[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"How about a round of applause for the Lollipop Guild?" – WGA speaker


"In years past, our picketing schedule has gone, 'Picket on Mondays for two hours and then meet at a bar until the following Monday.' That’s not how we’re going to do it this time." – David Young


"We see technologies we think can mature into very capable industries that can generate electricity cheaper than coal." – Larry Page


"There are no words to explain my rage. These people were supposed to be our friends." – Tina Meier


"One way or another she's got to pay." – Kevin Washburn


"Cultural dominatrixes." – Alexandra Wagner


"You could go a year without spotting another Zune (and, in fact, you probably just have)." – David Pogue



































December 1st, 2007





EMI Wants to Cut Funding to Trade Groups –Source
Kate Holton

British music industry major EMI wants to cut its funding to the industry's trade bodies, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Wednesday, which could deal a blow to the fight against music piracy.

The source said EMI, which was recently taken over by private equity group Terra Firma, was looking at ways to "substantially" reduce the amount it pays trade groups.

The groups, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other national associations, represent music companies and the fight against illegal piracy.

They receive funding from the four major music groups -- EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal -- and hundreds of small independent labels.

The IFPI said it believed the four majors give approximately 64 million pounds ($132.1 million) each year to itself, the RIAA and many other national associations.

The other majors were not available for comment, but a separate industry source said at least one of the major music companies is known to strongly support the associations and their work.

EMI is undergoing a strategic review after being bought by Terra Firma for 2.4 billion pounds ($4.95 billion).

Like all music groups, it has been hit hard by online piracy and falling CD sales, despite the efforts of the trade groups to combat the problem.

The IFPI said on Wednesday it was engaged in annual budget decisions and "as one would expect in this market, there is a focus on efficiencies and savings".

It declined to give any further details but added that it was also engaged in a very full agenda to promote the rights of its member record companies.

EMI, Terra Firma, the BPI and RIAA were all unavailable to comment.

Illegal file-sharing is estimated to cost the music industry billions of dollars a year in revenues. In response, the trade bodies have launched legal action and called upon Internet service providers to block the activity.

Analysts at UBS said any move to reduce the funding to trade bodies could hamper the industry's efforts to fight piracy and protect music copyright. (Reporting by Kate Holton, editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...071128?sp=true





Oregon AG Seeks to Investigate RIAA Tactics
NewYorkCountryLawyer

Turning the tables on the RIAA's attempt to subpoena information from the University of Oregon, that state's Attorney General has now filed additional papers to conduct immediate discovery into the RIAA's "data mining" techniques. These techniques include the use of unlicensed investigators, the turning over of subpoenaed information to collection agencies, and the obtaining of personal information from computers.

The AG pointed out that "Because Plaintiffs routinely obtain ex parte discovery in their John Doe infringement suits ... their factual assertions supporting their good cause argument are never challenged by an adverse party and their investigative methods remain free of scrutiny. They often settle their cases quickly before defendants obtain legal representation and begin to conduct discovery."
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/11/30/1910202.shtml





RIAA Hits Top US Schools. But Not Harvard
p2pnet news

Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA targeted several Ivy League universities in its latest “initiative,” as their RIAA calls it as it continues to wreak havoc in universities up and down up and down America.

InformationWeek notes that among them are Columbia University, Duke University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Princeton, and Brown University.

But what it doesn’t note is the fact that missing, significantly, is Harvard.

Or as Ray Beckerman puts it on Recording Industry vs The People, this latest anti-college round, “targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth”

One could be forgiven for thinking Harvard is escaping victimisation because it’s co-operating by sending its students RIAA blackmail letters, as are so many other US universities.

But that’s not the case. In fact, to the contrary, “take a hike,” Charles Nesson, William F. Weld professor of law, Harvard Law School, and founder and faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director, the Berkman Center, told the Big 4’s RIAA attack dogs.

They stated:

ring, 1,200 pre-litigation letters arrived unannounced at universities across the country. The RIAA promises more will follow. These letters tell the university which students the RIAA plans on suing, identifying the students only by their IP addresses, the ‘license plates’ of Internet connections. Because the RIAA does not know the names behind the IP addresses, the letters ask the universities to deliver the notices to the proper students, rather than relying upon the ordinary legal mechanisms.

Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process.

Meanwhile, the InformationWeek story has RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) mouthperson Jonathan Lamy declaring the attacks on American students are necessary, “given the continuing prevalence of music theft on college campuses.”

He goes on:

“This theft triggers a harmful domino effect throughout the music community - thousands of regular, working class musicians and others out of work, record stores shuttered, new bands never signed.”

In a p2pnet post, a corporate music industry worker bemoans the fact that, “some people still believe that we in the music industry are ‘fat cats’ and that it’s [a] multi-billion-dollar cartel”.

He continues, “A lot of my friends has lost their jobs in the last few years, last week another big company were shut down because they couldn’t afford to keep going. All employees in five countries were laid off.”

However, “I’m sorry that you are making below minimum wage in the industry you are working in now. Since you love music, maybe you need to find a job in another industry and spend your hobby time producing and distributing music,” says Cyberscan.

“I am willing to guarantee that you will have a more original product. In fact the product that you produce in your home will be yours, and you can use it to advertise yourself or a friend’s business. If people like your product, they will either buy it or come to see you perform. If you are not a performer, try hooking up with a garage band that produces great music. Produce good music, distribute it for free … and add a link to your website. If the product is good, you will make money. Working for a big corporation is akin to slavery.”
http://p2pnet.net/story/14106





Woman to Pay Downloading Award Herself
Joshua Freed

Jammie Thomas makes $36,000 a year but says she's not looking for a handout to pay a $222,000 judgment after a jury decided she illegally shared music online.

"I'm not going to ask for financial help," she told The Associated Press on Friday. But she added, "If it comes, I'm not going to turn it down, either."

Record labels have sued more than 26,000 people they accuse of downloading and offering music for sharing online in violation of copyright laws. Many of those people have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars.

Thomas was the first person to fight back all the way to a trial. Six major record companies accused Thomas of offering 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network. At trial, they focused on 24 songs and jurors decided Thursday that Thomas willfully violated the copyright on all 24. Their verdict was for damages of $9,250 per song, or $222,000.

The recording industry won two victories with that verdict.

Beyond the money, the industry added to a growing body of legal precedents holding that making copyright-protected songs available online, even without proof the songs went anywhere, infringes on the copyrights for the songs.

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis was planning to instruct jurors as they began their deliberations that record companies would have to prove someone copied the songs to show copyright infringement.

But record company attorney Richard Gabriel cited cases where making songs available was found to be infringement, and Davis changed course.

Legal experts said the question isn't settled.

"Record labels don't like that because it's harder to prove," said Andrew Bridges, an attorney who has argued for the Computer & Communications Industry Association that copyright holders should have to prove the offered material is actually used.

"It's all about whether they get a free pass to impose onerous damages on people without actually having to prove a case," Bridges said.

International intellectual property treaties assume that simply making a work of art available can violate the copyright, said Jane C. Ginsburg, an intellectual law professor at Columbia Law School.

"It would be hard to see how we could be living up to our international obligations if the law were interpreted differently," she said.

Ray Beckerman, an attorney who has represented people sued by the record companies, said the companies used one case where there was a $22,500 default judgment to scare people into settling.

"Now, look at this. This is 10 times better. They can talk about this case, they can use it for frightening people," he said.

Beckerman said the damage award was disproportionate to the price of the 24 songs Thomas was accused of sharing for free. She could have bought them for 99 cents each on a legal download site, he said.

Record company lawyer Richard Gabriel argued at trial that Thomas made the songs available to millions of users on Kazaa.

The lawsuits have cost more than they've brought in. But the Recording Industry Association of America has said it wants the lawsuits to send a message that downloading music illegally is risky.

But the number of people sharing files online at any given time has risen 69 percent to almost 9.4 million since 2003, when the lawsuits began, according to BigChampagne LLC, research firm that tracks file-sharing traffic.

That suggests the publicity has had a limited effect in deterring people from swapping music online, said Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.

Record companies "don't want to be on the front page battling a lot of customers," Garland said. "They want to be on the front page selling a lot of Kanye records."

Thomas denied that the Kazaa account at issue during the trial was hers. Neither side presented the computer hard drive Thomas owned in 2004 and 2005, which she allegedly use to download and offer the songs.

Thomas said Friday that people who heard about the verdict have been leaving messages on her MySpace page offering to help.

"I guess it's my Native pride," said Thomas, who is a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. "Up until this point I have not held my hand out and asked for financial assistance from anyone."

Thomas, 30, works for the Mille Lacs band coordinating a federal grant for cleaning up contaminated land. She said she doesn't have the means to pay.

"I am a single mother of two boys. I make $36,000 a year at my job," she said. "At best they could try and get a court order garnishing my wages."

Her attorney, Brian Toder, said that copyright law automatically awards court costs and attorney fees to the winning party.

Paying those too could push the total judgment against Thomas as high as a half-million dollars.

Recording Industry Association of America spokeswoman Cara Duckworth declined to comment on the group's plans for enforcing the judgment.

Thomas questioned whether the record companies will be able to enforce the verdict because she is an enrolled member of the Mille Lacs band, lives on its land and works for the band.

But Kevin Washburn, who teaches American Indian Law as a visiting associate professor at Harvard Law School, said tribal courts generally enforce judgments from other courts. And since this is a federal verdict, the tribal courts might not even have a say in enforcing the verdict.

"One way or another she's got to pay," he said.

The companies that sued Thomas were EMI Group PLC's Capitol Records Inc.; the Arista Records LLC label and its parent Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is run by Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG; Vivendi SA's UMG Inc. and its label, Interscope Records; and Warner Bros. Records Inc., which is a unit of Warner Music Group Corp.
http://www.siliconvalley.com//ci_7089665





Software Group Targets Small Business
Brian Bergstein

Michael Gaertner worried he could lose his company. A group called the Business Software Alliance had written him to claim that his 10-person architectural firm in Galveston, Texas, was using unlicensed software.

The letter demanded $67,000 - most of one year's profit - or else the BSA would seek more in court.

"It just scared the hell out of me," Gaertner said.

An analysis by The Associated Press reveals that targeting small businesses is a lucrative strategy for the Business Software Alliance, the main global copyright-enforcement watchdog for such companies as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Symantec Corp.

Of the $13 million that the BSA reaped in software violation settlements with North American companies last year, almost 90 percent came from small businesses, the AP found.

The BSA is well within its rights to wring expensive punishments aimed at stopping the willful, blatant software copying that undoubtedly happens in many businesses. And its leaders say they concentrate on small businesses because that's where illegitimate use of software is rampant.

But technology managers and software consultants say the picture has more shades of gray than the BSA acknowledges. Companies of all sizes say they inadvertently run afoul of licensing rules because of problems the software industry itself has created. Unable or unwilling to create technological blocks against copying, the industry has saddled its customers with complex licensing agreements that are hard to master.

In that view, the BSA amasses most of its bounties from small businesses because they have fewer technological, organizational and legal resources to avoid a run-in.

In Gaertner's case, some employees had been unable to open files with the firm's drafting software, so they worked around it by installing programs they found on their own, breaking company rules, he said. And receipts for legitimate software had been lost in the hubbub of running his company.

"It was basically just a lack of knowledge and sloppy record-keeping on my part," said Gaertner, who ended up with a settlement that cost him $40,000.

In the U.S., the largest software market, piracy rates have not budged in years. BSA critics say that is because making examples out of small businesses has little deterrent effect, since many company owners like Gaertner don't even realize they're violating copyrights.

"If they were going after actual pirates, that would be a different story, but they're going after hardworking companies," said Barbara Rembiesa, head of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers.

She founded the group to educate businesses on how to manage their software because she felt the industry wasn't doing enough of that, even as it was imposing steep penalties for noncompliance.

"If you were driving down the street and you got a speeding ticket, and there was no speed limit sign, it probably would be thrown out of court," she said.

Yet the BSA is getting more aggressive. Its CEO says software licenses aren't as difficult as many users contend. It has dropped an amnesty campaign for businesses. And this year it began dangling rewards of up to $1 million to disgruntled employees who anonymously report their bosses for using counterfeit or unlicensed software.

"The software vendors have every right to collect the license fees they're entitled to," said Tom Adolph, an attorney with Jackson Walker LLP who has defended against BSA claims. "It's the tactics of the BSA that rankle me."

The BSA was founded in 1988 to represent technology companies on many fronts, and its members also include IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. The alliance spends more than $3 million a year on lobbying, prodding Congress on such issues as patent reform and Internet security.

But the most visible element is the BSA's fight against counterfeit software and illegal copying. Not all members are part of that effort; those that are include Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Autodesk Inc., Apple Inc. and McAfee Inc.

In countries with the highest piracy rates, the BSA has pushed governments to crack down, arguing that greater respect for intellectual-property laws would stimulate investment in their economies. In July, Chinese police who cooperated with the BSA and the FBI crushed rings that had been selling an estimated $2 billion worth of pirated Microsoft and Symantec software around the world.

These steps seem to work. The percentage of software in China that was not legitimately purchased is 82 percent, but that's down from 92 percent in 2003 and 96 percent a decade ago, according to BSA-commissioned market research.

Overall, the BSA says the worldwide piracy rate is 35 percent, down from 43 percent in 1996. However, the group says that because the industry has grown in that time, software companies' annual piracy losses have quadrupled. The BSA says piracy took a $40 billion bite out of a $246 billion industry in 2006.

In the United States, where the piracy rate is a worldwide-low 21 percent, the BSA's strategy includes working with law enforcement and Web sites like eBay to stop suspiciously cheap software sales online.

Beyond hunting for dicey characters buying and selling counterfeits, the BSA also devotes significant attention to other forms of what it calls piracy by business users. The money harvested in these company-by-company crackdowns is not parceled to its members whose copyrights were infringed; the funds stay with the BSA to fuel its operations. (BSA's worldwide settlements soared 53 percent last year to $56 million.)

Plenty of cases originate when a whistleblower reports that a company is intentionally cheating - copying one program onto multiple PCs. In extreme cases, the BSA will get court approval to raid companies in search of evidence.

However, there are ways to get in trouble that do not begin with counterfeits or downloads. Companies sometimes legitimately buy software and fail to follow the letter of the licensing agreements that accompany the programs.

For example, computers often get handed down. Newer, faster machines go to employees who perform intensive technical work, and their old PCs go to colleagues with lesser needs.

Commonly an employee can transfer a copy of, say, expensive drafting software to a new machine. But many companies forget or don't realize that the software should be deleted from the old machine if the company has only one license for it - even if the receptionist who gets the hand-me-down PC never uses drafting software.

The situation is further complicated because software licenses vary greatly. Some programs can be shared on multiple computers in an organization, or used by the same person on a home and office computer.

Multiply such oversights by dozens of software programs, and suddenly a BSA audit can lead to a charge of big-time piracy.

"They call it something awful, but sometimes you grow so fast, you can't keep control of everything," said Mike Lozicki, president of MediaLab Ventures LLC of Tampa, Fla., which paid the BSA $125,000. Lozicki said 12 percent of MediaLab's software was deemed out of compliance, much of it sitting unused. "It was some really obscure stuff," he said.

The BSA enforcement director, Jenny Blank, wouldn't comment on his case.

BSA audits zing companies for software that came with used computers they bought to save money. The BSA considers software pirated if a company can't produce a receipt for it, no matter how long ago it was purchased. Software boxes or certificates of authenticity are no help, because the BSA argues the software could have been obtained from an illegitimate source.

No wonder, then, there are companies that exist mainly to help other businesses track and comply with their software licenses.

Robert Holleyman, who has headed the BSA since 1990, countered by saying a lot of companies have figured out how to get their software licenses in order.

"I don't agree with the assumption that license management is necessarily a complex task," he said. "I think that to suggest that it's impossible to do - which is not your word, but is your inference - would belie the heroic efforts of the vast majority of software users."

Yet it's safe to say the software industry has not exactly handed its customers a product that is easy to manage. That's one reason why Britain's Federation Against Software Theft - an industry group that, like the BSA, pursues scofflaw companies - has a sister division that educates companies, for a fee, on how to stay compliant.

John Lovelock, the British group's director, said that if it undertook enforcement without the education program, "it would be half of a virtuous circle. It would give us only half of a solution."

The BSA does have some software-management tools and advice on the Web. And this summer, it partnered with the federal Small Business Administration to develop and publish educational materials about software compliance.

However, software-management gurus say the BSA could be far more active in assisting companies - which are, after all, its members' customers.

"Instead of just being the software police, be the police in the sense of helping old ladies across the street," said Barbara Scott, a software consultant for Redemtech Inc. "The BSA could become more of a partner with organizations that they're hammering as well."

Rather than a helping hand, BSA targets say they feel a stinging slap.

After an audit, the BSA generally demands at least twice the retail price of software deemed out of compliance. It also seeks the "unbundled" price of software that is sold together. So if a company loaded too many copies of a $300 package of Microsoft Office, the BSA might tally the retail value of every element in the package - Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. - which totals more than $1,000, and then at least double that.

Rob Scott, an attorney with Scott & Scott LLP who specializes in defending against BSA claims, argues that by charging the unbundled rate, the alliance misrepresents U.S. copyright law, which counts product compilations as single works when it comes to assessing damages. (The BSA says Scott's reading misdefines "compilation.")

The BSA accurately points out that under copyright law, it could collect up to $150,000 per infringed work if it prevailed in a lawsuit, or $30,000 if the incident was unintentional. Neil MacBride, the group's head of legal affairs, calls the law's figures "draconian" and says that by seeking less, the BSA gives violators a break.

Another way the BSA used to rebut accusations that its copyright crackdown was all stick and no carrot was through occasional "grace periods" or "software truces." In those periods, the BSA would air ads in certain cities, reminding companies of software copyright rules and giving them 30 days to buy new licenses without penalty.

But the group no longer offers such amnesties.

"We just moved on to something different," Blank said. "You just don't do the same thing all the time or it gets old."

Lately, there's been another change in BSA tactics.

For years the group implored unhappy employees to report their companies for software piracy. "Nail Your Boss!" the ads said. But beginning in 2005, the BSA sweetened the deal by offering $50,000 rewards to whistleblowers in the U.S. It raised the limit to $200,000 last year, and now it is $1 million.

That matched the top reward of a smaller trade group, the Software and Information Industry Association, which has many of the same members, but not Microsoft. (SIIA also serves as a copyright watchdog for media companies, including The Associated Press, that want to stop their content from being misused online.)

Blank says the high reward is having its intended effect: It is bringing in more leads. However, she also says about half of all tipsters don't want any money.

It's unlikely the BSA will ever pay $1 million. The rewards have a sliding scale, with informants eligible for $1 million only if the resulting case reaps more than $15 million. The BSA's largest case, against what it called an "international media company," pulled in $3.5 million. Most informants collect closer to $5,000.

Even so, having rewards at all raises questions of whether the BSA creates a perverse incentive for employees who discover their organizations out of compliance: Should they help their bosses get squared away or try for a BSA jackpot?

Although whistleblowers aren't revealed to the target company, businesses often suspect the tipster was a technical employee - even someone who had been responsible for handling software installations.

The BSA says people who intentionally load software improperly at a company are ineligible for rewards. But it can still bring a case sparked by someone who had let the problem fester.

That dynamic, coupled with the fact that software can be hard to manage, is why BSA critics contend the organization can get cash almost anywhere it pokes.

Blank disputes that notion. She said it's not worth the BSA's time to chase "onesy, twosy random noncompliance," so it focuses on the worst offenders.

Yet in 2005, her group pursued Mediaport Entertainment Inc. of Salt Lake City, where an audit revealed two unlicensed copies of Microsoft software. Retail value: $6,500. The BSA pressed for $16,500; the sides settled for an undisclosed amount.

Blank said she didn't recall the case.

When he directed BSA enforcement from 1993 to 2005, former federal prosecutor Bob Kruger didn't make much of grumbling from BSA targets. Mainly, he says, people were rationalizing software copying they knew was wrong.

"It's never fun to be investigated or audited or charged. I think it's human nature to say, `Well, you know it's not all my fault,'" Kruger said. "I don't think BSA was ever above reproach, but I think we always tried hard to run a program we could take pride in."

In particular, Kruger's group enjoyed big gains against piracy. Even in the U.S. it was over 30 percent in the 1990s, but it fell to 22 percent in 2003, according to the BSA-commissioned research.

"People are better now than they used to be. More often, it was the case in the past that BSA would identify organizations trying to get away with something," Kruger said. "More likely these days the disputes are going to center around negligence or sloppiness. It's not across the board, but I think it's a fair general statement. And that's because BSA has been, to some degree, successful in raising awareness."

Yet the campaign no longer shows momentum. The U.S. piracy rate ticked down to 21 percent in 2004, and there it remains.

So does the BSA need a new strategy?

"I think it's a fair question: What exactly is the problem the program is tackling now, as opposed to the problem it was tackling 10 years ago?" Kruger said. "If the problem is the same, that says something about the effectiveness of the program, doesn't it?"

Holleyman acknowledged that the BSA is finding it tough to have its "voice heard for the remaining part of the marketplace where there is piracy." But he said he sees no reason to try a dramatically new approach.

Top antipiracy executives at Microsoft and Autodesk praised the BSA for keeping piracy from rising; Autodesk said its experience supports the notion that smaller businesses have the biggest compliance problems. Other alliance members declined to comment.

They may be overlooking something: BSA targets commonly say they wish they didn't have to buy anything again from the companies that unleashed the alliance on them.

In one case, a BSA raid on musical-instrument maker Ernie Ball Inc. cost the company $90,000 in a settlement. Soon after, Microsoft sent other businesses in his region a flyer offering discounts on software licenses, along with a reminder not to wind up like Ernie Ball.

Enraged, CEO Sterling Ball vowed never to use Microsoft software again, even if "we have to buy 10,000 abacuses." He shifted to open-source software, which lacks such legal entanglements because its underlying code is freely distributed.

For many businesses, open-source has seemed technically daunting or unable to match the proprietary programs seen as essential in some industries. These days, however, the march of technology might be changing that.

That's one hope of Michael Gaertner, the architect who worried his BSA encounter would crush his business. Now he wants to rid himself of the Autodesk, Microsoft and Adobe software involved in the case.

"It's not like they have really good software. It's just that it's widespread and it's commonly used," Gaertner said. "It's going to be a while, but eventually, we plan to get completely disengaged from those software vendors that participate in the BSA."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





MovieX Leeches From The BitTorrent Community
Ernesto

The private BitTorrent tracker Moviex has been setup and configured to leech from public BitTorrent users. Through some clever modifications, their tracker allows non-members to seed to the private tracker, while downloading is forbidden.

Private BitTorrent trackers are supposed to be private and for registered members only. A non-member that downloads a torrent from a private tracker will usually get a tracker connection failure in their BitTorrent client. They will not be able to download or upload any data from that torrent, rendering the torrent useless to them. This is the basis that most private trackers work upon, but not Moviex.

Lately, several people have noticed a sudden rise in torrent files being uploaded to public indexing sites like Newtorrents, Mininova, and The Pirate Bay. These uploaded torrent files contain two announce URLs, one from The Pirate Bay and a moviex.info URL that always has the same passkey present, presumably the passkey for an anonymous user.

http://www.moviex.info:2710/...3c73mdqxj31q/announce
http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

To see a pirate bay tracker URL present in a torrent file is nothing out of the ordinary. So what’s special about the moviex.info URL being present in public torrents? Well, the message you get when trying to connect to the moviex.info tracker if you are not a member might give you a hint.

“Failure: access denied, leeching forbidden, you’re only allowed to seed”

Normally you would get something like: “Failure: unregistered torrent pass.” However, moviex.info allows non-members to seed files, while they are not allowed to download. This is a huge bonus for MovieX and its members. Currently, newtorrents.info provides 1000’s of downloads per day to torrent users and reportedly 50% of the available torrents on that site have the moviex.info tracker URL present, the actual percentage may even be be higher.

It is not unusual for private trackers to upload files to public sites. Most of the time this is done to advertise the tracker, so their community grows. However, we don’t see torrents like this very often, I’m not sure if they do this on purpose, but they are definitely leeching bandwidth from people who only use the public tracker. It’s a pretty nice system if you want your private tracker to gain external seeds along with faster download speeds for your members, It’s however also a very damaging method for any user who is not a member of MovieX.info as they will continually upload pieces of the torrent to users who will give very little if anything at all back.

To see exactly what this tracker configuration does and how it works watch the video below. The video shows two clear examples, one of a non seeded file and one of a seeded file using these rogue torrents, obviously for legal reasons we have renamed the torrents that I used for this demonstration (HQ download).

There is a way to prevent the leeching. If you download a torrent file from a public tracker check the tracker URL’s and remove the moviex.info announce URL if it is present. This will stop you seeding the file on that tracker and in turn not allow members of moviex.info to leech data from you. You could also try blocking their IP Address (206.53.62.206) in your IP filter if you are not a member of the MovieX community.

MovieX have taken the time to code this feature into their tracker and at the moment as far as we can tell they are the only private site exploiting this type of dirty hack to leech from external BitTorrent users. What moviex.info should do is configure their tracker not to allow external users without a passkey to connect to their tracker in any way, instead it would seem they have deliberately setup to leech as much data from the public BitTorrent community as possible and boost their own private community speeds. MovieX deny this is the case and claim these torrents to be no more than simple advertising for the site in an attempt to attract new members?
http://torrentfreak.com/moviex-leech...munity-071201/





U.S. Slump Casts Pall Over Media, Entertainment
Kenneth Li

A U.S. economic recession could hammer those media and entertainment companies that rely heavily on advertising next year, curtailing experimentation when the industry needs it most.

Just how severe the impact of a sinking U.S. housing market, global credit crunch and possible slowdown in consumer spending will be depends on many factors, including how deeply embedded a company's product are in people's homes, executives told the Reuters Media Summit in New York this week.

Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto, who downgraded the entertainment sector in September, sketched out an even bleaker view if a recession materializes.

His firm pegged the risk of recession at 45 percent and Noto said that could cause ad revenue among traditional media companies to tumble 10 percent in 2008, compared with current estimates of flat to 1 percent growth.

While nearly all media companies depend in part on ads, worst hit will likely be print media and broadcaster CBS Corp, where advertising accounts for over 70 percent of revenue.

Entertainment companies with international exposure and Internet businesses could buck the trend. Noto cited News Corp and Walt Disney Co as top performers next year, noting however that even News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch is hedging forecasts against worse conditions.

"Obviously a recession is not a good thing and will have an impact on ad spending," Peter Levinsohn, president of News Corp's Fox Interactive Media, told the summit. "In times like that advertisers tend to move more towards accountability ... We still feel pretty good about our prospects."

Media companies that make their money by selling their entertainment could have a cushion, as consumers seek diversions even in the worst of times.

Electronic Arts Chief Executive John Riccitiello pointed out that its Pogo online casual games sites had one of its best days on September 12, 2001, one day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"People were at home and they had to do something. They were probably flipping back and forth between Reuters, CNN and Pogo," he said.

Fringe At Risk

Online ad growth across the industry is expected to rise more than 20 percent this year, fueling heavy investments. But consumption of new entertainment forms is tiny compared to traditional viewing habits.

For example, video viewing on the Web from the likes of Google Inc's YouTube relative to television watching is currently about 0.01 percent, said David Sanderson, head of Bain & Co.'s global media practice.

Web search, led by Google, should weather a recession, but more novel types of advertising -- such as ads on mobile phones and commercials built into video-on-demand programming -- could be vulnerable.

"Clearly, the fringe areas would be much more impacted... the newer areas that have less of a track record in terms of their ability to have a direct marketing impact," said Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer for North America at WPP Group's media-buying division GroupM.

Scanzoni said his division now expects lower U.S. ad growth for the 12 months to September 2008 of 3.7 percent to 3.8 percent, compared with a prior forecast of 4.2 percent.

Bright Spot

Gangbuster holiday sales of video games -- buoyed by titles this quarter including Activision Inc's "Guitar Hero III" and Electronic Arts Inc and Viacom Inc's "Rock Band" -- have put a new shine on the sector.

Top executives say the sector appears relatively recession-proof and is more vulnerable to industry-specific events, such as game console cycles, than economic fluctuations.

And for the first time in the current generation, sales of games for latest generation systems -- Sony Corp's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 -- have surpassed sales of older titles, EA's Riccitiello said.

"Most anything you can consume in your home wins at the expense of things that require travel or capital expense," he said.

Strauss Zelnick, chairman of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive Inc, warned that no sector should consider itself immune. Zelnick's career is rooted in traditional media, including stints as a former CEO of BMG Entertainment and President of 20th Century Fox.

"No entertainment business is truly counter-cyclical," he said. "People try to tell you that but it's just not the truth. Think about it -- you've just lost your home. No, you're not going to pay $50 on a video game, you're just not, even though it's Christmas time."
http://www.reuters.com/article/Media...21008520071130





Open Letter From TorrentFreak To Brein
Ernesto

The infamous anti-piracy watchdog BREIN infringed our copyright earlier this week as they used a quote from one of our articles without attribution. As a follow up to our previous article, we wrote an open letter to BREIN to educate the public about their lack of respect for the rights of people who don’t pay them millions.

Here’s what the MPAA has to say about what Brein did: “Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person’s shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging.”

One of our counsels has put together an open letter to BREIN to show how hypocritical they are. They don’t care about copyright, they care about money and blame pirates for the inability of their clients to adapt their business models to technological change.

Letter:

—

Dear Mr Kuik

Being vociferous exponents of the fight against copyright infringement, your organization is expected to uphold the highest possible standards where the misuse of other people’s intellectual property is concerned.

It has been brought to my attention that your organization has reproduced text from an article published by this website concerning the website SumoTorrent, without prior written consent1 and without complying with the copyright terms applicable to this publication, TorrentFreak2.

Specifically, your organization has selectively and misleadingly quoted from our publication without properly attributing the source, in contravention of the Creative Commons license3 under which this text was published. This is a contemptible infringement of our own intellectual property rights, illustrative of a gross lack of professionalism on your part.

Furthermore, you have mischievously and inaccurately attributed the source of the material stolen from ourselves as being “a pirate weblog”. This amounts to actionable libel, inasmuch that neither the owners nor the staff of this publication – a well respected and widely read source of filesharing news - have ever been accused, suspected or prosecuted, for any so-called act of piracy. We are neither sailors nor thieves of other people’s intellectual property, unlike yourselves.

Your “news release” is peppered with inaccurate information, calculated to mislead and intimidate the millions of legitimate users of the many peer-to-peer filesharing services that are in common use throughout the world. Much of the material that is shared by sites targeted by yourselves such as SumoTorrent is open source, copyright has never been asserted or it is in the public domain. To presume otherwise is to add arrogance to the ignorance your organization has already exhibited.

There is, and there can never be, any legitimacy attached to your harassment5 of those who merely assist in finding the location of such copyright free material. The indiscriminate prevention of people’s enjoyment of their own property, in this case their own computers, is in direct contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights4.

Having learned that you have falsely claimed that a District Court judgment in June 2007 against a specific defendant amounted to some sort of precedent, justifying your demand that others breach data protection principles5 & 6, my expectations of your professionalism are not high.

Whilst I harbor no illusions that you will have the grace to apologize for your unwarranted breach of my own rights in these matters, this letter will serve to educate others and make public your abuse of process, your contempt for the rights of others and your outright hypocrisy.

Sincerely

TorrentFreak Counsel
legal@torrentfreak.com

http://torrentfreak.com/open-letter-...-brein-071125/





Sony Sued in Meat Loaf Logo Row
BBC

Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 30 million copies

Sony Music must pay $5m (£2.4m) to a small record company for missing its logo off Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell album, a US court has ruled.

The decision comes after a court settlement in 1998 decided Sony should include the Cleveland International logo on future copies of the record.

But Sony failed to add the logo for more than a year afterwards.

Cleveland founder Steve Popovich said: "I worked too hard for them and made them too much money to get robbed now."

Sony claimed the logo omission was a mistake that was eventually corrected.

According to court documents, Sony claimed that Mr Popovich had fabricated the logo agreement.

In an original dispute over royalties from the album, Mr Popovich and his former partners were awarded $6.7m (£3.2m) by Sony.

Bat Out of Hell, which was originally released in 1977, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, according to court records.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7108975.stm





Copyright Choices and Voices
Michael Geist

Last week, I delivered an hour-long speech on copyright to the Canadian Federation of Students (the slides are here and posted below and a podcast is here). Since the audio on the podcast version of the talk is poor, I want to reiterate my central message. In the past, I have spoken frequently about the opportunity for Canada to make its own choices on copyright reform. After highlighting the remarkable array of new developments for content creation, content sharing, and knowledge sharing, I have emphasized the need for copyright laws that look ahead, rather than behind. In particular, I have pointed to the dangers associated with anti-circumvention legislation, to the need for more flexible fair dealing, to the desirability of eliminating crown copyright, and to the benefits of open access and open licensing. I typically conclude by stating that this can be Canada's choice and that we must choose wisely.

This speech had a different conclusion, however. Sometime over the next two or three weeks, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will rise in the House of Commons and introduce copyright reform legislation. We can no longer speak of choices because those choices have already been made. There is every indication (see the Globe's latest coverage) this legislation will be a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The industry may be abandoning DRM, the evidence may show a correlation between file sharing and music purchasing, Statistics Canada may say that music industry profits are doing fine, Canadian musicians, filmmakers, and artists may warn against this copyright approach, and the reality may be that Canadian copyright law is stronger in some areas than U.S. law, yet none of that seems to matter. In the current environment and with the current Ministers, politics trumps policy.

The new Canadian legislation will likely mirror the with strong anti-circumvention legislation - far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties - and address none of the issues that concern millions of Canadians. The Conservatives promise to eliminate the private copying levy will likely be abandoned. There will be no flexible fair dealing. No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.

The government will seemingly choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a "Canadian-made" solution. Once the bill is introduced, look for the government to put it on the fast track with limited opportunity for Canadians to appear before committees considering the bill. With a Canadian DMCA imminent, what matters now are voices. It will be up to those opposed to this law to make theirs heard.

Update: Many people have asked what they can do to make their voices heard on this issue. Last year, I posted 30 Things You Can Do about anti-circumvention legislation. Many of those recommendations still apply, starting with a letter (letter, not email - no stamp required) to your Member of Parliament, the Ministers of Industry and Canadian Heritage, and the Prime Minister.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2419/125/





Swiss DMCA Coming Down -- 50,000 Signatures Needed to Unmake It
Dave

Who cares about about Swiss copyright laws? Nobody it seems, not even Swiss citizens.

On the 5th of October 2007, the Swiss law makers adopted a new law to comply with the WIPO treaties. Thanks to the entertainment lobbies, apart from criminalizing DRM circumvention devices, you can now win a one year visit in jail if you share a copyrighted file on a P2P network.

Did anybody hear about this new law ? No. Not even Swiss citizens. The media is quiet about this.

The thing is, Switzerland uses a direct democracy system, and this new law could be the subject to a federal vote if 50,000 people sign a request for it. That's called a Referendum request, and the deadline for its deposit is the 24th of January 2008. If there's no Referendum request by then, the law will become effective.

There's little doubt that if federal votes were to made today, the law would pass anyway. But at least a public debate could be created around the issue and people could react.

I'm sending you this news item because I just read your news post about Canada. It seems that in Canada some people are fighting because they're aware of the situation. Please somebody stand up and start a debate in Switzerland. Please.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/28...coming-do.html





Consumer Groups Oppose Satellite Merger
FMQB

A coalition made up of the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Free Press have sent a letter to the FCC, urging the Commission to reject the proposed merger of XM and Sirius. In the filing, the organizations reiterate their position that it is a proposed "merger to monopoly that will unleash the market power of the satellite digital radio service providers at the expense of the public." The groups also call the proposed a la carte pricing "ill-defined and deceptive" and say that "nothing in the regulatory proposal will protect artists or retailers from the exercise of market power."

The 20 page document goes into great detail in the organizations' arguments against the proposed merger, with charts and data detailing the a la carte pricing possibilities, other price structures and trends in terrestrial radio over the past 11 years. Data from the FCC is used by the coalition to prove their point that the satcasters are not in competition with terrestrial stations.

The organizations conclude that the merger would not serve the public interest, stating that "This is a merger to monopoly. That was apparent on day one and it is still apparent today after thousands of pages of comments. The would be monopolists first tried to wrap the merger in a theory of intermodal competition that could not stand scrutiny. They then shifted to an attempt to convince regulators to abandon a century of principle and practice in merger review. Finally, they produced internal data that asks the wrong questions and is contradicted by publicly available data."

They continued that the satcasters "tried to sweeten the pot with an offer of price regulation that adds little value for consumers and is riddled with uncertainties, which, given their track record they will likely exploit to the detriment of the public, and fails to address a broad range of competitive concerns beyond price. Federal regulators should reject the merger."

XM and Sirius have released a statement in which they stand by their arguments and says they are "confident the FCC and DOJ will...allow the merger to proceed by the end of the year."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=520492





F.C.C. Chief Forced to Scale Back Cable Plan
Stephen LaBaton

In the face of a lobbying blitzkrieg from cable television executives and their lobbyists, the head of the Federal Communications Commission said this evening that he had struck a compromise to salvage but scale back his agenda to regulate the industry more tightly.

The compromise was a significant though not total victory for the cable industry, whose executives and lobbyists had worked to erode support for the agenda of the chairman, Kevin J. Martin, among his fellow commissioners. Among other things, consideration of a controversial finding proposed by Mr. Martin — that the industry had grown so dominant that the agency had expanded authority to impose other regulations — would be put off for months.

But the compromise would also impose some limited new regulation on the industry. And it enabled Mr. Martin to say that he was still able to force action that he and some consumer groups maintain could help to make programming more diverse and ultimately reduce cable costs. One of the new rules, for instance, would make it significantly less expensive for independent programmers to lease access to channels.

“As a package, these are all important steps,” Mr. Martin said in an interview this evening, referring to both the cable provisions and others that he said the agency would adopt. One would extend the “do not call” registry for five years, and another would enable lower-power radio stations to get on the airwaves.

Consumer groups, who have been allies with Mr. Martin on the cable issues and began the day fearful that his agenda would go down in defeat, ended up relieved that he was able to salvage parts of it.

But cable industry lobbyists also said that they were pleased that they had been able to kill or modify much of the package.

“The bottom line is we dodged a huge bullet,” said a top industry lobbyist who declined to be identified before the commission took a formal vote.

As in the past when the commission faces difficult issues, the meeting today was repeatedly postponed to give time to the commissioners to hammer out an agreement.

Mr. Martin is a rare Republican appointee of President Bush who has not been afraid to impose stiff regulations where he says there are market failures. In the case of the cable industry, he has repeatedly complained about increasingly higher prices, vulgar programs and market tactics that he says discourage competition from other pay-television providers.

But in the process, he has alienated cable television executives, who have complained to senior White House officials and lawmakers in recent days that Mr. Martin has overreached. They say he has sought to change the business models of the industry’s largest players in an ill-advised effort to help the telephone companies, which have begun to challenge the cable industry by offering television service.

Mr. Martin disclosed earlier this month that the commission would issue a report that would give the agency expanded powers over the cable industry after making a formal finding that the industry had grown too dominant. But after the industry and its supporters in Congress sharply questioned the basis for the finding, Mr. Martin was unable to muster a majority of the five-member commission in support of the report.

The data originally used for the finding was based not on direct numbers from companies, but on surveys by industry analysts. Under the compromise, cable companies will have two months to submit the numbers of customers and size of their markets, which the agency could use next year to determine whether the industry had grown too large.

Mr. Martin had also proposed to make it less expensive for independent programmers to have access to cable channels, and to set up a new complaint procedure that would impose arbitration to resolve disputes between the cable operators and programmers like the NFL Network and the Hallmark Channel. But as it became clear this morning that he did not have the support that he anticipated, he abandoned the complaint procedure.

A third proposal, which would make it less expensive for independent programmers to lease access to channels, is expected to be approved as part of the compromise package, officials said. But it will not go into effect immediately, as originally planned.

Mr. Martin said he thought earlier this month that he had the support of the commission’s two Democrats for the proposals, including a finding that the industry had become so dominant that the agency had expanded jurisdiction to impose new rules. That would have given him a slim majority. Mr. Martin’s two fellow Republicans on the commission had in varying degrees publicly questioned some of the proposals, and they were expected to support the industry in opposition to them.

But the agency faced a lobbying barrage in recent days by industry executives and their executives, who complained to lawmakers and senior White House officials that Mr. Martin had overreached. And one of the Democrats, Jonathan S. Adelstein, who is up for renomination next year, began to express reservations about the proposals, even though consumer groups insisted that he had assured them of his support.

As part of the lobbying effort, top cable executives and lobbyists met last week with senior White House officials, including Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff; Allan B. Hubbard, the president’s top economic adviser; and Joel D. Kaplan, the deputy chief of staff and a longtime friend of Mr. Martin’s, two lobbyists involved in those meetings said today.

A White House spokesman did not return a call seeking comment about the meetings, or about whether any officials had contacted anyone at the commission.

Republicans in the House and Senate sent letters to Mr. Martin echoing the industry’s concerns about the cable proposals, as did senior cable television and network executives.

The proposal that drew the most fire was a finding that the industry had become so dominant that the agency should have expanded powers to impose more regulations.

The agency had been preparing to invoke this authority under the so-called 70/70 rule of the Cable Communications Act of 1984. Under that provision, the agency may adopt any rules necessary to promote “diversity of information sources” once the commission concludes that cable television is available to at least 70 percent of American households, and at least 70 percent of those households actually subscribe to a cable service.

Officials and consumer groups said that the 70/70 cable television finding would provide the legal basis for the commission to adopt rules in the coming weeks and months aimed at increasing programming and reducing rates for consumers. They include a cap that would prevent the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast, from growing.

In a recent interview, Mr. Adelstein, a commission member since 2002, said he felt that Mr. Martin was rushing a series of measures through the commission to give him political cover for his proposal to loosen other rules, in particular relaxing the rule that has prevented a media company from owning a newspaper and a broadcast or television station in the same market. Mr. Adelstein has criticized the proposed change of the newspaper-broadcast cross- ownership rule, which is set to be decided by the commission next month.

“There is a manic attempt to finish an aggressive number of controversial decisions on short notice,” Mr. Adelstein said on Sunday. “Longstanding procedures were short-circuited on issues that deserve more thoughtfulness. The reason for the push is to provide quick cover for the media consolidation agenda.”

In the face of a deeply divided commission, Mr. Martin also withdrew a proposal to encourage more minority ownership of radio and television stations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/bu...-cable.html?hp





Laugh Lines in the Hollywood Strike
Brooks Barnes

When the 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America decided on Nov. 4 to strike, Hollywood wondered how hard the white-collar group would fight. The guild addressed the worry before the first pickets hit the streets.

“In years past, our picketing schedule has gone, ‘Picket on Mondays for two hours and then meet at a bar until the following Monday,’” said David Young, the union’s director, early this month. “That’s not how we’re going to do it this time.”

Studio executives rolled their eyes, but they soon blanched as well-organized pickets fanned out across Los Angeles and New York, and only grew in intensity. It turns out, many union members say, that striking in Hollywood — at least short term — is not that bad. A lot of strikers say they are enjoying networking, taping YouTube videos, organizing theme days and dreaming up placard slogans.

“The studios think we are having a horrible time out here,” said Richard Potter, a screenwriter who made “Strike Dancing,” a YouTube video showing pickets bebopping in formation to “Play That Funky Music.”

“What’s actually happening is we’re having a great time.”

The video is one of dozens on YouTube — most of them humorous, or trying to be — that are helping the union win the public relations war. A nationwide poll released on Nov. 14 by Pepperdine University found that 63 percent of Americans sided with the writers.

No one contends that writers would prefer to be walking in circles and shouting into megaphones than working. On Monday, the union and the studios will resume contract negotiations for the first time in 22 days. Writers are crossing their fingers that the studios will agree to give them a bigger cut of the proceeds from Internet reruns and that the strike will soon be over.

Still, certain perks in picketing are undeniable. For a lot of writers, picketing at a studio’s front gate is the closest brush with the movie industry’s halls of power they have ever had. They can wave to Steven Spielberg as he drives onto the lot and rub elbows with notably successful people in their field, like Steven Bochco, Tina Fey and J. J. Abrams, the creator of “Alias” and “Lost.”

Even some prominent screenwriters have been star-struck. “I didn’t know J. J. at all, except as a geeky fan,” wrote John August, the writer of the “Charlie’s Angels” movies and “Big Fish,” on his blog. In another posting, Mr. August offered to chat with screenwriting students while marching.

“Get to know some film and TV writers and talk to them about their work,” he wrote. “I was delighted to finally meet Gary Whitta,” a screenwriter and comic-book author.

There have been other attractions for striking writers. A special theme day, Picket With the Stars, drew celebrities like Ben Stiller, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ray Romano in Los Angeles. Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams turned up in New York.

To help cheer up striking members, and to keep reporters interested, the union helped organize impromptu concerts. The pop singer K. T. Tunstall performed an acoustic set outside an NBC parking lot in Burbank, Calif., while Alicia Keys headlined a rally last Tuesday that tied up sections of Hollywood Boulevard.

“Forget the strike, I’m just here to be entertained,” remarked Toni Perling, a television writer whose credits include “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” as Ms. Keys got started.

She had come to the right place. “When somebody is doing us wrong, they must go!” Ms. Keys shouted, before sitting down at a piano on the back of a truck. Several dozen writers jostled to take her picture with their camera phones.

Pickets have been well fed. The longshoremen’s union sent turkey baskets, and stars have played caterer roles. Justine Bateman brought tacos, Jay Leno chipped in doughnuts, and Jimmy Kimmel contributed burritos. Eva Longoria handed out slices of pizza.

Some union members say they are criticized no matter what they do on the picket line. At first, they drew comments about boring signs.

“People would say, ‘You people are writers — where is the creativity?’” recalled Joe Medeiros, head writer for “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” Early in the strike, most pickets carried signs reading simply, “On Strike.”

Writers took note. “They Wrong, We Write” became popular, as did slogans ridiculing J. Nicholas Counter III, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios. “Nick Counter Hates Babies and Puppies” was a favorite, and Katherine Heigl, a “Grey’s Anatomy” actress, weighed in with “Nick Counter is a Wiener.”

One person mounted a typewriter on the end of a metal crutch and waved that in the air.

The seeming contradiction between the serious strike and the circus sideshow was on display at the Hollywood Boulevard rally, which drew more than 4,000 people.

Writers pumped their fists in the air, cheered speeches by union officers and shouted slogans like, “On strike, shut ’em down. Hollywood’s a union town.”

Even the Teamsters were impressed.

“Wow,” said Leo Reed, the gruff secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 399 and director of its motion picture division. “You are acting like a militant union.”

At other times, the protest more closely resembled a Halloween parade. A man in a full Spider-Man costume picketed, as did someone dressed as the Incredible Hulk. Seven elderly actors who played munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” rode by in a carriage, waving.

“How about a round of applause for the Lollipop Guild?” a union speaker said.

Roxana Brusso, an actress picketing in support of the writers, made an adjustment to her Ugg boot and shrugged. “Well, that’s Hollywood for you,” she said.

While some union-sanctioned theme days have included “Bring Your Kids” and “Performers With Disabilities,” C. Jay Cox noticed that there was no day for gay and lesbian writers. So Mr. Cox, who wrote the screenplay for the movie “Sweet Home Alabama,” organized one.

“We’ll get a chance to catch up with some old friends,” his invitation said, “oh-so-casually check out some potential new ones and make snide comments about one another’s attire.”

Silvio Horta, writer-producer of “Ugly Betty,” declared the gay-theme day “like a party at my house.” About 200 people attended, eating Pinkberry yogurt and grooving to an iPod playlist as they marched. Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” handed out fruit bars.

Not everyone in the Writers Guild of America appreciated the effort. “Every other day I get some new mass e-mail from the WGA about what ‘fun’ themed strike event is coming up,” a writer on an industry blog said. “Is this a strike or a social event?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/bu.../26strike.html





Striking Screenwriters Dismiss New Proposals
Michael Cieply

Striking screenwriters on Thursday night dismissed a new set of proposals from producers as “a massive rollback,” and called on their members to continue their walkout with fresh resolve despite a plan to continue talks on Tuesday.

In a move to end a nearly four-week-old strike by writers, Hollywood’s studios and networks — represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — earlier in the day offered a new package of proposals that includes a revised offer for payments related to movies and shows distributed via new media.

In a statement, producers said the new package, styled a “New Economic Partnership” with writers, would add $130 million to $1.3 billion already paid annually to writers.

One company executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with writers and other executives, said the word “partnership” was chosen to convey a sense that the new proposals were far-reaching, offered new approaches to issues that had separated the parties and involved “give and take” between writers and producers.

The new proposals were disclosed in a press release at the end of a Thursday bargaining session. The sides had talked for four days in an effort to conclude a nearly four-week old strike by 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East.

Writers have been demanding payments for electronic downloads many times higher than the companies initially offered, and have sought to limit promotional showings to a matter of days, at most.

In a letter to members, however, the two guilds blasted the proposal as inadequate. They said, for instance, that it would pay only $250 for a year’s re-use of an hour-long program streamed on the Web, in contrast to the $20,000 currently paid for a network re-run. They also said the new proposal did not change the company’s proposed payments for downloaded films and shows. The guilds also said the companies refused to grant them jurisdiction over original content produced for the Internet.

The continued stand-off pushed Hollywood toward a decision point in the next week or so, as writers will have to decide whether to dig in for a long strike, or return to work without a contract, perhaps to resume their walk-out next June when members of the Screen Actors Guild might join them.

At the same time, companies will rapidly see the rest of the current television season crumble, unless they make another move to meet the writers’ demands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/bu...riters.html?hp





NBC Host Carson Daly to Defy Writers Strike
Steve Gorman

NBC's after-hours star Carson Daly is poised to become the first U.S. late-night television talk show host to cross the picket lines of striking Hollywood writers.

"Last Call with Carson Daly," which immediately halted production at the outset of the screenwriters' strike three weeks ago, plans to resume taping Wednesday for new episodes that will begin airing next week, an NBC spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

No guest roster for the half-hour show, which airs daily at 1:35 a.m. Eastern time, was revealed, and it was not clear which night next week the program would return.

"He wanted to go back to support his staffers," the network spokeswoman said.

The General Electric Co.-owned network had informed the non-writing staff of Daly's show, as well as "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," that they face layoffs at the end of this week unless they returned to the airwaves.
All three programs, along with shows hosted by David Letterman and Craig Ferguson on CBS, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on cable network Comedy Central, were thrown into reruns when the Writers Guild of America launched its strike on November 5.

NBC's weekly sketch comedy show "Saturday Night Live" also was knocked out of production.

NBC said there were no immediate plans for any of its other shows to return to production, and there was no indication the late-night programs on other networks intended to do so.

Representatives of several late-night shows were reported earlier this month to be quietly discussing among themselves when it might be appropriate for their hosts to return to the air without their writing staffs.

Doing so presumably would require the late-night hosts, who generally depend on a steady stream of topical jokes and comedy bits, to work with less-scripted material, perhaps with more time devoted to interviews.

The WGA had no immediate comment on Daly's plans.

Representatives for the striking writers and the major film and TV studios resumed contract talks for a second straight day on Tuesday as Hollywood's worst labor clash in nearly 20 years stretched into its fourth week. The sides have imposed a media blackout on their meetings.

The WGA's old contract expired on November 1, and the union launched its strike four days later as talks deadlocked on the question of how much money writers should earn in "residual" fees when their work is delivered via the Internet and wireless devices like cell phones.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/indust...52150520071127





Witherspoon, Jolie Top List of High-Paid Actresses

What a difference an Oscar makes when it comes to being among Hollywood's top-paid actresses, with Reese Witherspoon named on Friday as the highest earner of them all.

Witherspoon, who won the Oscar for best actress in 2005's "Walk the Line," earns an estimated $15 million to $20 million per movie and holds top spot on The Hollywood Reporter's annual list of high-paid actresses.

Angelina Jolie, who won the supporting actress Oscar in 2000's "Girl, Interrupted," landed in the No. 2 slot.

She also reportedly earns $15 million to $20 million a movie, but was paid only $8 million in a supporting role for the recent "Beowulf," the show business newspaper said.

Witherspoon, by contrast, can easily command more than $15 million if she stars in a comedy in the vein of her "Legally Blonde" hits, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Cameron Diaz, who is the voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" movies, came in the No. 3 slot with an asking price of more than $15 million.

Two more Oscar winners, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger, landed in the No. 4 and No. 5 positions with estimated asking prices of $10 million to $15 million per film.

Rounding out the top 10 were familiar faces earning over $10 million a movie. In order, they were Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, Jodie Foster and Halle Berry.

(Reporting by Bob Tourtellotte, editing by Belinda Goldsmith)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...28489620071130





Appeals Court Voids Agreement to Pay Freelancers for Work Published on the Web
Richard Pérez-Peña

A federal appeals court yesterday threw out a hard-fought agreement between publishers and freelance writers to pay the writers for electronic reproduction of their work.

In a 2-to-1 decision, an appellate panel ruled that the courts had no jurisdiction over the copyright dispute and that a lower court erred in accepting the writers’ lawsuit and approving the settlement.

People on both sides of the dispute said it was unclear what would happen next — whether the decision would be appealed, a new suit filed, or a new agreement negotiated.

“The decision is an outrage, and I hope it’s appealable to the Supreme Court,” said Gerard Colby, president of the National Writers Union, and a plaintiff.

In 2001, the United States Supreme Court ruled that digital reproduction of newspaper, magazine and other articles without the writers’ permission violated their copyrights. Publishers removed such articles from their digital archives and began requiring freelancers to explicitly cede electronic rights to their work.

But that did not resolve claims for monetary damages for the earlier violations. In Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge George B. Daniels allowed a class-action suit by writers and their organizations; without that crucial step, each writer determined to win payment would have had to sue individually.

The suit named major publishers and archive services, including the Thomson Corporation, The New York Times Company, Dow Jones & Company, the LexisNexis unit of the Reed Elsevier Group and the Tribune Company.

After years of negotiation, the companies and the writers reached a settlement in March, 2005, which the judge approved. It provided for mostly modest payments to freelancers, and capped the publishers’ payout at $18 million.

But yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan voided the settlement.

In his decision, Judge Chester J. Straub wrote that federal copyright law allows claims for damages only by writers who have registered their work with the United States Copyright Office. The vast majority of freelancers did not register, so he said the courts had no jurisdiction over their disputes, and the case should not have been approved as a class-action suit.

He noted that the defendants had themselves made similar arguments before settling and stated that they settled the case out of “the desire to achieve global peace in the publishing industry.”

The settlement had recognized the gap in standing, providing higher payments for writers who had registered their work with the copyright office. Judge Ralph K. Winter joined in the majority.

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Judge John M. Walker argued that the registration requirement was a malleable procedural rule for processing a legal claim, not a strict limit on the court’s jurisdiction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/bu...copyright.html





ABC News and Facebook in Joint Effort to Bring Viewers Closer to Political Coverage
Brian Stelter

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become a full-fledged platform for communicating, sharing and advertising. ABC News is betting that it will become a platform for political coverage, as well.

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

To underscore their collaboration, the two organizations will announce today that they are jointly sponsoring Democratic and Republican presidential debates in New Hampshire on Jan. 5, three days before the primary election there.

“Through this partnership, we want to extend the dialogue both before and after the debate,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president for business development.

The announcements are another sign that news organizations are looking to capitalize on the potential power of Facebook, which began as a database of college friendships, and other social networking sites. Media companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post have produced pages for use on Facebook and some newspapers, magazines and television stations have recently invited users to join special pages that are set up to follow reporters’ political coverage. But ABC’s new relationship is intended to be deeper.

“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News and a new Facebook member, said. “This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”

The collaboration between ABC News and Facebook started quietly several weeks ago, with personal pages of network reporters like Rick Klein, the author of ABC’s widely read political newsletter The Note, and Sunlen Miller, who has been covering Barack Obama.

Encouraging users to interact with reporters is a significant step for a news organization like ABC News. Until recently, a viewer wanting to respond to Mr. Klein’s daily essay could only write a comment or send an e-mail message to a generic address. Now, they can send private messages directly to reporters or can post them on the reporters’ public Facebook pages. For now, while the number of comments remains relatively small, reporters engage in dialogues with viewers.

Mr. Westin and Mr. Rose said that no money changed hands in the deal. For ABC News, the collaboration puts political content on a site with 56 million active users. For Facebook, it adds an authoritative source and fresh content for the site’s political section.

Around 250 users have signed up to follow Ms. Miller, an off-air reporter, making her the most popular to date. Ms. Miller believes her popularity is tied to the strong backing for Mr. Obama among Facebook users, with 164,000 declared supporters, more than twice as many as any other candidate.

“If you’re ABC News, your content can spread virally through all these friend networks,” said Steve Outing, an interactive media columnist for Editor & Publisher magazine.

For example, Eloise Harper, another off-air reporter, used a digital camera to record a 50-second clip of flags falling down behind Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign appearance in Iowa. The clip has been viewed over 350,000 times on ABCNews.com and Facebook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/technology/26abc.html





MTV to Cut Down on P2P Piracy by Offering Free South Park Downloads
Emilie Branstetter

MTV Networks, the biggest division of Viacom Inc. has announced plans to make every South Park episode available online for free as part of a plan to make the show available to a larger audience.

MTV originally based this decision from the success of providing "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" online. Since offering the "Daily Show" videos in October, viewership has been up with no obvious harm to ratings.

"One does not diminish the other by any stretch of the imagination. That is kind of our hat trick," was said by Judy McGrath the Chairman and Chief Executive at Reuters Media Summit in New York.

Although SouthParkStudios.com, the planned site for this venture, has not uploaded full episodes yet; it has provided clips, games, an avatar maker and other various media from the series.

With the prospect of a bigger viewership and better ratings, Viacom’s MTV Networks have mentioned placing other shows up for free online download as well. Names of the possible shows have not been mentioned, but it is nice to finally see a network starting to implement a way to work with today’s want of free content without the legal repercussions that can come along with P2P sharing.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...ark-downloads/





Dueling Guitars in Gameland: MTV and Activision Face Off
Robert Levine

The holiday season is when all the action takes place in the video game business, and this year has already pitted Microsoft’s Xbox 360 against Sony’s PlayStation 3, and sleek new software against sequels like Halo 3.

But one of the most watched rivalries is between two games that are not first-person shooters or movie tie-ins. Instead, Activision’s Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and MTV’s Rock Band put players in the role of rock musicians and allow them to play along with songs by bands like Metallica and the Who.

Both titles could be important to an industry that is trying to reach out to adults, women and anyone lacking interest in a fighting game. Like Nintendo’s Wii, the Guitar Hero games have found a receptive mainstream audience, and the earlier versions sold a total of six million copies. In its first week of release, Guitar Hero III had sales of $115 million. Rock Band was released last Tuesday.

This virtual battle of the bands will also pit a mainstay of the industry, Activision, against MTV, a unit of Viacom, a relative newcomer to the game business but one with deep roots in the music world. In the long term, both Activision and MTV believe that the genre of “rhythm games” has the potential to attract a mainstream audience unmoved by the robots and race cars that have become industry staples.

“We’ve never had anything like Guitar Hero in terms of appealing to a mass of people,” said Robert Kotick, the chairman and chief executive of Activision. “The game has been on ‘South Park,’ ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show.’ I don’t know the audience demographic for ‘Ellen,’ but it’s not your typical gamer.”

Both games use controllers shaped like musical instruments: Guitar Hero III is played with a miniature plastic version of a Gibson Les Paul with buttons where the strings would be, while Rock Band uses a toy Fender Stratocaster, a faux drum set and a microphone. The object of the games is to hit the guitar buttons or drums in time, or sing with the right phrasing and pitch, in an experience akin to karaoke.

MTV is looking for an additional benefit from Rock Band. At a time when its core demographic is spending more time with video games, the company wants to use this game as a starting point for new music and programming ventures. Rock Band and Guitar Hero both allow players using certain game systems to pay to download extra songs to play along with. Such sales would mean revenue for the beleaguered record labels.

“We thought the opportunity was wide open, and it fit into our brand and our heritage,” said Van Toffler, president of the MTV Networks Group. “It will yield a whole bunch of ancillary businesses and revenue streams.”

The rivalry between MTV and Activision is made more stark in that both Rock Band and the previous versions of Guitar Hero were developed by Harmonix Music Systems (the newest Guitar Hero was developed by another studio).

MTV purchased Harmonix in September 2006 for $175 million cash, in a deal that did not include rights to the Guitar Hero franchise. To distribute Rock Band, it signed a deal with Activision’s main competitor, Electronic Arts.

Like any battle of the bands, this one features its share of trash talk.

“MTV trying to take on Guitar Hero is like us trying to go into the music cable business,” Mr. Kotick said. One of the largest video game makers, Activision is enjoying its best year ever, because of Guitar Hero II, several successful movie tie-ins and the latest entry in the action game Call of Duty.

Both games have received positive reviews. Rock Band features more original songs instead of rerecorded versions by studio bands, but Guitar Hero III features the virtual likenesses of Slash, Tom Morello and Bret Michaels. Guitar Hero III, which is available for all the current consoles, is also less expensive, priced at about $100 with the controller. Rock Band will cost $160 for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, with a PlayStation 2 version due next month.

In the next few months, analysts believe that of the two, Guitar Hero III will sell better because there will be more copies on store shelves. “Rock Band is going to do fine, but there are supply constraints,” said Michael Pachter, a game industry analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities.

When the publisher RedOctane put out the first version of Guitar Hero two years ago, it seemed remarkably fresh in an industry that has come to depend on franchises and increasingly sleek iterations of old ideas.

Unlike most games, which take in a substantial percentage of their revenue during the first week of release, sales grew over the course of a few months. By February 2006, Harmonix’s chief executive, Alex Rigopulos, knew that his company had a hit on its hands when he entered the title on YouTube and, “I saw hundreds of people playing the game,” he said.

Other companies saw the game’s potential as well. In May 2006, Activision paid $99.9 million in cash and stock to buy RedOctane, which owned the Guitar Hero franchise under the terms of its publishing deal with Harmonix. MTV bought Harmonix four months later.

Rock Band is not MTV’s first foray into games. The company has run game-related programming on several of its channels and established the MTV Games division to participate in publishing deals. It also served as a marketing partner for the previous Guitar Hero games.

But Rock Band is the first title that it will so fully integrate with the rest of its business. MTV has already featured Rock Band on “TRL,” “Real World” and “MTV News,” and VH-1 has done a “Behind the Music”-style “mockumentary” recounting the imaginary history of the Rock Band band. “We have a plan for three to five years,” Mr. Toffler said.

Its first new business will involve selling music. Players who have the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 will be able to buy extra tracks for $1.99 each, as well as full albums, including “Who’s Next” and Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” Activision will also sell Guitar Hero III downloads, though only in packs of three. Both companies plan to make new content available on a regular basis.

This download market could be good news for record labels, which will be paid for the use of original songs. (Songwriters and publishers, but not labels, are paid for rerecorded versions.) Downloaded tracks are not technically considered sales, since the music serves as part of the game, but record companies and performers will still collect money according to how well they sell.

“These games allow people to discover and fall in love with music in a more impactful way,” said Paul DeGooyer, MTV’s senior vice president for home entertainment, music and games. “Part of what can happen out of this is an antidote to the disposable music era.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/te.../26guitar.html





Gluttonous Texting

For peculiar business reasons, Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages (although much of Canada has shifted away from this). This creates a stilted social dynamic whereby a friend forces you to pay $.10 (or use up a precious token msg in your plan) simply by deciding to send you something. You have no choice. There's no blocking, no opt-out. Direct to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Needless to say, this alters the culture of texting. From the getgo, Americans have been very cautious about texting. To be on the safe side, many Americans did not add texting to their plan so sending a text message was often futile because it was never clear if a text message would be received by the phone in question or just disappear into the ether. Slowly, mobile users figured out who had SMS and who didn't, but they were still super cautious about sending messages. It just felt rude, or wrong, or risky.

Teens, of course, never had this filter. They were perfectly happy to text. So much so that their parents refused to get them plans that supported it because, not surprisingly, there were all sorts of horror stories about teens who had texted up $700 phone bills. Sure enough, every family that I spoke with told me their version of the horror story and. In the U.S., we don't have pay-as-you-go so going over minutes or texts just gets added to your monthly bill. If you're not careful, that bill can get mighty costly. Unable to declare a max cost upfront, parents have been tremendously wary of teen texting simply for economic costs (although the occasional predator or cheating-in-school scare story does surface). Slowly, things have turned around, primarily with the introduction of cheap all-you-can-eat text messaging plans (and those that are so ridiculously high that it's hard to go over). Once the barrier to participation is dropped, sending and receiving text messages switches from being potentially traumatic to outright fun. What a difference those plans make in user practice. The brick leash suddenly turns into an extension of the thumb for negotiating full-time intimate communities.

I'm fascinated by how U.S. teens build intricate models of which friends are available via mobile and which aren't. Teens know who is on what plan, who can be called after 7PM, who can be called after 9PM, who can receive texts, who is over their texting for the month, etc. It's part of their mental model of their social network and knowing this is a core exchange of friendship.

Psychologically, all-you-can-eat plans change everything. Rather than having to mentally calculate the number of texts sent and received (because the phones rarely do it for you and the carriers like to make that info obscure), a floodgate of opportunities is suddenly opened. The weights are lifted and freedom reigns. The result? Zero to a thousand text messages in under a month! Those on all-you-can-eat plans go hog wild. Every mundane thought is transmitted and the phones go buzz buzz buzz. Those with restrictive plans are treated with caution, left out of the fluid communication flow and brought in for more practical or content-filled purposes (or by sig others who ignore these norms and face the ire of parents).

All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. For that matter, plans are relatively rare (while pay-as-you-go options were introduced in the U.S. relatively late and are not nearly as common as monthly plans). When a European youth runs out of texts and can't afford to top up, they simply don't text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren't actually kept out of the loop; they just have to call to respond if they still have minutes or borrow a friend's phone. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. As the U.S. goes from 0 to all-you-can-eat in one foul swoop, American texting culture is beginning to look quite different than what exists in Europe. Whenever I walk into a T-Mobile and ask who goes over their $10/1000 text message plan, the answer is uniform: "every teenager." Rather than averaging a relatively conservative number of texts per month (like 200), gluttonous teen America is already on route to thousands of texts per month. They text like they IM, a practice mastered in middle school. Rather than sending a few messages a day, I'm seeing 20-50+. College students appear to text just as much as teens. Older users are less inclined to be so prolific, but maybe this is because they are far more accustomed to the onerous plans and never really developed a fluid texting practice while younger.

Whatever the case, it's clear by comparing European and American practices that the economics of texting play a significant role in how this practice is adopted. It's more than one's individual plan too because there's no point in texting if your friends can receive them. As we watch this play out, I can't help but wonder about the stupidity of data plan implementation. Just last week, I went with my partner to AT&T to activate his Nokia N95. He was primed to add data to his plan because of the potential for the phone, but we both nearly had a heart attack when we learned that 4MB of data would cost $10 and unlimited would cost $70. We walked away without a data plan. More and more phones are data-enabled, but only the techno-elite are going to add such ridiculously costly plans. (And what on earth can you do with only 4MB?) It's pretty clear that the carriers do not actually want you to use data. The story is even scarier in Europe with no unlimited options. Who actually wants to calculate how many MB a site might be and surf accordingly? And forget about social apps with uncontrollable data counts. There's a lot to be said about paying to not having to actually worry about it.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/arc...nous_text.html





Nocturnal P2P Transmissions Account for 95 Percent of Internet Traffic
Nate Anderson

P2P apps are popular around the globe, even in regions where Internet access speeds are low. New research from German deep packet inspection gear maker ipoque shows that in places like Eastern Europe, P2P apps can account for an astonishing 95 percent of all nighttime traffic. The survey also found that one particular peer-to-peer app, Skype, is also single-handedly responsible for 95 percent of all Internet telephony.

Ipoque gathered its data with the permission of ISPs and universities in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia between August and September of this year (we covered the preliminary numbers back in September). In all, the three petabytes of information collected show that P2P sucks up anywhere between 49 and 83 percent of all Internet traffic during the day, and can spike much higher at night.

But everyone knows that P2P use is high. One of the study's most interesting findings didn't concern the volume of traffic, but the fact the 20 percent of it is now encrypted as the "arms race" between P2P users and ISPs, content owners, and law enforcement heats up. Increased network filtering—such as that being proposed in the US by AT&T and supported by content owners—would no doubt lead to the deployment of far more potent encryption. Such a move could leave ISPs with a choice of blocking certain P2P protocols altogether, risking the wrath of those who use them legitimately, or abandoning the attempt at filtering out specific files.

As far as what's being traded, ipoque used a variety of techniques (such as looking at file extensions or parts of filenames like "XXX") to identify the sort of content being swapped on P2P networks, and it shows some fascinating regional variations.

In Southern Europe, for instance, game downloads account for 25.5 percent of P2P traffic. Movies make up 38.8 percent, while pornography is a mere 1.8 percent. In the Middle East, by contrast, games are downloaded far less (6.3 percent), but movies much more (48 percent). Porn also makes up 5 percent of the traffic.

BitTorrent is, not surprisingly, the number one protocol, but eDonkey continues to hold its own. And the number one tracker in the world? The Pirate Bay, of course.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...bandwidth.html





Press release

EFF Releases Reports and Software to Spot Interference with Internet Traffic

Technology Rights Group Addresses the Comcast Controversy

In the wake of the detection and reporting of Comcast Corporation's controversial interference with Internet traffic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a comprehensive account of Comcast's packet-forging activities and has released software and documentation instructing Internet users on how to test for packet forgery or other forms of interference by their own ISPs.

Separate tests in October from EFF, the Associated Press, and others showed that Comcast was forging small parcels of digital data, known as packets, in order to interfere with its subscribers' and other Internet users' ability to use file-sharing applications, like BitTorrent and Gnutella. Despite having been confronted by this evidence, Comcast continues to issue incomplete and misleading statements about their practices and their impact on its customers.

"Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves."

Protocol-specific discrimination gives ISPs a tremendous amount of power over the kinds of new applications and services that can be deployed by innovators and competitors. To the extent that practices like those employed by Comcast change the "end-to-end" architecture of the Internet, those practices jeopardize the Internet's vibrant innovation economy.

"This recent interference by Comcast in their subscribers' Internet communications is a cause for grave concern," said EFF Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "It threatens the open Internet standards and architecture that have made the network such an engine of technical and economic innovation."

In addition to an account of the results of EFF's independent testing of Comcast's packet forging activities, EFF has also issued a detailed document and software to assist other networking experts in conducting their own testing.

"If ISPs won't give their customers accurate information about their Internet traffic controls, we have to detect and document them for ourselves," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen.

For "Packet Forgery by ISPs: A Report on the Comcast Affair":
http://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery...comcast-affair

For "Detecting Packet Injection: A Guide to Packet Spoofing by ISPs":
http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection

For more on EFF's research into Comcast's packet monitoring:
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2007/11/28





Comcast Using Malicious Hacker Technique Against Own Customers, New Report Says
Sarah Lai Stirland

One of the nation's largest telecommunications companies is using a controversial technique to cripple certain kinds of Internet traffic traveling across its networks, says a new report from the digital rigthts group the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

"Comcast is essentially deploying against their own customers techniques more typically used by malicious hackers (this is doubtless how Comcast would characterize other parties that forged traffic to make it appear that it came from Comcast or its subscribers,)" write the authors of the new report. "In other words, Comcast is essentially behaving like a telephone operator that interrupts a phone conversation, impersonating the voice of one party to tell the other that this call is over, I'm hanging up."
The nine-page investigation was conducted by EFF staff technologists Peter Eckersley, Seth Schoen and senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann.

The investigators say that their tests confirmed an earlier one conducted by the Associated Press that showed that Comcast is interfering with BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a protocol used to efficiently distribute the online transmission of large files, and some entertainment companies have partnered with its creators to distribute its content online.

Comcast has said that it doesn't block BitTorrent, or any kind of content.

When asked about the new report, spokesman Charlie Douglas said that the company had no comment. And he directed Wired News to a past statement issued by the company that said that the company merely delays certain kinds of peer-to-peer traffic at peak congested times, rather than blocking it.

But the investigators' report says that it is Comcast's approach to managing the traffic that is most problematic.

The authors say that Comcast is forging Internet traffic and injecting it into its customers' file-sharing applications' stream of traffic to choke their transmissions.

The effect for the end user is that they may end up thinking that it is the software that they're using that's failing, note the report's authors.

Comcast does tell customers that it retains the right to manage the traffic to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

But the EFF's investigators note that Comcast's approach is discriminatory because it targets only certain kinds of applications -- in this case, file-sharing applications. This kind of targeting undermines a fundamental ethos that has so far driven the success of innovators on the Internet -- an open system that requires no permission from anyone to experiment online, they say.

"Comcast's recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly," write the authors. "By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."

The report may have far-reaching consequences since it presents detailed evidence of an ISP actively interfering with its customers' traffic in an apparently arbitrary fashion.

The report says, for example, that its tests showed "no evidence that Comcast was targeting their jamming efforts at customers based on their individual consumption of bandwidth," and that there are more above-board ways of managing their traffic.

Various parties may use the report to boost their cases both against Comcast, and to push forward new rules to ensure that telecommunications companies do not discriminate online.

Both the Bush administration and telecom companies have argued that there isn't any evidence of discriminatory actions to justify such rules.

Lawmakers have re-introduced legislation on the subject this year in the Senate, and a House bill sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey is expected to be dropped before the end of the year. In addition, a complaint against Comcast over the issue has been lodged at the FCC, and a California consumer has launched a lawsuit against the cable company in the wake of the AP story.

"Certainly the FCC ought to thoroughly investigate this, and based on that investigation take the appropriate steps," said Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition. "It also argues for ex ante rules that prevents this from happening in the first place."

"In some ways, the EFF's paper raises an additional set of questions -- they only looked at Comcast --- what about the other ISPs, ... what other communications are being blocked and dropped?" he asked.

Comcast has 12.4 million high-speed Internet subscribers.

Addendum: The EFF has released an accompanying white paper that provides instructions on how to detect spoofing by your ISP. I'd be interested in chatting with anyone who tries this out with some friends.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...t-using-m.html





Net Neutrality May Not Resolve Comcast vs. BitTorrent
Anne Broache

Comcast's recent efforts to throttle file transfers that use the BitTorrent protocol have led to a renewed call for Congress to enact stiff Net neutrality laws.

Pro-regulatory groups including Public Knowledge have circulated press releases saying the episode demonstrates the "need for Net neutrality legislation." A Comcast-related post on DailyKos was titled "Why we need Net neutrality." Comcast, BitTorrent, and the phrase "need Net neutrality" appear in roughly 10,000 Web pages indexed by Google.

But even some supporters of new laws--which would enact antidiscrimination regulations aimed at broadband providers--are now reluctantly conceding that the proposals that have been circulating in Congress for more than a year may not do much to stop Comcast. (The company, a cable operator and broadband provider, has been sabotaging some peer-to-peer file transfers, which dramatically slows them down, although the file tends to be delivered eventually.)

Carole Handler, a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles who has written about Net neutrality and is now in favor of such regulations, says "the language is such that there is definitely some wiggle room in both bills." Handler was referring to bills that have been considered, but not approved, by both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Harold Feld, senior vice president for the Media Access Project, which lobbies for Net neutrality laws, is also skeptical about whether Rep. Ed Markey's legislation would do much. If Comcast announced, "'We are absolutely going to prohibit peer-to-peer on our network or even manage our network so when we reach some unspecified capacity restraint, we're going to start messing with everybody's BitTorrent uploads, but it'll be totally random...' that is arguably permissible under the Markey bill," Feld said.
One reason for this is the wording of the language that the House of Representatives considered. Lawyers think of it as the network management exception: it allows a broadband provider to implement "reasonable and nondiscriminatory measures" in order to manage its network, as long as the company doesn't discriminate "between content, applications, or services offered by the provider and unaffiliated providers."

According to Comcast, reasonable network management is all it's doing. "Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise," spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice told CNET News.com. "We engage in reasonable network management to provide all of our customers with a good Internet experience, and we do so consistently with FCC policy."

Fitzmaurice was referring to the Federal Communications Commission's 2005 broadband policy statement, which describes expectations that broadband providers will allow their users to view sites, run applications, and connect devices to the network as they wish. Crucially, it also contains an exception for "reasonable network management."

To make matters more complicated, most of the gray areas can be found in the earlier Markey legislation. The Senate counterpart, called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act and reintroduced in January by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), is more specific. It doesn't contain broad immunity for network management, a legal shield that broadband operators argue is necessary.

It's not clear whether that potential murkiness will be resolved in a new version of the legislation, which Markey is expected to introduce during the next few weeks. An aide, who declined to be identified since the bill isn't yet final, told CNET News.com that the language--including the exception for network management--will probably not be significantly different.

When asked whether Comcast's conduct toward BitTorrent would be prohibited under the original bill, the aide said the clearest answer is "maybe." In any case, the bill's authors want to leave it up to an "expert agency," presumably the FCC, to decide whether a company's conduct in a particular situation was both "reasonable" and "nondiscriminatory," the aide said.

Until then, whether Comcast would be reined in by the two existing proposals remains, literally, an academic question. University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Christopher Woo is one of the most vocal academic critics of extensive new Net neutrality regulations, which would typically be enforced by the FCC. Woo says that Comcast's conduct is "in a gray area," and it's hard to say exactly how either existing proposal would treat it. A "natural reading" of both bills, he added, is that Comcast's network management techniques would not pass muster because they're "discriminating on the basis of the application"--in this case, BitTorrent.

Another academic is more emphatic. Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu, a proponent of Net neutrality regulations, said it's clear that neither of the proposals would allow the sort of activity Comcast is engaged in. "What Comcast is doing is 'application discrimination'--they are choosing one application and treating it worse than others," he said. "Nothing in any of the Net neutrality bills allows this."

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report
http://www.news.com/Net-neutrality-m...?tag=nefd.lede





Are Mobile Torrents the First Big Trend of 2008?
Dana Blankenhorn

The first big open source trend of 2008 is already on the horizon.

Mobile Torrents.

Mobile implementations of the BitTorrent protocol are nearly certain to be part of whatever Google Android comes up with, and if not someone will have one for the open platform straightaway.

Already a Windows Torrent product is on Version 2.0, and given the video capability of the iPhone it’s clear Apple is not going to let this opportunity pass by. A Symbian Torrent program is on Version 1.3.

Torrent Reactor is listing a bunch of mobile Torrent files, not just the usual suspects of audio and video but games as well. MoveDigital has been offering metered Torrents since last year.

Savvy analysts like Eric Everson of MyMobiSafe are already writing here about the possible security implications of mobile Torrents.

I see the risk before the reward of UMTs but I (like most) am also starved for good mobile content. Mobile torrents will provide a medium for high quality third-party mobile content to enter mass market cellular users.

Sounds about right.

Getting this trend off the ground won’t be easy. The BitTorrent throttling which draws enormous objections when done on the Internet may be standard business practice at AT&T or Verizon wireless.

The latter may be available to new devices, but that doesn’t mean it’s, like, open. They still want to get paid.

My guess is Torrents will start taking off next year only through WiFi hotspots, and on a limited number of phones. But it will be a constant subject of discussion and debate throughout the year.

We’re getting our stake down early.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742





Dubai International Capital Takes Sony Stake
Kiyoshi Takenaka

Dubai International Capital, a private equity company owned by the ruler of Dubai, said it has made a "substantial investment" in Sony Corp, boosting the shares of the Japanese electronics and entertainment firm.

The value was not available, but Dubai International Capital said in July it might buy stakes of up to $1.5 billion in one or two publicly listed companies in Japan.

A $1.5 billion investment would be equivalent of a 3 percent stake in Sony, which has a market value of 5.52 trillion yen ($50.9 billion).

This is Dubai International Capital's first investment in a Japanese company.

The announcement followed a newspaper report that the Chinese government's investment arm was likely to pick up shares in Tokyo, stoking hopes that foreign investors may be stepping up investments in Japan, which briefly boosted the yen.

"I personally have not heard overseas investors making positive comments on Japanese stocks in recent months and recent years," said Kazuya Nakamura, deputy general manager at Norinchukin Zenkyoren Asset Management.

"These could be signs that (foreign investors' views on Japanese stocks) are changing."

The report by the Nikkei business daily that China's new sovereign wealth fund, which manages about $200 billion of foreign reserves, was likely to invest in Japanese stocks gave a brief boost to the yen and lifted Tokyo stocks.

Dubai International Capital did not disclose the size or timing of its Sony investment, but anyone who buys more than 5 percent of a listed company is required to report the stake to regulators within five business days.

After the announcement, Sony shares closed up 4.6 percent at 5,500 yen on Monday, outperforming the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index IELEC, which rose 1.95 percent.

"Whilst the restructuring process at Sony is well advanced, the recent successful listing of Sony Financial Holdings is evidence of management's ongoing strategy of focusing on capital efficiency and cash generation," Dubai International Capital Chief Executive Sameer Al Ansari said in a statement.

Sony, which is in the final year of its three-year turnaround plan led by Chief Executive Howard Stringer, took Sony Financial public in October in its latest step to focus on its core operations such as the consumer electronics business.

The maker of the PlayStation 3 game console and Bravia flat TVs said last month it swung to a quarterly operating profit thanks to strong sales of PCs and digital cameras and a weaker yen, and it raised its full-year forecast.

The Tokyo-based company was already owned 52.6 percent by foreign investors as of the end of September.

Other recent purchases of Dubai International Capital, which manages about $12 billion of assets, include German-based specialty alumina products company Almatis and a 9.9 percent stake in U.S. hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management.

($1=108.45 Yen)

(Additional reporting by James Cordahi in Dubai; Editing by Mike Miller)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...28183220071126





Exporting E-Waste

"American consumers unwittingly fuel toxic global trade in electronic waste with exporting e-waste," said John Bekiaris, chief executive of San Francisco-based HMR USA Inc., which collects and disposes of unwanted IT equipment from Bay Area businesses. "Anyone who's disposing of their computer equipment really needs to do a thorough inspection of the vendors they use."

The problem could get worse. Most of the 2 million tons of old electronics discarded annually by Americans goes to U.S. landfills, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. But a growing number of states are banning such waste from landfills, which could drive more waste into the recycling stream and fuel exports, activists say.

Many brokers claim they are simply exporting used equipment for reuse in poor countries. That's what happened in September, when customs officials in Hong Kong were tipped off by environmentalists and intercepted two freight containers. They cracked the containers open and found hundreds of old computer monitors and televisions discarded by Americans thousands of miles away.

China bans the import of electronic waste, so the containers were sent back to the U.S.

The company that shipped out the containers was Fortune Sky USA, a Cordova, Tenn.-based subsidiary of a Chinese company. General manager Vincent Yu said his company thought it was buying and shipping used computers, not old monitors and televisions, and is trying to get its money back.

Fortune Sky exports used computers and components to China, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Asian countries.

"There's a huge market over there for secondhand computers that we don't use anymore," Yu said. "I don't think it's going to cause any pollution. If the equipment can still be used, then that's good for everybody."

Yu refused to say where he bought the material, but Basel Action Network tracked it to a San Antonio, Texas, company that collects computers, printers and other electronics from schools and businesses.

Activists complain that most exporters don't test units to make sure they work before sending them overseas.

"Reuse is the new excuse. It's the new passport to export," said Puckett of Basel Action Network. "Other countries are facing this glut of exported used equipment under the pretext that it's all going to be reused."

At the other end at customs, the goods don't always get checked either.

"It is impossible to stop and check every single container imported into Hong Kong," said Kenneth Chan of Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department. "Smugglers may also deliberately declare their ... waste as goods."

In the first nine months of this year, Hong Kong authorities returned 85 containers of electronic junk, including 20 from the U.S.

Exporting most electronic waste isn't illegal in the United States. The U.S. does bar the export of monitors and televisions with cathode-ray tubes without permission from the importing country, but federal authorities don't have the resources to check most containers.

The EPA recognizes the problem but doesn't believe that stopping exports is the solution, said Matt Hale, who heads the agency's office of solid waste. Since most electronics are manufactured abroad, it makes sense to recycle them abroad, Hale said.

"What we need to do is work internationally to upgrade the standards (for recycling) wherever it takes place," he said.

The EPA is working with environmental groups, recyclers and electronics manufacturers to develop a system to certify companies that recycle electronics responsibly. But so far the various players have not agreed on standards and enforcement.

Many activists believe the answer lies in requiring electronics makers to take back and recycle their own products. Such laws would encourage manufacturers to make products that are easier to recycle and contain fewer dangerous chemicals, they say.

Eight states, including five this year, have passed such laws, and companies such as Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sony now take back their products at no charge. Some require consumers to mail in their old gear, while others have drop-off centers. HP says it also now designs its equipment with fewer toxic materials and has made it easier to recycle.
http://www.newstimes.com/ci_7554829





IBM Sues Company for Selling Fake, Flammable Batteries
Nancy Gohring

IBM is suing Shentech for selling laptop batteries that catch fire and sport allegedly fake IBM logos.

The suit, filed Nov. 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, accuses Shentech of trademark infringement, false advertising, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices.

IBM says that a consumer in Ohio bought a battery from Shentech for a ThinkPad laptop. The battery overheated and caught fire, causing damage to the laptop, IBM said. The user reported the problem to Lenovo, which licenses the IBM trademark. After examining the faulty battery, IBM discovered that it was not a genuine IBM battery, the company said in the suit.

IBM then ordered 12 batteries from Shentech and found them all to be fakes, IBM said.

IBM asks the court to require Shentech to turn over all of the batteries so that IBM can destroy them. IBM also asks for all the profits that Shentech earned from the sale of the batteries. In addition, IBM wants treble damages or US$1 million per counterfeit mark per type of item sold.

The Shentech.com Web site continues to list ThinkPad batteries for sale, as well as a host of other electronic devices and components. Shentech appears to be a Web-only operation with a mailing address in Flushing, New York. It describes its secret to success as its "ability to provide cutting edge computer technology parts at bargain prices."

No one from Shentech could be reached immediately for comment.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...2;fp;16;fpid;1





For All the Rock in China
Ben Sisario

AS she would anywhere in the world, Karen O of the arty New York rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs strode onto a festival stage here last month in costume, looking like a wild, futuristic harlequin in her cape of silver wings and blue-and-green striped tights. Shouting to 10,000 mud-soaked fans who shouted her lyrics right back at her, she thanked them in gasps of Mandarin: “Xie xie ni!”

A couple of days earlier the Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli was at a gleaming new club across town. And last Sunday, Linkin Park, a group of rap-rock titans with worldwide sales of 45 million, played in Shanghai to a sold-out stadium crowd of 25,000.

They are among the latest in a growing tide of Western acts hoping to crack the vast new entertainment market of China. Once largely closed to foreign music, the country has gradually loosened restrictions and — at a time when record sales in the West continue to plunge, and new sources of revenue have become essential — emerged as a crucial territory on pop’s global map.

“China is on the tip of everybody’s tongue,” said Peter Grosslight, worldwide head of music for the William Morris Agency. “There’s 1.3 billion people there. It’s becoming a much wealthier place. How can we ignore that?”

For the Western music industry China is a mix of new challenges and familiar frustrations, with rampant piracy of CDs and a minimal touring infrastructure. And many services taken for granted elsewhere, like the collection and distribution of recording royalties, are not fully established. But despite these obstacles, the broad commercial potential makes the country an irresistible draw, with money to be made from live shows, merchandise and technologies like cellphone ring tones. Five years ago a concert by Kenny G was big news. Now Chinese cities frequently turn up on the touring itineraries for a range of acts; this year Beyoncé, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Avril Lavigne and Sonic Youth have all played in China, along with underground rock bands that travel by train through a network of sweaty clubs in second-tier cities.

Linkin Park has already toured in Southeast Asia, but the group was looking at its first concert in China as a particularly lucrative opportunity. “This one show could break the band wide open in a brand-new frontier,” said Michael Arfin, Linkin Park’s booking agent.

The concert grossed $750,000, Mr. Arfin said. On a per-ticket basis that is roughly equivalent to the band’s take on recent American tours.

For musicians the thrill of playing to crowds who may be seeing their first foreign band can be intoxicating. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played the Modern Sky Festival, a three-day event at Haidian Park on the west side of Beijing, the fans waited in reverential silence between songs but erupted once the music kicked in, with fists in the air and young women screaming in the front.

“It was like nothing we’ve done before,” Karen O said afterward. “From the very beginning they were hungry for us.”

But the bulk of that rapidly urbanizing, discretionary-income-wielding audience might not be terribly hungry for foreign music. Well-scrubbed pop singers from Taiwan and Hong Kong dominate the airwaves and the popular imagination, with relatively little attention paid to rock.

Rock ’n’ roll has had a short and shaky history in China. After an initial flourish in the 1980s it went underground in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. For much of the ’90s the only Western rock to reach Chinese ears came in the form of remaindered CDs from overseas distributors, and musicians were frustrated to find that their music faced too many cultural barriers to take root.

“There was ample idealism then, but we hit the rocks pretty quick,” said Kaiser Kuo, a founding member of Tang Dynasty, one of the biggest Chinese rock bands of the ’90s. “We realized that we were doomed to life on the margins.”

Chinese rock got a second life with the arrival of the Internet, which flooded the country’s youth with new music. A small but vibrant scene developed, with sometimes startlingly up-to-date reference points. This year two Chinese bands traveled to the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.: Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, a ringer for the angular post-punk of Gang of Four, and Lonely China Day, which borrows from the cinematic grandeur of Sigur Ros. Of the 120 bands at Modern Sky, all but 10 or so were Chinese.

To capitalize on this emerging market, the international touring and record industries have in recent years established beachheads in China. William Morris opened a Shanghai office in 2004. This year Ticketmaster bought a majority stake in Emma Entertainment, a Chinese promoter and ticketing service that presented the Linkin Park show.

What works in China, however, can sometimes conflict with the larger goals of Western businesses. Linkin Park is among the biggest foreign bands in China, but its label, Warner Brothers, has not released its latest CD there. And despite recent tours by Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Chinese division of Universal has not released their records either.

The labels say that piracy has made the effort futile. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group, estimates that 85 percent of the CDs sold in China are counterfeit. Leong Mayseey, the federation’s regional director for Asia, says the piracy rate for downloaded songs is close to 100 percent.

When Jeff Antebi, manager of the R&B duo Gnarls Barkley, was looking over worldwide accounting statements, he was perplexed to see that the group’s song “Crazy,” a Top 10 hit around the world, registered no sales at all in China. It was a “black hole,” he said. Frustrated when the label, Warner Brothers, blamed only piracy, Mr. Antebi recently decided to open an office in China to protect his interests.

“Major record companies have two options in a place like China,” he said. “Adapt or die.”

But many Chinese labels, nimble and unencumbered by tradition, have adapted to the contaminated marketplace in ways that Western companies are struggling with. Viewing CDs as a loss leader they routinely sign groups to all-encompassing contracts that allow the label to share in revenues from touring, merchandise and endorsements.

“The Chinese music industry will be the model for the world’s music industry one day,” said Shen Lihui, the founder of Modern Sky, a small company that has released around 100 albums — most money losers, Mr. Shen said — but also has a host of auxiliary businesses, producing books, videos and Web sites.

Strolling through the festival grounds Mr. Shen, dressed in a lavender Burberry shirt and white shoes, pointed out the many corporate sponsors: Motorola, Levi’s, Diesel jeans. These deals bring in the money needed to run the event, he said, and his audience has no objection to advertising. By the main stage, which was flanked with giant Motorola-branded screens, one young man waved a big red flag that said, in a Beijing dialect, “I rock!”

For most concerts sponsorships are a necessity. Traveling expenses and the need for low ticket prices — anything higher than $6 or $7 or so is prohibitively expensive for many young Chinese — mean that many shows would lose money unless sponsors pick up the slack.

Advertisers can also lend essential brand identification to acts that have less recognition in China, said P. T. Black, a partner in Jigsaw International, a market research agency in Shanghai.

“In the U.S. an artist becomes big, and then a brand latches on to borrow their credibility,” Mr. Black said. “Here there are virtually no artists who have more credibility than the brands. Coke is a lot cooler brand than any young musician today in China.”

Many of the Western acts reaching Chinese shores operate far below the radar of multinational corporations. A decade of exploration by punk and metal groups has carved pathways through clubs in a dozen or so cities, and economical musicians — going by train because of the expense and unreliability of highway traveling — can break even on a tour.

Even little-known American bands can easily accommodate a Chinese jaunt. Last month the Birthday Boyz, a Brooklyn quartet that describes its sound as “very dire, dynamic, metallic post-hardcore” and plays tiny clubs at home, hustled through two weeks of Chinese shows.

Dodging other coach-class passengers in the aisle of a train from Changsha to Wuhan, two smog-choked inland cities with strong punk scenes, Jeff Bobula, one of the Birthday Boyz’ guitarists, described the culture shock: “The basis of touring the U.S. is, you hop in a van or car, you drive all day, you play, hopefully you sleep somewhere, and then you wake up and go to the next show. In China all the traveling you do is very public.”

Small bands can escape the notice of the Chinese government, but any band playing a gig above the club level will inevitably encounter the Ministry of Culture and its censors. Every lyric on a CD and every song planned for a live performance must be approved to obtain the necessary permits for a concert or retail release of an album. Approval can take months, and the ministry has a way of undercutting the best-laid plans of global promotional campaigns.

“Most of the rejected tracks are smash hits in the international market,” said Danny Sim, the marketing director for international repertory at Universal Music China. “Akon’s ‘Smack That’ and ‘I Wanna Love You,’ those tracks were rejected by the government. They were the first and second single from the album.”

Censorship can rear its head in less obvious ways. When Sonic Youth played Beijing in April, its hand-picked opening act, a Chinese band called Carsick Cars, was taken off the bill at the last minute. No explanation was given, but Thurston Moore, one of Sonic Youth’s guitarists, said he suspected the government had been alerted to his band’s participation in the Tibetan Freedom Concerts in the United States in the 1990s and was offering an oblique punishment.

“Who do you argue with?” Mr. Moore said after returning home. “You don’t. If you argue, you go to jail.”

Bands touring China face more prosaic hurdles as well. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were preparing to play at Modern Sky, their sound check took far longer than usual — “10, 12, 15 hours,” Karen O said with a groan — because the local crew’s professional standards were low.

But after the concert the band celebrated at a cavernous dance club, calling the show a success. Nick Zinner, the guitarist, said playing in China was something the band had wanted to do for years. When asked why, Mr. Zinner opened his eyes wide and looked at the crowd of well-dressed young Chinese.

“It’s the future,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/ar...ic/25sisa.html





Setting the Beat, and the Style
Ruth La Ferla

JUSTINE DELANEY speaks fashion like a native, her conversation studded with insider argot and references. She is drawn to hipster clothing brands like Preen and Comme des Garçons, and is as well acquainted with the Bauhaus aesthetic as she is with Vivienne Westwood or Siouxsie Sioux. A onetime Goth, she describes her current style as “preppy, but with a darker edge.”

Listening, you would peg her as an indie designer or, at the least, a “Project Runway” star. In fact, Justine D., as she is known to her public, is on cozier terms with a turntable than she is with a cutting table; her medium is vinyl — the kind that spins.

A high-profile D.J., she blends the sounds she loved as a teenager — strains of the Clash and British punk — with more-current fare, which she plays at private parties in New York. Like others in the growing contingent of female D.J.’s commanding the dance floor and building cults on the Web, she has an avid following. Scores of young women have picked up on her sound, and with it, her style, a graphic amalgam of black shirts with white bib tops and slinky halter dresses accessorized with tattoos and cataracts of cola-tone hair.

“I did have several female club-goers ask me, ‘How does it make you feel that everyone is dressing like you now?’” Ms. Delaney said. “‘Does it make you angry?’” Not so much. “Is someone really going to realize that I’m going for the Diane Keaton look in Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’? I doubt it,” she said briskly.

Her crowd, of course, is far too young to even catch that reference. Not that it matters. To them, Ms. Delaney is part of a formidably groovy sisterhood of well-established style-setters like Beverly Bond, Sarah Lewitinn (D.J. Ultragrrrl) and Skye Nellor in London; and younger influencers like Samantha Ronson in Los Angeles.

Yes, they are shaping their fans’ musical preferences. And to judge by the prevalence of high-waisted trousers, suspenders, cropped leather jackets, porkpie hats and fedoras on the dance floors, they are calling the tune in fashion as well.

“When you go into a club and the D.J. is wearing something, it almost gives it idol status,” said Frannie Schultz, 21, a college student from Brooklyn. Ms. Schultz, who mingles high style and low in deference to idols like Leigh Lezark of the MisShapes and Roxy Cottontail, noted that on the Lower East Side, epicenter of the downtown club scene, style is “centered around the promoters and the D.J.’s.”

“If you see a girl who is D.J.-ing, wearing a certain shirt or brand of shoes,” she said, “it makes people want to buy that item.”

A decade ago, only a handful of women, including Ms. Bond and Ms. Nellor, could claim the kind of style clout that comes with a presence in the D.J. booth.

“The barrier was high for females trying to enter an essentially male-dominated field,” said Rob Principe, a founder of Scratch Academy, a school for aspiring D.J.’s with outposts in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Today, women are less intimidated, Mr. Principe said. In 2002, when the school was established, 10 to 15 percent of applicants were women. Now that figure is closer to 40 percent.

“D.J.-dom has definitely been a boy’s club, a kind of cabal,” said Alexandra Wagner, the editor of Fader, a magazine that covers emerging music and fashion. It is a club, she noted, that women are only now penetrating in significant numbers.

“Cultural dominatrixes,” in Ms. Wagner’s phrase, they have a fashion influence that is a direct extension of their power on the stage. Unlike pop stars, who tend to be molded by production teams, the female D.J. is distinctly in charge, she observed: “The music that gets played is what she decides.” From the vantage of the dance floor, she added, “the D.J. booth is like the altar in the sky.”

“The woman who commands it can be a really powerful icon,” Ms. Wagner said.

That is not news to their fans. Their maverick stance and wizardry at the turnable have earned some performers fashion points. “A lot of these girls are just novelties,” said Alisa O’Connor, 21, of Brooklyn, alluding to the D.J. who flaunts glitter and angel wings to distract from the fact that she is playing prerecorded CDs. But “if she is a good D.J.,” Ms. O’Connor said, “I’m going to respect her for what she wears.”

Dispensing, for the most part, with stylists, the most memorable D.J’s strive for originality, setting themselves apart from competitors with looks that vary from Ms. Delaney’s Goth-tinged temptress to Ms. Ronson’s brash tomboy. Image, they argue, is essential to success.

“Today everyone is a D.J.,” said Lindsey Caldwell, a native of Atlanta who plays an amalgam of ’80s hip-hop, vintage Detroit sound and modern electronics Tuesday nights on the Lower East Side. “Just to be able to blend records is not enough anymore. You have to have a look.”

Her personal mélange, part fashion-progressive, part schoolmarm, is based on flat-soled granny boots with laces, skinny high-waist jeans, trailing scarves, the occasional Hanes T-shirt and, always, her trademark “big old glasses. They look like your science teacher’s glasses,” she said.

Like many in her cohort, Ms. Caldwell, known as D.J. Lindsey, has worked as a fashion insider. While wheeling sample racks at KCD, the fashion publicity firm, and casting models for clients like Marc Jacobs, she learned what it takes to stand out. D.J.-ing is “all about self-promotion, about getting on somebody’s photo blog,” she said. “You have to play that game. Because nobody is going to take your picture for Lastnightsparty if you look regular.”

She was referring to a popular blog that covers the late-night scene and is a measure of a D.J.’s standing. Faces turning up there may include those of Ms. Caldwell and New York personalities like Denise Kozlowski and Cyan Bonacci of VisAvis, the female D.J.’s seen spinning last week in the windows of Madewell, a youth-oriented store on Lower Broadway that is owned and operated by J. Crew.

They were enlisted, said Margo Brunell, the director of marketing for J. Crew, after being spotted on the Web. “We would look at the blogs and discover that the women who posted there were talking about fashion in one sentence and referencing to a cool D.J. they had seen in the next.”

The D.J. style is alluring to her target customer. “These women don’t necessarily like to be told what to wear,” she said.

Janessa Bautista, 28, a fashion designer in Manhattan, agreed, noting that the D.J.’s she likes dress in a manner that is unforced and inventive. “People who carry their own style are influential,” she said.

They include celebrities spinners such as Ms. Ronson, the sister of Mark Ronson, a music impresario, and the designer Charlotte Ronson, whose fashion show last fall was animated with her sister’s brand of hip-hop fused with rock ’n’ roll. Samantha Ronson’s signature look is unrehearsed, a combination of trousers worn with braces, short-sleeve tees, blazers from Dior Homme and the festoons of jewelry she piles on pell-mell.

“You don’t want to look like you went into a store, and they decided what you should wear,” she said.

You would never accuse her or her counterparts, D.J.’s like Stacy Spierer, whose stage name is Stacy Stylez, or Concetta Kirschner (a k a Princess Superstar), of catering to commercial tastes. Ms. Spierer’s twisted schoolgirl look is a funky combination of vintage cheerleader dresses, brownie uniforms or prom dresses, all liberally sprinkled with rhinestones. “Whatever I put on, it’s got to have some sparkle to it,” she said.

Ms. Kirschner, a recording artist, goes in for corsets, star-shaped mouches and shimmery eye makeup. “My look is definitely sexy,” she said, “but it’s also a bit trashy.”

“I don’t like to look too polished — for me that’s really bland,” she said, adding dismissively, “It’s good for pop stars.”

Jake Bernstein contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/fashion/29DEEJAY.html





London Transport Sacks Announcer for Spoof Messages

An official announcer for London's Underground railway system has been sacked after making spoof messages mocking American tourists, peeping Toms and sweaty commuters.

Voiceover artist Emma Clarke, 36, recorded the announcements in the same smooth tones that have warned millions of passengers to "Mind The Gap" on the London underground system also known as the "Tube" and posted them on her Web site.

The messages include:

* "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

* "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman's chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert."

* "Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers."

* "Here we are crammed again into a sweaty Tube carriage ... If you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He's probably not had sex for months."

Clarke said it was "just a bit of a laugh". But Tube operator Transport for London (TfL) failed to see the funny side and dropped her, after eight years.

"London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Miss Clarke are experiencing severe delays," a TfL spokesman told the Evening Standard on Monday.

All the recordings are at: http://www.emmaclarke.com/fun/mind-t...-announcements.

(Reporting by Peter Griffiths, editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...66179520071126





After Death, Unfinished Artwork Gets a Life
Dan Levin

In the dark days and weeks after the suicide of the artist Jeremy Blake in July, his friends and colleagues were left to pick up the pieces, literally.

When he walked into the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach in Queens, despondent over the suicide of his companion a week earlier, Mr. Blake was just three months away from an exhibition of his recent video art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and another show at the Manhattan gallery Kinz, Tillou & Feigen. Many wondered what would become of his unfinished work and whether it would shed any light on his life, and his death at 35.

His work in progress, “Glitterbest,” is a video portrait of the 1970s punk-music impresario Malcolm McLaren, with whom he collaborated on the piece. Having toiled on it for a year and a half, Mr. Blake left behind a completed audio track bursting with romping punk riffs, video-game blasts of intergalactic battles and clanging church bells and an impish 11-minute voice-over by Mr. McLaren.

But most of the visual presentation was unfinished. Embedded in his computer hard drive were numerous image files evoking an enchanted world populated by pirate ships, psychedelic phalluses and neon graffiti. The still frames were virtually a mere slide show, a far cry from the rich dimensionality of his previous animated, abstract work, featured in museums throughout the world and in the film “Punch-Drunk Love.”

Jonathan P. Binstock, the curator of the Corcoran exhibition, and Lance Kinz, a director of Kinz, Tillou & Feigen, decided to incorporate “Glitterbest” into their exhibitions in its incomplete state out of deference to Mr. Blake, who had approved inclusion of some of the images in the Corcoran exhibition catalog and advance announcements for the New York show. They hoped the unfinished work would give viewers insight into his creative process and provide a glimmer of what the video might have become.

“It was a way to remain true to the vision of the exhibition, and it furthers our efforts in exploring his theme of portraiture,” Mr. Binstock said of “Wild Choir,” the Corcoran show. Reflecting Mr. Blake’s most recent career focus, the exhibition presents lushly cinematic, deeply probing digital-video studies of three artists he admired.

In addition to his paean to Mr. McLaren, Mr. Blake produced homages to Ossie Clark, an influential Swinging London British fashion designer, and David Berman, an indie-rock musician and poet. In each case he used his artist-subject as a portal to explore seminal cultural moments, draping the viewer in a nonlinear fabric of color, film and sound.

“Given the terrible situation we were faced with, we thought it would be an interesting way to approach this challenge and wanted to share it with the museum audience,” said Mr. Binstock, who left the Corcoran this summer and is now senior vice president of Citigroup’s Art Advisory Service in New York. He continued to work on the exhibition after leaving the Corcoran.

But first they had to gain permission from Mr. Blake’s grieving mother and then find the correct files on his many computers, an arduous process that took weeks. Thus it was only at the end of September, less than a month before the Corcoran exhibition was to open, that they tracked down all the files.

With a deadline looming, Mr. Binstock approached a friend, David Sigal, a documentary filmmaker and videographer, to help unlock Mr. Blake’s intended arrangements. “I was concerned about the material being treated with the greatest sensitivity and the need to preserve the integrity of the artist’s work in process,” Mr. Binstock said, “and I knew I could trust David to exhaustively examine the material and do that.”

They discovered Mr. Blake’s labeled folders in Adobe Photoshop, the graphics-editing software. Each folder contained sequential picture files with titles. But within each dense file were numerous layers of the artist’s “moving painting” imagery, their intended direction and flow indecipherable. They also realized that Mr. Blake had tackled only the first five minutes, less than half of the work’s final visual component.

Armed with a copy of Mr. Blake’s hard drive and Mr. McLaren’s poetic though fairly incomprehensible narration, Mr. Sigal, 41, spent the next few weeks tinkering with the files on his laptop in his Greenwich Village apartment. He struggled to make sense of eerie scenes of World War II carnage shimmering with stars and bubbles; imperial imagery juxtaposed with psychedelic vegetables on the Moon; and mythical creatures that morphed into a swashbuckling Sid Vicious.

But the more he listened to the voice-over and scrutinized the layered images, “there were little clues and abstract lines that I would wind up understanding,” Mr. Sigal said.

He soon began to recognize phrases and words that corresponded to imagery and references from Mr. McLaren’s life growing up in postwar Britain and his time as the Sex Pistols’ flamboyant manager, a cheeky, roguish figure who personified the late 1970s.

There was also a larger theme among the layers: that of recasting a quintessentially anti-establishment figure as a hero of the British Empire for his wild creative contributions. Seizing on that concept, Mr. Sigal felt more confident in mapping out the progression of Mr. Blake’s images.

“David worked very hard, and I think successfully, to unravel the specific details of Jeremy’s organizational structure,” Mr. Binstock said.

As the weeks wore on, Mr. Sigal also felt increasingly haunted by the tumultuous lives and tragic deaths of Mr. Blake and Theresa Duncan, his companion of 12 years.

“I thought I would be able to figure out Jeremy’s life by figuring out the puzzle of ‘Glitterbest,’” Mr. Sigal said. “It was an intensely emotional time.”

Searching for answers, he turned to the Internet to learn more about the couple’s final days. There he read newspaper and blog accounts of Ms. Duncan’s setbacks as a screenwriter and the couple’s growing paranoia and conspiracy theories, some of which were detailed on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase (theresalduncan.typepad.com).

Ms. Blake killed herself on July 10 in the couple’s East Village apartment by washing down an overdose of Tylenol PM with bourbon. She left a suicide note. Mr. Blake made his way to Rockaway Beach the following week, leaving a note with his belongings in the sand.

Mr. Sigal found the accounts of their descent into paranoia harrowing and was distressed by obsessive online speculation that they had faked their deaths. “It only wound up upsetting me and making things even more confusing,” he said.

Eventually he finished piecing together the unfinished work and paced the images to last the length of the full soundtrack. The video was presented at the Corcoran exhibition’s opening event on Oct. 27 and at a memorial show on Nov. 10 at Kinz, Tillou & Feigen. (The Corcoran show runs through March 2, and the gallery show through Jan. 5.) The screenings enabled friends and visitors to grasp how Mr. Blake constructed his dense collages, layer by layer, and how he paid tribute to Mr. McLaren and his vision.

For Mr. Sigal and others, it was a bittersweet celebration of Mr. Blake’s legacy. “I found the images really beautiful,” he said. “I was sad that I was the one who wound up doing this. I wanted Jeremy to be there to complete it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/ar...gn/29blak.html





"Quiet Riot" Singer Found Dead in Las Vegas

Kevin DuBrow, lead singer of the popular 1980s heavy metal band Quiet Riot, has been found dead from unknown causes at his home in Las Vegas, authorities said on Monday.

DuBrow, 52, was found dead at about 5:20 p.m. on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the Clark County Coroner's Office said. She said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death.

"I can't even find the words to say," Quiet Riot bandmate Frankie Banali said on his Web site. "Please respect my privacy as I mourn the passing and honor the memory of my dearest friend, Kevin DuBrow."

Quiet Riot, which was founded in the mid-1970s, topped the Billboard charts in 1983 with the album "Metal Health," spurred on by the massive hit single "Cum on Feel the Noize."

The band has since endured break-ups and personnel changes but released a new album in 2006 and continued to tour sporadically.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bill Trott)
http://www.reuters.com/article/domes...41617420071126





Ten Things Holding Back Tech

Ever get the feeling that we aren't quite yet where we want to be? Here are 10 factors that may be holding back the world's technological development

The pace of change in IT has never been faster — or has it? After 25 years of desktop computing and 15 years of the commercial internet, there are still plenty of frustrations, pains and throwbacks in our everyday technology experience. It's great having a terabyte hard disk, but not so great trying to manage it using interfaces and tools that have barely changed from the days when 40MB was respectable.

Many factors are holding back technology. Here is a list of 10 such barriers, in no particular order. We have almost certainly missed a few, so feel free to leave your comments using the Talkback facility at the bottom of the page.

1. Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop
Windows unified the personal-computer market, and led it into the enterprise. A good thing, surely? Yes — if unity is more important than innovation, flexibility and a free market. The European Commission disagreed with that, as have courts around the world.

For most people, computing means Windows, not because they choose it but because the company's immense power in retail and business channels, together with the inertia that comes through decades of market dominance, make it a default that's hard to change.

So why does this hold back innovation? The European Commission ruled that computer users are unnecessarily used to products like Windows Media Player — applications that are mediocre just because Microsoft has no real incentive to make them better. Monopolies are anti-competitive and therefore anti-innovation. Just look at Internet Explorer's long stagnation.

Microsoft's stifling influence on new ways of thinking goes beyond applications, however. As Vista so readily proves, rehashing the same idea again and again does not make for progress. For everyone's sake, especially Microsoft itself, the company needs to learn to compete fairly again.

2. Operator lock-in
In Europe, we have only recently emerged from the dark ages of the mobile internet, as the market has forced operators to abandon the so-called "walled garden" approach. This meant that users could only access websites that had been pre-selected by their operator — the very embodiment of what net-neutrality advocates are seeking to block in the US. Of course, that debate revolves around fixed access, and is so relevant in the US because — unlike the UK — most of that country has very little choice of internet provider.

However, both situations show, or have shown, the harm that can be done to innovation when those operating the pipes of the internet decide they want control over content. Operators providing content is nothing new, nor is it a bad or surprising thing for them to do, but that provision needs to be in line with the founding principles of the internet if innovation is to flourish.

Any threat to the equality of access and provision on the internet is a bad thing for innovation, and a combination of the market and regulation is needed to hold such threats at bay.

3. Input methods
We haven't come far. Qwerty is 130 years old, and windows, icons, mice and pointers are 35. Both come from before the age of portable computing. So why are we reliant on these tired old methods for all our new form factors?

There are lots of new ideas — voice, gesture and handwriting recognition; video and infrared inputs that watch what we do with our hands and decide what it is that we want — but the mobile experience remains one of thumb-mangling, eye-straining frustration. A BlackBerry keyboard is a wonder of miniaturisation; shame the same's not true of most BlackBerry users.

Until we manage to break down the barriers erected between us and the machines back in the days before eight-bit processors, we'll be stuck back there too.

4. Battery life
All the newfangled input and display technology in the world doesn't amount to much when your handset and laptop struggle to support more than a few hours' hard usage.

Particularly on the handset side, the increase in processing power needed to support the internet and the mobile office puts huge demands on a device's battery, as do high-speed wireless data technologies like 3G — there is a good reason why the iPhone, which has to provide a reasonable simulation of the iPod's battery life, does not currently use 3G. Also, even when they refrain from exploding, the lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries used in a wide variety of electronic devices become less efficient over time. That means mobile technology will forever lag behind fixed technology.

But perhaps the greatest application for improved battery technology would be in electric cars. The concept is proven and on the street but, until it becomes possible to go as far on a charge as you would on a tank of fuel, only first adopters and urban eco-warriors will bother.

5. The mania for speed
Faster processors are great. However, there is more to computing than processor speed — a point which can be easily proven by comparing a two-year-old PC running Linux with a new PC buckling under the weight of Vista. Shrinking the manufacturing process to enable greater speed has proven essential, but it's running out of magic.

Too much R&D time and money goes into processor speed when other issues remain under-addressed. For example, could data not be handled a bit better? What about smarter ways of tagging data? The semantic web initiative runs along these sorts of lines, so where is the hardware-based equivalent?

It is all very well to be able to run the latest DX10 games on your PC, but untold mould-shattering developments lie on the other side of a concerted effort to rethink the nature of the computer. Whichever chipmaker becomes the first to think beyond speed alone will gain a whole new advantage over its competitors: smarter, not faster, will lead to both smarter and faster.

6. Intellectual property law
John Tehranian, a University of Utah law professor, has worked out that someone doing a job like his could, under US law, be committing more than 80 infringements of copyright a day — even without any P2P file-sharing shenanigans — and end up with multi-billion-dollar fines every year. Even whistling a tune in public is a multi-thousand-dollar mistake.

Intellectual property law is broken. Creativity needs protection, but the current system isn't working. Designed to encourage inventiveness and the building of ideas on ideas, it instead rewards power and influence with more power and influence. The ideal world of the intellectual property lawyer is one where nothing can move without permission; no idea can happen unless it is approved.

This is no model for a world where ideas can spread like never before and information is freer than even the most utopian could have imagined 50 years ago. A new way of thinking about information ownership is needed, and quickly.

7. Skills inequalities
Applications and technology might become more intuitive and creative if more women were involved in the industry. Diversity breeds innovation.

Technology has traditionally been terrible at attracting anyone but the technically minded. Seen by many as incredibly dull and exclusive, the industry most needs the influence of those who give it the least thought. Even the best technical process could benefit from a little humanity.

Industry is also waking up to the developing world and beginning to hear its voice. Technology has the capability of leapfrogging the biggest problems, but only if it's built to match the needs of the people it serves.

The more IT listens to and gives power to those it has traditionally excluded, the better it will be suited to solve real problems for us all.

8. Web 2.0
Speaking of daft innovations that do little to better the lives of humanity, Web 2.0 has a lot to answer for. So the web's gone two-way. Great. But the extremes of enthusiasm shown by financiers and business people are verging on counterproductive.

Do we really need applications like Twitter? What price a poke on Facebook? Microsoft's recent purchase of a chunk of Facebook valued the social-networking company at $15bn (£7.2bn). This is a company that does not yet have a proven business plan, despite having big aspirations as a marketing hub. Two years ago, eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn and Skype — a mostly free service — is currently struggling to justify that price.

It's nice to see the vanguard cashing in. But they're not really worth their valuations or the mountains of cash they have received from venture capitalists, whose money could probably find better use in other areas of technological innovation.

With the global economy in its current, credit-crunched state, Web 2.0 runs the risk of not only taking funding away from worthier areas of research but also contributing to a downturn that may hit the tech industry particularly hard. It remains a crucial element of the way we interact through technology, but its business models need a lot of work.

9. National interests
Every country places a high value — often the highest of values — on the rule of law. So why do they insist on behaving towards each other in a state of virtual anarchy?

If we view technology as a globally collaborative effort, one of the clearest barriers to its development is that of national interests. Look at the interminable arguments in organisations like the International Telecommunication Union. Countries defend the interests of their indigenous corporations and lobby groups; the idea that these interests may be better served in the long term by ceding ground in the short is as popular as skinny-dipping in the Antarctic.

Sometimes it is hard to escape the notion that certain countries are deviating from the pack just for the sake of it, much as Napoleon and the US had horses and carriages use the right-hand side of the road for no other reason than the British used the left.

Despite the upcoming Olympics, China is still dragging its heels over the deployment of 3G because it wants to use its own home-grown standard, TD-SCDMA. Its motivations for this include avoiding payments to western patent holders, but the main driver is the fact that China has a large enough internal market to not have to worry about inconsistencies with international norms. Overall, progress is yet again slowed down.

Some national interests have an almost absurdly negative effect on international technological development. For years, the US government classified encryption technology as a munition, and had export laws that forbade the distribution to the world of chips using the RSA algorithm. The ban proved unworkable in the long term but, for a long while, it seriously held back the development of security technology around the world.

10. The current lack of global wars and/or disasters
Forget peace, love and understanding. For a real boost, technology needs war. World War II gave us radar, rockets, the jet engine and digital computing. It also gave us 50 million dead.

These days, warfare still results in misery and death, but the technological benefits are harder to appreciate. There's not much in a stealth fighter or bomb-disposal robot that helps away from the battlefield.

Let's stick to metaphorical warfare. That's something politicans are good at promoting, but bad at executing — the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" both sound good but have generated little of note, beyond copious government expenditure on ever more inventive ways to annoy their own citizens.

If we must have war, we might as well use it wisely. The biggest threats to mankind are environmental change, disease and international political and economic upheaval. Putting the nations of the world on a war footing against this terrible triad would produce a flowering of new, focused thinking and technologies — and nobody would get hurt.

Rupert Goodwins contributed to this article.
http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/article...9291080,00.htm





Top Ten Terrible Tech Products

Number 10:

Windows Vista
Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor's reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39...3700-10,00.htm





Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off
Oliver Rist

I'm not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can't take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don't work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista. It's not better than Vista. Leopard is Vista. And Tiger is better than both of them!

I had to be talked, wined, dined, and peer-pressured into buying my first MacBook Pro this past January. But once I plunked down the bucks for the slightly less hardware oomph per dollar than I'm used to, I was impressed by one thing: Everything. Just. Worked. Period.

Tiger just works. End of story.

But Apple marketing has the swinging pair of crabapples to actually print "Leopard Just Works" on its Web site. Hey, at least Microsoft reps have the decency to look a little abashed when you point out their product's screwups. Apple reps just glare at you like they're daring you to say something. Well, I've got something to say. Several somethings.

XP Pro pre-SP1 crashed all the time, and Microsoft owned up to it—mostly. XP Pro post-SP2 crashed once in a while, and we sighed and kept working while Microsoft looked embarrassed and yelled at someone to work faster on SP3. From the start, Vista crashed noticeably less than XP Pro with SP2; it just doesn't work with 50 percent of new software—a year after its shrink-wrapped release. Cue the sound of teeth gnashing. But I digress. Here's the point, in case any Apple reps missed it: Microsoft has delivered clear improvements in stability over time—a feat you'd think Apple might want to emulate.

Let's see, Tiger crashed—oh yeah, NEVER. Ten months and I'm installing everything from production-level Office for the Mac 2004 to 0.x releases of VLC, Seashore, and Ecto—even betas of Firefox and Parallels. Whatever my nerdy little heart desires. I've had those early apps crash, but Tiger never faltered.

A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES! And all my complaints, mirrored by online forum traffic, are the same complaints I heard about Vista when it first reared its unbaked head.

Leopard is the new Vista. All the way. And here are five examples.

Vista Similarity 1: Wait for a Service Pack—Perpetually

Even our own reviewer, who loves Leopard, says not to upgrade until 10.5.1. And now that Apple has coughed that up, he'll probably say to wait for 10.5.2. Or .3. Now where have I heard that advice before? Oh yeah, every time I reviewed Vista.

What makes it worse is this convoluted argument that my Apple friends give me: They're more upset at Microsoft on account of it being in perpetual service pack limbo because Vista was supposed to be a ground-up redesign, whereas Leopard is really just a juicy point release. That makes zero sense to me. As far as I'm concerned, they both suck.

Vista's ground-uppedness wasn't nearly as major a landmark as I was expecting—aside from massive and continuous software and hardware incompatibilities. Leopard is touting many of the same "new" features, including the vaunted 64-bittedness. Vista took five years and lost a whole bunch of features along the way, so the fact that it's still unbaked after half a decade blows my mind.

No one is 100 percent sure how long Leopard took, since Apple whispered its name only just last year, but if it is "just a point release," then it should have been much easier to Q/A. And yet, it's still unbaked despite an ad campaign that implies it's fresh, steaming, just out of the oven, and delicious.

Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz

Then there's the new look. Vista comes out and we're all wondering, what was the big deal about window transparency? Yeah, it's great that the OS can support bigger, better video, but unless I'm seeing it as part of a game or an actual productivity app, I just don't care. Looking down to the bottom of my desktop as if I'm snorkeling in a clear blue Bahamas lagoon doesn't really do anything for me. Everyone agrees, and Vista's Aero gets nuked as just another example of Microsoft being in bed with hardware vendors, forcing all of us to run out and upgrade hardware—video cards, in this case.

Poof, here's Leopard, and the first thing the Apple folks want to show me is window transparency. Now all of a sudden that's the coolest thing ever and an obvious example of cutting-edge OS evolution. I had to check to make sure my ears were working when I heard that one.

Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface "Fixes"

Then there's how Microsoft screwed up Vista's UI, reorganizing things that didn't need to be reorganized—like the networking screens, for example. Under XP you can get to those with a single right-click on the desktop. Under Vista, it's three layers down for no good reason. Or those new Save As dialog boxes. Drunken monkeys could figure out what was going on under the XP format, but under Vista I've got users asking me for help—and this is at PC Magazine Labs!

Not to be left behind, Apple has messed up its own UI, too, but Apple did it with piles of senseless graphics enhancements. Users either have to deal with these or learn some nasty hack to kill them off. So much for ease of use.

Who's responsible for Apple's redesigned dock? I could understand a programmer thinking a mirrored dock would look great on his résumé. But I can't imagine that a UI expert looked at it and said it was more functional than Tiger's. A stupid cornflower-blue fuzzball is no replacement for Tiger's clear, dark arrow that let me know what apps I had open. I could actually see the arrow. The blue fuzzy thing just blends in with the pointless mirrored reflections of the app icons, so now I've got to squint for the same information.

Okay, Cover Flow I like, but at any normal resolution that's about as much preview capability as I need. So why add that two-clicks-down QuickLook deal? And what's with that curving Stacker thing off of docked folders? Any subfolder takes you back to Finder anyway, so why not just start there? Oh, wait, I'm forgetting about the new folder icons with the barely visible and nonintuitive subject tattoos on them. And the pièce de résistance: rounded corners on menu bars! Awesome. I have so been waiting for those!

Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking

Microsoft made a big deal out of Vista's completely redesigned TCP/IP networking stack, with a big part specifically intended to make wireless networking easier and more stable. And the OS did that fine. Only problem is, now wired networking tends to drop mysteriously every once in a while. But, hey, that's what SP1 is for, right? (Yeah, that was sarcasm.) At least Microsoft had a good reason to mess with its networking stack: XP's networking was a fiery offense against man and nature. What's Apple's excuse?

I actually don't know. Yeah, I know the OS went to full-on 64-bits, but that's no reason to mess with the networking stack. Especially since Tiger's networking just plain worked. Plug into an Apple network—you're good to go. Plug into a Windows network—you're good to go. Plug into any IP-based mixed-client network—you're good to go. Bring up a new Windows share in a mixed network, and Tiger usually sees it before the Windows client does. Did someone actually sit down and say, we've just got to improve on that?

Leopard's networking sees the physical part of the network just fine, wired or wireless. And if there's an AFP share, that pops up like a puppy for a doggie treat. But the Web abounds in complaints—plaintive cries as to why Leopard seems to ignore Windows shares, and semi-effectual fixes. Or it sees Windows shares for a little while and then in a fit of pique decides to drop them again. It's like the French waiter of networking. Oh, but who cares, Oliver? After all, it's not as if networking were in any way related to business functionality. Or that interacting peaceably with Windows is in any way required. As long as we can talk to the iPod and Apple TV we're good, right? —next: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck >

Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck

This drives me nuts. With Vista, it was SideShow. Not Sidebar, which is the annoying and semifunctional widget Microsoft copied into Vista because it just couldn't let Google and Yahoo! hog all the kudos. Sidebar is a decent example of a New Feature That Sucks, but SideShow is a great example. SideShow is that promised hardware-bundle feature that would let users scan e-mail, play music, and perform similar functions on a notebook or PDA-style Vista PC without opening or booting the computer (this requires a little screen on the notebook lid with some nav buttons). I saw a bad implementation on the much-cursed FlipStart mini PC, and there's a Dell notebook around now that has it, but on both it was essentially a non-feature.

For Leopard, the sad bundled app-as-feature is Time Machine. To hear Mac moonies tell it, this is the best thing to happen to backup since the letter b. In reality, however, it sucketh and it sucketh huge.

Okay, the screen looks like Star Wars. That's cool in an I-want-to-stay-a-virgin kind of way. But "easy to use"? Which groupie said that? Try putting a new Apple user in front of this app and see what happens. For one, you can't set up Time Machine from within Time Machine. How is that easy? You'll find some of the settings buried in System Settings and others in Time Machine. And if you want to kick off a manual backup, you've got to know to right-click on the Time Machine icon in the dock. Is Britney Spears moonlighting as Apple's UI designer?

Then there's the annoying marketing ploy showcasing how amazing it is that Time Machine takes a snapshot of the entire file system. News flash: EVERY backup app can take a snapshot of the entire file system. That would be the reason we call them "backup programs." Other backup apps simply tell you to choose which files and folders you want saved—up to and including the entire file system. Time Machine does it the other way around and says "I'm backing up everything unless you tell me otherwise." How is this better than, say, Vista's bundled backup?

In fact, Vista's backup kicks Time Machine's butt in three rather important ways: First, you can do an image-based bare-metal restore with the MS version—provided you've paid for the privilege by buying a more expensive version of Vista. (See, being able to do a bare-metal restore makes losing all that drive space that you eat by taking a full-system snapshot worthwhile.) Time Machine needs a working version of Leopard to talk to, so why am I backing up all that system stuff?

Second, Vista does block-level incremental backups to help conserve drive space and decrease backup time. With this type of backup, a previously backed-up file that's been recently changed has only the new changes saved and the rest of the file referenced. Time Machine doesn't do that at the file level. You change a file and it just snaps the whole thing again. Not such a big deal for Word docs, but for my Entourage mail database? My Fedora or Vista virtual machine files? That's a lot of data to just keep snapping away at.

So why doesn't Time Machine do block-level backups? I have no idea. Apple controls the file system. It controls the backup application. Generally, that's all you need. Maybe Apple couldn't spare the programmers working on the hugely important Star Wars core animation splash-screen project. Can't skimp on that, can we?

Third, Vista's backup works over a network. In its ads Apple blithely says that Time Machine can, too, but when you read the fine print—or try it in real life—you discover that Time Machine works with USB- or FireWire-connected drives only. Really? In 2007? When I saw that, I actually looked around to see if Ashton Kutcher was going to pop out from behind my lab bench and tell me I'd been punked.

Meanwhile, maybe I'm a boring old sys admin guy, but EMC's Retrospect worked just fine under Tiger, and some version of that app comes free with any number of networked hard drives or home NAS products. No Star Wars splash screen, though—just easy-to-navigate wizards, damn them.

Okay, I probably had a little too much coffee this morning, but Leopard really is just one big popped balloon of disappointment. Let's get it straight, however: I'm not any more against Leopard than I am against Vista. Both of them got too much wrong. I'll close with a little tidbit for that pudgy PC guy in the Apple commercials who's so sad because his users are "downgrading" to XP. Well, maybe they are—I know I did. But I'm writing this on an XP workstation right now because my Mac is busy reinstalling Tiger. Leopard can keep its glitzy crash-prone spots. I'll stick with the OS that really "just works"—for now.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2223921,00.asp





For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device
Matt Richtel and Brad Stone

Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.

Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets.

Consider the “hottest toys” list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on “preschool-appropriate Web sites”) and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game.

Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said there had been “a huge jump in the last 12 months” in toys that involve looking at a screen.

“The bigger toy companies don’t even call it the toy business anymore,” Mr. Silver said. “They’re in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they’re saying is, ‘We’re vying for kids’ leisure time.’ ”

Technology has been slowly permeating the toy business for a number of years, but the trend has been accelerating. On Wednesday, six of the nine best-selling toys for 5- to 7-year-olds on Amazon.com were tech gadgets. For all of 2006, three of the top nine toys for that age group were tech-related.

The trend concerns pediatricians and educators, who say excessive screen time stifles the imagination. But more traditional toys — ones without computer monitors, U.S.B. cables and memory cards — are seen by many children as obsolete.

“If you give kids an old toy camera, they look at you like you’re crazy,” said Reyne Rice, a toy trends specialist for the Toy Industry Association. Children “are role-playing what they see in society,” she added.

That seems to be the case even when youngsters are not old enough to have any clue how to use actual gadgets.

Yunice Kotake, of San Bruno, Calif., recently purchased a Fisher-Price Knows Your Name Dora Cell Phone for her twin year-old daughters. But a few days later, she returned the play phone to a local Toys “R” Us, after she found that the girls seemed to prefer their parents’ actual phones.

“They know what a real cellphone is, and they don’t want a fake one,” Ms. Kotake said.

Inside the Toys “R” Us, the shelves near the store’s front were brimming with toys with a high-tech twist. Among them were numerous starter laptops that play educational games (and in the shape, for instance, of Barbie’s purse and Darth Vader’s helmet) and traditional board games with DVD extras. Perched prominently on one shelf was one of the country’s hottest-selling toys, the EyeClops Bionic Eye, an electronic camera for children ages 6 and up.

Standing near the front of the store, a 6-year-old named Sabrina, with a gap-tooth smile, explained that her No. 1 choice for a Christmas gift is an adult laptop.

“ ’Cause it’s cool,” she explained.

“Maybe when she’s 8,” said her mother, Amina, who declined to give her last name. She might, she said, have to yield when her daughter turns 7.

“These kids are different from the way we were,” she added.

Toy companies are eager to meet demand with products like the LeapFrog ClickStart My First Computer, which gives children ages 3 and up a keyboard to help them learn computer basics, using a TV screen as a monitor.

“Children want to emulate their parents, whether they are on the phone, using a digital camera or on their computers and online,” said Mark Randall, vice president of the toy and baby store at Amazon.com. “The toy industry now has pretty much got a product for every one of those behaviors.”

Even toys with no typical connection to technology are newly wired. A new generation of popular stuffed animals and dolls, like Webkinz, are now tied to Internet sites so that toddlers can cuddle and dress them one minute and go online to social-network the next. Among the hottest toys listed in the holiday issue of Toy Wishes magazine are Barbie Girls MP3 players and the Rubik’s Revolution, a blinking, beeping update of the Rubik’s Cube that includes six electronic games.

Wiring toys for a young audience is worrying some children’s advocates and pediatricians. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against screen time for children ages 2 and younger, and it recommends no more than one to two hours a day of quality programming on televisions or computers for older children.

Donald L. Shifrin, a pediatrician based in Seattle and the spokesman for the academy, said tech toys cannot replace imaginative play, where children create rich narratives and interact with peers or parents.

“Are we creating media use as a default for play?” Dr. Shifrin asked. “When kids want to play, will they ask, ‘Where’s the screen?’ ”

But to the toy industry, the so-called youth electronics category is a bright spot and now accounting for more than 5 percent of all toy sales. Overall toy sales have been flat at around $22 billion a year for the last five years, according to the market research firm NPD Group.

“If you’re just selling traditional toys like board games or plastic toys, you can survive but you can’t grow,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Needham & Company. “This industry has to redefine what a toy is.”

Toy makers are also worried that they might be losing their youngest, most devoted customers to the consumer electronics and video game companies. Mr. McGowan said the industry has even coined a term for the anxiety: KGOY, which stands for Kids Getting Older Younger.

Meanwhile, electronics makers, and entrepreneurs, see opportunity in capturing today’s bib-wearing consumers.

A cellphone company called Kajeet, based in Bethesda, Md., introduced a cellphone this year for children ages 8 and up. In October, Toys “R” Us started stocking the phones, which have software aimed at children but the same hardware as adult models.

“When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they’re much less interested,” said Daniel Neal, Kajeet’s chief executive. “They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they’re smart enough to use it better than you do.”

Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft, has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer.

Asmin Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim, has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy computer. “We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it’s a fake,” he said.

Grace, a 1-year-old in San Francisco, however, has been going through a decidedly nontechnology phase.

Recently, playtime has involved “putting little toys and dolls into bags and zipping them up,” said her mother, Tanya, who declined to give her last name. “Wouldn’t it be great if our lives were so simple?”

Still, Tanya has put the Fun Elmo Laptop on Grace’s Christmas list. Tanya says Grace is getting the gift because she loves to sit on her mom’s lap and hit the keys and move the mouse on the family’s real computer.

“I think she just likes mimicking people,” Tanya said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/te...9techtoys.html





Facebook Jumps Ahead of Myspace in Traffic (Depending on Who You Believe)

This really isn’t a question of Facebook vs. MySpace. It’s a question of Alexa.com vs. Compete.com.

According to Alexa, Facebook jumped ahead of MySpace last week to technically take the #6 spot. While it hasn’t changed on the official Alexa Top 500, a close examination of the line graph comparison shows the too big dogs in social networking neck and neck on Novemeber 20 and 21. Facebook jumped ahead by a small margin after that.

Compete.com paints a completely different picture. Despite the slower updates, MySpace still have a huge lead lead in October, 2007. It shows MySpace at 65 million versus Facebook’s 24 million.

The trends over the last several months have shown both websites growing in traffic sporadically over the last year, but Facebook seems to be making bigger gains. That could change, as Facebook Beacon, their new user-data-driven advertising program, has drawn a tremendous amount of heat from users, critics, and watchdog groups since its launch this month.

This all brings up three questions:

1) Will the increase in revenue be sufficient to compensate for Facebook’s “loss of face”?

2) If Facebook succeeds, will MySpace follow with a similiar ad platform of their own? (perhaps they’ve already starting it)

3) Who’s right, Compete.com or Alexa.com, and why is there such a discrepancy?

*Bonus Question* - Does anyone really care outside of the financial driving forces behind the websites in question?

*Bonus Answer* - Probably not, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
http://socialnewswatch.com/facebook-myspace-alexa/





How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you're looking to avoid.

Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an endless geyser of free floppy disks and CDs, the kind of place where the clueless management were willing and able to -- for example -- alienate every Vietnamese speaker on Earth by banning the use of the word "Phuc" (a Vietnamese name) because naughty people might use it to evade the chatroom censors' blocks on the f-bomb.

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a benevolent dictatorship this clearly isn't one.

Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up the platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily exporting and importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work -- openness, decentralization, standardization -- it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable characteristic that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant proportion of Internet users.

The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it begins to define "the Internet" for a large slice of the world's netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).

But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later").

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a "social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=204203573





Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking
Louise Story and Brad Stone

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

“Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

“Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

“We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad executives have poked fun at Facebook users.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

Facebook users each get a home page where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their friends’ pages.

Under Beacon, when Facebook members purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com, for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel venues on NYTimes.com, friends are also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.

Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding if it would still push for a universal opt-out.

The whole purpose of Beacon is to allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad, for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a “recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But Facebook users say they do not want to endorse products.

“Just because I use a Web site, doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was cheaper.”

Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene It?” game.

“I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are getting me for Christmas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/te...gy/30face.html





In-Store Wi-Fi Is Free, but Not Commercial-Free
Lia Miller

PEOPLE who like to use their laptops, iPhones and other devices in public are always so delighted when they stumble on a wireless hot spot in an unexpected place. Will they be pleased enough to look at ads before getting their broadband fix?

AnchorFree, a company in Sunnyvale, Calif., that is two and a half years old, has introduced a service that lets merchants of any size — from a large bookstore chain to a mom-and-pop restaurant — offer free advertising-supported Wi-Fi to customers on the store premises. People who are shopping or eating in an AnchorFree location will see banner ads on their screens or short video spots or both before their browsing session.

Among the major companies that have signed up to advertise are American Express, Circuit City, Clorox, Ford, Kaiser Permanente, McDonald’s, Toyota and Major League Baseball.

Mark Smith, executive vice president for marketing and strategy at AnchorFree, said that advertisers could tailor their ads to reach people at specific locations in the network. For example, an ad for a Lexus might be shown to customers staying at a four-star hotel, but not to guests at an airport motel. “Advertisers could target airport travelers versus vehicle travelers, for instance,” he said.

Considering the growing number of hand-held devices that offer Web browsing, Mr. Smith said he viewed the Wi-Fi network as an untapped market of virtual billboards. Controlling this valuable bit of real estate, he said, gives companies “the ability for them to have their own branded relationship” with people “while they are their point of consumption.”

•

Until recently, the two most widespread options people had for using wireless broadband at public hot spots have been either paying a subscription fee to their cellphone carrier or paying a daily or hourly rate to the retailer that is host of the site. AnchorFree is one of a handful of companies offering an alternative business model, one in which the advertiser pays but the retailer and the Web surfer do not.

Businesses that traditionally offer Wi-Fi to customers — hotels, for example — can sign up with AnchorFree at no cost and collect a share of up to 50 percent of the advertising revenue. For small businesses, which might not be able to afford Wi-Fi service, AnchorFree will supply the necessary router and other technology at no cost.

The retailer can then promote its free wireless service, which could prove to be a competitive advantage. Some hotels, for instance, charge guests $10 to $15 a night for Wi-Fi access.

Mr. Smith said that AnchorFree’s technology created a “persistent messaging frame” by pushing down the Web page on a device’s screen and inserting a space for a banner ad. The space is independent of the Web pages being viewed and does not change based on where the user is surfing.

AnchorFree offers several options to retailers and advertisers. With the open network option, a retailer agrees to run any ad from the AnchorFree rotation, and in the closed network option a company with multiple locations (like a bookstore chain or hotel) can run its own advertising or other messages within that network.

Brad Agens, senior vice president for advertising sales at Gorilla Nation, a company that connects online advertisers to more than 500 Web sites, said that AnchorFree was the first network it was representing. He said that companies seeking to buy ad space online were “looking beyond the portals and the large, branded destinations, the ESPNs, the MTVs.”

•

AnchorFree is not the only company to offer an advertising network for mobile broadband. JiWire, based in San Francisco, has a similar system, though a different technological approach.

Analysts in the wireless industry say they expect that this sector will evolve and mature along with the growth of wireless Internet use.

“The real key is whether advertisers will embrace this model and drive online advertising revenue toward Wi-Fi hot spots,” said Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer with the Yankee Group, a technology research and consulting group.

He said it was too early to evaluate whether wireless advertising would emerge as a distinct and robust market, separate from the more established realm of online advertising.

“New economic models around advertising are disruptive,” Mr. Ayvazian said. “If companies like AnchorFree can add a new layer of innovation around free broadband access, they can be disruptive again and take market share.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/bu...ia/27adco.html





Technology Identifies Invisible Intruders on Wireless LANs

System is a window into an invisible world
Sandra Rossi

Groundbreaking research undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology has led to the creation of systems that can detect invisible intruders on wireless local area networks.

QUT Information Security Institute co-researcher Dr Jason Smith said he and a colleague had invented an effective system to detect unwanted presence on wireless networks.

"Unlike a building, there are no clearly defined boundaries to wireless networks. The perimeter of a network is defined by the quality of the receiving antenna," Dr Smith said.

"Intruders can easily gain access to wireless networks by either eavesdropping on unencrypted networks or actively hijacking computer sessions when a legitimate user logged onto the network leaves the connection."

Dr Smith said the system was a window into an invisible world that let network administrators see whether unexpected or undesirable things had occurred on their networks.

"We've created a series of monitoring techniques that when used together can effectively watch for both attackers and configuration mistakes in devices on the network," he said.

"The monitor is independent of the network, yet uses information accumulated by the network. This makes the system cheap and easy for businesses to incorporate.

"The strength of the signal travelling in a wireless network and the round trip time of the signal are both monitored because they will change if an intruder enters the network.

"Separately monitoring the signal and round trip time is unreliable, but correlating them against each other makes the system accurate."

Dr Smith said when an intruder was detected a number of steps could then be taken.

"Depending on how sensitive the network is, armed security guards could be deployed, or the wireless network may be turned off. The security protection might alter to avert the intrusion or the intruder may simply be monitored to see what they get up to," he said.

"Another application is to use the monitoring to search for security vulnerabilities in devices legitimately connected to the network. When a compromising security configuration is detected, the mistake could be corrected."

Dr Smith said he created the system with PhD researcher Rupinder Gill, who was now employed by a wireless network vendor in the US to create security products.

He said the valuable commodity at greatest risk on local area networks was information.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...2;fp;16;fpid;1





DI Fellows-- EXPELLED for Plagiarism

It is one thing to correct Michael Behe (some structure guy) with zero HIV-1 research experience on HIV-1 evolution. But considering the sheer number of DI 'fellows' who are lawyers, and the fact Im just a biology student with zero experience in law... I found it rather strange that I caught something the DI lawyers evidently had no problem with:


Long Original with Narration


DI manipulation with *Narration*


----------------

Now, I have brought this to the attention of Harvard and XVIVO. I dont know what theyre going to do (theyre Harvard-- they can do whatever they want). I do know that they are not happy campers. IANAL, I am a virologist, but heres why *I* would be upset.

This isnt a case of naive copyright infringement on Dembskis part, ie "Hey! I found this cool video on YouTube, lets use it!" Though Dembski is pictured here, others have reported multiple DI 'fellows' presenting this manipulated animation. The Discovery Institute does not have a license to use this animation, so they downloaded it illegally.

Maybe they think it is 'okay' to use it anyway, because they stripped off Harvard/XVIVOs copyright and credits.

Maybe they think it is 'okay' because they gave the animation a new title ('Inner life of a cell' became 'The cell as an automated city') and an extraordinarily unprofessional new narration (alternate alternate title-- ' Big Gay Al takes a tour of a cell!'). Harvard/XVIVOs narration, all of the science, is whisked away and replaced with a 'surrealistic lilliputian realm'-- 'robots', 'manufacturing', 'circuitry', 'nano moters', 'UPS labels'. Maybe they think it is 'okay' because they turned all of Harvards science into 'MAGIC!'

Hmm. From my point of view, as a virologist and former teaching assistant, this isnt just copyright infringement. This is theft and plagiarism. Taking someone elses work without their consent, manipulating it without their consent, pretending it supports ID Creationists distorted views of reality, and presenting it as DIs work.

*shrug* The DI fellows would be EXPELLED from my university for this.
http://endogenousretrovirus.blogspot...lagiarism.html





Law Review Article on the Problems with Copyright

Excellent article by John Tehranian: "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap":

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer -- a veritable grand larcenist -- or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

The point of the article is how, simply by acting normally, all of us are technically lawbreakers many times over every day. When laws are this far outside the social norms, it's time to change them.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...view_arti.html





Tiffany and eBay in Fight Over Fakes
Katie Hafner

For years, eBay has defined itself simply as an online marketplace that links buyers and sellers.

But in a weeklong bench trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan that ended last Tuesday, lawyers for Tiffany & Company argued that the online auction house was far more than that: it is a distribution network that enables the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

If Tiffany wins its case, not only could other lawsuits follow, but eBay’s business model could be threatened because it would be difficult and extremely expensive for the company, based in San Jose, Calif., to police a site that now has 248 million registered users worldwide and approximately 102 million items for sale at any one time.

Tiffany has requested injunctive relief that would require eBay to alter its procedures to eliminate counterfeit silver Tiffany merchandise from its auctions. Judge Richard Sullivan instructed both sides to file post-trial briefs by Dec. 7.

“I will hopefully turn this around quite quickly after that,” he told the lawyers.

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said eBay was not responsible for determining whether each product sold on the site was fake.

“As a marketplace, we never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site, so it would be impossible for us to solely determine the authenticity of an item,” Mr. Durzy said. “And we go above and beyond what the law requires us to do to keep counterfeits off the site.”

But in his closing argument last Tuesday, James B. Swire, the lawyer for Tiffany, told Judge Sullivan that eBay directly advertised the sale of Tiffany jewelry on its home page, and “because eBay profits from the sales generated by these and other actions,” Tiffany considers its actions direct copyright infringement.

Mr. Swire added that “there’s certainly much in the record to show that eBay is liable for contributory infringement.”

Bruce Rich, eBay’s lawyer, told the court the company had fulfilled its obligation to prevent the sale of counterfeit goods. In his closing argument, he said the law places the primary policing responsibility on the trademark owner, Tiffany, because Tiffany has the necessary expertise to identify counterfeits of its products.

Of course, fakes are sold everywhere, as anyone trying to dodge the street vendors selling fake designer handbags in Times Square can attest. But the anonymity and reach of the Internet makes it perfect for selling knockoffs. And as the biggest online marketplace, eBay is the center of a new universe of counterfeit products.

“The fact that eBay has chosen to set up its business in a manner that makes it extremely difficult for it to monitor the merchandise that is sold at its auctions is not a defense,” said Geoffrey Potter, chairman of the anticounterfeiting practice at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, a New York law firm.

Mr. Potter said that if the judge found that eBay had the same duty as flea markets and traditional retail stores to not sell counterfeit products, “eBay will likely have to either stop auctioning famous luxury products or radically alter the way it does business so that it can precertify the authenticity of those products.”

“One way that eBay could do this would be to require proof that Tiffany had been paid for the items, before eBay permits an auction of multiple, identical alleged Tiffany products,” Mr. Potter said.

Mr. Potter said eBay did manage to keep other illegal items — human organs, firearms, and child pornography — off the site. “The truth of the matter is that if eBay wanted to keep counterfeit Tiffany goods off, it probably could,” he said.

When Tiffany filed its suit against eBay in 2004, it said that Tiffany employees had trolled eBay to find fake Tiffany silver jewelry and concluded that 73 percent of 186 pieces they purchased on eBay were counterfeit.

In its original complaint, Tiffany maintained that anyone selling five or more pieces of jewelry said to be Tiffany’s at a discount “is almost certainly selling counterfeit Tiffany goods.” Other makers of luxury goods have complained that sales of counterfeit items are hurting their businesses.

“Louis Vuitton believes that people avoid buying their signature bags because of all the fake ones out there,” Mr. Potter said.

In his opening statement last week, Mr. Swire, Tiffany’s lawyer, said that in 2003 Tiffany put eBay on notice about the counterfeit items and requested that the company investigate. Yet “eBay simply turned a blind eye,” Mr. Swire said.

Last Tuesday, Judge Sullivan questioned Michael J. Kowalski, Tiffany’s chairman and chief executive, about the measures Tiffany has taken to track down and prosecute the counterfeiters.

Mr. Kowalski said it had been difficult — and often fruitless — to pursue sellers who list counterfeits on eBay, as they frequently change identity.

“We simply felt that we were chasing ourselves,” he said, and “chasing phantom sites that would be taken down one day and pop up another day, and so we were in a vicious circle.”

In the end, Mr. Kowalski said, “The heart of the issue was the distribution network,” referring to eBay.

Mr. Durzy said that eBay had put in place additional anticounterfeiting measures since Tiffany filed its suit. These include closer monitoring of categories chosen most often by counterfeiters, like expensive jewelry and handbags, as well as PayPal verification requirements, selective restrictions on sales volume and limits on cross-border sales.

“We’re very pleased with the way the trial went,” Mr. Durzy said.

After each side presented closing arguments, the judge noted what he called “a fundamental disagreement with respect to what the law is here.”

Although Judge Sullivan gave little indication of how he might rule, he pointed to legal precedents that have found that if a manufacturer or distributor continues to supply a product knowing it is engaging in trademark infringement, that manufacturer or distributor is “contributorily responsible” for any harm done as a result of the deceit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/te...gy/27ebay.html





RIAA Must Divulge Expenses-Per-Download
NewYorkCountryLawyer

The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/11/27/0215220.shtml





A Gimmick Becomes a Real Trend
Bob Tedeschi

TWO years ago, Cyber Monday was a marketing gimmick in search of shoppers. This year, it seems to be a genuine trend that retailers have embraced.

In a survey of roughly 120 members of Shop.org, the trade group for online retailers, nearly three-quarters said they would offer discounts today for Cyber Monday, as the first Monday after Thanksgiving has become known. Shop.org said 32 percent of adults surveyed last week said they would shop online on Cyber Monday, up from 27 percent in 2006.

Among the merchants participating is HSN.com, which is giving first-time customers a discount of 15 percent.

Retailers are hoping the sales create early demand for goods, thus easing the late-season strain on the merchants’ shipping operations. It could also help them record early gains during what could be a cheerless holiday season. Analysts said ripples from the credit crisis and rising fuel costs, among other factors, could damp consumer spending.

Doug Hart, an analyst at BDO Seidman, an accounting and consulting firm, said Cyber Monday sales would account for about 12 percent of the expected $39 billion in online revenue this holiday season. That is similar to the 15 percent share of holiday sales recorded by offline retailers on the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, he said.

Some online merchants see Cyber Monday promotions as an antidote to the crowds and traffic jams of Black Friday, and are hoping this year’s online promotions attract shopping refugees.

It helps that some retailers are more aggressively promoting their discounts. Ice.com, an online jeweler, last year offered a 20 percent discount on 15 items on Cyber Monday. “We didn’t go all the way with promotions because we didn’t think it was such a great idea,” said Pinny Gniwisch, executive vice president for marketing at Ice.com. “But last year, we saw huge increases in traffic and sales.”

The percentage of discounts on Ice.com will be similar to last year’s. This year, however, roughly 12,000 sites that promote Ice.com in exchange for a commission — like UPromise.com and FatWallet — are featuring Ice.com’s Cyber Monday promotion.

The sale also appears alongside those of dozens of other online retailers on CyberMonday.com, a site created by Shop.org two years ago. According to Scott Silverman, Shop.org’s executive director, 43 percent of the organization’s members joined the inaugural Cyber Monday promotion in 2005.

“Last year’s response really legitimized it,” he said.

Among this year’s promotions, 29 percent are one-day sales. Other deals are being offered in the days before and after Cyber Monday or, in some cases, the entire holiday shopping season. About one-fourth of the retailers participating are not charging customers for shipping.

•

Mr. Hart of BDO Seidman said this year’s Cyber Monday deals would culminate a series of November promotions intended to drive holiday sales sooner. Sales like Target.com’s discount on more than 60 gift items, he said, helped set the promotional tone of the month for retailers. Free shipping offers for toys sold on Walmart.com and Target.com show how jittery merchants have become since the recalls of toys made in China, he said.

Among the more aggressive entrants into the Cyber Monday fray is the recently introduced Web site of the retail chain Meijer. The site is cutting 30 percent from the price of many Global Positioning Systems, television and video items, and audio products. “Because it’s our first year out of the gate, we want people to get used to us,” said Dawn Bronkema, Meijer’s director for e-commerce marketing.

Meijer will continue offering sales after Cyber Monday, but the discount level could be smaller and the breadth of selection might not be as wide.

•

For some online merchants, the idea of Cyber Monday still rings hollow. Bill Bass, the chief executive of Fair Indigo, a seller of fair-trade apparel based in Madison, Wis., said his site would still not offer special price promotions.

“There’s something inherently dishonest about it,” he said. “If you’re giving a promotion now, you’re kind of saying you stuck it to people who bought from you when there wasn’t a promotion.”

Mr. Bass acknowledged that the policy could mean his site would lose sales to retailers that offer Cyber Monday discounts. “If you go down that path, you’re training your customers to expect promotions,” he said.

Like other retailers that rely heavily on catalogs for marketing, Fair Indigo can help encourage earlier holiday shopping by simply mailing catalogs sooner.

Mr. Gniwisch, of Ice.com, said that if nothing else, this year’s Cyber Monday success in attracting retailers shows the necessity of persistence in establishing an annual event.

“When something’s pushed down your throat continuously and the Internet becomes more part of your life, the customs of the Internet become more part of your life,” Mr. Gniwisch said. “So they finally got a holiday for the Internet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/te...gy/26ecom.html





Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday

Lowe's, Macy's, Victoria's Secret and others are hit hardest where it hurts—in the transaction times.
Evan Schuman

A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit.

But they were far from the exception, as almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance.

Many retailers count on Black Friday to turn their red ink black, but the fact that most slowdowns occurred during the transaction phase of the interactions may have reduced that salvaging effect considerably.

Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, said the slowdowns "impacted the product search and check-out processes—and presumably will impact online sales."

The Keynote study added that "the worst performing sites on Black Friday were showing as much as a 400 percent slowdown," which White said "will lead to consumers abandoning a product search or checkout."

Macy's, for example, saw site performance fall off from its typical 12 seconds to about 15 to 20 seconds. "But it's not happening on their homepage," White said. "It's happening when [site visitors] are actually searching the site."

Among some of the other hardest hit e-tailers were Lowe's—which saw a roughly "300 percent decrease in performance," White said. Site performance "used to be 100 percent [rapid response], but it's now fluctuating between 20 percent and 30 percent."

OfficeDepot went from 10 seconds to 25 seconds. Buy.com and Borders also suffered significant slowdowns, White said.

High-tech marketing marks Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Click here to read more.

White noted that, in general, homepage performances were good, but that delays crept in later in the purchase process, typically when the site visit moved from product description pages to either search or checkout. That is when sites move transactions to other servers and—quite often—to other sites entirely.

Indeed, some performance degradations may not be the direct fault of the retail site. But White said that major retailers can and should "put pressure on suppliers [and] partners" to optimize their own systems. He added that SLAs (service-level agreements) should include guaranteed response times during holidays and other anticipated high-traffic periods.

A site slowdown—as opposed to an outright outage—can be especially frustrating because steady—and oftentimes sharply rising—sales camouflage the problem. In the end, many executives are left wondering how many additional sales they might have made had the site responded normally.

How long is too long for a site to respond to a mouse click? That depends on the individual shopper and that shopper's patience. White cited the popular 8-second rule, but said that many factors influence how lenient shoppers will be.

Consumers may be willing to wait longer for exclusive products or information, such as the balance of their bank accounts.

Consumers might also be more patient with a graphic-intensive site that has images they truly want to see. Victoria's Secret, for example, experienced a huge slowdown Thursday night—from a 5-second response to a 15-second response—but White speculated that its customers might be more tolerant of delays because they're expecting a more graphic-intensive experience, and the delay is thus worth waiting through.

Predictions for retail generally suggest that 2007 will have one of the weakest years in terms of sales growth since 2002, the worst of the dot-com implosion years.

But the National Retail Federation on Sunday predicted that Monday will show a sharp increase, with "72 million consumers planning to shop online from home or at work tomorrow, up from 60.7 million in 2006 and 59.0 million in 2005." The NRF survey found that 31.9 percent of adults will shop on Cyber Monday, up 17.3 percent over last year.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2222015,00.asp





Dell Reports 26% Rise in Quarterly Earnings
Matt Richtel

Dell Inc. reported today that third-quarter net income increased 26 percent to $766 million, or 34 cents a share, on sales of $15.6 billion.

A consensus of Wall Street analysts had projected that Dell would post sales of $15.3 billion and earnings per share of 35 cents.

Shaw Wu, an industry analyst with American Technology Research, said the returns were a disappointment to investors given a 7.7 percent run-up of the stock in the last two days.

“It’s pretty solid, but expectations were higher,” Mr. Wu said.

Indeed, Dell’s shares fell sharply in after-hours trading, declining more than 10 percent.

In the same period a year earlier, the company posted sales of $14.4 billion, and net income of $601 million, or 27 cents per share.

Company executives characterized the earnings as solid, but hampered by the costs of its transition to putting more emphasis on consumers and the international market, and to selling through retail stores.

After years of selling directly to consumers, Dell will be available in 10,000 retail outlets by the end of the year, said Michael S. Dell, the company’s chairman and chief executive.

Still, even as the company forged ahead with its strategy, it continued to lose market share in the United States to its chief rival, Hewlett-Packard.

“We are generally pleased, but we expect and want to do a better job,” said Donald J. Carty, Dell’s chief financial officer. He said that “improvement in profitability was somewhat muted by costs” associated with the transformation.

Today’s earnings call with Mr. Dell, who reassumed the post of chief executive in January, was Dell’s first with analysts in 18 months. In the interim, it has been trying to resolve problems with its accounting practices, which have forced it to restate earnings. The accounting is the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Dell, once the leader in the PC business, has been under a relentless assault from Hewlett-Packard. According to IDC, a market research firm, at the end of the third quarter this year, H.P. had 20 percent of worldwide shipments of PCs, surpassing Dell’s 15 percent.

A year ago, the companies were tied at around 17 percent.

The challenge for Dell has been that growth in the market for desktop computers, laptops and servers has come largely in the consumer and international market — two areas where the company has been weaker than H.P.

Dell derives about 38 percent of its sales from outside the Americas. Only about 20 percent of its business is consumer-centered, and 80 percent corporate, said Clay Sumner, an industry analyst with Friedman, Billings, Ramsey.

“We all know that Dell has to participate more in international and more on the consumer side,” he said. “The question is how much it will cost Dell to do so.”

To emphasize the consumer business, it is widely accepted that Dell needs to transform from a direct sales model — selling over the phone, Internet and through catalog — to also selling through retail.

Already, Dell has announced a handful of retail partners, including Walmart. But those partnerships can add cost, not just because Dell has to reorganize its business, but also because it has to pay the retailer a share of sales.

Investors who are bullish on Dell believe that the new strategy will bring not only growth, but expanded profit margins as well. Some skeptical investors agree sales growth is likely but are concerned that profit margins will fall.

“That is the $64,000 question,” Mr. Sumner said of the margin question.

In addition to moving into the retail business, Dell has been making more acquisitions, something it had been loath to do. Earlier this month, Dell said it would acquire EqualLogic, a data storage company, for $1.4 billion.

Despite its struggles, Dell remains a strong, profitable company with $14.6 billion in cash, Mr. Sumner noted.

“Where they are losing dramatically to H.P. is in market share, but they have begun to grow again, and few dispute they will continue to grow and at a growing rate,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/te...9cnd-dell.html





The Big Sleep



Graham Robb

THE new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has made no secret of his antipathy to his country’s 35-hour workweek. This drastic solution to unemployment was mandated by the leftist government of Lionel Jospin in 2000. The intention was to share out the available work more evenly and to allow workers to spend more time with their families. Its long-term effects on the economy are still unclear.

In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Mr. Sarkozy wrote of “the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation”: “What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!” On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month give a taste of the unions’ reaction to President Sarkozy’s measure.

President Sarkozy’s 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the “hell” of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.

The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

It is unlikely this was hibernation in the zoological sense. While extreme cold might have set off a biological response normally seen only in squirrels, bears and marmots, human hibernation probably reflects a sensible, communal decision to stay in bed for as long as possible.

But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They “hibernated” even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

President Sarkozy’s campaign slogan, “Work more to earn more,” would have meant nothing to most French peasants. After the Revolution, government officials complained that farmers were “abandoning themselves to dumb idleness,” instead of undertaking “some peaceful and sedentary industry.” Income acted only as a deterrent. The people of Beaucaire on the Rhône made enough money at their summer fair to spend the rest of the year “smoking, playing cards, hunting and sleeping.”

Until the 20th century, few people needed money. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind. Economic activity was more a means of making the time pass than of making money, which might explain why one of the few winter industries in the Alps was clock-making. Tinkering with tiny mechanisms made time pass less slowly, and the clocks themselves proved that it was indeed passing.

In modern France, where the overheated ski stations of the Alps and the Pyrenees are busier in winter than at any other time, no one is proposing a return to the five-month year. But perhaps there are lessons to be learned from those hibernating ancestors who shared their homes with heat-producing herbivores.

In September, at the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Sarkozy proposed “un New Deal écologique et économique,” but without explaining how economic growth can be reconciled with conservation. If he is serious about saving the planet, and if he wants to reassure the unions that workers will still have time with their families, he should consider introducing tax incentives for hibernation. The long-term benefits of reduced energy consumption would counterbalance the economic loss. There has never been a better time to stay in bed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html