[JackSpratts]

Asia

First Peer-To-Peer Infringer Arrested

A 38-year-old jobless man has been arrested for illegally distributing copyright movies on the Internet through Bit Torrent, which is the first successful enforcement action against P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing.

Secretary for Commerce, Industry & Technology John Tsang said if convicted, it would deal a heavy blow to copyright infringement activities. He appealed to people to respect intellectual property rights and to not commit piracy-related offences. Parents should warn their children of the serious consequence of the offence.

Customs & Excise Assistant Commissioner (Intelligence & Investigation) William Chow said the arrest signifies the department's resolve in tracking down copyright infringing activities over P2P networks by using their expertise and the latest technology to employ round-the-clock monitoring.

On January 10 and 11, Customs officers located the suspect who had uploaded three movies onto a local Bit Torrent discussion forum for sharing with other network users. About 8am yesterday officers searched a Tuen Mun flat and seized two computers, equipment and a batch of VCDs, and arrested the suspect.

Under the Copyright Ordinance, it is an offence to distribute infringing copies of copyright works other than for the purpose of, in the course of, any trade or business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright, without the licence of the copyright owner.

The maximum penalty is a $50,000 fine per infringing copy and four years jail.
http://news.gov.hk/en/category/lawan...113en08002.htm


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Security Researcher To Be Jailed For Finding Bugs In Software?
Munir Kotadia

A French security researcher who published exploit codes that could take advantage of bugs in an anti-virus application, could be imprisoned for violation of copyright laws.

In 2001, French security researcher Guillaume Tena found a number of vulnerabilities in the Viguard antivirus software published by Tegam. Tena, who at the time was known by his pseudonym Guillermito, published his research online in March 2002.

However, Tena's actions were not viewed kindly by Tegam, who initiated legal action against the researcher. That action resulted in a case being brought to trial at a Court in Paris, France. The trial kicked off on January 4 after being deferred from its initially scheduled start date of October 5, 2004. The prosecution claims that Tena violated article 335.2 of the code of the intellectual property and is asking for a four month jail term and a 6,000 euro fine. Additionally, Tegam is proceeding with a civil case against Tena and asking for 900,000 euros in damages.

Accoridng to Tena's Web site, his research "showed how the program worked, demonstrated a few security flaws and carried out some tests with real viruses. Unlike the advertising claimed, this software didn't detect and stop ‘100 percent of viruses’."

Tena, who is currently a researcher for Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Tegam responded in a "weird way" by first branding him a terrorist and then filing a formal complaint in Paris. During the resulting tribunal, Tena said the judge decided that because the published exploits included some re- engineered source code from Viguard’s software, he had violated French copyright laws.

According to French security Web site K-OTik, Tena had technically broken copyright laws because his exploits were "not for personal use, but were communicated to a third party".

However, K-OTik, which regularly publishes exploit codes, claims that the ruling could create a precedent so vulnerabilities in software, however critical, could not be declared publicly without prior agreement from the software publisher.

K-OTik’s editors say the ruling is "unimaginable and unacceptable in any other field of scientific research".

On Tena's Web site, he claims that If independent researchers are not allowed to freely publish their findings about security software then users will be only have "marketing press releases" to assess the quality of the software. "Unfortunately, it seems that we are heading this way in France and maybe in Europe," Tena said.

"To use an analogy, it's a little bit as if Ford was selling cars with defective brakes. If I realised that there was a problem, opened the hood and took a few pictures to prove it, and published everything on my Web site. Then Ford could file a complaint against me," added Tena.

Philip N Argy, senior partner of the intellectual property and technology group at Australian law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques, said that if a similar case was put to trial in Australia the prosecution would be unlikely to get a conviction because of our "fair comment provisions".

"We have strong copyright protection as well as strong anti-hacking laws, but from what I can glean from the translations, all that Guillermito did was to publish the details of the parts of the code which contained serious bugs that made the software erroneously treat as a virus some legitimate software. I'd have thought that would be at least within the fair comment provisions of Australian copyright law," said Argy.

The final ruling will be made in Paris on March 8, 2005.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9176657,00.htm


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Steam heat

Plagued By Pirates, Gaming Industry Unveils Its Own Legal P2P Software
Peter Wilson

Last fall, Vancouver art director Tavis Dunn recently used a new program called Steam to download PC gaming's most anticipated title of the 2004, Half-Life 2 to his computer's hard drive.

It was a week before the game's official release date, which, ironically, had been delayed for a year because the first version of its code had been pirated and posted to the Internet.

So is Dunn, who works for Greedy Productions, producers of such popular gamer-oriented TV shows as Electric Playground, just another over-eager downloader of pirated games?

Well, no. Steam, unlike Kazaa, Limewire, eDonkey 2000, BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer programs, is a creation of the game's own developer, Seattle-based Valve Corp.

And Steam, which allows for complete game downloads and seamless invisible updates, could just be the first sign that an industry that loses some $3 billion U.S. each year to piracy is considering operating its own legal download sites, just like the music industry.

Greedy Productions' executive producer Victor Lucas, who noted that two hugely popular games, Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, were pirated to the Net, sees the arrival of Steam as the beginning of a change brought about by peer-to-peer networks.

"People in any kind of content development are looking at the success of iTunes and Apple's dominance of the music-playing sector and questioning what the implications are for future media delivery," said Lucas.

He said that just as movie makers are looking at an iTunes-style delivery system, he "wouldn't doubt that somewhere down the road an iteration of a game service will be out there."

Because distributors of the physical version of Half-Life 2 objected to any Net-based pre-release of the game, Dunn had to wait a full week after his download completed, to play it.

Dunn likes the convenience of it all. "I don't have the hassle of going to the store and picking up the box," he said. "It saves on all the packaging and that kind of thing."

No wonder games producers might be thinking about their own download systems.

According to a U.S. Justice Department report, the music and movie industries lose $250 billion U.S. annually and the software industry has put its losses for 2003 at $29 billion.

Whatever the real numbers are, there's no doubt that there's a ton of downloading of pirated content going on out there.

The most recent figures for Canada, released by Ipsos-Reid back in May before a controversial court ruling that peer-to-peer music downloading is legal in Canada, showed that 32 per cent of Canadians adults had downloaded at least one song from the Net.

And just 15 per cent of those were from fee-paying sites, which means by far the vast majority of music downloads are of pirated content. And the survey didn't cover teens, who are the most likely to use peer-to-peer systems to download.

The arrival of pay sites and systems has changed the outlook somewhat, at least in the United States, where some 20 million have paid for songs in the past six months, a rise of 120 per cent.

However, the survey shows that, again, teens are not among them, possibly because they lack money and have no credit cards.

So far, most surveys have concentrated on music, but if you look at most peer-to-peer programs, they carry a wide variety of software and games and, increasingly, full-length movies.

A quick search of Limewire, for example, showed that more than a dozen alleged copies of Christmas film The Polar Express were said to be available for download. However, without downloading, it would be impossible to know whether these are, in fact, full-length versions and what their quality is.

Another search, for the software favourite Photoshop CS, turned up more than 250 listings of everything from the full program to serial numbers to activation work-arounds.

In other words, if you build a peer-to-peer system, the pirates will come, bearing software, music and movies.

The legal situation on this is somewhat confused. In Canada, The Copyright Review Board has said that downloading music and movies from peer-to-peer networks is legal. And that's because this country tacks on an up to $25 levy on such devices as MP3 players, with the money to go to content creators to make up for their losses.

As well, there is a levy on blank tapes, CDs and DVDs.

In the U.S., the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles has ruled that peer-to-peer software developers aren't liable for any copyright infringement by downloaders if they have no way to stop them from doing it.

This means that peer-to-peer software developers and distributors are free to continue selling their products. However, file sharing itself has been ruled in lower courts as being against U.S. copyright laws.
http://www.canada.com/technology/sto...c-98dfe4cc632f


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Japanese institute signs software development contract
Press Release

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NiCT) of Japan has signed a $200,000 contract with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop new educational uses for Croquet, an innovative open-source operating system that the UW made available to developers in October.

Croquet is a new open-source software technology and peer-to-peer network architecture that supports online interaction and resource sharing among large numbers of users.

"Private developers and now government agencies are beginning to take note of Croquet's possibilities," says Julian Lombardi, one of the principle architects of Croquet and director of the project at the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) at UW-Madison. "Our Japanese colleagues are interested in working with us to develop new ways for all of us to interact with network-deliverable information."

The agreement with NiCT follows an announcement that 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based technology company, has begun developing commercial educational software using Croquet. Like 3Dsolve, NICT sees Croquet as a communications platform and service, available anytime, anywhere, from any device. Croquet is designed to run on everything, from a PDA through a set-top box. Observers say it will change the way people think about software and computation, from today's device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive service.

The Croquet Project is a joint software-development effort involving DoIT, the University of Minnesota, Hewlett Packard Inc. and Viewpoints Research Institute Inc.

Early adopters of the Croquet software-development environment include more than 20 higher-education institutions both in the United States and abroad.

For more information, visit the Croquet Project Web site.
http://www.news.wisc.edu/10588.html


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Apple Changes Course With Low-Priced Mac
John Markoff and Saul Hansell


The Mac Mini is 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall and starts at $499.

Apple Computer introduced its first low-priced Macintosh on Tuesday, signaling its bet that most consumers now see computers as simply another appliance in the modern house.

While computers have long been sold as machines that can turn a home into an office, most Americans now use them in their bedrooms and kitchens as e-mail terminals; as hubs for playing music, storing and editing photos; and as stations for navigating the Web.

The new Mac Mini, priced as low as $499 without a keyboard, monitor or mouse, is aimed squarely at the needs of this new digital household.

The new Apple strategy, which moves the company deeply into the consumer electronics market, positions the new Macintosh as an entertainment and communication device. It also promises to intensify Apple's battle with Microsoft in the personal computer market dominated by machines using Windows software.

The move is in part propelled by Apple's success with its iPod digital music players; with 10 million sold in the last three years, the iPod has pulled Apple into the mass market. The popularity of iPod, analysts say, may persuade consumers who have not been Apple computer users to consider the Mac Mini.

"I wish I had a nickel for every time people have suggested that we do this," said Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, at a conference on Tuesday. "We want to price this Mac so that people who are thinking of switching will have no excuse."

But Apple's introduction of a low-priced machine is not likely to cut significantly into Microsoft's dominance in personal computing; more than 90 percent of PC's are Windows machines.

More important, Microsoft is also moving to turn PC's into entertainment centers with its Windows Media Center Edition software, which lets a computer double as a television and video recorder.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said that Apple's consumers were probably not going to give up their Windows PC's but might buy a Macintosh as an additional computer for entertainment.

"It's not about switching but adding," he said. "People may still need a PC because of work activities, but this is for doing multimedia activities and searching the Internet."

For the last few years, Apple has deflected criticism of its roughly 3 percent share of the computer market by comparing itself to prestige brands like BMW. It tried to make sophisticated and attractive products that appealed to a small segment of consumers willing to pay a premium for superior design.

Mr. Jobs played down suggestions that Apple had any grand strategy to transform itself, saying instead that the new pricing strategy came in response to things that Apple customers have been requesting.

In addition to the Mac Mini, which goes on sale Jan. 22, Mr. Jobs introduced a tiny digital music player, the iPod Shuffle, which is priced as low as $99. The less-expensive player has no screen and can hold about 120 songs, compared with 5,000 songs on a standard iPod.

"Today we saw the unveiling of a business strategy that people will be talking about for years to come," said John M. Gallaugher, a business professor at Boston College.

Even with the low price of the new iPod, Mr. Gallaugher said that Apple would probably make up the low profit margins from the music player by selling a series of accessories with higher margins.

Even loyal iPod users have resisted Apple computers because they are perceived to be expensive and not compatible with the so-called industry standard of personal computers based on Windows and Intel microprocessors.

But the advantages for consumers of using a Windows PC are less significant if they are performing common Internet and entertainment functions. Moreover, the computer viruses, worms and spyware that plague Windows machines have been far less of a problem for Macintosh machines.

The question still remains, however, whether PC users will try Macintosh machines in large numbers.

"This is not going to return Apple to a high level of profitability," said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. "The margins on these new machines will be trivial. And I think they will add no more than one or two points of market share."

He said, however, that even a small growth in market share could be enough to attract software developers willing to write programs for the Macintosh.

Apple has struggled to break out of its niche position in the computer business since the Macintosh was introduced in 1984. Early on, Mr. Jobs defined the Macintosh as an all-in-one appliance, but he was forced to leave Apple just a year later after losing a management battle with the chief executive then, John Sculley.

During the 1990's, while Mr. Jobs was in exile from the company, Apple flirted with broadening its market by licensing the Macintosh operating system to companies that made systems that were Macintosh compatible.

The strategy backfired when those companies began stealing Apple's profits and Microsoft successfully imitated the Macintosh user interface with Windows version 3.1.

Mr. Jobs canceled the Macintosh operating systems licenses when he returned to Apple in 1997, focusing Apple instead on attractive industrial designs and a new operating system, Macintosh OS X, which he brought with him from Next, the company he founded in 1985.

Most of the decisions Mr. Jobs has made since returning to Apple have been well received, but the company's market share has continued to erode in the face of fierce price competition.

Some analysts said that the cheaper Mac Mini, which could cost a few hundred dollars more than $499 with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, could help stop the erosion. Inexpensive PC's sell for about $700 or even lower. The low-end Macintosh, called the eMac, sells for about $800.

"The product is sensational for the market it's designed for," said Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company. He said the new machine was designed to appeal to iPod users with Windows systems who have stayed away from the Macintosh in the past. "I think it's going to stem any further loss of market share, and I foresee the day late in the decade when they will double their market share because of a product like this."

Shares of Apple fell $4.40 Tuesday, to close at $64.56.

Mr. Munster said that investors had been guessing that Apple would sell more iPods in the fourth quarter than the 4.5 million the company reported. Apple will report its first-quarter results Wednesday afternoon.

Mr. Jobs made the announcements in front of an audience of more than 4,000 Macintosh enthusiasts. The announcements cap a year of both success and personal challenge for Mr. Jobs, who has seen Apple's stock more than triple.

Last summer Mr. Jobs was found to have a rare form of pancreatic cancer. After emergency surgery, he quickly returned to work at both Apple Computer and at Pixar Animation Studios, where he is also chairman and chief executive.

He has resisted speaking publicly about his personal crisis. Yet some at the conference thought the marketing slogan for the iPod Shuffle, "Life Is Random," was a reference to the fortunes of Mr. Jobs.

"It jumped out at me," said Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. "It's existential marketing with maybe even a touch of nihilism."

Mr. Jobs said he had not created the slogan, which came from the company's advertising agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, but he acknowledged that it had struck him as well. "I thought about it," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/te...y/12apple.html


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Apple's Profit Quadruples, Thanks to iPod
Laurie Flynn

Apple Computer said yesterday that profit in its first quarter more than quadrupled - the biggest increase ever - on strong holiday sales of its iPod music player.

The results came a day after the company embarked on a strategy to capitalize on the success of the iPod by selling a line of low-cost computers.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., reported net profit of $295 million, or 70 cents a share, for the quarter, which ended Dec. 25. That compares with $63 million, or 17 cents, for the quarter a year earlier. The results beat the consensus forecast of analysts, which was 49 cents a share.

"We're pretty thrilled," said Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in an interview yesterday. "This was Apple's biggest revenue increase in its history," along with the record rise in profit.

Mr. Jobs attributed the strong results to rising sales of personal computers and iPods, and said about 40 percent of the quarter's sales came from music-related products.

Revenue for the quarter was $3.49 billion, up 74 percent from $2 billion a year earlier. Analysts had forecast revenue of about $3.18 billion. The company also projected that revenue for the current quarter would be $2.9 billion, and estimated that earnings per share would be 40 cents, also surpassing analysts' expectations.

Shares of Apple rose 90 cents yesterday, to close at $65.46. Shares continued to rise in after-hours trading, gaining as much as $7.22.

The company shipped more than a million Macintosh computers in the quarter, a 26 percent increase over last year. Of those, the greatest demand was for the iMac, with its sales nearly tripling.

"This is the first proof positive that the halo effect is real," said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, referring to the notion that customers interested in buying an iPod sometimes buy a Macintosh as well.

The iMac is Apple's best-selling personal computer, with an average price of $1,400.

But the iPod remained the big story, with Apple selling 4.6 million of them in the quarter, five times the number sold in the period a year earlier. That brought the total number of iPods sold in three years to about 10 million.

Apple's iTunes music store made a small profit during the quarter and has sold 230 million songs to date, Apple's chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, said.

Gross margin for the quarter, a crucial indicator of profitability, was 28.5 percent, up from 26.7 percent in the quarter a year earlier.

At the annual Macworld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Apple introduced new versions of its Macintosh that are aimed at consumers who have traditionally opted for lower-priced Windows systems.

The Mac Mini - a stripped-down Macintosh that is priced as low as $499 without a keyboard, monitor or mouse - is the least-expensive computer that Apple has ever shipped and is competitively priced with machines sold by Dell Computer and other low-cost manufacturers.

"The Mac Mini is a game changer for Apple," Mr. Munster said. "They're standing in front of the best opportunity yet for Apple to gain market share."

The new Apple strategy moves the company deeply into the consumer electronics market and positions the new Macintosh as an entertainment and communication device. It also promises to intensify Apple's fight with Microsoft in a computer market that is dominated by machines using Windows software.

The strategy is in part propelled by Apple's success with the iPod, which has pulled Apple into the mass market.

Now, with a low-priced computer, Apple hopes to persuade more users to switch to the Macintosh from PC's operating on Microsoft Windows, and in turn raise its share of the overall market from its current 3 percent.

"The one question left is just what the switch rate will be," said Charles R. Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, which raised its rating on Apple from hold to buy. "Apple has set the table to grow their market share, finally."

Apple is also hoping to capture an even greater share of the market for portable music players, with the introduction of the iPod Shuffle, a device based on flash memory. It is priced at $99, which is $150 less than the current iPod Mini.

In the last year, the company has faced new competition from Sony and other companies, whose flash-based products are priced below the least expensive iPod.

On Tuesday, Mr. Jobs said that while Apple has 65 percent of the market for hard-drive portable music players, it has only a third of the total market for both hard-drive and flash-memory-based units.

The holiday season also led to a surge in traffic to Apple's retail stores. "The very positive news during the quarter has been the Apple stores," Mr. Wolf said. "Apple has become its own channel."

Apple's chain of retail stores had revenue of $561 million in the quarter, an average of $5.9 million a store. That compares with $4 million a store in the year-earlier period.

"Opening the Apple stores has been a phenomenal success," Mr. Wolf said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/te...y/13apple.html


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A Satellite Connection for IPod Reaches Out to Download Radio
Marc Weingarten

Time Trax Technologies, the Washington company that created a stir late last year when it introduced products that allow satellite radio subscribers to record programming to PC's, has followed up with a product that turns iPods into MP3 repositories for hundreds of channels of music and talk from XM and Sirius, the two satellite radio broadcasters.

DockTrax is an iPod docking station that connects to a U.S.B. port on any PC. When an iPod is inserted into the cradle, TimeTrax software can schedule recordings of XM or Sirius programs and download them to the iPod as MP3 files. Time Trax says it has taken measures to prevent peer-to-peer file sharing, embedding the serial number of the user's satellite radio receiver onto each MP3 file created.

DockTrax, which is available at the company's Web site (www.timetraxtech.com), has a list price of $200 and comes bundled with TimeTrax software, an XM or Sirius receiver and the iPod cradle. It will be at retail stores later this year. Marc Weingarten
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/te...ts/13trax.html


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Memory Prices Seen Slumping Below Production Cost
Michael Kramer and Jean Yoon

Memory chip prices are expected to slide 30 percent or more by mid-year to below the manufacturing cost as chip makers plough generous 2004 profits into new production lines, exacerbating a surplus of supplies.

But analysts expect prices to stabilize in the second half as production switches over to the next generation of dynamic random access memory (DRAM).

DRAM supply will outpace demand by 2 percent to 3 percent in 2005, said Jae H. Lee, analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research in Seoul.

"We project DRAM prices to weaken further and possibly hit bottom in the second quarter, before experiencing a short price rally in the third quarter," he said.

Lee forecast benchmark prices would hit $2.60 in the second quarter, below the $3 price that typically marks break-even for chip makers.

That would leave chip makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Micron Technology Inc., Infineon Technologies AG and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. facing losses, though bigger, more efficient companies will suffer less.

The boom-and-bust DRAM business enjoyed a strong 2004, with the price of benchmark 256 megabit DDR (double data rate) DRAM hitting highs above $6 per unit in April before easing to an average of $4.52 in the fourth quarter and around $3.70 in recent days.

Lee said the industry was funelling remarkably strong cashflow generated in 2004 into new capacity.

FLUSH WITH CASH

In one example of the sector's change in fortunes, top Taiwan DRAM maker Powerchip Semiconductor Corp. is expected to post T$22.13 billion ($69 million) in 2004 net profit, according to analyst forecasts compiled by Reuters Estimates, after a mere T$169 million profit in 2003.

Flush with cash, the company filled a plant making chips from advanced 12-inch, or 300 mm, silicon wafers with equipment last year and began construction on another.

Electronics giant Samsung, the world's largest DRAM maker, also said this week it would spend some $940 million to boost memory chip output this year.

And Japan's Elpida Memory Inc. is putting $1 billion it raised from its November stock market listing toward an aggressive capacity expansion plan. A new chip line typically costs about $2 billion.

With growing capacity outstripping lacklustre demand due to stagnant PC sales, ABN-AMRO analyst Crystal Lee said she saw DRAM prices falling to an average of $3 in the first quarter.

"It will drop about 30 percent compared to the fourth quarter (average) and then another 20 percent in the second quarter," Lee said.

However, she expected a switch to a new DRAM chip called DDR2 to brake the price side in the second half.

DDR2 offers faster speeds for data transfer and lower power consumption, but personal computer firms have shunned the technology because of a lack of compatible chipsets to link the new memory to a computer's microprocessor brain.

Supply has anyway been limited as chip firms work out production kinks, but analysts and industry insiders expect the technology to become mainstream this year as chipsets arrive and start-up problems ease.

"Falling DRAM prices will force DRAM makers to more aggressively convert capacity from DDR to DDR2," said Yu Chang-eyun, analyst at BNP Paribas Peregrine.

"Samsung will be the largest beneficiary of the trend as the company has DDR2 products ready and currently controls about half of the market," he added.

However, a semiconductor trader at the Korean electronics giant estimated Samsung's share of the DDR2 market would fall to about 33-35 percent by the end of the year as other microchip makers get into the game.

"We estimate DDR2 to account for about 55-60 percent of total DRAM shipments by the fourth quarter of 2005 versus 15 percent a year ago," the trader said, referring to shipments by all DRAM makers.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7315039


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Disk Drives To Stop Shrinking
Michael Kanellos

For hard-drive makers, getting small is becoming a passing fad.

While consumers have gone bonkers for music players and other sleek devices sporting tiny hard drives, disk drive companies say there's little room, and even less desire, for further reducing the size of the drive platters--the silver disks that spin around and hold data.

Since the platters constitute a substantial portion of the overall volume of the drive, this means a ceiling looms for shrinking drive sizes and potential increased competition from flash memory.

"The disk drive is not going to get much smaller," said Jim Porter, an analyst at Disk/Trend.

The problem goes back to Archimedes and some basic science. Reducing the diameter of a drive platter greatly reduces the surface area for storing data. And less available storage space makes it more difficult for drives to distinguish themselves against flash memory. Typically, flash memory accesses data faster, but drives can provide far greater storage capacity for the same amount of money.

"The trade-off in size is not as important as the trade-off in capacity," said Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Hitachi, which makes the drive found in the iPod Mini, has no plans to further shrink the 1-inch-diameter platter found in those drives. The company will, however, shrink the overall size of its mini drives by developing smaller motors and reducing packaging, Healy said.

Similarly, Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing for the storage division of Toshiba, says the Japanese giant is not interested in shrinking the 0.85-inch-diameter platters in its mini drive, which is featured in a video camera coming soon.

This doesn't mean that mini drives won't continue to improve. Design innovations such as perpendicular recording will allow drive makers to increase current capacities on small drives from the 4GB and 5GB range to 8GB to 10GB within a year. Brzeski, Healy and several analysts predict that drive makers will be able to maintain an advantage over flash when it comes to large-capacity devices. When 10GB mini drives hit the market next year, 10GB of flash memory might cost 10 times as much, Porter speculated.

Better packaging will also enable drive makers to reduce their size and volume. "Mikey," the code name for a Hitachi drive that comes out in devices next holiday season, will be 20 percent smaller than current mini drives.

Increased storage capacity and packaging reductions will enable hard-drive makers to insert their products into cell phones, which now almost exclusively rely on flash memory.

"People are even talking about building in projector capacity," he said, so that pictures taken on cell phones can be beamed onto flat surfaces for easier viewing, Healy said.

Still, because the platters occupy a significant portion of the overall space in a drive, size reductions are limited. A visual examination of an opened mini drive from Cornice with a 1-inch platter shows that the platter occupies more than half of the surface area. Another substantial portion is taken up by the hard-drive arm.

Reducing platter size is also constrained by the fact that a motor sits in the middle of the platter.

"Any time you shrink the disk, you halve the capacity," said Dave Reinsel, an analyst at IDC. Toshiba's 0.85-inch drive maxes out at 4GB. Consequently, 0.5-inch drive would be limited to 2GB of capacity, which would be hard-pressed to compete against flash chips on price.

This is potentially troubling for the disk drive industry because flash memory chips will relentlessly continue to economize on real estate and cost per memory bit. Moore's Law will reduce the cost of chips and enable manufacturers to increase memory capacity at the same time. Novel packages will let manufacturers stack four chips in a space that traditionally held one. Advanced Micro Devices will also come out with flash chips that hold four bits per cell rather than two bits.

Ultimately, if flash improves at a slightly faster rate than mini drives do, it could enable flash to scrape away market share in some areas. Flash might not be competitive at the high end of the market, where 10GBs or 20GBs are needed, but it might get more competitive for midrange devices.

"You've got flash on the other side that is growing," Reinsel said.

The notion that platters will stop shrinking is somewhat ironic, considering that they are just beginning to sell after a 10-year coming-out party. IBM invented the mini drive back in the early 1990s but couldn't commercially exploit it. IBM then sold its hard-drive division to Hitachi in 2002.

Hitachi then landed its drive in the iPod Mini, a popular portable music player that Apple Computer debuted a year ago.
http://news.com.com/Disk+drives+to+s...=st.rc.targ_mb


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Copyright Watchdogs Are Breeding A Bigger Enemy
Vincent Maher

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have recently drawn more blood with a massive drive against server administrators running Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing services like eMule and BitTorrent.

SuperNova.org, a widely used directory service for files available on the BitTorrent network, recently shut itself down voluntarily, coinciding with the dates of the MPAA action.

Since the early days of Napster the technology behind P2P file sharing has developed at a rapid rate, partially in response to the legal actions taken to shut down networks like Napster and AudioGalaxy.

Both Napster and AudioGalaxy relied on a centralised listing service for the location of files on each user’s computer, making it easy for the RIAA to take action against the organisations running them.

The reason the MPAA and RIAA dislike BitTorrent so much is that it does not rely on the presence of a centralised listing service. Individuals can post links to their files on websites, via e-mail or chat applications, and so it becomes significantly harder to track who is sharing what. However, the contents of the file can still be seen and many sites have sprung up listing massive numbers of BitTorrent links to make the process of finding a file easier for users looking for something specific.

With attacks on websites like SuperNova, N4P.com and pheonix- torrents.com, the P2P community has started to step up the levels of encryption and anti-detection mechanisms, and the near future will probably see a breed of P2P file sharing tools that make it virtually impossible for the RIAA and MPAA to identify which files are which.

As things stand today, there is no reliable option available for South Africans who would like to buy movies and music online that takes into account the lower production costs of shipping a single digital song via the internet as opposed to packaging it on a CD.

The Apple iTunes store, currently the most popular online store for digital music, charges approximately R6,60 per song and the service is not available in South Africa. This represents almost a 50% reduction in the cost of a single CD so let’s hope they figure out how to make the e- commerce side of things work here soon.

The problem, of course, is that many people would still not want to pay for music or videos if they could get them for free. This means that, as the RIAA and MPAA push file sharing software to new levels of sophistication, their opportunity to do something positive and take hold of a massive new market becomes slimmer and slimmer.

In the end I predict that movie and music piracy will continue until the prices drop significantly enough for it not to be worthwhile anymore. Old industries like physical distribution agencies face a tough challenge by this new market, but it is a battle they will win by creative thinking and innovation rather than bullying via litigation.
http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?c...=195028&sa=106


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Altnet Tries TrueNames On P2P Ops
Ron Lachman

p2pnet.net News:- You have to give it to Kazaa owner Sharman Networks and associates Brilliant Digital Entertainment and Altnet: they’ll try anything to turn their TrueNames DRM app into hard cash.

Their latest move is revealed in a circular they’ve sent to various p2p firms including BearShare, Limewire, MashBoxx and Shareaza, that we know of at the moment.

It says, among other things:

I write on behalf of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Inc. (“BDE”) and Altnet, Inc. (“Altnet”), the exclusive licensees for use in peer-to-peer computing of U.S. Patent No. 5,978,791, entitled “Data Processing System Using Substantially Unique Identifiers to Identify Data Items, Whereby Identical Data Items Have the Same Identifiers” (“the ’791 Patent”) and U.S. Patent No. 6,415,280 B1 entitled “Identifying and Requesting Data In Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data” (“the ’280 Patent”) (collectively the “Data Distribution Patents”).

It goes on:

Based upon our investigation, we believe that other peer-to-peer applications, including applications offered by your company, use the technology claimed in the Data Distribution Patents for identifying, accessing, and distributing data items between computers. Accordingly, we believe that your company requires a license from BDE and Altnet to continue practicing the ‘791 and ‘280 Patents with your company’s peer-to-peer application.

It also says:

On December 2, 2004, BDE and Altnet filed a patent infringement lawsuit against MediaSentry, Loudeye, Overpeer, and the RIAA (case number CV-04-9823 SJO (RNBx) filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California). According to the complaint, these entities infringe one or more claims of the ‘791 and ‘280 Patents by engaging in spoofing and monitoring activities on the networks formed by users of peer-to-peer applications.

We invite you to discuss licensing opportunities with BDE and Altnet. BDE and Altnet are willing to license your company on negotiated terms acceptable to BDE and Altnet, just as they have done with Sharman, so it can continue practicing the ‘791 and ‘280 Patents.

“We’re gathering information to find out what the goal of all this is,” a Shareaza spokesman says. “We’ll formulate where we’re going to go from there.”

MashBoxx boss Wayne Russo told p2pnet, “Well, when I stopped laughing …..” .

MashBoxx is the upcoming Big Music-approved application that identifies copyrighted music files on a p2p network

and allows copyright owners to control how they’re traded, and for how much. It's about to go into beta.

“What’s interesting is they said their investigation shows we’re utilizing their patent,” Russo states scornfully. “Their investigators must not be very thorough because MashBoxx hasn’t launched yet so I don’t see how it’s possible for us to have infringed on their patent.

”Not only that, but if I’m not mistaken, I made a deal with Snocap to do my content identification, and then if I’m not mistaken, Snocap made a deal with Philips and is utilizing Philips’ identification technology so Hey! – they’re barking up the wrong tree.

“Frankly, I think it’s some kind of bullshit move to try to bolster their case against the RIAA. And I’m starting to think the RIAA isn’t taking it seriously at all. They’re certainly not afraid of it, and neither is Loudeye or anybody else.”

“They’re going to get serious blow-back on this,” adds Russo.

BearShare’s Louis Tatta thinks p2p vendors should pool their resources and have an IP attorney evaluate Altnet's patent claims.

Altnet's "lame duck" patent
In 2002, Altnet ceo Kevin Bermeister bragged that TrueNames Ron Lachman had been appointed Altnet's chief scientist.

TrueNames, “claims invention of the old and trivial technique of using strong hashes as hashtable keys,” said InfoAnarchy. “A second patent spun out of the first … claims invention of the idea of requesting documents from network servers by unique identifier.”

"[...] the bottom line is that someone managed to persuade Altnet that the Truenames Patent was worth something (one imagines that this was right after Altnet's successful purchase of London's Tower Bridge and a large selection of invisible clothing)," said Freenet's Ian Clarke.

"Assuming that those Altnet threatens with their lame duck patent put up even the slightest bit of resistence, the patent won't stand, and Altnet will be left looking like the enemies of consumers, innovation, and competition, once again a pariah within a P2P community that should be working together against its common foes."

As well as granting Altnet an exclusive license to the TrueNames patent, "Lachman will also provide strategic and technical guidance on Altnet's distributed computing initiatives,” stated Bermeister in a puff release on Lachman’s appointment.

Lachman co-developed and patented TrueNames in 1994 and licensed it to Digital Island.

In 2002, a US federal judge granted Akamai Technologies its motion for a permanent injunction against Digital

Island to stop it from running its Footprint content delivery service, “the latest twist in a legal battle that began nearly two years ago,” said NetworkWorldFusion at the time.

“Digital Island, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Cable & Wireless says the ruling issued late last week has no impact on the company or its customers since it is aimed at a defunct technology,” says the report, going on:

“ ‘The injunction is a legal technicality about a legacy part of the CDN that was abandoned some time ago,’ says Chris Albinson, chief strategy officer for Exodus, a Cable & Wireless Service, which is the name of the business unit formed by the integration of C&W acquisitions Exodus and Digital Island.”

LimeWire’s Greg Bildson told p2pnet, “One interesting thing about LimeWire code is that we explicitly don't do searches by hash. We only do searches by keyword.

"We've been a proponent of not searching by hash in the Gnutella network due to efficiency issues. Further, we actually drop all searches by hash that try to go through our hosts.

"SHA1 searches (hash searches) are too specific for the Gnutella architecture. They're a very bad mix with the dynamic querying algorithms that are responsible for the dramatic improvements in Gnutella over the past two years.”

In the meanwhile, could it be that, following the Sharman/Kazaa trial in Australia, in which BDE and Alnet are named, the unhappy trio's financial resources have been seriously sapped by lawyerly fees and other expenses and they hope this will at least partially replenish their coffers?

Stay tuned.
http://p2pnet.net/story/3512


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Skype Living Up To Hype

European telcos are beginning to feel the bite as callers turn to Skype for long distance and even local calls, according to The Register.

High long distance and per-minute billing for even local calls make VoIP (voice over internet protocol) provider Skype extremely attractive in the market, business intelligence company Evalueserve told the Register.

Skype, invented by the same Dutch duo that generated KaZaA, now boasts 13 million users worldwide and is growing by 80,000 a day.

Unlike other VoIP products, Skype runs on a peer-to- peer protocol, much like KaZaA, and the more users it gets, the better it works.

Evalueserve told the Register that Skype could have between 140-245 million subscribers by 2008 -- something that could cut telco revenue by 10 per cent and profits by 22-26 per cent.

Perhaps the most famous of the Skype evangelists is also one of the most unlikely: Michael Powell, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission.

After he tried Skype last year, he told Fortune magazine that he knew the carrier ball game had changed forever.

"I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype," he said. "When the inventors of KaZaA are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it’s free – it’s over. The world will change now inevitably."

Others have called it "disruptive technology" -- that most dangerous of all things in any carefully ordered commercial universe.

So far, though, it has been seen as a hobby tool, rather than a telco alternative, because calls originally had to pass between Skype users.

But as Skype extends agreements with carriers for bringing the VoIP P2P signals down into the POTS, calls from Skype users to regular landline telephones become increasingly possible -- and decreasingly expensive.

Evaluserve opined to the Register that Skype-like services could transform telcos into carriers that derived revenue from value add services.

Skype recently added a stack that allows it to run on the Pocket PC system, adding to a lineup of versions designed for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_art...ame=Technology


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All The Ocean Is Vibrating
Jack



A new more accurate, nuanced and ultimately sobering tsunami simulation has been released by Vasily Titov, the same researcher who did the first one a few hours after the event. Global in scope, the 18 meg avi runs longer than the 32 meg mpg and thus fully shows in staggering detail the wave encircling the planet then hitting itself as it comes back around the pacific (also available as a local event from Cornel University). There wasn't a continent it didn't touch.


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Firefox Flaw Raises Phishing Fears
Ingrid Marson

A vulnerability in Firefox could expose users of the open-source browser to the risk of phishing scams, security experts have warned.

The flaw in Mozilla Firefox 1.0, details of which were published by security company Secunia on Tuesday, could allow hackers to spoof the URL in the download dialog box that pops up when a Firefox user tries to download an item from a Web site. This flaw is caused by the dialog box incorrectly displaying long sub-domains and paths, which can be exploited to conceal the actual source of the download.

Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research at software maker F-Secure, said this bug could make Firefox users vulnerable to cybercriminals. "The most likely way we could see this exploited would be in phishing scams," he said.

To fall victim to such a scam, a Firefox user would have to click on a link in an e-mail that pointed to a spoofed Web site and then download malicious software from the site, which would appear to be downloaded from a legitimate site.

This flaw was given a severity rating of two out of a possible five by Secunia.

David Emm, a senior technology consultant at antivirus company Kaspersky Labs, said that phishers aren't likely to take advantage of this flaw in Firefox, because Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market.

"I think it's unlikely that we'll see hackers rush to exploit this vulnerability," Emm said. "After all, Firefox has a much, much smaller install base than IE, and it's likely that hackers will continue to pay more attention to (IE) instead."

This may change in the future as Firefox has attracted a lot of interest in the past few months. A survey at the end of November found that Mozilla-based software, including Firefox, accounted for 7.4 percent of browsers in November 2004, up 5 percent from May.

The download vulnerability has been confirmed in Mozilla 1.7.3 for Linux, Mozilla 1.7.5 for Windows, and Mozilla Firefox 1.0. No solution is available at present, but Mozilla developers are expected to fix this bug in an upcoming version of the product.
http://news.com.com/Firefox+flaw+rai...3-5517149.html


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They're Not Worthy

Why extend the copyright on works that no longer have commercial value?
Lawrence Lessig

This New Year's Day, a wonderful thing will happen in Europe that won't occur again in the US until 2019: Copyrights on music and television recordings will expire. After a half century of monopoly protection granted artists in exchange for their creative work, the public will get its justly earned free access to an extraordinary range of both famous and forgotten creativity. Libraries, archives, and even other creators can spread and build upon this creativity without asking permission first. Songs from 1953 that seniors across Europe wooed their first loves to can be streamed across the Net for free.

Such a yearly event doesn't happen in the US anymore because Congress repeatedly extends the term of existing copyrights. The last extension in 1998 - the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act - was the 11th for existing works in 40 years, delaying any copyrighted song from entering the public domain for another 20 years. This practice is now inspiring copycats in Europe to similar plunder. Sir Cliff Richard - the most successful singles artist in British history - has launched a campaign in the EU to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 95. Billions will be wiped from the books of European record companies, Richard warns, if governments don't act immediately.

If you know anything about this debate, you might wonder why this question has come up again. (And, for that matter, if you know anything about accounting, you might be puzzled why EU record labels get to book value for assets set by law to expire.) When Congress passed the Sonny Bono Act, we were told its purpose was to "harmonize" US law with European law. Turns out - surprise! - that in the most important categories of copyright, the act made US terms longer than those of the EU. Thus the pirates of the public domain are back, arguing that the EU must lengthen its copyrights to harmonize with those of the US. And as Mexico is about to extend its terms beyond those in Europe and the US, no doubt soon we'll be hearing calls to extend our terms to match those of Mexico.

This spiral will not end until governments recall a simple lesson: Monopolies are evil, even if they are a necessary evil. We rightfully grant the monopoly called copyright to inspire new creative work. But once that work has been created, there is no public justification for extending its term. The public has already paid. Term extension is just double billing. Any wealth it creates for copyright holders is swamped by the wealth the public loses in lower costs and wider access.

The urge to extend terms for commercially valuable work is understandable, albeit from the public's perspective, senseless. But the way that governments extend these terms is even more senseless. Rather than limiting this corporate welfare to those works that are commercially exploited (leaving the forgotten to pass into the public domain so libraries and archives can make them available cheaply), governments uniformly extend the duration of copyrights indiscriminately. The Sonny Bono Act, for example, extended terms for works from as far back as 1923, even though, as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer estimated in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 98 percent of the oldest works are no longer commercially available.

It would be easy for governments to narrow term extension to those who want it by requiring copyright holders to pay a small fee. Even a very small fee would filter out the vast majority of works from automatic term extension. Most would enter the public domain immediately. Yet even this idea is ignored. Who can hear reason when billions are about to be wiped from the books?

Governments should end this game by tinkering with copyright terms for future works only. But if they're not strong enough to stick to this simple principle, they should at least limit their damage by restricting extensions to those works from which someone might actually benefit. That someone, no doubt, won't be the public. But there's no reason to extend terms when no one - not even record companies - could possibly benefit. Filter the forgotten from term extension, and we might forgive the senselessness that inspires Sir Cliff to sing again.
http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/view.html?pg=5


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Bill Aims To Filter Internet Content At State Libraries
Kristen Gelineau

Two Virginia lawmakers are pushing bills that would require any public library that receives state funds to install filtering software on its computers.

The legislation is necessary to protect children from unwittingly stumbling across pornography while using the Internet at their local libraries, said the House bill's sponsor, Del. Samuel Nixon, Jr., R-Chesterfield.

Nixon said his bill would be identical to one already filed by Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg.

Nixon introduced his plans for the bill at a Monday press conference for the Family Foundation, which unveiled its legislative agenda for the upcoming General Assembly session that also backs a state constitutional ban on same-sex civil unions.

The bill would simply put Virginia in line with federal law, said Nixon, who filed a similar bill last session that was killed in committee.

A 2000 federal law mandated that public libraries put blocking technology on computers as a condition for receiving federal money. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 upheld the use of anti-pornography Internet filters in public libraries.

Opponents of such legislation argue that it amounts to censorship, and relies on imperfect technology that can block legitimate sites on such topics as abortion or gay rights.

Librarians would be able to temporarily disable filters for legitimate research purposes, said the Family Foundation's executive director, Victoria Cobb, who added that 40 percent of the state's libraries already have filters in place.

Last month, Cobb said her office received a call from a parent whose child had been exposed to "obscene material" at a Henrico County library. The librarian denied a request from the child's parent to force a man viewing the material to take it off his screen, Cobb said.

"This is not a novel concept," Cobb said. "This is a very real problem that has a simple and cost-effective solution."

The bill does not specify which filters should be used, nor does it define exactly what constitutes "pornography," Nixon said.

"These filters are inexpensive, they're easy to use, they're constitutional," Nixon said.

The American Library Association has opposed the federal law for various reasons.

"The whole technology approach requires computers to make subjective judgments that they're incapable of," said Carolyn Caywood, intellectual freedom round-table counselor for the association and branch manager of the Bayside Area Library and the Special Services Library for the Blind in Virginia Beach.

Another problem with blanket filtering is that most companies who produce the filters keep their lists of blocked terms secret, Caywood said. While that is understandable, it is also troublesome, because companies could potentially allow their political, social or religious views to affect what words they consider inappropriate, she said.

Caywood said her library system gives visitors a choice of whether to use computers with or without Internet filters. It also offers young children the option of using a special, kid-friendly system that only allows access to 50 pre-approved sites, such as Disney, Caywood said.
http://www.dailypress.com/news/local...,1438622.story


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Return to sender eh what

Verizon's E-Mail Embargo Enrages
John Gartner

Verizon Communications customers expecting e-mail from across the pond may be in for a long wait. The internet service provider has been blocking e-mail originating from Great Britain and other parts of Europe for weeks, and customers are upset about having their communications disrupted without notice.

Verizon began blocking ranges of IP addresses belonging to British and European ISPs on Dec. 22, according to the company. The blacklisting of e-mail from abroad was in response to spam coming from the region, according to a customer service representative at Verizon who identified himself only as "Gary." He said company policy prevents him from giving out his last name.

Since Dec. 28, dozens of Verizon customers have been posting their frustrations on Verizon.adsl and verizon.email.discussion-general newsgroups about being unable to receive e-mail from Britain, Germany, France and Russia. Verizon customers describe the frustrations of not knowing how many e-mails have been blocked and receiving contradictory information from Verizon's customer service, and anger at switching to free e-mail accounts until the problem is resolved.

"What essentially this policy has done is to make it clear to me that unless they change their policy, Verizon's e-mails are not reliable enough even for non-critical home usage," said Verizon user Robert Jacobson of Brooklyn, New York, in an e-mail to Wired News.

Ashley Friedlein, CEO of consulting firm E-consultancy.com in London, said several of his e-mails to Verizon customers bounced back but he assumed that the recipient's inboxes were full.

Friedlein sees irony in an American ISP blocking e-mail from Europe. "I feel a bit affronted because most of the spam we get is from the U.S.," Friedlein said. He said that some of his bounced messages were replies to e-mails, "which is about as un-spammy as you can get."

Mike Teixeira, a blacklist investigator for Mail Abuse Prevention Systems, or MAPS, which provides ISPs with lists of known spammers, said his company is always updating its blocking list, adding and removing IP addresses that indicate the country of origin.

Wired News checked several e-mail accounts from Britain and Germany that were being blocked by Verizon, and none of them were on MAPS' list of known spammers. Teixeira said it was unusual to block e-mail coming from a geographic region. "We would never block a whole country and say, 'England is bad.'"

"Telephony companies are not so experienced in managing e-mail," said Dave Ferris, president of Ferris Research. "It's easy to set the filters too strong" and block valid addresses, he said, adding that companies need to be able to dynamically filter spammers instead of maintaining lists that can quickly become obsolete.

Ferris said ISPs such as AOL and MSN were making similar mistakes a year ago during their spam-fighting efforts. "It sounds like (Verizon is) going through a learning curve," he said.

Verizon media relations manager Ells Edwards said he did not know when Verizon would discontinue its blocking of the European e-mail. "Normally these things abate in a matter of days," Edwards said.

Verizon has more than 3 million DSL customers, according to Edwards.

Edwards suggested that Verizon customers who are waiting for an e-mail response from Europe should use alternative forms of communication. "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call," he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,66226,00.html


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Round up the usual suspects

Reports Of Child Pornography Continue To Climb

Reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's hot line grew for the seventh consecutive year.
John Foley

Reports of suspected child pornography climbed 39% in 2004, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which collects tips about the problem over the Web and by telephone.

The child-protection organization's CyberTipline logged more than 106,000 reports of child-pornography possession, creation, or distribution in 2004, the seventh consecutive year such incidents trended upward since the 24-hour hot line was established in 1998. "The totals have gone up remarkably each year," says Staca Urie, a supervisor with the National Center's Exploited Child Unit.

Urie attributes the increase, in part, to technologies such as digital cameras, peer-to-peer networking, and the Internet that have made it easier to create, distribute, hide, and access illicit images and videos. Yet, the growth in child- porn reports also is a reflection that Internet service providers are complying with federal law that requires them to take action against the problem, Urie says.

The National Center's CyberTipline also tracks child prostitution, online enticement, sexual molestation, and child sex "tourism," where under the Protect Act, made law in 2003, U.S. residents who sexually exploit children while traveling abroad can be prosecuted, as can child-sex tour operators and their co- conspirators. The tipline also tracks child pornography, which is by far the most frequently reported problem. Of all the incidents recorded, about 25% are forwarded to law-enforcement agencies such as the FBI, Justice Department, and Postal Inspection Service. Those reports and the remaining 75% of others are stored in a database that's available to law-enforcement officials.

Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement division announced Tuesday that two executives of an Internet billing company in Belarus have been extradited from France to face child-pornography, money laundering, and other charges in U.S. federal court. Yahor Zalatarou and Alexei Buchnev are the president and marketing director of Regpay Co. Ltd., which is accused of providing billing services for 50 child-porn Web sites and operating its own such sites. The company's technical administrator, Aliaksandr Boika, was extradited from Spain in June to face similar charges.

The extraditions are part of an ongoing investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigations division, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. The three Regpay employees were arrested in July 2003. So far, 190 people have been arrested in the United States and hundreds more in other countries as part of the investigation, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Yet, there's no way to track how many of the tips collected by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lead to arrests or convictions. Some experts believe law-enforcement agencies can't keep up with the scope of the problem. "The number of prosecutions is very small," says Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to online safety. A lawyer, Aftab writes a column on privacy issues for InformationWeek.

Industry groups representing peer-to-peer companies, which are under pressure to curb the use of their products for illegal file sharing, which can include child pornography, have undertaken public-awareness campaigns. "We can and are playing a role in the education process and even in facilitating law enforcement," says Adam Eisgrau, executive director of Peer-to-Peer United. The trade association's Web site, P2PUnited.org, provides a link to the National Center's CyberTipline.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...00595&tid=5978


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TV Room's PC Wants to Be the Center of All Media
Seán Captain

MANY air travelers have slipped DVD's into their laptops as an alternative to the in-flight movie. And for years, enthusiasts have installed tuners and software in their PC's to watch and record TV programs.

In 2002, Microsoft sought to take these activities into the mainstream with a new version of its Windows XP operating system, the Media Center Edition. Designed to turn a PC into an entertainment hub, it provided a single interface for watching TV, showing DVD's, displaying digital photos and playing music.

But PC's are still far from being fixtures in the TV room. For some people, the problem is one of logistics. PC's may not blend with the décor, or they may not fit into the racks that hold DVD players, cable decoder boxes and stereo receivers.

More important, the video from a PC set up to serve as a media center doesn't look very good, especially on a large screen, according to Joel Silver. His company, Imaging Science Foundation, tests video equipment and gives it a seal of approval for use in home theaters, which can be anything from a den with a large TV to a screening room with acoustic treatments and a $50,000 digital projector. (The company, commonly known as I.S.F. and based in Boca Raton, Fla., also consults with electronics industry companies and trains technicians who maintain home theaters.)

With DVD's, for example, Mr. Silver notes that PC output can look fuzzy. "It was nothing that would be noticed on a 17-inch screen," he said. "On a 12-foot screen, it was impossible not to notice." DVD players that cost under $100 typically outshine PC's that cost several thousand, he says.

A year and a half ago, Microsoft asked Mr. Silver's company to develop a certification program to improve the quality of media center computers. At the Consumer Electronics Show here last week, Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, announced that Alienware, Hewlett-Packard, Niveus Media, Stack9 Systems and RicaVision International would offer PC's that carried a Microsoft-I.S.F. joint certification for home theater use.

These new media center PC's resemble the audio-visual receivers they aim to replace; they're wider and lower than standard PC's, and have an assortment of audio and video jacks. One of the machines, the K2 from Niveus Media, has a black metal case, top vents and side fins, all designed to shed heat from a Pentium 4 PC silently, without cooling fans.

Reducing noise was one of the biggest challenges, Mr. Silver said. Even the systems with fans are engineered to run so quietly that they won't compete with soft dialogue in movies or with conversations when the TV is off.

Another challenge was rethinking PC video. In the computer realm, a program or a game specifies a level of brightness to display on the screen. In the video world, a signal also includes so-called blacker-than-black and whiter-than-white values that a technician uses to determine the optimal brightness and contrast cutoff levels when calibrating a TV.

As part of the Microsoft-I.S.F. program, ATI Technologies, a maker of graphics cards, created downloadable software updates, or drivers, that provide video output that meets I.S.F. quality requirements on their highest-end cards. (An ATI competitor, nVidia, is also developing I.S.F.-certified graphics.)

The Imaging Science Foundation seal of approval carries considerable weight among home theater enthusiasts and consumer electronics companies, and no one interviewed at the Consumer Electronics Show questioned the video quality of the new media centers. "I'm behind it all the way," said Sam Runco, chief executive of Runco International, which makes TV's and projectors for the upper end of the market.

But companies with competing visions pointed to the expense of a PC and its reputation for crashing or falling prey to viruses. Samsung, for instance, was demonstrating a technology concept called the Intelligent AV Home Network, in which separate devices like TV's, DVD players and stereos run basic software that allows them to be networked and to share digital content, with control through a common on-screen interface similar to Media Center's.

"You don't have to buy a $2,000 computer," said Mithun Sheshagiri, a developer of the technology. But Samsung's system won't appear in products until at least 2006, the project's leader, Alan Messer, said. Also, it will require that products from Samsung and other companies acquire networking capabilities, and that at least one of the products (likely the TV) can run the Samsung software.

Media Center supporters reject the common criticisms. The current certified products are quite expensive, about $2,000 to more than $6,000. But the price of the new technologies "is going to come down over time," said Muffaddal Ghadiali, who manages H.P.'s entertainment PC program. And Tim Cutting, the chief executive of Niveus Media, says PC's are stable and secure if used only for entertainment. "We're not going in there and doing Microsoft Word on it," he said.

In fact, PC technologies are already in home entertainment devices. "All of these products that we're making today essentially are computers," Jeffrey Cove of Panasonic said.

LG Technologies, for example, showed plasma televisions with built-in hard drives for recording programs, like a TiVo (which is itself a stripped-down computer).

Many of the objections may not be about bringing PC technology into the TV room, but rather about putting Microsoft in the center of it. As a counterpoint to a system built around Media Center, Mr. Messer of Samsung promotes the Digital Network Living Alliance, a consortium of consumer electronics and PC companies (including Microsoft) developing open standards that allow home entertainment devices to work together over a network.

But Mr. Silver sees greater influence from companies like Microsoft as inevitable, and potentially beneficial for customers. For instance, he admires the PC industry's ability to fix bugs quickly and to add capabilities to products through software updates, something that is just beginning to occur in other consumer electronic equipment.

And he feels it may take a heavyweight like Microsoft to push for standards that allow products to work better together. He cites Microsoft's advocacy years ago for plug- and-play capability, which allows any computer to recognize the properties of any monitor and automatically send it the right video signal. "They don't get any credit for it, because it works," Mr. Silver said.

In theory, devices like digital televisions, DVD players and set-top boxes should already have such capabilities, but they often don't. So, Mr. Silver said, a feature taken for granted on a $300 monitor very possibly won't function on a $39,000 television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/te...ts/13vide.html


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Videos Quick, Easy and Automatic
Katie Dean

Locating video content on the web can be cumbersome and time-consuming, especially for the not-too-tech- savvy tinkerer. But a new application combining BitTorrent and RSS could make it easy for video fans to automatically locate files and download them to their computers.

Sajeeth Cherian, a 20-year-old communications engineering student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, got the idea for Videora after watching the trouble his roommate went through to find and download anime off the internet. He thought there ought to be an easier way.

While the idea to combine BitTorrent and RSS isn't new, Cherian said his program is less complicated than others and doesn't "demand computer enthusiasts' knowledge."

"I thought I could make an easier version," Cherian said. "Something that anyone off the street could use. You don't need to know anything about BitTorrent or RSS."

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing application that enables fast downloads of large data files. When a person downloads a video, for instance, the data arrives in chunks from different users, resulting in a faster download. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a mechanism used by sites to automatically distribute their content -- like headlines, links or video -- to subscribers' computers. RSS subscribers choose what kind of information they would like to receive.

Videora puts together an easy-to-use interface so users don't have to worry about such details. Once a person downloads the application, the program automatically installs BitTorrent and downloads the RSS feeds, Cherian said. Then, users simply type in the title or keyword for a "series" they want to record, like amateur tsunami videos, for instance. The request can be added to a "want list," and the user can download any tsunami videos located by double-clicking the file. Or, a person can add the tsunami request to "season tickets" and the program will automatically download any tsunami video.

"We extract the BitTorrent link from the RSS feed, and if the title matches what you are looking for, we start downloading the BitTorrent file from the RSS link," Cherian said.

When the search is submitted, the request goes to the open-source Videora server, which includes an index of "tracker" websites -- which point users to locations where digital music and movie files can be found -- with RSS feeds. Anyone can contribute to the database, Cherian said. Cherian developed the source code and then set it free; he has no control over the content.

The site launched at the end of December. Users can download a free trial of the Videora application or pay $23 for a version with more features.

The Motion Picture Association of America recently sued several tracker sites, like LokiTorrent and SuprNova.org. The MPAA alleges that the sites are violating copyright.

The MPAA did not return calls for comment on Videora.

"There (are) a lot of programs out there that can be used for good and bad," Cherian said. "I think it's the responsibility of the copyright provider to make sure people aren't misusing their content.... I definitely don't condone piracy."

So far, Cherian hasn't heard from the MPAA. However, he did run into trouble when TiVo objected to the use of the phrases "season passes," which was originally used to describe Videora's automatic download feature, and "wish lists." Cherian renamed the features "season tickets" and "want lists." He's also heard from a few people interested in investing in the technology, he said.

One digital rights attorney said the program appears to be on the right side of the law, according to the description on its website.

"It looks like they don't control any of the sites that offer the RSS feeds or the BitTorrent tracker sites," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They are not suggesting any particular content and they aren't supervising what people are doing on the network."

That supervision was a key part of the downfall of the original Napster. The court ruled that Napster could supervise what its users were doing, he said.

Schultz compared Videora to another file-sharing service: "Grokster doesn't tell you where to go looking for the content and it doesn't have prepackaged content for you," he said. "It's just a tool you can use to find things. It's that lack of suggestion and lack of control over what you do that keeps it on the right side of the law."

"As long as he's not operating those trackers, it shouldn't be a legal problem," said Andrew Grumet, a programmer who also developed software that combines BitTorrent and RSS. "Although it could be a problem of finding content, ultimately, if these trackers get shut down."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66231,00.html


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Clutter Disappears as DVR Merges With Plasma TV
Michel Marriott

Like peanut butter and jelly or cellphones and cameras, some things seem made for convergence.

LG Electronics, a Korean consumer electronics maker, has a new pair in mind: large-screen plasma televisions and digital video recorders.

The sleek flat-screen LG 60PY2DR, which has a 60-inch display and will cost $15,000, and the 50PY2DR (a 50-inch version; $8,000) eliminate the need for set-top boxes, like a TiVo, to record a favorite show or pause live television.The televisions, to be released in the second quarter of 2005, incorporate an integrated 160-gigabyte DVR. It can record up to 14 hours of high-definition programming or 62 hours of digital standard-definition programs, said Michael Ahn, president of LG Electronics USA.

The DVR-equipped televisions will use TV Guide On Screen, Gemstar-TV Guide's interactive program guide, Mr. Ahn said, allowing consumers to browse channels or record programs with one touch.

The new televisions will also eliminate the need for a cable box. All PY2DR's will ship with CableCard capability, making them digital cable ready. LG incorporated several new imaging technologies in the PY2DR series, Mr. Ahn said.

One, called DoubleLife, extends a plasma television's longevity to 60,000 hours. That, Mr. Ahn and other LG Electronics executives said, is about 24 years of average viewing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/te...gXdA7QNDFjJyCA


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Snooping By Satellite
Declan McCullagh

When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome, N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state police.

Police suspected the lawyer of ties to a local Hells Angels Motorcycle Club that was selling methamphetamine, and they feared undercover officers would not be able to infiltrate the notoriously tight-knit group, which has hazing rituals that involve criminal activities. So investigators stuck a GPS, or Global Positioning System, bug on Moran's car, watched his movements, and arrested him on drug charges a month later.

A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote. "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway."

Last week's court decision is the latest to grapple with the slippery subject of how to reconcile traditional notions of privacy and autonomy with increasingly powerful surveillance technology. Once relegated, because of their cost, to the realm of what spy agencies could afford, GPS tracking devices now are readily available to jealous spouses, private investigators and local police departments for just a few hundred dollars.

Not all uses are controversial. Trucking outfits use GPS boxes to keep track of their drivers' locations, and companies sell software to dispatchers that instantly calculates which taxi is closest to a customer. OnStar uses GPS tracking to provide roadside assistance to owners of many General Motors vehicles.

What's raising eyebrows, though, is the increasingly popular law enforcement practice of secretly tagging Americans' vehicles without adhering to the procedural safeguards and judicial oversight that protect the privacy of homes and telephone conversations from police abuses.

"I think they should get court orders," said Lee Tien, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We're in a world where more and more of our activities can be viewed in public and, perhaps more importantly, be correlated and linked together."

GPS devices work by listening for radio signals from satellites and calculating how long the signals take to arrive.

The result of that calculation provides a highly accurate estimation of latitude and longitude. Depending on the type of GPS tracker, that information is beamed back to an eavesdropper's computer through the cellular network or quietly recorded and divulged when the device is retrieved a few days or weeks later.

Voluntarily agreeing to automotive GPS tracking can be a bargain for some consumers. Progressive Casualty Insurance began a pilot projectin Minnesota last year that embeds GPS devices in a customers' vehicles and offers insurance discounts based on where and when cars are driven.

Norwich Union, the United Kingdom's largest auto insurer, has experimented with a similar "pay as you drive" program involving 5,000 customers. Hertz has implanted GPS trackers in all of its rental cars, and trucking companies have used similar systems for years.

GPS tracking systems are becoming cheap enough--the prices have dropped by about 50 percent in the last few years--that they've become attractive methods for tracing the whereabouts of teenagers and spouses. In 2003, South Carolina police thought they had discovered a bomb under a vehicle, but it turned out to be a GPS bug planted by a man's wife. In another case, a man in Colorado was convicted of tracking his wife with a GPS bug after she began divorce proceedings against him.

Solving crimes
GPS devices have been used to solve crimes from the petty to the heinous. Massachusetts police recently nabbed the driver of a snow removal truck who exposed himself at a Dunkin' Donuts, thanks to the Massachusetts Highway Department's requirement that state contractors outfit their trucks with GPS locators.

In 2000, when William Bradley Jackson called Spokane County, Wash., police to report that his daughter had vanished from the front yard that morning, detectives were immediately suspicious. Jackson seemed unusually nervous, and blood stains were discovered on his daughter's sheets.

Eight days later, after desperate searches failed to locate 9-year-old Valiree, detectives won court approval to secretly attach GPS tracking devices to Jackson's two vehicles.

The tactic worked; the GPS bugs led police to Valiree shallow grave in a remote, dense forest about 50 miles from Spokane. The case ended in a murder conviction and 56-year prison sentence.

Complicating the privacy risks of tattletale cars is a pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases decided two decades ago. Those cases, U.S. v. Knotts and U.S. v. Karo, established that police don't need court approval to track suspects through a crude radio beeper.

In 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals invoked that logic when deciding that federal agents did not need a court order to slap a GPS tracker on a truck owned by a man suspected of growing marijuana. "In placing the electronic devices on the undercarriage of the Toyota 4Runner, the officers did not pry into a hidden or enclosed area,"the court ruled, saying the bug did not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Privacy intrusion?
A handful of courts have veered in the other direction, saying GPS technology is so powerful and can reveal so much about a person's life that it requires strict judicial oversight.

The "use of GPS tracking devices is a particularly intrusive method of surveillance, making it possible to acquire an enormous amount of personal information about the citizen under circumstances where the individual is unaware that every single vehicle trip taken and the duration of every single stop may be recorded by the government," the Washington Supreme Court said in the Jackson murder case in September 2003. "Citizens of this state have a right to be free from the type of governmental intrusion that occurs when a GPS device is attached to a citizen's vehicle...A warrant is required for installation of these devices."

Some legal scholars fear that when the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighs in on GPS tracking, it will side with police over privacy. "Unless it changes its view, it's unlikely that the court will think the same way as the Washington Supreme Court," said Dan Solove, a law professor at George Washington University. "The court has a very narrow and crabbed understanding of privacy. If something's not totally secret, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

GPS tracking--even when bugs are installed by police armed with a court order--can be imperfect. One bug used by police to track convicted murderer Scott Peterson sometimes developed glitches that showed him driving at about 30,000 miles per hour. Judge Alfred Delucchi ruled the data could be admitted during Peterson's trial, which appears to have been the first such decision in California.

Even with the occasional glitches, police see great potential in GPS tracking systems, like OnStar, that are built into more expensive cars--and that most people believe will be activated only in emergencies. In one North Carolina case, police used the built-in OnStar system in a 2000 Chevrolet Suburban truck to locate it and arrest the driver, who had bought it with a fake certified check.

An even more creative method of vehicle tracking arose when the FBI used such a system for audio eavesdropping. OnStar and other remote assistance products permit passengers to call an operator for help in an emergency. The FBI realized the feature could be useful for bugging a vehicle and remotely activated it to eavesdrop on what passengers were saying. (The 9th Circuit shot down that scheme in 2003, on the grounds that it rendered the system useless in emergencies.)
http://news.com.com/Snooping+by+sate...3-5533560.html


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An Aerial Crime-Fighting Tool Banks on Portability
Cyrus Farivar

If all goes well, this year a remote-controlled portable airplane will be taking to the air over Southern California, providing a low-cost eye in the sky for law enforcement.

Chang Industry of La Verne, Calif., is one of dozens of companies working on portable unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.'s, that can be equipped with cameras to transmit live video feeds to law enforcement officers on the ground, miles away. While larger and more sophisticated unmanned aircraft have been in use by the military for several years, this new breed of U.A.V.'s is small enough to be transported in the trunk of a patrol car, for example, assembled and flown by officers near a developing crime scene.

Dr. Yu-Wen Chang, the company's president, said that he expects to sell his Kite Plane, which has a wingspan of about 4 feet and weighs less than 5 pounds, for $5,000 apiece. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will be the first law enforcement agency to test the plane, probably in April, Dr. Chang said.

A big attraction of a small remote-controlled plane is the cost. Law enforcement agencies spend millions of dollars to purchase, maintain and fly helicopters and planes for surveillance and other crime-fighting tasks. U.A.V.'s could substitute for piloted aircraft in certain circumstances.

Safety is another consideration, Dr. Chang said.

"The big helicopter would get shot at, so they can just launch this and take a quick look," he said.

The Kite Plane has an exoskeleton made of foldable graphite composite poles, similar to tent poles, and a skin of parachute cloth, creating the wings of the airplane, Dr. Chang said. Its frame makes it durable and flexible, allowing for both a soft landing sliding onto dirt, or even into the arms of someone waiting to catch it. (The plane's 6-inch propeller shuts off before landing.)

The plane carries a video surveillance camera that is aimed toward the ground. Video is transmitted wirelessly at 30 frames per second.

The camera and electric motor are mounted in the center, below the wing, creating a miniature fuselage. It is piloted very much in the same way a toy remote-controlled car or airplane would be, with a hand-held joystick. While the Kite Plane can fly up to 1,000 feet and has a top speed of 30 miles per hour, its rechargeable battery can only last for 20 minutes.

The plane comes in pieces small enough to fit inside a sports duffel bag, and it can be put together and launched by hand in under a minute, Dr. Chang said.

The Kite Plane's light weight and low cruising altitude make it vulnerable to gunshots or even, in some cases, thrown rocks. However, Cmdr. Sid Heal, who is in charge of evaluating technology for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, said the plane's low cost makes it highly desirable, particularly when compared with the current alternative of a helicopter.

"That helicopter costs $450 an hour - for every 10 hours of use, I've bought a new one of these that I own," he said.

If a Kite Plane were shot down, he said, it would validate the purchase of the aircraft.

"We didn't put our pilot in harm's way," he said. "They shoot one of those down, and I guarantee I'll have funds for 100 of them the next day."

The miniaturization of these aircraft is also driven by a concern for public safety, said Prof. Ilan Kroo, director of the Aircraft Aerodynamics and Design Group at Stanford University.

"If something catastrophic happens with the airplane and it crashes in a populated region, you want this thing to weigh a few ounces, not a few thousand pounds," Professor Kroo said.

Chang Industry is also working on a larger and more sophisticated version of the plane. These eight-foot wide planes would have a rigid wing, and a camera with the ability to pan, tilt and zoom and to provide night vision capabilities.

More important, these advanced planes would have autonomous flight capability, meaning they would not have to be guided constantly by someone with a remote control. Using a Global Positioning System receiver and programmed maps, Dr. Chang said, the plane could be programmed to fly to a target and circle it before returning. This larger plane would cost approximately three times the Kite Plane, about $15,000.

Chang Industry will have to compete with autonomous U.A.V.'s already on the market. L-3 BAI Aerosystems, based in Easton, Md., makes a 44-inch-wide plane called the Evolution, which sells for $25,000 and flies on its own with live video feeds that can be transmitted up to 12.5 kilometers. The Evolution, which can be transported in pieces in a backpack, is designed to collapse into its component pieces upon impact, leaving open the chance for reassembly.

Jay Willmott, the company's executive vice president, said that the United States Marshals Service uses the Evolution plane, and that the Maryland Port Authority is also interested in acquiring a small fleet.

One obstacle to more widespread use of U.A.V.'s is the lack of Federal Aviation Administration regulations for their use.

Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the F.A.A., said that U.A.V.'s must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and that using them in an urban area required F.A.A. approval through a one-year "certificate of authorization" for a particular plane in a specific area. A rural or remote area, such as a testing zone, would not have the same restrictions, Mr. Takemoto said.

However, the F.A.A. is currently drafting sweeping regulations on the use of U.A.V.'s. The agency hopes to have the regulations completed by September.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/te...ts/13next.html


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P2P Site Operators 'Did Not Violate Copyright': Appellate Court
Choi Gyeong-woon

A Seoul appellate court on Wednesday acquitted the two brothers behind peer-to-peer music swapping website Soribada of copyright violation charges.

The bench said in its ruling that although the activities of site users constituted copyright violation, Yang Jeong-hwan and Yang Il-hwan did not themselves commit copyright infringement. The site allowed users to exchange music files and download them to their computer.

But in a separate ruling on the same day, the Seoul High Court said Soribada helped site users infringe on copyright and ordered it to shut down its file-sharing software and its three computer servers, upholding a lower court’s decision. Eleven record companies had filed charges against the P2P music exchange website.
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/ht...501120032.html


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All the President's Newsmen
Frank Rich

ONE day after the co-host Tucker Carlson made his farewell appearance and two days after the new president of CNN made the admirable announcement that he would soon kill the program altogether, a television news miracle occurred: even as it staggered through its last nine yards to the network guillotine, "Crossfire" came up with the worst show in its fabled 23-year history.

This was a half-hour of television so egregious that it makes Jon Stewart's famous pre-election rant seem, if anything, too kind. This time "Crossfire" wasn't just "hurting America," as Mr. Stewart put it, by turning news into a nonsensical gong show. It was unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, complicit in the cover-up of a scandal.

I do not mean to minimize the CBS News debacle and other recent journalistic outrages at The New York Times and elsewhere. But the Jan. 7 edition of CNN's signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.

On this particular "Crossfire," the featured guest was Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist (for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among many others, according to his Web site). Thanks to investigative reporting by USA Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers' money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private p.r. firm so that he would "regularly comment" upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year. Given that "Crossfire" was initially conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you'd think that the co-hosts still on duty after Mr. Carlson's departure might try to get some answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just beginning to discern.

But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators. "On the left," as they say at "Crossfire," Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and plaudits for Mr. Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Mr. Begala congratulated his guest for being "a stand-up guy" simply for appearing in the show's purportedly hostile but entirely friendly confines. When Mr. Williams apologized for having crossed "some ethical lines," that was enough to earn Mr. Begala's benediction: "God bless you for that."

"On the right" was the columnist Robert Novak, who "in the interests of full disclosure" told the audience he is a "personal friend" of Mr. Williams, whom he "greatly" admires as "one of the foremost voices for conservatism in America." Needless to say, Mr. Novak didn't have any tough questions, either, but we should pause a moment to analyze this "Crossfire" co-host's disingenuous use of the term "full disclosure."

Last year Mr. Novak had failed to fully disclose - until others in the press called him on it - that his son is the director of marketing for Regnery, the company that published "Unfit for Command," the Swift boat veterans' anti-Kerry screed that Mr. Novak flogged relentlessly on CNN and elsewhere throughout the campaign. Nor had he fully disclosed, as Mary Jacoby of Salon reported, that Regnery's owner also publishes his subscription newsletter ($297 a year). Nor has Mr. Novak fully disclosed why he has so far eluded any censure in the federal investigation of his outing of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame, while two other reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time, are facing possible prison terms in the same case. In this context, Mr. Novak's "full disclosure" of his friendship with Mr. Williams is so anomalous that it raised many more questions than it answers.

That he and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television's self- proclaimed "most trusted" news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of "news" metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly bigger picture reaches well beyond "Crossfire" and CNN.

Mr. Williams has repeatedly said in his damage-control press appearances that he was being paid the $240,000 only to promote No Child Left Behind. He also routinely says that he made the mistake of taking the payola because he wasn't part of the "media elite" and therefore didn't know "the rules and guidelines" of journalistic conflict-of- interest. His own public record tells us another story entirely. While on the administration payroll he was not only a cheerleader for No Child Left Behind but also for President Bush's Iraq policy and his performance in the presidential debates. And for a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

He took to CNN last October to give his own critique of the CBS News scandal, pointing out that the producer of the Bush-National Guard story, Mary Mapes, was guilty of a conflict of interest because she introduced her source, the anti-Bush partisan Bill Burkett, to a Kerry campaign operative, Joe Lockhart. In this Mr. Williams's judgment was correct, but grave as Ms. Mapes's infraction was, it isn't quite in the same league as receiving $240,000 from the United States Treasury to propagandize for the Bush campaign on camera. Mr. Williams also appeared with Alan Murray on CNBC to trash Kitty Kelley's book on the Bush family, on CNN to accuse the media of being Michael Moore's "p.r. machine" and on Tina Brown's CNBC talk show to lambaste Mr. Stewart for doing a "puff interview" with John Kerry on "The Daily Show" (which Mr. Williams, unsurprisingly, seems to think is a real, not a fake, news program).

But perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective."

This is a scenario out of "The Manchurian Candidate." Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel's "Nightline" recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor," under the rubric of "news" in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of "objective" news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn't have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry.

Ever since Mr. Williams was exposed by USA Today, he has been stonewalling all questions about what the Bush administration knew of his activities and when it knew it. In his account, he was merely a lowly "subcontractor" of the education department. "Never was the White House ever mentioned anytime during this," he told NBC's Campbell Brown, as if that were enough to deflect Ms. Brown's observation that "the Department of Education works for the White House." For its part, the White House is saying that the whole affair is, in the words of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, "a contracting matter" and "a decision by the Department of Education." In other words, the buck stops (or started) with Rod Paige, the elusive outgoing education secretary who often appeared with Mr. Williams in his pay-for-play propaganda.

But we now know that there have been at least three other cases in which federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television during the Bush presidency. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Census Bureau and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have all sent out news "reports" in which, to take one example, fake newsmen purport to be "reporting" why the administration's Medicare prescription-drug policy is the best thing to come our way since the Salk vaccine. So far two Government Accountability Office investigations have found that these Orwellian stunts violated federal law that prohibits "covert propaganda" purchased with taxpayers' money. But the Williams case is the first one in which a well-known talking head has been recruited as the public face for the fake news instead of bogus correspondents (recruited from p.r. companies) with generic eyewitness-news team names like Karen Ryan and Mike Morris.

Or is Mr. Williams merely the first one of his ilk to be exposed? Every time this administration puts out fiction through the news media - the "Rambo" exploits of Jessica Lynch, the initial cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire - it's assumed that a credulous and excessively deferential press was duped. But might there be more paid agents at loose in the media machine? In response to questions at the White House, Mr. McClellan has said that he is "not aware" of any other such case and that he hasn't "heard" whether the administration's senior staff knew of the Williams contract - nondenial denials with miles of wiggle room. Mr. Williams, meanwhile, has told both James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times and David Corn of The Nation that he has "no doubt" that there are "others" like him being paid for purveying administration propaganda and that "this happens all the time." So far he is refusing to name names - a vow of omertà all too reminiscent of that taken by the low-level operatives first apprehended in that "third-rate burglary" during the Nixon administration.

If CNN, just under new management, wants to make amends for the sins of "Crossfire," it might dispatch some real reporters to find out just which "others" Mr. Williams is talking about and to follow his money all the way back to its source.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/arts/16rich.html















Until next week,

- js.














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