[JackSpratts]

Surveillance

Basis for Spying in U.S. Is Doubted
Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane

President Bush's rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.

The analysis, by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, was the first official assessment of a question that has gripped Washington for three weeks: Did Mr. Bush act within the law when he ordered the National Security Agency, the country's most secretive spy agency, to eavesdrop on some Americans?

The report, requested by several members of Congress, reached no bottom-line conclusions on the legality of the program, in part because it said so many details remained classified. But it raised numerous doubts about the power to bypass Congress in ordering such operations, saying the legal rationale "does not seem to be as well grounded" as the administration's lawyers have argued.

The administration quickly disputed several conclusions in the report.

The report was particularly critical of a central administration justification for the program, that Congress had effectively approved such eavesdropping soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force" against the terrorist groups responsible. Congress "does not appear to have authorized or acquiesced in such surveillance," the report said, adding that the administration reading of some provisions of federal wiretap law could render them "meaningless."

The president acknowledged last month that he had given the security agency the power to eavesdrop on the international telephone and e-mail communications of Americans and others in the United States without a warrant if they are suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

The Justice Department is investigating the disclosure of the program, first reported in The New York Times. With Congressional hearings expected this month, the Congressional research report intensified debate on the program. Administration lawyers quickly responded that Mr. Bush had acted within his constitutional and statutory powers.

"The president has made clear that he will use his constitutional and statutory authorities to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks," said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, adding that the program represented "a critical tool in the war on terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties at the same time."

Many Democrats and some Republicans pointed to the findings as perhaps the strongest indication that Mr. Bush might have exceeded his authority in fighting terrorism.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who leads the House Democratic Policy Committee, said the report "raises serious questions about the president's legal authority to conduct domestic spying."

Mr. Miller said the justifications for the program were unacceptable.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the report made "absolutely clear that the legal authorities advanced by the president in justifying domestic surveillance are on very shaky ground."

Thomas H. Kean, a Republican who was chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, weighed in for the first time in the debate. Mr. Kean said he counted himself among those who doubted the legality of the program. He said in an interview that the administration did not inform his commission about the program and that he wished it had.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in 1978 after widespread abuses by intelligence agencies, created a system for court-ordered wiretaps for terrorism and espionage suspects. That system "gives very broad powers to the president and, except in very rare circumstances, in my view ought to be used," Mr. Kean said.

"We live by a system of checks and balances," he said. "And I think we ought to continue to live by a system of checks and balances."

One reason the administration has cited for not seeking to change the intelligence law and obtain specific approvals for eavesdropping was that it might "tip off" terrorists to the program. The Congressional research service found that unconvincing.

"No legal precedent appears to have been presented," the study said, "that would support the president's authority to bypass the statutory route when legislation is required" simply because of secrecy.

Opinions on domestic spying have largely broken down, though not exclusively, along partisan lines, causing splits between the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

The analyses of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress created in 1914, are generally seen as objective and without partisan taint, said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Congressional inquiry on the Sept. 11 attacks.

Because of its importance, the report was repeatedly reviewed by senior staff members at the research service for accuracy and bias before its release, officials there said.

Some Democrats say the administration bypassed the authority of Congress in ordering the eavesdropping. One congressman said he was actively misled. In a letter released Friday, Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, complained to the N.S.A. over what he described as deception by its director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander of the Army.

Mr. Holt, a physicist who has worked as an arms control specialist at the State Department, visited the agency on Dec. 6 for a briefing by General Alexander and agency lawyers about protecting Americans' privacy. The officials assured him, Mr. Holt said, that the agency singled out Americans for eavesdropping only under warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

After the program was disclosed, Mr. Holt wrote a blistering letter to General Alexander, expressing "considerable anger" over being misled. An agency spokesman, Don Weber, declined to comment on the letter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/po... ner=homepage





Republican Senator Defends Briefings on Domestic Spying
Scott Shane

In a sign of growing partisan division over domestic eavesdropping, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday defended the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the secret program and accused the committee's top Democrat of changing her position on the issue.

Also Thursday, 27 House Democrats sent a letter to President Bush asking for information about the National Security Agency eavesdropping program, including whether communications from or to members of Congress and journalists were intercepted.

The Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, was responding to a statement Wednesday by Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, that the law requires that the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees be informed of the N.S.A. program. By briefing only the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses and of the committees, the administration violated the law, Ms. Harman wrote in a letter to the president.

In a letter to Ms. Harman, Mr. Hoekstra said the briefings were in compliance with the National Security Act of 1947, which says the committees should be informed of intelligence activities, though "with due regard for" the need to protect secrets.

"The committee has been informed, in good faith by the president of the United States," through briefings he and Ms. Harman attended, Mr. Hoekstra wrote.

He said he was "surprised and somewhat bewildered" by Ms. Harman's letter because she had not previously complained about the briefings. Mr. Hoekstra told Ms. Harman that he found her letter to the president "completely incongruent" with her previous position.

"In the past," he said, "you have been fully supportive of this program and the practice by which we have overseen it."

The security agency's program, disclosed last month in The New York Times, involves eavesdropping without court warrants on the telephone calls and e-mail messages of people in the United States who officials say have been linked to terrorism suspects overseas.

Ordinarily, the law requires a warrant from a special intelligence court for such eavesdropping. But Mr. Bush has said he authorized the intercepts under his power as commander in chief.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released the 27 Democrats' letter. It asks for copies of all legal opinions on the spying program; the numbers of Americans singled out; and the names of agencies getting the information the agency collected.

F.B.I. agents and N.S.A. employees have been warned by their bosses not to discuss the program.

The warnings at the security agency, which were sent after the Times article appeared, came in two e-mail messages dated Dec. 16 and Dec. 22 from Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency's director, to the N.S.A. work force. They were released on Thursday to The Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the Dec. 16 message, General Alexander wrote, "Rest assured that any operation, regardless of sensitivity, is conducted within the law and in the best interest of our nation."

He reminded the employees in the same message that the program remained classified.

"We do not comment on intelligence operations, actual or alleged - to do so is professionally irresponsible and may put Americans or allied personnel in peril," he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/politics/06nsa.html





Poll: Americans Want Warrants For Spying
Katherine Shrader

A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows.

Over the past three weeks, President Bush and top aides have defended the electronic monitoring program they secretly launched shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as a vital tool to protect the nation from al- Qaida and its affiliates.

Yet 56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Agreeing with the White House, some 42 percent of those surveyed do not believe the court approval is necessary.

"We're at war," Bush said during a New Year's Day visit to San Antonio. "And as commander in chief, I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people. ... It's a vital, necessary program."

According to the poll, age matters in how people view the monitoring. Nearly two-thirds of those between age 18 to 29 believe warrants should be required, while people 65 and older are evenly divided.

Party affiliation is a factor, too. Almost three-fourths of Democrats and one-third of Republicans want to require court warrants.

Cynthia Ice-Bones, 32, a Republican from Sacramento, Calif., said knowing about the program made her feel a bit safer. "I think our security is so important that we don't need warrants. If you're doing something we shouldn't be doing, then you ought to be caught," she said.

To snoop or not to snoop. Americans are saying what they think.

But Peter Ahr of Caldwell, N.J., a religious studies professor at Seton Hall University, said he could not find a justification for skipping judicial approvals. Nor did he believe the administration's argument that such a step would impair terrorism investigations.

"We're a nation of laws. ... That means that everybody has to live by the law, including the administration," said Ahr, 64, a Democrat who argues for checks and balances. "For the administration to simply go after wiretaps on their own without anyone else's say-so is a violation of that principle."

The eavesdropping is run by the secretive National Security Agency, the government's code-makers and code-breakers.

Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said most people think that the eavesdropping is aimed at foreign terrorists, even when the surveillance is conducted inside the country.

"They are willing to give the president quite a lot of leeway on this when it comes to the war on terror," said Franklin, who closely follows public opinion.

Some members of Congress have raised concerns about the president's actions, but none of those lawmakers who have been briefed on the program has called for its immediate halt.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has promised hearings this year. Five members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, have called for immediate inquiries.

On top of that, a memorandum circulated Friday from two legal analysts at the Congressional Research Service concluded that the justification for the monitoring may not be as strong as the administration has argued.

The NSA's activity "may present an exercise of presidential power at its lowest ebb," the 44-page memo said.

Bush based his eavesdropping orders on his presidential powers under the Constitution and a September 2001 congressional resolution authorizing him to use military force in the fight against terrorism.

The administration says the program is reviewed every 45 days and that Bush personally reauthorizes it. His top legal advisers argue its justification is sound.

The issue is full of grays for some people interviewed for the poll, including homebuilder Harlon Bennett, 21, a political independent from Wellston, Okla. He does not think the government should need warrants for suspected terrorists.

"Of course," he added, "we all could be suspected terrorists."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAU LT





Judges and Justice Dept. Meet Over Eavesdropping Program
Eric Lichtblau

The Justice Department held an unusual closed-door briefing Monday for judges on a secret foreign-intelligence court in response to concerns about President Bush's decision to allow domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

A number of judges from around the country who serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which issues eavesdropping warrants in terror cases, flew to Washington to hear the administration's defense of the legality and use of the program, officials said.

One federal judge who sat on the court, James Robertson, stepped down in protest last month after the surveillance operation was first publicly disclosed.

Some of the other 10 judges on the court are known to have voiced recent concerns about whether information that grew out of the National Security Agency's surveillance operation might have been used improperly in securing warrants from the court for intelligence wiretaps.

The judge who leads the court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the only judge currently sitting on the court who is known to have been briefed on the N.S.A. operation, raised objections in 2004 to aspects of the program and instructed for a time that no material obtained by the N.S.A. without warrants could be presented to the court in warrant applications, officials have said in interviews.

At Monday's briefing, judges were expected to question Justice Department officials intensely about the legal underpinnings of the program, but afterward they would say little about the session. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls seeking comment on the briefing, which was held at the Justice Department, and officials for the department and the court would not discuss any aspect.

"There is going to be no comment about today," said Sheldon Snook, an administrator for the United States District Court in Washington. "The court has never commented publicly about their business."

The Bush administration, in defending the use of the N.S.A. program, has pointed to frustrations over the speed and flexibility of the foreign-intelligence court as one reason for allowing the N.S.A. to eavesdrop without warrants.

The intelligence court's caseload has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks, with more than 1,700 warrants issued as of the last public tally in 2004. Only a handful of requests for wiretaps have been turned down in recent years.

The 1978 law creating the court allows the administration to conduct emergency wiretaps and seek a formal order retroactively within 72 hours, but the White House says the system can be too cumbersome to allow for quick responses to developing terror threats.

In some cases, the Justice Department is known to have secured warrants from the foreign intelligence court in cases that grew out of the N.S.A.'s eavesdropping program. That has raised concerns among civil rights advocates.

Some defense lawyers in prominent terror cases around the country said they planned to go to court to determine whether the N.S.A. program had been used against their clients and, if so, whether courts or defense lawyers had been misled about the origins of the evidence against them.

A group of 13 law professors and former government officials weighed in Monday in the heated legal debate, writing in a letter to Congressional leaders that they had serious concerns about the legality of Mr. Bush's executive order.

The White House has strongly defended the lawfulness of the program, saying it was grounded both in the president's inherent authority under the Constitution and in a resolution passed by Congress days after the Sept. 11 attacks authorizing him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the attacks.

But an analysis released last Friday by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, took issue with several of the administration's main legal arguments, saying that Congress did not appear to have ever intended to give Mr. Bush the authority to conduct wiretaps without a warrant.

In the letter released Monday, the 13 law professors and former government officials went further, writing that "the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/politics/10nsa.html





White House Says Web Site Counts Visitors
Anick Jesdanun

The White House said Friday its Web tracking technology is consistent with federal rules because it only counts the number of visitors anonymously and doesn't record personal information.

The White House's site uses what's known as a Web bug _ a tiny graphic image that's virtually invisible _ to anonymously keep track of the number and time of visits. The bug is sent by a server maintained by an outside contractor, WebTrends Inc., and lets the traffic-analysis company know that another person has visited a specific page on the site.

Web bugs themselves are not prohibited. However, under a directive from the White House's Office of Management and Budget, they are largely banned at government sites when linked to cookies, which are data files that let a site track Web visitors.

Cookies are not generated simply by visiting the White House site. Rather, WebTrends cookies are sometimes created when visiting other WebTrends clients. An analysis by security researcher Richard M. Smith shows such preexisting cookies have then been read when users visit the White House site.

The discovery and subsequent inquiries by The Associated Press prompted the White House to investigate. David Almacy, the White House's Internet director, said tests conducted since Thursday show that data from the cookie and the bug are not mixed _ and thus the 2003 guidelines weren't violated.

"The White House Web site is and always has been consistent with the OMB guidance," Almacy said, adding that the limited tracking is common among Web sites.

Jason Palmer, vice president of products for Portland, Ore.-based WebTrends, said Web browsers are designed to scan preexisting cookies automatically, but he insisted the company doesn't use the information to track visitors to the White House site.

Smith said the White House and WebTrends could have avoided any appearance of a problem by simply renaming the server used at WebTrends.

The Clinton administration first issued the strict rules on cookies in 2000 after its Office of National Drug Control Policy, through a contractor, had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. The rules were updated in 2003 by the Bush administration.

Nonetheless, agencies occasionally violate the rules _ inadvertently, they contend. The CIA did in 2002, and the NSA more recently. The NSA disabled the cookies this week and blamed a recent upgrade to software that shipped with cookie settings already on.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...123000195.html





F.B.I. Tries to Dispel Surveillance Concerns
Lynette Clemetson

F.B.I. officials met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders on Wednesday in an effort to dispel anger and concern over the bureau's secret monitoring of radiation levels at Muslim sites around the country.

John Pistole, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and John Miller, the bureau's assistant director of public affairs, tried to reassure those at the session that the surveillance of mosques and Muslim businesses and homes had been based on intelligence leads.

"There was intelligence that talked about the desire to use a dirty bomb in the U.S.; there were statements from bin Laden indicating that he had those materials and that there were cells in the U.S. trained to blend into Muslim communities," Mr. Miller said after the meeting. "We explained how we work with intelligence and that we did what we did based on the patterns of Al Qaeda, not because of the patterns or activities of any mosque or Muslim neighborhood."

F.B.I. officials struck a conciliatory tone, several attendees said, and acknowledged that the bureau could have responded to their concerns more quickly. But Mr. Pistole offered few details on the monitoring, they said, and he emphasized that the program, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and lasted through 2003, remained classified.

Leaders of Muslim and Arab-American groups requested the meeting after the program was disclosed last month by U.S. News & World Report. The nationwide surveillance program included air monitoring of more than 100 private properties in the Washington area.

The controversy over the surveillance program comes after the F.B.I. cancelled financing for a bureau-wide training initiative intended to improve outreach to Muslim and Arab Americans. Group leaders say the news about the radiation monitoring makes such a program all the more crucial.

"This current situation reinforces the notion that our community is viewed more as suspects rather than partners," said one attendee, Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national advocacy organization. "Formalizing outreach sets a standard for better educating agents on the best means of acquiring information, and it demonstrates that partnership is the best way of protecting our country from terrorist attacks."

In October, the F.B.I. rescinded a $1 million pledge toward a training program to institutionalize bridge-building between its field offices and Muslim groups around the country. The program, which would have cost $6 million over three years, was cancelled, in part, because of budget constraints, Mr. Miller said.

In cities with sizable numbers of Muslims and Arab-Americans, F.B.I. field offices have developed relationships with mosques, advocacy groups and community leaders. In Washington and Los Angeles, for instance, special agents meet regularly with groups. Partnerships in Detroit formed the basis for the training program that bureau officials first embraced, then rejected.

Agents engaged in the outreach program said it helped them gain cultural awareness as well as practical insights into sorting good leads from bad. Muslim, Arab and Sikh leaders said that, as a result of the outreach, they received better F.B.I. protection from hate crimes.

But national initiatives like special security registration of citizens of Arab and Muslim countries, sweeps by federal agents in Muslim and Arab neighborhoods and the freezing of Islamic charities' assets have generated complaints.

The radiation surveillance, conducted with the Department of Energy, is another irritant. Disclosures of such programs, attendees at Wednesday's meeting said, make it more difficult to convince people that forming ties with government agencies is productive.

"When things like this happen, people come to us and ask, 'What are you doing talking to the F.B.I.?' " said Imam Mohamed Magid, leader of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, a mosque in Northern Virginia commonly called the Adams Center, which serves 5,000 families.

Imam Magid, who also attended the meeting on Wednesday, has forged ties with agents in the F.B.I.'s Washington field office and organized public forums between them and community members. Now, he said, some of those in the community have questioned whether those sessions were ruses for the agency to conduct secret monitoring.

Several F.B.I. agents have also supported bringing uniformity to bureau practices.

"We're consistent in how we deal with white-collar crime and every other type of crime," said Michael E. Rolince, who was in charge of counterterrorism for the Washington office before he retired in October. "When it comes to dealing with the Arab-American and Muslim community, we have no consistent program. We have 56 different approaches in our 56 different field offices."

The canceled training program, called the Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative, was developed at Northeastern University in Boston.

"It's not 'Kumbaya, let's sit and talk about how nice things are,' " said Deborah A. Ramirez, a Northeastern law professor and former racial-profiling consultant to the Justice Department, who developed the program. "It's a structured process to learn what exists, what works and what we all need to be doing."

Mr. Miller said the bureau would support the training program if outside financing was secured.

"Now that we've let some of the pressure out of this pressure cooker," he said, "we have to address how we go about building better relationships so that when the next crisis comes, we can just call people and talk about it up front."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/po...12muslims.html





F.B.I. Is Cleared of Misconduct in Jailing of Oregon Man
David Stout

Overconfidence in its own fingerprint-identification technology and sloppy paperwork contributed to the F.B.I.'s wrongly implicating a Portland, Ore., lawyer in the deadly 2004 Madrid train bombing, a Justice Department investigation said today.

But the investigation, by the department's inspector general's office, said there had been no misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and no abuse of the USA Patriot Act in the case of the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was jailed for two weeks in May 2004 as a material witness before he was cleared.

Although Mr. Mayfield's Islamic faith was not a factor in the initial stages of the bombing investigation, when F.B.I. technicians erroneously concluded that a print found on a plastic bag near the Madrid attack scene matched one of Mr. Mayfield's, it may have slowed his ultimate exoneration, the Justice Department inquiry found.

The inspector general said the chain of errors that led to Mr. Mayfield's jailing was due in part to the "unusual similarity" between Mr. Mayfield's fingerprints and those found at the site of the bombing on March 11.

"However, we concluded that the examiners committed errors in the examination procedure, and that the misidentification could have been prevented through a more rigorous application of several principles of latent fingerprint identification," the inquiry found.

The report, by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, said it concurred with several changes in F.B.I. laboratory procedures put in place as a result of the Mayfield case, "particularly with respect to the development of more objective criteria for declaring an identification," but that still more changes are necessary, including stricter documentation of errors and their causes.

The F.B.I. has already apologized to Mr. Mayfield, who contends in a suit against the government that he was singled out because of his faith. The bureau, which has denied that accusation, said today it was pleased that the inspector general had found no official wrongdoing and no violation of the Patriot Act, the statute that Congress passed shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster government surveillance powers.

"We are confident that the OIG's findings and recommendations, combined with corrective measures already implemented, will significantly enhance our ability to perform our duties to the public," the F.B.I. said in a statement today. It said the arrest of Mr. Mayfield was based on "an extremely unusual confluence of events," principally the unusual similarity between his prints and those found at the scene.

The inspector general's report amounts to a cautionary tale about over-reliance on crime-fighting techniques that are sometimes considered practically foolproof, and about the dangers of guilt by association.

Mr. Mayfield, who had married an Egyptian immigrant, had represented a suspected terrorist in a child-custody case in Portland. And when the F.B.I.'s much- praised Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System seemed to show a match between a print at the bombing scene at his own, he came under heavy suspicion.

His home and office were searched. And while the inspector general found no evidence that he had been mistreated in confinement, the report noted that he was initially kept in his cell 22 hours a day. Moreover, the report said, the material-witness and search warrants issued by a federal judge were based on F.B.I. affidavits "that reflected a regrettable lack of attention to detail."

In particular, the report said, the affidavits apparently conveyed the impression that the Spanish authorities agreed with the F.B.I.'s fingerprint work - when, in fact, Spanish investigators had already told their American counterparts they had serious doubts about whether there was a match.

Over-confidence in the F.B.I.'s fingerprint system, which can electronically sift millions of prints in a very short time, and too little confidence in the skills of the Spanish authorities helped to steer the investigation in the wrong direction, the report said. So did "circular reasoning," or the temptation to find fingerprint similarities that were not really there, once several genuine similarities had been detected.

In concluding that religious prejudice had played no part in the initial, erroneous fingerprint "match," the inspector general's report noted that F.B.I. technicians did not know Mr. Mayfield's religion at first. "However, whether Mayfield's religion was a factor in the laboratory's failure to revisit its identification and discover the error in the weeks following the initial identification is a more difficult question," the inspector general said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/po...nd-terror.html





Hong Kong

Net Firms Willing To Reveal File Suspects
Jonathan Cheng

Lawyers for some of the recording industry's biggest players asked the High Court Monday to pull back the "cloak of anonymity" on illegal music file-sharers by forcing Hong Kong's four largest Internet service providers to divulge the identities of 22 alleged wrongdoers.

It was the first public hearing in a case that could determine how courts handle contentious intellectual property issues in future.

Counsel for three of the four Internet service providers, or ISPs, told the High Court they would not contest the issue and would comply should the judge order them to reveal the names.

The fourth ISP - i-Cable Webserve Ltd - is expected to fight against such an order when it presents its position in court next Monday. The three ISPs that agreed to comply are Hong Kong Broadband Network, PCCW-IMS and Hutchison Global Communications.

The legal action is aimed at uploaders who share copyrighted content through peer-to- peer file-sharing services, rather than simply those who download the files.

Martin Liao, counsel for a consortium of recording industry titans that includes local companies as well as giants like Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music, portrayed the attempt to force ISPs to divulge the identities of their subscribers as "a last resort" by an industry battered by "massive infringement" of its copyrighted material through illegal file-sharing.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a representative of Hong Kong's recording industry, claims that retail sales of music CDs in Hong Kong fell 32 percent between 2000 and 2004, from HK$926 million to HK$629 million.

Using a series of frame-by-frame computer screenshots at Monday's hearing, Liao showed presiding judge Poon Shiu-chor how easy it was for IFPI investigators to download six songs in MP3 format in about half an hour using WinMX, a popular online peer-to-peer file-sharing network that has since shut down.

Because of the way WinMX was programmed, Liao added, the IP addresses of the file- sharers - which could be used to target the uploaders' true identities - were obscured.

Liao said that only the ISPs could reveal the IP addresses and identities of the alleged offenders, calling it a "necessary first step to protect plaintiffs' rights."

He argued that, while the ISPs themselves may be innocent of any wrongdoing, they were still compelled to "cooperate in righting the wrong they inadvertently helped to facilitate" and provide "full disclosure" of their suspect subscribers.

The court order, Liao said, would be used to request the names, addresses and Hong Kong ID numbers of the alleged offenders, presumably so that charges could be brought against them.

"We are not here to pry into their identities, or to harm them," Liao said, arguing that the court order was in the public interest for the administration of justice.

Liao argued at length that the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, which is meant to protect the privacy interests of individuals, was not intended to restrict the power of the High Court in seeking the disclosure of information such as the identities of the alleged file- sharers.

"An uploaded song has only one purpose- to allow others with the same software to download the song," Liao said.

The hearing was the first open to the public in the months since the record industry consortium announced plans to seek legal recourse against 22 uploaders last November.

The case follows the world's first conviction of an uploader of copyrighted material, when a Tuen Mun magistrate sentenced a man to three months in prison for sharing three movies through BitTorrent, another peer-to-peer file-sharing software.

In that case, the plaintiffs were able to identify the uploader directly without seeking the cooperation of the ISP, since the BitTorrent software shows the file-sharers' genuine IP address.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_d...412&con_type=1





Create An e-Annoyance, Go To Jail
Declan McCullagh

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

It's illegal to annoy

A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here's the relevant language.

"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

There's an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm."

That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.

Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)

Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.

"Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"

Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.

"I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."

He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.

It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.

If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.

And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.

Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the occasion.
http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-anno...3-6022491.html





Go Ahead, Try to Stop K Street
Todd S. Purdum

IN 1872, some Republican elders, revolted by the rampant influence peddling of Ulysses S. Grant's administration, challenged him for re-election. "He has used the public service of the government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence," they complained, and "shown himself deplorably unequal to the task imposed on him by the necessities of the country."

Jack Abramoff's trading room was his Signatures restaurant, not the front of the old Willard Hotel, where favor seekers so besieged Grant that he helped popularize the label - lobbyist - that still clings to their descendants with a pejorative sting. But Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea last week to charges of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials prompted similar revulsion among some of the Grand Old Party's canniest hands.

"I think as this thing unfolds, it'll be so disgusting, and the Republicans will be under such pressure from their base, that they will have to undertake substantial reform," said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker (who himself had to pay $300,000 to settle a 1997 ethics case). "This is like Watergate."

But will things really change? After all, Grant himself won a second term, despite the failings that would eventually leave his legacy forever tainted, and his chief Republican antagonist, Horace Greeley, died defeated and insane three weeks after the election. Is corruption just a part of Washington's DNA? What else explains the grim resignation of Washington veterans who wonder when, not whether, some scandal will arise?

"The history of civilization, for starters," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, an ethics group. "This kind of problem is faced by all societies throughout all of history. It comes and goes in cycles, and becomes most prevalent when the activities are viewed as O.K. by the society where it's taking place."

For watchdogs like Mr. Wertheimer, and for many Democrats, such tolerance dates to the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990's, when new leaders like Representative Tom DeLay of Texas began a campaign to fill the capital's K Street corridor with Republican lobbyists, and made it plain that those seeking to influence legislation would have to "pay to play," in the form of political contributions and other largesse.

Mr. DeLay, who was himself indicted last year in Texas on unrelated campaign finance charges and forced to step down from his post as House majority leader, has long had close ties to Mr. Abramoff. Now Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea increases the likelihood that Mr. DeLay will lose his leadership post for good, and raises the prospect that he - and other lawmakers - may be enmeshed in new legal troubles. The sheer scale of Mr. Abramoff's misdeeds - millions of dollars in kickbacks from Indian tribes, a luxury golf outing for politicians to Scotland, misuse of a tax-exempt foundation - make this an extraordinary case.

"There are all sorts of things that have gone on of the same generic kind," said Harry C. McPherson, who came to Washington 50 years ago this month as a Senate aide to Lyndon B. Johnson and has plied his trade as a lawyer-lobbyist since leaving the White House in 1969. "But this is truly a situation where the degree changes everything. It converts something that purists about government would find unpleasant into the utterly unacceptable - into crime."

But the problem is broader than Mr. Abramoff, Mr. DeLay or even the inherent potential for abuse in one-party rule of all three branches of government. It also has to do with the astounding growth of the lobbying industry, a growth that has tracked the growth of the federal government itself. The rise of government regulation - first in the New Deal and then in the 1960's and 70's - spawned a parallel rise in the private sector's efforts to master the new system. Between the early 1970's and the mid- 1980's, the number of trade associations doubled; in the first half of the 1980's alone, the number of registered lobbyists quadrupled, according to The Washington Monthly.

A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the early 1990's, political donations from 19 major industries - including

pharmaceuticals, defense, commercial banking and accounting - were split about evenly between the two parties.

By 2003, the Republicans held a 2-to-1 advantage. Since 1998, the center found, more than 2,200 former federal employees had registered as federal lobbyists, as had nearly 275 former White House aides and nearly 250 former members of Congress. Many rules governing their conduct remain deliberately vague, and the House Ethics Committee has been paralyzed because of dysfunction and partisan disputes.

"The scandal here is not that the rules were broken; the scandal is the rules themselves," said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, who with a Republican colleague, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and Senators John McCain and Russell D. Feingold, has been a leader in pressing to overhaul campaign finance and ethics rules. "Lobbying is part of our system, but there is a set of ethical standards and rules that ought to be followed."

Together with Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Mr. Feingold, Mr. Meehan has introduced legislation that would, among other things, require lobbyists to file quarterly financial disclosures, instead of semiannual ones and to disclose just whom in the government they lobbied. Former members of Congress would also not be able to lobby their colleagues for two years, as opposed to the current one year. Members would be required to submit detailed itineraries and descriptions of expenses for privately sponsored travel.

Mr. Gingrich has offered more ideas. He would allow unlimited fund-raising in members' states or districts, but bar fund-raising within the District of Columbia, and would require that all contacts between lobbyists and elected and appointed officials be posted weekly on the Internet. And he would shrink a government that has only grown further with post Sept. 11, 2001, spending.

"There is $2.6 trillion spent in Washington, with the authority to regulate everything in your life," he said. "Guess what? People will spend unheard-of amounts of money to influence that. The underlying problems are big government and big money."

Of course, the record suggests that for every loophole any new law might close, lobbyists will find a way to open another. The ban on so-called "soft money" contributions to political parties led to the rise of new special-interest spending groups, for example. Entrenched industries - and entrenched incumbents of both parties - can be expected to resist change that would threaten the way they know how to do business.

For their part, some lobbyists hope legislators intent on reform resist painting with too broad a brush.

"A lot of what we do is an enormous educational effort, to avoid what we consider even well-meaning but wrong-headed legislation," said Joseph Tasker, senior vice president for government affairs of the Information Technology Association of America, which represents companies like I.B.M. and Microsoft, on issues including privacy, piracy and Internet security.

"Congressmen don't know things; they're not experts in technology," he said. "In the mid-1990's, we were meeting with a Congressman about high-definition TV standards and we were talking about pixels and so on, and he said, 'Fellas, look, I'm trying to stay with you here, but one of the first times I ever took a ride on an airplane was when I came to Washington to take my seat and I remember looking out the window and I thought part of the wing was falling off when we landed, because the flaps came up.' "

And, this being Washington, even the best-intentioned efforts to stick to the rules can lead to overreaching silliness.

In 2004, David McKean, a veteran Senate aide, published a critically praised book on Thomas "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran, perhaps the most successful Washington lobbyist of the 20th century. But the Senate ethics committee advised him not to disclose on the dust jacket the name of the senator he worked for, John Kerry, lest he be seen as using his position for commercial gain.

The restriction hampered his ability to promote his book. Indeed, when a Washington bookstore inadvertently identified Mr. McKean's position in an advertisement, he had to cancel an appearance there. A very small victory, one would guess, for the capital's reputation.

Todd S. Purdum, a former reporter for The New York Times, is national editor of Vanity Fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/we...dum.html?8hpib





Could Microsoft Pirate Your PC?
p2p news / p2pnet

Could Bill and the Boyz grab your computer without your permission? - asks Email Battles, going on: "Obviously. But would they? While we would like to think Redmond will always do the right thing, there's a certain blogger in China who might not share that opinion. When China told Microsoft to pull the plug on the poor wretch's blog, the company shut him down."

The observations come in an Email Battles story centering on the recent critical Microsoft WMF security debacle, and which in turn picks up on another from Ars Technica.

The "poor wretch" in question , an MSN user, made the mistake of discussing the recent Beijing newspaper strike online. Following complaints from Communist China, Bill and the Boyz scuppered him.

Meanwhile, "In the midst of a debate at Ars Technica over Microsoft's personal-best performance in handling the WMF exploit, a few quiet voices popped up," observes Email Battles, referring to a post "from Zakharov" which asked:

"Is it me or was that patch distributed with some kind of hidden higher priority? I normally leave windows auto-update set to notify me when patches are downloaded for manual installation but the WMF patch took matters into its own hands and installed itself with a reboot."

And, "According to Microsoft's documentation for Automatic Update, that shouldn't happen to an Administrative user: 'If you are an administrator for your computer, you can delay the restart; otherwise, Windows warns you and then restarts your computer for you. Make sure you save your work and remind other users to save their work, especially before scheduled installation times'."

An Email Battles tech concurred with Zakharov, says the story, noticing, "one of our XP laptops that was set to simply download updates had restarted... And had the patch." And astrashe, another Ars Technica member, agreed, saying, "I noticed the same thing. I got a message saying the patch had been installed, and that my machine had rebooted."

"You may well ask, 'What's the problem? You got protected, didn't you'?" - says Email Battles, answering, "Quite true. However, it's one thing for your neighbor to knock on your door, then wait for an invitation to enter. It is quite another for your neighbor to barge in and start moving furniture while you're entertaining guest at your pool party. And it's especially troublesome when your neighbor walks in uninvited, using the keys you trusted him to use only when authorized.

"We were frankly astounded that Microsoft might be so bold. Back at Ars Technica, mmondok reported: 'It's funny that you guys should mention the reboot as I think it may have also happened to two of my PCs as well. I never log out or turn off my computer, but both were logged out and I had the "your PC has been updated" blob show up when I logged back into the machines. I just figured it was a strange coincidence. I can't verify that it was the updates that did it, but it sure sounds like it'."

The patch, "definitely installed itself on my work PC even though I did not allow it to install when I shut down on Friday," says a 2pnet reader. "Monday morning when I started up, I got the notice saying that my PC had been updated and had required a restart, none of which I had control over."

Back to the question in our intro, "Can Microsoft take over your computer without your permission? Obviously. But would they?"

Obviously.
http://p2pnet.net/story/7556





Beating Over-the-Air, But Not Quite Perfect
Frank Ahrens

Satellite radio in a nutshell: I spent one night earlier this summer driving around and listening to the Washington Nationals close out an exciting win. Where I was driving around, however, was Charleston, W.Va., well outside the broadcast range of the Nationals' Z104/ WFED radio network. It was not, however, out of range of XM Satellite Radio, which this season began carrying every game of all 30 Major League Baseball teams and beaming them across North America.

It was terrific to be able to keep up with the team from afar; every win sounded like the World Series on the radio, thanks to the vocal fans.

So, as the final out of this particular game was recorded, the Nats' announcer enthused, "Just listen to that crowd!" It was a cruel taunt. At that precise moment, I drove into one of a handful of dead spots around Charleston where XM service drops out for several seconds.

Hence, the often-simultaneous joy and frustration of satellite radio.

Now, with nearly 6 million subscribers between them, XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. have established a foothold as a competitively priced entertainment option for auto, home and mobile use. Like the cell phone, however, satellite radio is an infant technology compared with its predecessor, which has had more than a century to perfect its delivery system. And, like an infant, it still spits up from time to time.

On the face, Sirius and XM are comparable services: Both have more than 60 channels of commercial-free music covering a broad spectrum of niches, from old-school country to today's hits, from the most experimental jazz to the spaciest New Age, from the raunchiest hip-hop to the kid-friendliest Radio Disney.

Each has channels devoted to music from the decades of the '40s to the '90s; each has bluegrass and standards channels, each has several hip-hop and classical channels and so on. XM has a fun unsigned bands channel that Sirius does not have; Sirius has a groovy, trip-hoppy electronica channel that has no XM equivalent.

Both also have more than 50 channels of news, talk and entertainment and share many of the same third-party providers: Fox News Channel, the BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC and CNN.

And both cost a fair amount of money over time: The receivers for each start at $50 (in some cases, after a mail-in rebate), and each service runs $12.95 a month before any family-plan or pay-in-advance discounts.

But over the course of their short life spans, each service has begun to develop a personality and a direction.

Music fans will find a deeper and better-defined selection of stations on XM.

Sports and talk fans, however, will gravitate toward Sirius, which broadcasts NFL and NBA games. Sirius also has swiped NASCAR from XM, starting in 2007, and will resume NHL games, assuming anyone cares. XM cannot rival this lineup. For live action, it offers only baseball, the PGA Tour, three college conferences and IndyCar racing. Through its carriage of ESPN, it also broadcasts the NBA playoffs but not the regular season.

Of course, Sirius also can claim the sui generis Howard Stern, who probably will be good for 1 million new subscribers on his own after he joins Sirius in January.

By way of disclosure, I have had XM in two successive vehicles since December 2001. Before this comparison, my exposure to Sirius was limited at best, confined largely to rental cars that featured the service. Sirius sent me a loaner boom box in early June and I spent a large part of the month -- consecutive days and otherwise, dropping in at various times of days and late nights, on weekends and weekdays, well over 100 hours -- sampling the service.

In comparing XM and Sirius, I judged two factors: programming and reception.

With the benefit of a year's head start, XM has the better music stations. Each channel has what is known in the business as "stationality": a personality that makes it instantly clear to listeners which channel they are listening to. XM achieves this with a tight but deep selection of music for each channel, custom jingles featuring each station's name and, on a few channels, and sound effects that create radio's "theater of the mind." "Hank's Place," XM's classic country station, sounds like you've stepped into a honky-tonk, right down to the coin dropping into the Rock-Ola.

The allure of satellite radio is its plethora of narrowly formatted stations with little overlap between them. When you want classic alternative such as the Clash, the Smiths and Joy Division, you go to XM channel 44, which is called "Fred." One rarely if ever hears those artists on other XM channels.

By contrast, many of Sirius's channels sound like they're dipping into the same playlist. Flipping back and forth for several hours among Sirius channels "Starlite," "Sirius Love," "Movin' Easy" and "The Bridge" proved one channel indistinguishable from the others. Same with the four heavy-metal channels. If there are subtle distinctions, they evaded me.

While listening to Sirius in a rental car in May, I heard two Sirius channels commit what is, for me, an unforgivable sin for satellite radio: playing the same song at the same time. (Worse still: It was America's "Sister Golden Hair.") This I can get from hoary FM.

Sirius does have some outstanding personalities. I don't know from show tunes but found myself listening to "Broadway's Best" one night for two hours because of the hilarious host, Seth Rudetsky, a Broadway pianist and winner of a Funniest Gay Male contest. Sirius's celebrity deejays include Eminem, who helped program a hip-hop channel, and superstar skateboarder Tony Hawk. (More dudes per hour than any other radio show, guaranteed.) XM counters with Tom Petty and Snoop Dogg.

Fairly, it should be noted that I listened to Sirius at its weakest time of the year in terms of its sports programming. A huge part of Sirius's allure is its carriage of the NFL, NBA and NHL, none of which was currently playing. Sirius in November to January -- when all three leagues are in season -- must be nirvana for sports fans.

As for service, each relies on a different set of satellites. Sirius's three spacecraft ride a set of looping orbits that bring one at a time across the United States, while XM's two spacecraft sit in a more distant orbit that keeps them in fixed spots over the country.

Here's the problem: Satellite signals, unlike sturdier AM and FM signals, travel like sunlight and can't pass through obstructions such as buildings or dense foliage.

Sirius says the changing paths of its satellites minimize the areas shadowed by any ground-bound obstacles. XM compensates for its dead zones with hundreds of land- based repeaters that pick up the satellite signals and beam them around larger cities.

In places such as Washington, XM service is nearly flawless. In smaller cities such as Charleston, which has fewer repeaters, you get dropouts when driving along a southern ridgeline and between buildings downtown. Sirius's service in those spots is better but still has hiccups. Also, because Sirius's satellites move, I had to relocate the Sirius antenna from one window to another to find the signal over several hours of listening one afternoon.

As AM and FM convert to digital broadcasts and add additional channels to their signals, over-the-air radio probably will offer new competition for satellite. Digital radio will also allow AM and FM to go beyond their current limited ability to broadcast such text info as a station's call letters or the title and artist of the current track. (XM's baseball channels, for example, not only display the score but the situation -- "BOT 8TH 1 OUT" for bottom of the eighth inning and one out -- to bring listeners instantly up to date when they tune in.)

But local terrestrial radio stations will never be able to duplicate the wide variety of music, sports and talk choices and national reach of XM and Sirius, making both satellite radio services, even with the occasional signal glitches and sometimes-inconsistent quality of programming, far superior to their over-the-air cousins.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2700203_2.html





Satellite Radio Leaves the Car to Go Home and on Walks
Eric A. Taub

When Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio first introduced their subscription audio services, both companies expected success to come primarily from the automobile market. As most radio listening is done in the car, the two companies worked to sew up exclusive licensing deals with major car manufacturers.

But in the four years since satellite radio began, new technologies are making additional demands on listeners' time and dollars.

Today, satellite radio is competing not just with broadcast radio in the car, but also with MP3 players, which can hold thousands of songs and can be hooked up to car stereo systems. And unlike bulky satellite radio receivers, pocket-size MP3 players can be carried everywhere and are useful in the gym.

To compete with portable music devices, both XM and Sirius have had to start offering their programming over a range of devices and services. Both companies charge $12.95 a month for their programming, and discounted multiyear contracts are available.

In addition to the service in cars, consumers can now hear Sirius channels on the Dish Network and on Sprint cellphones. XM can be heard by AOL subscribers, on AirTran and JetBlue flights and on DirecTV.

"We want to make our service available over as many products as possible," said Robert Law, senior vice president of Sirius's consumer electronics division.

For now, standard radios and MP3 players still have the edge on easy music delivery. Broadcast radios are cheap and are incorporated into virtually every home stereo system, while satellite radio tuners are mostly stand-alone devices. And satellite signals cannot be received without a special antenna.

To get live radio, most portable satellite receivers on the market need to be docked (they can, however, play recorded programs on the go). Some have internal antennas for receiving live broadcasts on the go, but reception tends to be spotty. Sirius and XM are trying to address these limitations with several new devices introduced at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The latest receivers have MP3 players and advanced antennas that extend the areas where satellite programming can be easily heard. But even the newest devices do not allow reliable on-the-go reception inside buildings because, as with satellite TV, the antennas work best outside.

Satellite Radio Everywhere

The first generation of satellite tuners came with docks that allowed users to connect the tuner to a home stereo system. But customers who did not want to take their receivers in and out of the car had to buy a separate home unit and pay two subscription fees.

Now both Sirius and XM have introduced small modules that can be attached to a new generation of satellite-ready home receivers.

The new SiriusConnect Home, a 4-inch-by-3-inch device, connects with a cable to a satellite-ready receiver and activates the service.

This summer, RCA will sell three audio systems under the General Electric and RCA names, with prices ranging from $119 to $299. The RS2100 RCA Bookshelf Audio System with SiriusConnect, which costs $299, can get Sirius channels, play CD's and record MP3 tracks, FM radio and Sirius audio onto a portable MP3 player, which is included with the system.

One of XM's newest receivers, the pocket-size neXus from Samsung, ($200 and $250) uses XM's new $30 Passport cartridge, which can be plugged into any compatible device to receive XM programming. This feature, said Chance Patterson, XM's vice president for corporate affairs, "lets you avoid having to sign up for multiple subscriptions."

Bells and Whistles

The first satellite radios were simple, clunky affairs - large units with single-line text displays that could barely be seen in bright light.

Sirius's new flagship model, the recently introduced S50 ($330, before a $50 rebate), which is less than 2 inches by 4 inches in size, includes a bright color screen that shows the channel, while a female voice announces each channel's name.

With two docking stations, the S50 can be used in the car or in the house. As with a TiVo digital video recorder, the unit buffers the previous 30 minutes of programming, so listeners can pause live shows. Programs can also be scheduled to be recorded. (The receiver will turn on automatically at the preset time.)

The S50 records up to 50 hours of MP3 tracks and satellite broadcasts, and can be detached from its cradle for use while walking or in the gym. It also automatically records music based on listening patterns. But it cannot receive live satellite radio when out of its cradle.

"Studies show that portable audio units are usually used not with live, but with recorded content," Mr. Law of Sirius said.

Live satellite feeds often break up when an external antenna is not used. The company says it plans to introduce new devices by June with improved antenna technology to receive live transmissions.

XM says it has already solved the live reception problem.

Two new XM receivers, the Samsung Helix XM2go and the Pioneer Inno, identical devices that will sell for $400 when they go on the market in March, will be able to receive live XM programming on the go. Both have built-in antennas and can record up to 50 hours of radio programs or MP3 files downloaded from a PC. Any song can be bookmarked, or tagged. When the receiver is attached to its cradle and connected to a PC, it can download songs from the XM+ Napster online service.

To further improve reception quality, an optional headset with a separate antenna will also be available in the coming months.

Two less expensive models from Samsung do not include the on-the-go feature. The $200 and $250 neXus models can record either 25 or 50 hours of programming, but have to be attached to the home or car dock to receive live signals.

Receivers for the Novice

For consumers trying out satellite radio, Sirius and XM offer a range of inexpensive receivers, including some pocket-size devices.

The Sirius One radio, priced at $50, includes a one-line display and can transmit its signal through any of 100 FM channels. A thin unit, it can be hung on the sun visor or windshield, or placed on a car's dashboard. Up to 30 stations can be stored as presets.

The XM Roady XT, $80 from Delphi (now available with a $30 rebate), is the company's smallest plug-and-play unit, measuring roughly 2 inches by 4 inches. It can transmit a signal through any of 100 FM frequencies, and can display both sports scores and stock prices on its two-line display. An optional $100 pack, which will be available from Belkin by March, will include a battery and headphones with a built-in antenna. The pack will allow the Roady XT to be used as a portable unit.

XM's original on-the-go unit, the $225 Delphi XM MyFi (available with a $50 rebate), can be used in most outdoor locations, thanks to its built-in antenna, but reception can be uneven. The unit can also record up to five hours of programming for later listening. To improve on-the-go signal reception for this and other older XM2go receivers, users can purchase a $25 Belkin headset that includes a built-in antenna.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/te.../12basics.html





As His Sirius Show Begins, Radio Ponders the Stern Effect
Eric A. Taub

When Howard Stern begins his first broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio this morning, he may be playing to a diminished audience, but his impact on the future of satellite radio has already been substantial.

The next question is whether Mr. Stern's extraordinary compensation will have any effect on the way on-air talent is paid.

Last week, Sirius announced that it had granted Mr. Stern and his manager more than 34 million shares of common stock, currently worth about $225 million, because certain subscriber levels had been reached. That is on top of the $500 million that Sirius had already agreed to pay Mr. Stern for his salary and production costs. Mr. Stern now holds more shares than any other single investor, according to David J. Frear, Sirius's executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Whether or not Mr. Stern's show, which begins at 6 a.m., is a success, his decision to jump from free broadcast to subscription radio has bestowed legitimacy to a medium that many had regarded with skepticism. Sirius's number of subscribers has jumped from 660,000 at the time Mr. Stern's deal was announced in October 2004, to 3.3 million today.

"Clearly a lot of that is attributable to Howard Stern," said Jim Collins, a vice president at Sirius. As a result of its growth, the company's initial $500 million investment in Mr. Stern will be covered by the subscriber increase, Mr. Collins said. Still, XM Satellite Radio remains the leader in the industry. While Sirius added more listeners in the final quarter of 2005, XM ended the year with more than six million subscribers.

The decision by Mr. Stern to move to satellite radio may also encourage other talent to migrate to the fledgling medium.

"Actors never wanted to be on cable until some of them started to win awards," said Agnes Lukasewych, a vice president at MPG, a media planning company.

XM previously announced that both Bob Dylan and the hosts of ABC's "Good Morning America" would create shows for the company. Sirius has plans for programming from Martha Stewart and Bill Bradley.

With broadcast radio losing the large audiences attracted by Mr. Stern, Ms. Lukasewych says she expects that advertisers will need to buy more spots to reach the same number of listeners. "Terrestrial radio has to step up to the plate" and work to attract new talent, she said.

The problem will deepen over the next several years, as MP3 players and new Internet-based music ventures, such as Motorola's iRadio service, strive to grab consumers' attention.

"XM and Sirius got to their current subscriber levels fairly easily, but at what point do they reach some level of saturation due to increased competition?" said Danielle Levitas, a senior analyst with IDC. "There is value in having some sort of cachet with unique programming."

While Mr. Stern's agreement with Sirius helped put the company on the map, performers giving a second thought to satellite radio should not anticipate the lucrative arrangement that Mr. Stern was able to negotiate.

"There isn't anybody else in Howard's class. If Sirius had not done something they would have been totally in the dust," said Paul Kagan, chairman of PK Worldmedia, a Carmel, Calif., research firm. "You don't often see a network mortgaging itself to bring in a star."

XM said it did not have plans to mix up its programming because of Mr. Stern's new show.

"Our content has not changed," said Eric Logan, XM's executive vice president of programming. "We have a platform targeted at mainstream America. There are more and more people who find Howard Stern repulsive and offensive and will go away from anywhere he is."

Nor does XM expect Mr. Stern's salary to have much of an impact on the broader industry. Mr. Logan noted that a number of performers had asked to do shows without compensation, simply to be on XM. Mr. Stern's salary "is so far out of whack that it does not do anything to the economics of the business," Mr. Logan said.

Sirius has given Mr. Stern two channels to program. His four-hour show airs at 6 a.m. on both coasts, live in the East and tape-delayed in the West. In addition to the live show, programming will include Howard 100 News, a news operation "reporting on the world of Howard."

"Howard will be doing a show that he hasn't done for 15 years, because he's been held back" by the Federal Communications Commission, said Patrick Reilly, senior vice president of communications for Sirius. "It's not about swearing, it's about being candid, doing creative performance work for radio."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/bu...tern.html?8dpc





Hands-On with the Sony Reader

Sony’s new Reader is fantastic and we want one immediately. The price point is going to be painfully high, with guesstimates in between $300 and $400, but it’s everything the Librié—Sony’s first-generation, Japan-only ePaper-based eBook reader (whew)—should have been.

Not only is the display amazing (and amazingly readable), but Sony promised us that there would be no restriction on moving over your own documents to the Reader— the DRM schmutz has been greatly decreased. Not only will the Reader support PDF files natively, but Sony’s PC syncing software will automatically convert .doc files with most formatting intact. eBooks will be an optional purchase through Sony’s Connect service.

But here’s the hottest part: RSS support with images. The digital morning paper is finally about to happen.

(Please note, we think the Sony Reader is exciting as all get out, but we’re mostly just excited about a decent consumer ePaper/eInk product in general. Other units are on the way soon from other manufacturers and we’re hyped about those, as well.)

Enjoy another, larger picture of the unit displaying text after the jump.
http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/ces/li...der-146864.php





U.S. Office Joins an Effort to Improve Software Patents
John Markoff

The United States Patent and Trademark Office plans to announce today that it will cooperate with open-source software developers on three initiatives that it says will improve the quality of software patents.

The patent office has come under increasing pressure in recent years from critics who contend that it issues patents without adequate investigation of earlier inventions. As a result, conflicts over published patents have loosed an avalanche of intellectual property litigation.

At a meeting last month with companies and organizations that support open-source software (software that can be distributed and modified freely), including I.B.M., Red Hat, Novell and some universities, officials of the patent office discussed how to give patent examiners access to better information and other ways to issue higher- quality patents.

Two of the initiatives would rely on recently developed Internet technologies. An open patent review program would set up a system on the patent office Web site where visitors could submit search criteria and subscribe to electronic alerts about patent applications in specific areas.

The third initiative is focused on the creation of a patent quality index that would serve as a tool for patent applicants to use in writing their applications. It is based on work done by R. Polk Wagner, an intellectual property expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This is a great example of how the patent office can reach out to the community and how they can help us where we have difficulty getting prior art," said John J. Doll, the commissioner for patents.

The patent office has held similar discussions with other technology industries including biotechnology, nanotechnology and semiconductors, he said.

The open-source project, being led by I.B.M., aims to build an automated system for creating a series of categories to organize software written by open-source programmers. The system would then be made available to help patent examiners search for earlier examples in patent applications.

Mr. Doll said that Google had participated in the discussions and it was possible that its search technology would be used in the project.

Jim Stalling, vice president for intellectual property and standards at I.B.M., said, "We think that this initiative will lead to greater certainty in the patent system." He added that any improvement in the general quality of patents would lower the costs of defending patents, and that money could again be focused on financing research and development.

One frequent critic of the patent system, Gregory Aharonian, publisher of The Internet Patent News Service, said it was unlikely that the new initiatives would have a significant impact, because the patent office was not able to deal efficiently with the information it already had.

"If the patent office can't figure out how to use the resources they already have," he said, "what is the point?"

Diane Peters, general counsel for the Open Source Development Laboratories, a corporate consortium backed by Linux supporters, said that if the initiatives were successful it might lead the patent office to issue fewer but higher-quality patents.

Separately, the patent office plans to announce today that I.B.M. once again topped the list of private-sector patent recipients in 2005. The company received 2,941 patents last year, compared with 3,248 patents in 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/te...gy/10blue.html





A Night to See the Stars Actually Wearing Clothes
Matt Richtel

The actress known as Tyla Wynn took to the stage late Saturday night to accept an X-rated-film award, the pornography version of an Oscar. The category was excellence in a multiperson sex scene.

Although thousands of people have watched Ms. Wynn perform intimate acts, she admitted to extreme nervousness when accepting her trophy, an opaque rectangle with the image of a man and woman intertwined.

"Speaking in front of people is hard," Ms. Wynn said, cradling her award, called the AVN.

The 23rd AVN awards presentation here was a campy mix of Hollywood cliché and X-rated clips watched with 3,000 of your closest friends and industry insiders. The acceptance speeches tended to be brief, befitting a film industry with little emphasis on dialogue.

The program highlighted that pornography is, at least in a sense, at a crossroads. The sex-film industry shows signs of gaining some mainstream acceptance - spurred in part by its leading diva and business success, Jenna Jameson - and it is reporting record sales. According to AVN Publications, which organizes the awards, it generated $4.3 billion in sales and rentals last year. That amounted to about half the size of Hollywood's box-office receipts of nearly $9 billion last year.

At the same time, prospects for the industry have been tempered by fears that the Justice Department is poised to add to a handful of obscenity prosecutions recently brought against makers of hardcore films.

Saturday night, though, was an unapologetic, hearty celebration, with a flashbulb-drenched red carpet entrance and awards presented in 104 categories, including best performances in a wide range of explicit acts and sexual positions. The more conventional were for best director, supporting actor and actress, screenplay and the most anticipated award of the evening: best feature.

That went to "Pirates," a relatively high-budget story of a group of ragtag sailors who go searching for a crew of evil pirates who have a plan for world domination. Also, many of the characters in the movie have sex with one another.

Evan Stone, the stage name of the man who won the award for best actor as the good ship's captain, said a crucial component of the movie's success was its authenticity. A consultant instructed the cast on proper ship etiquette, he said, like never letting the captain steer the vessel, a job that belongs to the first mate.

"Take the sex out of this movie, and it's Walt Disney," said Mr. Stone, who declined to give his real name.

The precise criteria for winning an AVN are not, well, explicit. About 60 reviewers judge some 6,000 films submitted throughout the year. Paul Fishbein, the president of AVN Publications, said you know a good acting and sex scene when you see one.

Still, certain things rule out a nomination. One is "if you can still hear the director's voice," Mr. Fishbein said. Another no-no is "if it's clear the cameraman is not paying attention."

The industry seems to have a sense of humor about itself, but there is an awareness that many Americans disapprove of their trade. Savanna Samson, who won an award for best actress, said in her acceptance speech that "most of my family is pretty ashamed of what I do."

Universally, the participants defend their right to make the films, but even within the sex-entertainment industry, opinions differ about what is tasteful.

"The bikini models hate the topless dancers, the topless dancers hate the nude dancers, the nude dancers hate the adult-film actors," said Stormy Daniels, 26, who won an award for best supporting actress. Ms. Daniels, who said she wished people would stop judging one another, does have her own pet peeve: tired plots.

"There's nothing worse then when the pizza boy rings the doorbell, the girl says she doesn't have a tip, and then they get it on," she said. Ms. Daniels also won an award for best screenplay for a parody, "Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre," which presumably had a storyline more in keeping with her tastes.

When the night began, starlets paraded past more than a hundred photographers. The divas said they had agonized over what to wear. Tanya Mercado, 31, whose stage name is Gina Lynn, wore a strapless black gown from Nordstrom, bought after she had rejected two others as not fitting quite snugly enough.

Not everyone makes a big deal about the awards. Even Ms. Wynn, a winner, said in an interview the day before the ceremony that she had trouble remembering one of her sex scenes that was nominated.

"What's the movie called?" she asked, trying to distill just one title from the 150 movies that she said she performed in last year. A few moments later, it came to her - "Too Hot to Handle" - whose plot she described as two women who wear the same outfits and then have sex.

Unlike "Pirates," which has a high production value and is meant to appeal to both women and men, Ms. Wynn's film is in many ways more characteristic. More than 90 percent of the movies are called "gonzo," meaning they have little or no plot.

Steven Hirsch, chief executive of Vivid Entertainment, which made the award-winning "Devil in Miss Jones," said the awards could help market films to distributors and really bolstered sales.

Not all fans pay attention to awards, though. Ian Thomas, 34, who sells real estate in Las Vegas, said before the ceremony that he picked pornographic films based on his favorite female performers.

"If I want acting, I'll go to a mafia movie," Mr. Thomas said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/na... tner=homepage





Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'
Craig Smith

BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said.

Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.

Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/in...07hoffman.html





America Online Buys Developer of Video Search Service
Saul Hansell

Furthering its efforts to focus on Internet video, America Online said yesterday that it had acquired Truveo, a private Silicon Valley company that runs a search engine for video clips. AOL did not disclose the value of the purchase, but an executive briefed on the transaction said the price was around $50 million.

Truveo will be integrated into AOL's existing video search, which is based on technology from Singingfish, a company AOL acquired in 2003.

Truveo's index of 1.8 million video clips will be added to AOL's existing 2.5 million clips. There is little overlap between the two, said Kevin Conroy, an executive vice president in the media networks unit of AOL, which is part of Time Warner.

Building a search engine for video has proved to be much more difficult than for Web pages. It is often hard for a search engine to determine the content of a given clip. And many clips are hard to find because the Web sites that show them require users to run special video players that typically pop up in browser windows.

Truveo has found an automated way to run these video players and create an index of the video clips that they contain. It specializes in updating its index from mainstream publishers, making it particularly useful for finding current news clips.

Other video search sites, like those from Yahoo and AOL's Singingfish, have tried to solve this problem by asking sites that publish videos to send them regular feeds, with links and information about clips on their sites.

Tim Tuttle, the chief executive of Truveo, said these feeds often do not include all the videos and are updated only daily or weekly.

"We can control how frequently we crawl the Web, and if there are breaking news stories we can get them," he said.

Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an online news site, said AOL needed to improve its video search technology. "I have not been superimpressed with Singingfish," he said. "This deal is declaring that Singingfish is not as good as it could be."

The leading Web search engine, Google, has taken a completely different approach to video. Rather than trying to find video on other sites, it is asking publishers to upload video to be played from Google's site. Last week, Google announced that in addition to this free service, it would also allow producers to charge fees for their videos.

That service was introduced late Monday night, with a range of paid offerings including current shows like "C.S.I.," N.B.A. basketball games and reruns of "The Brady Bunch" and "The Twilight Zone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/te.../11online.html





A Million to One

Chances Are Imitators Can't Match This Student's By-the-Pixel Web Sales Success
Don Oldenburg

Look what Alex Tew did, and you get one of those "Why didn't I think of that?" flashes. It's so simple, so cheap, so mind-bogglingly lucrative that it took the 21-year-old student from small-town Wiltshire, England, not even five months to go from broke to millionaire.

Worried about paying his college tuition last August, Tew chanced upon one of those rare original money- making ideas. How about creating an Internet Web page out of 1 million blank pixels? And then selling those pinhead-size digital picture elements that make up a computer screen for a dollar apiece, or $100 per 10-by- 10-pixel block, to advertisers who turn them into colorful tiny billboards and micro logos linked to their own Web sites?

And why not call this new marketing monstrosity "The Million Dollar Homepage" -- since Tew stood to make a million bucks?

At exactly 1:42:28 p.m. EST today, Tew can post a "sold out" sign on the Million Dollar Homepage. (You can see it at http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ . ) The spiky-haired Brit put the last thousand pixels up for auction on eBay 10 days ago with a $1 starting bid for the lot. With 24 hours to go, yesterday's bidding reached $152,300, putting him over the million-dollar mark.

"I'm half-expecting a last-minute flurry of bids. I think it is going to go higher," says Tew, whose initial investment to set up the pixel page was less than $100. "I never imagined things would get to the level that they have."

Not sure initially that a single pixel would sell, Tew felt the idea had potential, so he aimed high. "I asked myself the question, 'How could I become a millionaire?' Twenty minutes later I had the answer," he says. In the beginning, he reasoned, even 1 or 2 percent of a million dollars wouldn't be bad.

The phenomenon he created has been hailed by some as a genre-changing concept in online marketing -- otherwise an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop-ups. Others say it's a brilliant, one-time marketing aberration that will never be replicated.

Whatever it is, the Million Dollar Homepage isn't a pretty site -- even as it nears completion and begins a guaranteed minimum five-year lifespan. Tew calls this head- cocking creation "a big collage of different colored ads." It looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can't not look at. Think "Where's Waldo?," only more cluttered and without a Waldo. It's like getting every pop-up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It's the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower.

But its conceptual beauty is that it's not designed at all. How the pieces fit together is totally random. Buyers create little ads and choose open ad space on a 10,000- block grid. It's more than 2,000 advertisements, their dimensions ranging from postage-stamp size to a Tart N' Tiny candy (sorry, we couldn't think of anything else small enough to compare!), displaying words normally red-flagged by spam filters -- EZ Money! Hair loss? Poker! Loans! Get Girls! Freebies! Cancer Cure! Casino!

Some of the ads are illustrations or photos -- images of bikini babes, cartoons, Che Guevara, the British flag, a marijuana leaf, a bull's-eye, the dollar sign. When you drag the cursor over any one of them, a small read-out appears identifying the advertiser -- dating services, online poker, loan companies, bookies, bloggers, ring tone sellers, snoring remedies.

Within the first month the site was getting 200,000 unique visitors daily, and more than 3.2 million in the past two weeks, Tew says. "The more people talked about the site, the more money I made," says Tew. "And the more money I made, the more people talked about the site. It's a self-perpetuating idea."

The idea has inspired a bad case of pixel envy online. More than 1,000 copycat homepages have cropped up hoping to duplicate his success -- from the Zero Dollar Homepage, which gives pixel blocks away and tries to make money from banner ads, to "The Most Expensive Pixels on the Internet" that sells space for $1,000 per pixel.

Twists and oddities also abound: The Million Pixel Gallery tries to sell art and advertising from galleries and museums, the Cover Up Osama Bin Laden site sells pixel blocks to obliterate Osama's face from the screen, and the Million Booby Homepage, well, appears to still be in the training-bra stage of development.

Few if any of the me-Tew'ers are likely to make a million dollars or even come close. Many remain barren sites without a single ad. One of the first was the Million Dollar Web Page created by Anthony Van Noordwyk, an Omaha Internet techie who launched a couple weeks after marveling at Tew's homepage. But while his unique visitors' count is up from four the first day to 2,115 Monday, he has sold just 60 ads.

"Nobody is anywhere close to being as successful as Alex's original," says Van Noordwyk, 35, who counts his sales so far in the tens of thousands. "Now that Alex's Web page is full, maybe some of the more popular pixel ad sites will catch on a bit. I am not holding my breath but I am crossing my fingers."

While a few pixel pages are dedicated to the Internet's biggest money-making venture, most copycat pages draw the line on pornography. "We had to turn them away because other advertisers wouldn't advertise," says Josh Moser, co-creator of the Million Quarter Webpage, which sells pixel blocks for 25 cents per pixel.

"This is probably going to be a fad," says Moser, 31, a Detroit Web site developer whose site went live a month after Tew's and now has 400 advertisers.

Including sales on their new site, PixelGiveaway.com, he and partner Jeremy Mlynarek, 29, have sold more than $85,000 in ads, Moser says.

Gareth "Gaz" Thomas, a 24-year-old biotechnology doctorate student from North Wales, United Kingdom, uses sex appeal to sell one-penny pixels on his SexyPixelHomepage.com site where ads gradually are blocking out a side view of a naked female torso. "How could an idea that was so unique and different spawn so many dull copycats?" says Thomas, who three months ago didn't know the first thing about creating a Web site, but has sold nearly 100 ads. "I made mine sexy so it would grab attention and it works!"

While Tew thinks the copycats are "quite funny, really," he doesn't like the "rip-off sites" that borrow heavily from his. "I like the ones that put a twist on it and improve the idea," he says, mentioning a favorite, TrumpingAlex.com, which features a photo of Tew with a Donald Trump hairstyle superimposed on his head. "But the one thing that everybody seems to be missing is that it's one of those crazy ideas that only works once. I was first to market and therefore I got 99 percent of the attention. Good luck to the imitators."

If his pixel page has any lasting value in online marketing, Tew believes it's that "very small ads have some sort of future."

And his future? He's putting his business management studies on hold. He's had job offers, business opportunities and a few new ideas he wants to explore. Not to mention a million dollars.

"The lesson is that consumers are willing to go to good ideas, things that are unique, things that are novel," says Tew. "Rather than copy each other, spend time thinking up new things. . . . Creativity works."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001703.html





Stricter Nanotechnology Laws Are Urged

Report warns of risk to public
Rick Weiss

An independent report being released this morning concludes that current U.S. laws and regulations cannot adequately protect the public against the risks of nanotechnology -- the rapidly growing science of making invisibly small particles and molecular devices.

Unless existing laws are modified or a new one is crafted, the report warns, the immense promise of the field - - predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2015 -- may be short-circuited by either a disaster or an economically damaging crisis of public confidence.

"There is a chance to still do this right and learn from previous mistakes," said study author J. Clarence Davies, an environmental policy analyst who played major roles in the Johnson, Nixon and first Bush administrations and is now with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank on environmental and energy issues.

"We know from what happened with agricultural biotechnology and nuclear power that if you don't have public support, or at least public tolerance, a field's potential is not going to be realized. For nanotechnology, I don't think existing systems or laws can serve this purpose," said Davies, who researched and wrote the report for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a research and policy arm of the Smithsonian Institution.

Several government officials and industry representatives disputed the findings yesterday. Among them was E. Clayton Teague, director of the National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office, which oversees the federal government's approximately $1 billion annual investment in nanotechnology.

"We still have so much to learn," he said. "You get one paper that says it's extremely toxic and harmful, and another that says it's not only not toxic but it's beneficial. All the agencies we talk with . . . have generally said to us that with the information that's currently available, their regulatory authorities should be adequate."

Nanotechnology involves manipulating atoms to make things that are smaller than one one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. At that size, even conventional materials exhibit unconventional physical and chemical properties, making them valuable for a wide variety of products. Already, nanomaterials are being used in computers, cosmetics, stain-resistant fabrics, sports equipment, paints and medical diagnostic tests. Scientists also hope to use nanomaterials to help clean up polluted sites.

But nanoparticles' peculiar characteristics are potentially hazardous. Animal studies have shown that at least some can cause deadly airway blockages or can migrate from nasal passages into the brain and other organs, where they may cause metabolic problems. Other studies suggest they can trigger environmental damage that would be difficult to reverse once the minuscule particles disperse into soil and water.

The report outlines the range of laws and regulations in place to protect people and the environment from such risks, and finds each one wanting when it comes to nanotechnology.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), for example, requires manufacturers to tell the Environmental Protection Agency about new chemicals they want to market and gives the agency the authority to restrict those that pose undue risks.

But under TSCA's "low volume" clause, chemicals made in quantities of 11 tons or less are largely exempt. That may be reasonable for conventional chemicals, the report states. But given the extreme chemical reactivity of nanomaterials -- the very trait that makes them so special -- the mere fact that relatively small quantities are being made is hardly an assurance of safety, it concludes.

Moreover, because most nanomaterials are ordinary chemicals that differ only in their particle size, makers have been avoiding TSCA restrictions by classifying their products as conventional chemicals, even though their tiny size is precisely what makes them different. The EPA, which favors a "voluntary" regulatory regimen for nanotechnology, has not yet decided how to deal with that loophole.

Other laws are weak because they do not require safety studies before products are marketed, Davies said. The Federal Hazardous Substances Act and the provisions of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that deal with cosmetics -- many of which are made with nano-ingredients -- allow the government to respond only after it is clear that people are being harmed.

Moreover, the report notes, the agencies in charge of implementing the nation's protective laws are understaffed. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has 25 percent fewer employees than it did in 1980, even though it must oversee more workplaces than ever -- including nanotech factories with their uncertain risks -- Davies said. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which administers the Hazardous Substances Act, today employs 446 people, less than half the number there in 1980.

The Food and Drug Administration yesterday reiterated that existing regulations are "probably adequate for most nanotechnology products."

"We are continuing to learn about the important scientific developments in this area and will evaluate and learn about the benefits this new technology will yield," the agency said in a statement.

David Rejeski, who leads the Woodrow Wilson Center's nanoscience program, warned that nanoscale materials are increasingly being enhanced with biologically active coatings that will only increase their health and environmental risks. He said it would help if companies were required to tell regulators more about what they are up to.

"The behaviors of these substances are going to get very complicated," Rejeski said. "But there hasn't been a big discussion yet. We're data-starved."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001520.html





First Tests: FX-60 Powers Superfast PCs

AMD's latest chip breaks records, while Intel's new Extreme Edition shows more modest gains.
Kirk Steers

AMD today launched its top-of-the-line Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU, andPC World's exclusive tests show the pricey new processor is indeed dominant. The processor powered a pair of our test PCs to the best benchmark scores we've ever seen and outpaced a reference system using Intel's latest Extreme Edition processor.

How much faster is the FX-60? Our fastest test machine notched a WorldBench 5 score about 8 percent higher than our previous top dog, a comparably configured PC with AMD's 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU.

The FX-60 processor marks the transition of AMD's premium line of FX processors to dual-core technology, replacing the single-core Athlon 64 FX-55, which also runs at 2.6 GHz. The single-core FX-57, which runs at 2.8 GHz, will remain available until it is replaced by a future 2.8-GHz successor to the FX-60, according to AMD.

More evolution than revolution, the $1031 FX-60 CPU is essentially a faster version of the same core (code-named Toledo) that comprises the dual-core, 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and the 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ chips. It comes with the same 1MB of Level 2 cache and incorporates the same on-chip memory controller that works only with DDR RAM. (Intel's processors support the faster DDR2 memory standard; however, AMD-based systems consistently outperform comparable Intel-based systems.) AMD expects to launch a CPU with DDR2 support by year's end, according to the company.

We tested three new shipping FX-60 systems: the $4250 Poly 939N4-SLI2/FX60 from Polywell, the $4499 Ultimate M6 Sniper II from ABS, and the $3499 Gamer Ultra XLC from CyberPower. Each of the systems came with almost identical hardware: an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, two high-performance 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array, and two SLI EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards. The CyberPower and Polywell machines had 512MB of graphics memory; ABS's had 256MB.

Two of the systems, the Ultimate M6 Sniper II and the Poly 939N4-SLI2/FX60, came with 2GB of RAM and posted record-breaking scores of 141 and 140, respectively, on the PC World Test Center's WorldBench 5 benchmark. The previous top mark of 130 was set by Xi Computer's MTower 64 AGE-SLI , which runs on AMD's 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+. The third FX-60 system, the Gamer Ultra XLC, came with 1GB of RAM and turned in a WorldBench 5 score of 123.

Intel isn't ceding the high-end market to AMD's FX line. On January 16 the company will launch its latest high-end processor, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 . No vendor systems featuring the new chip are available yet, but aPC World-built reference system featuring the processor scored higher than any Intel-based PC we've tested. However, it was no match for the FX-60 systems.

Intel's new dual-core 3.46-MHz chip, which will sell for about $1000, comes with 2MB of Level 2 cache per core (double that of its successor, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840).

Other new features include a faster frontside bus (now running at 1066 MHz), which connects the CPU with RAM, as well as Intel's Virtualization Technology , which allows a PC with the appropriate software to run multiple operating systems simultaneously without having to reboot.

We benchmarked the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 using a reference system that included an Intel D975XBS motherboard; 2GB of DDR2-887 RAM from Crucial Technologies; a single EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO graphics card with 256MB of memory; two 7200-rpm, 160GB Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array; and an Antec Turbo-Cool 510 ATX-PFC power supply.

The Intel system's WorldBench score of 109 was more than 10 percent faster than any dual-core Intel-based system we've tested, but it paled in comparison to the new FX-60-based machines.

High-end systems running on the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 will be available on January 16 from Alienware, CyberPower, Polywell, and others, according to the companies. Dell said it will launch a system using the chip sometime in the first quarter of 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001509.html





IBM, Sony, Toshiba Extend Partnership
Brian Bergstein

The partnership among IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. that produced the vaunted Cell microprocessor is being extended for another five years to focus on advancing chip designs at extremely small scales.

The companies planned to announce Thursday that their next joint research project will aim toward chips with features smaller than 32 nanometers - 32 billionths of a meter.

Today's chips generally are built with components as small as 90 nanometers, though 65-nanometer-based chips are emerging. It's part of the microprocessing industry's constant fight to wring performance improvements and cost efficiencies out of ever smaller chips.

Other efforts in the 30-nanometer range are already occurring, including a partnership between IBM and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Research into molecular computing is aiming even smaller, toward chips with features that might operate in the space of 2 to 3 nanometers.)

Lisa Su, a vice president in IBM's semiconductor research and development center, said this partnership is different because of Sony's and Toshiba's expertise with the specific needs of chips for consumer devices.

The Cell chip already produced by the IBM-Sony- Toshiba pact packs eight processors. With its powerful graphics capabilities, Cell is the heart of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 video game system and next-generation Toshiba TVs, but it has yet to win much wider acceptance.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said the companies appear to have concluded that costs and complexities of 32-nanometer technology would be so immense that "partnering is the best way to go."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Bye-Bye Hard-Drive, Hello Flash
Michael Kanellos

The world as notebook users know it is about to change in a flash.

Manufacturers of NAND flash memory say they will expand the market for their chips over the next few years and colonise devices that now rely on hard drives or other types of memory. In turn, this could mean phones that can record several hours of video, or smaller notebooks with twice or more the battery life.

The NAND noise will be particularly strong at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, with manufacturers showing off the solid-state technology as an increasingly important component in mobile phones and talking up how it will find its way into notebook hard drives in 2006.

By about the turn of the decade, NAND could even replace hard drives entirely in some mini notebooks because of the increasing amount of data the chips can hold, according to Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology, one of the world's largest memory makers. Flash also takes up less space and uses less energy.

"The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years," he said. "I'm not saying drives will go away. There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive?"

Jim Handy, an analyst at Semico Research, says NAND won't replace notebook hard drives as long as Microsoft keeps expanding the number of storage-heavy features in its software, but it will become standard in video cameras, displacing tape, recordable DVDs and mini drives. Flash-based cameras, already a staple in Japan, are smaller, and the cost premium associated with the chips can be hidden in a US$500 camera.

"Video is not a hard-drive area. I expect it will go with flash," Handy said.

NAND flash will also begin to appear in car navigation systems and play a role in large data storage systems at corporations and government agencies in the relatively near future, said Jon Kang, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics' technical marketing group. Kang's enthusiasm is understandable: Samsung is the world's largest maker of NAND in terms of bits shipped.

"It is really creating a boon in consumer applications," he said.

As with many other technologies before it, costs are coming down as capacities are heading up.

The NAND evolution fits the pattern established in Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a given chip will double every two years. Doubling the number of transistors on a memory chip allows manufacturers to put more memory cells on it.

Actually, the technology is moving a little faster than Moore's Law. A few years ago, NAND got produced on trailing-edge manufacturing lines. Now manufacturers are putting it on their cutting-edge processes. The shift has thus accelerated product development.

Currently, NAND chips double in memory density every year. The cutting-edge 4-gigabit chips of 2005, for example, will soon be dethroned by 8-gigabit chips. (Memory chips are measured in gigabits, or Gb, but consumer electronics manufacturers talk about how many gigabytes, or GB, are in their products. Eight gigabits make a gigabyte, so one 8Gb chip is the equivalent of 1GB.)

Another driving factor in the uptake of the technology is cost: NAND drops in price about 35 to 45 percent a year, due in part--again--to Moore's Law and in part to the fact that many companies are bringing on new factories. 1GB of flash costs a consumer electronics manufacturer about US$45, said Handy. That will drop to US$30 in next year, US$20 in 2008 and US$9 by 2009.

At US$45 a gigabyte, flash is nearly 100 times more expensive than hard-drive storage, which can sell to manufacturers for around 65 cents a gigabyte. Even in the most optimal comparisons for flash, the technology invariably costs more, say analysts. On the other hand, flash has advantages in space and energy consumption.

When and how NAND flash gets incorporated into a product category depends upon a host of factors. In mobile phones, the advent of fancy gadgetry is driving adoption. Historically, mobile phones only required 64Mb or so of memory, mostly to store basic system instructions. The chip of choice has been NOR flash, a different type that in some ways is more reliable. More than 90 percent of the phones made today store their software code in NOR flash, according to research firm iSuppli.

Adding photo, video and MP3 capabilities, however, has forced phone makers to add NAND to store files. Similarly, smart phones that handle e-mail and Web surfing require far more memory. NAND is more dense than its counterpart: NOR chips for mobile phones generally top out at 512Mb. By 2007, Samsung will produce 16Gb NAND chips and 32Gb ones a year later, said Kang. The growth rate for NOR isn't nearly that fast, so the density gap shows signs of widening.

As a result, the use of NAND chips--with some help from additional, inexpensive DRAM memory--is growing in phones. Some manufacturers are even contemplating displacing NOR with NAND for code storage, although that requires rewriting code.

"I don't see many (mobile phone makers) sticking with NOR when they go to 512Mb densities. NOR is going to be designed out," said Samsung's Kang. "It is a pain in the neck to switch software so people now use NOR, but let's say you have a gigabit of density. There is no reason to use NOR."

NOR manufacturers hotly dispute this and are working on packaging techniques to eliminate opportunities for NAND to intrude.

In MP3 players and notebooks, meanwhile, performance issues will drive adoption. The motor that spins hard-drive platters is one of the more energy-hungry components in a notebook. A hard drive developed by Samsung and Microsoft in which flash memory caches data for an idle hard drive will arrive in late 2006. The hybrid drive will extend battery life by 36 minutes, according to Samsung. A full NAND notebook would even use less power.

"How would you like 15 hours of battery life on a notebook rather than three or four? What if you didn't have to go through that stupid boot-up sequence?" said Appleton of Micron Technology. "Anytime a solution for storage can be US$50 or US$60 or less, the mechanical guys are out and the solid-state guys are in."

NAND would allow PCs to start up instantly because data wouldn't have to be retrieved from the drive platters. Intel, meanwhile, has developed a technology called Robson that cuts boot-up time by storing the most recently used software and files in flash.

Sam Bhavnani at Current Analysis said most consumers will continue to want big hard drives, but still, he added, "some high-end ultraportables could go that way" -- to flash -- "in a few years."
http://www.cnet.com.au/mobilecomputing/notebooks/ 0,39029089,40059358,00.htm





Nikon To End Film Camera Production

Digital SLRs are the place to be, apparently
Tony Smith

35mm film has come to the end of the roll, Nikon has said. The camera maker this week revealed it is focusing its efforts solely on digital photography products.

Nikon said its traditional film-based cameras now account for less than five per cent of its UK division's sales. It claimed the shift will also better equip the company to operate in an "increasingly competitive market place".

The company will stop producing film camera bodies, along with interchangeable manual focus lenses, lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses, it said. However, it doesn't expect stocks of these products to run down completely until the Summer. It will also continue to offer its F6 flagship pro-oriented film camera and lenses. Sales of the manual FM10 will also continue outside Europe, the company added.

Nikon is clearly looking to the higher end of the market for growth, pointing to rising demand for digital SLR cameras not only driven by users of traditional SLRs going digital, but also other consumers upgrading from compact digital cameras.

That mirrors Olympus' recently announced shift to focus on higher-end digital SLRs as the compact market becomes more competitive not only between camera makers but also with mobile phone vendors who are already driving up the resolution of camera phones
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01...s_all_digital/





P2P Wins Enthusiasts Among Bloggers And Broadcasters

Peer-to-peer technology enables immediate access to footage otherwise impossible to find
Sam Graham

In the days following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the number of casualties soared along with the volume of images and videos that captured the terrifying power of the waves. With thousands of tourists on hand, there were plenty of video cameras ready to capture the destruction.

Soon, these videos were posted on the internet and collected for download on websites and blogs such as Waxy.org.

In a day, demand was too much for Waxy and the videos were moved to Archive.org, a website dedicated to building a library of past and present websites. But even the so-called "largest repository of public- domain audio, video, and text in the world" could no longer handle the surging demand for the videos.

The conditions were tailor-made for peer-to-peer application BitTorrent, which reduces demand and stress on centralised servers by transferring data directly between people who had the videos and those who wanted them.

In Hong Kong, peer-to-peer technology garnered widespread attention on the back of the arrest and criminal conviction of "Big Crook" Chan Nai-ming, who used BitTorrent to illegally distribute copyrighted movies on the internet.

But peer-to-peer technology allows far more than free music and movies. It is increasingly being harnessed for legitimate broadcasting and other uses. Chris Holland, a blogger who collected tsunami videos and distributed them using BitTorrent, distributed 151 gigabytes of video with only 1.26 gigabytes uploaded by the server originally hosting the videos.

With content providers having to pay to upload material, using peer-to-peer passes the cost of distribution on to those who download by taking advantage of the capacity of all users to upload information to other users.

Applications such as BitTorrent break files into small pieces. When downloaders want a file they will obtain the individual pieces from different people across the internet before putting the pieces back together to form the original file.

The result is an effective solution for distributing large files at only a fraction of the cost of the traditional central server distribution model. Not surprisingly, major content producers are beginning to take notice.

The BBC will soon complete a trial of its Integrated Media Player (iMP), which allows people in Britain to download television shows for viewing on demand. Viewers will have seven days after the initial broadcast of a show to watch it before it expires.

Given that a 30-minute TV programme is about 200 megabytes and demand is likely to be high, the stress on the BBC's servers would be huge if videos were sent directly to everyone who requested the shows.

Using a peer-to-peer distribution system for iMP, much of the bandwidth demand is shifted to the users. Instead of directly sending all the video, the BBC will rely on users who have already downloaded the videos to distribute the vast majority of data.

"The media landscape is changing with the advent of new technologies, and audiences are changing the way in which they interact and view content," a BBC spokesman said.

With the advent of personal video recorders (PVRs), there is a growing trend towards watching content on demand rather than according to broadcasters' schedules. Peer-to-peer file-sharing not only allows the BBC to cater to this trend, it helps it to compete with the many illegal file-sharing services available without violating copyright laws.

The broadcaster hopes users will prefer using a legal system that has guaranteed content to an illegal one that does not always deliver.

It is not only the giants that are interested in the cost savings.

Multimedia blogs, often produced by just one or two people, are also seeking to harness the technology for distribution of large files as their popularity increases.

Rocketboom is one of the most popular video-blogs, with up to 100,000 daily viewers. Its presenter, Amanda Congdon, has gained geek stardom by putting a twist on news, technology and the arts in a daily three-minute video.

With server costs at about US$3,000 a month, there is significant money to be saved by using peer-to- peer networks for distribution.

While Rocketboom offers a BitTorrent option for downloading the video, producer Andrew Baron said very few people were using it, and that they would be promoting it in the coming year.

"Costs go up as we get more popular," Mr Baron said. "The costs are low enough that there are plenty of ways for this kind of thing to support itself."

BitTorrent and its peer-to-peer brethren are helping the internet deliver on its promise of converting media consumers into producers and distributors.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=36849





New Doubts Are Cast on Einstein's Cosmological Constant
Dennis Overbye

Einstein was wrong.

Einstein was right.

He was wrong about being wrong.

An astronomer from Louisiana State University said yesterday that a new analysis of cosmic history cast doubts on Einstein's cosmological constant, the leading explanation for the mysterious force that appears to be pushing apart the universe.

But other astronomers said that conclusion itself was in doubt.

The astronomer, Bradley E. Schaefer, said his analysis showed that the force, known as dark energy, was not constant, as Einstein would have predicted, but was growing more violent as cosmic time went on.

"The cosmological constant does not look good," said Dr. Schaefer, who used the violent flashes called gamma ray bursts as cosmic mileage markers to describe the history of the expansion of the universe.

In an interview Dr. Schaefer cautioned that it was just a preliminary result with years before a final answer came in. He presented his report at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington.

Several astronomers said it was Dr. Schaefer, not Einstein, who was wrong. His conclusion, they said, was undermined by mathematical and statistical flaws. Moreover, some astronomers questioned whether the properties of gamma ray bursts were known precisely enough to serve as cosmological beacons.

"I flat out don't believe this result," said Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was a discoverer of dark energy eight years ago.

Einstein first proposed the constant in 1917, as a way of explaining how the universe could be static despite the force of gravity. It was a sort of universal antigravity embedded in space. He abandoned that theory as a blunder when the universe proved to be expanding.

But in 1998, the cosmological constant gained new life. It was then that competing teams of astronomers, using exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovas as cosmic mileage markers, discovered that the expansion of the universe appeared to be accelerating, as if a dark antigravitational force were indeed at work.

As Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas said, Einstein's biggest blunder was believing the cosmological constant was a blunder.

Since the 1998 discovery, astronomers have been racing to chart the history of the expansion of the universe more precisely to pin down the properties of dark energy. Observations by Dr. Riess and his colleagues with the Hubble Space Telescope two years ago have determined that the universe hit the gas pedal about five billion years ago.

Dr. Schaefer used as his mileage markers 52 gamma ray bursts, which are 100 to 1,000 times as powerful as Type 1a supernovas, and can thus be seen much farther away, or back in time. The bursts, which can be seen only from space, have been studied by satellites like the High Energy Transient Explorer, or HETE.

The most distant burst, at 12.8 billion light-years, occurred when the universe was 6 percent of its present age, Dr. Schaefer said.

His measurements put the dark energy in a controversial category named phantom energy, which if it continued unabated would rip apart the cosmos in a few billion years.

But Donald Lamb, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, and others who were interviewed before Dr. Schaefer's talk but were made familiar with its conclusions, disagreed.

They said Dr. Schaefer had been forced to his finding about the Einstein constant by his use of a mathematical parameter called w-prime, a measure of how fast the violence of the dark energy appears to be changing with distance in the universe.

At large distances, Dr. Lamb said, the parameter becomes mathematically meaningless, and theorists have dropped it.

Moreover, he said, if Dr. Schaefer's analysis is valid, his results agree with Einstein's constant, within the measurements' uncertainties.

"It's not a meaningful discrepancy," Dr. Lamb said, adding that a statement like Dr. Schaefer's required stronger evidence. "The bottom line is the result doesn't show Einstein was right. And it doesn't show he was wrong."

That was echoed by Robert R, Caldwell, a dark-energy theorist at Dartmouth, who added that if dark energy evolved as swiftly as Dr. Schaefer said, it would have interfered with the formation of galaxies.

Another criticism is that most of Dr. Schaefer's data points are from the early universe, more than five billion years ago, before dark energy became a dominant force in the universe. The action, they say, is all at later times, when dark energy's effects are more easily seen, but his data is sparse there.

In his presentation, Dr. Schaefer said it was too early to make claims about the usefulness and ultimate meaning of his proposal.

"The first results are pointing to the cosmological constant not being constant, a point I don't want to push too much," he said. "This is the first demonstration of cosmologically useful results from a new method. We can't be too confident in the results right now."

The dispute shines an awkward light on what some astronomers regard as a promising and powerful tool for cosmology, gamma ray bursts. Dr. Schaefer called his work a "proof of purchase" for the use of the bursts, which can emit as much light in a second as our Sun does in a billion years, to investigate dark energy and other puzzles of the long night.

George Ricker, a gamma ray astronomer at M.I.T., said of Dr. Schaefer's work: "It's great that he's doing this. He's drawing attention to fact that this is possible."

Other astronomers said the use of gamma ray bursts for cosmology was in its infancy at best.

Until recently, astronomers did not even know what they were. Lately, the bursts have been traced to the titanic implosions of very massive stars into black holes, and astronomers have begun to learn how to calibrate the flashes.

Lorenzo Amati of the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics in Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues discovered a correlation between the total luminosity of a gamma ray burst and the wavelength at which it appears brightest.

Using such techniques, astronomers can estimate the intrinsic luminosity of a gamma ray burst within 25 percent, Dr. Lamb said. That is only two or three times the uncertainty associated with the Type 1a supernova explosions, considered the gold standard for cosmological work.

Dr. Lamb was the lead author of a report last summer outlining how a gamma ray burst mission could be used to investigate dark energy.

Such a mission is unlikely soon, however, because NASA's science budget suffers overruns from the James Webb Space Telescope, and scientists are trying to find money to maintain the HETE satellite, which is scheduled to be turned off.

Optical astronomers point out that it will take many more gamma ray bursts than supernovas to reach the same precision. Lacking a sound theoretical reason to believe that gamma ray bursts should be standard candles, they are reluctant to give them much credence.

Dr. Riess said, "The news is that we are really stumped about this dark energy puzzle and are being forced to be very creative to probe it."

Warren E. Leary contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/science/12cosmos.html
















Until next week,

- js.

















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

January 7th, December 31st, December 24th, December 17th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black