L. Donald Prutzman, a partner at Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt in New York who submitted an amicus brief in Tasini for the American Society of Media Photographers, called Greenberg II "a reaction to the 2nd Circuit's decision -- on behalf of another photographer with respect to the same product -- which declined to follow Greenberg [I ]."

Prutzman said the 2nd Circuit, in Faulkner v. National Geographic Enterprises, 409F.3d26, determined that Tasini would allow publishers to reproduce previously published articles in digital format as long as they were presented as part of an entire issue. On the other hand, "The National Geographic product added a number of bells and whistles," he said. "There was a basis for a holding that it was a new product, not just an alternative form of the magazine."

Post-Tasini appellate court opinions suggest that, "As long as you reproduce the publication in the same form it was published you haven't infringed," Prutzman continued. "But if you disaggregate it into separate articles and make them separately available, then you have infringed."

Leon Friedman, a professor of copyright law at Hofstra Law School, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of The Authors Guild in Tasini, suggested that, contrary to the Greenberg II opinion, "I don't think Tasini dealt directly with this issue. ... I think people are reading a little too much into Tasini."

To reach the conclusion opined in Greenberg II, "You have to read a lot between the lines ... I don't think Tasini compels the result in this case." Because of that, Friedman said he suspects that the U.S. Supreme Court "would take that case" on writ of certiorari. After issuing Tasini, the high court denied cert in Greenberg I, which the Birch panel had published six days before Tasini was argued.

But New York attorney Charles S. Sims -- who filed an amicus brief in Tasini for The Association of American Publishers in support of The New York Times -- said, "The 11th Circuit was wrong in 2001 and corrected itself in 2007. The analysis that the Tasini Court used was one of the reasons why it was so clear the 11th Circuit was wrong. It's certainly useful that they have corrected their error and brought themselves in line with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals."
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?i...pos=ataglance#





Required Reading: the Next 10 Years

During my keynote at the iCommons iSummit 07, I made an announcement that surprised some, but which, from reports on the web at least, was also not fully understood by some. So here again is the announcement, with some reasoning behind it.

The bottom line: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues. Why and what are explained in the extended entry below.

Three people I admire greatly are responsible for at least inspiring this decision.

The first is Obama. Six months ago, I was reading Obama's (really excellent) latest book. In the beginning of the book, he describes his decision to run for the United States Senate. At that point, Obama had been in politics for about 10 years. Ten years, he reflected, was enough. It was either "up or out" for him. He gambled on the the "up." We'll see how far he gets.

But for me, Obama's reflection triggered a different thought. It's been a decade since I have become active in the issues I'm known for. Over this decade, I've learned a great deal. There has been important progress on the issues -- not yet in Congress, but in the understanding of many about what's at stake, and what's important. Literally thousands have worked to change that understanding. When we began a decade ago, I would have said it was impossible to imagine the progress we've made. It is extraordinarily rewarding to recognize that my pessimism notwithstanding, we are going to prevail in these debates. Maybe not today, but soon.

That belief (some think, dream), then led me to wonder whether it wasn't time to find a new set of problems: I had learned everything I was going to learn about the issues I've been working on; there are many who would push them as well, or better, than I; perhaps therefore it was time to begin again.

That thought triggered a second, this one tied to Gore.

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a "corruption" of) the political process. That our government can't understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

This is a thought I've often had in the debates I've been a part of, especially with respect to IP. Think, for example, about term extension. From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a "no brainer." As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea -- both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

The point of course is not new. Indeed, the fear of factions is as old as the Republic. There are thousands who are doing amazing work to make clear just how corrupt this system has become. There have been scores of solutions proposed. This is not a field lacking in good work, or in people who can do this work well.

But a third person -- this time anonymous -- made me realize that I wanted to be one of these many trying to find a solution to this "corruption." This man, a Republican of prominence in Washington, wrote me a reply to an email I had written to him about net neutrality. As he wrote, "And don't shill for the big guys protecting market share through neutrality REGULATION either."

"Shill."

If you've been reading these pages recently, you'll know my allergy to that word. But this friend's use of the term not to condemn me, but rather as play, made me recognize just how general this corruption is. Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don't want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don't want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We've all been whining about the "corruption" of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I've come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

I do this with no illusions. I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That's true in this case.

Nor do I believe I have any magic bullet. Indeed, I am beginner. A significant chunk of the next ten years will be spent reading and studying the work of others. My hope is to build upon their work; I don't pretend to come with a revolution pre-baked.

Instead, what I come with is a desire to devote as much energy to these issues of "corruption" as I've devoted to the issues of network and IP sanity. This is a shift not to an easier project, but a different project. It is a decision to give up my work in a place some consider me an expert to begin work in a place where I am nothing more than a beginner.

So what precisely does this mean for the work I am doing now?

First, and most importantly, I am not leaving Creative Commons, or the iCommons Project. I will remain on both boards, and continue to serve as CEO of Creative Commons. I will speak and promote both organizations whenever ever I can -- at least until the financial future of both organizations is secure. I will also continue to head the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

But second, and over the next few months, I will remove myself from the other organizations on whose boards I now serve. Not immediately, but as I can, and as it makes sense.

Third, in general, I will no longer be lecturing about IP (whether as in TCP/IP or IPR) issues. No doubt there will be exceptions. In particular, I have a few (though because this decision has been in the works for months, very few) obligations through the balance of the year. There will be others in the future too. But in general, unless there are very strong reasons, I will not be accepting invitations to talk about the issues that have defined my work for the past decade.

Instead, as soon as I can locate some necessary technical help, I will be moving every presentation I have made (that I can) to a Mixter site (see, e.g., ccMixter) where others can freely download and remix what I've done, and use it however they like. I will continue to work to get all my books licensed freely. And I am currently finishing one last book about these issues that I hope will make at least some new contributions.

Fourth, these pages will change too. My focus here will shift. That will make some of you unhappy. I'm sorry for that. The blog is CC-BY licensed. You're free to fork and continue the (almost) exclusively IP-related conversation. But I will continue that conversation only rarely. New issues will appear here instead.

Fifth, some will think this resolution sounds familiar. In the beginning of the Free Culture talk I gave at OSCON 5 years ago, I said that talk was going to be my last. In fact, what I intended at the time was the last before the argument in the Eldred case. In my nervousness, I didn't make that intent clear then. The literally hundred of talks since (85 last year alone) should have made that obvious.

But again, this is not a resolution of silence. It is a decision to change channels. This new set of issues is, in my view, critically important. Indeed, I'm convinced we will not solve the IP related issues until these "corruption" related issues are resolved. So I hope at least some of you will follow to this new set of questions. For I expect this forum will be central to working out just what I believe, just as it has in the past.

Finally, I am not (as one friend wrote) "leaving the movement." "The movement" has my loyalty as much today as ever. But I have come to believe that until a more fundamental problem is fixed, "the movement" can't succeed either. Compare: Imagine someone devoted to free culture coming to believe that until free software supports free culture, free culture can't succeed. So he devotes himself to building software. I am someone who believes that a free society -- free of the "corruption" that defines our current society -- is necessary for free culture, and much more. For that reason, I turn my energy elsewhere for now.

So thank you to everyone who has helped in this work. Thanks especially to everyone who will continue it. And thanks the most to those who will take positions of leadership in this movement, to help guide it to its success. Just one favor I ask in return: when you get to the promised land, remember to send a postcard.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003800.shtml#003800





What Else Is New?

How Uses, Not Innovations, Drive Human Technology
Steven Shapin

I’m writing in the kitchen, surrounded by technology. There is a cordless phone, a microwave oven, and a high-end refrigerator, and I’m working on a laptop. Nearby is a gas range, a French cast-iron enamelled casserole, and a ceramic teapot. Drawers to my left hold cutlery—some modern Chinese-made stainless steel, some Georgian sterling silver. In front of me is a wooden bookstand, made for me by a talented friend and festooned with Post-it reminders of things to do (a method I prefer to my digital calendar). I’m sitting on a semi-antique wooden chair, though when my back is hurting I tend to switch to a new, expensive ergonomic contraption.

Perhaps you think I should have said that I’m surrounded by things, only some of which really count as technology. It’s common to think of technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things—ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. But it’s also possible to view it just as things (or, indeed, processes) that enable us to perform tasks more effectively than we could without them. The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.” Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—like my Brown Betty teapot, whose design goes back to the seventeenth century but which is still produced in England, not having been significantly improved on since. And even the newest items contain design or functional elements from the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878.

The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a new age into being. In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology. The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”

Consider the Second World War. When we think about the technologies that figured large in it, what comes to mind? Perhaps Germany’s V-2 terror weapons, with their emblematic role in Thomas Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky.” Or the triumph of theoretical physics and metallurgical engineering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the things that capture the imagination, and yet Edgerton offers an arrestingly different perspective, calling German investment in the V-2 project “economically and militarily irrational.” One historian wrote that “more people died producing it than died from being hit by it.” Edgerton estimates that although the Germans spent five hundred million dollars on the project, “the destructive power of all the V-2s produced amounted to less than could be achieved by a single raid on a city by the RAF.” Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, “it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power.”

So what forms of technology really pulled their weight in the war? Horse-powered transport, for one. Long past the age of steam—and well into the age of automobiles and aviation—the power of horseflesh remained critical. In the Italian campaign alone, the United States Army’s 10th Mountain Division used more than ten thousand horses and mules, and the great tank general George S. Patton wished he’d had many more:

In almost any conceivable theater of operations, situations arise where the presence of horse cavalry, in a ratio of a division to an army, will be of vital moment. . . . Had we possessed an American cavalry division with pack artillery in Tunisia and in Sicily, not a German would have escaped, because horse cavalry possesses the additional gear ratio which permits it to attain sufficient speed through mountainous country to get behind and hold the enemy until the more powerful infantry and tanks can come up and destroy him.

The Germans were better supplied: at the beginning of 1945, the Wehrmacht had 1.2 million horses in its ranks, and, altogether, the Germans lost some 1.5 million horses during the war.

Even today, horses aren’t quite history. In Afghanistan, the American Special Forces have had to rediscover how to use them. “Horses are actually an ideal way to get around there,” one correspondent embedded with the Green Berets has said. “No manual has ever been written on how to coordinate horse attacks with B-52s, so the Green Berets had to do OJT”—on-the-job training. “Early on, there was a cavalry charge with about three hundred horses where they had cut it so fine that as soon as the bombs hit the ridge the horses were riding through the gray smoke; it was quite an impressive sight.”

Technological palimpsests are everywhere; it’s the normal state of things. Darfurians are being slaughtered by Janjaweed militia mounted on horses and camels, while their Sudanese-government sponsors chip in with helicopters and Antonov cargo planes retrofitted as bombers. September 11th was a technological pastiche of new and old technologies (Boeings and box cutters), as was the 2003 Iraq invasion (stealth fighters, cruise missiles, and laser-guided smart bombs for the “shock and awe,” and jury-rigged sandbags and scrap-metal armor for Army Humvees when the Pentagon failed to provide high-tech alternatives). The Iraqi insurgents have revived the use of chlorine gas as a terror agent, a technology pioneered by patriotic German chemists in the First World War, and Saddam Hussein, whose aircraft dropped modern nerve-gas bombs on the Kurdish town of Halabja, was executed by hanging, a technology of judicial killing that goes back to the ancient Persian Empire.

Edgerton calls the tendency to overrate the impact of dramatic new technologies “futurism.” Few things, it turns out, are as passé as past futures. In the mid-twentieth century, a world was promised in which nuclear power would provide electricity “too cheap to meter,” eliminating pollution, forestalling energy crises, and alleviating world poverty; hypersonic civil air travel would whip masses of us around the globe in an hour or two; permanent settlements would be established not just on the moon but on the planets; nuclear weapons would put an end to war.

And so it goes. The “paperless office” was celebrated as long ago as 1975, in Business Week, but since then we’ve had avalanches of the stuff: global consumption of paper has tripled in the past three decades, and the average American worker now goes through twelve thousand sheets of paper every year. In 1987, Ronald Reagan announced that high-temperature superconductor technology would “bring us to the threshold of a new age,” but commercializing that technology has proved much more difficult than the original hype suggested. In 2000, Bill Clinton speculated that, as a direct result of the Human Genome Project, “our children’s children will know the term ‘cancer’ only as a constellation of stars.” (That would be nice, if only because it would indicate an improved knowledge of astronomy.) Predictions like these don’t inspire great confidence in the utopian futures now being spun around stem-cell research or nanotechnology.

But neither should we have great confidence in the more dire prophesies. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was thought that railways would whirl people about the world with such vertiginous speed that their nervous systems could collapse under the strain. Decades later, it seemed that the telephone would be a socially disruptive force, causing aural communication to take place without any of the rich cues of face-to-face interaction, breaking down the barriers between public and private space, and making it intolerably hard not to be “at home” when one was at home.

Learning how to make new technologies is one thing; learning how, as a society, to use them is another. Carolyn Marvin’s illuminating book “When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century” (1988) notes that, during the early years of the telephone, there was confusion about what codes should regulate faceless and socially clueless speech. The telephone operator, typically female, often had the responsibility of waking up the master of the house, and so joined the wife as a woman who could talk to the man in bed; Marvin writes that “sweet-voiced” telephone girls at the turn of the century “were often objects of fantasy.” It was also thought that, if just anyone could use the new device, its utility would be completely undermined. Marvin notes the firm opinion of the British postmaster general in 1895 that “the telephone could not, and never would be an advantage which could be enjoyed by the large mass of the people.” He was wrong, but understandably so. The story of how we came to terms with the new technology—how we adjusted to it, adapted to it, domesticated it, altered it to suit our purposes—didn’t come with the technical spec sheet. It never does. No instruction manual can explain how a technology will evolve, in use, together with the rhythm of our lives.

Old technologies persist; they even flourish. In that sense, they’re as much a part of the present as recently invented technologies. It is said that we live in a “new economy,” yet, of the world’s top thirty companies (by revenue), only three are mainly in the business of high tech—General Electric (No. 11), Siemens (No. 22), and I.B.M. (No. 29)—and all three go back more than a century. The heights of the early-twenty-first-century corporate world are still occupied—as they have long been—by petroleum companies (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and B.P., Nos. 1, 3, and 4), retailing (Wal-Mart, No. 2), automobiles (General Motors, No. 5), and finance (I.N.G. and Citigroup, Nos. 13 and 14). No Hewlett-Packard (No. 33); no Microsoft (No. 140); no Merck (No. 289).

The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness. When we cannot conceive what life would be like without e-mail, say, we correctly note the pervasiveness of the new technology, but we may incorrectly assume that the things we now do through e-mail could not have been done in other ways. Of course, we must know that many things now done through e-mail were once done, and to some extent are still done, by telephone, fax, snail mail, or actually stopping by to see someone. But we can never know how the technologies that existed before electronic communication would have developed had e-mail not become dominant, or what other technologies might have come along whose development was forestalled by e-mail.

In 1897, to move mail around the city, Manhattan started to equip itself with an island-wide system of underground pneumatic tubes, which soon extended from 125th Street as far as the Brooklyn General Post Office. Through the nineteenth century, the pneumatic tube had developed roughly in step with the telegraph and then the telephone. For a long time, indeed, pneumatic tubes seemed promising—perhaps they could shunt people around as well as mail—although, ultimately, it was the telegraph and the telephone that flourished, becoming the ancestors of the electronic communication systems we use today. Yet, had there been a century of continuous improvement, who knows what benefits a dense and speedy system of message tubes might have brought? A man working on Eighty-sixth Street could send a scribbled note, chocolates, and a pair of earrings to his girlfriend on Wall Street. To have left your wallet at home could be a mistake remedied in seconds. It’s a safe guess, anyway, that, while aware of a distant past containing such figures as postmen and delivery boys, we would be unable to imagine life without the pneumatic tube.

This kind of counterfactual history has a credibility handicap—we know how things did turn out but can only imagine how they might have turned out. Still, there’s no reason to assume that the technology we have is the only technology we could have had. The birth-control pill, we say, caused a sexual revolution, and perhaps that’s true. But it joined (and only partly replaced) many other methods of contraception, some of which—like the condom—have continued to improve in all sorts of ways since the advent of the pill. And it has been argued that the pill had a dampening effect on the development of other technologies, such as male hormonal contraceptives. Is the pill the best possible outcome? The answer depends on who you are, what you want to do, and the resources you command. As it turned out, the replacement of the condom as a sexual technology, so frequently announced in past decades, was premature. The emergence of AIDS caused condom sales to more than double between the early nineteen-eighties and the mid-nineties. And, for the first time, the old technology of the condom enjoyed an advantage previously monopolized by the new technology of the pill: it could be freely talked about in polite society.

Our obsession with innovation also blinds us to how much of technology is focussed on keeping things the same. The dikes of Holland maintain the integrity of the nation, and great ingenuity goes into preserving and improving them. We’re going to need a lot more, and more powerful, technologies of conservation: not just the technologies of levees and barriers against the ocean but technologies to maintain the supply of potable water, breathable air, and arable soil; technologies to maintain as much biodiversity as we can or want to maintain; technologies to preserve and renew our crumbling Victorian legacies of infrastructure (sewers, rail beds, roads, and bridges); technologies to stabilize and prevent the dispersal of radioactive waste. There may be hype attending new technological artifacts, but there’s money to be made, and spent, in maintaining them in usable shape. According to Edgerton, the take-home price of a P.C. is typically only about ten per cent of its lifetime cost, and sixty per cent of the lifetime cost of some military equipment is maintenance. The federal government spends twice as much on preserving highways as it does on building new ones. More than half of automobile-dealer profits come from servicing cars, less than a third from selling new cars, and much the same is true of the civil jet-engine business.

The importance of maintenance becomes even clearer if we take a global view. Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. “In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,” Edgerton writes. “In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.” John Powell’s marvellous study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, “The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers” (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: “As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair.” Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted “creole” technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.

Maintenance has implications for the identity of technological artifacts. There’s a traditional conundrum about “my grandfather’s axe”: over its lifetime, it has had three new heads and four new handles, but—its owner insists—it remains his grandfather’s axe. Philosophers have their proprietary version of the axe problem: “Locke’s socks” developed a hole, which he had darned, and then darned again. The socks kept the philosopher’s feet warm, but they troubled his head. Many people make their living repairing things; a very few make their living pondering whether repaired things are the same. But the identity of repaired and maintained things is not just a philosophical problem. The Bush Administration recently decided to build something called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, or R.R.W., a revised design for such weapons as the W76 thermonuclear warhead on submarine-based Trident missiles. The Administration argues that the technology is based on previously tested components and is just an updated version of the same thing. Critics disagree, seeing this as a new weapon that might be used to justify renewed testing. So judgments of whether the R.R.W. is or is not “the same” technology may well become central to whether or not there will be yet another post-Cold War round of the expensive and dangerous nuclear-arms race.

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” If he meant that we are unfamiliar with the principles on which the technology around us works, he was right—there’s an enormous gap between the knowledge of makers and the knowledge of users—but this is exactly as it should be. As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don’t want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all. The Brown Betty teapot is very old and seemingly simple. Its design is superbly adapted to its function, but I cannot give an account of how its composition and its shape help it to brew a really good cup of tea. Does this mean that I know nothing about the teapot—or, for that matter, the phone or the fridge?

Knowing about technology is not the same thing as understanding the scientific theories involved. Just as innovators commonly understand the fundamentals of a technology better than subsequent users, so users can acquire knowledge that would never have occurred to the innovators. In 1817, Thomas Broadwood, a vastly successful English piano manufacturer, visited Beethoven in Vienna and, shortly after, sent the composer a top-of-the-line instrument. Which of these two men understood the piano better—the craftsman-entrepreneur whose product adorned drawing rooms throughout Europe or the deaf genius whose works are a glory of piano repertoire? Or, for that matter, Liszt, who later owned the piano, and could do things at the keyboard that no performer previously could, or the curator in the museum where it resides today? The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The piano is one thing to a pianist, another to a piano tuner, another to an interior designer with no interest in music, and yet another to a child who wants to avoid practicing. Ultimately, the narrative of what kind of thing a piano is must be a story of all these users. It’s a narrative in which we turn out to know a surprising amount about the technologies that have infiltrated our lives, and in which knowing only as much as we want and need to know about them is, in a sense, to know a lot. “The Shock of the Old” is a necessary reminder of just how important things are in our lives, and how important we are in the life of things.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critic...urrentPage=all





It Might Pay to Follow Your Bliss
M. P. Dunleavey

REMEMBER the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? The ant works hard all summer, socking away provisions for the winter; the grasshopper frolics away each day. The ant warns the grasshopper that he’s being hedonistic and short-sighted. The grasshopper ignores the ant, and continues on his merry way — only to perish when winter sets in.

It’s a rather stern lesson about financial prudence, but there is a reason this tale has survived through the ages — and still preoccupies many researchers who study the eccentricities of human economic behavior. Why do the grasshoppers of the world have such a hard time emulating the ants?

The rewards of the ant’s strategy are obvious: by working hard, planning ahead and saving your resources, you end up healthy, wealthy and warm. The pleasures of the grasshopper’s life are short-lived — and ultimately lead to great stress and suffering (if not a dire end).

Yet economic research has demonstrated that most people find it hard to resist the siren song of “seize the day and spend what you have now” — even though a lifestyle based on constant consumption doesn’t enhance anyone’s long-term store of happiness and often puts people on shaky financial ground.

This conundrum also bedevils those who work in the field of personal finance. Why do millions of Americans resist saving for their retirements? Why do so many carry thousands of dollars in credit card debt?

The standard advice for those caught on the treadmill of “getting and spending” could come straight from the mouth of the ant: material kicks don’t pay off in the end, so mend your ways, plan ahead and financial prudence eventually will be its own reward. But this sort of finger-wagging makes few converts in the grasshopper world.

A more compelling approach may be to focus more on what makes you happier — because investing in your own well-being and quality of life may turn out to be more prudent and more profitable than you thought.

Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., studied 200 people who embraced Voluntary Simplicity, a movement focused “less on materialistic values — like wanting money and possessions and status — and more on what we called intrinsic values or goals,” Professor Kasser said. The three main intrinsic values were being connected to family and friends, exploring one’s interests or skills and “making the world a better place,” he said.

He conducted the study in 2005 with Kirk Brown, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The researchers compared the attitudes and behaviors of this group with a matched sample of 200 mainstream Americans.

Although the mainstream group’s income was much higher, an average of about $41,000 a year compared with $26,000 for those aiming to live more simply, “we found the people in the Voluntary Simplicity group were much happier and more satisfied with life,” Professor Kasser said.

THAT doesn’t mean frugal people are happier, said Professor Kasser, adding that research findings on this topic are mixed. But the study found that when people invested more in intrinsic values, like relationships and quality of life, and less in consumption, it seemed to increase their happiness. And, the study suggested, there may be a financial gain to doing so. Those in the simplicity group were far more likely than the control group to say that they were careful about their spending, Professor Kasser said.

Christopher K. Hsee, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has observed a similar pattern. He points out that when people use their purchases as a semaphore of status, there is “no natural stopping point;” there will always be a bigger house, a fancier car, a more expensive watch to go after.

When it comes to more basic needs, like food or sleep or friendship, most people naturally reach a point of satisfaction. “Consequently, people who value these types of goods may be financially better off,” Professor Hsee said.

As someone who struggles against her own grasshopper nature, wishing she had the foresight and impulse control of the ant, I like the idea that there’s another path to fiscal prudence. Working hard and being practical are ideal skills to have in life, but if those aren’t your bag, investing in a happier way of life may offer the same financial dividend. Too bad the ant didn’t know about that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/bu...instincts.html





Not Buying It
Steven Kurutz

ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.

New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another.

Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s wearing two bowler hats, dug deep and unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, 29, found a painting of a Mediterranean harbor, which she studied and handed down to another member of the crowd.

Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old high school student with a half-shaved head, was clearly pleased with a modest haul of what she called “random housing stuff” — a desk lamp, a dish rack, Swiffer dusters — which she spread on the sidewalk, drawing quizzical stares from passers-by.

Ms. Elia was not alone in appreciating the little things. “The small thrills are when you see the contents of someone’s desk and find a book of stamps,” said Ms. Kalish, 44, as she stood knee deep in the trash bin examining a plastic toiletries holder.

A few of those present had stumbled onto the scene by chance (including a janitor from a nearby homeless center, who made off with a working iPod and a tube of body cream), but most were there by design, in response to a posting on the Web site freegan.info.

The site, which provides information and listings for the small but growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.org, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away food and social services.

According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.

Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.

“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.

There are freegans all over the world, in countries as far afield as Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, Estonia and England (where much has been made of what The Sun recently called the “wacky new food craze” of trash-bin eating), and across the United States as well .

In Southern California, for example, “you can find just about anything in the trash, and on a consistent basis, too,” said Marko Manriquez, 28, who has just graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and is the creator of “Freegan Kitchen,” a video blog that shows gourmet meals being made from trash-bin ingredients. “This is how I got my futon, chair, table, shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design Within Reach, but it’s nice.”

But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)

Freegan.info sponsors organize Trash Tours that typically attract a dozen or more people, as well as feasts at which groups of about 20 people gather in apartments around the city to share food and talk politics.

In the last year or so, Mr. Weissman said, the site has increased the number and variety of its events, which have begun attracting many more first-time participants. Many of those who have taken part in one new program, called Wild Foraging Walks — workshops that teach people to identify edible plants in the wilderness — have been newcomers, he said.

The success of the movement in New York may also be due to the quantity and quality of New York trash. As of 2005, individuals, businesses and institutions in the United States produced more than 245 million tons of municipal solid waste, according to the E.P.A. That means about 4.5 pounds per person per day. The comparable figure for New York City, meanwhile, is about 6.1 pounds, according to statistics from the city’s Sanitation Department.

“We have a lot of wealthy people, and rich people throw out more trash than poor people do,” said Elizabeth Royte, whose book “Garbage Land” (Little, Brown, 2005) traced the route her trash takes through the city. “Rich people are also more likely to throw things out based on style obsolescence — like changing the towels when you’re tired of the color.”

At the N.Y.U. Dorm Dive, as the event was billed, the consensus was that this year’s spoils weren’t as impressive as those in years past. Still, almost anything needed to decorate and run a household — a TV cart, a pillow, a file cabinet, a half-finished bottle of Jägermeister — was there for the taking, even if those who took them were risking health, safety and a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department.

Ms. Brewster and her mother, who had come from New Jersey, loaded two area rugs into their cart. Her mother, who declined to give her name, seemed to be on a search for laundry detergent, and was overjoyed to discover a couple of half-empty bottles of Trader Joe’s organic brand. (Free and organic is a double bonus). Nearby, a woman munched on a found bag of Nature’s Promise veggie fries.

As people stuffed their backpacks, Ms. Kalish, who organized the event (Mr. Weissman arrived later), demonstrated the cooperative spirit of freeganism, asking the divers to pass items down to people on the sidewalk and announcing her finds for anyone in need of, say, a Hoover Shop-Vac.

“Sometimes people will swoop in and grab something, especially when you see a half-used bottle of Tide detergent,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want it? But most people realize there’s plenty to go around.” She rooted around in the trash bin and found several half-eaten jars of peanut butter. “It’s a never-ending supply,” she said.

Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”

There are also older freegans, like Ms. Kalish, who hold jobs and appear in some ways to lead middle-class lives. A high school Spanish teacher, Ms. Kalish owns a car and a two-family house in Queens, renting half of it as a “capitalist landlord,” she joked. Still, like most freegans, she seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have to take trees from the forest.”

Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial products to brush their teeth?

“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its cardboard container is biodegradable.

These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is an impossible dream.

Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans “try to reduce the impact.”

It’s not that freeganism doesn’t require serious commitment. For freegans, who believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, any interaction with the marketplace is fraught. And for some freegans in particular — for instance, Madeline Nelson, who until recently was living an upper-middle-class Manhattan life with all the attendant conveniences and focus on luxury goods — choosing this way of life involves a considerable, even radical, transformation.

Ms. Nelson, who is 51, spent her 20s working in restaurants and living in communal houses, but by 2003 she was earning a six-figure salary as a communications director for Barnes & Noble. That year, while demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”

After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and freeganism.

She sold her apartment, put some money into savings, and bought a one-bedroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that she owns outright.

“My whole point is not to be paying into corporate America, and I hated paying a big loan to a bank,” she said while fixing lunch in her kitchen one recent afternoon. The meal — potato and watercress soup and crackers and cheese — had been made entirely from refuse left outside various grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The bright and airy prewar apartment Ms. Nelson shares with two cats doesn’t look like the home of someone who spends her evenings rooting through the garbage. But after some time in the apartment, a visitor begins to see the signs of Ms. Nelson’s anticonsumerist way of life.

An old lampshade in the living room has been trimmed with fabric to cover its fraying parts, leaving a one-inch gap where the material ran out. The ficus tree near the window came not from a florist, Ms. Nelson said, but from the trash, as did the CD rack. A 1920s loveseat belonged to her grandmother, and an 18th-century, Louis XVI-style armoire in the bedroom is a vestige of her corporate life.

The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are stuffed with provisions — cornmeal, Pirouline cookies, vegetarian cage-free eggs — appropriate for a passionate cook who entertains often. All were free.

She longs for a springform pan in which to make cheesecakes, but is waiting for one to come up on freecycle.org. There are no new titles on the bookshelves; she hasn’t bought a new book in six months. “Books were my impulse buy,” said Ms. Nelson, whose short brown hair and glasses frame a youthful face. Now she logs onto bookcrossing.com, where readers share used books, or goes to the public library.

But isn’t she depriving herself unnecessarily? And what’s so bad about buying books, anyway? “I do have some mixed feelings,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But freegans would argue that the capitalist system is not sustainable. You’re exploiting resources.” She added, “Most people work 40-plus hours a week at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”

Since becoming a freegan, Ms. Nelson has spent her time posting calendar items and other information online and doing paralegal work on behalf of bicyclists arrested at Critical Mass anticar rallies. “I’m not sitting in the house eating bonbons,” she said. “I’m working. I’m just not working for money.”

She is also spending a lot of time making rounds for food and supplies at night, and has come to know the cycles of the city’s trash. She has learned that fruit tends to get thrown out more often in the summer (she freezes it and makes sorbet), and that businesses are a source for envelopes. A reliable spot to get bread is Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of bakery-restaurants that tosses out six or seven loaves a night. But Ms. Nelson doesn’t stockpile. “The sad fact is you don’t need to,” she said. “More trash will be there tomorrow.”

By and large, she said, her friends have been understanding, if not exactly enthusiastic about adopting freeganism for themselves. “When she told me she was doing this I wasn’t really surprised — Madeline is a free spirit,” said Eileen Dolan, a librarian at a Manhattan law firm who has known Ms. Nelson since their college days at Stony Brook. But while Ms. Dolan agrees that society is wasteful, she said that going freegan is not something she would ever do. “It’s a huge time commitment,” she said.

ONE evening a week after the Dorm Dive, a group of about 20 freegans gathered in a sparely furnished, harshly lit basement apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to hold a feast. It was an egalitarian affair with no one officially in charge, but Mr. Weissman projected authority, his blue custodian-style work pants and fuzzy black beard giving him the air of a Latin American revolutionary as he wandered around, trailed by a Korean television crew.

Ms. Kalish stood over the sink, slicing vegetables for a stir-fry with a knife she had found in a trash bin at N.Y.U. A pot of potatoes simmered on the stove. These, like much of the rest of the meal, had been gathered two nights earlier, when Mr. Weissman, Ms. Kalish and others had met in front of a Food Emporium in Manhattan and rummaged through the store’s clear garbage bags.

The haul had been astonishing in its variety: sealed bags of organic vegetable medley, bagged salad, heirloom tomatoes, key limes, three packaged strawberries-and-chocolate-dip kits, carrots, asparagus, grapes, a carton of organic soy milk (expiration date: July 9), grapefruit, mushrooms and, for those willing to partake, vacuum-packed herb turkey breast. (Some freegans who avoid meat will nevertheless eat it rather than see it go to waste.)

As operatic music played on a radio, people mingled and pitched in. One woman diced onions, rescuing pieces that fell on floor. Another, who goes by the name Petal, emptied bags of salad into a pan. As rigorous and radical as the freegan world view can be, there is also something quaint about the movement, at least the version that Mr. Weissman promotes, with its embrace of hippie-ish communal activities and its household get-togethers that rely for diversion on conversation rather electronic entertainment.

Making things last is part of the ethos. Christian Gutierrez, a 33-year-old former model and investment banker, sat at the small kitchen table, chatting. Mr. Gutierrez, who quit his banking job at Matthews Morris & Company in 2004 to pursue filmmaking, became a freegan last year, and opened a free workshop on West 36th Street in Manhattan to teach bicycle repair. He plans to add lessons in fixing home computers in the near future.

Mr. Gutierrez’s lifestyle, like Ms. Nelson’s, became gradually more constricted in the absence of a steady income. He lived in a Midtown loft until last year, when, he said, he got into a legal battle with his landlord over a rent increase — a relationship “ruined by greed,” he said. After that, he lived in his van for a while, then found an illegal squat in SoHo, which he shares with two others. Mr. Gutierrez had a middle-class upbringing in Dallas, and he said he initially found freeganism off-putting. But now he is steadfastly devoted to the way of life.

As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the biggest step.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/garden/21freegan.html





Lilly!

Herman Munster's Identity Stolen



Thieves apparently didn't realize he is a fictional 1960s TV character
Ted Bridis

Did Internet thieves steal Herman Munster's MasterCard number? Crooks in an underground chat room for selling stolen credit card numbers and personal consumer information offered pilfered data purportedly about Herman Munster, the 1960s Frankenstein-like character from "The Munsters" TV sitcom.

The thieves apparently didn't realize Munster was a fictional TV character and dutifully offered to sell Munster's personal details — accurately listing his home address from the television series as 1313 Mocking Bird Lane — and what appeared to be his MasterCard number. Munster's birth date was listed as Aug. 15, 1964, suspiciously close to the TV series' original air date in September 1964.

CardCops Inc., the Malibu, Calif., Internet security company that quietly recorded details of the illicit but wayward transaction, surmised that a Munsters fan knowledgeable about the show deliberately provided the bogus data.

"The identity thief thought it was good data," said Dan Clements, the company's president.

Clements said evidence indicates the thief, known online as "Supra," was operating overseas. "They really stumble over our culture. He's probably not watching any reruns of 'The Munsters' on TV Land."

Herman Munster was portrayed by Fred Gwynne, who died in July 1993.

"Phishing" thieves often trick consumers into revealing financial secrets by sending e-mail requests that appear to originate from banks. A consumer's financial details can be worth $4 and $40 among online thieves, who can use the information to open fraudulent credit accounts.

CardCops eavesdrops on conversations among thieves in underground Internet chat rooms to monitor for stolen credit card numbers being sold or traded. It offers monitoring services to alert consumers whose information is compromised by hackers.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19334522/

















Until next week,

- js.




















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