[JackSpratts]

Superfast Internet Cafe Launches

An internet cafe offering connections 50 times faster than typical broadband services has opened in Cornwall.

Computers at Goonhilly satellite station, on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, are connected to BT's global internet protocol network.

That means users can download data at speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).

It is thought to be the first time such high speeds have been seen at a UK internet cafe.

The service will be free to visitors.

61 dishes

Adrian Hosford of BT said: "It would be possible to use the cafe's computers to download in less than 15 minutes a file the equivalent size of the DVD version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its 19,000 illustrations, 629 audio and video clips and 100,000 articles.

"A standard broadband connection would typically take in excess of five hours."

The new internet cafe was officially declared open by Helston Community College pupils Chloe Smith and James Evans, both aged 17.

Goonhilly has 61 antenna dishes and handles thousands of international phone calls, TV broadcasts and data.

The first antenna, known as Arthur, was built to track the Telstar satellite and received the first live transatlantic television broadcasts from the United States in 1962.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ll/5123118.stm





What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?
Ken Belson

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Peter Shyu, an engineer, spends most of his day out of the office, and when he needs an Internet connection he often pops into one of the many coffee shops in this city that offer free wireless access.

He could use WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. But that would cost him $12.50 a month.

"I'm here because it's free, and if it's free elsewhere, I'll go there too," said Mr. Shyu, hunched over his I.B.M. laptop in an outlet of the Doutor coffee chain. "It's very easy to find free wireless connections."

Despite WiFly's ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.

Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and P.D.A.'s.

Like Q-Ware, operators in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia are eager to build municipal networks. But they are grappling with the high expectations politicians are placing on them. On June 9, MobilePro backed out of plans to develop a wireless network in Sacramento because it said the city wanted it to offer free access and recoup its investment with advertising, not subscriptions, a model that other cities are hoping to adopt. Elsewhere, incumbent carriers have challenged cities' rights to requisition new networks. And many services have had difficulty attracting customers.

"There is a lot of hype about public access," said Craig J. Settles, a technology consultant in Oakland, Calif., and author of "Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless." "What's missing from a lot of these discussions is what people are willing to pay for."

Q-Ware's relationship with Taipei has been less contentious, partly because the WiFly network is just one piece of a far broader and highly regarded plan to incorporate the Internet into everything the government does.

The brainchild of Taipei's mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, the CyberCity project was first conceived in 1998 as a way to catapult past Seoul, Hong Kong and other Asian capitals that were recasting themselves as cities of the future. Many government agencies now communicate almost exclusively online, saving millions of dollars, and citizens have been given hundreds of thousands of free e-mail accounts and computer lessons.

WiFly plays a role, too, by allowing policemen to submit traffic tickets wirelessly, for instance. But making it appeal to the average citizen is another story. Q-Ware, which is part of a conglomerate that, among other things, operates 7-Eleven franchises in Taiwan, has found that consumers will pay subscription fees only if there are original offerings to pull them in.

"Content is really key," said Darrell M. West, a professor of public policy at Brown University who conducted a survey of how well governments use the Internet. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."

To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.

The company has also developed a low-priced Internet phone service. The handsets cost about $200 and allow users to call other mobile phones for just over a penny a minute; calling a traditional phone costs less than half a penny.

Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices, including MP3 players and digital cameras.

"In the beginning, you have to do something to attract people to the service," said Sheng Chang, vice president of Q-Ware's wireless business group. "We're a wireless city, so if we can't make it here, it can't be made."

Mr. Chang added that Q-Ware lowered its target for attracting subscribers after several new product introductions were delayed, including the Internet phone service that he now expects to offer starting as early as August.

Q-Ware began building the network in 2003, working with Nortel Networks to install enough hot spots to reach nearly everyone living in this densely packed city.

Like municipal governments in many American cities, Taipei gave Q-Ware access to streetlight poles and other public property to install antennas and cables. Q-Ware has spent about $30 million putting together the network, which also reaches every subway station, hospital and public building. Streetlights did not have the electrical outlets needed to power the antennas, so outdoor hot spots cost about three times more than the indoor access points.

Initially, Q-Ware gave away subscriptions and about 60,000 people signed up. But once Q-Ware started charging for its service in January, only a few thousand subscribers remained.

"The problem is not the technology, but the business model," Mayor Ma said in an interview. "If they charge too much, people won't sign up. But Q-Ware needs to recoup their investment."

With so many options for getting online indoors, WiFly's main selling points are that its hot spots are in hard-to-reach spots like subway stations, and they link to unique services. But Amos Tsai, an office worker making his way through City Hall Station, said he rarely used his laptop or P.D.A. on trains and or in stations because they were too crowded — and because he also didn't want to pay. "Now that they started charging for WiFly, I stopped using it," he said.

For now, Q-Ware's most pressing problem is how to get people like Mr. Tsai to buy subscriptions. Q-Ware has been advertising its service on the radio, in computer magazines and on the Web, including Yahoo's local site. The company will also take out ads in newspapers and on television, and it has designed an interactive "survival" game called WiFly Hunter that offers cash rewards. It is teaming up with broadband providers so customers can get a D.S.L. line at home and WiFly access at a discount.

But even if Q-Ware meets its target this year, the company will need 500,000 users in a given month to break even, a target it is not expected to hit for several more years, according to Chou Yun-tsai, the chairwoman of Taipei's Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, which oversees the WiFly project.

"It's a huge task," Ms. Chou said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/te.../26taipei.html





In Texas, Fighting to Keep Brahms on Air
Daniel J. Wakin

In this landscape of oil derricks and Rangerettes — a renowned drill team dressed in smiles and miniskirts — a tiny radio station sends out a lifeline to classical music lovers in East Texas.

It is KTPB, the station of Kilgore College, which educates the children of oil hands and other blue-collar workers. Now the college has decided it can no longer afford to support the station and has announced its sale. The new owner? A Christian-music broadcasting company from California, which will pay the college $2.46 million over 10 years.

Richard Jenkins, the president of the company, EMF Broadcasting, acknowledges that the sale has some people in the area outraged. "I know there are some unhappy campers out there," he said. "But it always happens with change."

Though classical music may be a minority taste, its adherents here are vocal. Some have formed a group, Save Our Arts Radio. They have advertised in the local newspaper and generated at least 175 letters, many of them sent to the Federal Communications Commission, which must still approve the deal.

"Just because we live out here in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean we have to be a cultural void," said Nancy B. Wrenn, the executive director of the East Texas Symphony Orchestra, based in Tyler, about 30 miles away. She helped form the group. "This radio station has reached people who have no other access to the arts," she said. Meanwhile, three other Christian music stations lie just to the north on the FM dial.

The loss of a classical KTPB would be the latest footstep in the decline of classical music radio in the United States. Doomsayers see the trend as part of a broader diminishing of the art form, although new sources — satellite and digital radio and Internet streaming — are emerging. In 1990, about 50 commercial stations were on the air; the number is closer to 30 now. About two dozen public radio stations have cut back on classical programming to varying degrees in the last decade, said Tom Thomas, co-chief executive of Station Resource Group, an organization of public stations.

Kilgore's favorite son — the famously reclusive pianist Van Cliburn, who spent some of his childhood in the town — has spoken out against the sale. "There is no way to give a monetary evaluation to the world's heritage of great music," he wrote in a letter published in The Tyler Morning Telegraph this month. The trendy music of today is fleeting, he said, "but the permanent, ageless masterpieces are enduring and forever." Losing the station would be a travesty for the college, wrote Mr. Cliburn, whose name adorns a college auditorium.

The school's trustees voted unanimously on April 20 to approve the deal. The F.C.C.'s period for public comment ended Saturday; the commission must now issue a ruling, but it has not set a deadline.

The school, a junior college in this town of 11,000, has been increasingly strapped financially, and the money it was using to subsidize the station — about $125,000 a year — was better put toward educating students, officials said. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides about $85,000 a year, and donations amount to $80,000.

KTPB, the only classical music station between Dallas and Shreveport, La., a distance of 190 miles, has about 15,000 listeners and reaches a population of 300,000 to 400,000. Classical music plays from 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. during the week; then an hour of talk and "The World" from Public Radio International; then more music or syndicated concert programs; then music all night. It also plays jazz, blues and swing.

In an interview, William M. Holda, Kilgore's president, said the public share of financing for the college had declined from 87 percent of the budget to 35 percent in the last 30 years, partly because of the drop in value of the oil fields and the associated dip in tax revenues. He has had to cut the work force and also trim courses, in areas like forensics, fashion merchandising and watch repair. Meanwhile, tuition and fees are on the rise. The college has 5,000 students, most of whom commute.

He said the college did not actively seek a buyer but was approached by a radio station broker.

Mr. Holda also pointed out that the station has a meager 650 members. "People want things, but they don't want to pay for them," he said. "It's not unique to the arts."

Supporters of the station see it differently. "It's a public trust," said Otis Carroll, a prominent Tyler lawyer and a leader of the group trying to save the station. He and others say the college kept the negotiations quiet until it was too late and made no attempt to ask for outside financing.

Mr. Holda pointed out that the board meeting had been advertised in the local papers several weeks in advance.

EMF Broadcasting, which is based in Rocklin, Calif., plans to eliminate local programming and said it would beam in a feed of its K-LOVE or AIR-1 networks, or possibly a new format. EMF began providing programming for one affiliate in 1988, and it now owns and operates 192 stations, delivering programming to a half-dozen more.

"The mission of the organization is to promote Judeo-Christian values and bring people to some kind of spirituality, a closer walk toward God," Mr. Jenkins said. He added that Texas was fertile ground for EMF. "It's just a great, great area," he said. "People respond to our programming very, very well."

The story of KTPB is not just Bible versus Beethoven. It has surprising nuances. Mr. Holda of Kilgore College is a former music professor who trained as a singer. "It's a bittersweet deal," he said, adding, "My whole original life was in music."

The sale also means a much smaller audience for the college's sporting events and an end to broadcasts of music from local churches. Nor are the station's staff members a godless bunch; most say they are churchgoers.

KTPB's programming is substantial, in contrast to the easy-listening style of many classical stations. On Friday, for example, there was the entire Brahms "German Requiem," a Beethoven string quartet, lesser-known Liszt piano works, music of George Butterworth and Mozart, Arthur Sullivan's Cello Concerto, Morton Gould's "Santa Fe Saga" and Bartok's second piano sonata.

A hint of class friction also tinges the affair. Most of KTPB's listeners and vocal supporters live in Tyler, a well-heeled city of about 90,000 that has traditionally housed executives. Look for country clubs, not derricks.

On the other hand, the trustees who voted to sell the station live in Kilgore College's tax district. They include a broker, a banker, a lumberyard owner, a former Kilgore College football coach, a pharmacist and an auto mechanic.

If the station goes, "it makes us a small town," said Cris Selman, a 90- year-old woman who is a pillar of Tyler's cultural scene.

Kilgore, where oil was struck in 1930, is at the center of the East Texas oil patch. Working wells are common in the area, but most of the big derricks in town are ornamental, monuments to one of the world's biggest oil bounties. Its other famous (and energy-producing) export are the college's Rangerettes, who started performing in 1940. Attired in white Western hats and boots, blue skirts and red tops, they have appeared at bowl games and presidential inauguration festivities.

Kilgore College was founded in 1935 to give the newly booming town some gravitas. It has strong vocational programs, and is also the home of the respected Texas Shakespeare Festival. Nearby Longview has an orchestra of its own, a small opera company and an art museum.

The loss of KTPB would leave the Tyler folks the most bereft (to the east, some receive Shreveport's public radio station). No more Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. No more New York Philharmonic.

Moreover, KTPB is a cultural glue, sponsoring events for children and broadcasting some 50 local concerts a year, including those of the Longview and East Texas orchestras and their guest soloists.

KTPB has five full-time employees, and they have struggled to remain neutral. "It really is like a grieving process," said Kathy A. Housby, the general manager and afternoon on-air host, who has been at the station for all of its 15 years.

Just a year ago, the station moved into a one-story renovated yellow brick building opposite the First Presbyterian Church. Its old site was used for a $5-million new residence for the Rangerettes, who have their own museum on campus, and a motto: "Beauty knows no pain."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/ar...c/26radio.html





Ultimate iPod Accessory?

A US firm has invented a new iPod accessory which combines the portable music player with a toilet roll holder.

Manufacturers say the iCarta is designed to "enhance your experience in the smallest room", reports the Daily Mail.

The gadget, which costs around £50, merges an iPod docking station with a loo roll dispenser.

The device delivers high-quality sounds from moisture-resistant speakers, according to the manufacturer Atech Flash Technology.

It also re-charges the iPod while playing songs - either pre-programmed or a random selection.

One website which reviews the latest technology described the iCarta as "one of the stranger iPod accessories we've ever seen".
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ceanddiscovery





Spain

Congress Approves Intellectual Property Law
h.b.

Congress has approved the reforms to the intellectual property laws in Spain, with the deputies supporting amendments passed previously in the Senate.

However only the large parties have agreed the reforms of the text which has been criticized by cultural bodies, consumers’ organizations and the technology sector.

The new law means that a cannon is charged on any virgin media, be it for CD, DVD or MP3 players and mobile phones, scanners and even printers and pencil memories, and comes into effect as soon as it is published in the official state bulletin. However the amount of the cannon has to be agreed still between all sides.

The money collected will be paid to the copyright owners of the music or films concerned.
http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news...cle_5000.shtml





Paying for what you can’t have

Spain Outlaws P2P Filesharing

A Spanish intellectual property law has finally banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain, making it a civil offense even to download content for personal use.

The legislation, approved by Congress on Thursday, toughens previous provisions. An early May circular from Spain's fiscal general del estado, or chief prosecutor, allowed downloads for purely personal use.

Now Spaniards caught grabbing content from, say, eMule, will have to reimburse rights holders for losses --- although such losses will be difficult for authorities to track.

But the government is going after Internet service providers; it's a criminal offense for ISPs to facilitate unauthorized downloading.

The law also introduces a small tax to be levied on all blank media --- from a blank CD to mobile phones and even a memory stick. Computer hard disks and ADSL lines have been left out of the legislation despite their widespread use for illegally copying music and films. The money collected will be paid back to the owner of the copyright.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/06/27/1696993.htm





In Mexico, Internet Music Piracy Rising With Broadband Connections

On Genova Street in downtown Mexico City, illegally copied CDs of music by top U.S. artists sell for 20 pesos, just under $2 a piece, in tiny booths between tables overflowing with batteries, stuffed animals and cheap knockoff sunglasses. That's about one-tenth the price in nearby stores.

Music is even cheaper a few hundred yards away, inside the Internet cafes surrounding the pedestrian plaza of the Glorieta Insurgentes. At eMilios, about 20 customers a day fill virgin discs with illegally downloaded songs for about $1.60, according to the clerk, Luis Arturo Guerrero, and whether or not they pay legitimate Internet sites for the tunes is not his concern.

"We can't really be responsible for what people see or download," says Guerrero, who sells blank CD-Rs for 8 pesos, or about 70 cents, and charges 9 pesos, about 80 cents, for an hour of computer time. Most use the free file-sharing programs Limewire or Morpheus, he said.

Unauthorized downloads are a global challenge for the music industry, but the problem is becoming particularly serious in Mexico, where intellectual property laws don't punish file-sharing and an increasing number of people are getting the broadband Internet connections that make it easier to download content at high speeds.

Mexico today is a pirate's haven: In a nation where the government has made opening legitimate businesses bureaucratic and costly, consumers have learned to count on "ambulantes," street vendors like the crowd on Genova Street, for everything from contraband cigarettes to DVDs of just-released Hollywood movies to high-end electronics.

Illegal sales already account for 65 percent of CD sales in Mexico, and the entertainment industry is bracing for things to get much worse now that fast broadband connections have become more common, doubling to 61 percent of Web-enabled Mexicans in the last two years.

"Broadband makes it easier for people to trade musical files and to download recorded music, both legally and illegally," said Arturo Diaz, legal director of the Mexican Association of Music and Video Producers, which represents major labels like EMI and Universal Music in Mexico. "We're keeping track of it in order to define our strategies."

Mexico's intellectual property laws already provide for up to ten year prison terms for people caught selling pirated music in the street, but they are only occasionally enforced, and the penal code does not address file-sharing because no money is exchanged, Diaz said.

"It's a problem with the law that we are already working to solve," he said. When the next congressional term begins in September, Mexican legislators will consider his group's proposal to punish unauthorized file-sharers with fines of up to $20,000 and ten years in jail.

Internet use in Mexico increased about 20 percent per year from 2001 to 2006, and nearly one-fifth of the population of 107 million will have Web access by year's end, according to the Mexican Internet Association, which represents Web-related businesses. "People want faster connections to download music, videos and software," said the group's subdirector, Ernesto Valdez.

The global music industry has had some success in fighting illegal file-sharing on sites like Kazaa and Grokster. The global rate of Internet piracy has tapered off as people react to high-profile lawsuits and the risk of getting viruses from exposing their hard drives to peer-to-peer networks, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the recording industry against piracy worldwide.

Countries like Mexico, where broadband is just taking hold and consumers are accustomed to buying contraband CDs, are a particular challenge.

According to the IFPI, with a pirate market valued at $111 million in 2004, Mexico is now within the top ten countries for music piracy. The major labels say Mexican computer users download about 568 million songs per year.

The movie industry already lost about $483 million to counterfeit sales in Mexico in 2005, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, and while film downloads remain frustratingly slow at broadband speeds, all it takes is one very fast Internet connection and a rack of DVD burners for a pirate to make many contraband copies of the latest blockbuster.

These losses have a multi-faceted impact on Mexico's artists as well, according to Raul Vazquez, IFPI's Latin America director: local music industry jobs disappear, tax revenues don't arrive, and legitimate Mexican music sites like Beon and Tarabu have little chance to develop in competition with free illegal downloads. Musicians with record deals lose money on sales, and emerging local musicians miss out because record companies can't afford to develop and market them, opting instead to sell big international names.

"The market keeps shrinking," he said. "The local musical culture disappears because you're not recording local artists."

Recording companies pursued 20,000 lawsuits in 17 countries last year against illegal fire-sharing, but not a single one was filed in Mexico.

"The laws in Mexico are weak and they haven't been updated to take into account online trade," Vazquez said.

Even if the laws do change, finding offenders won't be easy. At Internet cafes, where one-third of Mexico's Internet users go online, several people may use the same computer every hour.

Valdez thinks education is the answer, teaching Mexicans see piracy as a crime. It's a message driven home in Mexican-oriented public service announcements that seemingly precede every rental movie.

But changing the culture of piracy will take time. At the Centro de Communicaciones, which offers rows of Web-enabled computers just a few storefronts away from eMilios, clerk Alan Sanchez Navarro said the many customers downloading free music weren't putting the store at risk, or even doing anything wrong.

"It's legal for you to download music," he said. "It doesn't affect us."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technolog...174351836.html

Thanks Multi!





Ottawa Will Limit Lobbying. It Will Also Finance It
Michael Geist

The Federal Accountability Act, which was passed last week by the House of Commons, has been the focal point of the Conservatives' legislative agenda in 2006. If the Senate grants its approval in the fall, the Act will establish new limitations on lobbying activities and campaign financing. While few would object to placing limits on powerful lobby groups, recent information obtained under the Access to Information Act suggests that another form of lobbying exists that requires closer scrutiny — lobbying that is financed by the government itself.

According to government documents, last fall the Ministry of Canadian Heritage entered into a multi-year agreement with the Creators' Rights Alliance, a national coalition of artists groups and copyright collectives with members both small (the League of Canadian Poets) and large (SOCAN and Access Copyright). The CRA has eight objectives, which notably include "to ensure that government policy and legislation recognize that copyright is fundamentally about the rights of creators" and "to ensure that international treaties and obligations to which Canada is signatory provide the strongest possible protection for the rights of creators."

The Canadian Heritage-CRA agreement, which could run until 2008 at a total cost of nearly $400,000, requires the CRA to provide the Ministry with its views on copyright in the form of comments, analysis or research papers (other deliverables include a policy conference, website communications, and a regular newsletter). In other words, in return for $125,000 annually, the contract appears to be designed primarily to enable the CRA to lobby the government on copyright reform.

The contract raises several issues. First, there is some doubt that CRA is a group that needs government funding for lobbying purposes. While several of its smaller members could undoubtedly use the support, given that these associations typically lack the resources to provide ongoing representation, larger collectives such as Access Copyright and SOCAN already employ external lobbyists with millions of dollars budgeted for copyright regulatory hearings and reform.

Even if backing the CRA can be justified, the manner in which this contract was established elicits some concerns. Last summer, the contract was submitted through the Advance Contract Award Notification program, whereby the ministry notified potential contractors that it intended to award a contract to CRA to promote the interests of Canada's creative community. Other parties were given 15 days in early July to submit a counter-proposal. When none were submitted, Canadian Heritage was free to proceed with the contract.

The structure of the contract itself appears to have raised some eyebrows within Canadian Heritage. As the funding was being considered, an internal memo noted that the Copyright Policy Branch "would be funding an organization through this contract to provide comments on government policy. There is a concern that the Copyright Policy Branch would be setting an unwanted precedent in such matters."

To address that issue, a different branch within the same Cultural Affairs department administers the contract.

Internal correspondence also reveals that the contract was designed to further the department's own policy objectives. A senior official outlined the rationale behind the proposed contract, stating in an email that once the CRA funding was complete, "we should have streamlined, stable funding to an organization whose structure, purpose and activities suit our own policy needs."

Those activities were clearly identified in an email to Canadian Heritage from CRA's co-chair who commented that "the job of taking on the educational sector on copyright reform is clearly a huge and major undertaking," adding that education was a "well heeled, publicly funded lobby . . . devoted to abolishing creators' rights on the Internet."

In a fair and balanced policy making process, government must hear from all stakeholders. While well-financed lobby groups have little trouble marshaling the resources necessary to have their message heard, many smaller stakeholders frequently feel left out of the process.

The Internet has magnified the importance of this imbalance — social networking tools make it easy and inexpensive for groups of interested stakeholders to form online — yet many still struggle to convert that enthusiasm into clout in the political arena.

Given the need for the government to take all stakeholders into account, public financial support for groups that lack the resources to have their voice heard may be necessary. With plans from Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda and Industry Minister Maxime Bernier for consultations this year on telecommunications and broadcast regulation, privacy protection, as well as copyright reform, a transparent program that would allow groups to apply for financial assistance would enhance the policy making process and would be consistent with the Conservatives' focus on accountability.

The Canadian Heritage-CRA contract does not meet those standards of openness and accountability. If Canada is to achieve a balanced approach on copyright matters, policy makers must offer programs whose goals are not to advance a particular policy agenda, but rather to foster policies in the interests of all Canadians.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=970599119419





Canadian Anti-DRM Coalition Makes Timely Debut
Bruce Byfield

A coalition of public interest groups and academic privacy experts has released a public letter and background paper to the Canadian government stating their concerns about digital rights management (DRM) technologies and their legal status. The coalition has also started a Web site, IntellectualPrivacy.ca, to coordinate its efforts.

We talked to representatives of two coalition members about the status of DRM in Canada: David Fewer, staff counsel at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), Canada's leading legal technology law clinic, and Evan Leibovitch and Russell McOrmond of CLUE, an open source advocacy group.

The public letter was sent to Bev Oda, Minister of Canadian Heritage, and Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry, the two cabinet members whose departments traditionally have been associated with copyright issues in Canada. In addition to CIPPIC and CLUE, signatories included public interest organizations such as the BC Civil Liberties Association and Online Rights Canada; groups that might be affected by DRM laws, such as the Canadian Federation of Students and the Canadian Library Association; and leading experts such as Bruce Phillips, the former Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

In the letter, the coalition expressed concern about the legal ramifications of DRM and offered to work with the government to ensure that any legislation would be compatible with existing privacy and copyright laws in Canada. In addition, the letter sought assurances from the ministers that any legislation "will create no negative privacy impact" and "will include pro-active privacy protections that, for example, enshrine the rights of Canadians to access and enjoy copyright works anonymously and in private." The rationale for this statement is expressed in a background paper, which explains the issues with DRM technologies and the possible effects of "anti-circumvention legislation" on a number of different groups, including Internet providers and consumers. All in all, the letter was a thorough summary of the issues -- and couldn't have come at a better time.

The legal climate in Canada

DRM and copyright issues are much the same in Canada as in the United States. In both countries, the movie and music recording industries and distributors such as Microsoft and Apple are actively promoting DRM. The names may be different -- for example, Canada has the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association instead of the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft rather than the Business Software Alliance -- but the positions and arguments are much the same. Similarly, like the United States, Canada would be affected by the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) proposed treaty on the protection of broadcasters that is currently being drafted, which would consider DRM a reasonable exception to existing copyright and privacy laws.

However, the resistance to DRM laws in Canada enjoys several advantages. To start with, according to both CIPPIC and CLUE, the legal situation is much less favorable for DRM in Canada than in the United States. Canada has never had an equivalent of the American Digital Millennium Rights Copyright Act, which implements the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act, and provides strong protection to copyright holders which legally justifies DRM-like technologies.

Similar legislation has been under consideration in Canada since 2001, as McOrmond points out. However, those who, like McOrmond, were consulted in the process had the chance to learn from the American experience, and the drafting of the legislation proceeded much more slowly than in the United States. Bill C-60, a DMCA-like piece of legislation, did receive first reading in the Canadian House of Commons on June 20, 2005, but was tabled with the fall of the Liberal minority government several months later.

Because Bill C-60 failed to pass, Canada's current laws provide at least two strong objections to DRM. First, under Canada's Copyright Act, copyright holders are entitled to a levy to compensate for loss of income due to copying technologies such as recordable CDs and DVDs. It is this provision that allows Canadian music collectors to legally make backup copies. Since the act contains this provision, any group would probably have a hard time claiming that DRM is needed to prevent loss of income. A dissatisfied vendor or lobby group would most likely have better luck increasing a levy, or lobbying to alter how the audits are done that determine how a levy is distributed.

Secondly, Canada's Personal Information and Electronic Document Act includes stronger protection of personal information than exists in the United States. This law explicitly defines how personal information collected by non-government organizations -- the type of information that many fear will be collected by DRM -- is handled. Among other provisions, this information must be gathered only with consent, used only for the reasons it was gathered, collected for a reasonable purpose, and store securely. At least in theory, any DRM legislation could be mitigated by having to comply with these provisions. Not only that, but any specific implementation of DRM might become the object of a complaint to Canada's Privacy Commissioner.

In practice, DRM legislation could be specifically exempted from these laws. All the same, the existing laws do seem to provide strong legal defence against DRM in Canada.

The chance to start again

"The emergence of C-60, and the lack of full stakeholder involvement in its development, was a wake-up call," Leibovitch says. With the change of government that destroyed the bill, anti-DRM lobbyists have had a chance to start their efforts again.

They do so in a public and political climate that is suddenly much more hopeful. Public perception of the issue has recently been altered by the announcement of the Canadian Music Creators' Coalition (CMCA). Consisting of some of Canada's leading musicians, including Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, and Sarah McLachlan, the CMCA recently sent its own letter to Oda and Bernier.

In the letter, the CMCA strongly opposed DRM. "Artists do not want to sue music fans," the CMCA stated in its letter. "The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names." The letter went on to suggest that DRM -- or digital locks, as it called the technologies -- are not in the best interest of consumers, and called upon the government to consider other means to help promote Canadian artists. Coming from one of the groups that DRM is supposed to protect, the letter was a clear and public denouncement. Implicitly, it suggested that DRM served corporate and non-Canadian interests, and no one else's.

This increasingly hostile public reaction to DRM comes at a time when the new Conservative minority government in Canada is just starting to formulate its policies on issues related to DRM. Although Fewer states that the government has been consulting on the issues informally since it took office in February, formal consultation seems to have started only on June 13, when Oda publicly called on the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the government body that regulates broadcasting and telecommunications, for input on the effects of digital technologies.

"We anticipate," Fewer says, "that this government is going to try to put itself in the position to put together a bill, perhaps in the fall, perhaps later. This is a minority government, so probably it doesn't have a long life, but, regardless of whether it's this government or the next government, we do anticipate that we're going to see copyright legislation, likely in the near term."

Asked whether the legislation would resemble the discarded Bill C-60, Fewer replied, "We expect it to address the same issues. It remains to be seen whether it follows the C-60 route."

In the attempts to anticipate the current government's approach to DRM-related issues, the IntellectualPrivacy.ca coalition is scrutinizing the cabinet ministers involved. "Maxime [Bernier]," McOrmond notes, "is an unknown, without much history," since he was elected for the first time in February.

By contrast, both Fewer and McOrmond see reason to hope that Oda will be more receptive to their concerns than the previous Heritage Minister. "Bev Oda is a former Heritage critic [the member of the opposition in charge of critiquing the ministry], so she has the copyright file in front of her, and she has long and strong ties to the broadcasting community -- which we regard as somewhat hopeful, because that would suggest that she would be somewhat resistant to the sometimes strident rhetoric employed by copyright absolutists," Fewer says.

McOrmond agrees. "I met with Bev Oda when she was still the Heritage Critic," he says. "She was far more open-minded about the diversity of constituencies in copyright than her Liberal counterparts."

To date, neither Bernier or Oda have indicated any clear predisposition on such matters. However, regardless of their opinions, Fewer emphasizes that the time to lobby the government is now. "If we're raising our concerns for the first time when a bill goes to committee, it's too late. We need to educate the government on what the issues are."

"The government," Fewer says, "operates on a stakeholder basis. It relies on stakeholders to come forward and state their concerns. If no stakeholders do, or if the concerns they hear are disproportionately one-sided, government policy may reflect one side of the debate that they've heard."

Pro-DRM lobbyists evidently feel the same way. On his blog, Michael Geist, one of the founders of CIPPIC, recently revealed that David Dyer, a registered lobbyist for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, has been holding private meetings with members of the Heritage ministry and introducing them to pro-DRM representatives almost since the current government took office.

Differing opinions in the coalition

As a coalition, IntellectualPrivacy.ca includes a variety of opinions. Focusing on privacy issues, and, to a lesser extent, consumer concerns, Fewer sometimes talked as though DRM was inevitable. "We're realists, right?" Fewer says. "We have certainly said to the government -- and we will continue to say -- that no anti-circumvention law is a good law, and that Canada should not be legislating anti-circumvention laws. If, despite our warnings and despite our cautions, the government is dead set on drafting such a law, we have statements about the things that governments can do to mitigate the harmful effects of such laws."

While CLUE shares these concerns, McOrmond explains that free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) communities have addition concerns. Quoting the Free Software Definition, McOrmond says, "Any technology that revokes the right of the owner of a device to be in control that device for lawful purposes (i.e.: revokes the ability to 'run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software' that controls the device) can't be implemented with FLOSS. This is where the technical and the legal communities sometimes diverge." DRM legislation that protected privacy could still threaten FLOSS.

For this reason, while CLUE continues to work with other members of the coalition, McOrmond and Leibovitch are also developing their own policy documents.

Other members of the coalition may have their own positions. For instance, the various library associations that belong to the coalition may be chiefly concerned with how legislation affects their members. But, in general, Fewer feels that the coalition is a representative cross section of stakeholders. "I don't think anyone can look at the signatories on this letter and dismiss them as being an insignificant community. And they've spoken with us in a fairly firm and consistent message."

From whatever perspective, Fewer concludes, the coalition "would encourage anyone with concerns about these kinds of laws to speak up -- even if it's ordinary individuals, even if it's individual open source programmers. Make your voice heard."
http://trends.newsforge.com/article....03238&from=rss





The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers
Bruce Perens

We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: attacks against Open Source developers by patent holders, big and small. One is a lawsuit against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping used in Hibernate, a popular component of enterprise Java applications everywhere. The other attack is on an individual Open Source developer for his model railroad software.

These two attacks are the tip of the iceberg, thousands more are possible as software patent holders turn to enforcement as an income producer and away from the patent cross-licensing détente exercised by large companies until the mid-1990s. Open Source will not be the only victim: small and medium-sized companies make up 80% of our economy and any of those companies that develops software, either proprietary or Open Source, will be vulnerable. The American IP Law Association estimates that defense against a single software patent lawsuit will cost between 2 and 5 million dollars. Under US law, even a company that only uses software can be sued. The suit against Red Hat's concerns the use of software "objects" to encapsulate a database record and make it easier to access, a technology called Object Relational Mapping or The ActiveRecord Pattern. That technology is used in the Hibernate software developed by jBoss, which Red Hat recently purchased. FireStar Software claims that it invented the technology, and that it is covered by its U.S. patent number 6,101,502. However, over the past two decades there has been much prior art for object-oriented databases, including TopLink, an object relational system developed in the early 90's and now owned by Oracle, so it may be that the filers of FireStar's patent made no invention.

There's also the question of obviousness, whether the principles claimed in the patent would be obvious to a normally-skilled practitioner of the software art and thus not be an invention at all. The function of an object is to encapsulate data, and object-oriented programming has been known since the Simula language introduced it in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing another patent lawsuit in which the defense claims that there should be a much higher standard below which purported inventions would be considered obvious and thus not patentable. A higher standard of obviousness could help, but the real solution is to go back to the original intent of the Patent Office and stop granting patents on software.

Should FireStar prevail, or should Red Hat be forced to settle, Open Source use of the object-relational paradigm, including that in Hibernate, PHP, and Ruby on Rails, might become impossible. Recently RIM Systems, maker of the ubiquitous Blackberry, settled their patent case with NTP for half a billion dollars, after most of NTP's patent claims had been overturned by the patent office! In that case, the patent office ruled the patents invalid after the judge rendered his verdict in the lawsuit, and the judge refused to reconsider. Justice seems to be hard to find where software patents are concerned.

Red Hat will probably stick with the FireStar case rather than settle, but how many of them can it sustain? It's not possible to write a significant program today without using a principle covered by a current U.S. software patent. A study of patents possibly infringed within the Linux kernel found 283 of them in 2004. And that's just one program out of the thousands that make up a Linux distribution.

The other current patent attack against Open Source faces Bob Jacobsen, the developer of the JMRI model-railroad control software. Jacobsen gives his work away, with full source code. He is faced with an invoice for over $200,000 from Michael A. Katzer and his company KAM, $19 for every copy of JMRI that Jacobsen gave away. KAM filed a patent making a broad claim covering the transmission of model-railroad control commands between multiple devices in 2002. Again, there's prior art: this technology probably goes back to the MIT Model Railroad Club in the 1960's. But Jacobsen could easily go bankrupt in defending himself or paying KAM's claim. Because the cost of a patent defense is many times the net worth of the typical Open Source developer, it's difficult to see how there can be justice for the little guy.

These patent attacks come at an interesting time, as SCO's lawsuit against IBM starts to collapse. But while SCO's case was never well-constructed, a software patent case is much more substantial. It's possible to invalidate some patent claims in court or at the patent office, but some of the potentially thousands that can be brought against significant Open Source programs will be found to be legitimate.

There is also the specter of patent shake-down operations, like Intellectual Ventures. Founded by ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and touted as a means to "encourage innovation", it appears to be a litigation factory in the making. Intellectual Ventures has been purchasing patents to construct a portfolio that it will then assert against someone, probably small and medium-sized businesses to start with. Most businesses, when faced with the prospect of an expensive patent infringement lawsuit, choose to pay a license fee, or shall we call it an extortion fee, rather than go to court and spend so much that even when they win, they lose. Income from license fees will fuel more attacks on more businesses. The effect of Myhrvold's business on Open Source could be crippling. But Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, and eBay have nothing to fear. They invested in the company, and will be excluded from attacks.

All of this could be excused if it only encouraged innovation, which is supposed to be the purpose of the patent system. Patents were created as a means to get inventors to disclose their inventions, rather than keep them secret. The disclosure of an invention was supposed to allow others to more easily build on that invention, thus creating more inventions. But the patent system has evolved into something useless for the purpose of disclosure, and engineers are now instructed to avoid looking at other companies' patents because if the victim of a patent lawsuit can be shown to have known of a patent, the award to the patent holder is tripled. There have been no reliable studies that show software patenting to have encouraged innovation, and there is much evidence that they actually impede it. Computer programs are already protected by copyright, and that protection is sufficient to protect proprietary software businesses. Software is unique in that it is protected by both copyright and patents, other industries have one or the other and that is sufficient for them.

There are many other problems with software patenting, too many for me to cover in one piece. But you can see my essays The Problem of Software Patent in Standards, Software Patents vs. Free Software, and The Open Source Patent Conundrum, and my State of Open Source message.

Even the United States Patent Office thought software patents were a bad idea. It was forced to grant them by the Supreme Court, in a lawsuit brought by IBM. More recently, there has been news about Europe resisting a big-company push to make software patents enforcible, a fight that will continue when the question comes up again next month in Brussels. Large companies, including some otherwise perceived as friends of Open Source like IBM, HP, Nokia, and Philips, continue to push for increases in software patenting as a means of fighting disruptive technologies from smaller companies and Open Source incursions into their proprietary software markets. This is a big-company vs. little-guy fight. Despite the fact that the "little guy" represents most of the economy and the main sources of innovation, the big companies have the political connections and thousands of full-time lobbyists, and they are winning.

Over the past decade, Open Source has shown itself to be a better paradigm for supporting software innovation than a software patenting system ever could be. Open Source developers share both principles and the actual implementation, and allow anyone to build upon their work. The Linux kernel development, just a single example of Open Source success at innovation, has been the fastest and most broad-ranging of any operating system project ever attempted, and has achieved many capabilities that are unmatched by proprietary operating systems.

But we should not be confident that we will continue to have the right to use and develop Open Source software. A coordinated patent attack by a few companies, or even one large company, could completely destroy Open Source in the United States and cripple it in other nations. Funds and patent portfolios that have been established to help defend Open Source would not be sufficient to defend it. Only legislative changes to the patent system can fully protect Open Source and maintain it as a viable source of innovation for our future.
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/6/30/5032





10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed
Clint DeBoer

I’m not typically a doom and gloom kind of guy – really, I’m rather optimistic. But this pending format release/war is simply the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in a long time. The hype machine is entirely enthusiast-created and since that day I realized Steve Jobs could sell a fart provided he sued a public Mac forum for talking about it before its release, I began to understand the power of public mania.

There are a number of reasons why the new high definition DVD formats have already failed and I’ll gladly go over some of them in this article. I am not a soothsayer, but I do study the industry – and at times, sit back and take assessment of what’s happening from both a consumer and manufacturer perspective.

Without any further ado, here are the reasons HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc will never turn into the dominant formats for digital media viewing:

1. Nobody likes false starts
With the debut of HD DVD at an underwhelming 720p/1080i, coupled with a buggy interface and a transport that makes boiling water seem like a speedy event, the entrance of high definition DVD into the mainstream came out of the starting gate lame and hobbled. For Toshiba to release a player that didn’t support true HD at 1080p (even though the software does), and with no lossless audio format to accompany the video track, the high definition wave was more of a ripple. Add to this the delay of HDMI 1.3, lack of market penetration and supply, and a dearth amount of software titles and you have a very unimpressive product launch.

2. Format Wars Don’t Sell Players
The only reason Sony’s Playstation, Microsoft’s Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube can sell so well simultaneously is because of the prevalence of excellent software titles. People want to buy the hardware just so they can play the software. This is not a format war – it is choice, just like Chevy and Ford (and just like the gaming systems, some people have one of each). The high definition DVD formats, however are really just the same source material packaged in two different wrappers- not to provide choice, mind you, but because the two camps simply are too greedy to combine forces, and not innovative enough to drive two truly separate products successfully. Take careful note – a format war is NOT competition, it is a hindrance and the bane of high definition DVDs.

3. HD DVD and Blu-ray are NOT Quantum Leaps in Technology
Consumers came over in droves when CDs were released back in 1982. The new format offered not only a new digital media, but also a way to instantly access tracks across an entire “album”. Convenience, not technology, drove this format to almost instant consumer adoption. Fast forward a bit to 1997 when the first DVD player was released. Again, convenience, not technology, drove people to the market en masse. Unlike VHS tapes, the new DVD format was smaller, easily navigated and would not wear down over time like existing tape-based formats. Heck, the concept of a shiny plastic disc was new – and quite frankly, it was the coolest thing to hit the technological shelf since solid state technology. In comparison, the high definition DVD formats, save the color of the business side of the disc, look exactly the same… and consumer confusion will surely follow.

What do the new high definition DVD formats offer consumers over DVD? Technology and more storage. Is this enough? Not on your life. Consumers, most of whom rarely know how to properly configure their players or home theater systems, are perfectly content with their current DVD players (and indeed some have just jumped on board to DVD in the last several years). While the potential for more extras and alternate endings exists due to increased storage on the new media, there is no compelling reason for consumers to migrate over to the new high definition DVD formats in large numbers.

4. Studios are Conservative, Greedy and Unmotivated
Studios are so conservative in their practices as to consistently miss out on market advances – even those that can make them money (ie. Why is a computer company running the world’s most successful online music store?) The studios are not jumping on board the high definition DVD bandwagon just yet – and you can see the lack of titles to prove it. If the movie studios decided that HD DVD or Blu-ray (or both) was to be the next dominant format, it need only to flood the market with software titles and present a plan to roll back on DVD production over the next 10 years. Even though this would grant them the secure format that they seem to want (HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs promise to be much harder to rip or duplicate) there is no indication in the industry that this is taking place or even in the works. The studios are making money hand over fist with DVD they cannot seem to bring themselves to seriously initiate a new, unproven technology – even if it saves them from some other copyright headaches.

Add to this the fact that new titles are coming out at $30 a pop (and this down from an initial $35/title) and you have a really hard sell for consumers who are used to $15 titles at Wal-mart and the large electronics chains.

5. Playstation3 Cannot Save the World
We have consistently heard it said that the Playstation3 will “jump start” the market by flooding it with millions of gaming systems capable of handling Blu-ray Disc software. The problem with this theory is that the PS3 is not being marketed as a home theater component and, if current installations prove the rule, most will not be situated in the average consumer’s living room. The result is that the PS3 will primarily be a *gasp* gaming system. Maybe I have a more traditional group of parents in my association of friends, but, taking into account #4 above, I do not think that Blu-ray will make any major leaps forward in market penetration as a home video format – at least not anytime soon.

History is bearing this out, as the HTPC market, though driven hard by such manufacturers as Microsoft, Dell and HP, has struggled to find a place in the living room. Nearly every gaming system of the past: PS2, Xbox, and even the legendary 3DO system have been touted as “set-top boxes” but in reality find themselves situated in more “gaming-centric” environments playing… you guessed it, games.

6. Those Who Ignore History…
For years we’ve heard about the evils of MP3 and illegal downloading. All the while the RIAA and music industry had two formats that could have prevented any illegal copying – at least for all but the most dedicated crackers: DVD-Audio and SACD. These formats proved to be higher quality than CD, presented much enhanced copy protection schemes and were easily used as alternative formats to CD. Yet both formats failed miserably to achieve any significant market penetration. Why? Without an artificial “shove” from the record industry – which never materialized – technology alone is never enough to push a new format into the hands of consumers. In terms of convenience and ease of use, DVD-Audio and SACD offered nothing to consumers. In fact, they made listening to music more complex, since most hardware was unable to correctly decode and provide adequate bass management for the new formats.

Could these formats have succeeded? Absolutely. If the recording industry had presented a plan to phase out CDs and the “format war” had been avoided (simply by the industry picking one format over the other) we would all be using DVD-Audio players and illegal downloadable music would be mostly confined to analogue rips or older music. Is this a stretch? Perhaps, but only because history shows us that corporate greed causes most companies to miss the long term economical gains over a short term loss of licensing revenues.

7. People Want Technology that’s 15 Minutes Ahead of Its Time
For many people, getting into HDTV is all about the widescreen and being able to see their DVDs with more clarity than ever before. When Billy Bob comes home with his new high definition 720p display, the difference between that and his older SD TV is amazing – at least when he’s watching DVDs. You see, that’s the problem – and it’s two-fold. While most consumers are still getting into the HDTV craze, they’re already impressed. And the difference between SD TV and HDTV is more amazing than the difference between 480p DVDs and 1080i downrezzed high definition discs.

The other side of the coin is the lack of HD content available on TV – and this is a biggie. While Billy Bob is impressed by his DVD player, he is dumbfounded by his cable TV – which actually looks worse than it did on his old set (mostly because it’s bigger). You see, nobody told Billy Bob that he’d have to get an antenna or subscribe to HD service from his cable/satellite provider. He was also not told that most of his favorite shows (Billy likes sitcoms and the Sci-Fi Channel) aren’t yet available in HD, regardless of technology or service provider. As a result, many Americans are underwhelmed or feel like they got burned by HDTV. The last thing they’re going to do is rush out and buy the next greatest thing.

8. Enthusiasts Are Getting Tired (and Smarter)
While some home theater audio- and videophiles have the money and inclination to rush out and buy the latest and greatest toys as soon as they are available, many more are becoming more cautious. Burned by 8-track, laserdisc, SACD, and DVD-Audio (and possibly soon non-HDCP HDTV) – these war-weary consumers are going to think long and hard before jumping onto any new technological bandwagons. This leaves a shrunken market of even the bleeding-edge consumers, and that means even less sales to early-adopters.

9. A Skeptical News Media Doesn’t Help
I’ll admit it, we’re part of the “problem” (though I’d like to think we’re saving consumers from making the next big mistake). An increasingly skeptical news media isn’t buying into the hype of HD DVD and Blu-ray, especially not after wasting millions of editorial words on DVD-Audio and SACD, only to watch the software and technology dwindle into obscurity. Even after almost 6 years, most consumers continue to proffer puzzled looks when these audio formats are mentioned. The new DVD formats are getting plenty of press, mind you, but with the Toshiba flop and lack of software, the fact that the Emperor has no clothes (at least not yet) is hard to avoid.

10. Broadband and IPTV to Compete?
With Verizon, AOL, Time Warner and others jumping to provide HD on-demand services for the consumer it is a very likely event that high definition DVD will be something that isn’t relevant in a service-directed marketplace. Add to this Apple Computer’s recent push for video downloads and we may find that consumers are far more interested in quantity, portability, and ease of use over high quality source material. Even with respect to high definition formats, downloadable files burned to consumer-supplied media may make data high definition DVDs more significant than the retail formats. This consumer model is being readied for testing in South Carolina’s head-end for Time Warner Cable this year.

So, while I certainly hope for the best, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. High definition is headed for a niche market at best, not an industry takeover.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/edit...DVDsfailed.php





If Your Face Fits
Sean Coughlan

An online social network is sweeping the most famous universities. Is the Facebook website going to create the digital equivalent of the old school tie?

What are the three most important things in the life of students in the United States? Beer, iPods and Facebook.

That's the finding of a lifestyle-tracking survey in US colleges this month. But what's that third one again?

Facebook is an online social network which has swept the university population in the United States and is making a foothold in this country. It's already a verb: "to facebook" someone. And if a couple are really publicly together they'll be described as "facebook official".

But what is this thing that US students say is now more important than sex and texting?

Founded by a Harvard student a couple of years ago, Facebook allows people to list their personal details online and communicate with other people through the website. It's an online Who's Who. It's how you advertise your parties and politics.

Digital ivy league

So what? You might think this is just another campus fad, or a pale imitation of Myspace, the social networking site that's one of the top five websites in the world. But what's different about Facebook is that it's not just an easy way to keep in touch, it's also a way of keeping it exclusive.

The website works around individual institutions. So if you don't have an e-mail account from the University of Oxford, you don't get into the Facebook for students at Oxford.

And in the UK, the Facebook wave has made its biggest impact at the upmarket universities - in places such as Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, the London School of Economics.

"It's pretty much universal at Oxford, everyone is on it," says Richard Hardiman, deputy editor of the Oxford Student newspaper.

Students put on their pictures, describe their likes and dislikes and romantic status - and use the website to swap messages. You list your friends, you can check out your friends' friends, or find people who have matching interests.

People use their real names and pictures - and the fact that these are identifiably fellow students makes it seem safer, says Richard Hardiman.

There's also a dating aspect of the website - as account holders can identify their current relationship status as anything from single to "it's complicated".

Blind dates

"A tremor can go through a social group when they hear someone has updated their relationship profile," says Hardiman.

Facebook

Founded as an online social directory by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004
7.5m people registered
Seventh most popular website in US
"Facebooking": checking someone's Facebook profile before meeting them
"Facebook official": really going out together

So widespread is the use of "facebooking" of potential partners - checking out how they look and what they like - that Cambridge students have warned about the death of the blind date.

This hasn't met with universal approval. Sam Steddy, a languages student at University College London, says that the obsession with using Facebook is disrupting non-online relationships.

"People will organise parties and I'll say 'I didn't know you were having one'. And they'll say: 'I put it on Facebook'. They forget that there's a real world out there."

Among the students supporting lecturers during the recent strike was UCL's Kat Lay - and she said distributing information through Facebook was the most effective campaign tool.

"Leaflets would get thrown in the bin. But everyone is so obsessed with Facebook that they use it every day - people would be more likely to see something there," she says.

'Wheat from the chavs'

But what are the implications of all this? In the United States, Facebook has drawn the enthusiastic attention of politicians and businesses, eager to influence the hatching ground of the bright, young middle classes.

For politicians, it's a form of digital hustings, giving them a chance to set up stall in the place where young people are meeting. And for brand promoters, it's an instant insight into what young people like and dislike.

Employers have also been using the website as a way of checking out job applicants - creating a rash of stories about sober-looking job applicants being caught out by their own frolicking Facebook listings.

But in the UK, the question raised by Facebook is whether it's going to be socially exclusive. As an Oxford paper asks, is it about sorting the "wheat from the chavs"?

This extends beyond university, because Facebook also provides an ongoing private connection for students after they've graduated and when they're in the jobs market.

Will people be using these networks to tap each other up for jobs? How would you know if people were recruiting from lists of Oxbridge friends of friends?

Social commentator and university professor, Frank Furedi, says that the "sub-cultures gathering around these networks will become very powerful".

Not least because these huge exchanges of information and ideas are all taking place below the radar - out of sight of the traditional media. But Professor Furedi says that overall these networks will help people to sustain relationships, rather than create division.

"On balance, these networks will be positive, people will be able to intensify their social engagement with each other."

More to the point, these online networks have already entered the language. What's the ultimate sign that someone is really committed to you?

"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5109160.stm





Kent Banning Athlete Web Profiles
Ryan Loew

One student chose a picture of himself shirtless holding a Miller Lite can for his profile photo. He's on the baseball team.

Another belongs to the "My cell phone is my best friend when I'm drunk in Kent" group and lists skinny-dipping as an interest. She competes in track and field.

Both are Kent State University athletes with profiles on Facebook.com, a social networking Web site that boasts more than 7.5 million users from high schools and universities nationwide.

But soon, Kent State's nearly 400 athletes will be banned from Facebook -- not by the Web site, but by university administrators.

Athletics Director Laing Kennedy recently told student-athletes they have until Aug. 1 to remove their Facebook profiles, citing a need to protect both their identities and the university's image.

"We're really concerned about the safety of our student-athletes and some of the personal information some of them have on there," he said.

Many universities also warn students against putting personal information on such online sites out of concern that it makes them targets for predators, and some schools review the sites for evidence of wrongdoing.

Kennedy said some Kent students who list phone numbers and addresses have been contacted inappropriately, either by strangers or sports agents.

Although Kennedy said he regrets limiting the students' ability to communicate, he sees it as a necessary step.

"It would be irresponsible on our part if this led to something serious," he said.

The move to ban the site came from students and coaches expressing concern over safety and privacy issues. Kennedy said he hasn't seen the site.

If student-athletes don't remove their profiles by the deadline, they risk losing their scholarships, he said. Coaches and athletics counselors will monitor the site for violators.

The ban presents some First Amendment concerns, said Gary Daniels, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

Many high schools and colleges prohibit the consumption of alcohol during a sports season, which makes sense, he said.

But this is a different story.

"There's no clear connection between their roles as athletes and their use of these Web sites," Daniels said.

"For the government to say that you can't engage in First Amendment activities, they better have a really good reason. And saying, 'I don't want them to do it' is not a good-enough reason."

Student-athletes are representatives of the university, Kennedy said, and anything embarrassing on a student's profile can be embarrassing for the university as well.

"The expectations of a student-athlete are significantly higher than if you are an ordinary student," Kennedy said.

Most students have responded to the ban positively, Kennedy said.

Other universities have expressed concern with Facebook but have taken different steps.

Miechelle Willis, senior associate athletics director for Ohio State, said that university doesn't have a policy.

It instead engages coaches and student-athletes in talks of what is and isn't appropriate for networking sites.

"We're trying not to implement a policy where students have to remove their pages and instead using it as an educational opportunity," she said.

Greg Seibert, director of security and compliance for Kent State, said all students, not just athletes, face safety issues with networking sites.

By posting their addresses, class schedules and what bars they go to, they put themselves at risk, he said.

"That's pretty much a blueprint if you want to stalk me," he said.

Resident advisers at Ohio State review Facebook to see what their residents are doing behind closed doors, said Steve Kremer, assistant vice president for student affairs.

In a handful of occasions, he said, some students have been investigated by police based on their profiles.

In one instance, he said, a group of students was caught after posting a photo of themselves with stolen property.

Police at other universities have staked out parties and other illegal activities through the site.

Businesses are also checking out students' Facebook and Myspace profiles when considering a new hire.

For that reason, some information is best left off the sites, Kent State's Seibert said.

"If you go on and on about the times you were stoned out of your mind or drunk driving, and an employer sees that … you might not get the job," he said.

Erin Evans, a recruiter at the Worthington office of Act-I, a local staffing company, said it doesn't look at the Facebook profiles of potential hires.

But she stressed the importance of excluding information employers wouldn't want to see.

"Anyone can Google you and find many different things," she said. "The Internet is open for everybody."


Dispatch reporter Bob Moser contributed to this story.
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/news...p?story=194268





Kent State Bans Student Athletes From Facebook
Peter Pollack

Kent State University has elected to ban its student athletes from placing profiles on Facebook.com. Reasons given range from concern over the safety of the athletes, who can be easily stalked using the personal information often found on Facebook profiles, to concern over the image of the university, given some of the info students choose to share in what amounts to a very public forum.

Free speech issues abound, of course, but it's hard to blame any school for being worried about its image if its most public representatives might be on display engaging in drug use, underage drinking, sex, or hazing. College athletic programs being what they are, many schools depend on the revenue generated by sports programs as a significant source of funding. There are also secondary benefits that come with the notoriety of a good athletic program, including being perceived as a desirable school by prospective students and potentially higher contributions from pleased alumni. Although few people probably expect any school to have a squeaky-clean student base, scandal does no one any good, and online chronicles of wild activity can alter public perception from "good school" to "party school" to "I'm not sending my kid there." With sites such as BadJocks.com trolling the 'Net for outrageous acts, a few minor incidents can begin to shift a college's image very quickly.

Kent State officials have also expressed concern over the personal information posted by student athletes. That data has been used by both sports agents and fans to contact students inappropriately.

Although there have been several cases in which Kent State students have gone public with activities the university would rather they kept private or avoided altogether, the school has so far been spared any real trouble from profiles on Facebook. Other schools have not been so lucky, as in the case with North Carolina's Elon University, where photos of baseball players at a party were displayed on Facebook. It wasn't so much the party that got them in trouble, but the fact that the students were displayed drinking and wearing women's underwear—probably not the public image a high-grade private university affiliated with the United Church of Christ is looking to project.

While asking college athletes to agree to a code of conduct is pretty standard practice, banning them outright from using a particular web site is seen by many as a fairly draconian reaction to the problem. For one thing, there is the question of just how much control a school should be allowed to exercise over an activity that could very well be benign most of the time. For another, banning a particular web site probably has little effect when numerous online outlets—ranging from other social sites like MySpace and Friendster to blogs and more traditional web pages—exist upon which students can post personal information.

Certainly, the schools have a right and a reason to be concerned. With students from such well-known universities as Northwestern and Penn State getting into trouble by documenting their activity on the web, and even the police beginning to take an interest, the problem is more than theoretical. On one level, Kent State could be applauded for having the foresight to prevent an issue from ever arising. However, outright bans are probably less likely to produce the desired effect than simply educating the students about what is expected of them and potential issues they may face. Education, after all, is what going to college is all about, isn't it?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060626-7133.html





"Shoot the messenger"

Bush Says Report on Bank Data Was Disgraceful
Sheryl Gay Stolberg

President Bush on Monday condemned as "disgraceful" the disclosure last week by The New York Times and other newspapers of a secret program to investigate and track terrorists that relies on a vast international database that includes Americans' banking transactions.

The remarks were the first in public by Mr. Bush on the issue, and they came as the administration intensified its attacks on newspapers' handling of it. In a speech in Nebraska on Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly criticized The Times by name, while Treasury Secretary John W. Snow dismissed as "incorrect and offensive" the rationale offered by the newspaper's executive editor for the decision to publish.

"Congress was briefed," Mr. Bush said. "And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."

The New York Times, followed by The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, began publishing accounts of the program on Thursday evening.

In his remarks during a brief photo session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Mr. Bush appeared irritated, at times leaning forward for emphasis, though he did not mention any newspaper by name.

Mr. Cheney, who had earlier said he was offended by news accounts of the financial tracking program, on Monday went a step further, singling out The Times for criticism in a separate appearance at a fundraising luncheon for a Republican candidate for Congress, Adrian Smith, in Grand Island, Neb.

"Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs," the vice president said, adding that the program provides "valuable intelligence" and has been "successful in helping break up terrorist plots."

The executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, said in an e-mail statement on Monday evening that the decision to publish had been "a hard call." But Mr. Keller noted that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has "embarked on a number of broad, secret programs aimed at combating terrorism, often without seeking new legal authority or submitting to the usual oversight."

He added, "I think it would be arrogant for us to pre-empt the work of Congress and the courts by deciding these programs are perfectly legal and abuse-proof, based entirely on the word of the government."

Representative Peter King, Republican of New York and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, released a letter on Monday in which he called on the attorney general to investigate whether The Times's decision to publish the article violated the Espionage Act.

In a television interview on Sunday, Mr. King described the disclosure as "absolutely disgraceful" and said he believed that the newspaper's action had violated the statute.

In Nebraska on Monday, Mr. Cheney reminded his audience that The Times had also disclosed the National Security Agency's secret program of monitoring international communications of suspected terrorists without court warrants. Mr. Cheney said it was "doubly disturbing" that The Times printed the article and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest honor, for it.

"I think that is a disgrace," he said.

Administration officials had argued strongly that in reporting on the financial tracking operation, The Times would endanger national security by prompting the Belgian banking consortium that maintains the financial data to withdraw from the program. On Sunday, Mr. Keller, the paper's executive editor, posted a letter on The New York Times Web site saying that the newspaper "found this argument puzzling," partly because the banking consortium is compelled by subpoena to comply.

Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

Mr. Keller said in the letter that the administration had made a "secondary argument" that publication of the article would lead terrorists to change tactics, but he said that argument had been made "in a halfhearted way."

Mr. Snow, the Treasury secretary, challenged that view in strong terms in a letter to Mr. Keller, saying, "Nothing could be further from the truth." Mr. Snow said that he and other high-level officials, including Democrats, had made "repeated pleas" in an effort to dissuade The Times from publication. The letter was made public by the Treasury in a news release on Monday evening.

In explaining the newspaper's rationale for publication, Mr. Keller also wrote that it was not the newspaper's job "to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective" — an explanation that drew pointed criticism from Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, during a televised briefing on Monday.

Mr. Snow, who is not related to the Treasury secretary, said journalists made such judgments all the time, and accused The Times of endangering lives and departing from what he said was a longstanding tradition by news organizations of keeping government secrets during wartime.

"Traditionally in this country in a time of war, members of the press have acknowledged that the commander in chief, in the exercise of his powers, sometimes has to do things secretly in order to protect the public," Mr. Snow said. "This is a highly unusual departure."

Mr. Snow said there was no coordinated effort by the White House to ratchet up pressure on journalists, or The Times in particular. But he said the president seemed eager to have a chance to express his views about the issue, and decided at the last minute to take reporters' questions at Monday's photo session, after a meeting with supporters of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money," the president said. "And that's exactly what we're doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror."

On Capitol Hill, the financial-tracking program itself has not generated much criticism, even from Democrats, since its existence was disclosed. A spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said Mr. Reid was briefed on the program several weeks ago and had concluded that "it does not appear to be based on the same shaky and discredited legal analysis the vice president and his allies invoked to underpin the N.S.A. domestic spying program."

An exception has been Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has made privacy a signature issue and who said in an interview Monday that the Bush administration was adopting a strategy of "shoot the messenger" in trying to avoid Congressional oversight of the financial tracking program.

"There are very serious constitutional and legal questions that have been raised," Mr. Markey said, "and they're being obscured by this almost ad hominem attack on The New York Times."

Administration officials have held classified briefings about the banking program for some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 commission, intelligence and law enforcement officials said, and more lawmakers were briefed after the administration learned that The Times was making inquiries for an article about the program.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/wa...rtner=homepage





Damage Study Urged on Surveillance Reports
Scott Shane

Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, asked the director of national intelligence on Tuesday to assess any damage to American counterterrorism efforts caused by the disclosure of secret programs to monitor telephone calls and financial transactions.

Mr. Roberts, Republican of Kansas, singled out The New York Times for an article last week that reported that the government was tracking money transfers handled by a banking consortium based in Belgium. The targeting of the financial data, which includes some Americans' transactions, was also reported Thursday by The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.

In his letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Mr. Roberts wrote that "we have been unable to persuade the media to act responsibly and to protect the means by which we protect this nation."

He asked for a formal evaluation of damage to intelligence collection resulting from the revelation of the secret financial monitoring as well as The Times's disclosure in December of the National Security Agency's monitoring of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans suspected of having links to Al Qaeda.

In London, meanwhile, a human rights group said Tuesday that it had filed complaints in 32 countries alleging that the banking consortium, known as Swift, violated European and Asian privacy laws by giving the United States access to its data.

Simon Davies, director of the group, Privacy International, said the scale of the American monitoring, involving millions of records, "places this disclosure in the realm of a fishing exercise rather than a legally authorized investigation."

The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, has asked the Justice Ministry to investigate whether Swift violated Belgian law by allowing the United States government access to its data.

The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the program, and a Chicago lawyer, Steven E. Schwarz, filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Swift on Friday alleging that it had violated United States financial privacy statutes.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and numerous Republicans in Congress have vigorously defended the financial tracking program as legal and valuable and condemned its public disclosure. They have suggested that the articles might tip off terrorists that their money transfers could be detected. Representative J. D. Hayworth, Republican of Arizona, circulated a letter to colleagues on Tuesday asking that The Times's Congressional press credentials be suspended.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said any effort to measure damage to intelligence collection would take some time.

"It's not as if the terrorists are going to say, 'Oops! Going to stop doing that,' " Mr. Snow said at a briefing. "But I think it is safe to say that once you provide a piece of intelligence, people on the other side act on it."

The electronic messaging system operated by Swift, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, routes nearly $6 trillion a day in transfers among nearly 8,000 financial institutions.

At a confirmation hearing on Tuesday for Henry M. Paulson Jr., the nominee for Treasury secretary, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, asked whether the monitoring might violate the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. "I think you'll agree that we could fight terrorism properly and adequately without having a police state in America," Mr. Baucus said.

Mr. Paulson did not express an opinion on the propriety of the Swift monitoring but pledged to study it. "I am going to, if confirmed, be all over it, make sure I learn everything there is to learn, make sure I understand the law thoroughly," he said.

Democratic staff members said they had pressed Treasury officials in recent days for a fuller accounting of which members of Congress were briefed on the program and whether notification requirements under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, invoked by President Bush days after Sept. 11, were met.

Treasury officials have told Congressional staff members that they briefed the full intelligence committees of both houses about a month ago, after inquiries by The Times, according to one Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Some members were told of the program several years ago, but the Treasury Department has not provided a list of who was informed when, the aide said.

Democrats said they hoped to get a clearer idea of the legal foundations for the program, how it was monitored, and how long it will be allowed to continue under the president's invocation of emergency powers.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who serves on the House financial services committee, said Tuesday: "The administration is basing its actions on a 1970's law that never envisioned a state of perpetual emergency. It wasn't meant to become the status quo. That is why Congress needs to look at its current use."

Victor Comras, a former State Department official who served on a United Nations counterterrorism advisory group, pointed out on The Counterterrorism Blog that a 2002 United Nations report had noted with approval that the United States was monitoring international financial systems.

While providing no details, the report mentioned Swift and similar organizations, saying "the United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions."

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Brussels for this article, andCarl Hulse and Eric Lichtblau from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/wo.../28secure.html





Argument Against Report Puzzles NYT Editors
AP

The New York Times is defending itself from criticism about a report on secret financial monitoring of terrorists, saying it found arguments by Bush administration officials against publishing it ''puzzling'' and ''half-hearted.''

In a note on the paper's Web site Sunday, Executive Editor Bill Keller said the Times spent weeks discussing with Bush administration officials whether to publish the report.

He said part of the government's argument was that the anti-terror program would no longer be effective if it became known, because international bankers would be unwilling to cooperate and terrorists would find other ways to move money.

''We don't know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling,'' Keller said, pointing out that the banks were under subpoena to provide the information. ''The Bush Administration and America itself may be unpopular in Europe these days, but policing the byways of international terror seems to have pretty strong support everywhere.''

The note to readers was published the same day Rep. Peter King urged the Bush administration to prosecute the paper.

''We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,'' the New York Republican told The Associated Press.

Keller said the administration also argued ''in a half-hearted way'' that disclosure of the program ''would lead terrorists to change tactics.''

But Keller wrote that the Treasury Department has ''trumpeted ... that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.''

Stories about the money-monitoring program also appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. But King, who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he singled out the New York paper because it also disclosed a secret domestic-wiretapping program in December.

He charged that the paper was ''more concerned about a left-wing elitist agenda than it is about the security of the American people.''

King said he would write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, urging that the nation's chief law enforcer ''begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times -- the reporters, the editors and the publisher.''

King's action was not endorsed by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

''On the basis of the newspaper article, I think it's premature to call for a prosecution of The New York Times, just like I think it's premature to say that the administration is entirely correct,'' Specter told ''Fox News Sunday.''

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Treasury officials obtained access to a vast database called Swift -- the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The Belgium-based database handles financial message traffic from thousands of financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

Democrats and civil libertarians are questioning whether the program violated privacy rights.

The service, which routes more than 11 million messages each day, mostly captures information on wire transfers and other methods of moving money in and out of the United States, but it does not execute those transfers.

The service generally does not detect private, individual transactions in the United States, such as withdrawals from an ATM or bank deposits. It is aimed mostly at international transfers.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the paper acted responsibly, both in last week's report and in reporting last year about the wiretapping program.

''It's pretty clear to me that in this story and in the story last December that the New York Times did not act recklessly. They try to do whatever they can to take into account whatever security concerns the government has and they try to behave responsibly,'' Dalglish said. ''I think in years to come that this is a story American citizens are going to be glad they had, however this plays out.''

In recent months, journalists have been called into court to testify as part of investigations into leaks, including the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA operative's name.

Gonzales has said the First Amendment right of a free press should not be absolute when it comes to national security.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...Reporters.html





Letter From Bill Keller on The Times's Banking Records Report

The following is a letter Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, has sent to readers who have written to him about The Times's publication of information about the government's examination of international banking records:

I don't always have time to answer my mail as fully as etiquette demands, but our story about the government's surveillance of international banking records has generated some questions and concerns that I take very seriously. As the editor responsible for the difficult decision to publish that story, I'd like to offer a personal response.

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.) Some comes from readers who have considered the story in question and wonder whether publishing such material is wise. And some comes from readers who are grateful for the information and think it is valuable to have a public debate about the lengths to which our government has gone in combatting the threat of terror.

It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. Who are the editors of The New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications that also ran the banking story) to disregard the wishes of the President and his appointees? And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy, and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish.

The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly. The responsibility of it weighs most heavily on us when an issue involves national security, and especially national security in times of war. I've only participated in a few such cases, but they are among the most agonizing decisions I've faced as an editor.

The press and the government generally start out from opposite corners in such cases. The government would like us to publish only the official line, and some of our elected leaders tend to view anything else as harmful to the national interest. For example, some members of the Administration have argued over the past three years that when our reporters describe sectarian violence and insurgency in Iraq, we risk demoralizing the nation and giving comfort to the enemy. Editors start from the premise that citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news, and that the more they know the better they will be able to make their views known to their elected officials. Our default position — our job — is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate, and our biggest failures have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration's claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not "why publish?" but "why would we withhold information of significance?" We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so.

Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it's the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements.

Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress. Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight. We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them.

Our decision to publish the story of the Administration's penetration of the international banking system followed weeks of discussion between Administration officials and The Times, not only the reporters who wrote the story but senior editors, including me. We listened patiently and attentively. We discussed the matter extensively within the paper. We spoke to others — national security experts not serving in the Administration — for their counsel. It's worth mentioning that the reporters and editors responsible for this story live in two places — New York and the Washington area — that are tragically established targets for terrorist violence. The question of preventing terror is not abstract to us.

The Administration case for holding the story had two parts, roughly speaking: first that the program is good — that it is legal, that there are safeguards against abuse of privacy, and that it has been valuable in deterring and prosecuting terrorists. And, second, that exposing this program would put its usefulness at risk.

It's not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective, but the story cites strong arguments from proponents that this is the case. While some experts familiar with the program have doubts about its legality, which has never been tested in the courts, and while some bank officials worry that a temporary program has taken on an air of permanence, we cited considerable evidence that the program helps catch and prosecute financers of terror, and we have not identified any serious abuses of privacy so far. A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don't know about it.

We weighed most heavily the Administration's concern that describing this program would endanger it. The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don't know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it. The Bush Administration and America itself may be unpopular in Europe these days, but policing the byways of international terror seems to have pretty strong support everywhere. And while it is too early to tell, the initial signs are that our article is not generating a banker backlash against the program.

By the way, we heard similar arguments against publishing last year's reporting on the NSA eavesdropping program. We were told then that our article would mean the death of that program. We were told that telecommunications companies would — if the public knew what they were doing — withdraw their cooperation. To the best of my knowledge, that has not happened. While our coverage has led to much public debate and new congressional oversight, to the best of our knowledge the eavesdropping program continues to operate much as it did before. Members of Congress have proposed to amend the law to put the eavesdropping program on a firm legal footing. And the man who presided over it and defended it was handily confirmed for promotion as the head of the CIA.

A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.

I can appreciate that other conscientious people could have gone through the process I've outlined above and come to a different conclusion. But nobody should think that we made this decision casually, with any animus toward the current Administration, or without fully weighing the issues.

Thanks for writing.

Regards,
Bill Keller

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/bu...er-letter.html





Librarians holding firm – threat "without merit"

Feds Drop Request For Library Records
AP

Federal authorities have dropped their demand for library patrons' computer records, saying Monday that they had since discounted a potential terrorism threat that sparked the request.

But the FBI said the failure by librarians to comply with the request last year slowed the investigation.

"In this case, because the threat ultimately was without merit, that delay came at no cost other than slowing the pace of the investigation," John Miller, the FBI's assistant director, said in a statement. "In another case, where the threat may be real, the delays incurred in this investigation could have increased the danger of terrorists succeeding."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the librarians who received the demand for records, said the librarians might have been willing to comply with a similar demand if it had been approved by a judge.

"I'm glad that we're vindicated in resisting the request for the records," said George Christian of Windsor, one of the librarians. "We're just protecting our patrons to the extent we can."

The Library Connection, a consortium of 26 Connecticut libraries, sought help from the ACLU when the FBI demanded computer records through a national security letter last year.

The letter sought subscriber and billing information related to a computer used within a 45-minute time period on the day the threat was transmitted from a library computer on Feb. 15, 2005. Authorities said the request did not involve reading lists of library patrons.

"We concluded that based on the passage of time as well as other information we've been able to develop that this threat is probably not viable," Connecticut U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor said.

"All I can say is there was an e-mail and the e-mail contained information about a potential terrorist threat and we were trying to determine the credibility and the identity of the person who sent that e-mail because that will tell us a lot about whether or not something is a viable threat," O'Connor said.

O'Connor said authorities are trying to prevent attacks and not every case involves enough information to get a warrant.

The librarians were initially under a gag order that was lifted by a federal judge who said it unfairly prevented them from participating in a debate over how the Patriot Act should be rewritten.

"First the government abandoned the gag order that would have silenced four librarians for the rest of their lives, and now they've abandoned their demand for library records entirely," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU. "While the government's real motives in this case have been questionable from the beginning, their decision to back down is a victory not just for librarians but for all Americans who value their privacy."

Beeson said in an interview that the government pursued the case until after Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act.

O'Connor said the national security letter was appropriately issued and said the ACLU should not question the motives of federal agents trying to investigate a threat.

The librarians who were subject to the gag order last month are all on the board of Library Connection. The computer in question was in a library that is part of the group's shared computer network. Federal authorities have declined to say where exactly that computer was located.

The Patriot Act, passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows expanded surveillance of terror suspects, increased use of material witness warrants to hold suspects incommunicado and secret proceedings in immigration cases. It also removed a requirement that any records sought in a terrorism investigation be those of someone under suspicion. Now anyone's records can be obtained if the FBI considers them relevant to a terrorism or spying investigation.

Prosecutors argued that secrecy about demands for records is necessary to avoid alerting suspects and jeopardizing investigations. They contended the gag order prevented only the release of librarians' identities, not their ability to speak about the Patriot Act.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....category=Local





ACLU Seeks Information About Government Use of Brain Scanners in Interrogations

Group says technology should not be deployed until it is proven effective
Press Release

In the face of suspicions that the government is using cutting-edge brain-scanning technologies on suspected terrorists being held overseas or at home, the American Civil Liberties Union today announced that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with all the primary American security agencies.

"There are certain things that have such powerful implications for our society -- and for humanity at large -- that we have a right to know how they are being used so that we can grapple with them as a democratic society," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood."

The most likely technology to be used for anti-terrorism purposes is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which can produce live, real-time images of people's brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli. Two private companies have announced that they will begin to offer "lie detection" services using fMRI as early as this summer. These companies are marketing their services to federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and to state and local police departments.

"This technology must not be deployed until it is proven effective -- and we are a long way away from that point, according to scientists in the field," said Steinhardt. "What we don't want is to open our newspapers and find that another innocent person has been thrown into Guantánamo because interrogators have jumped to conclusions based on a technology no one understands very well."

Experts in the field say that the science to back up any reliable use of fMRI as a "lie detector" or "mind reader" simply does not exist. At most, correlations have been observed between certain brain patterns and particular, highly controlled behaviors produced in laboratory experiments. But experts note that these early experiments on a few American college students are a long way from real-world settings, involving individuals in widely varying situations and with widely varying cultures, intelligence levels and states of mind.

The ACLU's FOIA requests were filed yesterday with the Pentagon, NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

"These brain-scanning technologies have potentially far-reaching implications, yet uncertain results and effectiveness," said Steinhardt. "And we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding the underlying processes of the brain that the scanners have begun to reveal. We do not want to see our government yet again deploying a potentially momentous technology unilaterally and in secret, before Americans have had a chance to figure out how it fits in with our values as a nation."
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/medical/...s20060628.html





Coming Soon -- Mind-Reading Computers
Patricia Reaney

A raised eyebrow, quizzical look or a nod of the head are just a few of the facial expressions computers could soon be using to read people's minds.

An "emotionally aware" computer being developed by British and American scientists will be able to read an individual's thoughts by analyzing a combination of facial movements that represent underlying feelings.

"The system we have developed allows a wide range of mental states to be identified just by pointing a video camera at someone," said Professor Peter Robinson, of the University of Cambridge in England.

He and his collaborators believe the mind-reading computer's applications could range from improving people's driving skills to helping companies tailor advertising to people's moods.

"Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional moment to try to sell you something, a future where mobile phones, cars and Web sites could read our mind and react to our moods," he added.

The technology is already programmed to recognize different facial expressions generated by actors. Robinson hopes to get more data to determine whether someone is bored, interested, confused, or agrees or disagrees when it is unveiled at a science exhibition in London on Monday.

People visiting the four-day exhibition organized by the Royal Society, Britain's academy of leading scientists, will be invited to take part in a study to hone the program's abilities.

The scientists, who are developing the technology in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, also hope to get it to accept other inputs such as posture and gesture.

"Our research could enable Web sites to tailor advertising or products to your mood," Robinson told Reuters. "For example, a webcam linked with our software could process your image, encode the correct emotional state and transmit information to a Web site."

It could also be useful in online teaching to show whether someone understands what is being explained and in improving road safety by determining if a driver is confused, bored or tired.

"We are working with a big car company and they envision this being employed in cars within five years," Robinson said, adding that a camera could be built into the dashboard.

Anyone who does not want to give away too much information about what they are feeling, he said, can just cover up the camera.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsar...1-ArticlePage1





WEP Cracking, the FBI Way

WEP cracking usually takes hours. Lots of hours, depending on the amount of traffic on the access point. A few months ago, two FBI agents demonstrated how they were able to crack a WEP enabled access point within a couple of minutes. 3 minutes to be exact. This is unbelievable when compared to, say 3 days of work. Here is how they did it, and how you can do it. You may need to know your way with each and every of these tools to get this done. You can ask Google for that. Anyway, if you are familiar with them, just do as follows :

o Run Kismet to find your target network. Get the SSID and the channel.
o Run Airodump and start capturing data.
o With Aireplay, start replaying a packet on the target network. (You can find a ‘good packet’ by looking at the BSSID MAC on Kismet and comparing it to the captured packet’s BSSID MAC).
o Watch as Airodump goes crazy with new IVs. Thanks to Aireplay.
o Stop Airodump when you have about 1,000 IVs.
o Run Aircrack on the captured file.
o You should see the WEP key infront of you now.

The software runs on Linux, they are all available on the Knoppix Linux Live CD. And finally, I think you should always use a combination of 2 or more security features. As for what you need, get Aircrack (Includes Airodump, Aireplay, Aircrack and optional Airdecap for decrypting WEP/WPA capture files) and get Kismet.

Update: Kismet for Windows (Kiswin32) is available now.
http://www.primary0.com/2005/06/04/w...g-the-fbi-way/





The Newbie's Guide to Detecting the NSA

It's not surprising that an expert hired by EFF should produce an analysis that supports the group's case against AT&T. But last week's public court filing of a redacted statement by J. Scott Marcus is still worth reading for the obvious expertise of its author, and the cunning insights he draws from the AT&T spy documents.

An internet pioneer and former FCC advisor who held a Top Secret security clearance, Marcus applies a Sherlock Holmes level of reasoning to his dissection of the evidence in the case: 120-pages of AT&T manuals that EFF filed under seal, and whistleblower Mark Klein's observations inside the company's San Francisco switching center.

If you've been following Wired News' coverage of the EFF case, you won't find many new hard revelations in Marcus' analysis -- at least, not in the censored version made public. But he connects the dots to draw some interesting conclusions:

· The AT&T documents are authentic. That AT&T insists they remain under seal is evidence enough of this, but Marcus points out that the writing style is pure Bell System, with the "meticulous attention to detail that is typical of AT&T operations."

· There may be dozens of surveillance rooms in AT&T offices around the country. Among other things, Marcus finds that portions of the documents are written to cover a number of different equipment rack configurations, "consistent with a deployment to 15 to 20" secret rooms.

· The internet surveillance program covers domestic traffic, not just international traffic. Marcus notes that the AT&T spy rooms are "in far more locations than would be required to catch the majority of international traffic"; the configuration in the San Francisco office promiscuously sends all data into the secret room; and there's no reliable way an analysis could infer a user's physical location from their IP address. This, of course, directly contradicts President Bush's description of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program."

· The system is capable of looking at content, not just addresses. The configuration described in the Klein documents -- presumably the Narus software in particular -- "exists primarily to conduct sophisticated rule-based analysis of content", Marcus concludes.

My bullet points don't come close to conveying the painstaking reasoning he lays out to back each of his conclusions.

Perhaps the most interesting -- and, in retrospect, obvious -- point Marcus makes is that AT&T customers aren't the only ones apparently being tapped. "Transit" traffic originating with one ISP and destined for another is also being sniffed if it crosses AT&T's network. Ironically, because the taps are installed at the point at which that network connects to the rest of the world, the safest web surfers are AT&T subscribers visiting websites hosted on AT&T's network. Their traffic doesn't pass through the splitters.

With that in mind, here's the 27B Stroke 6 guide to detecting if your traffic is being funneled into the secret room on San Francisco's Folsom street.

If you're a Windows user, fire up an MS-DOS command prompt. Now type tracert followed by the domain name of the website, e-mail host, VoIP switch, or whatever destination you're interested in. Watch as the program spits out your route, line by line.

C:\> tracert nsa.gov

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 12.110.110.204
[...]
7 11 ms 14 ms 10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
8 13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]
9 18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17
10 88 ms 92 ms 91 ms tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.186]
11 88 ms 90 ms 88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41]
12 89 ms 97 ms 89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
13 89 ms 88 ms 88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65]
14 102 ms 93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214
15 94 ms 94 ms 93 ms 12.110.110.13
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * *

In the above example, my traffic is jumping from Level 3 Communications to AT&T's network in San Francisco, presumably over the OC-48 circuit that AT&T tapped on February 20th, 2003, according to the Klein docs.

The magic string you're looking for is sffca.ip.att.net. If it's present immediately above or below a non-att.net entry, then -- by Klein's allegations -- your packets are being copied into room 641A, and from there, illegally, to the NSA.

Of course, if Marcus is correct and AT&T has installed these secret rooms all around the country, then any att.net entry in your route is a bad sign.
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/ind...try_id=1510938





Man Charged After Videotaping Police
Andrew Wolfe

A city man is charged with violating state wiretap laws by recording a detective on his home security camera, while the detective was investigating the man’s sons.

Michael Gannon, 49, of 26 Morgan St., was arrested Tuesday night, after he brought a video to the police station to try to file a complaint against Detective Andrew Karlis, according to Gannon’s wife, Janet Gannon, and police reports filed in Nashua District Court.

Police instead arrested Gannon, charging him with two felony counts of violating state eavesdropping and wiretap law by using an electronic device to record Karlis without the detective’s consent.

The Gannons’ son, Shawn Gannon, 18, is charged with resisting detention and disorderly conduct, and his wife also was cited for disorderly conduct, she said.

Janet Gannon said the family plans to hire a lawyer, and expects to sue the police department.The couple’s 15-year-old son also was arrested, charged as a juvenile in an unrelated robbery case, according to police reports and Janet Gannon.

The Gannons installed a video and audio recording system at their home, a four-unit building at 22-28 Morgan St., to monitor the front door and parking areas, family members told police. They installed the cameras about two years ago, buying the system at Wal-Mart, Janet Gannon told the police, according to reports filed in court. The Gannons have owned the property, which is assessed at $382,700, for the past three years, city records show.

Janet Gannon spoke with The Telegraph by phone Wednesday afternoon, before going to bail out her husband. She said they installed the system in response to crime in the neighborhood, and at their house.

“We’ve had two break-ins. One guy came right up our stairs and started beating on my husband, and we called the cops,” she said. Another time, after someone broke into a camper on their property, Janet Gannon said an officer suggested they were “too rich” for the neighborhood, and should move.

The security cameras record sound and audio directly to a videocassette recorder inside the house, and the Gannons posted warnings about the system, Janet Gannon said.On Tuesday night, Michael Gannon brought a videocassette to the police department, and asked to speak with someone in “public relations,” his wife said and police reported.

Gannon wanted to lodge a complaint against Karlis, who had come to the family’s house while investigating their sons, Janet Gannon said. She said Karlis showed up late at night, was rude, and refused to leave when they asked him.

“He was just very smart-mouthed. He put his foot in the door, and my husband said, ‘Excuse me, I did not invite you in, please leave,’ and he wouldn’t,” Janet Gannon said. “We did not invite him in, we asked him to leave, and he wouldn’t.”

After the police arrested the Gannons’ sons, Janet Gannon said, they “secured” the house, and told her and her sister-in-law they had to stay out of it from around 8:45 p.m. Tuesday until about 4 a.m. Wednesday.

Police said they were waiting to get a warrant to search the house, Janet Gannon said.

“They were waiting for a warrant to seize the cameras and the tapes in my house . . . because they said having these cameras was against the law. They’re security cameras,” she said, adding, “They said they could do that. They could seize my apartment.”

Karlis went to the Gannons’ home at about 11:30 p.m. Friday night and again at about 7 p.m. Tuesday, police reported. Karlis was investigating the Gannons’ 15-year-old son in connection with a June 21 mugging outside Margaritas restaurant, for which two other teens already have been charged, according to police reports. The boy also is charged with possessing a handgun stolen three years ago in Vermont, and resisting detention, police said.

The boy wasn’t home when Karlis went there, and the Gannons were “uncooperative” regarding his whereabouts, police reported.

The Gannons felt police were harassing the family, Janet Gannon said.

“There were six cops in my yard,” the first time police came, she said. “My husband was very upset. How many cops does it take to talk to a 15-year-old.”

Karlis didn’t know about the security camera until his second visit, when Michael Gannon told him to “smile” for the camera, police reported.

Janet Gannon said her husband explicitly warned officers of the camera, later adding “smile,” as a joke.

“I heard him say it,” she said. “He said, ‘Gentlemen, there’s a camera right there.’”

According to police, however, Janet Gannon told officers she didn’t remember her husband warning police about the security camera.

Police reported that Gannon “has a history of being verbally abusive” toward police, and that after his arrest, he remarked that the officers “were a bunch of corrupt (expletives).”
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/...WS01/106290121





Lawmakers: NSA Database Incomplete

Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees confirm that the National Security Agency has compiled a massive database of domestic phone call records. But some lawmakers also say that cooperation by the nation's telecommunication companies was not as extensive as first reported by USA TODAY on May 11.

Several lawmakers, briefed in secret by intelligence officials about the program after the story was published, described a call records database that is enormous but incomplete. Most asked that they not be identified by name, and many offered only limited responses to questions, citing national security concerns.

In the May 11 article that revealed the database, USA TODAY reported that its sources said AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon had agreed to provide the NSA with call records.

AT&T, which is the nation's largest telecommunications company, providing service to tens of millions of Americans, hasn't confirmed or denied its participation with the database. BellSouth and Verizon have denied that they contracted with the NSA to turn over phone records. On May 12, an attorney for former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio confirmed the USA TODAY report that Qwest had declined to participate in the NSA program.

Most members of the intelligence committees wouldn't discuss which companies cooperated with the NSA. However, several did offer more information about the program's breadth and scope, confirming some elements of USA TODAY's report and contradicting others:

•Nineteen lawmakers who had been briefed on the program verified that the NSA has built a database that includes records of Americans' domestic phone calls. The program collected records of the numbers dialed and the length of calls, sources have said, but did not involve listening to the calls or recording their content.

•Five members of the intelligence committees said they were told by senior intelligence officials that AT&T participated in the NSA domestic calls program.

AT&T, asked to comment, issued a written statement Thursday. "The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T's participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause 'exceptionally grave harm to national security' and would violate both civil and criminal statutes," it said. "Under these circumstances, AT&T is not able to respond to such allegations."

•Five members of the intelligence committees said they were told that BellSouth did not turn over domestic call records to the NSA.

Asked about BellSouth's denial, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "What they said appears to be accurate."

Still, BellSouth customers' call records could end up in the NSA database, he said. "Obviously, a BellSouth customer can contract with AT&T (for long-distance phone service). There is a possibility that numbers are available from other phone companies."

•Three lawmakers said that they had been told that Verizon did not turn over call records to the NSA. However, those three and another lawmaker said MCI, the long-distance carrier that Verizon acquired in January, did provide call records to the government.

While Verizon has denied providing call records to the NSA, it has declined to comment on whether MCI participated in the calls database program.

"The President has referred to an NSA program, which he authorized, directed against al-Qaeda," Verizon said in a written statement May 12. "Because that program is highly classified, Verizon cannot comment on that program, nor can we confirm or deny whether we have had any relationship to it." The statement also said the company was now "ensuring that Verizon's policies are implemented at that entity (MCI) and that all its activities fully comply with law."

In the weeks since the database was revealed, congressional and intelligence sources have offered other new details about its scope and effectiveness.

"It was not cross-city calls. It was not mom-and-pop calls," said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who receives briefings as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee. "It was long-distance. It was targeted on (geographic) areas of interest, places to which calls were believed to have come from al-Qaeda affiliates and from which calls were made to al-Qaeda affiliates."

Other lawmakers who were briefed about the program expressed concerns that gaps in the database could undercut its usefulness in identifying terrorist cells.

"It's difficult to say you're covering all terrorist activity in the United States if you don't have all the (phone) numbers," Chambliss said. "It probably would be better to have records of every telephone company."

"The database is not complete," said another lawmaker who was briefed on the program, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. "We don't know if this works yet."

Other publications have characterized the breadth of the database and how it is used.

The New York Times reported on May 12, for instance, that a senior government official had confirmed that the NSA had access to records of most telephone calls in the USA but said the records are used in a limited way to track "known bad guys."

The Washington Post reported on May 12 that "sources with knowledge of the program" said that the Bush administration had been collecting the domestic telephone records in "gargantuan databases" and that the "companies cooperating with the NSA dominate the U.S. telecommunications market and connect hundreds of billions of telephone calls each year."

President Bush and his top aides have defended the legality of the program, although they haven't directly confirmed its existence.

Three days after the USA TODAY story was published, national security adviser Stephen Hadley said on CBS' Face the Nation that he couldn't "confirm or deny the claims that are in the USA TODAY story."

He went on: "But it's very interesting what that story does not claim. It does not claim that the government was listening on domestic phone calls. It does not claim that names were passed, that addresses were passed, that content was passed. It's really about calling records, if you read the story. ... There are a variety of ways in which those records lawfully can be provided to the government."

At a news conference two weeks later, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a similar point. "There has been no confirmation about any details relating to the USA TODAY story," he said. "I will say that what was in the USA TODAY story did relate to business records." Citing a 1979 Supreme Court decision, he said, "There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in those kinds of records."

Lawmakers who were briefed about the program disagree about whether it's legal.

"It was within the president's inherent powers," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said there was a "schizophrenia in the presentation" by the administration. Officials say, " 'It's legal,' " she said. "But in the same breath they say, 'Perhaps we should take another look at FISA.' " FISA refers to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court that can grant warrants for eavesdropping.

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., another member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "I find it interesting that it seems the government is asking telephone companies to do things that their customers and shareholders would find totally unpalatable."

Debate over the database continues in several areas:

•In federal courts, at least 20 class-action lawsuits have been filed alleging that the government and phone companies have violated the rights of people whose calls have been reviewed by the NSA. The Justice Department signaled its intention in a court filing in Chicago this month to assert the "military and state secrets privilege" in all of them. That privilege allows the government to seek the dismissal of lawsuits if pursuing them would imperil national security.

•In New Jersey, the state attorney general is investigating whether telephone companies released confidential information without the consent of their customers. The federal government asked a court this month to quash subpoenas the state had issued to phone companies seeking information.

•At the Federal Communications Commission, the American Civil Liberties Union requested this month that approval of AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth be withheld until the commission reviews the companies' dealings with the NSA. However, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said last month that the commission couldn't investigate complaints about the phone companies and the NSA because the reported activities were classified.

•On Capitol Hill, Vice President Cheney held private talks this month with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Cheney discouraged them from supporting Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter's vow to call telecommunications executives before the panel to answer questions about the database. Specter, R-Pa., protested to Cheney in an angry public letter.

The White House then agreed to talks with Specter on legislation he has drafted that would give the administration the option of putting the NSA's warrantless-surveillance program — which includes domestic wiretapping without a court warrant when one participant in a conversation is overseas — under the scrutiny of the FISA court.

"I'm prepared to defer, on a temporary basis, calling in the telephone companies," Specter said. If the discussions on his legislation fall through, however, he said, he will move again to demand testimony from the telephone executives about the database.

This story was reported by Leslie Cauley, John Diamond, Jim Drinkard, Peter Eisler, Thomas Frank, Kevin Johnson and Susan Page. It was written by Page.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...6-30-nsa_x.htm





Court Review of Wiretaps May Be Near, Senator Says
Anne E. Kornblut

Senator Arlen Specter said Sunday that the White House and Congress were close to reaching a resolution on submitting a National Security Agency wiretap program to judicial review.

"I think there is an inclination to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that would be a big step forward for protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Mr. Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday."

President Bush and his top advisers have resisted calls for formal legal oversight of the program under which the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to terrorists. Only those communications into and out of the country are monitored, administration officials say.

Until late 2001, the security agency focused only on the foreign end of such conversations; if the agency decided that someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it was supposed to get a warrant from the intelligence surveillance court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people in the United States.

Revelations about that program have incited debate in Congress and beyond about the president's constitutional authority to order the wiretaps, and lawsuits have been filed against the government and phone companies.

At a Senate hearing in March, five former judges on the intelligence surveillance court urged Congress to give the court a formal role in overseeing the program. Members of Congress have offered proposals for oversight, and discussions continue with the administration over possible legislation.

Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, has proposed such legislation. In his television appearance on Sunday, he said discussions with Vice President Dick Cheney appeared to be leading to that end.

Mr. Specter expressed less concern over new reports that the administration, in another effort to investigate and block terrorists, has been secretly tracing financial records through a banking consortium in Brussels. He said he had not yet seen the need to hold hearings on the financial monitoring, disclosed Thursday by The New York Times and other news organizations.

But Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said he was outraged that such a sensitive method had been exposed and called for a criminal investigation into The Times.

"I'm calling on the attorney general to begin a criminal investigation and prosecution of The New York Times, its reporters, the editors that worked on this and the publisher," Mr. King said on the same Fox News program. "What they've done here is absolutely disgraceful."

He did not say on the program why he had singled out The Times in his remarks when others had also published articles about the banking program.

In a telephone interview on Sunday night, Mr. King said the reason was that "The Times is more of a recidivist" because of its publication of its article on the N.S.A. program last year. He added, however, that he believed that the actions of other news organizations, including The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, should also be examined.

Responding to Mr. King's remarks on the television program, Mr. Specter said: "I think it's premature to call for a prosecution of The New York Times, just like I think it's premature to say that the administration is entirely correct. I think you start with the proposition that there is not the privacy interest in bank records that there is in a telephone conversation. And let's find out more before we try to make a judgment here."

In a letter to readers posted Sunday on The Times's Web site, Bill Keller, the executive editor, wrote about the decisions to report about secret programs to monitor terrorism.

"Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to The Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight," Mr. Keller said. "We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them."

Asked on Sunday whether Mr. Bush was moving closer to accepting legal curbs on the N.S.A. program, Ken Lisaius, a White House spokesman, said: "The administration has long said that while we don't believe additional legal authority is necessary that we are willing to listen to the ideas of members of Congress on possible legislation. Further active discussions are ongoing, and we'll continue to work with Chairman Specter, as well as members of the Intelligence Committee, as that process proceeds."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/wa...on/26bank.html





Italians Weary of Scandals Generated by Phone Tapping
Peter Kiefer

Italy's justice system is famous for grinding slowly. But recently, whenever a scandal arises, the newspapers quickly fill up with tapped phone conversations of some of the nation's most important people, in the most embarrassing situations.

"She is Sicilian, so she isn't going to talk," Salvatore Sottile, an aide to one of Italy's most powerful politicians, is portrayed as saying in one transcript, as he discussed having an affair with a television presenter.

Theirs is the latest tale in a string of titillating though important cases that are, in effect, being tried in the mass media through leaked transcripts long before they get to court. The defendants often argue that their remarks were taken out of context.

But more and more, legal scholars — not to mention worried politicians — are objecting to both tapping and leaking on principle, seeing a grave risk to a fair trial. La Stampa newspaper contends that the obsession for tapping and leaking has become a national psychosis.

While the United States is struggling with the Bush administration's approval of broader eavesdropping on Americans, Italian authorities' use of phone-tapping has long been a simmering issue. But since 2001, the number of tapped phones has more than tripled, the Justice Ministry says. In each of the past two years, 100,000 phones have been tapped — representing a total of some 1.5 million overheard conversations — at an annual cost of 300 million euros, or some $379 million.

An Italian law established in 1974 stipulates that a judge may permit a tap if it is "indispensable" to an investigation and only when it pertains to crimes that carry sentences of five years or longer in prison.

"In some cases they are indispensable," said Antonio Polito, a former journalist who is now a senator representing the liberal Ulivo Party. "In many other cases, however, it is born from the laziness of the judges who don't know how to conduct an investigation any other way. Some think that if they cast out enough line, sooner or a later a fish will bite."

The current and nearly continual wave of transcript leaking began last year, in a case involving the Bank of Italy governor at the time, Antonio Fazio. He was brought down after a series of intercepts, one of which caught his wife cooing on the phone to a man who was trying to take over an Italian bank. More recently, tapped phone calls generated scandals over fixed soccer matches and party rivalries in regional elections.

The remarks of Mr. Sottile, who works for Gianfranco Fini, a national leader of the political right, were leaked while he was under house arrest in connection with a sting operation that centered on Prince Victor Emmanuel, the onetime heir to the Italian throne.

The prince's conversations were intercepted as he chatted about accepting bribes, swapping votes for political favors, insulting leftist politicians and seeking sex with young women.

"I wanted to go get a hooker," the prince was recorded as saying in a conversation with a businessman, Ugo Bonazza, who then provided an address. "I'll give her no more than 200 euro, eh?" the prince asked. "Even nothing," Mr. Bonazza responded. "Tell her that I'll arrange it later."

The prince, 70, is now under house arrest and the conversations have provided fodder for newspaper front pages.

A significant amount of the leaking seems to be deliberate. The possible culprits are many, including prosecutors — who are aching to intimidate wrongdoers but frustrated that the court system drags on — defense lawyers, politicians, or the carabinieri, Italy's national police force. Because the intercepted conversations pass through so many hands, leakers face little threat of being discovered.

In this climate, some lawyers see a threat to basic rights. Alberto Biffani, a prominent defense lawyer, said, "This is a country where civil liberties don't exist and where no one respects privacy."

In the early 1990's, Mr. Biffani said, he was shown transcripts of his phone conversations with a former client, Claudio Vitaloni, a former government minister. Mr. Vitaloni, with former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, was accused of involvement in the murder of the Italian journalist Mino Pecorelli. Both Mr. Andreotti and Mr. Vitaloni were acquitted.

But during the investigation, Mr. Biffani said, "We would pick up the phone and the carabinieri would be on the other end of the line. It shouldn't happen, but it does."

Italy's involvement with tapping dates to the early 1970's, when the government was locked in a battle with organized crime. But Stefano Rodota, a professor of law at Sapienza University in Rome and the former chairman of the Italian data protections commission, said, "The use and the aim has changed deeply."

Part of the problem, Mr. Rodota says, is Italy's cumbersome judicial system. "If you have to wait as we do in Italy for months or years before the conclusion of the investigation, and then wait for the trial, and you do not diffuse the data collected, it means that public opinion cannot be informed. If you have a faster and more efficient legal system, you can escape some aspects of the use of the media," he said.

It seems that Italian politicians have had enough of the intercepts making their way into the press. This week senators from both the left and right were howling in protest with rarely seen solidarity. A group of 53 senators signed a petition to form a commission to look into the practice of phone tapping, one of five parliamentary initiatives looking into the practice.

Italy's justice minister, Clemente Mastella, said he was willing to make changes through a decree if he were to get more bipartisan support. "I am ready to intervene with a decree against this bulimia of interceptions," Mr. Mastella was quoted as saying.

Senator Polito said, "It is certain that justice in Italy is slow, and inefficient in some cases." But, he warned: "If we want to substitute the penal justice with media justice, we are ruined. We drop to the level of a country that has no respect for rights."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/wo...e/25italy.html





Big Brother Watching You Surf?
Canadian Press

One of Canada's largest Internet service providers is warning its customers that Big Brother is lurking on-line, with the federal government expected to revive an Internet surveillance bill.

If the legislation is reintroduced, it could allow police unfettered access to personal information without a warrant, experts warn.

Bell Sympatico has informed its customers that it intends to "monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request."

Bell Sympatico's new customer service agreement, which took effect June 15, is a clear signal the telecommunications industry expects the Conservative government to revive the surveillance law, said Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa.

"Everybody expects it's going to be reintroduced," Geist said in an interview. "If anything, [the new bill] will be a hardened approach."

A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said no decision has been made on the bill, known as the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act.

But she noted that Day has spoken to telecom industry officials and legal experts about bringing it forward as early as the fall session.

"We don't know if it will be introduced in the fall, winter or spring," said Melisa Leclerc. "We're working on it."

The act was originally introduced by the Liberals last November, but died on the Commons order paper when their minority government fell shortly after.

Surveillance laws in the U.S. sparked controversy recently after several newspapers reported the U.S. Treasury Department has been secretly monitoring on-line banking activities to track terrorist financing.

Geist said Bell's new customer service agreement shows that Canadian telecommunications companies are already preparing to comply with new on-line surveillance legislation.

Bell Sympatico did not return calls requesting an interview.

Geist fears police will be able to demand customer information from Internet providers without having to make a case before a judge, opening the door wide to an abuse of civil rights.

The recent arrest of 17 men in the Toronto area on terrorism charges proves that Canada already has effective law enforcement tools, Geist argues.

"Authorities were able to investigate and arrest 17 individuals with the laws we have in place," he said. "Even if we do reach the conclusion that we need new laws, we need oversight included in the system."

Geist said police haven't yet made a compelling case to prove why the new surveillance rules are needed.

A spokesman for the RCMP said it would be premature to comment on the proposed legislation, since it has not yet been re-introduced.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...echnology/home





“Mmm mmm good”

Axl Rose Allegedly Bites Security Guard

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Axl Rose was arrested early Tuesday after allegedly biting a security guard in the leg in a hotel scuffle, police said.

The Guns N' Roses frontman was held on suspicion of attacking and threatening the guard and causing damage to the Berns Hotel, said police spokeswoman Towe Hagg.

"He was deemed too intoxicated to be questioned right away," Hagg told The Associated Press. She said a prosecutor will decide whether to press charges.

It was unclear what caused the fight, but Swedish tabloids said the guard tried to intervene when the 44-year-old rocker started arguing with a woman in the hotel lobby.

Police officer Fredrik Nylen was quoted by the daily Aftonbladet Web site as saying Rose acted aggressively toward police and had to be "handcuffed and restrained."

"He kept a high profile, so to speak," Nylen was quoted as saying.

Guns N' Roses played a concert in Stockholm's Globe Arena on Monday night, and had been partying at a well-known nightclub before the scuffle, Aftonbladet said.

In May, Rose and fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger capped an evening out at a new club called The Plumm in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood with midnight fisticuffs.

The scuffle reportedly started after Rose moved the drink of Hilfiger's girlfriend. According to Rose, Hilfiger, 55, smacked him in the arm and told him to put the drink back.

Rose was at the club to play a surprise set for "Rent" actress Rosario Dawson for her 27th birthday party.

He did perform, and dedicated the song "You're Crazy" to "my good friend Tommy Hilfiger."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Limbaugh Detained At Palm Beach Airport
AP

Rush Limbaugh was detained for more than three hours Monday at Palm Beach International Airport after authorities said they found a bottle of Viagra in his possession without a prescription.

Customs officials found a prescription bottle labeled as Viagra in his luggage that didn't have Limbaugh's name on it, but that of two doctors, said Paul Miller, spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

A doctor had prescribed the drug, but it was "labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes," Roy Black, Limbaugh's attorney, said in a statement.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection examined the 55-year-old radio commentator's luggage after his private plane landed at the airport from the Dominican Republic, said Miller.

The matter was referred to the sheriff's office, whose investigators interviewed Limbaugh. According to Miller, Limbaugh said that the Viagra was for his use, and that he obtained it from his doctors.

Investigators confiscated the drugs, which treats erectile dysfunction, and Limbaugh was released without being charged.

The sheriff's office plans to file a report with the state attorney's office. Miller said it could be a second-degree misdemeanor violation.

Limbaugh reached a deal last month with prosecutors who had accused the conservative talk-show host of illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping painkiller prescriptions. Under the deal, the charge, commonly referred to as "doctor shopping," would be dismissed after 18 months if he continues to submit to random drug tests and treatment for his acknowledged addiction to painkillers.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Tips n tails

How to Get Rid of Restart Now/Restart Later
Daniel Turini

I found this after a lot of Googling, so I'd like to share the solution. Yep, this may not be new or even advanced but it surely helped me...

Anyone who is running Windows XP SP2 know what I'm talking about. That stupid, annoying, most ill-designed dialog box ever invented in the history of the computer science that asks "Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?"

And there are only two options: Restart Now/Restart Later. "Restart Later" means that this stupid thing will ask you again in 10 minutes. Yes, if you're willing to work for the next 4 hours until lunch before rebooting, this means you'll need to answer this question 24 times. Did I mention that the dialog steals the focus?

Now, to get rid of it:

Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

You can configure how often it will nag you (I re-configured it for 720 minutes, which means I'll be asked twice on a work day), or completely disable it.

Oh, I almost forgot: this setting is only loaded when Windows starts, so a reboot is needed. If that stupid dialog is on your screen now, just stop the "Automatic Updates" service (but keep it as Automatic, so it gets reloaded on the next start) and you won't see it again.
http://www.codeproject.com/lounge.as...75#xx1254875xx





Microsoft Makes Anti-Piracy Tool Less Intrusive

The company upgraded its Windows Genuine Advantage tool to communicate less with Microsoft and changed its end-user license agreement to make it more clear what the tool does.
Antone Gonsalves

Microsoft Corp., stung by criticism over the daily phone-home feature within its Windows Genuine Advantage tool, released on Tuesday an upgrade of the anti-piracy software that communicates less with the company's server.

In addition, Microsoft replaced the end user license agreement with one that the company said more clearly explains the purpose of the software and how it operates.

The Redmond, Wash., company came under fire this month following media reports that WGA communicated with Microsoft each time a PC connected to the Internet. In addition, critics complained that the company mislabeled the software as a "critical update" when it was distributed through the Windows Update feature in XP, and then gave no way to remove it.

Microsoft at the time acknowledged that it made mistakes in trying to get WGA in as many PCs as possible and promised to make changes. In general, WGA checks that the version of Windows XP running on a PC is a legal copy.

To correct previous mistakes, the WGA upgrade no longer calls to Microsoft servers each time a computer launches on the Web. Instead, the software will validate the copy of Windows when first installed, and only run the check again when a new version of the tool is deployed.

In addition, WGA would be distributed as a "high priority" update, rather than a "critical update," and a preamble added to the end user license agreement provides a high-level summary of the program, its purpose and functions.

Finally, Microsoft also made available instructions for people who downloaded the previous version and wished to remove it. The instructions were available through the knowledge base on Microsoft's support site, using the KB number 921914.

Installing the anti-piracy software is not mandatory, but the version of Windows XP running on a computer must be validated before updates are installed via Microsoft's Automatic Updates and Windows Update features, or Microsoft update Web sites. If WGA finds that the version of Windows is not legal, the PC users can still get critical security updates, but nothing else. Those with invalid copies are notified through the tool, which directs them to resources for obtaining a valid copy of XP.

Lauren Weinstein, co-founder for the advocacy group People for Internet Responsibility, said the changes were an improvement, but didn't address the broader issue of how far a vendor can go in protecting themselves against piracy, while not infringing on PC owners' rights to privacy and to control communications between their machines and vendors' remote systems.

"This whole controversy is one of those teachable moments where you can use them as good examples of broader issues," Weinstein said. "It points us at a bigger problem."

To protect the rights of all parties, consumer groups, high-tech vendors and lawmakers would have to work together toward a compromise. If the high-tech industry goes it alone, it risks angering consumers, which could lead to a backlash in the marketplace and from government.

"I do have this sense that people are really starting to feel that this is all getting too complicated, and that's not a good thing for the industry," Weinstein said. "You want to go after pirates, but worst thing you can do is upset the innocent."

The update release on Tuesday marked the end of Microsoft's WGA pilot program, which has been rolled out in phases since November 2005. The company plans to gradually make the tool generally available worldwide.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=189602024





Lawsuit Calls Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Tool Spyware

Company disputes claim, says action is baseless
Todd Bishop

A computer user is suing Microsoft Corp. over the company's Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool, alleging that it violates laws against spyware

The suit by Los Angeles resident Brian Johnson, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle, seeks class-action status for claims that Microsoft didn't adequately disclose details of the tool when it was delivered to PC users through the company's Automatic Update system.

Windows Genuine Advantage is designed to check the validity of a computer user's copy of the operating system. But the tool became a subject of heightened controversy earlier this month, after PC users began noticing that it was making daily contact with Microsoft's servers without their knowledge, even if their software was valid.

"Microsoft effectively installed the WGA software on consumers' systems without providing consumers any opportunity to make an informed choice about that software," the suit alleges.

A Microsoft spokesman, Jim Desler, called the suit "baseless" and disputed the characterization of the tool as spyware.

"Spyware is deceptive software that is installed on a user's computer without the user's consent and has some malicious purpose," Desler said.

Windows Genuine Advantage "is installed with the consent of the user and seeks only to notify the user if a proper license is not in place."

Microsoft issued a software update this week to address some of the concerns computer users had raised about the Windows Genuine Advantage tool.

The suit deals with one of the software industry's most controversial issues -- the circumstances under which companies should be able to deliver programs to computers, and what they must disclose to PC users when they do.

The lead lawyer representing Johnson in the suit against Microsoft, Scott Kamber of Kamber & Associates LLC in New York, was co-lead counsel for consumers in the lawsuit over Sony Corp.'s surreptitious placement of copy-protection "rootkit" software on PCs, through music CDs. That software, designed to prevent music from being copied illegally, disabled protections against viruses and spyware, potentially leaving unaware computer users vulnerable. Sony settled the suit.

But even those who have questioned the behind-the-scenes activities of Windows Genuine Advantage say the Microsoft tool doesn't appear to do anything damaging.

"It doesn't seem to me that this particular incident rises anywhere near the kind of damage that is normally associated with spyware," said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility. "That's not to say that Microsoft should have done it the way they did. ... But that doesn't necessarily make it illegal."

Kamber acknowledged key differences between the Microsoft and Sony cases. But he said some of the same underlying principles are at work.

"The statute says that people have a right to know what's on their computer," Kamber said. "We're at a point in time right now where people's rights on their own computers and technology are really at issue."

Kamber declined to say how the suit began or to describe his client, Johnson, beyond calling him "a typical user of Microsoft operating systems."

Microsoft has said that the purpose of the daily check-in was to allow for changes in the tool's settings, because Windows Genuine Advantage was still in test mode. The company says those who installed the tool via the company's Automatic Update system have always seen a license agreement that gave information about the tool.

At the same time, a previous version of the WGA license agreement didn't explicitly state that it was making the daily check-ins.

"The disclosure was slim to none, and it certainly isn't what we're looking for as a matter of public policy from a distinguished company like Microsoft," said Ben Edelman, a Harvard University doctoral candidate and anti-spyware researcher.

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a finished version of Windows Genuine Advantage tool that it says no longer checks in daily with its servers.

The company also issued a revised license agreement that spells out in greater detail what Windows Genuine Advantage does, including the fact that it sends the PC user's Windows product key and Internet Protocol address to the company.

But the suit goes beyond that issue to challenge the company's practice of using the automatic updating system as one method of delivering the tool. Although Microsoft has delivered a variety of programs through Automatic Updates, it's most commonly used for security updates, and the suit alleges Microsoft effectively hid delivery of the tool under that guise.

Microsoft's Desler disputed that assertion and said the suit shouldn't obscure what he called the "real issue," software piracy. "The WGA program was carefully developed to focus on what is really an industrywide problem in a manner that is lawful, and provides customers with the confidence and assurance that they're running legitimate software," he said.

The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, makes claims under statutes including the Washington Consumer Protection Act and California Unfair Competition Law, in addition to anti-spyware statutes in both states.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...sftsuit29.html





Worm Appears as Microsoft Antipiracy Program
Jeremy Kirk

Security analysts have detected a new piece of malware that appears to run as a Microsoft Corp. program used to detect unlicensed versions of its operating system.

The malware has been classified as a worm and spreads through AOL LLC's Instant Messenger program, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos PLC, a security vendor.

Sophos is calling it W32.Cuebot-K, a new variation in the Cuebot family of malware. The worm has a range of malicious functions. After it's installed, the worm immediately tries to connect to two Web sites, a sign it may try to download other bad programs on the machine.

Cuebot-K can disable other software, shut off the Windows firewall, download new malicious programs, perform basic distributed denial-of-service attacks, scan local files and spawn a command prompt, Sophos said.

Worms that spread through instant messaging programs often appear as messages or links sent from friends, which trick a user into executing the program. Cuebot-K propagates by sending itself as a file named "wgavn.exe" to more people in the user's Buddy List but without a message, Cluley said.

If installed on a computer, Cuebot-K is registered as a new system device driver service named "wgavn." When a list of services running on the computer is summoned, the worm appears as "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Notification" Sophos said.

Cuebot-K's registry entry appears as HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wgavn\.

The worm's ruse comes as Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program is being criticized for functioning like spyware. WGA collects hardware and software data on a user's computer and compares it to a database of licensed operating systems.

If an improper copy is detected, Microsoft warns the user and cuts off some free downloads.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...e =rss_news10





Hmmm, where’d I put that copy of Ubuntu…

Is Microsoft About to Release a Windows "Kill Switch"?
Ed Bott

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my serious objections to Microsoft’s latest salvo in the war against unauthorized copies of Windows. Two Windows Genuine Advantage components are being pushed onto users’ machines with insufficient notification and inadequate quality control, and the result is a big mess. (For details, see Microsoft presses the Stupid button.)

Guess what? WGA might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” – and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.

Last week, a correspondent on Dave Farber’s Interesting People list posted some comments about his experiences with Windows OneCare Live. In the middle of the post, he added this tidbit:

I like to review updates before they are installed. The only update that I have not installed is the latest WGA because of the security issues related to it.

I called Microsoft support to see if there is a hidden option to say, "yep, I've got updates turned to manual… it's okay." The rep said, "No and why wouldn't you want to get the latest updates to Windows."

I responded with the issues relating to WGA. He spent some time telling me that WGA was a good thing, etc. I reiterated that I have accepted all the updates except WGA and just want to review the updates before they're installed on my machine.

He told me that "in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now." [emphasis added]

I'm wondering if Microsoft has the right to disable Windows functionality or the OS as a whole (tantamount to revoking my legitimate Windows license) if I do not install every piece of software that they send it updates.

That can’t be true, can it? I’m always suspicious of any report that comes from a front-line tech support drone, so I sent a note to Microsoft asking for an official confirmation or, better yet, a denial. Instead, I got this terse response from a Microsoft spokesperson:

As we have mentioned previously, as the WGA Notifications program expands in the future, customers may be required to participate. [emphasis added] Microsoft is gathering feedback in select markets to learn how it can best meet its customers' needs and will keep customers informed of any changes to the program.

That’s it. That’s the entire response.

Uh-oh. Currently, Windows users have the ability to opt out of the Windows Genuine Advantage program and still get security patches and other Critical Updates delivered via Windows Update. The only thing you give up is the ability to download optional updates. Hackers have been working overtime to find ways to disable WGA notification. If WGA becomes mandatory, would it mean that Microsoft could prevent Windows from working if it determines – possibly erroneously – that your copy isn’t “genuine”? That’s a chilling possibility, and Microsoft refuses an easy opportunity to deny that that option is in its plans.

Over at Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise, I’ve been soliciting feedback from Windows users who’ve been burned by WGA. So far, I’ve received 20 comments. Here’s a sampling:

§ I have an XP Media center with a promise RAID 0 4-disc array. When I installed the WPA it broke the drivers for the array by causing failed delayed writes (half of the array just “disapears”.) If I do a system restore to before the installation of the WPA everything goes back to working just fine.

§ [S]ince installing WPA … I’ve had blue screens and a total inability to boot. I had to run the XP repair function to get the computer to boot. I had a damaged boot sector on the hard drive. I am running two drives on a RAID 1 config.

§ I purchased a SEALED OEM copy of XP Professional. WGA said the license key was already used. I called MS and they said I should uninstall and buy another copy. I told them I wasn’t made of money and hung-up.

§ Microsoft rejected the product key that came with the ThinkPad I’m using. I had to call in and they gave me another code to enter which supposedly worked but now I get the blue screen of death about every other time I reboot. I’ve also lost all internet connectivity.

§ I sent my Compaq Presario notebook for service repair, and it fails the WGA check. I have a legal version of windows xp professional on it. But I have no way to correct this problem.

What’s most disturbing about this whole saga is Microsoft’s complete lack of transparency on the issue. And before the ABM crowd jumps in with predictable “What did you expect?” comments, let me argue that Microsoft actually has a fairly good track record on transparency issues in recent years. Windows Product Activation is very well documented, and when a similar uproar occurred in 2001, it was squelched quickly by some fairly prominent postings from high-level executives who provided details without a lot of spin. Likewise, the Microsoft Security Response Center has done an exceptional job at providing quick responses to security issues. (Just ask Adam Shostack.)

Currently, no one at Microsoft is blogging about this fiasco. No executive has been quoted on the record about it. There are very few technical details available, and those that have been published are being tumbled through the spin machine and spit out as press releases.

If Microsoft really does plan to turn WGA into a kill switch in September, be prepared for an enormous backlash.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=84





Life Without Windows
Chin Wong

Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux, has been running so nicely on my home personal computer that I decided to do an experiment. I wrote down a list of tasks I normally do with Windows XP and decided to see how many of them I could do on Linux.

Here’s what my list looked like: 1) Write this column; 2) Browse the Web; 3) Get new software and install it; 4) Download files; 5) Play music and video files; 6) Burn CDs; and 7) Print my documents.

Of all these, the first was the easiest. Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice.org 2.0, an excellent personal productivity suite that works much like Microsoft Office, with its own word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation programs. It reads and writes files in MS Word, RTF and a variety of other formats, so sharing your files with colleagues who use Windows or Mac PCs won’t be a problem. Unlike earlier versions, too, the program seems to load and run much faster.

Browsing was just as easy. Ubuntu lets you take your pick from several Web browsers, including Firefox. I experienced some glitches initially with YouTube—the videos were playing without sound—but that worked itself out after I rebooted the system.

For Windows users, downloading and installing new software on Linux can be rather daunting. Where’s the .EXE file? What do you do with the downloaded file (called a package, in Linux)? What file do you run? Fortunately, Ubuntu takes care of most of these problems for you. A program called Synaptic Package Manager takes care of finding new programs and installing them for you. These are sorted by program types, but the sheer number may be overwhelming. When I ran Synaptic Package Manager, it happily reported that there were more than 18,808 programs available, only 1,221 of which I had installed.

Downloading music and videos? Check. My favorite BitTorrent client, uTorrent, isn’t available on Linux but KTorrent, which works much the same way, already comes with Ubuntu. I put the program through its paces and found it held up quite nicely against my trusted file-sharing utility.

To play music and videos, Ubuntu comes with a number of multimedia players. For MP3 files, I like XMMS, which looks like WinAmp. Downloaded AVI files won’t play properly on the default Movie Player, but installing VLC Media Player (using Synaptic) will take care of that.

Burning CDs proved to be trickier.

Ubuntu is smart enough to detect a blank CD when it’s inserted and will ask if you’d like to burn a data or an audio CD. If you choose data, it will open a window into which you can drag files you’d like burned. Burning a data CD in this manner is simplicity itself, but it might be a bit too simple. The program, Nautilus, doesn’t even tell you how much disc space you’re using.

If you choose to burn an audio CD, Ubuntu will start a program called Serpentine, which enables you to add audio files to an audio CD compilation. The puzzling thing is, Serpentine will not accept MP3 files by default! All is not lost, however. You need to install the LAME encoder for the Gstreamer package (gstreamer0.8-lame), again using Synaptic. Once you’ve done that, Serpentine will burn your MP3 files into an audio CD without a hitch.

Burning a VCD from AVI files is even trickier. In very broad strokes, you’ll need to install K3b, a CD burning program, and a package called VCDimager, and tell K3b where it’s located. You’ll also need a command-line program called FFmpeg to convert AVI files to MPG, which is the format that K3b uses. Sounds complicated? It is, but it’s doable.

Finally, I wanted to print documents on my Epson Stylus C50 inkjet printer. Simple as it sounds, this last task almost stumped me. Even though Ubuntu detected my printer and said it was using the correct printer driver from a program called Gimp-print, my C50 kept spewing out garbled, unreadable text. Hours of online research about Gimp-print only confused me further with what seemed to be gobbledygook. Many sheets of wasted paper later, I remembered a snippet of information from a mailing list. It was written before the C50 driver was available and suggested that the driver for an earlier Epson model, the C44UX might work. I went to Ubuntu’s printer setup utility and told it to use that driver and—voila!—I was finally able to print. Frustration faded away and a sense of satisfaction set in. I had survived the weekend without Windows.
http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/?...06_june27_2006





Univision's Board OKs $12.3 Billion Sale
Alex Veiga

Univision Communications Inc.'s board has agreed to sell the nation's largest Spanish-language broadcaster for $12.3 billion in cash to a consortium of investors, the parties involved in the sale announced early Tuesday.

The figure agreed upon late Monday equals $36.25 a share, according to a news release on the sale. That's a 13 percent premium to Univision's closing stock price on Monday. The group of investors will also assume about $1.4 billion in debt.

The consortium, led by private equity firms Texas Pacific Group Inc. and Thomas H. Lee Partners, also includes Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, Providence Equity Partners Inc., and media mogul Haim Saban.

"Univision is truly a one-of-a-kind property," the acquiring group said in a joint statement. "It is an outstanding media brand with exceptional positions in the fastest-growing markets in the country, world-class assets, strong management, popular programming and unmatched ratings."

The consortium initially bid $35.50 a share, or just under $11 billion total, last week. But the broadcaster, which had reportedly been seeking an offer of $40 a share, rejected the group's initial bid as too low.

The investor group's offer remained on the table until Friday, when it expired. Both sides talked over the weekend and came to terms, a person familiar with the deal told The Associated Press.

Each of the private equity groups is expected to invest around $1 billion initially and Saban somewhat less, the person said.

The deal, if approved by Univision shareholders and regulators, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year or first quarter of 2007, according to the news release.

Univision dominates the U.S. Hispanic media market through its three television networks - Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision - more than two dozen television stations, a recorded music division, Internet portal and Spanish-language radio stations.

Monday's agreement ended a rocky auction for the broadcaster, which decided in February to explore selling the company.

A rival investor group led by Mexican broadcaster Grupo Televisa SA - which owns an 11 percent stake in Univision and is a key supplier of Univision's programming - struggled to put together a bid early last week amid defections by several of its investor partners.

First, private equity firm Carlyle Investment Management LLC dropped out, followed by Blackstone Management Associates V LLC, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

On Friday, Televisa lost the investment arm of Venezuelan broadcaster Venevision, a unit of The Cisneros Group of Companies. Venevision owns a 14 percent stake in Univision and also supplies the U.S. network with programming.

Still, Televisa and its remaining partners, private equity firms Bain Capital Partners LLC and Cascade Investment LLC, which invests for billionaire Bill Gates, managed to submit an offer Friday that they claimed at the time exceeded the Texas Pacific Group's initial offer.

Univision shares fell 92 cents, or 2.79 percent, to close Monday at $32.03 on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock has traded in a 52-week range from $23.52 to $36.67.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





From last fall

Imagine a World Without Copyright
Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel

Amsterdam Copyright was once a means to guarantee artists a decent income. Aside from the question as to whether it ever actually functioned as such - most artists never made a penny from the copyright system - we have to admit that copyright serves an altogether different purpose in the contemporary world. It now is the tool that conglomerates in the music, publishing, imaging and movie industries use to control their markets.

These industries decide whether the materials they have laid their hands on may be used by others - and, if they allow it, under what conditions and for what price. European and American legislation extends them that privilege for a window of no less than 70 years after the passing of the original author. The consequences? The privatization of an ever-increasing share of our cultural expressions, because this is precisely what copyright does. Our democratic right to freedom of cultural and artistic exchange is slowly but surely being taken away from us.

It is also unacceptable that we have to consume cultural creations in exactly the way they are dished out to us, and that we may change neither title nor detail. We thus have every reason to ponder about a viable alternative to copyright.

At the same time, a fascinating development is taking place before our very eyes. Millions of people exchanging music and movies over the Internet refuse to accept any longer that a mega-sized company can actually own, for example, millions of melodies. Digitalization is gnawing away at the very foundations of the copyright system.

What might an alternative idea of copyright look like? To arrive at that alternative, we first have to acknowledge that artists are entrepreneurs. They take the initiative to craft a given work and offer it to a market. Others can also take that initiative, for example a producer or patron who in turn employs artists. All of these artistic initiators have one thing in common: They take entrepreneurial risks.

What copyrights do is precisely to limit those risks. The cultural entrepreneur receives the right to erect a protective barrier around his or her work, notably a monopoly to exploit the work for a seemingly endless period of time. That protection also covers anything that resembles the work in one way or the other. That is bizarre.

We must keep in mind, of course, that every artistic work - whether it is a soap opera, a composition by Luciano Berio, or a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger - derives the better part of its substance from the work of others, from the public domain. Originality is a relative concept; in no other culture around the globe, except for the contemporary Western one, can a person call himself the owner of a melody, an image, a word. It is therefore an exaggeration to gratuitously allow such work the far-reaching protections, ownership title and risk-exclusion that copyright has to offer.

One might ask whether such a protective layer is really necessary for the evolving process of artistic creation. Our proposal, which will entail three steps, will demonstrate that this is not the case.

What then, do we think, can replace copyright? In the first place, a work will have to take its chances on the market on its own, without the luxurious protection offered by copyrights. After all, the first to market has a time and attention advantage.

What is interesting about this approach is that this proposal strikes a fatal blow to a few cultural monopolists who, aided by copyright, use their stars, blockbusters and bestsellers to monopolize the market and siphon off attention from every other artistic work produced by artists. That is problematic in our society in which we have a great need for that pluriformity of artistic expression.

How do we think this fatal blow could work? If the protective layer that copyright has to offer no longer exists, we can freely exploit all existing artistic expressions and adapt them according to our own insights. This creates an unpleasant situation for cultural monopolists, as it deprives them of the incentive to pursue their outrageous investments in movies, books, T-shirts and any other merchandise associated with a single cultural product. Why would they continue making these investments if they can no longer control the products stemming from them and exploit them unhindered?

The domination of the cultural market would then be taken from the hands of the cultural monopolists, and cultural and economic competition between many artists would once again be allowed to take its course.

This would offer new perspectives for many artists. They would no longer be driven from the public eye and many of them would, for the first time, be able to make a living off their work. After all, they would no longer have to challenge - and bow down to - the market dominance of cultural giants. The market would be normalized.

Certain artistic expression, however, demands sizeable initial investments. This is the second situation for which we must find a solution. Think about movies or novels. We propose that the risk bearer - the artist, the producer or the patron - receive for works of this kind a one-year usufruct, or right to profit from the works.

This would allow the entrepreneur to recoup his or her investments. It would still be an individual decision whether or not to make the large investments, for example, needed to make a movie, but no one would be granted rights to exploit that work for more than a year. When that period expired, anyone could do with the work as he or she pleased.

The third situation for which we must conceive a solution is when a certain artistic creation is not likely to flourish in a competitive market, not even with a one-year usufruct. It may be the case that the public still has to develop a taste for it, but that we still find, from the perspective of cultural diversity, that such a work must be allowed to exist. For this situation it would be necessary to install a generous range of subsidies and other stimulating measures, because as a community we should be willing to carry the burden of offering all kinds of artistic expressions a fair chance.

Cultural monopolists desperately want us to believe that without copyright we would have no artistic creations and therefore no entertainment. That is nonsense. We would have more, and more diverse ones.

A world without copyright is easy to imagine. The level playing field of cultural production - a market accessible for everyone - would once again be restored. A world without copyright would offer the guarantee of a good income to many artists, and would protect the public domain of knowledge and creativity. And members of the public would get what they are entitled to: a surprisingly rich and varied menu of artistic alternatives.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1008-24.htm

Thanks TG!





Ignoring the “Great Firewall of China”
Richard Clayton

The Great Firewall of China is an important tool for the Chinese Government in their efforts to censor the Internet. It works, in part, by inspecting web traffic to determine whether or not particular words are present. If the Chinese Government does not approve of one of the words in a web page (or a web request), perhaps it says “f” “a” “l” “u” “n”, then the connection is closed and the web page will be unavailable — it has been censored.

This user-level effect has been known for some time… but up until now, no-one seems to have looked more closely into what is actually happening (or when they have, they have misunderstood the packet level events).

It turns out [caveat: in the specific cases we’ve closely examined, YMMV] that the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection — and obey. Hence the censorship occurs.

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall — just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾.

Ignoring resets is trivial to achieve by applying simple firewall rules… and has no significant effect on ordinary working. If you want to be a little more clever you can examine the hop count (TTL) in the reset packets and determine whether the values are consistent with them arriving from the far end, or if the value indicates they have come from the intervening censorship device. We would argue that there is much to commend examining TTL values when considering defences against denial-of-service attacks using reset packets. Having operating system vendors provide this new functionality as standard would also be of practical use because Chinese citizens would not need to run special firewall-busting code (which the authorities might attempt to outlaw) but just off-the-shelf software (which they would necessarily tolerate).

There’s a little more to this story (but not much) and all is revealed in our academic paper (Clayton, Murdoch, Watson) which will be presented at the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies being held here in Cambridge this week.

NB: There’s also rather more to censorship in China than just the “Great Firewall” keyword detecting system — some sites are blocked unconditionally, and it is necessary to use other techniques, such as proxies, to deal with that. However, these static blocks are far more expensive for the Chinese Government to maintain, and are inherently more fragile and less adaptive to change as content moves around. So there remains real value in exposing the inadequacy of the generic system.

The bottom line though, is that a great deal of the effectiveness of the Great Chinese Firewall depends on systems agreeing that it should work … wasn’t there once a story about the Emperor’s New Clothes ?
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217...wall-of-china/





Russian Prosecutors Target 3 Teen Mags
Ap

Russian prosecutors on Wednesday asked media officials to close three popular teenage magazines, arguing the publications propagate sexual activity.

Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said in a letter to education officials that the magazines Molotok (Hammer), Cool and Cool Girl ''exploit underage readers' interest toward sex,'' and asked that a law suit be filed to have the publications shut down.

For instance, Molotok ''regularly publishes materials that pervert underage readers and provoke them to begin sexual life early,'' Fridinsky wrote. He also asked that ''persons responsible'' for the publications be prosecuted. In the letter he did not specify whether he was referring to the journalists, the editors or mass media officials.

Yekaterina Mil, deputy chief editor of the Molotok publishing house which prints Molotok said the magazine violated no laws and that it was not advertising sex but merely educating teenagers on the subject.

''It is not propaganda, but enlightenment -- we explain why early sex is bad for you, why it is dangerous, about AIDS, about how sexual diseases are transmitted,'' Mil told The Associated Press.

Darya Samsonova, spokesman for the Burda publishing house which publishes Cool and Cool girl declined to comment until the house gets official notification from the Prosecutor General's office.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/worl...Magazines.html





With a Cellphone as My Guide
John Markoff and Martin Fackler

Think of it as a divining rod for the information age.

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at.

The new service is made possible by the efforts of three Japanese companies and GeoVector, a small American technology firm, and it represents a missing link between cyberspace and the physical world.

The phones combine satellite-based navigation, precise to within 30 feet or less, with an electronic compass to provide a new dimension of orientation. Connect the device to the Internet and it is possible to overlay the point-and-click simplicity of a computer screen on top of the real world.

The technology is being seen first in Japan because emergency regulations there require cellphones by next year to have receivers using the satellite-based Global Positioning System to establish their location.

In the United States, carriers have the option of a less precise locating technology that calculates a phone's position based on proximity to cellphone towers, a method precise only to within 100 yards or so.

Only two American carriers are using the G.P.S. technology, and none have announced plans to add a compass. As a result, analysts say Japan will have a head start of several years in what many analysts say will be a new frontier for mobile devices.

"People are underestimating the power of geographic search," said Kanwar Chadha, chief executive of Sirf Technology, a Silicon Valley maker of satellite-navigation gear.

The idea came to GeoVector's founders, John Ellenby and his son Thomas, one night in 1991 on a sailboat off the coast of Mexico. To compensate for the elder Mr. Ellenby's poor sense of direction, the two men decided that tying together a compass, a Global Positioning System receiver and binoculars would make it possible simply to point at an object or a navigational landmark to identify it.

Now that vision is taking commercial shape in the Japanese phones, which use software and technology developed by the Ellenbys. The system already provides detailed descriptive information or advertisements about more than 700,000 locations in Japan, relayed to the cellphones over the Internet.

One subscriber, Koichi Matsunuma, walked through the crowds in Tokyo's neon-drenched Shinjuku shopping district on Saturday, eyes locked on his silver cellphone as he weaved down narrow alleys. An arrow on the small screen pointed the way to his destination, a business hotel.

"There it is," said Mr. Matsunuma, a 34-year-old administrative worker at a Tokyo music college. "Now, I just wish this screen would let me make reservations as well."

Mr. Matsunuma showed how it works on a Shinjuku street. He selected "lodgings" on the screen. Then he pointed his phone toward a cluster of tall buildings. A list of hotels in that area popped up, with distances. He chose the closest one, about a quarter-mile away. An arrow appeared to show him the way, and in the upper left corner the number of meters ticked down as he got closer. Another click, and he could see a map showing both his and the hotel's locations.

Mr. Matsunuma said he used the service frequently in unfamiliar neighborhoods. But it came in most handy one day when he was strolling with his wife in a Tokyo park, and he used it on the spur of the moment to find a Southeast Asian restaurant for lunch.

The point-and-click idea could solve one of the most potentially annoying side effects of local wireless advertising. In the movie "Minority Report," as Tom Cruise's character moved through an urban setting, walls that identified him sent a barrage of personally tailored visual advertising. Industry executives are afraid that similar wireless spam may come to plague cellphones and other portable devices in the future.

"It's like getting junk faxes; nobody wants that," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a policy group in Washington. "To the degree you are proactive, the more information that is available to you, the more satisfied you are likely to be."

With the GeoVector technology, control is given over to the user, who gets information only from what he or she points at.

The Ellenbys have developed software that makes it possible to add location-based tourism information, advertising, mobile Yellow Pages and entertainment, as well as functions for locating friends. Microsoft was an underwriter of GeoVector development work several years ago.

"We believe we're the holy grail for local search," said Peter Ellenby, another son of John Ellenby and director of new media at GeoVector.

The GeoVector approach is not the only way that location and direction information can be acquired. Currently G.P.S.-based systems use voice commands to supplement on-screen maps in car dashboards, for example. Similarly, many cellphone map systems provide written or spoken directions to users. But the Ellenbys maintain that a built-in compass is a more direct and less confusing way of navigating in urban environments.

The GeoVector service was introduced commercially this year in Japan by KDDI, a cellular carrier, in partnership with NEC Magnus Communications, a networking company, and Mapion, a company that distributes map-based information over the Internet. It is currently available on three handsets from Sony Ericsson.

In addition to a built-in high-tech compass, the service requires pinpoint accuracy available in urban areas only when satellite-based G.P.S. is augmented with terrestrial radio. The new Japanese systems are routinely able to offer accuracy of better than 30 feet even in urban areas where tall buildings frequently obstruct a direct view of the satellites, Mr. Ellenby said. In trials in Tokyo, he said, he had seen accuracies as precise as six feet.

Patrick Bray, a GeoVector representative in Japan, estimated that 1.2 million to 1.5 million of the handsets had been sold. GeoVector and its partners said they did not know how many people were actually using the service, because it is free and available through a public Web site. But they said they planned in September to offer a fee-based premium service, with a bigger database and more detailed maps. Juichi Yamazaki, an assistant manager at NEC Magnus, said the companies expected 200,000 paying users in the first 12 months.

He said the number of users would also rise as other applications using the technology became available. NEC is testing a game that turns cellphones into imaginary fly rods, with users pointing where and how far to cast. Another idea is to help users rearrange their furniture in accordance with feng shui, a traditional Chinese belief in the benefits of letting life forces flow unimpeded through rooms and buildings.

The market in the United States has yet to be developed. Verizon and Sprint Nextel are the only major American carriers that have put G.P.S. receivers in cellphone handsets.

"The main problem is the carriers," said Kenneth L. Dulaney, a wireless industry analyst at the Gartner Group. Although some cellular companies are now offering location-based software applications on handsets, none have taken advantage of the technology's potential, he said, adding, "They don't seem to have any insight."

Sirf Technology, which makes chips that incorporate the satellite receiver and compass into cellphones, said they added less than $10 to the cost of a handset.

Several industry analysts said putting location-based information on cellphones would be a logical step for search engine companies looking for ways to increase advertising revenues. Microsoft has already moved into the cellular handset realm with its Windows Mobile software, and Google is rumored to be working on a Google phone.

According to the market research firm Frost & Sullivan, the American market for location-based applications of all kinds will grow from $90 million last year to about $600 million in 2008.

It is perhaps fitting that the elder Mr. Ellenby, a computer executive at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970's, is a pioneer of geolocation technology. In the 1980's he founded Grid Computer, the first maker of light clamshell portable computers, an idea taken from work done by a group of Xerox researchers.

A decade later a Xerox researcher, Mark Weiser, came up with a radically different idea — ubiquitous computing — in which tiny computers disappear into virtually every workaday object to add intelligence to the everyday world. Location-aware cellphones are clearly in that spirit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/te.../28locate.html





Game Maker's Shares Slide Amid Inquiry
Matt Richtel

The video game publisher Take-Two Interactive, which surprised investors on Monday by disclosing that it had received criminal grand jury subpoenas inquiring into a range of its business practices, has shown signs since early this year that it continues to struggle with problems that have plagued it since 2001.

In March the company appointed three new outside directors to its board and put them on a committee to investigate charges raised in several shareholder lawsuits, according to a motion the company filed in response to one of the suits. That came after a director resigned and complained that the board was not independent enough of management.

Both steps were unusual and appeared to be characteristic of a company facing significant continuing struggles, said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate with the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research group.

The company's problems were compounded yesterday when its share price fell to $10.85, more than 15 percent below Monday's close.

Take-Two, publisher of the hit video game franchise Grand Theft Auto, said after the market's close on Monday that it had received the subpoenas from the Manhattan district attorney. The company said the inquiries pertained to its inclusion of hidden sexually explicit material in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and to many business and accounting practices dating back to 2001.

Take-Two said the district attorney had not informed it whether or not it was the focus of the criminal inquiry. A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office declined to comment on the investigation.

Investors have grown accustomed to Take-Two operating under a cloud; the company has been investigated by, and reached settlements with, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting issues. In early 2002 it restated seven quarters of financial returns.

But some Wall Street analysts said news of the latest investigation gave considerable new reason for concern. Elizabeth Osur, a video game industry analyst with Citigroup, lowered her 12-month price target for the stock to $9, from $12.

Ms. Osur said the company's profits could suffer amid higher legal fees, management distraction and departing employees.

"There is amazing breadth to the investigation," Ms. Osur said, adding, "We assume the district attorney is not reckless in their investigation. They at least found something worth investigating further."

Take-Two has declined to comment on the investigations. Ms. Osur said she spoke with a company executive and characterized his sentiments as frustration and confusion as to why the New York district attorney would begin an investigation, as opposed to federal regulators.

Some Wall Street analysts remained optimistic about a rebound for the company's stock. Heath P. Terry, an industry analyst with Credit Suisse, wrote in a note to investors today that "while the inclination may be to throw in the towel here," the company had $142 million in cash and no debt, and was unlikely to go out of business.

In January, Barbara A. Kaczynski, formerly the chief financial officer of the National Football League, resigned as a director of Take-Two. Her lawyer then sent a letter to the board saying management had failed to keep the board "informed of important issues facing the company or failed to do so in a timely fashion."

Ms. Kaczynski's attorney, Bruce A. Baird, declined further comment.

Mr. Hodgson of the Corporate Library said it was rare for a director to step down on the grounds that the board was not adequately independent of management.

In March, the Take-Two board established a so-called special litigation committee composed of three new directors. They were charged with investigating issues raised in shareholder lawsuits that, for example, accused company executives of insider trading and of failing to disclose the sexually explicit material hidden in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The company withdrew the game from the market for a month to remove the material.

According to a court filing by the company, the three directors — Grover C. Brown, Michael Malone and Jon F. Levy — are "nonparty independent directors, none of whom has been alleged to have received any benefits from the transactions" questioned in the shareholder suits.

Mr. Hodgson said the fact that the company appointed independent directors to investigate the issues was unusual and indicated that some members of the current board could be compromised. "It suggests they don't think the existing outside directors are free enough from the existing problems, or that they don't possess enough leverage" to obtain the information they need, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/te...y/28games.html





Aw, c’mon

Warner Music Throws Out EMI Bid

The world's fourth-largest music firm, Warner Music, has rejected a $4.2bn (£2.2bn; 3.3bn euros) bid by rival EMI.

A merger between the two has long been on the cards, in an attempt to compete more effectively with larger rivals Universal Music and Sony BMG.

Warner Music said it had carefully examined the offer, but decided it did not benefit shareholders.

The rejection came just 24 hours after EMI had tendered its $28.50 a share offer to Warner.

"This is disappointing, as we believe the logic for combining the two businesses is compelling," said Lorna Tilbian, an analyst with Numis.

If the two had merged, the combined company would have held about 25% of the recorded music market, based on figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Warner Music has the rights to more than a million songs via its publishing arm Warner/Chappell Music.

Artists recording on the Warner label include Madonna and James Blunt, while EMI's list includes Coldplay, Robbie Williams and Norah Jones.

In 2000, attempts to merge EMI and Warner Music were blocked by European competition regulators.

Warner Music was once part of the Time Warner group, but was sold to a group of investors in 2003.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/4968814.stm





No you c’mon

EMI Rejects Warner Takeover Bid

UK-based music group EMI has turned down a £2.5bn ($4.6bn) takeover offer from US rival Warner Music Group, the firm which it is itself trying to buy.

The 320 pence a share approach from Warner is the second the UK group has received in less than two weeks.

Both Warner's offers have been "wholly unacceptable", EMI said in a statement.

The UK firm has already made two approaches to Warner, following talks with Warner's management and with some of its shareholders.

A combination between the two firms would slim the roster of global music majors down to three, making a new group similar in size to Sony-BMG and Universal Music.

Tug of war

The tit-for-tat bidding began in early May, when EMI offered $28.50 a share - or about $4.2bn - for Warner.

Bid Timeline

3 May: EMI Group makes $28.50 a share ($4.2bn) bid for Warner Music Group. The US firm rejects the approach.
14 June: Warner makes cash counter-proposal of 315 pence a share, valuing EMI at £2.46bn. EMI's board unanimously rejects it.
23 June: EMI comes back with a revised proposal offering $31 a share, again in cash.
27 June: Warner Music renews its own approach, suggesting a price of 320 pence a share.
28 June: EMI announces its board has again unanimously spurned Warner's approach.

The US firm, home to performers including Madonna and REM, rejected the deal but talks continued.

On 14 June, Warner countered with its own 315 pence a share offer for the UK group, whose artists include Robbie Williams, Gorillaz and Corinne Bailey Rae.

In rebuffing Warner's renewed approach, EMI said it remained keen to pursue its own offer, which it has raised to $31 a share.

"An acquisition of Warner Music by EMI... would deliver value to EMI's shareholders which is far superior to Warner Music's revised alternative proposal," it said.

EMI's most recent financial performance, published in late May, showed the firm's profits up 13% in the year to March on the back of surging download sales.

In early trading, EMI shares were up 8.28% or 23.5 pence at 307.25 pence.

Warner shares closed in New York on Tuesday night at $27.23, down 29 cents or 1.05%.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/5123946.stm





Satellite Radio Company Addresses Music Industry Concerns
Ryan Paul

In an open letter to musicians published last week, XM Radio affirms its respect for artists and responds to criticism from the recording industry. Last month, several recording companies sued XM Radio for producing a satellite radio receiver with recording functionality, contradicting the RIAA's previously stated position regarding satellite radio recording devices.

RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol contends that XM's new recording device threatens legitimate music downloading services by enabling "broadcast programs to be automatically captured and then disaggregated, song by song, into a massive library of music." In the open letter, XM Executive Vice President Eric Logan argues that the Inno and Helix satellite radio recorders are merely time-shifting devices like Tivo rather than piracy tools. Logan points out that the new devices do not enable users to duplicate, redistribute, or permanently preserve downloaded content, and that the service itself doesn't enable users to select which songs are played.

The open letter also responds to Bainwol's claim that XM's devices are "fundamentally unfair to songwriters and labels" by clarifying the parameters of the company's financial relationship with the music industry. According to the letter, "the satellite radio industry is the single largest contributor of sound recording performance royalties to artists and record labels." The letter explains that XM and other satellite radio companies are paying tens of millions in performance royalties. The letter also points out that satellite radio services directly benefit artists by promoting music purchases.

As the Consumer Electronics Association has pointed out, FM radio and the cassette tape were both once subjected to similar attacks by the recording industry. The RIAA's hollow criticisms of satellite radio sound a lot like the music industry's typical alarmist attitude towards technological innovation. That said, is there reason to be skeptical about XM's claims regarding the capabilities of the new devices? History shows us that it is usually only a matter of time before even the most elaborately protected content system is cracked. Although XM has intentionally chosen not to include a mechanism for copying music from their devices to a computer, enterprising users will probably find a way to adapt the technology.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060627-7139.html





Arif Mardin, 1932-2006

The Grammy-winning producer generated hits with Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Norah Jones, and many others
James Sullivan

Arif Mardin, the longtime Atlantic Records producer whose remarkable resume includes major hits with Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, Norah Jones and many others, died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. He was seventy-four.

Born March 15, 1932, to an aristocratic Turkish family, Mardin studied at the London School of Economics. In 1956, when he was writing orchestral arrangements, Mardin met Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones at a concert in Istanbul. The two musicians were impressed. Two years later Mardin moved to Boston, where he became the first recipient of the Quincy Jones Scholarship at the Berklee College of Music. Much later, in 1985, Berklee awarded him an honorary doctorate. After graduating in 1961, Mardin joined Atlantic Records as an assistant to Nesuhi Ertegun, brother of label founder (and fellow Turkish expatriate) Ahmet Ertegun. Mardin's compositional touch soon earned him a role as staff producer and arranger. His first work was with the label's jazz artists, including Eddie Harris and Sonny Stitt.

Soon Mardin moved into the pop realm, scoring a 1966 No. 1 hit with the Young Rascals' "Good Lovin'." The team behind that single, including co-producer Jerry Wexler and engineer Tom Dowd, helped make Atlantic a multi-genre powerhouse. Mardin worked extensively with Aretha, the Queen of Soul, and made definitive records with Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart, Laura Nyro and Roberta Flack.

In the early 1970s, Mardin worked on several albums by John Prine, then considered a new Dylan, as well as Bette Midler's debut and early records by Hall and Oates. His successes with the Average White Band and the Bee Gees, who credited him with suggesting the falsetto sound that became the group's trademark, led to his first Producer of the Year Grammy in 1975.

Mardin's commercial instincts served him well on pop productions with Carly Simon and Chaka Khan, whose 1984 smash "I Feel for You" was one of the producer's biggest hits. He proved adept at ever-changing musical styles, working with Grandmaster Melle Mel on Khan's hit and going New Wave with Culture Club and Howard Jones. In 1989 he had another blockbuster with Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings"; his production work over the next decade included records by Jewel and the original cast recording of Rent.

Mardin became a vice president at Atlantic in 1969 and remained senior vice president until his retirement from the label in 2001. After leaving, he joined EMI's Manhattan Records, playing a major role in its revival, and produced Norah Jones' breakout album, Come Away With Me, which earned him his second Producer of the Year Grammy. In total, he won eleven Grammys, as well as the Recording Academy's prestigious Trustees Award in 2001.

Mardin considered himself a facilitator, lucky to work with great talent. He prided himself on his ability to match an artist with his or her appropriate key. In the studio, he considered himself more an arranger than a technician. "I'm not a nerdy technical person," he said. "I don't care about brand names, model numbers -- but I know what can be done."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...ardin_19322006




Always in the Camera's Eye
Janet Kornblum

Traffic cameras zoom in enough to capture your dangling cigarette. Crime cameras "see" in the dark. Satellite images show whether your car is in the driveway. Most Americans realize ubiquitous monitoring is the price of living in a high-tech world.

These days, surveillance cameras aren't just mounted on buildings and satellites, controlled by government and businesses. Now they're carried by a nation obsessed with its own image.

Kids snap cellphone pictures at parties and instantly put them on the Web; fans who nab photos of unsuspecting celebrities share them on celebrity-watch sites. The guy in the car next to you is leaning out of his window, taking a video that he later uploads to a video site where it could be seen by dozens or hundreds of people — maybe even millions.

"Our computers are about to become unblinking paparazzi," says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "And we're all going to feel a little bit like Brad and Angelina."

Thanks to the availability of cheap digital cameras and websites that simplify photo-sharing, Americans have a new favorite pastime: creating their own reality shows, featuring themselves — and anyone else they see along the way.

While many, especially young people, think it's all fun, privacy watchers are eyeing the new trend, trying to gauge just how it will affect us legally and shape us socially.

"We're going to be a society where tons and tons of photographs and information about us are available online without our consent," says Jason Schultz, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy and civil liberties advocacy group that focuses on computers and digital technology.

"Privacy is sometimes something we don't realize we value except in hindsight."

It's not that most citizen videographers are looking to violate anyone's privacy.

Instead, many of today's burgeoning filmmakers are tomorrow's Hollywood hopefuls just looking for their lucky break. And many bystanders will do anything they can to be in pictures.

"I usually have my camera on me," says Steven Downie, 22, a manufacturing technician from Woburn, Mass., whose home-brewed videos have drawn some attention on YouTube, a rapidly growing website where people post and watch a huge array of homemade and professional videos. "If you go to a party or convention, you'd be surprised how many people wave, (flash) a peace sign, stick out their tongue or just yell 'Hey.'

"Cameras are fun. It's like the new thing to do," he says. "TV shows are boring. Cameras are the way to go. It's fresh."

When Downie is at a party, he says there "are just flashes left and right. I'll run over and do stupid things to get on camera. I do love the camera a lot. I will admit it.

"Obviously, everybody wants to be famous."

Well, maybe not everybody. While most people mug for the camera when he takes pictures at work, for instance, some of the older workers "put their hands in front of it and yell, 'Get out of my face.' "

Some parents of teens also can't fathom why teens pose provocatively or flaunt illegal behavior, such as downing a beer when they're under 21, in photos online.

"The gesture of putting up these pictures is the gesture of 'Know me,' " says Parry Aftab, an expert on teen safety and the Internet. " 'Understand me. Let me express my identity to you.' This is the job of adolescence."

The wilder — and more seductive — the picture, the more likely a teen is to draw attention and make new online "friends." (Friends are made when one person invites another to be a friend on a personal profile. Sometimes they know each other well. Sometimes they're passing acquaintances.) The more links to friends someone has on sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the higher their status.

Most kids are posting for each other, but quickly are learning that the world also is watching.

Internet expert Nancy Willard has been warning parents about the possibly incriminating pictures their kids' friends may post online after graduation parties.

"Kids go to these parties, and everybody's going to have a camera," she says. "And when they finally wake up (the day after the party), they'll post all these really fun pictures on the Internet and maybe post names to go along with the pictures. Nobody has any ability to control what's going to happen with those images. And they can be damaging."

But being able to post photos also can empower young people, says Ginger Thomson, CEO of YouthNoise, a site aimed at helping young people use the Web to promote social causes.

It gives young people "a sense of 'I'm someone' in a world of tremendous complexity and enormous population," Thomson says.

Experts are resigned to the reality that our photos increasingly are everywhere.

Our images are not only stored in government databases (taken from places such as traffic cameras and satellite images), but they also are stored on the computers of our friends, our neighbors and family and in the databanks of Internet companies that host photo sites.

Right now, those images are relatively benign because technology doesn't yet allow us to search through images, Saffo says.

Photo searches online are based on the words used to describe those photos and not on the photos themselves.

"So far they haven't really destroyed our privacy because it's too much trouble for humans to look through and find the things they want to find," Saffo says.

But face recognition software has been improving rapidly. And the point at which it is good enough for people to use computers to quickly scan images, "things are really going to change a lot," Saffo says. "Automating the watcher is going to sweep away the last vestiges of privacy. It's starting to happen now.

"Americans are touchingly naive about these things."

Privacy advocate Schultz sees a legal solution: passing laws that will keep the government from using our pictures against us.

"As more people take private photos and make them available online or save them, the temptation for the government or other powerful entities to want to subpoena or take those photos and plow through them will increase," he says. "The government will think 'Oh, someone else has already collected all this data. I'll just take theirs instead of doing my own internal criminal investigation.' That's a danger."

But cameras offer "upsides as well." They can allow ordinary citizens to keep would-be assailants and authority figures from overstepping their bounds, Schultz says.

Political protesters regularly photograph police at rallies, for example. In a now well-known story, a woman identified a man who had exposed himself to her in New York's subways by snapping his photo with her cellphone camera. A San Francisco photographer regularly posts pictures of security guards who try to stop him from taking photos in public places.

Aside from the legal issues, however, social scientists worry about the way the ever-present lens already is affecting society.

Just the knowledge that cameras are everywhere can "have a chilling effect," says psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It can give people "a sense of living your life on camera and living your life potentially being watched."

That changes behavior, adds Howard Rheingold, an author and consultant on online communities. "It forms an environment in which the assumption that there's a camera around is more and more part of your daily awareness. This assumption you're being watched internalizes surveillance."

The result: super-self-consciousness.

"Nobody's ever going to scratch their nose in public again," Saffo says, only half joking.

"In the past, privacy meant a right to be invisible. But I think it's fallen to the lower standard of the right to be left alone. You're going to accommodate yourself to the fact that you're constantly being watched. All you're going to say is just 'Don't bother me. Don't hassle me.' "

Unless, of course, you want to be in pictures.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...ra-crazy_x.htm





Today's Movie Theaters, Tomorrow
Lore Sjöberg

Welcome to The Theater Replica Catalog. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the last commercial movie theater closing and interest in re-creating the early 21st-century American movie-going experience is higher than ever. We have the products you need to create an authentic historical setting in your own AV room, recreation pod or orbital party yacht. What follows are just a few of our newest carefully researched offerings.

Cell phone sound-effect generator

This module provides one of the most vital aspects of the early 21st-century movie experience: the thrilling chirps and trills of ringing cellular phones. We've programmed the generator with over three hundred authentic antique cell-phone alert signals, or "ringtones," including "Laffy Taffy," "My Humps" and "Please Let Me Touch Your Secondary Sexual Characteristics."

In addition, the cell phone sound-effect generator can be set to three modes: 2001 mode, in which the phone is quickly shut off when it rings; 2004 mode, in which the call recipient answers the phone and has a brief conversation; and 2008 mode, in which a moviegoer makes an outgoing call to someone watching a different movie so they can decide which one has better testicle jokes.

Authentic ad reel

In the early 21st century, it was common for American consumers to pay to see ads for other products they could pay for. In many cases these products contained ads for still more products, and so forth. Historical economists say this is what sustained the economy once all actual useful jobs were outsourced to the Third World, robots or Third-World robots.

We help bring this charming turn-of-the-century custom to you with an ever-changing lineup of advertisements for soft drinks, video games, online services and pheromonic implants. These can be played, depending on the year you're replicating, either before the lights go down, after the lights go down but before the previews, or right in the middle of the movie during what was called a "customer service intermission." For full authenticity, during customer service intermissions the exit doors should be locked and bolted.

The "shakedown package"

As movie theaters faced increasing pressure from pirates and counterfeiters, whose free or nearly free "warez" cut into the theaters' "revenuez" and "profit marginz," theater owners retaliated with increased harassment of their paying customers. Historical economists are unclear on the reasons for this, but there is evidence for hysteria induced by a hallucinogenic mold.

For an early 21st-century experience, you can play the included "public service announcement" (also called a "guilt trip") which explains that you're a dirty, waste-covered pirate and personally responsible for the deaths by starvation of over 60 directors, actors and Foley artists, and a slight downturn in the annual income of producers and movie executives. For a later feel, the package includes a variety of metal detectors, strip-search gloves, "hospitality bats" and memory wipe helmets.

Self-serve food aisle

Many theater replica fans have painstakingly re-created early 21st-century snack bars, complete with charmingly inflated prices and marijuana-scented robotic food servers with authentic bloodshot eyes who have to ask you three times if you said Coke or Diet Coke. However, our researchers have recently discovered a very exciting tradition of the early 21st century. It turns out that many theater owners felt that a 2,000-percent markup on soda provided insufficient profit to actually hire someone to pour the soda for you.

In many theaters, the snack counter was replaced with a snack section, where the only employees in evidence were there to scoop popcorn and take money. The customers themselves paid money to pour their own drinks, fetch their hot dogs from bins kept at the perfect temperature to encourage the growth of delicious bacteria, and balance everything on a food holding device that was the federally mandated minimum size to qualify as a "tray" rather than a "business card." And now you can have that experience in your own entertainment room! Comes with optional Roomba 9000X floor cleaner and home defense robot.
http://wired.com/news/columns/0,7124...?tw=wn_index_3





Court Refuses To Return Servers

A Stockholm court today rejected an application to return servers seized in raids against file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.

Internet hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and computer equipment seized by police, saying that the material had no significance for the investigation and arguing that it was vital for PRQ's work.

But Stockholm District Court rejected the application after a hearing held behind closed doors on Wednesday.

The company said it intended to appeal the decision.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...&date=20060628





Pirates Pursued Democracy, Helped American Colonies Survive
Cathy Keen

Jason Acosta, who studied pirates for his history thesis at the University of Florida, shows his pirate paraphernalia, including a replica of a 17th century pirate flintlock gun and sword, on May 10, 2006. Pirates deserve more credit than the Hollywood stereotype of bloodthirsty one-eyed peg-legged men who bury treasure and force people to walk the plank, Acosta said. They helped European nations explore the Americas and practiced the same egalitarian principles as our Founding Fathers, he said. Acosta is a descendant of a pirate who fought in the Battle of New Orleans. (University of Florida/Kristen Bartlett)
Blackbeard and Ben Franklin deserve equal billing for founding democracy in the United States and New World, a new University of Florida study finds.

Pirates practiced the same egalitarian principles as the Founding Fathers and displayed pioneering spirit in exploring new territory and meeting the native peoples, said Jason Acosta, who did the research for his thesis in history at the University of Florida.

“Hollywood really has given pirates a bum rap with its image of bloodthirsty, one-eyed, peg-legged men who bury treasure and force people to walk the plank,” he said. “We owe them a little more respect.”

Acosta, a descendant of a pirate who fought for the United States in the Battle of New Orleans, studied travel narratives, court hearings, sermons delivered at pirate hangings and firsthand accounts of passengers held captive by pirates. Comparing pirate charters with the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, he said he was amazed by the similarities.

Like the American revolutionaries, pirates developed three branches of government with checks and balances. The ship captain was elected, just as the U.S. president; the pirate assembly was comparable to Congress; and the quartermaster resembled a judge in settling shipmate disputes and preventing the captain from overstepping his authority, he said.

Colonists and pirates also were alike in emphasizing written laws, democratic representation and due process, Acosta said. All crew members were allowed to vote, ship charters had to be signed by every man on board, and anyone who lost an eye or a leg was compensated financially, he said.

These ideals grew out of both groups’ frustration at being mistreated by their leaders; the British forced the colonists to quarter troops and pay taxes, and captains on merchant ships beat their shipmen, starved them and paid less than promised, Acosta said.

“It’s no wonder that many sailors seized the opportunity to jump ship and search for a better way of life, namely piracy, which offered better food, shorter work shifts and the power of the crew in decision-making,” he said.

A golden age of pirating emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as these Brethren of the Sea sailed the world’s waterways, plundering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold, silver and other merchandise, shaping the modern world in the process, Acosta said.

Pirates mapped new territory, expanded trade routes, discovered good ports and opened doors with the native peoples, Acosta said. “They really helped European nations explore the Americas before Europeans could afford to explore them on their own,” he said.

By selling stolen silks, satins, spices and other merchandise in ports and spending their booty in the colonies, pirates created an economic boom, helping struggling settlements and making Port Royale in Jamaica and Charleston, S.C., huge mercantile centers, Acosta said. “They didn’t bury their treasure, they spent it, helping colonies survive that couldn’t get the money and supplies they needed from Europe,” he said.

Without the infusion of money into the New World from piracy, it is possible that Britain and France may not have been able to catch up with Spain, Acosta said.

“Had it not been for pirates, Britain might have had trouble holding onto the American colonies,” he said. “Pirates decimated the Spanish so badly that Spain finally had to give up some of its American empire just to get pirating to stop.”

Native Americans and black slaves oppressed by the Spanish in the Caribbean gave pirates inside information on where to dock ships and find supplies, Acosta said. Slaves fleeing plantations were welcomed on pirate ships, where they shared an equal voice with white sailors, he said.

Acosta said he believes pirates would be given a place in the history books if they had been able to write their stories and leave diaries like the more literate American colonists.

A Gainesville middle school teacher, Acosta occasionally brings up pirates in his classroom, where he has a captive audience, thanks to the popularity of the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean,” which has a sequel opening July 7. “I had one group of students in my class who just went around the playground all the time saying, ‘Aaar, we’re the pirates,’” he said.

Richard Burg, an Arizona State University professor and expert on pirates, said Acosta is performing a great service by emphasizing pirates’ democratic and egalitarian ways. “The men who sailed under the skull and crossbones were ordinary folk, like America’s revolutionaries, standing firm against oppressive governments and economic systems,” he said. “Mr. Acosta is one of the few scholars who understand this.”
http://www.physorg.com/news70726212.html

Via TG












Until next week,

- js.


















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