[JackSpratts]

How to Explain DRM to Your Dad
Eliot Van Buskirk and Sean Michaels

My friend John was trying to think of a way to explain the problem with digital rights management to his dad and friend of ours who don't see what's wrong with it. He compiled a list of examples of DRM-related problems to help people understand what the big deal is with DRM.

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"1. I want to watch an Egyptian movie for my Middle Eastern studies class. But it is region coded not to play on my DVD player, in an effort to stop piracy. Now I have to hack my DVD player and break the law to get it to play. The movie isn't released in the U.S. This is the only version that was ever published. Since it isn't published in the US, and it's for academic purposes, I can rip it make copies for my classmates. That's fair use. But since I have to break the DRM to copy it -- I've broken the law anyway.

"2. My mom bought a phone that was a "music player" from Verizon. The manufacturer (LG) created a great phone to play all sorts of music. Verizon crippled the phone to only play music bought from the Verizon music store. If I hack my mom's phone, that she bought legally, to play music that she legally owns because she bought it on CD, I could be breaking the law my modifying a DRM scheme.

"3. In the Comcast situation, the MPAA and RIAA are leaning so hard on ISPs that they are afraid of legal action. This fear is causing ISPs to do a coast benefit analysis and adopt policies that are halting the development of the Internet. They are turning peoples access off without good reason. I can't sue them because of all the fine print in the service agreement., and if I could it would probably have to be in Delaware. People are using bandwidth to distribute perfectly legal creative commons software. (In this case, Linux.) It's necessary for people to exchange files to develop that software. Comcast infrastructure probably relies heavily on this software. Yet they are blocking it's development because they don't bother filtering out illegal from suspicious. The ISP start blocking "suspicious behavior" and makes life difficult for people like me.... Granted, Comcast is the party at fault in this situation, but I cansend you 100 other links of similar stories. Comcast is terrified of the copyright holders, and the draconian laws that are being rammed through congress and being copied by other nations are insanely unfair to the consumer...

"4. Democracy has been nurtured by the open source community for a while now. It's a combination Video player / RSS reader / torrent downloader. The concept is: I release a weekly/daily video-cast from my server. the first 10 people download from my server -- then the next 1000 people "swarm" download it torrent style. This way, as I get popular, I'm not put out of commission by the cost of bandwidth from one location. It distributes the bandwidth load to the network, where it is easily absorbed. ISPs are trying to block torrents because the MPAA is leaning on them to stop copyright violation. But Democracy isn't about pirating movies- It's about eliminating the costs of distribution. If you can choose from 500 movies available for free via Creative Commons, why watch the blockbuster feature? They are hindering new tech in the name of copyright. It's insane. And all this stuff flies under the radar for the most part.

"5. Microsoft sells a Zune. The Zune shares music, but you can only play that shared music for 3 days because when it's shared, it's wrapped up in a DRM scheme. If I'm in a band, and I release my songs for free under creative commons, and you download it and put it on a Zune -- you are breaking that creative commons licenses. There is no way to tell the Zune "don't protect this one". I don't want to sue my fans for locking up the music in DRM, and I don't have the resources to sue Microsoft for breaking the CC license. But the RIAA can sue 10 year olds."
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/02/..._explain_.html





U.K. Government Rejects Calls for DRM Ban
Graeme Wearden

The U.K. government has rejected a call for digital rights management to be banned in the U.K., but has acknowledged that the technology could undermine consumer rights.

A total of 1,414 people signed an online petition calling for digital rights management (DRM)--which places restrictions on how people can use media such as software or music--to be outlawed. The petition, hosted on the U.K. government's e-petitions Web site, warned that DRM removes the freedom of choice between competing products offered for digital download or on CDs.

The petition, created by blogger Neil Holmes, also cited an investigation into DRM last year by the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group, an independent Parliamentary organization. The group demanded safeguards for consumers against invasive technologies such as the rootkit-like program used by Sony on some music CDs in 2005.

The government published its response to the petition on Monday and claimed that DRM could bring value to consumers.

"DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay," said the government, in its response.

"It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied," the government added.

The DRM debate in the U.K. coincides with arguments against use of the technology from another sector--Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, who earlier this month advocated licensing music without DRM. Jobs contends that eliminating DRM will encourage interoperability between music services and boost sales of downloadable recordings.

Sony's use of rootkit-like technology on its music CDs caused a storm of protest. The DRM technology was secretly installed and hid itself from the operating systems on people's PCs when they played Sony CDs on their computers. Users complained that this violated their rights to full disclosure about the products they bought from Sony, whose problems escalated after virus writers used the technology to hide malicious software.

In the U.K., the Open Rights Group campaigns against technologies such as DRM, which it believes can undermine the rights of users.

Becky Hogge, executive director at the Open Rights Group, believes that public awareness of the issues surrounding DRM is growing. "DRM had been seen in the past as a niche technology issue, but there is now rising consumer awareness about it," she told ZDNet UK.

Hogge added that some DRM technologies put restrictions on users that run counter to their rights under U.K. copyright law. For example, a blanket ban on copying prevents an individual from taking a sample for review or illustrative purposes, as they are allowed to under the "fair use" provisions within copyright law.

"DRM attempts to enforce copyright, but it does it badly," Hogge said.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+government+...3-6160760.html





Time to Face the Music on File Sharing
Rob Pegoraro

Customers might not like the idea of technology that allows some uses of music (like copying iTunes downloads to their iPods) but forbids others (like copying the same song to another kind of music player). But until recently, it didn't seem to bother the executives behind these anti-piracy systems.

They all agreed that anybody selling downloadable music and movies needed to police what customers did with their purchases.

Last week, however, the person responsible for the most successful copy-control software in the music market, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, ruffled feathers with the question: Do we need any of this in the first place?

In an essay called "Thoughts on Digital Music" on Apple's site, Jobs wrote that his company's iTunes Store used copy-control software called FairPlay only because major record labels insisted on it. Those same labels' demands made it impossible for Apple to share its technology, he said. So his proposed solution to the "this download will only play on my iPod" problem is to abolish copy-control software altogether.

Since that remarkably blunt piece of writing hit the Web, the debate over whether technology can curb illegal file sharing has come back to life. That's good. But in the process, a lot of old myths are resurfacing -- and believing them will stop you from understand the deeper problems with the digital-media market. The myths include:

· "Apple can't share FairPlay with other companies, because the technology could get leaked and eventually prompt the labels to pull their catalogues from the iTunes store."

That's not necessarily so.

You can't completely dismiss Apple's contention; only Apple knows the fine print of its deals with the record labels. We don't. But the simple way Apple's copy-control system works should make it relatively easy for outsiders to join the FairPlay game.

FairPlay assigns the police work to the iTunes program on your Mac or PC, not the iPod. As a result, you can plug a friend's iPod into your computer and copy your iTunes purchases to it, even if that iPod is already loaded with your pal's iTunes downloads.

Plus, Apple has already taken a baby step toward putting FairPlay in other companies' hardware, in the form of Motorola cellphones that include a miniaturized version of iTunes. If the iTunes Store survived that experiment, it should be able to live through the addition of FairPlay compatibility to other playback-only devices, such as handheld organizers or car stereos.

It would be different if Apple were to let somebody design a competitor to iTunes. A lot more would be at stake in that case.

· "Microsoft solved the compatibility problem years ago when it created its PlaysForSure standard."

That depends on how you define "solved."

Microsoft can point to dozens of PlaysForSure devices from various companies, not including its own incompatible Zune. Even users of Palm organizers and smartphones can join the fun, by using NormSoft's Pocket Tunes. But when it comes to anything more complex than a handheld gadget, Microsoft takes a different stance.

Although the company allows other people to develop Window Media-compatible programs for other operating systems, such as Telestream's Flip4Mac for Mac OS X, it won't let them add PlaysForSure support.

When asked why PlaysForSure should be confined to Windows, Microsoft says it would be too difficult to keep that software secure on another operating system. That's almost the same excuse Jobs used in his online essay, except that Apple still managed to ship a Windows version of iTunes.

Either Microsoft needs to upgrade its understanding of competing operating systems, or it should admit that promoting Windows outweighs living up to its own talking points.

· "This is the price we have to pay to stop illegal file sharing."

Just try to prove that.

First, as Jobs noted in his essay, the vast majority of music sold today comes on audio CDs that impose no copying restrictions. DVDs include copying controls, but they were breached years ago.

Even if you abolished these old formats in favor of media locked up with technologies like FairPlay or PlaysForSure, you'd still have no bar to music file sharing. Both Apple and Microsoft's systems allow buyers of a song to burn it to an audio CD that can then be copied back to a computer in an unrestricted format.

The side effect: It only took a few minutes with a file-sharing program to find MP3 copies of songs sold only on iTunes. And even without the audio-CD workaround, hackers have repeatedly dismantled the defenses of FairPlay and PlaysForSure.

Either way, all you need is one unprotected copy loose in the wild; that copy can then be duplicated endlessly. And no existing anti-piracy system can stop people from downloading and playing those copies.

The technology can still serve a role in online music or movie rental services, which have drawn far fewer customers than stores like iTunes, but for purchases it does too little to justify its costs. In practice, it only stops copying by the unmotivated, the over-scheduled or the inexperienced -- the people most likely to buy a song or movie online as long as they can do so quickly, easily and cheaply.

In the music industry, a growing number of outlets beyond the big-name companies, from tiny indie-rock operations to the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Smithsonian Institution's Folkways label, have realized the futility of copy-restriction software and now sell digital downloads in open, unrestricted formats.

At this point, this all amounts to little more than expensive psychotherapy for Hollywood executives. It's the height of arrogance for them to keep sending us the bill.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021401759.html





Off I say!

OLPC's XO Laptop Comes with Anti-Theft Kill-Switch in Select Countries
Ken Fisher

While the One Laptop Per Child Project has yet to decide on whether or not they will sell the $150 XO laptop to the public, they already know their biggest customers: governments. Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay have all committed to buying the laptops for their citizenry, but as it turns out, some of these countries have worries that the laptops could end up in the hands of people other than those whom they're intended for. As a result, OLPC has built a remote kill-switch into XO laptops so they can be remotely deactivated in the event that they are used without authorization.

In a technical document published earlier this month, Ivan Krstić writes that "The OLPC project has received very strong requests from certain countries considering joining the program to provide a powerful anti-theft service that would act as a theft deterrent against most thieves."

OLPC has responded to such concerns by developing an anti-theft daemon that the project claims cannot be disabled, even by a user with root access. Participating countries can then provide identifying information such as a serial number to a given country's OLPC program oversight entity, which can then disable the devices in certain scenarios. Disabled devices are not wiped of all data, but the user environment will cease to function.

Here's how it works: the system allows countries to optionally establish a "license" period for the laptops, such as 21 days. When laptops are connected to the Internet, they will synchronize with an NTP server to obtain the correct time and date, and then obtain a license which must be renewed in the time specified. Laptops which are not renewed within the timeframe will lock. If the laptops are connected to the Internet after being reported stolen, the license-issuing server can deactivate the laptops immediately, as well. Locked laptops can be reauthorized and returned to normal use by the oversight entity.

The one thing this approach cannot stop is the gutting of a machine. However, since the majority of parts in the system are soldered to the motherboard, OLPC feels as though this kind of thievery will not be common.

The biggest methodological concern with this approach is its need for Internet access. Countries may opt for very long license periods in areas where Internet usage would be less common, or Internet uplink problems are frequent. According to the documentation, specific schools could be provided with tools that would enable them to weather an Internet outage. It would also be the countries' responsibility to determine what license period, if any, provides the greatest protection without creating unnecessary hassles.

It remains to be seen what countries will use the anti-theft service. Clearly there are worries here that the inexpensive laptops could become hot items on the black market, perhaps even in the United States and Europe where the laptops have become objects of geek fantasy. Whether it be geeks or thieves (or a combination of both), you can bet that people will be poking and prodding this anti-theft system with the hope of cracking it. Just ask Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070218-8872.html





Half of all US Households Will Have Broadband This Year
Nate Anderson

US broadband growth, though slower than that in some other countries, is expected to hit a significant milestone at some point in 2007. Consultancy Parks Associates has just released its annual report on US broadband, and it concludes that more than 50 percent of US households will have a high-speed connection by the end of the year.

The FCC recently released data of its own showing that broadband use shot up by 52 percent between June 2005 and June 2006, but the Parks report takes issue with those numbers. It claims only a 20 percent increase during 2006 (which is still significant growth) and says that at the end of last year, 47 percent of US households had broadband. That number is expected to continue upwards in 2007 and break the 50 percent barrier at some point this year.

The market's growth has certainly been astonishing. Who remembers the bad old days of one-month waits for DSL installations or the outrageous price that early adopters had to cough up for the privilege of 512Kbps speeds? 80 percent of US households that can get local phone service can now get DSL, while 93 percent of those households that can receive cable can pick up a cable modem, according to the FCC. That's great to hear.

But the US still lags behind 11 other advanced countries in broadband penetration percentage (though the total number of subscribers is the highest in the world). According to OECD statistics from June 2006, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Korea, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada, the UK, and Belgium all have a higher number of subscribers per 100 inhabitants.

When it comes to fiber rollouts, too, countries like Korea, Japan, and Denmark are doing exceptionally well. Japan, for instance, has more than 6 million fiber connections. In the US, the largest fiber to the home network is being installed by Verizon. Though FiOS is popular, it had only half a million subscribers late in 2006.

The growing ubiquity of high-speed connections isn't just changing the frequency with which people check their e-mail, though; according to Parks, it's changing the way companies do business. "The foundations of digital lifestyle applications and products are built on access services, including broadband Internet and television," said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst with Parks Associates. "With the penetration of high-speed Internet exceeding 50 percent in 2007, we're also witnessing shifts in the way companies are positioning their communications, entertainment, and information services as home technology solutions."

One has to look no further than the battle surrounding YouTube content to see how true this is. It's not affecting the country equally, though. FCC data shows exactly what we would expect: higher-density areas have better broadband availability than rural ones. That has led some in Congress to call for government intervention to boost broadband connections in rural areas, though it's not clear the proposal has any legs. Of course, for the masochists, there's always satellite.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8874.html





AT&T Could Buy a Satellite Broadcaster—But Should It?
Anders Bylund

CBS MarketWatch just published some speculation about whether AT&T might want to buy one of the two North American satellite TV providers. The idea makes sense on some levels, so let's dig a bit deeper in the pros and cons, and then into each prospective partner.

Can they do it?

The new AT&T is what used to be known as SBC Communications, a Baby Bell based in San Antonio, Texas and equipped with deep pockets. That cash has been working hard of late. SBC has bought out fellow regional Bells from coast to coast over the past ten years, culminating in two blockbuster deals. The company acquired AT&T for $16 billion in 2005 (and then took its name), and then paid $67 billion for BellSouth and full control over Cingular Wireless.

That spending spree has landed AT&T, née SBC, in heavy debt. The company has about $2.4 billion of cash-equivalents on hand, versus $51 billion of long-term debt. On the other hand, the telecom business is still a cash machine, and free cash flow amounted to $8.1 billion last year alone. AT&T is clearly capable of servicing its debt, oppressive though it may be. And that's after spending $7.5 billion to maintain and upgrade its massive infrastructure.

Two brides, one groom

So which satellite TV operator makes the better catch? Either one would be another Brobdignagian acquisition for AT&T—DirecTV comes with a $30 billion price tag today, excluding the traditional 15 to 20 percent buyout premium, and DISH Network parent EchoStar would cost more than $23 billion, net of cash and debts.

For EchoStar, this is a historically low valuation of about 2.4 times annual sales. DirecTV hasn't commanded such a premium per dollar of sales in the last five years, and its price now stands at 2.2 times revenues. In return for that cash, AT&T would get a larger installed customer base from DirecTV, and do less damage to its net income margins. DISH isn't as picky about customer acquisition as its larger rival, so DirecTV ends up with a higher proportion of fat-margin premium packages and the like.

Win-win-win

No matter which way the phone giant throws its stone, it would kill a whole flock of birds. In the race to sell triple-play solutions across the nation, cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable have a leg up with their robust, high-speed networks, and several viable upgrade paths for filling future needs. Rival telco Verizon is pushing hard on its roll of fiber-optic cabling so it can provide cable-grade services, but AT&T's position has always been that the old last-mile copper connections are good enough.

If AT&T runs into any more roadblocks rolling out its fiber-to-the-curb network, buying a satellite operator could be a great way to enter the bandwidth-intensive video market. The telco covers some vast expanses of thinly populated Midwestern outback, where satellite communications make perfect economic sense, too. AT&T already has some ties to EchoStar, including a small ownership stake and a longstanding co-branding partnership. But EchoStar insiders own more than 55 percent of the company, so that buyout would come with some tough negotiations. DirecTV doesn't have a majority owner, though Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. just arranged to sell its 38 percent stake in the company to Liberty Media—where cable industry veteran John Malone is chairman of the board.

If AT&T feels up to taking on another $30 billion to $40 billion of debt, or diluting its stock to pull off a deal, such a hookup would make sense for that company. For each of the TV broadcasters, it's a chance to get a competitive advantage over its rival, with bundled voice and data services that don't play too well over laggy satellites. Finally, the FCC may not even object, given the emergence of online entertainment options and the newfangled video-over-phone-networks trend. But it's not a given outcome, and AT&T might decide to accelerate Project Lightspeed instead, or to pull some other trick out of its sleeve.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8875.html





Neutrality On the Net Gets High '08 Profile

Tech issue gains traction in election
Charles Babington

Bloggers and other Internet activists made their marks in the past two presidential elections chiefly by building networks of political enthusiasts and raising money for candidates. Now, they are pushing aggressively into policymaking -- and not just over high-profile issues such as Iraq.

They are pressing candidates to back a handful of issues that are obscure to many Americans but vital to those who base their livelihoods on the Internet and track its development.

Armed with massive e-mail lists and high-speed networks, these activists are bypassing the familiar campaign tactics of door-knocking and phone-banking. They are also using their new-age technologies for an old-fashioned purpose: making politicians take note of their legislative priorities.

One of those is "net neutrality." Hardly a household term, it has no overtly partisan or ideological dimensions. Yet it is shaping up as a Democratic issue this year, largely because its most fervid advocates are liberal bloggers and other Internet activists who play a big role in the early stages of choosing a Democratic presidential nominee.

Unlike their Republican counterparts, every major Democratic presidential candidate has endorsed net neutrality. The move keeps them in good standing with powerful grass-roots groups, such as MoveOn.org, and costs them little in return -- perhaps a bit of space on campaign Web sites to promote a matter that comparatively few voters might explore.

Net neutrality is a principle that bars Internet providers, primarily phone and cable companies, from charging higher rates to Web-based firms in return for giving their content priority treatment on the pathways to consumers. Without such restrictions, proponents say, a user might find it time-consuming, or even impossible, to call up a favorite site that carriers have relegated to slower lanes for economic or even philosophical reasons.

"It's an issue that really captures the attention of one of their core constituencies, especially the bloggers and 'netroots,' " said Craig Aaron of Free Press, a group that champions net neutrality. "For candidates looking to appeal to those folks, it was important to take a stand," he said, even though "nobody was talking about it a year ago."

A veteran Democratic consultant who spoke on condition of anonymity was more blunt. Among Democratic candidates, she said, "if you're not for net neutrality, then the blogs will kick your" rear. The grass-roots groups that strongly favor it are relatively small but very noisy, she said, "and you just don't want to have to deal with that."

Opposing net neutrality are the telephone and cable companies that control the "pipes" that transport Internet content from producers to users. The companies say they need flexibility to manage Internet traffic, even if it eventually means charging higher rates for priority service.

For several years, the issue has been debated mainly in legal and telecom circles. Recent telecom mergers have raised its profile, however, as regulators considered the possible ramifications of consolidating control over the Internet's major pathways.

Net neutrality restrictions "could prevent broadband providers from offering enhanced levels of service for specialized applications such a telemedicine, or to offer their own branded or co-branded products or services," said Christopher Wolf, co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, a group sponsored by phone and cable companies . Such arrangements, he said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop, "will help pay for the build-out of the next generation of Internet pipes."

Moreover, Wolf said, his industry's critics cannot cite an example in which any U.S. user has been blocked.

But some groups that rely heavily on their Web sites to share information, raise money or promote causes say they fear it's only a matter of time. They cite, for example, a 2005 comment by William L. Smith, then chief technology officer for BellSouth, which has merged with AT&T, that Internet service providers should be able to charge a firm such as Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than Google's site.

Last spring, the debate over net neutrality barely scratched the consciousness of Congress, let alone the general public, after a House subcommittee defeated an effort to add net-neutrality restrictions to a multi-faceted telecommunications bill. The 23 to 8 vote goaded more than 850 interest groups, many, but not all, politically left of center, to form a coalition called SavetheInternet.com.

Members included organizations such as Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union, but the name that really grabbed the attention of Democratic officials was MoveOn.org. The group, founded in 1998 to oppose the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, rocked the political establishment in 2003 and 2004 with its ability to rally supporters and raise money for causes such as opposing the Iraq war.

With MoveOn.org urging its 3 million members to sign and deliver pro-net-neutrality petitions to senators last spring, congressional support began to grow. The net-neutrality language died in an 11 to 11 Senate committee vote, but its backers claimed a moral victory after a wide-ranging telecom bill, which lacked their amendment, eventually collapsed.

The debate's partisan nature has surprised and disappointed some advocates, who note that conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition of America and the Gun Owners of America are part of the SavetheInternet coalition. The Christian Coalition of America, in its policy statement, said net neutrality is "extremely important to America's grassroots organizations and those Americans who want to ensure the cable and phone companies controlling access to the Internet will not discriminate against groups like Christian Coalition of America." Michele Combs, a spokeswoman for the Christian Coalition of America, said that net neutrality is a nonpartisan matter and that "the conservative side has not been educated on the issue."

MoveOn.org officials agree that net neutrality should transcend political lines. "There's a growing online people-powered movement that has increasing relevance in our politics," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.org. "An issue like net neutrality, which directly taps into Internet issues, . . . could have a special energy in the political season," he said. "Every Republican and Democrat who uses the Internet is threatened by corporations that want to control which Web sites people can access."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021900934.html





Videos Have Net Bursting at the Seams

As Web's capacity nears its limits, debate rages over what to do next Advertisement
Jon Van

Those amusing YouTube video clips that Internet users send to friends gobble up large chunks of bandwidth and may cause the Net to crash, some elements of the telecom industry warn.

It's an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish.

But no one disagrees that the Web's capacity is being pushed to its limits.

"We don't see anything catastrophic near term, but over the next few years there's this fundamental wall we're heading towards," said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International Inc., one of the operators of the Internet backbones, which are the big pipes at the network's center.

The problem, Poll said, is that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands.

A recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Worldwide, more users every day join the 1 billion people who now use the Internet. Popularity of bandwidth-hungry video makes far greater demands on the network than more basic applications like e-mail, Web browsing or even voice over the Internet.

"For some service providers," the Deloitte report said, "video-chat traffic already exceeds voice volumes, and given that a minute of video requires 10 times the bandwidth as voice, the threat to bandwidth becomes clear."

David Tansley, a London-based Deloitte partner, said that "so many business models assume Internet capacity to be ubiquitous and inexpensive that capacity isn't seen as a limiting factor in applications.

"Yet little thought is given to how infrastructure providers may be [enticed] to keep investing."

While the network was famously overbuilt during enthusiasm of the 1990s Internet bubble, much of that capacity is being used now or soon will be, Tansley said, and network operators are faced with making significant investment to expand capacity further to meet growing demands fueled largely by video applications.

"2007 may be the year of the tipping point where growth in capacity cannot cope with use," Tansley said.

The Deloitte report, along with comments earlier this month by a Google executive at a technology conference in Amsterdam about Web capacity problems, have been cited as examples why telecom companies shouldn't face new regulations.

Walter McCormick Jr., chief of US Telecom, the trade group representing dominant phone companies, wrote to lawmakers arguing that the need to manage capacity would be impeded if "network neutrality" legislation passes.

Backed by several consumer groups as well as large Internet enterprises such as Google, network neutrality legislation forbids phone companies from managing the network to favor one Internet user's content over another's.

Network managers need flexibility in order to provide needed capacity as demand grows, McCormick contends.

That logic is tortured at best, said Andrew Odlyzko, director of the University of Minnesota's digital technology center.

"It's posturing for political reasons," said Odlyzko. "The telecom industry opposes network neutrality and uses any pretext to fight it."

Having monitored Internet growth for a decade, Odlyzko said he sees parallels now to earlier ploys from telecom executives. Nearly five years ago, when computer users started to hold voice conversations using Internet telephony, industry insiders fretted that bandwidth demands would exceed capacity, he said.

"Local phone companies started fighting Internet calling," he said. "They tried to get regulators to impose access charges on those calls. In a certain sense, what the industry said was plausible because the Internet was small at that time, compared to the voice network.

"If all calling had shifted to the Internet, it would've crashed the network. But that didn't happen. The shift took place more slowly. Today the giants like AT&T and Verizon carry most of their voice traffic as Internet protocol, and it's just a fraction of total traffic."

Telecom executives focus on possible broadband capacity shortfalls because of their heritage, said David Isenberg, an independent industry analyst who once worked for the Bell System.

"They want to manage the Internet as a scarce resource," Isenberg said. "Internet executives want to manage it as an abundant resource. It's a basic philosophical difference."

A major obstacle for telecom managers in planning future capacity needs is that much of the Web's video traffic is generated by individuals who send clips to friends.

This contrasts to the broadcast model, where one source sends the same program to many recipients, said Bill Kleinebecker, a senior consultant with Austin-based Technology Futures Inc.

"People's changing habits drive demand instead of just sending out TV channels," Kleinebecker said. "It's much less predictable."

A growing appetite for high-definition video is certain to keep broadband demand rising, he said, noting that even inexpensive digital cameras available to consumers increasingly have high-definition video capability.

While keeping ahead of bandwidth demand is challenging and expensive, it's not impossible, said John Ryan, a senior vice-president at Level3 Communications, which operates part of the Internet backbone.

"With appropriate continuing investment, the Internet is capable of handling any applications," Ryan said. "What we're starting to see is a distinction between those operators who have the capital to fund expansion and those that don't."

Any service degradation will be spotty and transient, predicted Ryan, who said that underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...i-bizfront-hed





State AGs Break Beer Bottle on Bar, Threaten Bud.tv Over Age Verification
Nate Anderson

Anheuser-Busch (A-B) has come under fire from 21 state attorneys general (the AP says 23) over its Bud.tv video streaming site. Advertising Age, which secured a copy of their letter to the brewer, says that it asks A-B to use a better age-checking tool; the worry is that underage youngsters might somehow see the streaming goodness of Bud.tv and be tempted by the demon alcohol.

Bud.tv, launched at the Super Bowl, is A-B's attempt to stake out a media presence on the Internet, and the site offers video clips and original programming to those discerning drinkers who enjoy a cold Bud.

It's not as though Bud.tv is simply letting people waltz on in after they supply fake birth years, though. The site's sign-up process is deeply annoying, requiring the creation of an account and the surrender of name, e-mail, ZIP code, and date of birth, which is apparently checked against public records to verify the information. The state AGs want more; anyone could, they say, get access to an adult's information and easily sign up for the site.

Of course, it's not like signing up for Bud.tv is in any way equivalent to sneaking into the local tavern, downing five or six frosty ones, then climbing behind the wheel of a Hummer. You can't even order beer there.

That's not good enough, say the states, led by the attorneys general from Maine and Louisiana. "We feel strongly that since you are creating the programming and controlling the internet-based network, not just advertising on it, you have a higher responsibility to ensure that youth are not exposed to the marketing on your site," says the letter. "We fail to see how your use of age verification on the Bud.tv site is a genuine attempt to keep youth from accessing the site's content."

Real age verification is a difficult problem for Internet applications. MySpace is dealing with the same issue, but if faces the problem of verifying kids' ages who don't yet have state IDs or credit cards and who routinely lie. Bud.tv only needs to vet adults, but even that is difficult when all that's needed is some information. Tracking down mom and dad's credit card would not be much more of a challenge for many kids, either, so what's a company to do? The RIAA has even learned about this problem first-hand in court cases that illustrate how tough it is to say exactly who is sitting on the other side of the monitor, even when you have an IP address.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8873.html





Fired Worker Claims Internet Addiction Led to Workplace Sex Chat, Dismissal
Eric Bangeman

A former IBM employee fired for accessing an adult chat room from work is suing the company for $5 million. In his lawsuit, James Pacenza claims that he is an Internet addict and sex addict, and that IBM should have allowed him to seek treatment after he was caught in the chat room rather than firing him.

Pacenza is a decorated Vietnam veteran and says that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his service there. The PTSD then led him to become a sex addict, he claims. Once he discovered the Internet, Pacenza then added an Internet addiction to his other psychological problems.

IBM—like most companies—has strict corporate policies against accessing adult web sites from work. Despite that, Pacenza logged on an adult chat room on ChatAvenue while at work in 2003. When he stepped away from his PC, another worker saw that he was logged into the chat and reported it to his supervisor. Pacenza was fired the following day.

Pacenza's complaint contains a whole slew of accusations against IBM. Given his age at the time of the dismissal (55 and just one year away from retirement), Pacenza believes that IBM's decision to terminate him constitutes age discrimination. He also accuses IBM of improperly accessing his medical records—which included details of his psychiatric treatment—before firing him and also violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. Perhaps most interestingly, Pacenza says that IBM should have allowed him to seek treatment for his "Internet addiction" instead of firing him.

"It is also discriminatory (not to mention manifestly unfair) that Plaintiff has been shown no 'mercy' by IBM, when people with other more severe psychological disabilities (alcoholism or drug addiction) or behavioral problems are routinely offered help and/or shown mercy," reads Pacenza's complaint.

In response, IBM has filed for a summary judgment, arguing that Pacenza's conduct violated the company's long-standing prohibition against accessing sexual web sites from work. IBM also says that Pacenza had previously been warned for similar behavior, a charge Pacenza denies. The company says that even if Pacenza does have a sexual behavior disorder, such disorders are specifically excluded from the ADA.
The matter of Internet addiction

Internet addiction has been a popular topic of discussion in recent years, with a 2006 study calling it a "serious problem," and one that affects between 5 and 10 percent of all web surfers. Researchers include "cybersexual addictions" and "net compulsions" among the components of Internet addiction, both of which it appears that Pacenza manifests.

Whether Internet addiction is a distinct malady deserving of its own diagnosis or just another manifestation of an addictive personality remains a subject of vigorous debate. Critics of the diagnosis are quick to point out that problematic online behaviors are almost always manifestations of "real-world" problems transported to the Internet. It appears that this describes Pacenza's case, in which a "real-world" sexual addiction became a cybersexual addiction, leading him to access an adult chat room from an IBM workstation.

The trial is scheduled for later this year.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070218-8870.html





In Brazil, Plumpness is No Longer Pleasing
Larry Rohter

As king of carnival, the corpulent Rei Momo is supposed to embody all the jollity, carnality and excess associated with that most Brazilian of bacchanals. So when the event's reigning monarch has gastric bypass surgery, sheds 68 kilograms and starts an exercise program, you begin to wonder what's going on.

And when six young women die of anorexia in quick succession — two in the last two weeks — the wonder turns to bewilderment. Brazil may well be the most body-conscious society in the world, but that body has always been Brazil's confident own — not a North American or European one.

For women here that has meant having a little more flesh, distributed differently to emphasize the bottom over the top, the contours of a guitar rather than an hourglass, and most certainly not a twig. Anorexia, though long associated with wealthier industrialized countries, was an affliction all but unheard-of in Brazil.

But that was before the incursions of the Barbie aesthetic, celebrity models, satellite television and medical makeovers made it clear how far some imported notions of beauty, desirability and health had encroached on Brazilian ideals once considered inviolate.

By "'upgrading' to international standards of beauty," said Mary del Priore, a historian and co-author of "The History of Private Life in Brazil," the country is abandoning its traditional belief that "plumpness is a sign of beauty and thinness is to be dreaded." The contradictory result, she added, is that "today it's the rich in Brazil who are thin and the poor who are fat."

A generation ago, the ideal type here was Martha Rocha, a Miss Brazil from the mid-1950s. She finished second in the Miss Universe competition supposedly because her body was a bit too generous in the hips, buttocks and thighs, but since those characteristics were so highly valued in Brazil, as suggested by cartoons and the popularity of the semi-pornographic drawings of Carlos Zéfiro, it was the rest of the world whose taste was questioned.

Even the famous "girl from Ipanema," immortalized in the bossa nova song written in 1962, illustrated the cultural differences that prevailed then: Only in the English lyrics is she "tall and tan and young and lovely." In the original Portuguese version, the emphasis is on "the sweet swing" of her hips and backside as she walks, a sway described as "more than a poem, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

Today, in sharp contrast, the epitome of beauty is Gisele Bündchen, the top model whose enormous international success has inspired the thousands of Brazilian girls who dream of emulating her to enroll in modeling schools and competitions. But very little about Bündchen's body — tall and blond, rangy yet busty — connects her to her homeland and its traditional self-image.

"Hers is a globalized beauty that has nothing to do with the Brazilian biotype," said Joana de Vilhena Novaes, author of "The Intolerable Weight of Ugliness: On Women and Their Bodies" and a psychologist here. "She has very little in the way of hips, thighs or fanny. She's a Barbie," one whose parents are of German descent.

Novaes and others have noted that during the 1960s and '70s, Brazilian girls played with a locally made doll named Susi, who, reflecting the national aesthetic, was darker and fleshier than her counterparts abroad. But in the 1970s, Barbie arrived, and by the mid- 1980s, production of Susi dolls had ceased, though it has resumed in recent years in a sort of backlash.

Yet until recently no one here would ever have talked with admiration about having an hourglass figure like Barbie's, let alone the coat-hanger physiques of the international runways. Instead, the ideal was what is known as "um corpo de violão," or "guitar-shaped body"; that is, like Susi's, thicker in the waist, hips and fanny.

One indication of how rapidly values are changing can be gleaned from a government study released in November, just after the first in the cluster of anorexia deaths, that of Ana Carolina Reston, a 21-year-old model. According to the survey, the percentage of the population taking appetite suppressants more than doubled between 2001 and 2005, making Brazil the world champion in the consumption of diet pills.

"The reasons are purely aesthetic, not medical, especially for women," who account for at least 80 percent of the market, said Elisaldo de Araujo Carlini, a professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo who is the author of the study. "They want to get thin no matter what, all because of images from north of the Equator. It is a cruel cultural imposition on the Brazilian woman."

Women in countries around the world are subject to such pressures, of course. But Brazilians argue that the situation here is more extreme: this is, after all, a tropical country in which, much more than the United States, Europe or Japan, people live their lives outdoors, often, for comfort's sake, in skimpy clothes showcasing the body's glories or defects.

A result is a culture of vanity that seems to know no boundaries.

This summer, the newest rage, according to local news reports, is liposuction on the toes, and there have also been accounts of a boom in plastic surgery among women 80 and older.

Men are not immune. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is reported to have recently had cosmetic work done on his teeth, and even the chief of an Indian tribe in the Amazon had plastic surgery because, as he guilelessly put it, "I was finding myself ugly and I wanted to be good-looking again."

But most of the complaints about the tyranny of the culture of beauty here come from women. Each year follows the same pattern: Enrollment at gyms, here called "academies," declines as cool weather arrives, and then rises in the final quarter of the year, as women try to prepare their bodies to look good on the beaches during the Southern Hemisphere summer vacation season, which runs from just before Christmas until carnival, about two months later.

The new paradigm has been slower to penetrate poorer regions like the Amazon and the northeast, where hunger is still widespread and the idea of "fartura," or cornucopian abundance, is especially valued. There, men in particular are proud to show off wives and children whose bodies are more rounded, as a sign that they are good providers.

"To be fat used to be considered wonderful in Brazil, because it showed that you eat very well, which is important to Brazilians," said Roberto da Matta, an anthropologist and newspaper columnist who is a leading social commentator. "That you have three meals a day and eat meat and beans, calmly, at a table with friends and relatives, means that someone is taking good care of you."

Experts also agree that Brazilian men, whatever their class or race, have been much slower to accept slenderness as a gauge of feminine beauty. When they are looking for a sexual partner, Brazilian men are consistent and clear in saying that they prefer women who are fleshy in the rear — "popozuda" is the wonderfully euphonious slang term used here — and have pronounced curves.

In the past, that standard was so firmly established that some Brazilian women resorted to breast reduction or buttock augmentation surgery, sometimes even transferring their own tissue from top to bottom.

But as the international standard has taken hold, tastes are changing.

"Those huge breasts you see in the United States, like in Playboy, were always considered ridiculous in Brazil," said Ivo Pitanguy, a top plastic surgeon. "But there is now more of a tendency than before to want breasts that are a bit larger — not to make them huge, mind you, but more proportional as part of a body that is more svelte and more athletic."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/14/news/rio.php





Goodbye to Girlhood

As Pop Culture Targets Ever Younger Girls, Psychologists Worry About a Premature Focus on Sex and Appearance
Stacy Weiner

Ten-year-old girls can slide their low-cut jeans over "eye-candy" panties. French maid costumes, garter belt included, are available in preteen sizes. Barbie now comes in a "bling-bling" style, replete with halter top and go-go boots. And it's not unusual for girls under 12 to sing, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?"

American girls, say experts, are increasingly being fed a cultural catnip of products and images that promote looking and acting sexy.

"Throughout U.S. culture, and particularly in mainstream media, women and girls are depicted in a sexualizing manner," declares the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, in a report issued Monday. The report authors, who reviewed dozens of studies, say such images are found in virtually every medium, from TV shows to magazines and from music videos to the Internet.

While little research to date has documented the effect of sexualized images specifically on young girls, the APA authors argue it is reasonable to infer harm similar to that shown for those 18 and older; for them, sexualization has been linked to "three of the most common mental health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression."

Said report contributor and psychologist Sharon Lamb: "I don't think because we don't have the research yet on the younger girls that we can ignore that [sexualization is] of harm to them. Common sense would say that, and part of the reason we wrote the report is so we can get funding to prove that."

Boys, too, face sexualization, the authors acknowledge. Pubescent-looking males have posed provocatively in Calvin Klein ads, for example, and boys with impossibly sculpted abs hawk teen fashion lines. But the authors say they focused on girls because females are objectified more often. According to a 1997 study in the journal Sexual Abuse, 85 percent of ads that sexualized children depicted girls.

Even influences that are less explicitly erotic often tell girls that who they are equals how they look and that beauty commands power and attention, contends Lamb, co-author of "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes" (St. Martin's, 2006). One indicator that these influences are reaching girls earlier, she and others say: The average age for adoring the impossibly proportioned Barbie has slid from preteen to preschool.

When do little girls start wanting to look good for others? "A few years ago, it was 6 or 7," says Deborah Roffman, a Baltimore-based sex educator. "I think it begins by 4 now."

While some might argue that today's belly-baring tops are no more risque than hip huggers were in the '70s, Roffman disagrees. "Kids have always emulated adult things," she says. "But [years ago] it was, 'That's who I'm supposed to be as an adult.' It's very different today. The message to children is, 'You're already like an adult. It's okay for you to be interested in sex. It's okay for you to dress and act sexy, right now.' That's an entirely different frame of reference."

It's not just kids' exposure to sexuality that worries some experts; it's the kind of sexuality they're seeing. "The issue is that the way marketers and media present sexuality is in a very narrow way," says Lamb. "Being a sexual person isn't about being a pole dancer," she chides. "This is a sort of sex education girls are getting, and it's a misleading one."

Clothes Encounters

Liz Guay says she has trouble finding clothes she considers appropriate for her daughter Tanya, age 8. Often, they're too body-hugging. Or too low-cut. Or too short. Or too spangly.

Then there are the shoes: Guay says last time she visited six stores before finding a practical, basic flat. And don't get her started on earrings.

"Tanya would love to wear dangly earrings. She sees them on TV, she sees other girls at school wearing them, she sees them in the stores all the time. . . . I just say, 'You're too young.' "

"It's not so much a feminist thing," explains Guay, a Gaithersburg medical transcriptionist. "It's more that I want her to be comfortable with who she is and to make decisions based on what's right for her, not what everybody else is doing. I want her to develop the strength that when she gets to a point where kids are offering her alcohol or drugs, that she's got enough self-esteem to say, 'I don't want that.' "

Some stats back up Guay's sense of fashion's shrinking modesty. For example, in 2003, tweens -- that highly coveted marketing segment ranging from 7 to 12 -- spent $1.6 million on thong underwear, Time magazine reported. But even more-innocent-seeming togs, toys and activities -- like tiny "Beauty Queen" T-shirts, Hello Kitty press-on nails or preteen makeovers at Club Libby Lu -- can be problematic, claim psychologists. The reason: They may lure young girls into an unhealthy focus on appearance.

Studies suggest that female college students distracted by concerns about their appearance score less well on tests than do others. Plus, some experts say, "looking good" is almost culturally inseparable for girls from looking sexy: Once a girl's bought in, she's hopped onto a consumer conveyor belt in which marketers move females from pastel tiaras to hot-pink push-up bras.

Where did this girly-girl consumerism start? Diane Levin, an education professor at Wheelock College in Boston who is writing an upcoming book, "So Sexy So Soon," traces much of it to the deregulation of children's television in the mid-1980s. With the rules loosened, kids' shows suddenly could feature characters who moonlighted as products (think Power Rangers, Care Bears, My Little Pony). "There became a real awareness," says Levin, "of how to use gender and appearance and, increasingly, sex to market to children."

Kids are more vulnerable than adults to such messages, she argues.

The APA report echoes Levin's concern. It points to a 2004 study of adolescent girls in rural Fiji, linking their budding concerns about body image and weight control to the introduction of television there.

In the United States, TV's influence is incontestable. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, for example, nearly half of American kids age 4 to 6 have a TV in their bedroom. Nearly a quarter of teens say televised sexual content affects their own behavior.

And that content is growing: In 2005, 77 percent of prime-time shows on the major broadcast networks included sexual material, according to Kaiser, up from 67 percent in 1998. In a separate Kaiser study of shows popular with teenage girls, women and girls were twice as likely as men and boys to have their appearance discussed. They also were three times more likely to appear in sleepwear or underwear than their male counterparts.

Preteen Preening

It can be tough for a parent to stanch the flood of media influences.

Ellen Goldstein calls her daughter Maya, a Rockville fifth-grader, a teen-mag maniac. "She has a year's worth" of Girls' Life magazine, says Goldstein. "When her friends come over, they pore over this magazine." What's Maya reading? There's "Get Gorgeous Skin by Tonight," "Crush Confidential: Seal the Deal with the Guy You Dig," and one of her mom's least faves: "Get a Fierce Body Fast."

"Why do you want to tell a kid to get a fierce body fast when they're 10? They're just developing," complains Goldstein. She also bemoans the magazines' photos, which Maya has plastered on her ceiling.

"These are very glamorous-looking teenagers. They're wearing lots of makeup. They all have very glossy lips," she says. "They're generally wearing very slinky outfits. . . . I don't think those are the best role models," Goldstein says. "When so much emphasis is placed on the outside, it minimizes the importance of the person inside."

So why not just say no?

"She loves fashion," explains Goldstein. "I don't want to take away her joy from these magazines. It enhances her creative spirit. [Fashion] comes naturally to her. I want her to feel good about that. We just have to find a balance."

Experts say her concern is warranted. Pre-adolescents' propensity to try on different identities can make them particularly susceptible to media messages, notes the APA report. And for some girls, thinking about how one's body stacks up can be a real downer.

In a 2002 study, for example, seventh-grade girls who viewed idealized magazine images of women reported a drop in body satisfaction and a rise in depression.

Such results are disturbing, say observers, since eating disorders seem to strike younger today. A decade ago, new eating disorder patients at Children's National Medical Center tended to be around age 15, says Adelaide Robb, director of inpatient psychiatry. Today kids come in as young as 5 or 6.

Mirror Images

Not everyone is convinced of the uglier side of beauty messages.

Eight-year-old Maya Williams owns four bracelets, eight necklaces, about 20 pairs of earrings and six rings, an assortment of which she sprinkles on every day. "Sometimes, she'll stand in front of the mirror and ask, "Are these pretty, Mommy?"

Her mom, Gaithersburg tutor Leah Haworth, is fine with Maya's budding interest in beauty. In fact, when Maya "wasn't sure" about getting her ears pierced, says Haworth,"I talked her into it by showing her all the pretty earrings she could wear."

What about all these sexualization allegations? "I don't equate looking good with attracting the opposite sex," Haworth says. Besides, "Maya knows her worth is based on her personality. She knows we love her for who she is."

"Looking good just shows that you care about yourself, care about how you present yourself to the world. People are judged by their appearance. People get better service and are treated better when they look better. That's just the way it is," she says. "I think discouraging children from paying attention to their appearance does them a disservice."

Magazine editor Karen Bokram also adheres to the beauty school of thought. "Research has shown that having skin issues at [her readers'] age is traumatic for girls' self-esteem," says Bokram, founder of Girls' Life. "Do we think girls need to be gorgeous in order to be worthy? No. Do we think girls' feeling good about how they look has positive effects in other areas of their lives, meaning that they make positive choices academically, socially and in romantic relationships? Absolutely."

Some skeptics of the sexualization notion also argue that kids today are hardier and savvier than critics think. Isaac Larian, whose company makes the large-eyed, pouty-lipped Bratz dolls, says, "Kids are very smart and know right from wrong." What's more, his testing indicates that girls want Bratz "because they are fun, beautiful and inspirational," he wrote in an e-mail. "Not once have we ever heard one of our consumers call Bratz 'sexy.' " Some adults "have a twisted sense of what they see in the product," Larian says.

"It is the parents' responsibility to educate their children," he adds. "If you don't like something, don't buy it."

But Genevieve McGahey, 16, isn't buying marketers' messages. The National Cathedral School junior recalls that her first real focus on appearance began in fourth grade. That's when classmates taught her: To be cool, you needed ribbons. To be cool, you needed lip gloss.

Starting around sixth grade, though, "it took on a more sinister character," she says. "People would start wearing really short skirts and lower tops and putting on more makeup. There's a strong pressure to grow up at this point."

"It's a little scary being a young girl," McGahey says. "The image of sexuality has been a lot more trumpeted in this era. . . . If you're not interested in [sexuality] in middle school, it seems a little intimidating." And unrealistic body ideals pile on extra pressure, McGahey says. At a time when their bodies and their body images are still developing, "girls are not really seeing people [in the media] who are beautiful but aren't stick-thin," she notes. "That really has an effect."

Today, though, McGahey feels good about her body and her style.

For this, she credits her mom, who is "very secure with herself and with being smart and being a woman." She also points to a wellness course at school that made her conscious of how women were depicted. "Seeing a culture of degrading women really influenced me to look at things in a new way and to think how we as high school girls react to that," she says.

"A lot of girls still hold onto that media ideal. I think I've gotten past it. As I've gotten more comfortable with myself and my body, I'm happy not to be trashy," McGahey says. "But most girls are still not completely or even semi-comfortable with themselves physically. You definitely still feel the pressure of those images."

To read the APA report of the Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, go to http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021602263.html





States Seek Laws to Curb Online Bullying
Justin M. Norton

Ryan Patrick Halligan was bullied for months online. Classmates sent the 13-year-old Essex Junction, Vt., boy instant messages calling him gay. He was threatened, taunted and insulted incessantly by so-called cyberbullies.

In 2003, Ryan killed himself.

"He just went into a deep spiral in eighth grade. He couldn't shake this rumor," said Ryan's father, John Halligan, who became a key proponent of a state law that forced Vermont schools to put anti-bullying rules in place. He's now pushing for a broader law to punish cyberbullying - often done at home after school - and wants every other state to enact laws expressly prohibiting it.

States from Oregon to Rhode Island are considering crackdowns to curb or outlaw the behavior in which kids taunt or insult peers on social Web sites like MySpace or via instant messages. Still, there is some disagreement over how effective crackdowns will be and how to do it.

"The kids are forcing our hands to do something legislatively," said Rhode Island state Sen. John Tassoni, who introduced a bill to study cyberbullying and hopes to pass a cyberbullying law by late 2007.

But others argue that legislation would be ineffective. George McDonough, an education coordinator with Rhode Island's Department of Education, concedes that the Internet has become an "instant slam book" but questions whether laws can stem bad behavior.

"You can't legislate norms, you can only teach norms," he said. "Just because it's a law they don't necessarily follow it. I mean, look at the speed limit."

The Internet allows students to insult others in relative anonymity, and experts who study cyberbullying say it can be more damaging to victims than traditional bullying like fist fights and classroom taunts.

Legislators and educators say there's a need for guidelines outlining how to punish cyberbullying. They say the behavior has gone unchecked for years, with few laws or policies on the books explaining how to treat it.

Cyberbullying is often limited to online insults about someone's physical appearance, friends, clothing or sexuality. But some cyberbullies are more creative. In Washington state, a bully stole a girl's instant message username and used it to send out insulting messages.

In New York, two high school boys were accused of operating an Internet site that listed girls' "sexual secrets." Prosecutors decided not to charge the boys because of free-speech concerns.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it will be difficult to draft a cyberbullying law that doesn't infringe on free-speech rights.

"The fact that two teenagers say nasty things about each other is a part of growing up," he said. "How much authority does a school have to monitor, regulate and punish activities occurring inside a student's home?"

In Arkansas, the state Senate this month passed a bill calling on school districts to set up policies to address cyberbullying only after it was amended to settle concerns about students' free-speech rights.

States are taking different approaches to the problem.

A South Carolina law that took effect this year requires school districts to define bullying and outline policies and repercussions for the behavior, including cyberbullying. One school district there has proposed punishments from warnings up to expulsion for both traditional bullying and cyberbullying.

Some of Oregon's most powerful lawmakers have lined up behind a proposed bill that would require all of the state's 198 school districts to adopt policies that prohibit cyberbullying.

Some local school districts aren't waiting for the state to take action: The Sisters school district in Central Oregon adopted rules that allow it to revoke cyberbullies' school Internet privileges, or even expel a student in egregious cases.

Ted Thonstad, superintendent of the rural school district of 1,475 students, said it was important to clarify by policy how to treat cyberbullying - now prohibited under strict school hazing rules. Previously, the district had guidelines for what types of Internet sites students could visit, he said, but no policy specifically dealt with cyberbullying.

Thonstad said no case prompted the policy, although there were some minor incidents of cyberbullying before it went into place at the beginning of the school year. Nothing has been reported since then.

"It's difficult to monitor if you don't have the right software," he said. "So you rely on students to let you know when it's going on."

Other schools are also being proactive. Rhode Island's McDonough sent both public and private school superintendents information and resources on cyberbullying. One school is designing lesson plans to help stop cyberbullying and protect children from Internet predators.

"I think it would be a good idea if there was a law, but I really believe it has to start at home," said Patricia McCormick, assistant principal of the private St. Philip School in Smithfield, R.I.

McCormick said all the teachers in the school have been trained on Internet safety, and students now receive at least 15 classes on the subject, which includes cyberbullying. But she said stopping the problem will require parental participation.

"Cyberbullying isn't going on in school," she said. "It is going on at home, and I think there needs to be more programs to educate parents about the dangers."

News Corp.'s social-networking site MySpace prohibits cyberbullying and tells users to report abuse - to the company as well as parents and law enforcement, according to a statement issued by Hemanshu Nigam, the company's chief security officer.

John Halligan, whose son's suicide has turned him into an advocate for broader cyberbullying laws that would allow victims and their families to pursue civil penalties against bullies, said something must be done to stop the problem.

"I didn't simply want it to be Ryan's school that agreed to do something," he said. "At the end of the day this wasn't just a problem in Ryan's school."
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...erbullying.htm





For Fox’s Rivals, ‘American Idol’ Remains a ‘Schoolyard Bully’
Bill Carter

Listening to the Fox network’s competitors describe what “American Idol” has done to the television landscape is not unlike listening to a group of quavering readers offer a synopsis of a Stephen King novel:

Once a year an unrelenting monster invades a town, and all the townspeople, cowed by years of being crushed under its massive claws, have to pay it fealty or run off and hide until it goes back into a six-month hibernation.

Kelly Kahl, the chief scheduler for CBS, summed up the “Idol” factor this way: “This is a big monolith sitting out there. It’s the ultimate schoolyard bully.”

If any of Fox’s rivals had hopes that this year might signal some hint that the monster — NBC favors the term Death Star — would finally betray some sign of weakness, those hopes were dispelled in just a week. Most television shows, no matter how successful, fall off sometime after their second or third season, but against all expectations, and most of the historic record of network television, “American Idol” has come back for its sixth season bigger and stronger than ever.

Last year at this time, five weeks into its season, “American Idol” was roaring along as television’s most-watched show, with an average of 31.7 million viewers (up substantially from its fourth season, when it averaged 28.3 million viewers over the same five weeks).

Improbably, this season the show has done even better, averaging 33.5 million viewers over its first five weeks. For perspective, at this point “Idol” could lose half its audience and still rank among the top 10 shows on television. And no one dares predict when this phenomenon will fade.

“Idol” is creating ever more powerful shock waves. A growing number of television executives have begun to regard “American Idol” as a programming force unlike any seen before. Jeff Zucker, the new chief executive of NBC Universal, said, “I think ‘Idol’ is the most impactful show in the history of television.”

That takes in a lot of time and territory, but there is ample justification for the assessment, beginning with those raw numbers. Bringing in well over 30 million viewers for each installment in a television universe filled with hundreds of channels is an undeniable feat. Just about everything else in television loses viewers every year; not “Idol.”

Other top-rated shows have demonstrated similar dominance in the past. “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s, for example, regularly attracted about half of the available audience.

Still, that show accounted for just one half-hour of one night every week. “American Idol” has filled up to four hours on two nights for Fox so far this season. And starting tonight, it will occupy three nights a week for three weeks, expanding its reach beyond its regular Tuesday and Wednesday nights to a Thursday hour as well. There it will presumably take a serious bite out of “Survivor,” “Ugly Betty,” “My Name Is Earl” and “The Office.”

That is the last thing CBS, NBC and ABC want to see happen. One fallout from the overpowering performances of “Idol” on Tuesday and Wednesday nights has been a circling of the programming wagons on Monday and Thursday nights. A collection of the strongest shows the other networks program has been piling up on those two nights, out of fear that they would be chewed up by “American Idol.”

The most notable recent example of a show’s being rescheduled out of danger was ABC’s decision to protect its own reality series “Dancing With the Stars” from having to compete directly with “Idol.”

“Dancing” was a runaway hit last fall, when it played for 90 minutes on Tuesdays and an hour on Wednesdays. When it returns next month, it will be seen at 8 on Mondays, a night with no episodes of “Idol,” and at 9 on Tuesdays — just as “Idol” goes off the air.

ABC executives declined to comment on the influence “Idol” has had on their scheduling. But executives at two of the other networks noted that ABC probably had the best programming counter to “Idol” in “Dancing,” yet clearly wanted no part of that showdown.

Similarly, last winter NBC moved its promising comedies “Earl” and “The Office” from Tuesday nights, where they had thrived, to Thursday, partly to escape the annual January “Idol” invasion. ABC and NBC have mostly backed off from any serious challenge to “Idol,” relying on repeats, low-rated comedies and news magazines as cannon fodder in the hours “Idol” is on the air.

Only CBS has managed to eke out respectable ratings numbers versus “American Idol,” relying on a couple of its steady crime dramas: “NCIS” on Tuesday and “Criminal Minds” on Wednesday.

“In a way we feel a little bit lucky to have two shows that basically hit our average ratings against it,” Mr. Kahl, CBS’s chief scheduler, said. “We don’t feel quite the doom and gloom that the other guys feel. We’re lucky. We don’t get nuked.”

ABC, on the other hand, went into retreat this month with one of its signature hit series, “Lost,” moving it from 9 p.m. on Wednesdays to 10 p.m., when it no longer has to face “Idol.”

One senior network executive said the shadow “American Idol” casts was so formidable that “we have ‘Idol’ strategy sessions.” The executive asked not to be identified because the network did not want to acknowledge openly the impact “Idol” was having. “We realize we’ve got to be very, very practical” in dealing with the threat that “Idol” poses to new and promising shows, the executive said.

This has proved especially true, the executive noted, with comedy, a genre that has become especially fragile on television. The prospect that “American Idol” will arrive every January on Tuesday and Wednesday nights means that any show introduced on those nights in September is living on borrowed time — and ratings.

That makes things especially hard for ABC, which has no half-hour comedy shows on any other night.

At Fox, executives are doing no boasting at all, perhaps realizing that this kind of phenomenon cannot be planned. And, indeed, the story of Fox’s initial reluctance to put “American Idol” on the air is now well known. Far from beating their chests, Fox executives seem in awe of what the show has wrought.

“When you have it, you don’t quite grasp it when you come in in the morning and see those ratings,” said Preston Beckman, the chief scheduler for Fox.

The show’s impact on Fox has been disproportionate, even with all the hours that it fills between January and May every year. Fox is a network with only 15 prime-time hours, as opposed to the 22 that ABC, NBC and CBS program each week. (Fox’s nightly schedule ends an hour earlier than theirs.) Adding the enormous “Idol” ratings raises its network average much more quickly.

Fox has ranked fourth and last for much of this season. Now it wins most weeks, and it probably will for most of the rest of the television season.

The show has also begun to extend its sphere of influence. Fox is using “American Idol” to enhance other shows around it. The already strong drama “House” has recently grown into the highest-rated scripted show on television, thanks in large part to its post-“Idol” slot on Tuesdays.

A newer drama, “Bones,” has seen its ratings rise in the past month because it gets some early tune-in on Wednesday nights, when it plays at 8 p.m., just before “Idol.” And Fox has plans to build a new game show, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?,” into a hit by placing it behind “Idol” many times in the coming weeks.

A new show could hardly get a better opportunity to find viewers quickly. One competing executive noted that the numbers Fox has been getting weekly from “Idol” almost amount to the equivalent of having the Super Bowl on every week.

Fox executives look at it much the same way. “It really is an event every year,” Mr. Beckman said. “Really, it doesn’t feel like a TV show sometimes. It’s like the Super Bowl. It’s like a big sporting event. Sometimes it almost feels like it’s bigger than Fox. At some point in the year, it’s just time for ‘Idol.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/ar...on/20idol.html





User generated content

Bomb Squad Called After CD Players Blast 'Pornographic Messages' at Ash Wednesday Mass in New Mexico

Three CD players hidden under a cathedral's pews blared sexually explicit language in the middle of an Ash Wednesday Mass, leading a bomb squad to detonate two of the devices.

Authorities determined the music players were not dangerous and kept the third one to check it for clues, said police Capt. Gary Johnson.

The CD players, duct-taped to the bottoms of the pews, were set to turn on in the middle of noon Mass on Wednesday at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.

The recordings, made on store-bought blank discs, featured people using foul language and "pornographic messages," Johnson said. He would not elaborate because of the ongoing investigation.

Church staff members took the CD players to the basement and called police, who sent the bomb squad, Johnson said.

The bomb squad blew up two players outside and kept the third one to test for fingerprints or DNA and trace its components, he said.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, which marks a 40-day period of fasting and penitence before Easter.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/...l-Language.php





MySpace Faces Stiff Competition in Japan
Yuri Kageyama

Visit Japan's top social-networking site, the 8-million-strong "Mixi," and you'll see prim, organized columns and boxes of stamp-size photos _ not the flashy text and teen-magazine-like layout of its American counterpart, MySpace.com. The difference in appearance between the two online hangouts reflects a broader clash of cultures _ and illustrates the challenge News Corp.'s MySpace faces as it jumps into the Japanese market.

Mixi knows how to thrive off the nation's cliquish culture so different from the aggressive me-orientation prevalent in American culture.

"MySpace is about me, me, me, and look at me and look at me and look at me," said Tony Elison, senior vice president at Viacom International Japan, which is offering its own Japanese-language social networking service here. "In Mixi, it's not all about me. It's all about us."

Mixi Inc. President Kenji Kasahara, 31, and others say the services merely reflect the cultural differences.

While self-assertion is quick and direct on MySpace, with posted profiles upfront about personal views, Japanese tend to be more reserved and prefer to gradually get to know each other.

The messages on Mixi are surprisingly positive: You look great. It's so nice seeing you. I feel the same way. Kasahara calls it a "friendly mood that values harmony."

"I feel people speak their minds on MySpace," he said. "Japanese tend to like peaceful communication. We're often told how heartwarming Mixi is."

That doesn't mean MySpace won't try to compete. Analysts say MySpace, which arrived in Japan in November, has a chance for success because of its 50-50 partnership with Japanese Internet company Softbank Corp., which owns a part of Yahoo Japan and took over Vodafone's mobile business in Japan last year.

"The key is having a viable mobile strategy for MySpace in Japan," Ko Orita, a Seattle-based advertising consultant who gives advice on U.S.-Japan partnerships in the online media industry. "MySpace's openness has a very good application if you are a musician or a filmmaker and promote your content."

MySpace allows anyone with a valid e-mail address to sign up for free accounts. By contrast, Mixi requires an introduction from someone who is already a Mixi member, a bit like winning entry to an old-style club in this society long reputed as guarded against outsiders.

That feature, designed to give a sense of security and in-group feeling, has been critical in Mixi's success among shy and conformity-driven Japanese. Mixi soundly defeats domestic social networking rivals as well as all other sites except Yahoo and Google.

Understanding Mixi's appeal is easy when you watch Jun Yamagishi, a 27-year-old salesman, during his lunch break. He connects with old friends casually and less obtrusively than with e-mail or telephone calls, which are better for more direct communication.

"It's been really easy to be able to keep in touch with all my friends," said Yamagishi, who checks Mixi every other day to see what everyone is saying. "I find Mixi really helpful, really useful for life."

Meeting friends of friends is just a click away on Mixi. Simply send a message and the person will either accept or reject it. Acceptance means Yamagishi has another friend.

The replies get forwarded to Yamagishi's cell phone through Mixi's mobile service that started in December. Yamagishi has also joined about 100 "communities," or clusters of Mixi members who gather around common interests, from orchid-growing to snowboarding.

Mixi has evolved to be first and foremost a communication tool for people who are already friends, rather than an opportunity to meet new people or to express yourself _ both widespread goals on MySpace. (Smaller U.S. services such as Facebook also encourage in-group networking. Facebook has no Japanese-language version.)

Launched in 2004, Mixi arrived early and used that advantage to grow into a successful service used by one in every three Japanese in their 20s.

Kasahara dismisses MySpace's arrival with a nonchalant shrug.

"It's not going to be easy for them to increase market share in Japan," the Mixi president said in a recent interview. "This tends to be a winner-take-all market, and also-rans have a hard time. No one is going to want to join (a social-networking site) that their friends aren't in."

Kasahara says Mixi is even considering challenging MySpace's turf abroad, although he said there are now no specific plans. South Korea's Cyworld Inc. launched a U.S. version of the site in August, though its millions of users are still mostly in Asia.

Mixi is projecting 4.8 billion yen ($40 million) in sales, mostly advertising revenue, for the fiscal year through March, more than double what it made the previous year. Its initial public offering last year earned more than 6 billion yen ($50 million), catapulting Kasahara to dot-com stardom.

Fumi Yamazaki at Technorati Japan, a blogging search company, isn't too upbeat about MySpace's chances in Japan as people usually don't want to switch social-networking services.

"Mixi and MySpace may be able to appeal to different needs," she said. "But there are some hurdles MySpace needs to overcome."

Even MySpace Japan Vice President Naoko Ando acknowledged MySpace isn't about to put Mixi out of business, but she believes Japanese can use both.

Ando is hoping that Japanese may want to check out American musicians, who offer tunes, messages and virtual friendships on MySpace. The site plans to use its Softbank partnership to sign on Japanese artists.

MySpace also has strengths in video sharing. It's among the leading sites where users post video clips, but MySpace does not yet offer video sharing in its Japanese service and is trying to win over copyright protection groups here, said Softbank spokesman Takeaki Nukii. Mixi started offering video sharing earlier this month.

The look and mood of MySpace's Japanese site, however, will not differ from the American original.

MySpace claims it has drawn more than a 100 million people worldwide, including thousands of Japanese who already used MySpace in English, according to the company. Softbank declines to say how many have subscribed to the Japanese version of the site

Michiko Yoshida, who studies social networking at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, thinks MySpace's emphasis on self-assertion will have only niche appeal in Japan, but she also believes people may be slowly outgrowing Mixi.

"There may be a lot of information," said Yoshida. "But people are starting to realize that much of it is simply garbage."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021600034.html





Google Challenges Microsoft With New Business Package
Miguel Helft

Google is taking aim at one of Microsoft's most lucrative franchises.

On Thursday, Google, the Internet search giant, unveiled a package of communications and productivity software aimed at businesses, which overwhelmingly rely on Microsoft products for those functions.

The package, called Google Apps, combines two sets of previously available software bundles. One includes programs for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and Web page creation; the other, called Docs and Spreadsheets, includes programs to read and edit documents created with Microsoft Word and Excel, the mainstays of Microsoft Office, an $11 billion annual franchise.

Unlike Microsoft's products, which reside on PCs and corporate networks, Google's will be delivered as services accessible over the Internet, with Google storing the data. That will allow businesses to offload some of the cost of managing computers and productivity software.

For corporate technology staffs, "we think that will be a very refreshing change," said Dave Girouard, Google's vice president and general manager for enterprise.

The e-mail and messaging package, which is based on products like Gmail, Google's e-mail service, has been available in a free trial since August and is supported by advertising. It has been used by thousands of businesses, educational institutions and other organizations, Google said.

Google will continue to provide the extended bundle of software free to businesses and educational institutions. But it will also offer businesses additional e-mail storage and customer support for an annual fee of $50 a user.

By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange, the Microsoft server software typically used for corporate e-mail systems, in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Google said initial customers of Google Apps would include a unit of Procter & Gamble and SalesForce.com, a pioneer in the business of delivering software as an Internet service.

Google Apps comes at a time of increased competition between Microsoft and Google in a number of areas, including Internet search and advertising and mobile services. And it comes just as corporations are considering whether to upgrade to recently released versions of Microsoft Windows and Office.

While most analysts say that businesses will increasingly use software delivered over the Internet and supported by advertising — a formula that Google has mastered — they are split over the threat that Google's offering represents to Microsoft in the near term.

"I think Microsoft should be very concerned about this," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research.

Wettemann noted that a business may spend about $80,000 on a systems administrator to manage e-mail and desktop office software.

For the same amount of money, Google Apps allows a business to support 1,600 users, she noted. Simply in terms of staffing, "this may be a better proposition even if Microsoft were free," Wettemann said.

Mark Anderson, an analyst at Strategic News Service, a technology consulting firm, said Microsoft should worry about Google's inroads into one of its core businesses but would not see an immediate impact.

"These things take years to happen," Anderson said. "Google will have to prove itself in terms of security and in terms of quality."

Girouard said Google's products were not replacements for Excel or Word, which he admits are more powerful. But he added that for smaller businesses and for certain groups of employees within larger companies, Google Apps could be a substitute for Microsoft's products.

Microsoft has taken steps to embrace the trend toward Internet services with products like Office Live, a package of functions to help small businesses set up Web sites.

"We have a bunch of hosted services that we offer to our customers," said Chris Capossela, vice president for Office at Microsoft. "Our belief is that the future of computing is a combination of software and services."

Capossela said he welcomed the competition. But he said he expected that many customers would continue to want to have their data stored in-house because of security, legal and compliance reasons.

For now, Google's share of the business software market is a tiny fraction of Microsoft's.

Google said more than 100,000 small businesses had been using Google Apps for Your Domain, as the earlier package of e-mail and messaging programs was known. Docs and Spreadsheets had 432,000 users in December, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Microsoft says Office has 450 million to 500 million users.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...ess/google.php





Microsoft CEO Dampens Vista Sales Forecast

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said sales forecasts for its new Vista operating system may be "overly aggressive"
Robert Mullins

Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer believes that sales forecasts for its new Vista operating system may be "overly aggressive."

In a conference call Thursday with financial analysts Ballmer said lower selling prices, limited new corporate sales, and software piracy may combine to temper Vista sales forecasts.

"I'm really excited about how enthusiastic everybody is about Vista," he said. "But people have to understand that some of the revenue forecasts I've seen out there for Windows Vista in fiscal year 2008 are overly aggressive."

Microsoft's 2008 fiscal year begins this July 1.

Ballmer did not provide specific sales numbers.

Sales of Microsoft's Windows operating systems are driven by the growth in sales of personal computers (PCs), Ballmer explained. But PC sales growth tends to come more from the consumer market these days than the business market.

Also, while Ballmer expects Vista to see greater sales growth in emerging markets such as in China, India and Brazil, that growth will be on a smaller base than in developed countries. Also, those emerging markets are also high-piracy markets. Even though Microsoft has added features to Vista to thwart piracy, it is still a problem in some countries, he said.

And while Microsoft sold a lot of Vista upgrades to corporate customers, they have already been accounted for in previously signed contracts, so forecasts of additional corporate sales "may be a little more bullish" than is warranted, he said.

Vista is the first totally new desktop operating system from Microsoft since the introduction of Windows XP in 2001. Vista has been much-delayed in coming to market as the company tried to avoid releasing a product with defects and security flaws that plagued previous Windows versions.

Although Ballmer reported a strong early surge in Vista sales, which began for corporate customers in November 2006 and for consumers in late January, the surge may be limited to what's left of fiscal 2007 and "will not recur in fiscal year 2008."
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php/i...54;fp;2;fpid;1





World’s Oldest Newspaper Now Online Only

The world’s oldest newspaper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition, and exists now only in cyberspace.

Sweden’s “Post och Inrikes Tidningar” was founded in 1645 by Queen Kristina to keep her subjects informed of the affairs of state. The first editions, which were more like pamphlets, were carried by courier and posted on notice boards in cities and towns throughout the kingdom.

Today the newspaper carries around 1500 official legal announcements a day by corporations, courts, and some government agencies. The paper edition had a circulation of only around 1000, but the web-based version is expected to attract more readers.

The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers says an online newspaper is still a newspaper, so the Swedish publication officially remains the world’s oldest.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/Internation...ikel=11 86678





Surveillance

Europe’s Plan to Track Phone and Net Use
Victoria Shannon

European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information — which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing purposes — to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but not its content.

But law enforcement officials argued after the terrorist bombings in Spain and Britain that they needed better and longer data storage from companies handling Europe’s communications networks.

European Union countries have until 2009 to put the Data Retention Directive into law, so the proposals seen now are early interpretations. But some people involved in the issue are concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals’ privacy rights.

Under the proposals in Germany, consumers theoretically could not create fictitious e-mail accounts, to disguise themselves in online auctions, for example. Nor could they use a made-up account to use for receiving commercial junk mail. While e-mail aliases would not be banned, they would have to be traceable to the actual account holder.

“This is an incredibly bad thing in terms of privacy, since people have grown up with the idea that you ought to be able to have an anonymous e-mail account,” Mr. Fleischer said. “Moreover, it’s totally unenforceable and would never work.”

Mr. Fleischer said the law would have to require some kind of identity verification, “like you may have to register for an e-mail address with your national ID card.”

Jörg Hladjk, a privacy lawyer at Hunton & Williams, a Brussels law firm, said that might also mean that it could become illegal to pay cash for prepaid cellphone accounts. The billing information for regular cellphone subscriptions is already verified.

Mr. Fleischer said: “It’s ironic, because Germany is one of the countries in Europe where people talk the most about privacy. In terms of consciousness of privacy in general, I would put Germany at the extreme end.”

He said it was not clear that any European law would apply to e-mail providers based in the United States, like Google, so anyone who needed an unverified e-mail address — for political, commercial or philosophical reasons — could still use Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail addresses.

Mr. Hladjk said, “It’s going to be difficult to know which law applies.” Google requires only two pieces of information to open a Gmail account — a name and a password — and the company does not try to determine whether the name is authentic.

In the Netherlands, the proposed extension of the law on phone company records to all mobile location data “implies surveillance of the movement of large amounts of innocent citizens,” the Dutch Data Protection Agency has said. The agency concluded in January that the draft disregarded privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Similarly, the German technology trade association Bitkom said the draft there violated the German Constitution.

Internet and telecommunications industry associations raised objections when the directive was being debated, but at that time their concerns were for the length of time the data would have to be stored and how the companies would be compensated for the cost of gathering and keeping the information. The directive ended up leaving both decisions in the hands of national governments, setting a range of six months to two years. The German draft settled on six months, while in Spain the proposal is for a year, and in the Netherlands it is 18 months.

“There are not a lot of people in Germany who support this draft entirely,” said Christian Spahr, a spokesman for Bitkom. “But there are others who are more critical of it than we are.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/bu...20privacy.html





Privacy Row as Checks on Phones and e-Mails Hit 439,000

Home Office reveals figures for first time Watchdog condemns high number of errors
Michael Evans, Defence Editor and Philip Webster, Political Editor

Almost 450,000 requests were made to monitor people’s telephone calls, e-mails and post by secret agencies and other authorised bodies in just over a year, the spying watchdog said yesterday.

In the first report of its kind from the Interceptions of Communications Commissioner, it was also revealed that nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. While most appeared to concern “lower-level data” such as requests for telephone lists and individual e-mail addresses, 67 were mistakes concerning direct interception of communications.

Sir Swinton Thomas, the report’s author, described the figure as “unacceptably high”.

The disclosures came as Tony Blair admitted that the fingerprints of everyone obtaining identity cards could be checked against nearly a million unsolved crimes.

Human-rights campaigners described the twin revelations yesterday as signs of a “creeping contempt for our personal privacy”.

For its report the spy watchdog monitored 795 bodies, all of which were empowered to seek out communications data. These included MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the signals intelligence centre in Cheltenham, as well as 52 police forces, 475 local authorities and 108 other organisations such as the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority. Between them they made 439,000 requests for communications information over the 15-month period.

The Home Office said that the total number of such requests, which includes information on e-mail addresses and lists of phone numbers, had not been published before. It was unable to say if this represented a huge increase in data collection.

Warrants for serious crime intercepts last three months and warrants for national security cases last for six months.

In response to Sir Swinton’s criticism of the number of errors, the Home Office said that only “intercepts” of communications involved “sensitive” material and required a warrant from a secretary of state. Most of the errors, it said, involved requests for data such as individuals’ e-mail addresses and lists of telephone calls, and did not include intercepting the contents of messages and phone conversations.

The Prime Minister sparked further controversy over ID cards after replying to 28,000 people who had signed an e-petition calling on him to scrap the scheme. He said that the register would help the police to bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. “They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register.”

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said of Mr Blair’s response to the petitioners: “This is a massive move away from the presumption in Britain that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Tony Blair has admitted that the authorities will go on a fishing expedition through the files of innocent people to try to match them up to unsolved crimes.

“This is completely contrary to undertakings given throughout the course of the Bill in the Houses of Parliament and would be a major invasion of privacy. Mr Blair clearly does not realise that fingerprint technology is not infallible. With the vast number of crimes involved it is virtually guaranteed there will be errors and massive miscarriages of justice in a number of cases."

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the Liberty civil rights campaign group, said: “Public confidence in the Government’s respect for our personal privacy has never been lower. There is an urgent need to rebuild that trust. The Prime Minister’s ambitions for ID cards seems to grow as public confidence in the scheme diminishes. This will become a national suspects database.”

On the 450,000 data requests, she said: “There is a creeping contempt for our personal privacy.”

Sir Swinton said that the intelligence and law enforcement agencies had been under extreme pressure, and that crucial evidence had been uncovered from intercepts in the case of the July 7 suicide bombers.

He said it was time to lift a ban on tapping the phones of MPs and peers, which has been in place for the past 40 years. Ministers and MPs had failed to give a good reason why politicians should be immune.

The nonbugging policy for MPs and peers was introduced by the Government of Harold Wilson 40 years ago, and is known as the Wilson Doctrine. Successive prime ministers have upheld the doctrine.

But Sir Swinton rejected the suggestion of allowing intercept material on terrorists and organised criminals to be used in evidence in trials. “If terrorists and criminals, most particularly those high up in the chain of command, know that interception would be used in evidence against them, they will do everything possible to stop providing the material which is so very valuable as intelligence.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1409395.ece





U.S. Relaxing New Passport Rules for Children
Ron Vample

Children will be exempt from new rules that will require travelers to show passports when entering the U.S. at land or sea borders, a move the Bush administration said Thursday is aimed at helping families and school groups.

The new passport requirements will take effect as soon as January 2008. In a change from earlier plans, children aged 15 or younger with parental consent will be allowed to cross the borders at land and sea entry points with certified copies of their birth certificates rather than passports.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff discussed the relaxation in rules at a speech Thursday to the Detroit Economic Club before touring the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, a link with Windsor, Ontario under the Detroit River.

"This is going to make it a lot easier for kids to cross the border without having to get passports and passcards," Chertoff said. "By the way, it's specifically designed to make it cheaper for families."

Children aged 16 through 18 traveling with school, religious, cultural or athletic groups and under adult supervision will also be allowed to travel with only their birth certificates.

The rule is designed, for example, to allow hockey teams and other groups to go back and forth without disrupting their schedule, provided they are chaperoned, Chertoff said.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a longtime critic of the overall passport requirements because of the potential impact on the economy of border states, said he was pleased by the exemption for those under age 15.

"That's a great first step and now we're going to have to make sure they do it for everyone over 15 as well," Schumer said.

Schumer said he would introduce legislation that would delay implementation of the passport requirement until at least June 2009. The bill also would require studies on the economic impact of the initiative on each border state, and to test an enhanced driver's license program as an alternative to passports in at least one location.

Any alternative to passports would have to cost adults no more than $20 and be free for children, under the bill.

Beginning last Jan. 23, nearly all air travelers entering the U.S. who are citizens of Canada, Mexico, Bermuda or the Caribbean - as well as returning American citizens - have been required to display passports. Children entering the United States by air will still be required to show passports.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the easing of rules for children entering by land or sea was in part the result of talks between the department and Canadians and interested state officials. Canada and U.S. border states have been concerned that the passport requirements would hurt legitimate travel and commerce.

When the new requirements for travelers crossing land and sea borders take effect, it will bring residents of Western Hemisphere nations under the same rules as travelers from the rest of the world.

The rules were mandated by Congress in 2004 as a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the recommendations by the Sept. 11 commission that border security be tightened.

Last October, Congress passed an amendment sponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, that would postpone the day the land and sea rules take effect for as long as 17 months, till June 2009, if certain conditions have not been met.

One of those conditions was to develop an alternative procedure for groups of children traveling across the border under adult supervision and with parental consent.

Chertoff met with local officials in Detroit and planned to travel to Ottawa, Canada, for meetings Friday with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts.

In Detroit, Chertoff met with Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, who has offered a proposal where state driver's licenses and identification cards, which are being revamped to meet federal standards, also could serve as a passport. She said the plan would be simple and cut costs.

"It eases the burden of these new laws on our citizens with a commonsense, workable solution," she said. "It also protects our economy while achieving everyone's goal of combating terrorism."

---

Associated Press Writers Beverley Lumpkin in Washington and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, N.Y., contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Canadian Court Limits Detention in Terror Cases
Ian Austen

Canada’s highest court on Friday unanimously struck down a law that allows the Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely using secret evidence and without charges while their deportations are being reviewed.

The detention measure, the security certificate system, has been described by government lawyers as an important tool for combating international terrorism and maintaining Canada’s domestic security. Six men are now under threat of deportation without an open hearing under the certificates.

“The overarching principle of fundamental justice that applies here is this: before the state can detain people for significant periods of time, it must accord them a fair judicial process,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote in the ruling.

The three men who brought the case are likely to remain jailed or under strict parole because the court suspended its decision for a year to allow Parliament to introduce a law consistent with the ruling.

The decision reflected striking differences from the current legal climate in the United States. In the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Congress stripped the federal courts of authority to hear challenges, through petitions for writs of habeas corpus, to the open-ended confinement of foreign terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A federal appeals court in Washington upheld the constitutionality of that law this week, dismissing 13 cases brought on behalf of 63 Guantánamo detainees. Their lawyers said they would file an appeal with the Supreme Court. In two earlier decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Guantánamo detainees on statutory grounds but did not address the deeper constitutional issues that this case appears to present.

At a news conference in Montreal, a defendant, Adil Charkaoui, praised the Canadian court’s decision.

“The Supreme Court, by 9 to 0, has said no to Guantánamo North in Canada,” said Mr. Charkaoui, who is under tightly controlled, electronically monitored house arrest.

Stockwell Day, the Canadian minister of public safety, said Friday, “It is our intention to follow the Supreme Court ruling.”

He added, “We are taking in stride what they did say and we will look at the changes that are necessary.”

The decision is also the latest in a series of events that has seen Canada reconsider some national security steps it took after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Last September, a judicial inquiry rebuked the police for falsely accusing a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, of terrorist connections. Those accusations, in 2002, led United States officials to fly Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured. Earlier this year, the Canadian government reached a $9.75 million settlement with Mr. Arar and offered a formal apology. The commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also resigned for reasons related to the affair.

Canada’s Parliament is divided over whether to continue two antiterrorism measures introduced in 2001 that are set to expire on March 1. The opposition Liberal Party, which had brought in the law, does not want to continue its special preventive arrest powers or the secret court hearings it permits, which resemble grand jury hearings in the United States. Two other portions of that law have been struck down by courts in Ontario.

“We’ve started to see the rollback,” said Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada. “Today the Supreme Court of Canada has said, ‘Make sure you put human rights at the center of how you prevent terrorism.’ ”

The security certificate system was introduced in a 1978 immigration law and has been used 27 times, mostly before September 2001. It allows the government to detain people indefinitely if the minister of public safety and the minister of immigration conclude that they are a threat to national security. The certificates, once signed, are reviewed by a federal judge who can rule to keep any or all of the evidence secret.

While Amnesty International and other groups have long campaigned against the certificates, the issue attracted relatively little attention for many years. Historically the certificates were issued against people who were accused of spying in Canada and who were swiftly deported.

The current cases, however, have become more prominent because they generally involve people who have been jailed for years without charges, using secret evidence and, in many cases, without bail.

The sparseness of evidence makes it difficult to assess if there is any connection linking the men. The authorities say they have tied five of them in various ways to Al Qaeda. A sixth was arrested in 1995 and has been out on bail since 1998. He is charged with being a fund-raiser for the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Hassan Almrei, a Syrian arrested in Mississauga, Ontario, in 2001, is the only one directly involved in this case who remains in jail.

A document from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service charges that Mr. Almrei, who entered Canada on false papers in 1999, forged documents for the Sept. 11 attacks and is a member of “an international network of extremist groups and individuals who follow and support the Islamic extremist ideals espoused by Osama bin Laden.” He was also accused of sending money to Mr. bin Laden’s network through a honey and perfume business he ran in Saudi Arabia. The government said that a computer belonging to Mr. Almrei contained images of Mr. bin Laden, guns, a jet cockpit and a security badge.

Like most of the other suspects, Mr. Almrei remains under a certificate because the government’s efforts to deport him to Syria conflict with Canadian laws that ban sending people to places where they are likely to be tortured.

Based on the limited information available, other security certificate cases appear to be circumstantial. Mr. Charkaoui, a Moroccan who was arrested in 2002 and released on house arrest in 2005, is accused of having trained in Afghanistan.

“I am innocent,” he said Friday. “I was never charged, I was never accused of a crime. If the government has anything to accuse me of, well, there’s the criminal code.”

Much of the judgment provides a blueprint for Parliament on how to make security certificates fit with Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. As part of that, one of the court’s suggestions seems to be adopted from Britain, whose legal system provided the basis of Canada’s. After the House of Lords struck down a similar law in 2004, Britain adopted a system that allows security-cleared lawyers to attend the hearings, review the evidence and represent the accused.

A provision of the ruling that is effective immediately requires people held under certificates to receive a bail hearing within 48 hours.

For terrorism suspects in the United States, whose situation is most directly analogous to that of the men in Canada, the legal situation is cloudy at best. In the two years after Sept. 11, 2001, the government detained more than 5,000 foreign citizens.

Most were charged with offenses no more serious than overstaying a tourist visa, and many were held for months, awaiting clearance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after they had agreed to leave the country. Not one was convicted of a crime of terrorism.

Judge John Gleeson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled last June on a class-action lawsuit brought by eight detainees. All have left the country and are seeking damages for what they argued was an illegitimate incarceration. Judge Gleeson dismissed that portion of the lawsuit, ruling that the courts should not “encroach on the executive branch in a realm where it has particular expertise” and “legitimate foreign policy considerations.”

Even if the plaintiffs could demonstrate that their right to constitutional due process was violated, Judge Gleeson wrote, the officials they sued would be entitled to immunity because any right to “immediate or prompt removal” had not been “clearly established” at the time. The case, Turkmen v. Gonzales, is now on appeal.

Dalia Hashad, the United States program director for Amnesty International, said the Canadian decision should serve as “a wake-up call that reminds us that civilized people follow a simple and basic rule of law, that indefinite detention is under no circumstances acceptable.”

Linda Greenhouse contributed reporting from Washington, and Christopher Mason from Ottawa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/24/wo...ottawa.html?hp





Wi-Fi Turns Internet Into Hideout for Criminals

Authorities struggling with anonymity provided by unsecured networks
Jamie Stockwell

Detectives arrived last summer at a high-rise apartment building in Arlington County, warrant in hand, to nab a suspected pedophile who had traded child pornography online. It was to be a routine, mostly effortless arrest.

But when they pounded on the door, detectives found an elderly woman who, they quickly concluded, had nothing to do with the crime. The real problem was her computer's wireless router, a device sending a signal through her 10-story building and allowing savvy neighbors a free path to the Internet from the privacy of their homes.

Perhaps one of those neighbors, authorities said, was stealthily uploading photographs of nude children. Doing so essentially rendered him or her untraceable.

With nearly 46,000 public access points across the country -- many of them free -- hundreds of thousands of computer users are logging on every day to wireless networks at cafes, hotels, airports and even while sitting on park benches. And although the majority of those people are simply checking their e-mail and surfing the Web, authorities said an increasing number of criminals are taking advantage of the anonymity offered by the wireless signals to commit a raft of serious crimes -- from identity theft to the sexual solicitation of children.

"We're not sure yet how to combat that," said Kevin R. West, a federal agent who oversees the computer crimes unit in North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation. "Free wireless spots are everywhere, and it makes it easy for people . . . to sit there and do their nefarious acts. The fear is that if we talk about it, people will learn about it and say, 'I can go to a parking lot, and no one will catch me.' But we need to talk about it so that we can figure out how to solve it."

The way it works is simple: Anyone who has a wireless card installed in his or her computer -- and most new computers are equipped with one -- can access the Internet from any of the public WiFi "hotspots," as they're known. In an age of portability and instant gratification, getting online has never been easier -- for law-abiding folks and those with bad intentions.

And in especially dense areas such as the Washington region, some neighborhoods might offer users a dozen or more open wireless signals from which to choose.

"Unsecured networks are a treasure trove for neighbors," said John Sheehan, program manager of the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "Those looking to access illegal content obviously feel they have anonymity" and can get away with it.

They most often do, authorities said.

"It's frustrating for officers," said Todd Shipley, director of training services at the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics. "If a suspect is going from coffee shop to coffee shop and using free signals to commit crimes, the police probably aren't going to catch him. That's the reality."

Open wireless signals are akin to leaving your front door wide open all day -- and returning home to find that someone has stolen your belongings and left a mess that needs cleaning.

One way to combat it is for people to secure their wireless networks by making them password-protected. But, authorities said, businesses and cities that offer free connections need some way to track the users, such as filtering measures that could scan to see who is accessing the network.

Locally, Alexandria recently announced plans to expand its wireless network. The Internet service provider EarthLink will build a citywide network for a 16-square-mile area, with free wireless connections available in more than two dozen public locations. The provider also has worked on municipal WiFi in cities including Philadelphia and New Orleans. Alexandria officials said EarthLink will decide whether to implement security measures on the network, which will be accessible to anyone passing through the city.

In one recent case, West said, a truck driver used free wireless signals at motels across the country to post and view pornographic images of children at a Web site. By pure luck, the man was caught, West said. When the suspect got online from his home computer, authorities were able to trace his computer's Internet Protocol address, or the unique set of numbers assigned to every computer that uses the Internet. That number, which serves as a virtual street address, often leads authorities to the offender's physical residence.

"Otherwise he would've slipped through the cracks," West said. "We wouldn't have been able to identify him."

These days, the Internet is as indispensable to an officer's arsenal as his gun and handcuffs. Indeed, a growing number of officers are being assigned to patrol cyberspace.

Across the nation, 46 multi-jurisdictional Internet Crimes Against Children task forces have been created to carry out online sting operations aimed at ensnaring sex offenders because a man tapping away on a computer in Rockville might very well be soliciting a child in California. Every week, federal and local authorities cast their nets.

And although most sex crimes against underage boys and girls involve victims and suspects who know each other, an increasing number involve online interactions between strangers. Online solicitations -- in which pedophiles cultivate relationships with children and then arrange to meet them in public places -- are becoming more common, federal authorities said.

And even in those cases in which the suspect is brought to police attention by a neighbor or friend or relative, computers are often rich sources of evidence, West said.

"Technology just makes the park no longer the only place where the pervert goes," West said.

The Northern Virginia-D.C. task force has officers from 23 local, state and federal agencies. It was established in November 2004 through a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Justice Department. Since its creation, dozens of cases have been opened and more than three dozen arrests have been made.

Those assigned to the task forces patrol the virtual streets for pedophiles and others who want to commit crimes against children. Using software and other tracking devices, the officers trace a suspect's IP address. But as technology improves, so too do the tactics of criminals. Closing cases is more difficult if the IP address originated from a wireless signal because it often leads back to the owner of the network instead of the criminal.

The problem is going to get worse, authorities said. Every day, more homes, businesses and entire jurisdictions are outfitted with wireless networks, creating an almost seamless patchwork of available Internet connections to anyone with a laptop and the desire to get online.

"This is part of the future . . . and we're working to catch up and educate the public," said Capt. Tommy Turner of the Virginia State Police.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021001457.html





GPS Tagging Is for Wild Animals, Not Truants
Courtland Milloy

Let's say your teenager is a habitual truant and there is nothing you can do about it. Maryland Del. Doyle L. Niemann (D-Prince George's) thinks he might have the solution: Fit the child with a Global Positioning System chip, then have police track him down.

"It allows them to get caught easier," said Niemann, who recently co-sponsored legislation in the House that would use electronic surveillance as part of a broader truancy-reduction plan. "It's going to be done unobtrusively. The chips are tiny and can be put into a hospital ID band or a necklace."

Excuse me. But that is obscene. Electronic monitoring is used by criminal court judges to keep track of felons. Researchers use them to track the movements of wild animals. Let parents use such devices if they must. But that's no way for government to treat a child.

Niemann's legislation mirrors a bill sponsored by Sen. Gwendolyn T. Britt (D-Prince George's). Both would provide truants and their parents with better access to social services, such as mental health evaluations and help with schoolwork. Electronic monitoring would be a last resort. Still, the prospect of tagging children and using them in some "catch and release" hunt by police casts a pall over everything that's good about the plan.

"Obviously, we don't want to do something to make the problem worse, like stigmatizing the student," Niemann told me. "On the other hand, you may want others to know there are consequences for truancy." Sounds stigmatizing to me.

All of this is because about 6,800 Prince George's students out of 134,000 missed between 20 and 35 days of school in 2005, and an additional 5,800 missed 36 days or more. A problem? Yes. Bad enough to use an Orwellian quick fix? No way. Besides, is there no end to this fiddling with mere symptoms?

Stephanie Joseph, a member of the board of ACLU of Maryland who testified against the bill at a recent Senate committee hearing, correctly observed that "it really doesn't address truancy and its root causes." Even as Niemann and other lawmakers seek to rustle up students and herd them back to school, school officials are kicking them out by the score. More than 4,300 county students were suspended at least twice during the 2005-06 school year; 480 of them, five or more times. You can imagine what all of that confusion might look like on a GPS monitor: satellite images of dots streaming in one school door and back out through another.

Perhaps most distressing is the number of students who stay in school only until age 16, when they can legally drop out. Enrollment figures show that, during any given year, there are roughly 14,000 students in ninth grade. By 12th grade, the number drops to 8,000.

"We need to take a look at the whole system," Niemann said. "We want to know why students drop out and if we are preparing them for the world they live in. But there is a limit to what you can do."

Odd how billions and billions of dollars keep going to a war that almost nobody wants but there's never enough to fund the educational programs that nearly everybody says are needed. Aimed solely at students in Prince George's -- the only predominantly black county in the Washington area -- the truancy effort is called a "pilot program," a first-of-its-kind experiment. It would cost $400,000 to keep track of about 660 students a year.

Surely that money could be better spent. Take one example: In Montgomery County, Beall Elementary kindergarten teacher Kathleen Cohan noticed that 5-year-old children of affluent parents were entering school knowing about 13,000 English words, while children from poor and immigrant families knew as few as 500. So she and other teachers came up with a plan to close the gap. And it worked. Between 2002 and 2005, the percentage of low-income kindergartners reaching first grade soared from 44 percent in 2002 to 70 percent in 2005.

Now that's a pilot program. Invest in something like that and you might find more students becoming eager to attend school.

Niemann notes that the law requires students to attend school -- period -- and his proposal is aimed at getting as many as possible to go. "Where do you lodge responsibility for school attendance -- with the parent and child or society?" he asked. "If you say that the school system has to do blank this and blank that before holding parents and students accountable, that's a dead end. That's just making excuses for unacceptable behavior."

But maintaining a school system that is among the worst in the state ought to be unacceptable, too. Maybe county officials should be monitored to see why they aren't showing up for work.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021301270.html





Trio of Climbers Who Survived on Mount Hood Saved by Electronic Beacon and a 4-Year-Old Dog
AP

Thanks to a high-tech electronic gadget and a big warm dog named Velvet, three climbers rescued after a harrowing fall and a night in the wind and cold high on Mount Hood are expected to be fine.

They were found at about the 7,400-foot level on Monday and hiked down the mountain with their rescuers.

"I'm really glad they were there for us," Matty Bryant, one of the three climbers, said of the rescue teams. "They did an incredible job. They were amazing."

Searchers credited the group's rescue to two things _ Velvet, a black Labrador mix who provided warmth as the three climbers huddled under sleeping bags and a tarp, and the activation of an emergency radio beacon the size of a sunglasses case that guided them to the group.

"The most important part of this rescue is that they did everything right," said Lt. Nick Watt of the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.

The three climbers set out on Saturday with five other friends _ all in the 20s and 30s and from the Portland area _ to scale the 11,239-foot mountain, Oregon's tallest.

However, a storm moved in and on Sunday they started their descent in blowing snow.

"You had no visual reference around you to determine if you were going up or down," said one member of the group, Trevor Liston. "You could make out a climber at 30 feet at best."

Then he saw the group of three _ all roped together with Velvet _ disappear over an icy ledge.

Liston and the four others used a rope to lower one of their climbing party over the edge in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the trio.

Then they used a cell phone to call for help as the wind howled at up to 70 mph.

Liston, who described himself as a veteran of Mount Hood climbs, said all eight had experience at either rock climbing or mountaineering.

They'd known about the Mount Hood disaster in which three climbers died in December. But Liston said that wasn't the reason the group decided to take Mountain Locator Units, the small beacons that can send out radio signals to rescuers.

"We've been up on the mountain for many years," Liston said. "With the group we were going up with this time, we just wanted another extra level of security, just in case something happened, especially with winter conditions."

In addition to Bryant, 34, a teacher in the Portland suburb of Milwaukie, the rescued climbers included Kate Hanlon, 34, a teacher in the suburb of Wilsonville.

The other woman, whose name was not released, was being treated for a head injury in Portland, said Jim Strovink, spokesman for the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office. "She's going to be fine," he said.

Velvet, owned by Bryant, had minor cuts and abrasions on her back paws and legs from prolonged exposure to the snow, but she was cleared to go home.

"The dog probably saved their lives" by lying across them during the cold night, said Erik Brom, a member of the Portland Mountain Rescue team.

Liston said he felt that he and his companions were well-equipped for climbing Mount Hood in the winter with cell phones, global positioning system gear and the locator beacons.

"We'd been in those conditions up on this mountain before," he said. "We've walked out in whiteouts before. We didn't know it was going to be that bad. But we were prepared that it might be snowing and blowing."

Liston said he understands critics who say people climbing Mount Hood during the winter are putting not only their own lives at risk, but also the lives of rescuers dispatched when something goes wrong.

"It's a kind of delicate balance," he said, "about doing winter climbing, and pushing some of those limits, and not doing it, and only climbing in the summer in shorts and T-shirts.

"It's kind of a point of pride you might say for a lot of climbers _ that you can take care of yourself out there."

Still, Liston said, "Things happen."
http://news.newstimes.com/news/updates.php?id=1031930





Hail Freedonia!

Estonia Set for World First Internet Election

(This is the first in a series of stories in the run-up to Estonia's parliamentary election)
David Mardiste

The Baltic state of Estonia plans to become the world's first country to allow voting in a national parliamentary election via the Internet next month -- with a little help from the forest king.

E-voting will be introduced for a parliamentary election on March 4, for the first time after it was used in more limited local elections in 2005. It is a fresh sign of Estonia's strong embrace of technology since it quit the Soviet Union in 1991.

The e-voting system was tested earlier this week, including the chance to choose the "king of the forest". Voters could pick an animal from 10 candidates, including moose, deer and boars.

"It is hard to say how many people could vote (via the Internet), but 3,925 people used the system over the last week, when we used different testing scenarios to vote for the king of the forest," said Arne Koitmae of the electoral commission.

Estonia rushed to modernise after independence, and has become a major European base for Internet telephony group Skype: Estonians helped develop the service, owned by ebay Inc.

Just under 10,000 people voted via the Internet in local elections in October 2005. Computer specialists have estimated 20,000-40,000 of 940,000 registered voters will vote via the Internet from Feb. 26-28, ahead of the March 4 election day.

"I will be voting in these elections via Internet, it is a good system and I think my grandfather, who is over 80, will be doing the same as well, he already calls me on Skype," said Toomas Talts, a technology worker, as he tested the system.

The voting will take place by people putting their state-issued ID card, which has an electronic chip on it, into a reader attached to a computer and then entering two passwords.

Pollsters expect the current two main coalition parties, the centre-right Reform Party and left-leaning Centre Party, to win the vote, though it is not clear which will be the biggest.

Reform leader Andrus Ansip is current prime minister, though the Centre Party has 21 parliament seats, two more than Reform, in the 101-seat house. Third coalition member is the People's Union, with 12 seats.

Used To The Internet

The uptake of new information technology has come despite the fact Estonia, though with a strongly growing economy, is one of the poorest nations in the European Union. GDP per inhabitant in 2004 was at 57 percent of the bloc's average.

Its infrastructure was decrepit after independence. Even today, outside the glitzy new skyscrapers of Tallinn city centre, buildings looked battered, roads are potholed and Soviet-era trolley buses still whirr around town.

"One of the most common explanations as to why Estonians have taken to new IT technology is that everything had to be done new here," said Jaan Tallinn, a senior programmer involved in the development of Skype.

"There were no legacies to deal with, like with bank cheques, which were already obsolete. So companies could create new systems and people just used them," he added.

Despite modest economic means Estonian banks started to offer online banking services in 1997, and every move by the private sector has been matched with laws to support e-commerce and e-services such as access to government information.

As in the Nordic states, Estonians can also use mobile phones to pay for car parking, or buy bus tickets: scattered across the country are many wireless Internet points.

"We are a very small country in the EU, therefore we have to be very careful in spending our money on government infrastructure as it gives very little back," said computer systems and security specialist Jaan Murumets.

The security angle of voting via the Internet has not raised many worries. "E-voting is not so difficult to think about here. We are used to using the Internet for business and for almost 10 years we have been using the Internet for banking," he said.

But the winner of the "king of the forest" vote remained a mystery -- no count was done as it was one of several tests.

"In the end, only the animals in the forest know," said election committee official Koitmae.

Article





Working in France, in Style of Silicon Valley
John Tagliabue

Jacques Souquet had gone through several start-ups in Seattle, but he still was not entirely prepared for beginning a high-tech company in his native France.

Failure is still a no-no here, creating a challenge for any start-up. Not to mention the idea that difficulty here seems a contradiction in terms for, after all, the word “entrepreneur” is French.

And Mr. Souquet, 58, a compact man with a gentle manner, has a lot of rules to learn. When he once had to meet a deadline, he asked his colleagues to come in on a Sunday, which they did; but Mr. Souquet got a scolding from his lawyer, who lectured about the legal limits on the French workweek.

Now, Mr. Souquet’s company is up and running smoothly, and that is a testimony to recent changes in France and greater Europe: start-ups are no longer rare. Moreover, Europe’s new entrepreneurs are turning West to learn the start-up culture bred in Silicon Valley before coming back here to apply their learning.

After the Internet bust, the number of European start-ups in the computer and telecommunications sectors began growing again in 2003, according to the Center for European Economic Research, in Mannheim, Germany. And venture capital is pouring into start-ups, which last year attracted about $970 million, the highest level in a decade since the Internet boom ended in 2000.

Overall venture capital fund-raising in Europe is more than twice the levels of 2002. In France, the number of new businesses set up last year rose 4 percent, to 233,052, over 2005, according to the Agency for the Creation of Businesses, a government body. The number of small American businesses also grew that much, at 4.5 percent, but at 671,800, there are nearly three times as many such American companies, according to the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Souquet’s experience illustrates how far the Continent has to go if it hopes to match the United States. He was able to lure eight of his 27 employees back from the United States. And after two years, he is preparing to offer his product in 2008, a device that measures the elasticity of living tissue, to assist doctors in diagnosing and treating cancer.

Still, Aix is not Seattle. French attitudes are a bit rigid, compared with the American approach of if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed. And French law, which mandates a 35-hour week, still crimps entrepreneurial flair.

“In a start-up environment, you cannot work a 35-hour week,” Mr. Souquet said, referring to the time he asked his colleagues to work on a Sunday. “My lawyer was furious,” he said, fearing the company could be penalized.

Mr. Souquet also recounted that at Stanford University, where he got his Ph.D. in applied physics, one of his teachers, William Shockley, a pioneer in transistors who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, taught by discussing failed experiments.

“Then he would turn to another page, showing why the experiment failed,” Mr. Souquet said, recalling images of his professor’s Bell Labs notebooks. “He called them constructive failures.”

Mr. Souquet’s company began with a colleague’s fear that France was failing to retain its scientists. Georges Charpak, the winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in physics, came to him.

“He told me, ‘It’s dramatic,’ ” Mr. Souquet said, describing how his French colleague begged him to help stanch a drain of French talent to the United States by promoting start-ups here. “He said his best laboratory talent was going to the United States, that he was about to lose 15 people who were being offered grants by U.C., San Diego.”

So two years ago, Mr. Souquet began gathering patents, including several from a Russian émigré, Armen Sarvazyan, whose own start-up, Artann Laboratories, in West Trenton, N.J., held key patents for working with shear waves crucial to Mr. Souquet’s device. A shear wave is so named because it moves through the body of an object, unlike a surface wave.

At his previous start-up, SonoSite, which is based in Seattle, Mr. Souquet helped develop hand-held ultrasound devices that were essentially conventional technology, drastically miniaturized.

Mr. Souquet’s latest device is “a new concept,” Mr. Sarvazyan said. “It opens an era, not only for elasticity, but for imitating the sense of touch, the feeling of a doctor,” which is now often crucial in diagnosing cancer.

Mr. Souquet had broad experience in ultrasound, having worked in the United States for Varian Semiconductor, before moving to ATL Ultrasound in Seattle. Together with a small group of ATL researchers, he founded SonoSite. When Mr. Charpak approached him, Mr. Souquet was the head of research in the medical division of Philips, the Dutch electrical giant.

Weary of the constant travel and the bureaucracy of a global giant like Philips, Mr. Souquet heeded Mr. Charpak’s cry for help. His idea, as outlined on the company’s Web site, is to develop a device that would use ultrasound to measure the elasticity of human tissue.

Since cancerous tissue loses much of its elasticity, such a device would be useful in helping diagnose and treat cancer in the breast, he said, but also the prostate gland, the thyroid and the liver.

SuperSonic Imagine, with headquarters in a glass-and-steel corporate park outside this southern French resort city, was floated with Mr. Souquet’s own savings, plus money from French government sources. Last March, a group of venture capital funds led by Crédit Agricole Private Equity pumped 10 million euros ($13 million), into the company.

Amounts of capital like this are still only a fraction of the money flowing into start-ups in the United States, but in Europe, their impact is widening. The European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, set up in 2001, has seen its membership grow to almost 950 members.

Representatives of the association tell of many technology success stories, like that of Xavier Niel, 39, a entrepreneur based in Paris who in 2002 started Free, now the No. 2 Internet access engine in France, after Orange, the France Telecom unit.

Vectrix began in Italy about a decade ago, but came into its own only in 2003 when Carlo Di Biagio, the former Ducati Motorcycle chief executive, became its boss. It is about to bring to market a novel electric-engine scooter, with a top speed of about 62 miles an hour, developed with help from about $50 million in venture capital.

“From the point of view of technology, this was a real innovation,” said Alexia Perouse, director of life science investments at Crédit Agricole, explaining why they gave the money to Mr. Souquet. Later this year, the venture capital funds will consider a second grant of 20 million euros, Mr. Souquet said.

In April, Mr. Souquet plans to talk with the Food and Drug Administration to have the devices certified. By next year, he hopes to begin delivering them.

SuperSonic is focusing primarily on breast cancer, and its device employs different types of ultrasound waves that produce better images than existing diagnostic methods — X-ray, ultrasound echography and magnetic resonance imaging.

Conventional ultrasound, said Dr. Stephen B. Corn, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is director of clinical innovation at Children’s Hospital Boston, “is not always sensitive and specific enough, particularly in cases of dense breast tissue.”

“It looks very intriguing,” he said of the company’s work, “very exciting.”

Mr. Souquet has hired a marketing director, opened an office in Seattle, and has chosen the tentative design for the first product. And his company has some of the Silicon Valley feel. People sit in open carrels, rather than closed offices; dress is casual. At lunch, employees sit around an open counter in the center of the building.

“It’s easy in the States,” Mr. Souquet said, still bemoaning the French hardships. “You know what to do; you go to Barnes & Noble, you buy a book, 20 tips to create a start-up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/bu...repreneur.html





Meet Kate, and Stick Around
Eric A. Taub

WITH what they claim to be the world’s largest selection of beads, company officials at Shipwreck Beads near Seattle were not used to seeing customers abandon their online store in droves.

Which is why Pat Simmons, the company’s information technology manager, was so perturbed when he noticed that 97 percent of visitors to one page of the Web site were consistently heading for the hills. “As soon as they came, they left,” he said.

After analyzing the site, Mr. Simmons realized that the page was not intuitive — the best products were at the bottom of the page, not the top. Once he reorganized it, people started to stick around.

Mr. Simmons could see how customers were using (or not using) his site by employing Google Analytics, one of several tools that allow even small businesses to analyze their Web traffic, learning not only how many people visit but also where they come from, where they go and how long they stay.

Thanks to online retail heavyweights, customers expect e-commerce Web sites to entertain, inform and make transactions a snap.

“The big story is that the little guys want to be like Amazon,” said David Thompson, the chief executive of Genius.com, which makes Web site analytic software. As a result, Mr. Thompson said, “customers assume they’ll get intelligent product recommendations whenever they visit a site.”

With so many companies selling so many products, retailers have to make their sites “sticky,” said Ramon Ray, the editor of a Web site, smallbiztechnology.com, that helps businesses use technology to grow.

Mr. Ray recommends that owners provide extensive information about their products or services throughout their Web sites. Links to case studies or white papers are “a good way to bring the story out,” he said.

Displaying relevant video clips from YouTube or other Web video services also helps. Short audio clips with a “play” button, placed next to a product’s logo, can add interest.

RSS feeds of appropriate material from other sources can lure customers back, too. A company selling windows, say, could include installation tips from another proprietor.

The owners of Goldfish Software, a company that sells accounting software, wanted to customize their site, but they did not anticipate that a feature would take on a life of its own.

Goldfish incorporated an avatar — an animated human — that speaks whenever someone visits the site, goldfishsoftware.com. The company used VHost, a product from Oddcast, to create the avatar, whose face, clothing and speech can be changed by customers.

“We called the character ‘Kate,’ but then our customers started calling it by the same name,” said Judy Thornell, the company’s customer-relations executive. “We didn’t realize that they would develop a personal relationship with it.”

After “Kate” started telling customers about the “hot deals” listed under a tab on the site, sales for that section went up 50 percent.

“Having the avatar on the site keeps customers there longer, as they listen to the character speaking,” Ms. Thornell said.

Patti Lucia and Desiree Ramos-Aponti, who own Les Beans Coffee, an online coffee retailer, thought a female avatar would complement their products, which have names like Ethiopia Sophie and Costa Rita.

This month, the character speaks with a cooing French accent for Valentine’s Day. “Customers say they look forward to the character of the month,” Ms. Lucia said. “It keeps the site fresh.”

Spicing up a site is worth the effort only if the results can be tracked. Analytic tools can determine not only the number of visitors, but also their state, city or country and type of computer and browser used.

Google Analytics, at google.com/analytics, is a free service that can tie in its tools to Google’s AdWords classified ads service, so businesses can learn which keywords drive the most sales.

Each ad word’s return on investment can be calculated. Users can learn if a keyword that appeared lower in a list of search results (and therefore cost less) may have actually brought in more money than a more costly one that appeared at the top of the search-results page.

Other Web analytic tools are available from AWStats (awstats.org), FreeStats (freestats.com) and SiteTracker (sitetracker.com).

SalesGenius, an online tool, can help gauge a customer’s interest in a product or service by using the person’s e-mail address. People on a mailing list are sent e-mail via the Genius.com server. The seller knows who opened the messages and, as long as the customers click on an embedded link, who visited the site, where they clicked and how long they stayed. Follow-up e-mails can be sent suggesting other products.

“Web sites are becoming like real stores,” said Mr. Thompson of Genius.com. “And people now expect the same level of service on a site as in a store.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/bu...=smallbusiness





Fewer Visit the Air and Space Museum
Brett Zongker

It's a mystery even for researchers at the Smithsonian Institution: What happened to the huge crowds at the National Air and Space Museum? The estimated number of visitors to the museum plunged to about 5 million in 2006 from a six-year high of 9.4 million in 2003, according to the latest attendance report from the museum complex. And the decline has been far sharper than that of the overall Smithsonian, which includes 18 museums and the National Zoo.

Last year, attendance at what has been one of the world's most-visited museums fell below that of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, which features ancient fossils and the Hope Diamond. (Museum officials say this is the only instance in recent memory in which the air and space museum trailed the history museum.)

Peter Golkin, a spokesman for the air and space museum, said officials are not worried. He noted that the museum is still the most popular overall.

One explanation for the downturn could be that the museum hasn't opened a major new gallery since 2003. Jason Hall, spokesman for the American Association of Museums, said a museum's "novelty factor" is important in attracting visitors, and it can help explain sudden increases and downturns in attendance.

For the air and space museum, 2003 happened to be a banner year. The museum - home to the Wright brothers' first airplane and relics from the space race and Apollo moon walks - had special events in 2003 about the 100th anniversary of powered flight and tragic fate of the space shuttle Columbia.

But the museum could use some freshening up, according to some visitors.

Allen Witt, an engineer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said many of the displays seemed to stop after the mid-1980s.

Still, he said, "I don't think this museum will ever lose its relevance. It will get more historic through time."

Construction near the museum may have also kept some visitors away, officials said.

"They've had extensive construction outside for a couple years ... which made it look as if the museum was closed," Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas said.

Another possible factor in the decline could be the museum's annex - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - which opened in Chantilly, Va., in 2003. The massive annex, built like an airplane hanger and located near Washington Dulles International Airport, houses the "Enola Gay" B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, the prototype space shuttle Enterprise and dozens of other planes.

The newer facility drew 1.6 million visitors in 2004, its first full year of operation, and about 1 million last year - visitors who might be ignoring the annex's sister museum in Washington.

"That's possible, although we'd like to think that you need to see both facilities to really get the whole sweeping history of flight that we present," Golkin said. "It's one collection that's in two locations."

The attendance slump comes amid flat attendance at museums nationwide and an overall, though less stunning, decline at the Smithsonian complex.

Overall Smithsonian attendance has fallen 27 percent since 2001, compared to the air and space museum's decline of 46 percent in the same period. But the air and space museum is still one of the most visited museums in the nation. Attendance at the Smithsonian declined after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the air and space museum also felt the impact of the decline in tourism. The numbers for both also plunged in 2004, rose the next year and then fell in 2006.

"Things have been skewed numbers wise since 2001," Golkin said. "I think we still haven't come fully out of that aftermath."

Another museum that has seen sharp declines since 2001 is the National Museum of American History. Attendance dropped 42 percent from 5.2 million in 2001 to 3 million in 2005, the last full year of operations before the museum closed in 2006 for renovations. The museum will remain closed until 2008.

But the American history museum's biggest problems were evident; they had been spelled out by a 2002 blue-ribbon commission. The commission called the museum's layout and presentation confusing and questioned why some subjects at the museum are underrepresented, such as religion, capitalism, immigration and slavery. The report is being used to guide the renovation and strengthen the museum, officials say.

The method of counting visitors isn't exactly scientific. Smithsonian officials said security guards use hand clickers to count people as they leave each of the 18 museums. And though the count may not be exact, it does indicate trends, they said. Between 2002 and 2003, the museums changed from counting people as they enter to counting as they exit. Golkin said museum entrances can be crowded at security checkpoints, but there's less crowding as visitors leave.

Museums across the country count visitors in many different ways or not at all. Many museums, unlike the Smithsonian, charge admission fees, making it easier to track attendance.

The Smithsonian is pursuing a number of initiatives to raise its profile this year.

This fall, for example, the air and space museum will open a renovated air transportation gallery called "America by Air," which will include the nose of a Boeing-747. Visitors will be able to walk through the cockpit of the jumbo jet and through earlier airliners. The project and other renovations have required ongoing construction in recent years.

The Smithsonian is also creating a controversial new TV unit with Showtime Networks Inc. and a new Web site to help tourists plan their visits. The Go-Smithsonian Web site was launched this month with links to hotels, transportation and dining options along with exhibition calendars. The Smithsonian's semi-exclusive deal with Showtime could mean potential restrictions for other filmmakers and historians.

Meanwhile, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small said private donations to the museums have rebounded since 2001. The Smithsonian's private endowment reached a record high of $894 million at the end of 2006.

Last year, the complex raised $132 million in private donations, including three $15 million gifts: two unannounced gifts for the natural history museum and one donation from Boeing for the air and space museum.

"We're quite a bit ahead of where we were last year," Small said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...s/16742648.htm





Winfrey Breaks Long Absence of Book Club with Sidney Poitier Book
Tara Burghart

If her goal was to erase the memory of the disgraced James Frey, then Oprah Winfrey couldn't have made a better pick for her book club than a memoir by Sidney Poitier. - Winfrey ended a year-long hiatus in her club by announcing Friday that she had chosen "The Measure of a Man," a "spiritual autobiography" by one of Hollywood's most admired actors -- for whom the word "dignified" could practically be copyrighted -- and a personal hero of Winfrey's.

Published in 2000, Poitier's book combines memories of such plays and films as "A Raisin in the Sun" and "The Defiant Ones" with observations about the Academy Award-winning actor's childhood, his religious faith, his thoughts on racism and the influence of such world leaders as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.

"He writes really candidly and passionately about his childhood, his family, relationships and his extraordinary career," Winfrey said on her show, which airs from Chicago. "It (the book) really is about what makes character, what makes you be who you are. He is the measure of one of the greatest men I think who has ever been on our planet."

Poitier did not appear on the telecast. But Winfrey said she will host "a once in a lifetime dinner party" with Poitier that will include members of her book club.

In a statement issued Friday by his publisher, HarperSanFrancisco, Poitier said he was "overwhelmed far beyond the point where words, alone, could fully express either my appreciation or my gratitude."

"Meanwhile, I proudly accept this honor on behalf of the forces that brought it about: the love of my parents, the ever-present kindness of strangers, and the hidden mysteries of the universe and, of course, Oprah Winfrey," he said.

"The Measure of a Man" spent several weeks on The New York Times' list of best sellers, and the audio edition, narrated by Poitier, won a Grammy Award for best spoken word album. Poitier wrote a previous memoir, "This Life," released in 1980.

Right before Winfrey announced her selection, the 56th for her book club, "The Measure of a Man" ranked 288,958 on Amazon.com, a number that quickly changed, soaring within hours to the top 5. Winfrey's picks almost inevitably top best seller lists.

Mark Tauber, vice president and deputy publisher of HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of HarperCollins, declined Friday to say how many books would be printed, but did say he expects to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Tauber also said that, unlike many celebrity memoirists, Poitier did not use a ghostwriter, although the actor did have editorial "help."

"I'm sure there'll be speculation about Winfrey picking yet another memoir," Tauber said. "But Poitier's life is filled with so much integrity."

Winfrey and Poitier have met in the past. During an interview in her own "O" magazine in 2000 -- around the time "Measure of a Man" was released -- Winfrey and Poitier discussed his life and career; the talk show host confided that she felt like a star-struck fan.

"Poitier and I are sitting across from each other at the Bel-Air hotel in Los Angeles -- and I'm admiring that, at 73, this man still personifies grace, ease, strength and courage," Winfrey wrote at the time. "He is a gentleman in every sense of the word. In my more than 25 years as an interviewer, I've talked to hundreds of people -- yet today, I'm giddy."

Poitier, who turns 80 on Feb. 20, became the first black performer to win the Oscar for best actor, cited in 1964 for "Lilies of the Field." His other films include "In the Heat of the Night," "To Sir, With Love" and "The Blackboard Jungle." In 2002, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

He should be a welcome break from the travesty of Frey, whose "A Million Little Pieces" was picked by Winfrey in the fall of 2005, only to have The Smoking Gun Web site reveal in January 2006 that the memoir was largely fabricated. Winfrey initially defended Frey, then changed her mind, brought him back to the show and chewed him out.

Winfrey's next pick, Elie Wiesel's "Night," was announced on Jan. 16, 2006, soon after the Frey scandal broke, but had already been decided upon weeks earlier. More than 1.5 million copies of Wiesel's Holocaust memoir were sold because of Winfrey's selection, according to publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Winfrey acknowledged on Friday's show that it had been a year since she had chosen a selection for her book club. But she didn't blame Frey. Instead, she said she was busy during that time researching curriculum for her school for disadvantaged girls in South Africa, which opened earlier this month.

"So I really did not have time to devote to reading other books," she said. "But now I do."

Winfrey indicated the idea to feature “The Measure of a Man” came to her over the holidays while she was dining with a group of people in Africa that included Poitier.

“We were all sitting around the table, and I was asking Sidney Poitier to tell some of the life stories from his book. And let me tell you, everybody at the table was weeping,” Winfrey said. “I was sitting there thinking, I wish everybody could hear this. And then I realized, everybody can! Everybody can. I love this book.”

AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16826335/





A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
Noam Cohen

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.

But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

With the move, Middlebury, in Vermont, jumped into a growing debate within journalism, the law and academia over what respect, if any, to give Wikipedia articles, written by hundreds of volunteers and subject to mistakes and sometimes deliberate falsehoods. Wikipedia itself has restricted the editing of some subjects, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said.

Although Middlebury’s history department has banned Wikipedia in citations, it has not banned its use. Don Wyatt, the chairman of the department, said a total ban on Wikipedia would have been impractical, not to mention close-minded, because Wikipedia is simply too handy to expect students never to consult it.

At Middlebury, a discussion about the new policy is scheduled on campus on Monday, with speakers poised to defend and criticize using the site in research.

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, “I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.”

He continued: “Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.

“If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.”

Indeed, the English-language version of the site had an estimated 38 million users in the United States in December, and can be hard to avoid while on the Internet. Google searches on such diverse subjects as historical figures like Confucius and concepts like torture give the Wikipedia entry the first listing.

In some colleges, it has become common for professors to assign students to create work that appears on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia’s list of school and university projects, this spring the University of East Anglia in England and Oberlin College in Ohio will have students edit articles on topics being taught in courses on the Middle East and ancient Rome.

In December 2005, a Columbia professor, Henry Smith, had the graduate students in his seminar create a Japanese bibliography project, posted on Wikipedia, to describe and analyze resources like libraries, reference books and newspapers. With 16 contributors, including the professor, the project comprises dozens of articles, including 13 on different Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias.

In evaluations after the class, the students said that creating an encyclopedia taught them discipline in writing and put them in contact with experts who improved their work and whom, in some cases, they were later able to interview.

“Most were positive about the experience, especially the training in writing encyclopedia articles, which all of them came to realize is not an easy matter,” Professor Smith wrote in an e-mail message. “Many also retained their initial ambivalence about Wikipedia itself.”

The discussion raised by the Middlebury policy has been covered by student newspapers at the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts, among others. The Middlebury Campus, the student weekly, included an opinion article last week by Chandler Koglmeier that accused the history department of introducing “the beginnings of censorship.”

Other students call the move unnecessary. Keith Williams, a senior majoring in economics, said students “understand that Wikipedia is not a responsible source, that it hasn’t been thoroughly vetted.” Yet he said, “I personally use it all the time.”

Jason Mittell, an assistant professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury, said he planned to take the pro-Wikipedia side in the campus debate. “The message that is being sent is that ultimately they see it as a threat to traditional knowledge,” he said. “I see it as an opportunity. What does that mean for traditional scholarship? Does traditional scholarship lose value?”

For his course “Media Technology and Cultural Change,” which began this month, Professor Mittell said he would require his students to create a Wikipedia entry as well as post a video on YouTube, create a podcast and produce a blog for the course.

Another Middlebury professor, Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said, “I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.”

And yes, back at Wikipedia, the Jesuits are still credited as supporting the Shimabara Rebellion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/ed...5&ei=508 7%0A





Single Bullet, Single Gunman
Gerald Posner

Advanced forensics and minuscule traces of DNA have created an ability to solve crimes, even cold cases decades old, has turned many people Americans into armchair sleuths seeking to "solve" the unexpected deaths of people like Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith. But sometimes old-fashioned evidence is as useful in solving puzzles as anything under a nuclear microscope.

Last weekend, a never-before-seen home movie was made public showing President John F. Kennedy's motorcade just before his assassination.

An amateur photographer, George Jefferies, took the footage and held onto it for more than 40 years before casually mentioning it to his son-in-law, who persuaded him to donate it to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas.

The silent 8-millimeter color film was of interest to most people simply because it showed perhaps the clearest close-up of Jacqueline Kennedy taken that morning.

But to assassination researchers, the footage definitively resolves one of the case's enduring controversies: that the bullet wound on Kennedy's back, as documented and photographed during the autopsy, did not match up with the location of the bullet hole on the back of his suit jacket and shirt.

The discrepancy has given conspiracy theorists fodder to argue that the autopsy photos had been retouched and the report fabricated.

This is more than an academic debate among ballistics buffs. It is critical because if the bullet did enter where shown on the autopsy photos, the trajectory lines up correctly for the famous "single bullet" theory — the Warren Commission hypothesis that one bullet inflicted wounds to both Kennedy and Governor John Connally of Texas.

However, if the hole in the clothing was the accurate mark of where the bullet entered, it would have been too low for a single bullet to have inflicted all the wounds, and would provide ev idence of a second assassin.

For years, those of us who concluded that the single-bullet theory was sound still had to speculate that Kennedy's suit had bunched up during the ride, causing the hole to be lower in the fabric than one would expect. Because the holes in the shirt and jacket align perfectly, if the jacket was elevated when the shot struck, the shirt also had to have been raised.

Some previously published photos taken at the pivotal moment showed Kennedy's jacket slightly pushed up, but nothing was definitive. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have done everything to disprove that the jacket was bunched. Some used grainy photos or film clips to measure minute distances between Kennedy's hairline and his shirt, , what they dubbed the "hair-to-in-shoot distance."

The new film has finally resolved the issue. At the end of the clip, as the camera focuses on the backs of the president and first lady, Kennedy's suit is significantly bunched up, with several layers creased together. Only 90 seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald fired the first shot, Kennedy's suit jacket was precisely in the position to misrepresent the bullet's entry point.

While the film solves one mystery, it leaves another open. Estimates are that at least 150,000 people lined the Dallas motorcade route that fateful day, so there must be many other films and photographs out there that have never come to light.

Those who have them should bear in mind that even the most innocuous-seeming artifacts, like the Jefferies tape, can sometimes put enduring controversies to rest. As Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum said the other day, "The bottom line is, don't throw anything away."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/...n/edposner.php





A Digital Life

New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive.
Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell

Human memory can be maddeningly elusive. We stumble upon its limitations every day, when we forget a friend's telephone number, the name of a business contact or the title of a favorite book. People have developed a variety of strategies for combating forgetfulness--messages scribbled on Post-it notes, for example, or electronic address books carried in handheld devices--but important information continues to slip through the cracks. Recently, however, our team at Microsoft Research has begun a quest to digitally chronicle every aspect of a person's life, starting with one of our own lives (Bell's). For the past six years, we have attempted to record all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits--storing everything in a personal digital archive that is both searchable and secure.

Digital memories can do more than simply assist the recollection of past events, conversations and projects. Portable sensors can take readings of things that are not even perceived by humans, such as oxygen levels in the blood or the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Computers can then scan these data to identify patterns: for instance, they might determine which environmental conditions worsen a child's asthma. Sensors can also log the three billion or so heartbeats in a person's lifetime, along with other physiological indicators, and warn of a possible heart attack. This information would allow doctors to spot irregularities early, providing warnings before an illness becomes serious. Your physician would have access to a detailed, ongoing health record, and you would no longer have to rack your brain to answer questions such as "When did you first feel this way?"

Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. We have found that digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes. Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. Your locations can be logged at regular intervals, producing animated maps that trace your peregrinations. Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.

A Web of Trails
The vision of machine-extended memory was first expounded at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, then director of the U.S. government office that controlled wartime research. Bush proposed a device called the Memex (short for "memory extender")--a microfilm-based machine that would store all of an individual's books, records and communications. The Memex was to be built into a desk and equipped with a keyboard, a microphone and several display surfaces. The person behind the desk could use a camera to make microfilm copies of photographs and papers or create new documents by writing on a touch-sensitive screen. The Memex user could also mount a camera on his or her forehead to capture pictures while away from the desk. One of the most prescient of Bush's ideas was the suggestion that the Memex should be designed to imitate the associative thinking of the human mind, which he described in lively terms: "With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

Over the next half a century intrepid computer science pioneers, including Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, developed some of Bush's ideas, and the inventors of the World Wide Web borrowed the concept of the "web of trails" to build their system of linking sites. But the Memex itself remained technologically out of reach. In recent years, however, rapid advances in storage, sensor and processor technologies have paved the way for new digital recording and retrieval systems that may ultimately go far beyond Bush's vision.

The growth of digital storage capacity has been staggering: today a $600 hard drive can hold a terabyte (one trillion bytes) of data, which is enough to store everything you read (including e-mails, Web pages, papers and books), all the music you purchase, eight hours of speech and 10 pictures a day for the next 60 years. If current trends continue, within a decade you will be able to carry the same amount of information in your cell phone's flash memory, while connecting wirelessly to a $100 four-terabyte drive on your PC. In 20 years $600 will buy 250 terabytes of storage--enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs. This capacity should be able to satisfy anyone's recording needs for more than 100 years.

At the same time, manufacturers are producing a new generation of inexpensive sensors that may soon become ubiquitous. Some of these devices can record a wealth of information about the user's health and physical movements. Others can gauge the temperature, humidity, air pressure and light level in the surrounding environment and even detect the presence of warm bodies nearby. Some monitors are meant to be worn, and others are designed to be placed in rooms or incorporated into appliances such as refrigerators. (A fridge sensor could keep track of your snacking habits by measuring the number of times the door is opened.) And microphones and cameras are now cheap enough to be installed virtually anywhere--particularly in cell phones, where camera inclusion is becoming the norm, with voice recording soon to follow.

Finally, the dramatic increase in computing power over the past decade has led to the introduction of processors that can efficiently retrieve, analyze and visualize vast amounts of information. An ordinary notebook PC can run a database that is more powerful and almost 100 times as large as that of a major bank of the 1980s. An inexpensive cell phone can surf the Web, play videos and even understand some speech.

As the hardware for digital recording has improved, more and more people have started to create electronic chronicles of their lives. The advent of cheap, high-quality digital cameras (including those incorporated into cell phones) has triggered a boom in photography. Blogs that incorporate photographs are now becoming more common than personal Web sites. Young people in particular are embracing blogging and the use of mobile devices. The fact that this proliferation of digital chronicling is taking place with only very rudimentary tools demonstrates how deep the desire must be. And the interest will surely grow once the process of digital recording becomes easier and more comprehensive.

One Man's Memories
Our own experience with digital memories began in 1998, when Bell decided to go paperless, doing away with a messy mountain of articles, books, cards, letters, memos, posters and photographs. To transfer this heap of memories to a digital record, Bell became obsessed with scanning all the documents and artifacts from his personal life and his long career in the computer business. (He even went so far as to scan the logos on coffee mugs and T-shirts.) He also began digitizing home movies, videotaped lectures and voice recordings. Bell is now paperless, but the cost was high: it took a personal assistant working for several years to complete the task. (Archiving more recent items has not required such strenuous effort, because the great majority of documents, images and videos are now created in digital formats, so capture is automatic.)

After scanning all this information, however, Bell became frustrated with his inability to make real use of it with the software available to him at the time. This frustration led to the MyLifeBits project. When we started the project in 2001, the search tools that had been developed for desktop computers were cumbersome. We set out to create a database that would give us the ability not only to do full-text searches of our PCs (a capability that is now commonplace) but also to quickly retrieve digital memories using attributes called metadata: for example, the date, place and subject of a photograph or written or spoken comments that the database appends to the file. Metadata are frequently a crucial part of recall; a person seeking a specific e-mail, for instance, may remember that it was sent at a certain time of year. By linking these metadata, much of which are obtained automatically, to digital memories, the database allows users to efficiently comb through even the largest archives.

MyLifeBits has also provided Bell with a new suite of tools for capturing his interactions with other people and machines. The system records his telephone calls and the programs playing on radio and television. When he is working at his PC, MyLifeBits automatically stores a copy of every Web page he visits and a transcript of every instant message he sends or receives. It also records the files he opens, the songs he plays and the searches he performs. The system even monitors which windows are in the foreground of his screen at any time and how much mouse and keyboard activity is going on. When Bell is on the go, MyLifeBits continually uploads his location from a portable Global Positioning System device, wirelessly transmitting the information to his archive. This geographic tracking allows the software to automatically assign locations to Bell's photographs, based on the time each is taken.

To obtain a visual record of his day, Bell wears the SenseCam, a camera developed by Microsoft Research that automatically takes pictures when its sensors indicate that the user might want a photograph. For example, if the SenseCam's passive infrared sensor detects a warm body nearby, it photographs the person. If the light level changes significantly--a sign that the user has probably moved in or out of a room and entered a new setting--the camera takes another snapshot. A recent study led by researchers at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England, showed that a memory-impaired patient who reviewed SenseCam images every night was able to retain memories for more than two months. (In contrast, a nightly review of a written diary resulted in almost no improvement in memory retention.) Neuropsychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds in England speculates that the SenseCam could become "the first truly powerful 21st-century memory stimulant."

After six years, Bell has amassed a digital archive of more than 300,000 records, taking up about 150 gigabytes of memory. The information is stored on Bell's dual-disk notebook computer and his assistant's desktop PC, which are backed up locally and off-site. Video files grab the lion's share of the storage space--more than 60 gigabytes--whereas images take up 25 gigabytes and audio files (mostly music) occupy 18 gigabytes. The remainder is shared by 100,000 Web pages, 100,000 e-mails, 15,000 text files, 2,000 PowerPoint files, and so on. Bell has found the system particularly useful for contacting old acquaintances and finding other people with whom he needs to communicate. He has also employed MyLifeBits to retrieve Web sites for citations in his research papers, to provide doctors with records of a 25-year-old coronary bypass, and to obtain a photograph of a deceased friend for a newspaper obituary.

Some features of MyLifeBits, such as full-text search, have already been incorporated into commercial products. As a whole, though, the system requires more development to improve its ease of use and its management of the data. Better software for converting speech to text would greatly enhance the system by allowing users to search for words or phrases in phone conversations or other voice recordings. Similarly, automatic face recognition would solve the pesky problem of photograph labeling. And the retrieval of information could become easier if the system automatically identified the nature of each of the several hundred document types, perhaps by analyzing their form and content. But our research project has already dramatized the evolution of the PC from a word processor and number cruncher to a transaction processor that can log everything about the user's life in high-fidelity multimedia. Many experts have predicted the demise of the personal computer, but it is clear that the "P" in "PC" is not going away. If anything, PCs will become even more personal. What will change is the "C." Our machines will evolve into computing ecosystems that encompass not just computers but storage services on the Internet, new access devices (such as cell phones and entertainment centers), and ubiquitous sensors. Most likely our LifeBits will eventually be housed in a home server connected to various Web services.

Realizing the Vision
To illustrate the potential impact of digital memories, we have imagined a day in the life of a fictitious family making full use of this technology in the not so distant future. Various pieces of the family's digital memories are stored in their personal devices--their cell phones, laptops, home computers and so on--but all that information is also securely transmitted over the Internet to a host server run by a hypothetical company called LifeBits, Inc. This company manages the storage of the data, performs regular backups (so as to recover any inadvertently deleted material) and places copies of the archive in various locations to ensure that it is not destroyed in a natural or man-made disaster.

Because most of their information is available via secure Web access, the family members can retrieve it anywhere and at any time. Particularly sensitive information that might put someone in legal jeopardy can be kept in an offshore data storage account--a "Swiss data bank," if you will--to place it beyond the reach of U.S. courts. The children in the family can encrypt their recordings, but the LifeBits service will give the parents access to the data in case of an emergency. Likewise, some of the parents' digital memories may be covered by employment contracts that stipulate that the data related to their jobs belong to their employers. When such employees leave their jobs, they may have to perform a "partial lobotomy" on their copies of the memories, expunging everything deemed to be company property.

Some of the scenarios we have described are not all that futuristic. Wearable sensor platforms that collect health data and monitor vital signs such as heart rate, breathing and the number of calories burned are already being commercialized by companies such as VivoMetrics in Ventura, Calif., and BodyMedia in Pittsburgh. In the meantime, Dust Networks in Hayward, Calif., has developed a wireless hub for relaying signals among a network of sensors. The Human Speechome Project, led by Deb Roy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is engaged in recording nearly every waking hour of the first three years of a child's life--the child is Roy's son, now a one-year-old--to study how people acquire language. And Kiyoharu Aizawa and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo are working on wearable video camera systems that would identify interesting moments to capture for posterity by monitoring the alpha waves in the user's brain.

Microsoft Research is supporting 14 universities undertaking a variety of projects in the field of digital memories. One of them is MyHealthBits, led by Bambang Parmanto of the University of Pittsburgh; this effort is taking on the challenge of recording huge amounts of health data and managing the voluminous records that result. Recent studies at the University of Washington have shown the benefits of continuous health monitoring in diabetic patients and individuals with sleep disorders.

This early progress is encouraging, but the advent of the digital-memories era will not be trouble-free. Some countries and U.S. states currently impose restrictions on recording conversations or photographing people. Many individuals are equally concerned about recording information that could be used against them in court. Digital memories, unlike those in our brains, would be fair game in a legal proceeding. Richard Nixon famously advised his aides to say "I can't recall" when testifying before a grand jury, but tape recordings of his own conversations were his downfall. For those of us who view digital memories as an extension of our own minds, the use of such materials in court would feel like self-incrimination. New technologies, however, can help minimize the potential dangers. When recording others, for instance, it may be possible to obscure their images or speech to avoid illegal recording.

Guarding the privacy of digital memories will be critical. The prospect that identity thieves, gossipmongers or authoritarian states could gain access to such records is frightening. Most people, however, already have quite a lot of sensitive information on their PCs. Security is an important concern regardless of how far you go with the concept of digital memories (although storing a lifetime of personal data in a single archive does at least make the problem quantitatively worse, if not qualitatively). Furthermore, even if our computer systems can be made as secure as Fort Knox, users must be very careful when sharing their information; with a single errant keystroke, one's medical records might inadvertently be distributed to the entire world. To prevent such mistakes, the user interfaces for digital memories must be better than the ones we have now, and we will need intelligent software to provide warnings when sharing data looks risky.

Another technical challenge will be ensuring that users are able to open their digital files decades after storing them. We have already run into cases where we could not access documents because their formats were obsolete. Digital archivists will have to constantly convert their files to the latest formats, and in some cases they may need to run emulators of older machines to retrieve the data. A small industry will probably emerge just to keep people from losing information because of format evolution.

An even bigger challenge will be devising software that can enable computers to perform useful tasks by tapping into this gigantic store of collected knowledge. The ultimate goal is a machine that can act like a personal assistant, anticipating its user's needs. At a minimum, computers must do a better job of organizing the information. Search strategies that work well for a few shelves of books may not work at all for a collection the size of the Library of Congress. Most of us do not want to be the librarians of our digital archives--we want the computer to be the librarian!

Consequently, our research group is very interested in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to digital memories. Although many experts are skeptical about AI efforts, we believe that such software may yield practical results if it can draw on the tremendous stores of data in personal archives. An AI system designed to work with a wealth of information is bound to perform better than one that has to make a recommendation based on very few data points. We have begun work in this area, developing software that could organize files based on their content, but much remains to be done.

In a sense, the era of digital memories is inevitable. Even those who recoil at our vision will have vastly more storage on their computers in the coming years and will expect software to help them more and more in utilizing it. Although some may be frightened at the prospect of ubiquitous recording, for us the excitement far outweighs the fear. Digital memories will yield benefits in a wide spectrum of areas, providing treasure troves of information about how people think and feel. By constantly monitoring the health of their patients, future doctors may develop better treatments for heart disease, cancer and other illnesses. Scientists will be able to get a glimpse into the thought processes of their predecessors, and future historians will be able to examine the past in unprecedented detail. The opportunities are restricted only by our ability to imagine them.
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=...DA5FF0B0A22B50





Users Who Know Too Much (And the CIOs Who Fear Them)

A new IT department is being born. You don't control it. You may not even be aware of it. But your users are, and figuring out how to work with it will be the key to your future and your company's success.
Ben Worthen

An April 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 45 percent of adults who use the Internet said it has improved their ability to do their jobs “a lot.”

These are your employees, and their message couldn’t be clearer: Technology, at least in their eyes, has made them significantly more productive. But CIOs shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back just yet. For this productivity boost the study credits the Internet, not enterprise IT, not the technology you provide, not, in short, you. And while Pew’s finding undoubtedly includes people who use the Internet to access your corporate applications, Lee Rainie, the Pew project director, says the research is not pointing to what a good job CIOs have been doing.

It tells a different tale.

“The big story is that the boundary that existed in people’s lives between the workplace and the home has broken down,” says Rainie. Almost unlimited storage and fast new communication tools allow people to use whatever information they choose, whenever they want to, from wherever is most convenient for them.

According to Pew, 42 percent of Internet users download programs, 37 percent use instant messaging, 27 percent have used the Internet to share files, and 25 percent access the Internet through a wireless device. (And these numbers are all one or two years old. Rainie “would bet the ranch” that the current numbers are higher.)

Does that sound like the tools you’ve provided your company’s employees? Do you encourage them to download programs and share files? Do you support IM? Have you outfitted a quarter of your company’s employees with wireless devices?

Really?

“A consequence of the blending of worlds is that people bring gadgets from their home life into the workplace and vice versa,” says Rainie. For example, a December 2006 survey by Searchsecurity.com found that only 29 percent of companies had a corporate instant messaging tool, a number that seems relatively small when compared with the percentage of people Pew says use IM in the office.

Users have a history of providing their own technology, but the capabilities of today’s consumer IT products and the ease with which users can find them is unprecedented. Thumb drives, often given away free at conferences, provide gigabytes of transportable storage. Google spreadsheets and other online documents let multiple people collaborate in one file. The Motorola Q, a phone that uses the cell network as an always-on high-speed Internet connection (and can be yours for just $125 on eBay) lets users forward their work e-mail to their phones without ever touching a mail server. And that’s only three examples. There’s a consumer technology out there for every task imaginable—and if there isn’t, there’s a tool that will let someone create it tomorrow.

The era in which IT comes only from your IT department is over.

So where does that leave you?

The Shadow IT Department

The consumer technology universe has evolved to a point where it is, in essence, a fully functioning, alternative IT department. Today, in effect, users can choose their technology provider. Your company’s employees may turn to you first, but an employee who’s given a tool by the corporate IT department that doesn’t meets his needs will find one that does on the Internet or at his neighborhood Best Buy.

The emergence of this second IT department—call it “the shadow IT department”—is a natural product of the disconnect that has always existed between those who provide IT and those who use it.

And that disconnect is fundamental. Users want IT to be responsive to their individual needs and to make them more productive. CIOs want IT to be reliable, secure, scalable and compliant with an ever increasing number of government regulations. Consequently, when corporate IT designs and provides an IT system, manageability usually comes first, the user’s experience second. But the shadow IT department doesn’t give a hoot about manageability and provides its users with ways to end-run corporate IT when the interests of the two groups do not coincide.

“Employees are looking to enhance their efficiency,” says André Gold, director of information security at Continental Airlines. “People are saying, ‘I need this to do my job.’” But for all the reasons listed above, he says, corporate IT usually ends up saying no to what they want or, at best, promising to get to it...eventually. In the interim, users turn to the shadow IT department.

For many good and not-so-good reasons, the CIO’s first instinct frequently is to fight the shadow IT department whenever and wherever he detects it. But that approach, according to people who have thought long and hard about this potential war between IT departments, is a recipe for stalemate, if not outright defeat for CIOs.

The employees in your company are using consumer IT to work faster, more efficiently and, in many cases, longer hours. Some are even finding new and better ways to get work done. CIOs should be applauding this trend. But when you shut down consumer IT, says William Harmer III, assistant vice president of architecture and technology of financial services company Manulife, “You end up as a dissuader of innovation.”

Yes, the shadow IT department presents corporate IT with security and compliance challenges. Users could be opening holes in the corporate firewall (by downloading insecure programs), exposing company data irresponsibly (by scattering laptops, handhelds, and thumb drives hither and yon) and handling information in any number of ways that could violate any number of federal regulations. But CIOs need to deal with these problems strategically, not draconically.

“There’s a simple golden rule,” says David Smith, a vice president and research fellow at Gartner. “Never use security and compliance as an excuse for not doing the right thing. Never use these as sticks or excuses for controlling things. When you find that people have broken rules, the best thing to do is try to figure out why and to learn from it.”

Successful companies will learn how to strike a productive balance between consumer IT—and the innovative processes for which employees are using these tools—and the need to protect the enterprise. This will require CIOs to reexamine the way they relate to users, and to come to terms with the fact that their IT department will no longer be the exclusive provider of technology within an organization. This, says Smith, is the only way to stay relevant and responsive. CIOs who ignore the benefits of consumer IT, who wage war against the shadow IT department, will be viewed as obstructionist, not to mention out of touch. And once that happens, they will be ignored and any semblance of control will fly out the window.

And that won’t be good for anyone.

How the Shadow IT Department Works

Here’s an all-too-common response to the shadow IT department, courtesy of Bill Braun, vice president of information systems for the Texas Credit Union League: “What’s good for me is that it’s simple to say no [to consumer IT]. There goes most of the problem. Possibly some of the benefit, but certainly the problem.”

Passing over the fact that Braun admits that he’s willing to forgo the potential innovations consumer IT can provide, this approach also assumes that the shadow IT department has a similar structure to its corporate counterpart and can be managed in the same way.

It doesn’t and it can’t.

The shadow IT department is an entirely different beast.

Corporate IT is highly structured, with one individual or a small group controlling the nodes in a network and their relationships to one another. The shadow IT department, on the other hand, has no central authority and at best an ill-defined hierarchy; nodes join on their own and develop their own relationships. Marty Anderson, a professor at the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, calls corporate IT a command architecture and shadow IT an emergent architecture. Command architectures are set up to make them easy to manage and, as a result, they respond to top-down orders. Emergent architectures contain no dominant node and therefore provide no lever by which to manage them. That’s why it is impossible to kill the shadow IT department or keep it out of your company. It has no head to cut off or single channel to dam.

It’s natural for corporate IT to feel threatened by the shadow IT department, but the truth is that they already coexist everywhere. “The two have always been present,” says Anderson. “The management skill is noticing where they intersect and coming up with a strategy for dealing with it.”

For example, a similar dynamic has long played out in HR. A company’s employees have titles and reporting relationships that give their work a formal structure. But at the same time every company has an informal structure determined by expertise, interpersonal relationships, work ethic, overall effectiveness and so on. Companies suffer when HR is out of phase with the informal structure. Employees are demoralized when the formal architecture elevates someone at the bottom of the informal architecture, and people who occupy the top spots in the informal architecture leave when they aren’t recognized by the formal one. Good HR departments know where employees stand in both the formal and informal architectures and balance the two.

IT needs to learn how to strike a similar balance. Corporate IT isn’t going to go away, and neither are the systems that IT has put in place over the years. But a CIO who doesn’t develop a strategy to accommodate the shadow IT department will be employing an outdated and (more important) an inefficient business model. And, like the HR department that ignores the informal relationships in a company, the CIO might lose sight of how his users actually work. Corporate IT thereby loses its authority and, eventually, the CIO loses his job. It won’t happen quickly, but it will happen. As Anderson puts it, “It will be like getting nibbled to death by ducks.”

How to Make Peace With Shadow IT

Techniques will differ for each company depending upon its business, the degree of regulation to which it’s subject, its risk tolerance and so on, but some principles are universally applicable. Here are some starting points.

1. Find out how people really work.

Whether you know it or not, your company’s employees are using technology of their choosing, or using technology of your choosing in ways you never intended. Brian Flynn, senior VP of IT at BCD Travel, found this out when he deployed software that monitored the content moving across his network. Not only were employees using consumer IT tools (like IM) but they were using IT-provided applications to do things that were clearly security risks (such as sending sensitive information back and forth).

“I am convinced that most companies are flying blind,” says Flynn. “This is going on everywhere and IT just doesn’t know.”

Fight your instinct to discourage these behaviors by legislating against them. Yes, there may be security and compliance risks, but declaring open war on the shadow IT department will only turn it into an insurgency, driving it underground where it will be harder to monitor and harder to negotiate with. Instead, consider this an opportunity to find out where the IT you’ve provided is out of sync with your users’ needs.

2. Say yes to evolution.

CIOs need to make users feel comfortable about bringing their underground behavior into the light. The first step is a change in attitude.

“We tend to think of people who think out of the box as troublemakers,” says Flynn. “But we need to realize that maybe they know what they’re talking about and maybe we should try to meet them halfway if we can.”

Always try to help users figure out a safe and secure way to do whatever it is they’re trying to do. “People get used to [IT] telling them no, and after a while they stop telling you what they’re doing,” says Continental’s Gold. “So we try to say yes, dot dot dot.”

Rob Israel, CIO of the John C. Lincoln Health Network, has developed a policy that formalizes this mind-set.

“I’m the only person in IT allowed to say no,” he says. Conversely, his IT employees have only three options: approve a request, research it or pass it up to him. According to Gold and Israel, getting a reputation for saying yes will encourage users to come to you with ideas. That gives you the chance to learn what it is that the user is really trying to do and come up with a way to do it that won’t compromise security.

As irrelevant or irresponsible as some shadow IT projects seem on the surface, it’s important to accept the fact that users do things for reasons. If they are e-mailing critical files among themselves, it’s because they need to work on something from a different location and that’s the most direct solution that they can come up with. IT’s job shouldn’t be figuring out how to prevent the user from accessing and moving files, but rather to find a solution that lets him take that file home in a way that doesn’t make the company vulnerable and isn’t any more complex than the method that the user discovered on his own.

That last part is important. “No one,” says Flynn, “will jump through hoops.” They’ll go around them.

Gold says that most shadow IT projects are attempts to solve simple problems, and it’s easy for CIOs to mitigate the risks if they’re willing. For example, Gold found that people were taking files home on thumb drives. Instead of trying to outlaw the practice, he began distributing thumb drives with encryption software on them. The users’ experience never changed. “It was common sense to keep both security and how people work in mind,” he says.

3. Ask yourself if the threat is real.

The other part of developing a say-yes reputation is realizing which shadow IT projects really represent a security threat and which just threaten IT’s position as the sole god of technology provisioning. Maria Anzilotti, CIO of Camden Property Trust, a real estate developer, says that she has continued to allow IM even though most people use it for nonwork purposes. “We looked at the risk and decided it wasn’t worth [shutting it down],” she says. “A lot of people use it to communicate with their kids. It’s faster and less disruptive than phone calls.

“We keep an eye on it.”

Killing a shadow IT app without appreciating how thoroughly it’s been integrated into a company’s workflow can have unanticipated and unfortunate consequences. When Gold shut down IM at Continental, he got an angry call from an employee in the fuel management group who was using it (successfully) to negotiate jet fuel pricing for the airline.

Oops.

When a CIO prohibits people from using a technology that doesn’t pose a real security threat or doesn’t adversely affect his budget, he is setting himself up as a tin idol, a moral arbiter. That’s a guaranteed way to antagonize users. And that’s never a good idea.

4. Enforce rules, don’t make them.

There’s a fine line between providing access to data and determining who should have access to it. And Manulife’s Harmer says IT often crosses it.

“I own the infrastructure,” he says, “but the business owns the data.” IT creates artificial hurdles for employees when it makes blanket judgments about access that affect the entire company. “The key is not to paint all the users the same,” says Harmer.

Lincoln Health’s Israel deals with this challenge every day. It’s one thing, he says, for his nursing staff to search the Internet for the word breast; it’s another for someone in the accounting department. But if Israel installed a filter that prevented access to (apparently) pornographic websites, his nurses might not be able to find information that they need to treat a patient. The solution is for IT to provide tools that let an individual’s manager decide what information she needs to do the job.

“IT doesn’t know everything the business knows,” says Gold. “So it’s hard for me to make rules about who should have access to what.”

5. Be invisible.

Most companies have long lists of policies and regulations with which everyone must comply. But lists don’t enforce themselves.

“I wrote all the policies [here], and I only know two of them well,” says Israel. “So it’s unreasonable for an IT department to expect users to know them all. But we can put systems in place that put some automation behind our policies.”

Manulife’s Harmer says that the key is to develop an approach that secures data without depending upon how a user accesses it or what he does with it.

“The way I approach it is to bring the controls closer to the data,” he says. “That means not relying on a firewall but trying to figure out what I’m actually trying to protect and then dealing with it appropriately.”

At Continental, this type of approach has led to a change in the way the IT department designs systems. “Ninety percent of the applications we have that involve sensitive data are things we’ve written,” Gold explains. All that data was protected...as long as the user accessed it from the application IT built. But when a manager tried to compare revenue for different cities by copying the data into Excel (something Gold says happens routinely), the information was suddenly placed at risk. With this in mind, Gold encouraged the IT department to build encryption and other safeguards directly into the applications. That way, when a user pastes the revenue figures into a spreadsheet, the data, not the sanctity and integrity of the application (which are irrelevant), will still be protected.

Messy But Fertile Beats Neat But Sterile

IT has a natural tendency to think about technology in a system-centric way. Systems automate workflow and control access to information. And for a long time these systems made work and workers more efficient. “But there has always been a bright line between IT systems and what people really wanted to do,” says Babson’s Anderson.

“I used to have users come to me as if I was the almighty IT god,” says Israel, who recalls those as “the good old days.” But in that sense, god is dead, and IT’s authority and sense of purpose can no longer derive from controlling how people use technology.

“IT can’t insist on doling out IT,” says Gartner’s Smith. “The demographics of the workforce are changing. Younger people who are more familiar with technology are coming in, and they will not sit still while [CIOs] dole out corporate apps. If you want to retain the best and the brightest, you can’t lock down your environment.”

Smith advises CIOs to try to stop thinking about technology as something that must always be enterprise class. There are plenty of Web-based tools that can meet their users’ needs and not cost the company a dime. “Be open-minded and bring them in where appropriate,” he says.

Does that mean that the enterprise is going to become a messier place? Absolutely. That’s an inevitable consequence of user-centric IT. But messiness isn’t as bad as stagnation.

“Controlled chaos is always OK,” says Gold. “If you want to be an innovator and leverage IT to get a competitive advantage, there has to be some controlled chaos.”
http://www.cio.com/archive/021507/fe...mt.html?page=1





Vista Security Overview: Too Little Too Late
Thomas C. Greene

Review Microsoft has gone out on a limb to promote Vista not merely as "the most secure version of Windows ever" (every recent version is marketed with that tired slogan), but for the first time as an adequately secure version of Windows. "We've got the message and we've done our homework", the company says. So let's see if the reality lives up to the marketing hype.

As Billg likes to point out, Windows is the platform on which 90 per cent of the computing industry builds, and this naturally means that it's the platform on which 90 per cent of spyware, adware, virus, worm, and Trojan developers build. That translates into 90 per cent of botnet zombies, 90 per cent of spam relays, 90 per cent of spyware hosts, and 90 per cent of worm propagators. In a nutshell, Windows is single-handedly responsible for turning the internet into the toxic shithole of malware that it is today.

That's not going to change any time soon, no matter how good Vista's security might be, but a version of Windows with truly adequate security and privacy features would certainly be a step in the right direction.

And indeed, there have been improvements. For one thing, IE7, at least on Vista, is no longer such a dangerous web browser. It may still be the buggiest, the most easily exploited, and the most often exploited browser in internet history, and probably will be forever, but it has become safer to use, despite its many shortcomings. This is because MS has finally addressed IE's single worst and most persistent security blunder: its deep integration with the guts of the system.

Browser woes

At last, MS has, in a sense, sandboxed IE on Vista. In IE7's new protected mode (Vista only), which is enabled by default, IE is restricted from writing to locations outside the browser cache without the user's consent, even if the user has admin privileges. IE is essentially denied write access to the wider file system and to much of the registry. Hallelujah.

To oversimplify this, IE7 protected mode runs as a low-integrity process which is restricted to writing to corresponding low-integrity locations, where rights are minimal. A process started from such a location would have very low rights, as would each child process it spawns. This helps to reduce the impact of malware on the system overall. However, there is a brokering mechanism that enables users to download files to any location they have access to, or to install browser plugins and extensions, and the like. So users are still invited to make a mess of their systems, and no doubt many will, while Microsoft has a chance to shift blame away from itself.

However, IE7 on Vista does still write to parts of the registry in protected mode. And it appears to write to parts that MS says is won't (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ectedMode.asp). The company says that "a low integrity process, such as Internet Explorer in Protected Mode, can create and modify files in low integrity folders". We are assured that such low integrity processes "cannot gain write access to objects at higher integrity levels". And again, MS emphasises that a low integrity process "can only write to low integrity locations, such as the Temporary Internet Files\Low folder or the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\LowRegistry key".

So I tested this assurance. I ran IE in protected mode, typed a URL into the location bar and went there. Then I opened regedit, and searched for a string of text from that URL.

Sadly, IE7 is still stashing typed URLs in the registry, and not in the ...\LowRegistry location, either. I found them in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs (if you want to fix this, navigate to the key in the left-hand pane of regedit and right click, and choose permissions. Deny permission for each account. That ought to delete all the entries and take care of all related keys in one go).

No doubt one of those brokering mechanisms decided to write to that location, because a URL hardly carries the risk of causing malicious activity. So it's "safe", at least to some. But I wasn't asked if IE could write anything there. It was done automatically. And this behaviour does carry a security risk, if, like me, you think that user privacy and data hygiene are at all related to computer security. Surely, users should not have to hack their registry merely to purge their browser's data traces once and for all.

Next, there is IE7's anti-phishing filter gimmick. I disabled it almost immediately. It's very showy and it says, "Message: We Care", but I found it more irritating than actually helpful. I think a lot of users will disable it, and trust their instincts instead. Remember, if you put your mouse pointer over a link, the actual URL will be displayed in the status bar. The link may say Bank of America, but if the actual URL is http://123.231.123.231/bankofamerica.com/u/0wn3d/dummy/ then it should be pretty clear that it's a dodgy link.

IE7 also has a handy menu for deleting your history, cookies, cache, and so on. This is similar to the Mickey Mouse privacy utility in Firefox (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01...ady_progress/). Remember that these data traces are not securely wiped, but merely deleted. They remain on your HDD until they happen to be overwritten. Firefox will let you delete all that stuff automatically each time you exit; IE won't: you have to do it manually. And remember, with IE your typed URLs are in the registry, where they definitely don't belong, and this utility won't purge them. Oh, and you have to enable User Account Control (UAC) for IE's protected mode to work. Not everyone is going to want to do that, as we will see later.

IE sorely needs cookie and image management like Mozilla's, allowing third-party or off-site images to be blocked, and allowing users to set all cookies to be deleted on exit. IE will allow you to block third-party cookies in the advanced section of the cookie management options, although the default is to allow them. There is no setting to block third-party images, unfortunately, which means that you can't avoid web bugs, or web "beacons" as marketing droids like to call them. IE also won't let you set cookies to be deleted on exit. IE7 will happily block cookies from websites that don't have a "compact privacy policy", a meaningless cookie policy statement (http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/s...vacypolicy.asp) that any malicious website could easily have. But this is something MS has been involved with, so they're all excited about it, even though it's rubbish. Unfortunately, they encourage users to depend on it, which is worse rubbish.

The default security settings for IE are basically sensible and I would change only a few, and this is the first time I've ever said that. I would tighten things up just a bit, disabling MetaRefresh, disabling "Launching programs and files in an IFRAME", disabling "websites in less privileged web content zone can navigate into this zone", and disabling Userdata Persistence. Otherwise, IE7 on Vista offers a decent compromise between security and usability. The privacy conscious are, as always, encouraged to use Mozilla for browsing instead, and leave IE in its default configuration, to be used solely for manual sessions with Windows Update.

Spambuster?

Next up, we have the successor to Outlook Express, called Windows Mail. I always considered Outlook Express to be hands down the worst email client ever devised. Windows Mail is a little better. There now are half-decent junk mail controls and, of course, the famous anti-phishing filter. Email memos are now stored as individual files instead of in a database file, which means they can be searched faster, and email contents will show up in the Windows main search, which is either very handy, or a privacy nightmare, depending on what you get up to with your email. This type of storage also makes it easier for you to nuke messages with a wipe utility, either by wiping free space after deleting, or wiping them manually if you have the patience.

However, junk mail controls are awkward. Flagging memos as spam is a hassle; you do this in a list above the preview pane with the right mouse button, and then select from a list of actions. This can be quite tedious if you get a lot of spam, because one can't select several emails for the same action. There really ought to be a junk button that one can use to mark memos as spam and delete them with a single click, as there is with Thunderbird. It would be nice if the default rule for such a junk button were to be blocking the sender, rather than the sender's domain. One can always block a troublesome domain manually if need be.

Interestingly, an email from Microsoft Press Pass - a mailing list of self-congratulatory press releases for tech journos - was automatically flagged as spam. I find it hard to disagree with that call.

Memos can be displayed as HTML with all the risky stuff, such as online images and scripts, blocked. And Windows Mail doesn't give you a hard time about displaying all memos as plain text, which I recommend. Or rather, it displays lightly formatted text; you don't get the raw text as you do with Kmail, so links show up as they would in HTML, with the actual URL hidden. Now, with IE7, such links show up in the status bar as the full URL when you mouse over them, but in Windows Mail they don't. This should be fixed, because otherwise one is stuck relying solely on Microsoft's anti-phishing filter gimmick.

While not security related, I will note briefly that there is no undelete button or Edit menu option to undo a deletion, for those of us who tend to delete first and ask questions later.

Click yes to continue

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a feature from XP SP2 that shuts down programs that handle memory oddly, and it is now set to full on by default. It works with address space layout randomisation, a new feature in Vista that loads some system code in unpredictable memory locations to defend against buffer overflow attacks. Both are very good ideas, and should help reduce the impact of malware to some extent.

However, DEP, when full on, may cause a number of applications to crash, or interfere with their installation. I'm betting that a majority of users will opt for the more conservative setting, and this of course means less defense for everyone.

User Account Control (UAC) is another good idea, because it finally, finally, finally allows the machine's owner to work from a standard user account, and still perform administrative tasks by supplying admin credentials as needed on a per-action basis. You know, the way Linux has been doing it forever.

This is one way of helping protect a multi-user system from being loaded with malware by users, and for ensuring that any malware on the system runs with reduced privileges. When you are in a user account, and you wish to perform an administrative task, you will be prompted for the required credentials. Aside from the prompt, the GUI shell will be disabled during this time, to help prevent certain kinds of privilege escalation attacks where the GUI shell or elements of it are spoofed by malicious software.

Of course, it only works if everyone stays out of the admin account as much as possible, and if everyone with an admin password knows better than to install a questionable program with admin privileges. And there's the catch: "Windows needs your permission to install this cleverly-disguised Trojan nifty program. Click Yes to get rooted continue."

So you see that, here again, MS's security strategy involves shifting responsibility to the user.

UAC is all well and good in theory, but here's the problem: it's never going to work. And the reason why it's never going to work is because MS still encourages the person who installs Vista (the owner presumably) to run their machine with admin privileges by default. I was delighted, when I set up Vista for the first time, to be presented with an opportunity to set up a "user" account. But moments later, when I saw that I was not invited also to create an admin account, I knew that the "user" account I had just set up was indeed an admin account. And so it was.

Until MS gets it through their thick skulls that a multi-user OS needs a separate admin account and a user account for the owner, and that the owner should be encouraged to work from a regular user account as much as possible, UAC will never work as intended.

In fact, UAC is the most complained-about new feature of Vista, and most people are disabling it as soon as possible. Why? Because MS still encourages the owner to set himself up as the admin, and work from that account. And when you're running in an admin account, UAC is nothing but a bother. Every time you try to take an action, and this could be as simple as opening something in Control Panel, UAC disables your screen and pops up a little dialog asking you if you really want to do what you just did. A pointless irritant that will cause the vast majority of Vista users to disable UAC, because the vast majority of Vista users will, unfortunately, be running as admins, thanks to MS's stubborn refusal to try to put everyone into a user account to the extent possible.

And once UAC is disabled, all of its security enhancements are lost. Yes, the basic idea is good, but the implementation has been completely bungled.

A few irritating details

The default folder view options could be improved for the security conscious user. One should definitely not hide file extensions, as the default file view has it, because it is possible to spoof icons and use bogus extensions that can make executables appear to be other than they are. Yes, UAC and DEP are supposed to help with this, but DEP will be set to its lower setting, and UAC will be turned off, on the vast majority of Vista boxes, for reasons we've already discussed. And since it's very likely that you will still be running your Windows box as an admin, if you're going to open a file with Windows Explorer, you'd better look to see whether or not it's an executable, because it will run with your privileges. So, at a minimum, the folder view should default to showing file extensions.

As usual, Windows enables far too many services by default. It would be a tremendous help if MS could somehow use its many wizards to enable only the services needed for each bit of hardware or software installed. That would take some effort on Microsoft's part, and on the part of device and software vendors, but the alternative so far has been to leave every single bell and whistle blaring. Unnecessary services waste RAM, and worse, those related to networking are a needless target for worms and other online attacks.

Data hygiene

The start menu now offers the option of not storing or displaying a list of recently-accessed files and programs. This used to be a real nightmare for data hygiene. Finally, it's fixed.

Oh wait; it's not fixed. In fact, things just got a lot worse. There is the new "Recently Changed" directory, which will show up as one of your "Favourite Links" in the left-hand column of your home or user directory, and in Windows Explorer. And guess what: all the files you've been fiddling with recently will show up in it. Its contents are identical to the "Recent Documents" folder that Microsoft let you think you had shut off.

But worse, the contents of your recently-changed directory will not show up in main search, even if you use advanced search, and search "everywhere". So you might not even know it's there. And still worse, you can't empty this directory without deleting all of the files it points to. You can empty your "Recent Documents" folder, and only the pointers or links will be gone; you don't lose the actual files. But with this new gimmick, you've got an archive of all the files you've looked at, regardless of where you've buried them in the file system hierarchy in hopes of keeping prying eyes off them, and you can't empty it unless you want to say goodbye to the files themselves.

The worst part of this is that by offering the option to disable the list of recent files, MS has given users a false sense of privacy and security. The reality is that privacy and data hygiene are even more difficult than before. What a blunder.

Child safety first

Now there is some good news, finally. Vista ships with parental controls that are reasonably easy to implement. You can set up accounts for the kiddies, and prevent them using all sorts of programs, like email, chat, and IM, or even deny them internet access altogether if they're too young. One thing that I like is the ability to prevent the little porn fiends from downloading files via IE7. But remember, if you have any other browsers loaded on the system, you must disable them all individually via the parental controls, because download blocking only works with IE.

The basic setup is sensible and allows for fine-tuning depending on each child's level of maturity and responsibility. And parents can schedule regular reports on their children's internet use.

Now, parental controls and filtering are all well and good, but we should beware of any false sense of security they might encourage. In a recent Today Show interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6TcxNjK7Kc) (video), Billg dilated glowingly about Vista's new parental control centre; but we should remember that it's merely a tool, not a solution. Parental controls are not a substitute for adult supervision. The internet is adult space, and so it should remain. Nothing sends my blood pressure into aneurysm territory faster than talk of legislation that would make the internet safe for children. The internet has been created by adults for adults, and children venturing online simply have got to be supervised, either by a parent or by a mature and responsible older sibling. Filtering is not a panacea.

Package deal

Now, for the Vista Security Centre. This has been controversial, involving MS in skirmishes with security software vendors who claim that Vista's built-in product is anti-competitive.

I'm not sure why anyone would worry. The Security Centre doesn't do very much except remind users, "Message: We Care". It's a little craplet with a stereotypical icon that looks like a shield, and it simply informs you of whether or not the firewall is on, whether or not you've got anti-virus software installed, and so on. It is integrated with an improved version of the malicious software removal tool, or anti-spyware tool, in the form of Windows Defender.

There's nothing much in Security Centre that XP SP2 doesn't have, except a warning that you've turned off UAC. It's something that one might wish to run or consult after installation, and maybe once a month thereafter. But it's on all the time, ready to harangue you, and it's rather difficult to make it go away.

It doesn't contain AV software, but a query for further information on virus issues will bring you to this web page (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...svistaav.mspx), where MS recommends the vendors it thinks are ready to handle Vista (McAfee is notably absent). Nor does it have a packet filter (firewall) with many features. It's not too bad to configure, but third-party packet filters offer many more options in terms of notification and controlling individual applications. I noticed one exception in the default firewall configuration that I didn't care for, for allowing remote assistance. I don't think that should be allowed unless you're actually using remote assistance.

Windows Defender is certainly better than nothing; it monitors files for changes that can indicate malicious activity, and searches for known spyware. It is also integrated with IE7 to some extent. However, what constitutes spyware is a judgment call, and it's never a bad idea to use more than one anti-spyware/anti-adware product, in hopes that one will pick up what another overlooks. (And WD does seem to miss (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02...spyware_tests/) an awful lot of spyware.) I certainly wouldn't recommend depending solely on Windows Defender. But it's nice that it's there.

In a nutshell

So, what have we got here? An adequately secure version of Windows, finally? I think not. We have got, instead, a slightly more secure version than XP SP2. There are good features, and there are good ideas, but they've been implemented badly. The old problems never go away: too many networking services enabled by default; too many owners running their boxes as admins and downloading every bit of malware they can get their hands on. But MS has, in a sense, shifted the responsibility onto users: it has addressed numerous issues where too much was going on automatically and with too many privileges. But this simply means that the owner will be the one making a mess of their Windows box.

Data hygiene is still an absolute disaster on Windows. In fact, it's worse than it ever was in some ways, and that's very bad indeed. Browser traces still in the registry, heavy and complicated indexing to improve search, new locations where data is being stored. It all adds up to a privacy nightmare. Keeping a Vista box "clean" is going to be impossible for all but the most knowledgeable and fastidious users.

So don't rush out to buy Vista in hopes of getting much in return security-wise. I do like some of the changes, at least in theory, or as a decent platform on which to build an adequately secure version of Windows one day. But that day, if it ever comes, will be well in the future.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02...rity_oversold/





British Royal Reporter Jailed for Hacking Into Palace Phone Systems
Tariq Panja

A British tabloid journalist who hacked into royal officials' voicemail was sentenced Friday to four months in prison, and his editor resigned. - The judge said he had no option but to hand a prison sentence to Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News of the World, describing his crime as "reprehensible in the extreme."

Goodman's accomplice, the 36-year-old private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, was sentenced to six months in prison for hacking into the messages, including some from Princes William and Harry.

Shortly after the sentencing, The News of the World's editor Andy Coulson announced his resignation.

"I have decided that the time has come for me to take ultimate responsibility for the events around the Clive Goodman case," Coulson said.

Judge Peter Henry Gross said Mulcaire duped mobile phone network operators into passing him confidential pin numbers to access messages left on the cell phones. He passed those on to Goodman, and between them the pair made 609 separate calls to the voicemail systems of three senior members of the royal household.

"Neither journalist or private security consultant are above the law," the judge said, passing the sentence.

The calls to intercept the voicemail messages -- made between November 2005 and June 2006 -- targeted the telephones of the Prince of Wales's aide Helen Asprey, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the ex-SAS officer who is private secretary to Princes William and Harry, and Prince Charles' communications secretary Paddy Harverson.

Goodman, 49, acted after his once celebrated career began to founder, his lawyer Jon Kelsey-Fry said during the daylong sentencing hearing.

"Mr. Goodman's stories were no longer considered adequate by his superiors," he said. "He was demoted, sidelined and a younger reporter was assigned to cover the royal family. Under that pressure, he feared for his job.

"It was whilst under that pressure that he departed from these high standards with which he lived his life, a departure of which he will be ashamed for the rest of his life."

Gross acknowledged the reporter had acted in desperation, but said it could not reduce the "intrinsically serious and unattractive nature" of the crime.

Mulcaire, once a semiprofessional soccer player, had also pleaded guilty to five other charges of intercepting messages of well-known figures, including those of supermodel Elle Macpherson.

Goodman and Mulcaire had earlier apologized through their lawyers to the Prince of Wales, Princes William and Harry at a previous hearing, and the judge said their contrition had allowed them to have a more lenient sentence than the maximum two years they faced.

The judge said that although none of the stories produced using the intercepted messages were particularly noteworthy, the two men's conduct was a risk "to the very fabric of life in our country."

Eavesdropping is a sensitive issue for the royal family. Charles was the victim of an embarrassing intercept in 1989. The prince and his current wife, Camilla, were recorded having an explicit phone conversation while he was still married to Princess Diana.
http://www.metronews.ca/storyCP.aspx?pg=./X012607AU.xml





Airport ‘07

How to Crash an In-Flight Entertainment System
Hugh Thompson

One of the most interesting examples of a software "abuse case" came to me rather abruptly on an airplane flight from Las Vegas to Orlando in mid 2005.

Each seat in the airplane had a small touch screen monitor built into the head rest of the chair in front, and on this particular airline, passengers could watch a variety of television channels and play a few simple games. One such game looked remarkably similar to the classic strategy game Tetris, where players use their skills to manipulate falling blocks on a screen to try and form horizontal lines. I'm a big fan of Tetris; for a few months in 1998 I was borderline obsessed with it. I would start looking at everyday objects and start mentally fitting them together with other tings in the room to form weird line configurations. One of the options on this particular airborne version of Tetris was to alter the number of blocks one could see in advance on the screen before they started falling.

To give myself the biggest advantage in the game, I pressed the + control as many times as it would allow and got to the maximum value of 4. I then put on my "bad guy" hat on and asked: How *else* can I change the value in this field? Near my armrest was a small phone console; you know, the one where you can make very important calls for a mere $22 per minute. I noticed that the phone had a numeric keypad and that it also controlled this television monitor embedded in the seat in front of me.

I then touched the screen in front of me to highlight the number "4" in the options configuration shown in Figure 1. I tried to enter the number 10 into that field through the phone keypad with no luck: it first changed to the number "1" followed by the number "0". Frustrated, I then made the assumption that it would only accept single digit values. My next test case was the number "8"; no luck there either, the number didn't change at all. I then tried the number 5: success! '5' is an interesting test case, it's a "boundary value" just beyond the maximum allowed value of the field which was '4'. A classic programming mistake is to be off by 1 when coding constraints. For example, the programmer may have intended to code the statements:

0 < value < 5

When what actually got coded was


0 < value <= 5

I now had the software exactly where I wanted it, in an unintended state; the illegal value 5 was now in my target field. I then turn my attention back to the screen and hit the + button which, to my complete surprise, incremented the value to 6! Again, an implementation problem, the increment constrain probably said something like "if value = 4 do not increment." In this case, the value wasn't 4 but 5 so it happily incremented it to 6! I then continue to increment the value by pressing the + button until I get to 127 and then I pause for a moment of reflection. 127 is a very special number; it is the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer. Strange things can happen when we add 1 to this value, namely that 127 + 1 = -128! I considered this for a moment as I kicked back a small bag of peanuts and in the interest of science I boldly pressed the + button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof...screen goes black.

Poof...screen of the person next to me goes black.

Screens in front of me and behind me go black.

The entire plane entertainment system goes down (and thankfully the cascading system failure didn't spill over to the plane navigation system)!

After a few minutes of mumbling from some of the passengers, a fairly emotionless flight attendant reset the system and all was well. I landed with a new-found respect for the game of Tetris and consider this to be the most entertaining version of it I have ever played.
http://blogs.csoonline.com/node/151


















Until next week,

- js.



















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