[JackSpratts]

Life after Napster
Dawn Kawamoto

Hank Barry has come full circle: attorney, venture capitalist, chief executive, attorney.

But his career has seen far more twists than these titles might suggest.

For example, his foray into the entrepreneurial realm, vis-a-vis his role as a venture capitalist, landed him the role of interim CEO at Napster. In that position, he played a part in helping define the boundaries of the file-swapping, or peer-to-peer, industry.

The first leg of Barry's transitions came as a chief legal eagle for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati during the 1990s, representing the likes of Global Village Communications, Liquid Audio and Upshot to signing aboard with VC firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in 1999 and serving as interim CEO for Hummer Winblad portfolio company Napster between 2000 to 2002.

Earlier this month, Barry came full circle when he joined Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin as a director and member of its business department. As an attorney with Howard Rice, Barry will focus on intellectual property, commercial strategy and venture capital as it relates to high-growth companies.

Barry recently chatted with CNET News.com about his circuitous route and the lessons learned along the way.

Q: What prompted you to leave the VC world and re-enter law?
Barry: I continue to have a great relationship with Hummer Winblad and loved working there, but this seemed like the right thing to do.

I always loved practicing law, and Howard Rice has the scale to do complex matters, like RIM (PDF) and Charles Schwab, but also is small enough for the human factor. I think there's somewhere around 125 lawyers, so it seems like a good fit for me.

If you loved the law so much, why did you leave Wilson Sonsini after five years to join Hummer Winblad in 1999?
Barry: While I was at Wilson Sonsini, I did five IPOs in 1999 and was familiar with Hummer Winblad. I had known them for 10 years. The era we were in had lots of opportunities, and I wanted to know more about the financial aspects of companies and do an operating role.

It seems you got both at Napster. What are some of the key lessons learned while serving as interim CEO at Napster that can be applied to the companies you'll be representing at Howard Rice?
Barry: The No. 1 thing I have an appreciation for is how fast things move on the operations side. As lawyers, you're trained to reflect. But on the operations side of things, you don't have time. The marketscape map is changing on a daily basis. You don't come to appreciate it until you experience it. And that experience will make me a much better lawyer as a result.

I also have a better understanding of what is functionally important, rather than what is important in the abstract. One thing we did at Napster that I regret is having somewhere around 30 engineers to develop a filtering system. With all the delays we had, we could have had a smaller team and made more progress in the same amount of time.

Do you expect to do a lot of work representing peer-to-peer companies?
Barry: I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities out there. I think it is an architecture that is much better understood than when we were doing Napster. The good news is it's a very efficient transport mechanism, but that is all that it is--a transport mechanism. So companies try to build on top of that and then it kind of becomes an applications business. The interesting thing to see is what happens to P2P in mobile devices. Mash-ups are in essence P2P.

With the entrepreneurial experience you gained from running Napster, what consideration did you give to launching your own company?
Barry: I could, but Howard Rice is an entrepreneurial firm and very hands-on. I see this as an entrepreneurial opportunity. I have an operational role and will also be doing complex litigation and complex transactions.

When you were with Wilson Sonsini, did you work with start-ups on their term sheets that would be presented to the VCs? And when you went to Hummer Winblad, did it prove much of an eye-opener on the process those term sheets go through?
Barry: I see it from both sides now. I learned it's all about pattern matching. Once you work with a lot of companies, you see a lot of patterns.

A year after a company is funded, you often see a beef develop with the CEO. As the company grows, the founder's relationship with the VCs often changes. You see this on the side that's representing the companies and you see it on the VC side.

At Hummer Winblad, I learned about the VCs' decision-making process and the dynamics considered when determining what to invest in. I have a greater appreciation for the ecosystem, that relationship they have with institutional investors, corporate partners and the companies. I think people who have never been at VC firms don't realize how important these relationships are on a day-to-day basis.

I have a much better ability to match up which companies should go with which VC firms and which VC capitalists. You get to know who is interested in what and who would get along with whom.
http://news.com.com/Life+after+Napst...3-6143743.html





P2P: From Internet Scourge to Savior

New peer-to-peer video-downloading options should please Internet users--and stave off a network meltdown.
Wade Roush

Every few years, someone predicts the imminent collapse of the Internet. Bob Metcalfe--Ethernet inventor, 3Com founder, and Technology Review patron--famously said at a 1995 Web conference that he would eat his words from a pessimistic Infoworld column if the Web didn't disappear within a year under the strain of traffic overloads and other problems. In April 1997, Metcalfe contritely drank a milkshake containing the torn-up bits of his column. In 2004, Helsinki University of Technology professor Hannu Kari said spam and viruses would kill off the Internet by 2006. The fact that you're looking at this website now means Kari was wrong.

The point is that even the sharpest innovators and entrepreneurs have often had a hard time seeing how the next hurdle in the Internet's growth would be overcome--only to be surprised by some new resource, technology, or business idea that emerges in the nick of time. (In both 1996-97 and 2005-2006, Internet service providers responded in part by adding more bandwidth to their networks.)

But will that pattern hold out forever? The dam-breaking success of YouTube and Apple's iTunes Video Store--neither of which existed prior to 2005--has unleashed a huge new flow of digital video on the Internet, and many consumers now spend hours a day streaming or downloading everything from home movies to live sports and prime-time TV series. Because video files are so large compared with the Web pages and e-mail messages that used to dominate Internet traffic, backbone lines are under strain, and backbone operators such as AT&T and Verizon and Internet service providers such as Comcast are facing new costs they can't easily recoup, given the flat-rate pricing of most consumer broadband Internet access plans.

Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies broadband networks, says that "2006 will be remembered as the year of Internet video. Consumers have shown that they basically want unlimited access to the content owners' video. But what if the entire Internet gets swamped in video traffic?"

This time around, the Internet may be saved by the unlikeliest of rescuers: the builders of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. In the minds of many consumers--and many studio executives--P2P networks are still synonymous with digital piracy. After all, Napster, Kazaa, and other early peer-to-peer networks were playgrounds for copyright violators, who downloaded millions of music files they hadn't paid for. But today a number of researchers and entrepreneurs are arguing that peer-to-peer technology--which allows network members to retrieve content by tapping into the hard drives of other members who have already downloaded that content--is also great for distributing legitimately purchased, copyright-protected music and video. It might even lessen the burden on service providers and content distributors.

By putting new twists on the P2P concept, businesses hope to bring digital distribution of movies, TV shows, and other premium content to a market beyond iPod owners and YouTube addicts. In August 2005, for example, Internet company Wurld Media, of Saratoga Springs, NY, rolled out a P2P platform called Peer Impact. Once users have downloaded the free Peer Impact media player, they can buy and download movies and TV shows (as well as games, radio shows, and music) to a shared folder on their PC. The twist: Peer Impact pays users every time someone else on the network draws that content from the shared folder. Members can use their "Peer Cash" to buy more content. (I tried Peer Impact's service recently and found downloads to be fast and smooth. I was able to start watching a one-hour episode of the fanfic production "Star Trek: New Voyages" about two minutes after the download process began; the entire download took about twelve minutes.)

Even BitTorrent, an advanced P2P network long seen by movie and record executives as an irksome successor to Napster and Kazaa, is going mainstream. The company announced early this month that it had raised $20 million in a second round of venture-capital funding and acquired competitor μTorrent (pronounced "microtorrent"), maker of a compact version of the BitTorrent software meant to be suitable for set-top boxes and other non-PC devices. BitTorrent--which speeds up downloads by grabbing and reassembling file fragments from the most accessible peers on the network, rather than by transferring whole files from one peer to another--is still one of the best tools for locating and procuring Internet video. That's in part because it's free and in part because so many people use it and have built a worldwide archive of digital files.

Many other companies are jumping into the P2P video mix, including Peercast, Octoshape, Allcast, and Itiva. Dijjer, a project of Revver (which was founded by peer-to-peer pioneer Ian Clarke), reduces the load on individual users' computers by grabbing much of the content of a requested file from other users' computers. A team of researchers from three universities in the Netherlands has introduced Tribler, a BitTorrent-like program that adds useful features such as Amazon-like recommendations and real-time maps showing who is downloading the same content. And in the United Kingdom, the BBC is developing a peer-to-peer media player called iPlayer. In a trial conducted with 5,000 users from November 2005 to February 2006, users were able to download first-run BBC shows for seven days after their official TV broadcast; many participants used the service simply to catch up on their favorite programs, but interestingly, the network also found that study participants were disproportionately drawn to several new shows and "niche" shows that hadn't fared as well among regular broadcast viewers.

The Internet is already teeming with peer-to-peer traffic. In fact, P2P downloads may account for as much as 60 percent of network traffic--and as much as 60 percent of that traffic is video, according to CacheLogic, which has developed a proprietary system for accelerating P2P downloads. (The system enhances P2P distribution by giving peer-to-peer networks access to dedicated, high-capacity "edge servers" scattered around the Internet, in much the same way as the traditional content-distribution networks pioneered by companies like Akamai.)

So how could additional P2P traffic actually be a good thing for the Internet? Carnegie Mellon's Zhang points out that because peer-to-peer networks exploit both the downlink and uplink capacities of users' Internet connections, they distribute content more efficiently than centralized "unicast" technologies. Zhang also says it should be possible to label P2P traffic so that service providers can track it and decide how much of it to allow through their networks. He and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley have founded a startup, Rinera, to develop software that will give service providers such control.

"The network itself needs to be informed about the types of traffic it's handling, and service providers need to participate by setting policies," says Zhang. "Otherwise, as applications like video downloading really take off, we will see a congested network, which will in turn impede the development of video-sharing technology."
http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/17904/page1/





Cleanfeed Canada - What Would It Accomplish?
Bennett Haselton

Cybertip.ca, a Canadian clearinghouse for providing information to law enforcement about online child luring and child pornography, has announced that a group of major ISPs will begin blocking access to URLs on Cybertip's list of known child pornography sites. A Cybertip spokesperson says that the list fluctuates between 500 and 800 sites at any given time.

The system is named after a similar filtering system used by service provider BT in the UK. It is also reminiscent of a law passed in Pennsylvania in 2002 requiring ISPs to block URLs on a list of known child pornography sites; the law was struck down in 2004 on First Amendment grounds. Although child pornography is of course not protected by the First Amendment, the law was struck down partly because the ISPs were blocking entire servers and IP address ranges, hundreds of thousands of non-child-pornography sites were also being blocked.

Under the implementation of the Cleanfeed system, representatives from Sasktel, Bell Canada, and Telus claim that only exact URLs will be filtered, not sites hosted at the same IP address. (Although conventional Internet filtering programs sold to parents and schools have also made the same claims, only to turn out to be filtering sites by IP address after all, so we'll have to wait until the filtering is implemented before we know for sure.) The other difference of course is that the Cleanfeed system is not the law, so there's nothing to "strike down" in court. Cybertip did acknowledge that this means customers can get around the filtering for now by switching to a non-participating service provider, although they are encouraging more providers to sign up. Cybertip declined to say whether any providers had simply refused to participate. But of course it's much easier than that to get around the filter, since filter circumvention sites like Anonymouse and StupidCensorship will not be blocked.

So, if it's that easy to circumvent, does it do any good? Even respected Canadian academic and columnist Michael Geist, hardly a friend of censorship in other forms, has spoken out in favor of the plan. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it doesn't accomplish anything meaningful, and may set a horrible precedent that could make it much easier to block other content in the future.

First of all, it seems that it obviously won't stop anyone who is deliberately looking for child porn. Empirically there's no way to tell -- we don't whether systems like Cleanfeed in the UK have prevented people from accessing child pornography on purpose. Even if the providers are counting the number of blocked accesses to known child porn sites, nobody knows what people have been looking at instead through proxy sites like Anonymouse. All we can do is ask, logically, whether it is likely to work. I think purely logical arguments are frustrating when there is no empirical data to act as a referee, but let's face it, users are not going to self-report on their success at finding child pornography, and there's no way to see what users are accessing through encrypted circumvention sites. Logic is all we have.

So, consider people who are deliberately looking for child pornography. Such people are likely to be resourceful to begin with (since real child porn -- remember, non-sexual pictures of naked children do not count -- is vastly less common than regular porn; Cybertip claims after all that they "only" have about 800 sites on their list, compared to millions of regular porn sites). Virtually all such people would be aware of circumvention sites like Anonymouse, or of peer-to-peer networks, which Cybertip says they have no plans to block. So nothing is blocked from people who want to get around the filter.

The only scenario where the filters could make a difference is the case where someone accidentally accesses a child porn site. Now when I first read the Cybertip press release announcing that the filter would aim to stop "accidental" exposure to child porn, I thought that was just a tactfully sarcastic way of referring to the people who get caught accessing child porn and claim it was just a mistake. But Cybertip.ca claims they've received over 10,000 reports since January 2005 from people who accessed child porn by accident. Even though that only works out to about 15 per day, I have to concede in those cases it almost certainly was a bona fide mistake, for the simple reason that nobody would voluntarily report accessing a child pornography URL that they visited on purpose. But even so, there's the question: What have you accomplished by blocking accidental exposure?

I would argue that the harm done by child pornography is to the minors coerced into the production of it, not to the people who view it. (This, by the way, corresponds with current U.S. jurisprudence; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that a law banning fake child porn was unconstitutional, even when the viewer can't tell the difference.) Obviously you prevent the most damage by stopping child porn at the production stage, but if it's too late for that, you can try to stop people from obtaining it willfully. This lowers the demand and decreases the incentive for people to produce more in the future.

But how would it lower demand if you block people from accessing it accidentally? If those people weren't going to proceed to buy or download more pictures anyway, then they're not fueling the demand. You can block them from accessing the pictures, but the pictures are still out there, and the people who really are fueling the demand can still access them.

So it seems that by blocking someone from accidentally viewing child porn, all you've really accomplished is to avoid offending their sensibilities. Now I don't mean that mockingly, I'm certainly not disagreeing with anyone whose sensibilities are offended by child porn. But there are lots of graphic pictures on the Internet that could offend someone's sensibilities, which are outside of Cleanfeed's mandate. Consider a photo of a 16-year-old having sex, versus a photo of an adult woman fellating a horse; even though the former is illegal to possess and the latter isn't, I think most people would be more grossed out by the second one. (I would even argue that there was more harm to the participants in the making of the second one, and in this case the law's priorities are a bit screwed up. Poor horse!)

So, why block 1% of the content that would offend someone's sensibilities, when 99% of the content that would still offend that person would still be out there? The fact that the 1% is illegal doesn't answer the question; even if it's illegal, you don't have to block it, so what have you accomplished if you do?

Possibly law enforcement is sick of people using the "I accidentally clicked on it" excuse when they get caught accessing child pornography, and wants to remove that as a defense. But couldn't someone just as easily claim that they "accidentally" accessed child pornography through a circumvention site like Anonymouse? They could claim that they thought they were accessing a regular porn site, they were using a circumventor to protect their privacy, and they didn't know that the site carried child porn and didn't find out until they'd already accessed it. So it doesn't seem like the filtering would remove the "accidental" defense.

So, I don't think the filtering accomplishes much at all, but it could set a very bad precedent once the filters are in place. Once Internet users have accepted the precedent that ISPs should block content that is "probably" illegal, what's to stop organizations and lawmakers from demanding that ISPs block access to overseas sites that violate copyright, for example, as the RIAA did in 2002? The technical means will already be in place, and more importantly, people will have gotten used to the idea that legally "questionable" content should be blocked. And with lobbyists claiming that 90% of content on peer-to-peer networks violates copyright laws, wouldn't it follow logically to block peer-to-peer traffic as well?

In a legislative climate where lawmakers have proposed everything from jail time for p2p developers to letting the RIAA hack people's PCs for distributing copyrighted files, we should resist any kind of content-based blocking that would let them get their foot in the door. That includes even well-intentioned efforts like Cleanfeed.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/12/15/1624215.shtml





Senator: Illegal Images Must be Reported
Declan McCullagh

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders.

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Arizona Republican and former presidential candidate warned that "technology has contributed to the greater distribution and availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography." McCain scored 31 of 100 points on a News.com 2006 election guide scoring technology-related votes.

After child pornography or some forms of "obscenity" are found and reported, the Web site must retain any "information relating to the facts or circumstances" of the incident for at least six months. Webmasters would be immune from civil and criminal liability if they followed the specified procedures exactly.

McCain's proposal, called the "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act" (click for PDF), requires that reports be submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn will forward them to the relevant police agency. (The organization received $32.6 million in tax dollars in 2005, according to its financial disclosure documents.)

Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain's proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme--and even stiffer penalties--on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.

"I am concerned that there is a slippery slope here," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "Once you start creating categories of industries that must report suspicious or criminal behavior, when does that stop?"

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.

Kate Dean of the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association said her members appreciated McCain's efforts to rewrite the current procedures for reporting illegal images, which currently are less than clear.

McCain's proposal comes as concern about protecting children online has reached nearly a fever pitch in Washington. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave two speeches recently on the topic, including one on Friday in which he said "we must do all that we can to protect our children from these cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet."

But the reporting rules could prove problematic for individuals and smaller Web sites because the definitions of child pornography have become relatively broad.

The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, indicted an Alabama man named Jeff Pierson last week on child pornography charges because he took modeling photographs of clothed minors with their parents' consent. The images were overly "provocative," a prosecutor claimed.

Deleting sex offenders' posts
The other section of McCain's legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of "any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier" they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don't supply it.

Then, any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender.

Because "social-networking site" isn't defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites. The list could include: Slashdot, which permits public profiles; Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists; and blogs like RedState.com that show public profiles. In addition, media companies like News.com publisher CNET Networks permit users to create profiles of favorite games, gadgets and music.

"This constitutionally dubious proposal is being made apparently mostly based on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts," said EFF's Bankston. Studies by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show the online sexual solicitation of minors has dropped in the past five years, despite the growth of social-networking services, he said.

A McCain aide, who did not want to be identified by name, said on Friday that the measure was targeted at any Web site that "you'd have to join up or become a member of to use." No payment would be necessary to qualify, the aide added.

In this political climate, members of Congress may not worry much about precise definitions. Another bill also vaguely targeting social-networking sites was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in a 410-15 vote.

And in July, for instance, Congress overwhelmingly approved a bill that made it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" to trick minors into visiting their sites and viewing sexually explicit material.

Next year, Gonzales and the FBI are expected to resume their push for mandatory data retention, which will force Internet service providers to keep records on what their customers are doing online. An aide to Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, said Friday that she's planning to introduce such legislation when the new Congress convenes.

Cathy Milhoan, an FBI spokeswoman, said on Friday that the FBI "continues to support data retention. We see it as crucial in advancing our cyber investigations to include online sexual exploitation of children."

In addition, Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and McCain said that they'll introduce similar legislation dealing with sex offenders and social-networking sites in January.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report
http://news.com.com/Senator+Illegal+...3-6142332.html





Home Office to Clean Up Sadville?
Andrew Orlowski

British Home Secretary John Reid today vowed to cleanse the internet of Entartete Kunst, or degenerate art.

Reid says he wants "computer generated" images of child abuse prohibited. In the UK, it's illegal to harbour photographs, but legal to harbour artwork of child abuse.

"I am currently consulting cabinet colleagues about how we might ban the possession of computer-generated images of child abuse, including cartoons or other graphic illustrations of children being abused... while it is illegal to distribute these abhorrent images, it is entirely legal to possess them," Reid told the first meeting of the newly-formed Internet Child Safety Task Force.

The move is sure to raise questions that pit self-expression against the desire to clean up the net. We raised a couple of these with the Home Office.

Firstly, would work of artistic merit fall under the guidelines? For example, would an image of one of Jake and Dinos Chapman's sexualized sculptures of children qualify?

And secondly, was the Home Secretary seeking to criminalize role playing gamers?

Bizarre as it is, on the much-hyped VR environment Second Life, some subscribers represent themselves as children, in the expectation of being abused. You can (if you wish) see a "child" being "raped" by an avatar of Star Trek's Lt. Spock, here (http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4206&p=4).

"It's too early to say whether something will or not be in a law that we haven't started consulting on," a Home Office spokesperson told us. "We're putting together a consultation document - we're just at the starting point."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12...o_art_illegal/





VA. AG Wants Sex Offenders' Online Names
Michael Felberbaum

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said Monday he will seek legislation requiring convicted sex offenders to register their online identities with the state to help MySpace and other online hangouts more easily block access.

If enacted, Virginia would be the first state to require registration of e-mail addresses and instant-messaging identities on the state's sex offender registry, McDonnell's office said.

"We require all sex offenders to register their physical and mailing addresses in Virginia, but in the 21st century it is just as critical that they register any e-mail addresses or IM screen names," McDonnell said in a news release.

Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have grown increasingly worried that teens are at risk on MySpace and other social-networking sites, which provide tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages known as profiles.

MySpace announced plans last week to develop technologies designed to help block convicted sex offenders by checking profiles against government registries, but the News Corp. site's ability to do so is limited by the fact that users do not have to use their real names.

Requiring registrations of e-mail addresses would make matching easier. To guard against offenders registering one address but using another on MySpace, the penalty would be the same as it would be for not registering or for providing incorrect information, which could result in a misdemeanor or felony charge.

There are more than 550,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, including 13,000 in Virginia. McDonnell said e-mail registration requirements are better done at the state level because most prosecutions and convictions for sex offenders are under state jurisdiction.

Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, applauded the Virginia announcement.

"This legislation is an important recognition that the Internet has become a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards," Nigam said.

Nigam said the information would also give law enforcement new tools to "employ against predators who attempt to misuse the Internet to find potential victims."

Donna Rice Hughes, president of the Internet safety group Enough Is Enough and a member of Virginia's Youth Internet Safety Task Force, said that although there's no "silver bullet," the legislation will be a helpful part of the solution.

U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John McCain, R-Ariz., last week announced plans for similar federal legislation to apply to those on probation or parole. The Virginia proposal is not limited to those still on probation or parole.

The state proposal stems from discussions with MySpace and the safety task force and is part of a package of proposals the task force will announce Dec. 20.

Regardless of e-mail registration requirements, MySpace is deploying within a month a database that will contain the names and physical descriptions of convicted sex offenders in the United States. An automated system will search for matches between the database and MySpace user profiles. Employees will then delete any profiles that match.

Skeptics say such technologies will address only part of the problem, as much of the danger comes from sexual predators who have never been convicted and thus are not in the databases.

"Most of the people who are molesting children or sexually exploiting children that they encounter online are not registered sex offenders," said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-11-17-29-06





States Use Polygraphs to Monitor Paroled Sex Offenders
Michael Gormley

When Andrew McDaniels, a convicted sex offender in upstate N.Y., was interviewed by a parole officer in September, he faced something new. The parole officer had a laptop computer receiving data from skin sensors on McDaniels. When the parole officer noticed a blip, he asked more pointed questions.

Soon, McDaniels acknowledged he had been around boys near Watkins Glen, parole officials said Monday. More officers followed up in the field and the parolee was accused of violating the condition of his release that requires him to stay away from children. He remains in Schuyler County Jail until a hearing this week, Parole Division spokesman Scott Steinhardt said.

New York is the latest state to require paroled sex offenders to answer questions while hooked to a lie-detecting computer.

The action, by the outgoing Pataki administration, comes just before the legislature will consider civil confinement for the most dangerous sex offenders after they complete their sentences. Gov. George Pataki has called for the legislature to meet Wednesday to pass a civil confinement bill for sex offenders.

Parole officers equipped with the computers ask convicted sex offenders about where they have been and who they have seen to determine whether they might have violated parole. They are also asked if they committed any new crimes.

"It is being used more," said Anna Carol Salter, a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist in Madison, Wis. She lectures on sex offenders and is a consultant to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, which uses polygraphs for sex offender cases.

"I think it is proving to be effective. You get many, many more admissions by offenders about illegal activities and it also appears to act as a deterrent," she said. "They are often more fearful of lying to a polygraph than they are to a person."

Skin monitors provide data on changes in a subject's skin temperature, moisture and electrical signals sent to the brain. The information is then sent to the computer, where a trained operator does the analysis. Long gone is the stylus hooked up to a paper roller.

Salter said, however, there is a concern. A badly administered test, for example, could yield results that show a parolee is following the rules when he or she isn't. That would lull parole officials into a false sense that all is well. And, she said: "It's easy to do a bad polygraph."

The use of polygraphs for sex offenders, begun in the early 1970s in Oregon, Idaho and Washington, has spread steadily nationwide, said T.V. O'Malley of the American Polygraph Association.

"It's getting more popular as polygraph has cleaned up its act and we became very sophisticated about sex offender results," he said. "The alternative is self-disclosure. And that doesn't work."

In New York, 13 parole officers have been trained to do the tests as part of "Operation Truth or Consequences," state Division of Parole Executive Director Anthony G. Ellis II said Monday. The training, equipment and the cost to dedicate trained officers to conduct the tests is about $1 million this fiscal year, according to the division.

"There are no limits as to what you can ask, but they are trained to gear it in a certain way so you can get what you are looking for," said Angela Jimenez, director of operations at the division. "This group needs tighter control," she said, noting that there is a high rate of recidivism among sex offenders.

Polygraphs are being used on sex offenders in more than two dozen states, sometimes in trial programs, and in Great Britain, according to newspaper accounts. A British pilot program found 85 percent of convicted sex offenders were committing new crimes or violating parole or simply failed the polygraph, according to The Independent of London.

A study by the Colorado Department of Public Safety sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice found more than half of the sex offenders subjected to polygraph tests were in violation of their supervision rules. As a result, 37 percent were given new treatment plans and 15 percent were returned to court for further action.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers based in Washington is studying the issue, but has some concerns. For example, supporters say the tests are 90 percent accurate, while detractors say they are only 70 percent accurate. Even at 90 percent, that could mean thousands of innocent men and women would face jail time or further restrictions because of a bad test, said the association's Jack King.

"We don't have a policy yet, but generally you don't want to put somebody's liberty in the hands of a polygrapher," King said.

In May, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Albany ruled that lie detector tests can be used on sex offenders, but included safeguards such as limiting questions to information necessary for supervision, case monitoring and treatment.

The appeals court ruling found that polygraph testing "produces an incentive to tell the truth, and thereby advances the sentencing goals."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Virtually Addicted

A lawsuit against IBM is reviving debate over whether Web overuse may be classified as an addiction. The answer will have big implications for business
Catherine Holahan

By his own admission, James Pacenza was spending too much time in Internet chat rooms, in some of them discussing sex. He goes so far as to call his interest in inappropriate Web sites a form of addiction that stems from the posttraumatic stress disorder he's suffered since returning from Vietnam. Whatever it's called, Pacenza's chat-room habit cost him his job.

After 19 years at IBM's East Fishkill plant, Pacenza was fired in May, 2003, after a fellow employee noticed discussion of a sex act on a chat room open on Pacenza's computer. IBM (IBM) maintains that logging onto the Web site was a violation of its business conduct guidelines and a misuse of company property—and that it was well within its rights to terminate Pacenza's employment.

Pacenza and his attorney beg to differ. They filed suit in a New York U.S. District Court in July, 2004, seeking $5 million for wrongful termination. Earlier in the year, Pacenza had admitted to a superior that he had a problem with the Internet at home. Pacenza's attorney, Michael Diederich Jr., alleges that the perception that Pacenza was addicted to the Internet caused IBM to fire first without asking questions or "even attempting to examine the situation." Diederich says there are several steps IBM could have taken, including limiting his Internet use or blocking certain sites. "It's not productive or useful for the employer to unfairly terminate employees," says Diederich.

The case was held up for years due to Pacenza's medical problems and his attorney's service as a military lawyer in Iraq. But it has come back to the fore recently, and IBM on Dec. 8 sought a dismissal of the case, saying it's without merit. On the surface, Pacenza's may appear to be an open-and-shut case. He doesn't deny logging onto the chat room at work, and company policy provides for the termination of employees who access inappropriate Web sites.

Certifying Addiction

But cases like Pacenza's, which involve Internet misuse, may no longer be quite so simple, thanks to a growing debate over whether Internet abuse is a legitimate addiction, akin to alcoholism. Attorneys say recognition by a court—whether in this or some future litigation—that Internet abuse is an uncontrollable addiction, and not just a bad habit, could redefine the condition as a psychological impairment worthy of protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

That in turn would have far-reaching ramifications for how companies deal with workplace Internet use and abuse. For starters, businesses could be compelled to allow medical leave, provide counseling to, or make other accommodations for employees who can't control Internet use, says Brian East, co-chair of the disability rights committee of the National Employment Lawyers' Assn. East says recognizing Internet abuse as an addiction would make it more difficult for employers to fire employees who have a problem. "Assuming it is recognized as an impairment…it is analyzed the same way as alcoholism," says East.

That's a big assumption—and there's intense debate over whether compulsive Internet use should be recognized as an addiction. The American Psychiatric Assn. (APA) doesn't include Internet addiction in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, which serves as the basis for many ADA claims related to mental disabilities. Substance abuse, on the other hand, is listed in a special category under substance-use disorders. Internet addiction would not be eligible for inclusion in the manual until nearly 2012, when the next edition is scheduled to be released, according to the APA.

Compulsive Behavior

Whatever the APA stance, several psychiatrists and psychologists already say compulsive Internet overuse can legitimately be called an addiction. Among them is Dr. David Greenfield, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and author of the 1999 book Virtual Addiction. He compares compulsive Internet use to alcoholism, drug abuse, or pathological gambling.

Like alcoholics or those who abuse drugs, people who are addicted to the Internet use it to change their mood and feel better, says Greenfield. There are also many who can't stop using it, despite reprimands from work, disputes with family and friends, and other negative effects such as debt due to compulsive Internet shopping or gambling. "It's not surprising that it is not defined yet, because these things change very slowly," says Greenfield. "But when you are in clinical practice and you are dealing with people's lives, you can't wait for those issues to be addressed. There is a huge problem with Internet abuse in the workplace, and you can't pretend that they don't exist because there isn't a label."

In October, researchers at Stanford University's medical school released a study showing that a significant number of Americans show addiction symptoms with regard to the Internet. Some 14% reported that it was hard to stay away from the Internet for a several-day stretch. More than 12% said they stayed online longer than intended and nearly 9% said they hid their Internet use from loved ones or employers. Roughly 6% said relationships had suffered due to excessive Internet use.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic, which conducted the study, says there are clear similarities between excessive Internet use and other addictions. "People are very secretive, people will tell me that they feel restless when they go for a whole afternoon without checking e-mail, there is mounting anxiety when they try to cut back on their online use," says Aboujaoude. However, he stops short of calling it an addiction. The clinic is designing a more rigorous study aimed at determining whether Internet abuse is an addiction and not just a bad habit, or a manifestation of another addiction or psychological problem. "Based on our studies there are definitely red flags and there are things that should be followed up on. But until that is done, you are not going to find a serious researcher calling this Internet addiction," says Aboujaoude. "It's too early to coin a new term 'Internet addiction.'"

Treatment Options

Not according to psychologist Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa. She says that the U.S. lags behind other countries in its recognition of compulsive Internet use as a legitimate addiction worthy of specialized treatment. Korea, for example, has launched the Centre for Internet Addiction Prevention & Counseling in response to what the government sees as the growing problem of Internet addicts in its highly wired society. In October, a 24-year-old died after playing an online game nonstop for 86 hours (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/11/06, "Online Gaming: Korea's Gotta Have It"). "They have been able to move faster than we have in America," says Young of the Korean government. "They have a lot of government funding to put together these clinics."

China also recognizes Internet addiction as a legitimate problem. Chinese employers can send workers to a two-week rehabilitation clinic for Internet issues. Besides counseling, the clinic provides regimented exercise and medical treatment to help people become healthy and redirect their energy.

U.S. companies ought to wake up to the problem in order to avoid lost productivity from workers and liability for unjust termination or disciplinary action regarding the Internet. "If you have something like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which recognizes many addictions as a disability, it is not a stretch to see that people who are getting in trouble with the Internet are going to see it as a legitimate addiction and sue," says Greenfield. "It is only a matter of time before one of these suits is successful."

Just how many suits are coming down the pike isn't clear, and Pacenza's is among the earliest to weave Internet addiction into a wrongful termination suit. There have been several other legal battles relating to presumed Internet addiction, though often those involve online games or chat rooms that parents say contribute to a child's problems.

Workplace Prevention

Even as the debate rages on within the medical community and increasingly in the courts, some businesses are taking steps to combat Internet addiction beyond implementing Internet-use policies. Young, author of Caught in the Net, says she regularly speaks to companies about Internet addiction. "They want to deal with the problem of abuse and minimize that as much as they can," she says. Young says she sees everyone from IT professionals obsessed with Web surfing, to administrative assistants glued to eBay (EBAY), to self-employed lawyers who are missing deadlines because of a fixation with Internet porn. Still, most companies are leery of treating Internet abuse as an addiction. "Overall companies are still a little hesitant to look at it as an addiction," says Young. "But if they look at the costs, it makes more sense than just firing people."

Employers try to alert employees to the potential of the problem, by paying for talks or literature, in order to avoid problems such as lost productivity, too much demand on company bandwidth, and sexual-harassment claims from employees who see objectionable material on a colleague's computer. However, some businesses are concerned enough about the cost of replacing otherwise good employees that they send employees to rehabilitation clinics.

When it comes to Internet overuse, some companies are finding the best cure isn't firing, but preventive medicine. Some limit Internet access to only those employees who need it to do their jobs. And they are spending money on filtering and blocking software to keep employees from surfing the Web for personal use.
Sensible Limits

Continental Airlines (CAL) acknowledges it's impossible to ban all personal use of the Web at work. Louis Obdyke, Continental's managing attorney for labor and employment issues, says the company lets employees occasionally surf the Web, shop, bank, or do other activities online—providing it doesn't interfere with productivity. "It's pretty much under a rule of reason," says Obdyke. "If you get your work done and you go on the Internet during the workday, we wouldn't see that as a problem."

When Internet use causes work to suffer, stiffer measures are taken. And an employee who can't improve or who visits adult or pornographic sites while at work is susceptible to firing. As for whether Internet abuse is comparable to other disorders such as alcoholism, Obdyke is clear: "We don't recognize this Internet addiction idea."

Depending on the outcome of Pacenza's case and others likely to follow, companies like Continental may have to.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo....g3a.rsst1214a





Report: Wi-Fi Demand Up 25 Pct. in '06
Jessica Mintz

Demand for microchips that help laptops, video game consoles and other gadgets connect wirelessly to the Internet pushed higher in 2006, a trade group said Monday.

But early versions of the upcoming "n" generation of wireless laptop cards and routers didn't catch on.

Global shipments of the wireless chips are expected to grow 25 percent to 200.9 million by the end of the year, compared with 160.9 million in 2005, according to figures from the Wi-Fi Alliance industry association and In-Stat, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based research group owned by Reed Elsevier Group PLC.

Chips for Wi-Fi-enabled laptops and routers continued to make up the bulk of the category, about 75 percent in 2006.

While shipments of chips used in consumer electronics such as the Nintendo Wii video game console and Microsoft Corp.'s new Zune portable digital music player weren't enough to boost full-year figures significantly, fourth-quarter shipments indicate this category is poised for growth, according to Karen Hanley, senior marketing director of the Austin, Texas-based Wi-Fi Alliance.

Wireless chips for portable consumer electronics, which includes hand-held video games and the Zune, made up about 15 percent of shipments in 2006, down from 17 percent in 2005, In-Stat data show. Chips for stationary consumer electronics like video game consoles accounted for about 10 percent of shipments, up from 8 percent last year.

Cell phones that can use a Wi-Fi connection are also expected to take off. Data and projections from In-Stat show shipments of chips bound for dual-mode phones to grow from less than 1 percent this year to 5 percent next year, to nearly a quarter of the market in 2010.

This year, manufacturers also started shipping a new generation of chips that promised greater speed and longer reach, even though the body that governs wireless standards has yet to settle on a final recipe for the so-called 802.11n products.

Shipments of the pre-standard "n" wireless chips made up just 4 percent of the market in 2006, according to In-Stat, while the dominant "g" variety held on to a 55 percent share.

Chips that combine the older "a" technology with "g" made the biggest splash this year, taking 25 percent of chip shipments in 2006 compared with 9 percent in 2005.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-11-12-43-30





Ultrawideband Legal in EU Within Six Months
David Meyer

High-bandwidth, short-range wireless technology finally gets the Euro nod

Ultrawideband is to be legalised across Europe within the next six months, ZDNet UK has learned.

The short-range, high-bandwidth technology — which promises speeds of up to 1Gbps — has until now been illegal outside the US. Its status has now been reversed at a meeting on the 4th and 5th December of the Radio Spectrum Committee (RSC), a European Commission body which can mandate spectrum usage across the continent.

Ofcom's chief technologist, Professor William Webb, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the UK regulator was "delighted" at the approval of ultrawideband (UWB). He pointed out that if the RSC approves a document "it automatically becomes EC law" and said the decision to mandate acceptance of UWB across all European states within the next six months was taken at an RSC meeting earlier this week. Although no officials from the RSC were prepared to comment on the record, sources close to the deliberations confirmed that the decision had been taken.

"We think it's important to allow as many technologies to be tried in the marketplace as possible," said Webb, adding that UWB "has some potentially unique characteristics".

Ultrawideband uniquely combines very low power across bands many gigahertz wide to reuse frequencies allocated to other users without causing significant interference. The technology, which operates at ranges of up to 10 metres and was developed by companies such as Intel, Texas Instruments, HP and Nokia, is most widely marketed in the US by the WiMedia Alliance. The Federal Communications Commission in the US only allows UWB under strict conditions that limit how much power it can radiate across the bands it covers — typically less than the normal noise emitted by ordinary, non-wireless electronic equipment.

Ofcom said in March that it would impose even tighter restrictions on UWB. The regulator also told ZDNet UK at the time that it was predicting an announcement on the availability of UWB by the end of this year.

On Friday, sources confirmed to ZDNet UK that the restrictions put forward by the EC would indeed be more rigorous than those imposed in the US, although they would not be so restrictive as to make it impossible for some global harmonisation of UWB devices — a stance which would have angered the manufacturers of such equipment.

It is understood that the committee decision to allow UWB was based on a far from unanimous majority, with some Scandinavian countries and France opposing the proposal. UWB opponents are mostly established band users who claim that high densities of UWB usage will raise the interference level enough to affect their existing and future services. However, tests in the US have not found any plausible scenarios where such interference is a significant factor.

The decision still has to be formally approved by the EC, and an announcement is expected within the next few months. This delay is not expected to prevent manufacturers currently developing UWB products from preparing them for European availability.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communicatio...9285057,00.htm





Survey: Weather Updates Popular Via Cell
Bruce Meyerson

A greater percentage of cell phone Internet users visit popular weather and sports Web sites compared with people who go online via computer, according to survey findings by MobileWeb Metrix.

Though mobile Web usage still represents a tiny fraction of all online activity, the findings may suggest certain types of information and services are seen as more popular or critical on wireless devices.

AccuWeather.com, for example, was accessed by cell phone browser among 7.5 percent of the roughly 4,000 survey respondents who identified themselves as wireless Web users in September. By contrast, among regular computer-based Web users, only 1.7 percent said they visited AccuWeather.com, according to MobileWeb Metrix, a joint venture between Telephia Inc. and comScore Networks.

Web usage patterns were similar for two other leading sources of weather information: At Weather.com, the online outpost of The Weather Channel and a unit of Landmark Communications Inc., wireless use came to 22.1 percent of mobile Web users vs. 12.7 of computer-based users. About 9 percent of the mobile Web users accessed Yahoo Inc.'s weather service, while queries from desktop users numbered 5.7 percent.

Mobile usage of ESPN.com, a unit of Walt Disney Co., provided a similar contrast: 17.9 percent to 9.4 percent, respectively.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-11-15-51-21





From April

Print Me a Heart and a Set of Arteries
Peter Aldhous

SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.

Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his "bioprinting" technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of "bioink", clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.

This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed "biopaper", with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. "We can print any desired structure, in principle," Forgacs told the meeting.

Other tissue engineers have tried printing 3D structures, using modified ink-jet printers which spray cells suspended in liquid (New Scientist, 25 January 2003, p 16). Now Forgacs and a company called Sciperio have developed a device with printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster.
“When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ”

Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. "After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner," says Forgacs.

Most tissue engineers trying to build 3D structures start with a scaffold of the desired shape, which they seed with cells and grow for weeks in the lab. This is how Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues grew the bladders which he successfully implanted into seven people (New Scientist, 8 April 2006, p 10). But if tissue engineering goes mainstream, faster and cheaper methods will be a boon. "Bioprinting is the way to go," says Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
http://www.newscientist.com/article....mg19025474.300





So This Manatee Walks Into the Internet
Jacques Steinberg

The skit, as scripted for the Dec. 4 installment of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” was about absurdist college sports mascots that the host and his writers would like to see someday.

Among them were “the Boise State Conjoined Vikings,” who had been born locked at the horns, as well as something Mr. O’Brien called “the Webcam manatee” — said to be the mascot of “F.S.U.” — which was basically someone in a manatee costume rubbing himself or herself provocatively in front of a camera (to the tune of the 1991 hit “I Touch Myself”). Meanwhile a voyeur with a lascivious expression watched via computer.

Who knew that life would soon imitate art.

At the end of the skit, in a line Mr. O’Brien insists was ad-libbed, he mentioned that the voyeur (actually Mark Pender, a member of the show’s band) was watching www.hornymanatee.com. There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it.

In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast.

By yesterday afternoon hornymanatee.com — created by Mr. O’Brien’s staff and featuring images of such supposedly forbidden acts as “Manatee-on-Manatee” sex (again using characters in costumes) — had received approximately 3 million hits, according to NBC. Meanwhile several thousand of Mr. O’Brien’s viewers have also responded to his subsequent on-air pleas that they submit artwork and other material inspired by the aquatic mammals, and the romantic and sexual shenanigans they imagine, to the e-mail address conan@hornymanatee.com.

One viewer sent a poem. Mr. O’Brien asked James Lipton, the haughty host of “Inside the Actors Studio” on Bravo, to read it on “Late Night.” It included the lines: “I want to freak thy blubber rolls,” and “The product of our ecstasy will be half man and half a-’tee.” After that a curtain opened, and Mr. Lipton gamely danced with the manatee character. Another viewer wrote a song, which Mr. Pender, the band’s trumpet player, crooned to the character. Set to the heavy metal band AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” it included the lyrics “She had big black eyes/no discernible thighs” and “The waves start shakin’/the ocean was quakin’/my pelvis was achin’. ”

Reached by telephone at NBC yesterday, Mr. O’Brien said he was stunned and overwhelmed by the viewers’ response to what had initially been a throwaway line, and by what that response, collectively, suggested about how the digital world was affecting traditional media like television.

“We couldn’t have done this two years ago, three years ago,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s sort of this weird comedy dialogue with the audience.”

He added, “I still have an abacus.”

Regardless, Mr. O’Brien and his staff are digitally savvy enough to seize an opportunity when it presents itself, particularly in the aftermath of such Internet comedy phenomena as “Lazy Sunday,” a filmed clip from “Saturday Night Live” that drew large audiences on the Web last year, initially as a bootleg. After the taping of the Dec. 4 show, Mr. O’Brien said the show’s executive producer, Jeff Ross, informed him of the problem, then asked him whether he wanted to mute the mention of the site or buy the Web address.

“We didn’t want to take it out,” Mr. Ross said yesterday, “so we bought it.”

In explaining to the audience the next night what he and his writers had done, Mr. O’Brien marveled, “For $159, NBC, the network that brought you ‘Meet the Press,’ Milton Berle and the nation’s first commercial television station became the proud owner of www.hornymanatee.com.”

Now, by clicking on “tour,” visitors to the site are drawn into a netherworld of mock-graphic images with titles like “Mature Manatee” (with a walker of course) and “Fetish” (a manatee in a bondage costume) as well as dozens of viewer submissions, including “Manatee & Colmes,” a spoof of “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News.

Mr. O’Brien said he knew he was on to something when, on Wednesday night, he was at a Christmas party in the lobby of a friend’s building and a waiter approached him with a platter of salmon and toast points. When Mr. O’Brien politely declined, he said the waiter drew in close and whispered in his ear, “My compliments to the horny manatee.”

As he prepared last night’s show, Mr. O’Brien said he was planning to give the bit its first night off, although he was confident it would soon return.

“We don’t want the entire show to be ‘Late Night With Horny Manatee,’ ” he said. “Though, of course, it will become that eventually.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/ar...on/12mana.html





The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist
Dan Gillmor

The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long.

But professional photojournalists, and more recently videographers, have continued to make good livings at a craft that helps inform the rest of us about the world we live in. That craft has never been more vibrant, or vital. But the ability to make a living at it will crumble soon.

The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers.

Let’s do a little time travel.

This movie camera captured the most famous pictures in the citizen-media genre: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Abraham Zapruder, the man pointing the camera that day in Dealey Plaza, sold the film to Life Magazine for $150,000 — about half a million dollars in today’s currency.

In Dealey Plaza that day, one man happened to capture a motion picture — somewhat blurred but utterly gruesome nonetheless — of those terrible events. Zapruder’s work, by any standard we can imagine, was an act of citizen journalism.

Now consider what media tools people carry around with them routinely today — or, better yet, consider what they'’l have a decade from now. And then take yourself, and those tools, back to 1963.

Dozens or hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza would have been capturing high-definition videos of the assassination, most likely via their camera-equipped mobile phones as well as devices designed to be cameras and little else. They’d have been capturing those images from multiple perspectives. And — this is key — all of those devices would have been attached to digital networks.

If soon-to-be-ubiquitous technology had been in use back in 1963, at least several things are clear. One is that videos of this event would have been posted online almost instantly. Professional news organizations, which would also have had their own videos, would have been competing with a blizzard of other material almost from the start — and given traditional media’s usually appropriate reluctance to broadcast the most gruesome images (e.g. the Nick Berg beheading in Iraq), the online accounts might well be a primary source.

(Less germane to the topic here, we’d also soon have a three-dimensional hologram of the event, given the number of cameras capturing it from various angles. And we’d probably know for sure whether someone was shooting at the president from behind that famous grassy knoll.)

Consider, as well, how we might remember the horror of September 11, 2001 under similar circumstances. Recall that people inside the World Trade Center towers and on the four hijacked airplanes were making mobile-phone calls to loved ones, colleagues and authorities. Suppose they had been sending videos of what was going on inside those buildings and planes to the rest of us? The day’s events would go into history with even grimmer — and even more human — detail.

Now consider another famous picture, the one at the left. It’s the single image that we will most remember from the July 2005 bombings in London. It was taken by Adam Stacey inside the Underground (subway), as he and others escaped from a smoky train immediately after one of bombs exploded.

Again, the production values of the image are hardly professional. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the utter authenticity of the image, made so by the fact that the man was there at the right time with the right media-creation gear.

In a world of ubiquitous media tools, which is almost here, someone will be on the spot every time.

And there will be business models and methods to support their work.

Today, YouTube is the site of choice for all kinds of videos, including newsworthy ones such as the recent abuse-by-taser of the student at the University of California, Los Angeles (more than 764,000 viewings as of today), and the racist nightclub rantings of Michael “Kramer” Richards (more than 1.2 million viewings). Both were captured by mobile-phone video cameras.

Others will make their way to sites like the newly announced projects such as YouWitness News (a joint project of Yahoo and Reuters), or operations like Scoopt or NowPublic. They and other companies want to be aggregators of, and in some cases brokers for, citizen-created media. (Disclosures: I am teaching a class with Yahoo’s editorial director, and I’m an advisor to NowPublic.)

If reputable photojournalists face big changes, so do the paparazzi who capture celebrities’ public (and sometimes private) doings. Bild, the trashy German tabloid, asks its Leser-Reporters to send in their own pictures — and pays handsomely. (I’ve been told, but haven’t verified, that some of the professional paparazzi are submitting photos this way, because they can make more money than through traditional dealings with the newspaper.)

The business part of this is important. I’m highly skeptical of business models, typically conceived by Big Media Companies, that tell the rest of us: “You do all the work, and we’ll take all the money we make by exploiting it.” This is not just unethical.. It’s also unsustainable in the long run.

Not every person who captures a newsworthy image or video necessarily wants to be paid. Stacey’s picture was widely distributed, including onto the front pages of many newspapers, in part because he put it out under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone else the right to use it in any way provided they attribute the picture to its creator. There were misunderstandings (including at least one use by a photo agency that apparently claimed at least partial credit for itself), but the licensing terms almost certainly helped spread it far and wide in a very short time.

The problems this trend will create are not trivial. One is that democratized media tools also include easy and cheap ways to fake or alter reality.

The picture at right circulated widely around the Net after Sept. 11. It purportedly shows an airliner about to hit a World Trade Center tower, with an unlucky tourist having his picture taken just before the moment of impact. The photo is fake — a composite created by a not-so-funny prankster. It was quickly debunked (see this Snopes urban-legends page, for example), but not before a lot of people were initially fooled. Some who saw the “photo” are probably still believing it was authentic.

To weed out the phony stuff, we’ll need to combine traditional means of verification with new kinds of reputation systems. It won’t be easy, but the need for such methods is plain enough.

So, back to our friends, the professional photo or video journalists. How can people who cover breaking news for a living begin to compete? They can’t possibly be everywhere at once. They can compete only on the stories where they are physically present — and, in the immediate future, by being relatively trusted sources.

But the fact remains, there are far more newsworthy situations than pro picture takers. In the past, most of those situations never were captured. Not any longer.

Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be — and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways.

To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive.

Remember, there was once a fairly healthy community of portrait painters. When photography came along, a lot of them had to find other work; or at least their ranks were not refilled when they retired. Professional portrait photographers, similarly, are less in demand today than a generation ago. But portraits have survived — and thrived.

The photojournalist’s job may be history before long. But photojournalism has never been more important, or more widespread.
http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/12/04/...otojournalist/





Researchers Developing Anti-Fraud Tool
Joe Mandak

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are relying on an old adage to develop anti-fraud software for Internet auction sites: It's not what you know, it's who you know.

At sites like eBay, users warn each other if they have a bad experience with a seller by rating their transactions. But the CMU researchers said savvy fraudsters get around that by conducting transactions with friends or even themselves, using alternate user names to give themselves high satisfaction ratings - so unsuspecting customers will still try to buy from them.

The CMU software looks for patterns of users who have repeated dealings with one another, and alerts other users that there is a higher probability of having a fraudulent transaction with them.

"There's a lot of commonsense solutions out there, like being more careful about how you screen the sellers," said Duen Horng "Polo" Chau, the research associate who developed the software with computer science professor Christos Faloutsos and two other students. "But because I'm an engineering student, I wanted to come up with a systematic approach" to identify those likely to commit fraud.

The researchers analyzed about 1 million transactions involving 66,000 eBay users to develop graphs - known in statistical circles as bipartite cores - that identify users interacting with unusual frequency. They plan to publish a paper on their findings early next year and, perhaps, market their software to eBay or otherwise make it available to people who shop online.

Catherine England, an eBay spokeswoman, said the company was not aware of the research and would not comment on it. But England said protecting the company's more than 200 million users from fraud was a top priority.

Online auction fraud - when a seller doesn't deliver goods or sells a defective product - accounted for 12 percent of the 431,000 computer fraud complaints received last year by Consumer Sentinel, the Federal Trade Commission's consumer fraud and identity theft database. Auction fraud was the most commonly reported computer-related fraud in the database.

And the scams run the gamut.

Last year, a federal grand jury indicted an Ohio man on charges he sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of stolen Lego merchandise on the Internet. Earlier this year, a New Mexico woman was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for selling forged hunting licenses on eBay, over the phone and by e-mail, and then not delivering trips paid for by out-of-state hunters.

Earlier this month, a man who failed to deliver tickets to the 2005 Ohio State-Michigan football game to 250 online auction customers was sentenced to 34 months in federal prison.

Johannes Ullrich, an Internet fraud expert with the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md., said the CMU research "sounds like a credible way to detect fraud."

"Essentially, what they're trying to do is find these extended circles of friends who make positive recommendations to each other," said Ullrich, the chief technology officer of SANS' Internet Storm Center, which tracks viruses and other Internet problems.

But Ullrich said the CMU researchers must find a way to screen out false positives. He said a small group of users - such as baseball card collectors - might repeatedly buy from one another and could be flagged as high-risk.

Faloutsos said the researchers have thought of that in developing the software called NetProbe - short for Network Detection via Propagation of Beliefs.

"We're not just looking at your neighbors (on the auction site)," Faloutsos said. "We're looking at the neighbors of your neighbors, and the neighbors of your neighbors' neighbors."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-11-13-50-15





How Much Will Windows Security Matter?
Brian Bergstein

Microsoft Corp. took great pains to improve security in its newly released computer operating system, Windows Vista, redesigning it to reduce users' exposure to destructive programs from the Internet. Outside researchers commend the retooled approach - yet they also say the changes won't make online life much safer than it is now.

Why not? Partly because of security progress that Microsoft already had made in its last operating system, Windows XP. Also because a complex product like Vista is bound to have holes yet to be discovered. And mainly because of the rapidly changing nature of online threats.

Sure, Microsoft appears to have fixed the glitches that used to make it easy for viruses, worms and other problems to wreck PCs. But other avenues for attack are always evolving.

"Microsoft has made the core of the operating system more secure, but they've really solved, by and large, yesterday's problems," said Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at antivirus vendor Symantec Corp.

That claim would not please Microsoft, which touts Vista's improved security as a big reason why companies and consumers will want to upgrade to the new operating system.

In fact, Microsoft's effort to tighten security in Vista was one reason the software was delayed past the crucial holiday shopping season. It's now available for businesses and will be available to consumers Jan. 30.

"It is an incremental improvement - it is a reasonably large increment," said Jon Callas, chief technology officer at PGP Corp., a maker of encryption software. "I don't think it's a game-changer."

Some of Vista's security enhancements require computers with the latest microprocessors - which are known as 64-bit chips, in reference to how much data they process at once. That won't improve things on today's standard 32-bit computers, which will stick around for a long time.

However, most of the improvements are available in all editions of Vista, including a stronger firewall and a built-in program known as Defender that alerts users if Vista believes spyware is being installed.

"Windows is going to talk to you a lot more and make sure you're a lot more aware of what you're doing," said Adrien Robinson, a director in Windows' security technology unit. "It's going to help consumers be more savvy."

One of Vista's biggest changes is more control over computer management. With previous versions of Windows, users were given by default great control over the computer's settings - a situation that opened the door to nefarious manipulation by outsiders. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. In Vista, users are prompted to supply a password when they make significant changes - a security feature long available on Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh and computers running the Linux operating system.

At the same time, the software gives corporate PC administrators new security powers, such as the ability to turn off the USB ports that employees might use to remove data or bring in troublesome programs on flash drives. (Some network administrators had told Microsoft they were so desperate to stop that practice that they were filling the PC ports with glue.)

Even with all the changes, Vista does not promise a total cure for security headaches. Microsoft, after all, is also selling security add-ons, competing more directly with antivirus companies than in the past.

"Rather than having all the doors unlocked, you now have locks on the doors. It doesn't mean it's a silver bullet," Robinson said. "If they really wanted to get in, they could get through. They could throw a rock through the window. But it's harder. Our goal is to make it harder, to raise the bar."

Still, when Vista for businesses was launched in New York on Nov. 30, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised a "dramatic" drop in "the number of vulnerabilities that ever present themselves."

If so, that would spare Microsoft from a repeat of the embarrassing series of "critical" security patches it had to release for the previous operating system.

But it might not mean much against many threats Web surfers face today.

For one thing, the kinds of large-scale, automated worms that Vista purportedly will hinder have been waning anyway, according to security analysts. Symantec's Friedrichs said 2006 hasn't seen any worms as prevalent as the kinds that caused widely publicized PC outages several years ago, with names like Slammer and Blaster.

That's partly because of enhancements Microsoft already made in Service Pack 2, a huge set of patches for Windows XP that were released in 2004.

"If you're looking at two versions, XP Service Pack 2 versus Vista, I'm going to say to the average user they're both going to offer them good security," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "Is Vista better? I don't know if it's that substantially better."

Security experts say malicious hackers have largely moved away from outage-causing attacks, motivated by publicity or pride, in favor of more targeted and lucrative thefts of users' data. Those attacks tend to exploit flaws in Web applications or employ "social engineering" - such as tricking people with phony e-mails into giving up passwords.

"From that perspective, Vista is a non-event," said John McCormack, a senior vice president at security vendor Websense Inc.

To its credit, Microsoft is fighting such "phishing" attacks by configuring its new Internet Explorer 7 Web browser to alert users if they're visiting a dicey-seeming Web site. Internet Explorer 7 is already available for free download.

But IE7's phish-catching method alone is limited: It is based on a "black list" of sites known to be up to no good. Outside security experts say that will not stop the increasingly savvy attackers who constantly morph their tactics, sometimes every few hours.

For example, Websense recently tracked a phishing attack that mimicked a customer service message from Amazon.com. It passed through most spam filters, and the phony Web site to which it directed victims changed throughout the day. For at least the first few days, IE7 hadn't caught up to block it, McCormack said.

Perhaps one indication that security in the Vista era will be better but far from perfect came in recent research by Sophos PLC.

The security software company determined that three of the 10 most prevalent malicious worms circulating on the Internet in November were able to run on Vista.

Impressively, the e-mail program that comes with Vista - Windows Mail, formerly called Outlook Express - successfully found and blocked the malware. But Web-based e-mail services let it through, said Sophos security analyst Ron O'Brien.

For O'Brien, that finding showed that while Microsoft's efforts to upgrade computer security are praiseworthy, there's only so much the company can do. Not only are Microsoft's hands tied when it comes to the security of third-party applications, but the company also is limited in what it can do with its own software.

For example, McCormack said Microsoft might have done more to prevent criminals from surreptitiously placing keystroke-monitoring programs on computers to steal data. But the fix likely would have shut out legitimate programs as well, such as those that let people operate their PCs remotely.

"You have to find this happy medium between usability and security," McCormack said.

Of course, with Vista on a tiny fraction of desktops today, it's way too early to assess how much hackers can mess with it.

"I don't know how long Microsoft is going to be able to claim the streets are safe before a criminal decides to challenge that opinion," O'Brien said. "That's going to just be a matter of time."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-10-21-31-19





Study Shows One in Twenty-Five Search Results are Risky
Jeremy Reimer

Security researcher Ben Edelman has revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines were marked as either "red" or "yellow" by SiteAdvisor, indicating that they presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May.

SiteAdvisor is a service provided by antivirus vendor McAfee that rates sites based on their affiliation with spyware, viruses, excessive pop-up advertisements, and junk e-mail. Edelman used the tool to run 2,500 popular keywords through several search engines, including Yahoo, MSN Search (now Windows Live Search), AOL Search, Ask.com, and of course Google.

The study found that not only can regular links found by search engines be dangerous, the sponsored links that appear in prominent positions in the results pages can also be harmful. In fact, in the May study, sponsored links were more than twice as likely to be linked to malware than non-sponsored links (8.5 vs. 3.1 percent).

What this data indicates is that search engine companies are not doing a very good job of filtering out the types of companies they are willing to sell advertising to. Some sites, such as Google, will sell advertising on an automatic basis to anyone with a credit card, without a single human present during the entire interaction. Google, for their part, states that they are working hard to eliminate fradulent links, and have started flagging links to sites that they deem risky, although this applies only to their unsponsored links.

What can web surfers do to combat these threats? Many of the malware-infested web sites attempt to use security holes in the operating system to install their payload, so keeping your computer's OS updated is paramount. Updated browsers such as Firefox 2, Opera 9, and Internet Explorer 7 contain extra security protections to protect against bad links, including phishing scams, which are quickly becoming the most popular form of online attacks as they do not require an unpatched system or even a particular operating system in order to work. As always, skeptical computing is the order of the day.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061213-8417.html





Worm Hits Computers' Antivirus Program
AP

A computer worm is attacking some business PCs through a flaw in antivirus software by Symantec Corp., a security company warned Friday.

EEye Digital Security, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., said the worm, dubbed ''Big Yellow,'' began attacking some computer systems on Thursday -- seven months after eEye first discovered the flaw.

Symantec released a patch to address the flaw in May, but it's up to its corporate customers to install it. Officials at the Cupertino, Calif.-based security software company said Friday it had so far received three reports of systems affected by the worm.

''It is definitely a new worm, and it is looking for vulnerable systems, but we're not seeing any evidence of a significant outbreak or infection,'' said Vincent Weafer, a senior director at Symantec's security response unit.

Big Yellow enters machines through a security hole in the corporate version of Symantec's antivirus software. Once infected with the worm's ''bot'' program, a hacker can use it as a way to connect with other computers for malicious attacks.

EEye urged corporate information-technology departments to fix the flaw.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://w...ZwWxUJZTbfsOM=




Personal Data Hacked at Texas College
AP

Hackers might have obtained the personal information of 6,000 people who worked for, applied to or attended the University of Texas at Dallas, school officials said Wednesday.

The information includes names and Social Security numbers, the school said. In some cases, addresses, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers also might have been obtained.

There is no indication that the information has been distributed or used, school officials said.

The information suspected of being exposed belongs to staff and faculty members employed from January 1999 through August 2005, and to students and faculty members of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. Applicants to the Jonsson school dating to 1993 also were affected.

The school discovered the intrusion Sunday, officials said. The university has been contacting affected people.

On Tuesday, the University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff that personal information was exposed after a hacker broke into a computer system.
https://http://www.utdallas.edu/data...mise/form.html





Information of Insurance Members Taken in Theft
AP

Computer records containing personal information of about 130,000 members of Connecticut-based health insurer Aetna Inc. were stolen from the office of a vendor, the company said.

A lockbox stolen during an Oct. 26 break-in at Concentra Preferred Systems contained computer backup tapes of medical claim data, Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said Tuesday.

It's unlikely the culprits were trying to obtain information needed to commit identity theft because cash, DVD players and other items also were stolen, authorities said.

"We believe the likelihood of anyone successfully accessing or compromising the data to be low," Michener said.

Accessing information from the backup tapes, which cannot be used on a standard personal computer, would require commercial equipment and special software packages, Concentra Preferred Systems said.

The Naperville, Ill.-based company provides claims cost management services to health insurance carriers and health maintenance organizations.

The stolen data included information on 19,000 Aetna members in Ohio and several other Concentra clients, Michener said.

Concentra officials declined to say which clients were involved, citing confidentiality concerns.

Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna, one of the nation's largest health insurers, plans to notify members and providers who could be affected and offer them free credit monitoring services for a year.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-13-04-35-50





Stolen Boeing Laptop Held ID Data on 382,000

Former Boeing employees, some retirees could be at risk of ID theft after a notebook goes missing.
Dawn Kawamoto

Boeing has confirmed that a laptop stolen from an employee's car contained sensitive information on 382,000 workers and retirees.

It is third such incident at the aircraft giant in the past 13 months. The laptop contained names, home addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for current and former Boeing employees, company spokesman Tim Neale said. The theft potentially puts the individuals at risk for identity theft.

Despite the large number of people affected by the theft, Neale said Boeing has received no reports of the sensitive information being compromised.

"We have no evidence that Boeing was targeted by an individual or a group, so maybe the laptop was stolen just for the value of the laptop," Neale said.

He added that the notebook was turned off at the time it was stolen and requires a password to access the data.

Boeing, meanwhile, is still in the process of notifying those individuals whose information was on the laptop. It is providing them with up to three years of free credit monitoring.

Since fall of last year, Boeing has suffered the theft of two other laptops containing sensitive information about current or former workers. In April, a notebook containing information about 3,600 individuals was stolen, and in November 2005, a similar incident involved a breach of data on 161,000 people.

"Even before the first incident, the company had security procedures and policies that called for them to work off of the server behind the firewall. But after the November theft, we asked for everyone to review our policy and remove information off their hard drives and work off the server. We even had managers go around to double check that that had happened," Neale said.

He added he has not yet heard why the employee in this latest incident downloaded information off of the server.

After the April incident, Boeing decided to start a project that would automatically encrypt files as they are pulled off the server, Neale said. The first groups to test this technology will be those working with employee data. However, the encryption procedures will be eventually implemented in other areas of the company that deal with sensitive data, he added.

The company also is working on ways to eliminate the use of Social Security numbers, as much as possible, as an identifier for Boeing employees, he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-6143780.html





UCLA Probes Computer Security Breach
Brooke Donald

The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system.

It was one of the largest such breaches involving a U.S. higher education institution.

The attacks on the database began in October 2005 and ended Nov. 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a statement posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.

Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams said in a letter posted on the site that while the database includes Social Security numbers, home addresses and birth dates, there was no evidence any data have been misused.

The letter suggests, however, that recipients contact credit reporting agencies and take steps to minimize the risk of potential identity theft. The database does not include driver's license numbers or credit card or banking information.

"We have a responsibility to safeguard personal information, an obligation that we take very seriously," Abrams wrote. "I deeply regret any concern or inconvenience this incident may cause you."

School representatives did not return calls for additional comment.

The breach is among the latest involving universities, financial institutions, private companies and government agencies. A stolen Veterans Affairs laptop contained information on 26.5 million veterans, and a hacker into the Nebraska child-support computer system may have gotten data on 300,000 people and 9,000 employers.

Security experts said the UCLA breach, in the sheer number of people affected, appeared to be among the largest at an American college or university.

"To my knowledge, it's absolutely one of the largest," Rodney Petersen, security task force coordinator for Educause, a nonprofit higher education association, told the Los Angeles Times.

Petersen said that in a Educause survey released in October, about a quarter of 400 colleges said that they had experienced a security incident in which confidential information was compromised during the previous 12 months, the newspaper reported.

In 2005, a database at the University of Southern California was hacked, exposing the records of 270,000 individuals.

This spring, Ohio University announced the first of what would be identified as five cases of data theft, affecting thousands of students, alumni and employees _ including the president. About 173,000 Social Security numbers may have been stolen since March 2005, along with names, birth dates, medical records and home addresses.

Jim Davis, UCLA's chief information officer, said a computer trespasser used a program designed to exploit an undetected software flaw to bypass all security measures and gain access to the restricted database that contains information on about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff, as well as some student applicants and parents of students or applicants who applied for financial aid.

"In spite of our diligence, a sophisticated hacker found and exploited a subtle vulnerability in one of hundreds of applications," Davis said in the statement.

The university's investigation so far shows only that the hacker sought and obtained some of the Social Security numbers. But out of an abundance of caution, the school said, it was contacting everyone listed in the database.

About 3,200 of those being notified are current or former staff and faculty of UC Merced and current or former employees of the University of California Office of the President, for which UCLA does administrative processing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121200173.html





Memory Chip Breakthrough for Electronic Devices
Glenn Chapman

A team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in computer memory technology that heralded more sophisticated and reliable MP3 players, digital cameras and other devices.

Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made "phase-change" memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used "flash" memory, while using half as much power.

"You can do a lot of things with this phase-change memory that you can't do with flash," IBM senior manager of nanoscale science Spike Narayan told AFP.

"You can replace disks, do instant-on computers, or carry your own fancy computer application in your hand. It would complement smaller technology if manufacturers wanted to conjure things up."

Technical details of the research were to be presented to engineers gathered at the 2006 International Electronic Devices Meeting in San Francisco.

Researchers expected the discovery to anoint phase-change memory the successor to flash memory as the electronics industry continues a relentless quest to make devices smaller and more powerful.

"These results dramatically demonstrate that phase-change memory has a very bright future," said IBM vice president of technology T.C. Chen.

"Many expect flash memory to encounter significant scaling limitations in the near future. Today we unveil a new phase-change memory material that has high performance even in an extremely small volume."

The new material was a complex semiconductor alloy that resulted from collaborative research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, California.

Qimonda memory technology firm is based in Germany and Macronix is a "non-volatile" memory company located in Taiwan.

Computer memory cells store information as sequences of digital "zeros" and "ones" in structures that can be rapidly switched between two distinctive states.

Most computer memory devices are based on the presence or absence of electrical charge contained in a tiny region of a cell.

The fastest and most economical memory designs -- SRAM and DRAM, respectively -- use inherently leaky memory cells, so they must be powered continuously and, in case of DRAM, refreshed frequently as well.

These "volatile" memories lose their stored information whenever their power supplies are interrupted.

At the heart of phase-change memory is a tiny chunk of alloy that can be changed rapidly between an ordered, crystalline phase and a disordered, amorphous phase.

Because no electrical power is required to maintain either phase of the material, phase-change memory is "non-volatile."

"This is a much more robust memory technology," Narayan said. "It will be used more and more as flash gets into more and more trouble at small dimensions."

While the semiconductor alloy from Almaden is new, phase-change technology has been around for decades and has been used in DVDs and CDs, according to researchers.

Samsung and Intel have both been working with phase-change memory devices, according to Narayan.

"We have demonstrated the potential of the phase-change memory technology on very small dimensions laying out a scalability path," said Qimonda vice president Wilhelm Beinvogl.

"Phase-change memories have the clear potential to play an important role in future memory systems."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061211...a_061211134556





Samsung's Solid State Disk Drive Unveiled
Iddo Genuth

In May 2006, Samsung was the first to come out with a consumer 32 GB flash-based solid state drive for mobile PCs, opening up the category for other solid state drive manufacturers. This article explores the solid state drive technology that might replace our aging hard drives in only a couple of years.

Hard disk drives have been around for decades. The first hard drive was part of a computer system built by IBM in the mid 1950's called IBM 305 RAMAC that was used to process accounting information. Although it occupied almost half a room, cost around $50,000, and had only 5 Mb of storage, it is still considered a highly innovative device for its time. Since then, although hard drives have become continuously smaller, cheaper, and their storage capacities have grown over 100,000-times, the basic technology has remained the same. Rapidly spinning platters coated with ferromagnetic material hold the data, while a special actuator arm equipped with a read/write head hovers just above it. Despite the fact that this technology reached a very high level of maturity in recent years (for instance, the actuator arm hovers just nanometers above the spinning platter without crashing the disk), it still suffers from a number of basic limitations due mainly to its mechanical nature. Hard drives are vulnerable to shock, consume relatively high amounts of power in order for the platters to spin, produce a large amount of heat, and take time to start.

In 1984, Dr. Fujio Masuoka from Toshiba invented the first flash memory, which Intel introduced as a commercial product four years later. Solid state drives based on flash memory have a number of unique advantages over conventional hard drive technology. Since they lack mechanical parts, they are much more resistant to shock, consume far less power, and release far less heat. They also produce no sound during operation and respond much more quickly than a mechanical drive. The size of a flash drive can also be very small (relative to a mechanical hard drive), resulting in a lighter device. All these advantages beg the question 'Why are we still using what might seem as an outdated mechanical hard drive technology?' Rochelle Singer, Marketing and Technical Documentation Manager at msystems (recently acquired by SanDisk) explained to TFOT the two main reasons why more than 20 years following their invention, flash drives have not yet replaced hard drives in mobile PCs: "The most important reason is the poor price to capacity ratio of flash memory compared to hard disk drives. When solid state disks were first brought to the military and aerospace markets by msystems in 1989, 1 MB of flash cost a few thousand dollars. At the time, the same capacity inside a hard disk drive cost in the range of tens of dollars. But despite its clearly inferior pricing, the solid state disk gained wide acceptance in the military sector because, unlike the hard disk drive, it was able to meet very strict reliability requirements for field operation in extreme conditions of shock, vibration, altitude, and temperature ranges.

Today, as flash prices continue to decline 50% annually and sometimes even at higher rates – this year flash prices have dropped a phenomenal 70% since January - the solid state disk is gaining entree into new markets. Currently a 4 GB flash memory retails for around the same price as a 120 GB hard drive. Although hard disk drives still have the price edge - building even a relatively small drive based solely on flash memory costs hundreds of dollars at current prices – analysts agree that the trend in cost reduction is expected to continue. The recent success of MP3 players based on flash memory has contributed greatly to high volumes and, therefore, reduced prices of the media. It is not inconceivable that in two years, flash-based drives will hold a two-digit share of the hard drive mobile PC market.

The second obstacle that blocked the uptake of flash was the large footprint required. When flash was first introduced, it was more than five times the size of a hard disk drive of the same capacities. In mobile PCs, the limited size allocated for hard disk drives, usually a 2.5” or 1.8” casing, made it impossible for flash to compete up until only very recently, since it could not deliver enough capacity in such a small footprint.

As new etching processes and technologies are implemented, the capacity of flash is doubling every year and its footprint is becoming smaller. Finer etching processes down to 50 nm in 2007 (as compared to 90 nm in 2005) and more advanced technologies such as multi-level cell (MLC) NAND, which stores 2 bits/cell - instead of single-level cell (SLC) NAND, which stores only 1 bit/cell - continue to enable less silicon to be used to produce ever higher capacities in ever smaller footprints.

These cost and size economies come at a price: flash has become more difficult to manage to deliver the high reliability and endurance that have become its trademark. This entails the need for more sophisticated flash management to make sure that flash endurance (measured as the number of write/erase cycles that it can endure without degrading data reliability) can meet market requirements. Error detection and correction must be robust enough to combat the exponentially increasing number of errors as the media becomes increasingly dense. msystems, the first company to bring MLC NAND to the mobile handset market 3 years ago, has proven that it is capable of delivering the required reliability and endurance."

Samsung, the first to come out with a consumer Solid State Disk (SSD), decided to test out the technology on laptops and portable devices first, releasing 32 GB 1.8” and 2.5” SSDs inside a laptop and an ultra-portable mobile computer, costing $2,430 and $3,700, respectively, in Korea. Other solid-state drive manufacturers will join the ranks in the very near future, using both SLC and MLC NAND flash. In the meantime, and until flash memory prices drop, Samsung is building on the introduction of the midterm solution – the hybrid hard drive (covered in a previous TFOT article), which uses a combination of flash memory and conventional hard drive design.

To learn more about Samsung's SSD technology, TFOT interviewed Don Barnetson, Director of Flash Marketing for Samsung Semiconductor.

Q: How fast is your current SSD and what performance improvements does it offer?

A: The streaming R/W speeds are 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively, but the most significant performance advantage comes from its latency feature - less than 1 millisecond; roughly 10-15x faster than a hard disk drive.

Q: Is there currently some sort of technical limitation on the creation of SSDs other than cost, and what about the reliability of flash media?

A: Historically SSDs were limited in the number of R/W cycles. However, with modern flash technology and error correction, the reliability of the flash in a PC exceeds 10 years. Cost is currently the barrier. However, flash pricing has historically come down 40% per year over the past 10 years. Thus, densities that were unaffordable only a few years ago are practical today; the same will hold true in the future.

Q: Why did you choose to start with portable (1.8”/2.5”) SSDs and not include desktop (3.5”) versions as well? When should we expect a desktop version of the SSD?

A: Several key values of SSD are most applicable to notebooks (95% power reduction, virtually impervious to shock and vibration, no noise, weight reduction), though performance gains would be apparent in both segments. The limitation on density is not a function of physical size – we could put much more than 32 GB in the 1.8” or 2.5” form factors. It is more an economic limitation, and this would not be resolved by going to a 3.5” form factor.

Q: Is it possible to increase the R/W speed of the SSD drive?

A: It is possible to increase streaming read/write speeds by interleaving more flash components. However, streaming R/W speeds are seldom the bottleneck in PCs; streaming performance has been the focus of specification one-upmanship in the HDD industry. In actual usage, however, as Microsoft discussed at WinHEC, random I/O is almost always the bottleneck with real performance. In this case, our SSDs offer up to 5000 IOPS (I/O operations per second) vs. approximately 100 IOPS on a consumer-grade HDD. This is the key reason why a notebook equipped with an SSD can respond 4x more quickly to standard Vista operations (loading applications, etc.) than a similarly equipped HDD-based notebook at WinHEC.

Q: Why is your current SSD drive PATA and not SATA and will future SSDs be able to take advantage of the SATA-II bandwidth?

A: SATA-based SSDs will be offered in the future. Since the streaming R/W performance of our SSD does not currently exceed that of either the PATA or SATA-I interfaces, it is unclear whether building an SSD with faster read performance would necessarily make any difference to system-level performance for the reason mentioned above.

Q: How much will your SSD drive cost?

A: We have not yet announced pricing; however it will closely track the market price for the flash components it is based on (one possible reference). It is important to note that there isn’t a substantial cost difference in producing a 1.8”, 2.5”, or 3.5” version at the same density.
http://www.tfot.info/content/view/100/59/





Al Shugart, Hard-Drive Pioneer, Dies at 76
Michael Kanellos

Al Shugart--the man who founded Seagate Technology, convinced his pet dog to run for public office, and favored Hawaiian shirts over business suits--has died at age 76.

The California native passed away at a hospital from heart failure Tuesday, a Seagate representative said.

Shugart played an integral role in the development of the hard-drive industry. He was part of the original team of engineers at IBM that developed the first hard-drive storage system, which came out 50 years ago this year.

He then held several different positions in the industry before founding Seagate in 1979. The company went on to become a dominant force in the hard-drive industry. It is, in fact, the largest hard-drive manufacturer, and it is consistently profitable. Shugart left the company in 1998.

"It's really impossible to look at modern business, society, communications, science, music, entertainment or anything else without seeing the power and impact of Al's legacy," Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said in a statement. "Al's unique spirit made him a remarkable entrepreneur. And it also made him an unforgettable human being. Stories about Al and the many ways he touched people still circulate around the industry. Most will remember him as a man who loved to enjoy life and encouraged everyone he touched to do the same."

As Watkins noted, Shugart was well-known for his jovial, somewhat rowdy, personality. He often liked to say that his real goal in life was to have fun. He ran his dog Ernest for Congress (the dog lost) and owned a restaurant.

"When I got fired from Seagate, I had a few investments, but I thought of doing PR in exchange for equity," a Hawaiian shirt-clad Shugart said in a 1999 interview at Comdex to discuss a small venture fund he had launched.

One thing he wasn't was an efficient corporate manager. For years, Seagate struggled--like almost all disk makers--with turning a consistent profit. One of the chief problems was that there were too many competitors in the field. Seagate eventually acquired rival Connor Peripherals.

Seagate, though, was also saddled with a somewhat antagonistic culture. Watkins, who came from Connor, recalled recently his first executive meeting at Seagate. The executives swore constantly at each other for about six hours and got almost nothing got done.

Greg Quick, a reporter who has covered technology for about two decades, recalled his encounter with Shugart in an article on the drive industry in 2004.

"In my only Shugart interview, he took his shoes off in the middle of it and put them on the table. Then he sent his limo driver out for a huge sack of McDonald's," Quick wrote.
http://news.com.com/Al+Shugart%2C+ha...3-6143474.html





How To Choose Archival CD/DVD Media
Patrick McFarland

Ahh, I’ve been planning to write this one for awhile: an entire article on archival quality media. As I do professional software development as well as professional photography (what a weird combination), I need archival quality CD and DVD media to store my data on.

However, one of the hardest things to is actually find good media, or even understand why it is good media. This article focuses on the history of Compact Discs, writable CD/DVD media, and why DVD+R is superior to DVD-R. If you want to just know what media is worth buying, skip to the summary at the bottom.

Short history of the Compact Disc
The invention of the Compact Disc has had a large impact on both music and computing in the last 20 years. Invented in 1979 as a joint project between Sony and Phillips to counter the self-destructive nature of consumer audio playback (such as tapes and records that could only be played so many times before the recording degraded significantly) by switching to a resilient digital format.

The CD was also designed to store standard computer data, as in 1985 the first CD drives for computers were released; massive, bulky, and expensive, it was not until the mid-90s that they really took off, driven almost solely by video games and large multimedia applications.

In 1990, Sony and Phillips went back to the drawing table, and then came out with the CD-R, a record-once medium. Yet again, the first CD burners were large, expensive, and bulky, but by the late 90s having a CD burner was the new ‘in’.

The first few generations of CD media, designed by Taiyo Yuden (a company who I respect, and buy all my archival quality media from), actually kind of sucked; it wasn’t until around 2000 that companies started producing very high end media.

CDs and DVDs store individual bits (encoded in various ways depending on the media) with spots of reflective and non-reflective areas. This method is called ‘pits and lands’, where pits ‘absorb’ light (ie, are ‘off’ bits) and lands ‘reflect’ light (ie, are ‘on’ bits).

With pressed media, the pressing method causes pits to reflect the laser’s light away from the sensor, and the lands to reflect it back at the sensor. With burned media, a high energy laser causes spots of organic dye to go opaque and obscure the reflective surface for the pits, leaving the organic dye for lands alone.

Short history of the DVD
While burning was becoming popular in the late 90s, so was playing high quality video on DVDs. Storing almost 7 times the data of a 700MB CD (or almost 13 in the case of dual layer DVDs), allowed companies to store massive amounts of data on one disc, leading to the movie industry to drop VHS tapes and the video game industry to drop CDs.

In 1995, the first DVD specification was ratified by over a dozen companies including Sony and Phillips, as well as Thompson, Pioneer, and Mitsubishi. By 2000, at least half the homes in the US and Japan had DVD players.

So, obviously, the next step was to produce burnable DVDs. Two separate, and incompatible, efforts took hold. The first one, Pioneer’s DVD-R (pronounced ‘DVD dash R’) was released in 1997, using different data storage methods than pressed DVDs (appearing to be more like CD-R than DVD), a poor error correction scheme, and the ‘wobble’ laser tracking system of DVD-R is inadequate for the job.

The second effort, lead by the DVD+RW Alliance (headed by Sony, Phillips, Mitsubishi, and Thompson) was released in 2002, as an alternative to the poorly implemented DVD-R. DVD+R uses a superior ‘wobble’ laser tracking system, a far better error correction method, and the media quality itself is typically higher. (See the ‘Why DVD+R?’ section below for a more technical explanation)

Why archival media is hard to produce
Unlike pressed CDs/DVDs, ‘burnt’ CDs/DVDs can eventually ‘fade’, due to five things that effect the quality of CD media: Sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices (please keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers; this will triple the lifetime of any media).

The silver and aluminum alloys used in virtually all blank CD/DVD media has one major issue, requiring the manufacturer to lacquer a protective seal over the entire disc: silver and aluminum oxidize when they hit air, turning the normally reflective layer into silver or aluminum rust. Some (very expensive) media uses gold instead which doesn’t oxidize, however DVD media cannot use gold due to design issues (not true anymore, see update below). Today, only the cheapest of the cheap media has severe issues with sealing practices (as such, avoid any media made outside of Japan and Taiwan; especially avoid media made in India).

Assuming that the protective seal and reflective layer are manufactured correctly, the next issue is the organic dye. The first organic dyes, designed by Taiyo Yuden, were Cyanine-based and, under normal conditions, had a shelf life of around ten years; simply, that was simply unacceptable for archive discs. Taiyo Yuden, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Mitsui Co., and Ciba Specialty Chemicals spent the next ten years trying to produce the best organic dyes, eventually reaching archive-quality CD media.

Taiyo Yuden produced ‘Super Cyanine’, a chemically stabilized version of the original Cyanine dye designs, while TDK offers media that uses ‘metal-stabilized Cyanine’ dye, leading to similar shelf lives as Taiyo Yuden’s media. Taiyo Yuden states their Super Cyanine dye is chemically stable for at least 70 years, and TDK states their metal-stabilized Cyanine is also stable for 70 years.

On the other hand, Mitsubishi went in a different direction and produced what is called a Metal Azo dye, that they claim is stable for around 100 years. Azo dyes are chemically stable, however, the shelf life of media using Azo dyes typically does not exceed that of Super Cyanine and metal-stabilized Cyanine.

The third dye produced for CD media is called Phthalocyanine dye, with the majority of such dyes produced by Mitsui and Ciba. Typically marketed as more resistant to heat and UV radiation than Cyanine and Azo, modern Cyanine and Azo dyes last just as long in extreme conditions.

DVDs also use similar dyes, however manufacturers have intentionally kept what dyes they use a secret (instead of a feature in their marketing of the media), and all blank DVDs are intentionally the same color (as different dyes on CDs make blanks different colors, however, it is not indicative of what dye is used due to some manufacturers using different colored silver alloys and non-reactive additives in the dye).

Why Taiyo Yuden media, and how to buy in the US
The best discs in circulation tend to be Taiyo Yuden media, which you rarely can buy directly. In Japan, you find their media under the brand That’s, which are wholly owned by Taiyo Yuden. In other countries, popular brands such as TDK and Verbatim carry their media (see the Taiyo Yuden FAQ by the CD Freaks Forum for a listing).

Simply put, I have never had problems with any kind of Taiyo Yuden media. Ever. I have bought CDs and DVDs under a dozen different brands (including non-Taiyo Yuden manufactured TDK and Verbatim), and the only ones that have had a 100% success rate is Taiyo Yuden.

If you cannot find any company selling Taiyo Yuden under the own brand, I suggest buying from the SuperMediaStore.com, who offer a wide range of Taiyo Yuden CD media, DVD-R media, and DVD+R media. I tend to buy just from them, as they are the only company that guarantees that their media is actually from Taiyo Yuden and not a fake (see the above linked FAQ on information about fake Taiyo Yuden media).

Why DVD+R?
This is the most technical section of the article. If you don’t understand the basics of how CD/DVD media works, or find such technical discussions boring, skip to the next section.

As I said earlier, DVD-R sucks for data preservation for three reasons: inferior error correction, inferior ‘wobble’ tracking, and the fact its data writing methods look like an un-needed halfway point between CD-R and DVD+R. The wobble tracking I shall explain first, then the error corrections method, then the specifics of ATIP/pre-pit/ADIP optimum power settings.

For a CD/DVD burner to track where it is on the disc, it uses three things: the ‘wobble’ of the data track (where it actually wobbles back and forth instead of in a straight line) to tell where it is in the track, the position of the track to tell where it is on the disc, and some additional information on the disc to tell where the track (singular, as CDs and DVDs only have one track, and it is written in a concentric spiral) begins and ends.

This additional information on a CD-R is called the ATIP (Absolute Time In Pregroove), which contains how long the track is, where it begins, what the maximum and minimum writing speeds are, what formula dye it uses, who actually made it, optimum power control settings, and error correction data. The ATIP is stored as a frequency modulation in the wobble itself.

However, since the wobble changes subtly to encode data, it is impossible to use with the small size of tracks DVD requires, as electric noise in the laser pickup and wobbles introduced by the electric motor spinning the disc, these could easily be read as frequency changes in the real track itself.

On DVD-R, they tried to solve the problem with something called ‘pre-pits’ where spikes in the amplitude of the wobble appear due to pits fully out of phase with the rest of the track (ie, between two spirals of the track, where there is no data). This can be viewed as a simple improvement over CD-R as it makes it easier to track the wobble (since the wobble is constant except for the easy to detect and remove spikes).

Unfortunately, this method as one flaw: due to electric noise in the laser pickup, it would be very easy to miss the pre-pit (or read one that wasn’t actually there) if the disc were damaged or spun at fast speeds. The time to read a pre-pit is 1T (roughly .0000000038th of a second), which even for a computer can be easy to miss. DVD-R traded hard to track frequency changes for hard to read wobble-encoded data.

On a DVD+R, however, they came up with a much better method. Instead of changing the frequency of the wobble, or causing amplitude spikes in the wobble, they use complete phase changes. Where CD-R’s and DVD-R’s methods make you choose between either easy wobble tracking or easy ATIP reading, DVD+R’s method makes it very easy to track the wobble, and also very easy to encode data into the wobble. DVD+R’s method is called ADIP (ADdress In Pre-groove), which uses a phase change method.

With ADIPs’ phase changes, the direction of the wobble changes and continues on going in the exact opposite direction (ie, counter-clockwise to clockwise, or the reverse). For example, if the wobble was ‘going up’, the phase change causes it to instantly reverse direction start ‘going down’ no matter where it in the wobble cycle. The phase change is very easy to detect, and also continues for a set period (in this case, one 32T section of the track, or 32 times longer than the pre-pit method of DVD-R).

The state of the phase change (clockwise or counter-clockwise) encodes the individual bits in each block In essence, with the phase change method, not only do you have an easy way of tracking the wobble, but you now have an easy way of reading wobble-encoded data.

As I mentioned earlier, this wobble-encoded data includes error correction of wobble-encoded data itself. Error correction is the most important part of media, because if it does not work, then you’ve lost your data, even if there is nothing seriously wrong with the disc.

The DVD-R specification states that for every 192 bits, 48 of them are not protected under any scheme, 24 of them are protected by 24 bits of parity, and the last 56 bits are protected by another 24 bits of parity. This weird (to put it mildly) scheme allows you to easily scramble or lose 25% of the data that is required to read your disk! This information is almost more important than the actual data burned on the disc itself.

The DVD+R specification, however, states that for every 204 bits of information, it is split into four blocks of 52 bits containing 1 (shared among all blocks) sync bit to prevent misreading because of phase changes, 31 bits of data, and a 20 bit parity (that protects all 32 bits).

Now, the third item on the list: how DVD+R discs burn better. As I said earlier, ATIP/pre-pit/ADIP stores information about optimum power control settings. This information is basically formulas stating how much output power is needed, what the laser startup power should be, and other pieces of information you require to properly burn a DVD.

Optimum power control output is dependent on three things: burning speed, laser wavelength, and information given to the drive about the media. DVD-R basically fails on all three accounts because DVD+R simply includes far more information about the media in the ADIP data than DVD-R does in it’s pre-pit data.

DVD+R includes four optimum profiles, one for four major burning speeds (usually 2x, 4x, 6x, and 8x, though this can change as speeds increase). Each of these profiles include optimum power output based on laser wavelength, more precise laser power settings, and other additional information. With this information, any DVD+R burner can far more optimize it’s burning strategy to fit the media than it can with DVD-R, consistently providing better burns.

For comparison, DVD-R includes one profile, optimum power output based for that one profile only and uncalibrated towards what wavelength it is for, less precise laser power settings, and no other additional information. Typically, DVD-R burners have to already know how to burn a certain piece of media (and include this information in their firmwares) before they can properly burn to it. New media often is not properly supported.

In addition to the optimum power control profiles, DVD+R also gives four times more scratch space for the drive to calibrate the laser on; more space can only improve the calibration quality. So, in short, DVD+R media exists to simply produce better burns and protect your data better.

And finally, the end of the article…
Finally, after roughly three pages of technical discussion, we arrive at the end of my dissertation on archival quality CD/DVD media. So, you’re probably now wondering, in simple terms, what media do I recommend?

To begin with, I do not recommend CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW media in any form for permanent storage. This is mostly a no-brainer, but those discs are meant to be able to be changed after burning, and they are simply unsuitable for long-term archival storage. I also do not recommend DVD-R media due to DVD+R’s superior error correction and burning control.

That said, I recommend Taiyo Yuden media across the board. Taiyo Yuden currently manufactures 52x CD-R, 16x DVD-R, and 8x DVD+R media in normal shiney silver, inkjet printable, and thermal printable forms. Taiyo Yuden may be one of the most expensive (if not the most expensive), but their media quality is unsurpassed. Taiyo Yuden (currently) does not produce any dual layer media. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I recommended buying from SuperMediaStore.com as they are the only online US distributor that guarauntees that their Taiyo Yuden media is certified as coming from Taiyo Yuden.

However, for those that absolutely require dual layer media, Verbatim produces DVD-R DL and DVD+R DL, however, due to the fact DL media costs over twice as much as two single layer discs, I recommend you only use single layer unless you really, really need a single disc.

So, what am I using? Due to Taiyo Yuden’s superior media quality, and DVD+R’s superior design, I use only Taiyo Yuden DVD+R media. I recommend this media to everyone who wishes to keep their data for a long, long time.

Update: It seems MAM-A and Kodak actually has managed to make a gold DVD, though no one else seems to be manufacturing them. However, MAM-A’s gold archival media still doesn’t seem to exceed TY quality (although Mr 60,000 in the comments below puts TY second best to MAM-A). Due to the extreme cost of gold archival media ($2+ a disc) with very little increased protection (if any), I’ll still say TY media is better. I want to see more independent tests on this before I change my recommendation.
http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/20...rchival-media/





Q & A

J. D. Biersdorfer

Helping A Balky Laptop

Q. I get an occasional “insufficient system resources exist to complete the API” message when I try to put my laptop in hibernation. When I bought this laptop six months ago, I was impressed with its speed in booting and opening programs, but now it has slowed dramatically, even with two gigabytes of RAM. What can I do?

A. In an article in its technical support database, Microsoft has acknowledged a problem with the hibernation function and computers that have more than one gigabyte of memory installed.

According to Article No. 909095 (found at support.microsoft.com/kb/909095), many versions of Windows XP Home and Professional — including systems updated to Service Pack 2, as well as Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 — are affected. The problem occurs because the kernel power manager within Windows can’t get the memory it needs to put the PC into hibernation mode. (The kernel is the main module in an operating system and is in charge of handling the memory-, disk- and process-management chores for the computer.)

Microsoft has a “hot fix” update available on the article page and recommends downloading and installing the patch to help with the hibernation problem. You will need to “validate” your copy of Windows on the site before you can download the patch, which means letting Microsoft peek over the Internet to make sure your computer is not running a counterfeit copy of Windows.

The slowness of your laptop’s start-up process may be unrelated to the hibernation issue. A number of things can cause a computer to slow, including the number of programs you have set to load automatically when you boot up the machine. Antivirus and other security programs that load at start-up can add time, as can spyware or other sinister software than may have infiltrated your system.

Another article on Microsoft’s site offers general tips for speeding your system, including disconnecting unused network drives and removing programs that start automatically. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/46u3t.

Making a Browser Forget the Past

Q. The Firefox browser seems to remember everything I type in search boxes. How can I stop this?

A. Mozilla’s Firefox browser can save information you have previously typed into Web forms and search boxes. If you would rather it not do that, go to the Tools menu to the Options box and click the Privacy tab. Mac users can find the Privacy settings Preferences area of the Firefox application menu.

Once in the Privacy settings, uncheck the box next to “Remember what I enter in forms and the search bar” and then click O.K.

Scanning Slides By Hand

Q. I have about 500 good Leica images on slides that I want to put on a CD or DVD. The options seem to range from $1 to $2 per slide for professional scanning to cheaper mail-in slide-transfer companies. Is there a good, reasonably priced scanner I can buy to do it myself?

A. Scanners that can convert 35-millimeter slides to digital images generally come in two types: regular flatbed scanners that have a slide-tray attachment, or a dedicated slide scanner. Of the two, flatbed scanners tend to be less expensive but slower, and some people find the color images produced to be of lesser quality than using a more expensive, dedicated slide scanner. Scanners designed just to do slides and film negatives tend to cost at least $350 and can run well past $1,000.

Many flatbed scanners, especially those designed for scanning both prints and slides, come with a slide attachment that lets you scan up to four slides at a time. Major scanner manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Canon typically have models for $100 to $200 that can scan slides.

Sites like Photo.net (www.photo.net/ezshop/category) and Imaging Resource (www.imaging-resource.com/SCAN1.HTM) have reviews of different scanners available, and can provide more information. Attachments like the Nikon SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder can let you scan up to 50 slides at a time, but they cost $300 or more and may require the use of a specific scanner model.

Image-editing programs designed for home users, like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Apple’s iPhoto, can also help enhance scanned slides and burn them to a disc once you get them on the computer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/te...gy/14askk.html





Detainee Case Highlights Conservative, Libertarian Rift
Matt Apuzzo

Prominent conservative lawyers joined liberal colleagues Tuesday in opposing Bush administration anti-terror tactics, arguing that an immigrant held as an enemy combatant has a right to seek his freedom in court.

The legal brief, filed in the case of suspected al-Qaida sleeper agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, argues that a new military commissions law is unconstitutional.

The argument has been made in this and other detainee cases, but Tuesday's brief is notable for the bedfellows created by the politics of anti-terrorism. Staunchly Democratic law school deans Harold Koh of Yale and Laurence Tribe of Harvard were joined by lawyers such as Steven Calabresi, who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and helped found the conservative Federalist Society.

"It shows the phrases 'conservative' and 'libertarian' have less overlap than ever before," said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and Federalist Society member who signed the brief. "This administration has lost all libertarians on all counts."

In June, the Supreme Court said the Bush administration's handling of detainees violated U.S. and international law. Bush then pressed for, and got, a new law that he said would help the government prosecute terrorists.

The Military Commissions Act allows the military to hold detainees indefinitely and strips them of the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts. The Justice Department defends the law as a constitutional and necessary tool to combat terrorism.

"The question here is not one of political perspective but of law," Justice Department spokeswoman Kathleen Blomquist said Tuesday night. "The district court found al-Marri to be an enemy combatant and dismissed his habeas petition."

If al-Marri wants to challenge that determination, Blomquist said, then he can challenge the determination before a Washington appeals court.

Like the warrantless wiretapping program and the Patriot Act, the law has divided conservatives. Some say the president must have the power to act in times of war and that detaining enemy combatants is the only way to ensure they won't return to the battlefield. Supporters of the law say the detainees are more like prisoners of war than criminal defendants.

Civil rights groups and conservatives with a libertarian viewpoint see the law as a government infringement on personal freedom.

"This involves the executive branch changing the rules to avoid challenges to its own authority," Koh said Tuesday. "Serious legal scholars, regardless of political bent, find what the government did inconsistent with any reasonable visions of the rule of law."

Epstein, who said he regards Koh as "mad on many issues," said the al-Marri case is "beyond the pale."

"They figured out every constitutional protection you'd want and they removed them," Epstein said.

Al-Marri is the only enemy combatant known to be held in the United States, where immigrants normally have the right to use U.S. courts to question the legality of their detention.

Al-Marri was arrested in 2001 while studying in the United States. He had faced criminal charges until authorities designated him an enemy combatant and ordered him held at a naval base in South Carolina.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., is considering al-Marri's case. Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno warned the government's argument in the case could set a dangerous precedent.

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice who is handling the al-Marri case, said it brings up issues about what the framers of the Constitution intended - something libertarians and judicial conservatives often look to.

The al-Marri case, along with two cases before a federal appeals court in Washington, are likely bound for the Supreme Court, where its fate could be decided by whether the court's conservative justices prove to be libertarians on this issue.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-12-21-27-19





Supermodel's Stepdad is Allowed Trips Out of Prison
AP

The former stepfather of supermodel Maggie Rizer is allowed to leave his Buffalo prison during the day as part of a work release program.

John Breen Jr. pleaded guilty to stealing up to $7 million from Rizer. He is serving a 1 1/3- to 4-year prison sentence at the minimum-security Buffalo Correctional Facility in Erie County.

Breen, who will eventually be allowed to stay away from the prison overnight, is participating in the state Department of Correctional Services' work-release program.

"He is being permitted to go out each day when his hours of employment make it necessary," said Linda Foglia, a DOCS spokeswoman. "He also can go out on Saturdays and Sundays for a period of time."

Breen has been looking for a job in the Buffalo area and has applied for permission to live at his sister's Watertown home. Parole officials rejected that request.

Breen had power of attorney over Rizer's bank accounts. He claims to have spent much of the money playing Quick Draw at local bars.

Rizer, a 1996 Watertown High School graduate, has appeared on the covers of Mademoiselle, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Allure magazines. date in November, she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=





Cock and Bull
Michael Crowley

There is an obscure publishing doctrine known as "the small penis rule." As described in a 1998 New York Times article, it is a sly trick employed by authors who have defamed someone to discourage their targets from filing lawsuits. As libel lawyer Leon Friedman explained to the Times, "No male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, 'That's me!'" This gimmick was undoubtedly on the mind of Michael Crichton, the pulp science-fiction writer of Jurassic Park fame, when he wrote the following passage in his latest novel, Next. (Caution: Graphic imagery. Kids, ask for permission before reading on):

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire. And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

The road to this literary hit-and-run began back in March, when I wrote an article about Crichton pegged to his 2004 best-seller, State of Fear. The 624-page thriller presented global warming theory as the work of a fiendish cabal of liberal environmentalists, celebrities, journalists, academics, and politicians. Crichton's populist disdain for these "experts" dovetailed neatly, I argued, with the Bush administration's antiintellectual streak--and it was the reason that Karl Rove had invited Crichton for a chat with George W. Bush at the Oval Office and a right-wing senator had asked him to testify before his committee. Crichton discussed his White House visit with me, and our talk was friendly--though Crichton was clearly nervous about being linked to Bush. How ironic, then, that he wound up responding to my critique with a move worthy of Rove's playbook.

Indeed, much like a crude political operative, Crichton savages his cultural villains with sadistic glee. In Jurassic Park, a sleazy lawyer is consumed by a t-Rex while sitting on the toilet. State of Fear prominently featured a fatuous Hollywood liberal, remarkably similar to Martin Sheen, who winds up consumed by cannibals. But, despite his generally worshipful treatment in the press, Crichton loathes no creature like the journalist. His 1996 novel, Airframe, ostensibly about aviation disasters, was in fact a diatribe about the news media's cynicism and stupidity. Next, meanwhile, is peppered with sneering jibes at The New York Times. It's a strange crusade for the son of a journalist.

Thus far, no one seems to have publicly drawn the connection between Mick Crowley and Michael Crowley. In her November 28 review of Next, the Times's Janet Maslin nearly did, noting the presence of some oddly mean-spirited caricatures--including, as Maslin put it, "a Washington political columnist and spoiled heir who turns out to have raped a 2-year-old." But, while Maslin generously called these characters "ham-handed," she didn't make the link. Others have, including a friend who called breathlessly from New York. When I accused him of a prank, he replied, "How could I possibly make that up?" True, I thought. My friend was not nearly demented enough.

I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level--particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child. It's uplifting, however, to learn that Next's sales have proved disappointing by Crichton's standards, continuing what an industry newsletter dubs Crichton's "recent pattern of erosion." And I'm looking forward to the choice Crichton will have to make, when asked about the basis for Mick Crowley, between a comically dishonest denial and a confession of his shocking depravity.

Crichton launched his noxious attack from behind the shield of the small penis rule because, I'm sure, he's embarrassed by what he has done. In researching my article, I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys. And Crichton must know that turning a critic into a poorly endowed child rapist won't exactly aid his cause. Ultimately, then, I find myself strangely flattered. To explain why, let me propose a corollary to the small penis rule. Call it the small man rule: If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061225&s=diarist122506





Why We Shop
Jennifer Michael Hecht

Holiday shopping is underway, sparking a lot of discussion about the tension it causes. Some call the buying frenzy vulgar, given how much hunger there is in the world. Some express an opposite anxiety — that Americans might not shop enough to fuel the economy. This year, economists report happily that the season opened with higher sales than last year, but add nervously that growth slowed compared with the year before. Individually, people seem to accept holiday shopping as a challenging, unavoidable chore.

But there is a profoundly good side to holiday shopping that goes beyond the generosity it expresses toward family and friends. Whether we realize it or not, we are drawn to and fulfilled by the crowds, the rush, the choices and even the outlay of cash. Why? History suggests that holiday shopping fills an ancient need to gather and tithe, and serves as a modern-day ritual of renewal.

Throughout history, societies have arranged for people to congregate and engage in shared activities. The ancient world had a full schedule of feast days and rituals. In Greece, for example, the annual Thesmophoria brought together the town’s adult women to act out their hope that the coming year would be a fertile one. They would camp out for three nights, dance, and perform dramatic animal sacrifices. The January Kalends, an old Roman holiday meant to renew the city, was celebrated into the early medieval period, even though in 404 A.D., St. Augustine of Hippo preached against it. The celebrants were good Christians, not inclined to believe that their festivities actually did anything to keep Rome alive, but they were afraid of what might happen if they stopped. A thousand years later, large festivals on saints’ days were part of the church calendar, and attendance was mandatory.

Holiday shopping is not a formal religious ritual, but it does offer a chance for society at large — people with no obvious connections to one another — to gather for a shared purpose. And these days such opportunities are rare. For most of history, people typically lived in groups of 300 to 3000, defined by extended family, church parish, and village. Now we live in cities in much larger numbers, yet we are much more isolated. We identify with the small community of our nuclear family, and the enormous community of the nation. We sit home with our three family members and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as it is broadcast to all 300 million of us at once.

Yet there is a certain part of our humanity that can be evoked only when we act as part of a big crowd keeping a tradition. Consider the pleasure of walking the boardwalk on Independence Day, the psychological high of it. Also think of how eerie it would feel if one year the crowd did not materialize. Community spirit is a real thing. When people come together, they report feeling part of something larger than themselves. When this sensation goes bad, the crowd becomes a mob, but at a concert in the park or a peaceful demonstration, we can get a distinct feeling of comfort and happiness.

Who would go to a department store on the last Saturday before Christmas? Obviously, a lot of people would. They may explain it by saying they have procrastinated, but to an important degree, whether we realize it or not, everything we do is intentional. December after December, we come together in large crowds and enact a modern sacrifice ritual.

In ancient societies, people gathered to ritually slaughter the fatted calf in an effort to renew the strength of the tribe for another year. After the sacrifice, which bonded them around loss, came feasting, which bonded them in fulfillment. Today, when we arrive at the mall and hand over a portion of the money we’ve worked for all year, and then break bread at the food court, we likewise renew our optimism for the year ahead.

Sure, buying presents for people who are buying you presents, too, is not exactly sacrifice, but even in ancient times, sacrifice included an element of fun. When the ancient Hebrews set fine meat ablaze, they usually didn’t let God have it all. (When they did, it was enough of a special event to mention in the Bible, as when, in Exodus, we learn of “whole burnt offerings, in which the whole sacrifice was consumed with fire upon the altar.”) The Greeks, too, regularly kept the good parts for themselves, and sacrifice was always followed by feasting. What counted, and still counts, is that together we use up some of what we have been hoarding.

Although we may not consider shopping a ritual of sacrifice, we all know that by pitching in money, we help the economy run. Shopping also has a component that is less rational and more like magic.

So pay attention to how you feel this year, as you head into the thick of the retail season. The crowds are not just an annoying obstacle; they’re part of the experience. And you are a part of the crowd, on a ritual mission of renewal.
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/





Nintendo Tries to Rein in the ‘Whee!’ of Its Wii
Matt Richtel

Nintendo said today that it was taking steps to keep energetic users of its new Wii video game console from damaging their televisions, ceiling fans and bystanders.

The Wii, which Nintendo began selling in November, has generated considerable consumer enthusiasm in part because it has a novel game controller that players can wave to manipulate action of the screen. Trouble is, some players have grown so enthusiastic that the controller has slipped from their hands and taken brief flight.

Nintendo on Friday said it has begun a voluntarily replacement program for the wrist straps that are supposed to keep the controllers attached to a player. Thicker straps should mean fewer flying controllers, said Beth Llewelyn, a spokeswoman for Nintendo of America.

The new straps are free, she said, but the company is not committing to replacing other household items — like the handful of televisions that have reportedly been smashed by unleashed controllers.

“We’re handling those on a case-by-case basis,” Ms. Llewelyn said. She said that reports of broken straps have been relatively few; they have broken in fewer than 1/100th of one percent of cases, she said. “There’s no problem if you just hold onto the controller,” she noted.

The strap issue appears to be a rare early glitch for the Wii — a console that video game industry analysts say is having considerable success in the marketplace.

In November, Americans bought 476,000 Wiis, according to Evan Wilson, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, citing figures from NPD Group. That compared to November sales of 197,000 Sony Playstation 3’s, which also went on sale last month.

During that month, there were sales of 511,000 Xbox 360s, Microsoft’s video game console. The 360 has been available to consumers for a full year and is more readily available than the Wii and the Playstation 3.

While the battle for the hearts and wallets of consumers is in its early days, industry analysts said the Wii has most forcefully captured consumer interest. Unlike the super-powerful, graphics-intensive PS3 and Xbox, the Wii is targeted at a more mainstream audience, and, pointedly, it costs less than the other systems.

The Wii costs $249, while the PS3 and Xbox cost $600 and $400 respectively.

The Wii “appears to be the hit gaming product,” Mr. Wilson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/te...ne r=homepage





ComScore: MySpace Tops Yahoo in November
Anick Jesdanun

The online hangout MySpace got even more popular in November, beating Yahoo in Web traffic for the first time, a research company said Tuesday.

News Corp.'s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace's growth was 2 percent over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.

The numbers underscore the rapid rise of a social-networking site that encourages visitors to stay and make friends through free tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages known as profiles.

ComScore warned, however, that a one-month change could represent an aberration. Furthermore, Yahoo's page views could be diminished by the company's growing use of Ajax technology for maps, e-mail and other services. Ajax is a set of tools that speeds up Web applications by summoning snippets of data as needed instead of pulling entire Web pages over and over.

Yahoo, which last week announced a major reorganization after finding itself repeatedly beat in advertising sales by rival Google Inc., still remains the leader in unique audience, with 130 million visitors in November.

"Yahoo continues to be the overall Web audience leader with the largest number of unique users and most time spent online. The page view change in November is related to the use of Ajax and other Web 2.0 technologies across the Yahoo network," Yahoo spokeswoman Nissa Anklesaria said Tuesday.

"These technologies enhance the overall user experience, but do not either generate a page view or qualify to be counted as a page view while the user is engaged with the product," she said,

Fox Interactive Media ranked sixth at 73.8 million, including 57.2 million for MySpace. Unique audience is a measure of how many people visit in any given month; page views reflect how often they come back and how long they stay.

Including other Fox properties such as IGN Entertainment Inc., comScore said Fox had 39.5 billion page views in November. In a statement, Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, credited strong traffic at game site IGN.com due to the release of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Co.'s Wii video game consoles.

ComScore had planned to release the numbers Wednesday or Thursday, but word of the figures leaked in an analyst report from UBS Investment Research.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-12-19-44-41





IBM to Open Islands in Virtual World
Rachel Konrad

IBM Corp. is launching an ambitious marketing campaign in the hip virtual world "Second Life."

Big Blue has developed 12 "virtual islands," and most will be open to anyone with a Second Life account starting next week. Other areas will remain private haunts for about 800 IBM employees - including the CEO - who have cyber alter-egos.

Second Life is a subscription-based 3-D fantasy world devoted to capitalism - a 21st century version of Monopoly that generates real money for successful players. More than 1.95 million people worldwide have Second Life characters, called avatars.

At any given time, 10,000 or more avatars may be logged onto Second Life, socializing by instant messages or engaging in virtual pastimes such as flying, dancing, gambling or watching adult videos.

Second Life is notoriously buggy; avatars may spontaneously shed clothing, hair or limbs, and sometimes graphics take several seconds to render. In September, the San Francisco-based company that runs Second Life, Linden Labs, warned that a security breach may have exposed subscribers' data, including credit card numbers and passwords.

IBM's chief technologist, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, acknowledged Tuesday that virtual-world business is the "experimental stage." Big Blue doesn't expect to generate a profit in Second Life soon.

But the medium is promising - particularly for training and orientation sessions for Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, which has 330,000 workers worldwide. Two in every five IBM employees work offsite part- or full-time, and it'd be vastly easier to host a virtual meeting than to assemble hundreds of salespeople or engineers in a physical conference room.

The technology is particularly suited to online education - not only for executives but for kids, Wladawsky-Berger mused.

"Perhaps we can make major changes in how to teach kids of all sorts, including kids with disabilities and kids from poorer communities who might be disadvantaged in very 'text oriented' styles of teaching," Wladawsky-Berger's avatar, Irving Islander, said in a public forum hosted by CNet Networks Inc.

IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon said IBM might use Second Life for customer service.

"Instead of me trying to explain in a phone call how to unscrew your hard drive, someone in a more immersive 3D world could actually show you," McMahon said.

Toyota Motor Corp., Adidas AG and American Apparel Inc. have Second Life outposts. But marketing experts say technology companies have the most to gain from virtual worlds. Sun Microsystems Inc., Intel Corp., Advance Publications Inc.'s Wired magazine were Second Life pioneers.

"It gives them access to an audience that is technically literate and creative - that's a defined demographic that's beneficial to the tech business," said Tony Hynes, senior vice president of San Francisco-based Bite Communications, which helped develop Sun's virtual strategy. "For everyone else, it's a highly nascent medium, and I'm not really sure how beneficial it is."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-12-23-40-52





DivX Watches HDTV as its Compression Technology Expands
Michael Kanellos

DivX is finally getting its U.S. breakthrough.

The video compression and playback technology was found in only about 5 percent of U.S. DVDs in the first quarter, but the figure climbed to about 20 percent in the third quarter, according to Jordan Greenhall, CEO of DivX, the company of the same name.
Jordan Greenhall

The lack of DivX players in the U.S. is mostly just a problem of inertia and not part of a plot to keep the technology out of the country, Greenhall said in a meeting prior to annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "It's the DivX conspiracy theory. You can get it in Canada, but you can't get it in the U.S."

Manufacturers don't want to put something on their boxes until they see that buyers want it. That's finally begun to happen, so manufacturers are responding.

The company charges a licensing fee of about $1 to $2 every time a manufacturer loads the company's software onto a device. To date, Europe and Asia have been the more popular geographies for the company.

DivX essentially sells software that lets viewers watch videos encoded with DivX software. Years ago, consumers used it for a vehicle for piracy, and the company was reviled by studios. A few years ago, the company started to more actively support digital-rights management and now works with entertainment companies.

A sign of corporate respectability came this year when DivX held an IPO. The stock went out at $16 in September and now sells for more than $28. (Initially, the company planned to price its shares at between $12 and $14.)

So what will DivX talk about at CES? It wants to branch out into high-definition TV. Blu-ray Disc players and HD DVD players are too expensive for consumers in India or Eastern Europe. The company will try to cut deals with Bollywood executives and film producers in those countries to get them to adopt a high-definition version of DivX, Greenhall said.

"The supply of DivX HD content will be compelling," he said.

The San Diego, Calif.-based company also plans to promote Stage 6, its own video site, at the conference. Professional filmmakers post their movies there--some are known, some are unknown. The site mostly seeks to attract artists who aren't getting mainstream recognition.

"We do outreach to find some of this stuff," he said. "If you have been doing postproduction in Hollywood for 10 years, you've got to have a lot of interesting material. The number of people who make a living in the video industry is pretty big."

One thing that won't likely happen soon, though, is a deal with a studio in the United States. In late 2004, the company said it was negotiating with a couple of major studios, but the deals fell through. "It was kind of depressing. We thought they would be realistic," Greenhall said.
http://news.com.com/DivX+watches+HDT...3-6144118.html





Free-to-Air Copping a Download
Lara Sinclair

AUSTRALIA'S $3.5 billion free-to-air commercial television industry is being threatened by the internet more quickly than expected, with a new online study showing 53 per cent of respondents regularly download TV shows from the internet, most of them illegally.

The research, conducted by University of Sydney honours student Adam Zuchetti, shows one in four people download TV programs twice a week or more, with downloads now the main form of TV viewing for 21 per cent of respondents.

Almost 800 TV fans responded to the survey, which was conducted on local TV websites earlier this year.

The research shows most people know unauthorised downloading is illegal, but 97per cent of downloaders still use peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, commercial websites such as YouTube, and friends as their main sources of content.

According to Zuchetti, people are tired of watching shows when it's convenient for the networks, instead of when it suits them.

"People want more ways to access shows," Zuchetti says. "'I can now get everything I want from channel BitTorrent, so the commercial networks are going to get what's coming to them' -- that is typical of what people are saying."

The research shows 19 per cent of downloaders don't want to wait for local networks to screen their favourite overseas programs, a further 18 per cent time-shift their viewing to watch programs on demand, and another 17 per cent are accessing programs not screened here.

All of the free-to-air networks are experimenting with making clips from programs available over the internet, with Ten's podcasts of its comedy Thank God You're Here just one example.

The network has also screened shows such as The OC and Jericho within 24 hours of their US debut in order to reduce the temptation for fans to go online.

Media buyer Steve Allen from Fusion Strategy says the downloading figures are higher than expected.

According to Free TV Australia, downloading is not affecting viewing levels, which rose 0.7 per cent this year in metropolitan centres.

Allen says while the pressure on the networks is increasing, downloading is unlikely to affect TV viewing by even a single ratings point. "I don't believe that time-shift viewing is going to ... have a major impact on TV," he says. "We've got a couple of examples of shows going to air within 24 hours and it's made no difference to their viewing levels.

"Desperate Housewives, Lost and Prison Break were all available illegally over the internet last year," Allen says. "The minute we get the next stage of true broadband, this will become far more a case not of how many people download content, but how often they do it."

Zuchetti says people who regularly download programs still watch free-to-air TV in order to discuss the shows. "There's a real cultural divide between downloaders and non-downloaders. The downloaders had to come back and see where Australian viewing was up to, so they could contribute to discussions here."

Lost was the most downloaded show, the study revealed, followed by Veronica Mars, House, Prison Break and Dr Who.

Paid downloads are among the options local TV operators are exploring to make more shows available on demand: Yahoo7 has flagged its intention to make fresh episodes of TV shows available over the internet for a price. Ten has meanwhile made clips from Australian Idol available to watch with pre and post-roll video ads.

According to Zuchetti's study, a slight majority (53 per cent) of respondents say they are prepared to pay for content, but one in three will not.

"The most popular option would be to offer the choice of the two: paid, or free downloads with advertising," he says.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html





Movie review | 'The Good German'

Spies, Lies and Noir in Berlin
Manohla Dargis

In his genre pastiche “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. Based on the well-regarded Joseph Kanon novel, this film stars a distracted, emotionally detached George Clooney as Jake Geismer, an American journalist who, following World War II, returns to Germany to check out the doings at Potsdam and find his lost love, Lena, a frau who, as played by a vamping Cate Blanchett, recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s postwar heroine Veronika Voss by way of Carol Burnett.

As it turns out, they don’t make them like they used to even when they try. Mr. Soderbergh has explained that with “The Good German” he was seeking to make a film that looked and sounded like an old studio picture, but without the old studio prohibitions. In the name of verisimilitude and creative freedom, his actors talk a blue streak in black-and-white images captured with period-era camera lenses. More lewdly, Tobey Maguire, who plays Tully, one of those smiling sadists of the type once played by Dan Duryea, helps the film earn its R rating by doing the kinds of things to Ms. Blanchett that audiences could only dream of doing to Ingrid Bergman. Here’s looking at you kid, flung over the bed and on your knees.

With one startling and critical difference, Paul Attanasio’s screenplay follows the general direction of Mr. Kanon’s novel, which, embroidered with historical detail, zeroes in on the mid-1940s moment when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to scoop up German scientists in preparation for the long, cold war to follow. The novel stacks up the various acts of wartime violence — genocide, carpet bombing, postwar raping and pillaging committed by the respective German, American and Soviet players — as if they were poker chips. In this game of high-stakes moral relativism, the Germans clearly have amassed the most chips (six million and counting), though the thuggish Soviets and slick, smiling Americans are doing their best to catch up.

Mr. Attanasio, whose credits include “Quiz Show,” attempts to work all this murk and mess into a compressed screenplay that also leaves room for the stars. When not chasing after Lena, Jake races around the impressively dilapidated sets trying to put all the geopolitical pieces together. When an American soldier winds up dead in Potsdam, Jake thinks he has the makings of an ideal you-are-there story. His zigzag pursuit of his long-cooled love quickly dovetails with a boiling-hot story involving Nazi war crimes, the details of which are helpfully provided by assorted secondary types, including Beau Bridges as the American military officer running part of Berlin, Leland Orser as an American Jew hunting down Nazis and Ravil Isyanov as a watchful Soviet officer.

Despite Mr. Soderbergh’s attempt to mimic the classic studio style, notably through the deliberate editing patterns and fairly restrained camerawork, “The Good German” bears little resemblance to a Hollywood film of the period. Tonally his cinematography is particularly off-key, characterized by hot whites and inky blacks that can put faces into harsh light and swallow bodies whole; neither Ms. Blanchett nor Mr. Clooney is flattered by his attentions. Although he tosses in an occasional beauty shot, framing Jake against a mottled nighttime sky in one scene, the film’s high-contrast austerity owes more to the anti-aesthetic of the modern art house than it does to the back-lot Expressionism of Hollywood noirs or one of the filmmaker’s favorite touchstones, “The Third Man.”

In “Casablanca,” another of the golden oldies Mr. Soderbergh samples for “The Good German,” Humphrey Bogart cozies up to Bergman in flashback on a Parisian bed. The lovers remain dressed throughout their abbreviated affair, though one suggestively uncorked bottle of Champagne and several coy dissolves suggest realms of adult possibility. Yet while the language routinely waxes raw in “The Good German,” the most striking difference between it and a Hollywood film like “Casablanca” aren’t the expletives, the new film’s calculated cynicism or even that glimpse of bedroom coupling; it’s that the older film feels as if it was made for the satisfaction of the audience while the other feels as if it was made for that of the director alone.

In the film laboratory that is Mr. Soderbergh’s brain, ideas boil, steam and sputter. In 1989 he conquered Cannes and launched a thousand Harvey and Bob Weinstein stories with his independently financed sensation “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” quickly becoming a legend before his time. He subsequently flopped and floundered before he brought his independent ways to bear on the studio apparatus, a metamorphosis that involved turning a television actor into the sexiest man alive, repurposing the Rat Pack and winning an Oscar.

It has been a second act that, until recently, seemed as smart as the man living it but that has grown gradually more disjointed as Mr. Soderbergh’s penchant for experimentation has become an end in itself rather than a means to aesthetic liberation. That’s too bad for us, for him and for Hollywood, which frankly could use all the help it can get.

In a recent interview Mr. Soderbergh said that he would have been happy with a career like that of Michael Curtiz, a workhorse who spent decades churning out entertainments like “Casablanca” for Warner Brothers. The idea that the extremely self-motivated Mr. Soderbergh might be satisfied with a career like Curtiz’s is rich nonsense. Curtiz had next to no say on the personnel who worked on “Casablanca.” By contrast, for “The Good German” Mr. Soderbergh persuaded the same studio, now owned by a media conglomerate for which movies represent only a thin slice of the pie chart, to cough up millions for what is essentially a pet art project.

Increasingly, Mr. Soderbergh’s oscillation between glossy divertissements like the “Ocean’s” films and modest diversions like “Bubble” seems less like the natural workings of a restless imagination than a disengaged one. Even more than “Bubble” or “Ocean’s Twelve,” “The Good German” feels like the product of a filmmaker far more interested in his own handicraft — in the logistics of moving the camera among the characters with a dip and a glide — than in the audience for whom he’s ostensibly creating that work.

Manufactured for mass enjoyment, “Casablanca” runs wonderfully more than half a century after leaving the factory. It’s sentimental and contrived. It’s also the kind of well-wrought, pleasurable film that Mr. Soderbergh can do beautifully (see “Out of Sight”) and seems recently reluctant to pursue.

The extent of that disengagement is most evident in the new film’s wildly feel-bad denouement, in which the paradoxically good German of Mr. Kanon’s title, the one who looked away from atrocities, is transformed into a duplicitous Jew. The most charitable explanation for this offensive, historically spurious character is that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Attanasio, in trying to cram the novel’s nearly 500 pages into a 105-minute film, decided to conflate two different clichés into one.

Rather unfortunately, and perhaps with an eye to the present, they end up suggesting that in wartime everyone’s hands can become slicked with blood, even a Jew in Nazi Germany. Somewhere, Jack and Harry Warner, who stopped doing business with Nazi Germany before any other studio in Hollywood, are spinning. They aren’t the only ones.


“The Good German” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film includes some gun violence and fisticuffs, a little sex and a lot of raw language.

THE GOOD GERMAN

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon; director of photography, Mr. Soderbergh (under the name Peter Andrews); editor, Mr. Soderbergh (under the name Mary Ann Bernard); music by Thomas Newman; production designer, Philip Messina; produced by Ben Cosgrove and Gregory Jacobs; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 105 minutes.

WITH: George Clooney (Jake Geismer), Cate Blanchett (Lena Brandt), Tobey Maguire (Tully), Beau Bridges (Colonel Muller), Tony Curran (Danny), Leland Orser (Bernie), Jack Thompson (Congressman Breimer), Robin Weigert (Hannelore) and Ravil Isyanov (General Sikorsky).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/1...es/15germ.html





Movie Review | 'Automatons'

Defending the Human Race With Old Spare Parts
Jeannette Catsoulis

With its retro look, cautionary theme and not-so-special effects, “Automatons” is a shameless ode to ’60s sci-fi and classic television shows like “Lost in Space” and “The Outer Limits.” Shot in silvery black-and-white with old 8-millimeter cameras, the movie depicts a blasted, depopulated future in which the few remaining humans wage a remorseless war of competing beliefs.

Yet this evocation of a time before C.G.I. and other technical marvels is more than just the nostalgic reframing of a current ideological impasse. As we watch a lone young woman (Christine Spencer) live out her life in a crumbling laboratory, endlessly repairing an ever-dwindling army of clunky robots, the movie’s loving attention to light and shade transcends its hermetic setting and meager budget. At times the buzzing static and fizzy backlighting recall the glistening surrealism of the filmmaker Guy Maddin, while the decaying mise-en-scène effectively suggests a planet — and a species — exhausted by human conflict.


Written and directed by James Felix McKenney, “Automatons” is driven less by its hints of suicide bombers than by its rigorous adherence to a time when robots were played by inverted dustbins and battles were represented by dots converging on a crackling screen. This lack of sophistication is enormously endearing, leaving us with the comforting notion that the end of the world will look a lot like the beginning of television.

AUTOMATONS

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written, directed and edited by James Felix McKenney; director of photography, David W. Hale; music by the Noisettes with score by Noah DeFilippis; produced by Lisa Wisely and Mr. McKenney; released by Glass Eye Pix. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 83 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Christine Spencer (the Girl), Brenda Cooney (the Enemy Leader), Angus Scrimm (the Scientist), Noah DeFilippis (the Companion Robot), Don Wood (the Helper Robot), John Anthony Blake (the Communications Captain) and Larry Fessenden (Enemy Guard).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/1...es/13auto.html





'Amateur' Night

An unrefined musician uses stop-motion video to play a catchy tune
Aaron Rutkoff

Lasse Gjertsen's YouTube video has no spoken language, zero sudden injuries and nothing in the way of narrative or pop-culture reference. No copyrighted material was harmed in the making of this film.

Yet, in just a month, "Amateur" has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, according to YouTube's tally, and the video earned the highest user ratings over that span -- making it a certified viral-video hit.

The title of Mr. Gjertsen's successful submission refers to his skill at playing musical instruments. By calling himself an amateur, Mr. Gjertsen also inflates his stature as musician -- the star performer can't play a lick. But in the three-minute video, the Norwegian weaves together a drums-and-piano duet, creating a knee-bouncing tune that substitutes crafty editing for the instrumental skills Mr. Gjertsen lacks. His trick: stop-motion video.

In the Basement

The movie opens with a borrowed drum kit sitting in a wood-paneled suburban basement in Mr. Gjertsen's hometown of Larvik, Norway. He enters stage right dressed in formal attire -- prepared to conduct a symphony, perhaps -- and proceeds to fumble with the drums for a few moments. How much of this is acting or actual ineptness isn't known, but the would-be percussionist certainly looks uncomfortable at the controls.

Suddenly, the image leaps into herky-jerky motion as Mr. Gjertsen repeatedly slams his drumstick into the kit. Each disjointed drumbeat, including some distinct sounds created by Mr. Gjertsen hitting himself in the head with a drumstick, was captured individually.

Mr. Gjertsen stitched together and rearranged dozens of individual clips to create a smooth backbeat. Through blisteringly fast editing, Mr. Gjertsen is heard performing dazzling feats of syncopation -- all while his body is strangely out of synch.

After a minute-long drum solo, Mr. Gjertsen strikes a chime and the screen splits in two. A second Mr. Gjertsen -- dressed in dorky sportswear replete with wristbands -- takes a seat at a piano. Mr. Gjertsen and his clone proceed to perform a duet of stop-motion pop music, with the piano melody fitted perfectly with the drumbeat. At one point, the drummer stops for a smoke while the pianist lets loose a disorderly shuffle up and down the keyboard.

"I have some music sensibility," the 22-year-old Mr. Gjertsen admits. He self-produced his own album of electronica music, but it was made entirely of computerized samples and without any interference from physical instruments. "I cannot play the piano or the drums."

To make "Amateur," Mr. Gjertsen recorded each analog beat and note one by one on video. He transferred the sounds from each video clip into audio files, which he could rearrange with the Fruity Loops sound-editing program -- the same software he's used to create his all-digital music in the past.

After organizing the sound files into the right order, Mr. Gjertsen reconstructed the pattern with the original video files. In the final product, he insists, nothing about his performance was digitally enhanced. "You have the original sounds from the video," he says.

The finished video, with its rapid-fire barrage of clips, seemed impossibly tedious to construct. Not true, Mr. Gjertsen admits. The drum portion consists of only 40 distinct beats, which didn't take too long to arrange. The piano melody was a different story: "That was about 130 different clips," he explains. A single note or cord, once captured on video, might be used several times in the video. But to create the effects of his body sliding up and down the piano bench took substantial efforts at choreography.

Plus, Mr. Gjertsen adds, it's not as if he has the ability to play the melody straight through, from the opening note until the last. "I didn't play the song in slow motion and just cut it together," he says. Even now, after all his tinkering with the melody, Mr. Gjertsen says he can't duplicate the one-note-at-a-time opening of the piano segment in real time.

The whole project -- from planning to filming to editing -- took two days to complete. He released "Amateur" via YouTube on Nov. 7.

Rejection as Motivation

Mr. Gjertsen created his first stop-motion music video three years ago while studying animation at a British art school. In that video, called "Hyperactive," Mr. Gjertsen created individual beats using only his mouth.

The result -- much more annoying than "Amateur" -- has also become popular on YouTube since its release last May. (The human-beatbox-via-stop-motion-video act was popular enough to be used in a commercial for Cartoon Network's show "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.")

As a homework assignment, however, it wasn't well received.

The teacher "didn't like it all," Mr. Gjertsen recalls bitterly. Academic rejection, both at the British school and back at an animation program in Norway, left Mr. Gjertsen out of sorts. He filled his hours watching "South Park" and "The Simpsons."

"That's what I did last year," he says. "But then this 'Amateur' video happened and I'm getting so much positive feedback -- job offers and everything." Mr. Gjertsen says he just returned from Italy, where he began work on music-video project. He credits the high visibility of "Amateur" for landing him the job.

Mr. Gjertsen's story of YouTube redemption isn't quite a rags-to-riches saga -- for the time being, the former student is back at home living with his folks. But it's another example of the video-sharing site's impact. Without YouTube's easy-access mass audience, Mr. Gjertsen probably wouldn't have bothered creating "Amateur." And even if he had, it's likely only a few people would have seen it buried somewhere on an obscure Web site.

How did "Amateur" find such a large and largely approving audience in just a month? Mr. Gjertsen isn't all that interested in analyzing his sudden popularity. But it's possible that the language-free aspect of his music video played a strong role, given the globalization of Web entertainment. The most-watched video in YouTube's history is "The Evolution of Dance" by "inspirational comedian" Judson Laipply. The video has taken more than 36 million viewers on an interminably long dance medley spanning Presley to Timberlake (sans lyrics).

According to New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan, who has puzzled over the enduring popularity of "Dance," the video's mass appeal comes from its absolute lack of English-language dialogue. "That's its secret: It's a silent movie. With a soundtrack," she wrote in October on her online-video blog. "'Evolution' plays in Asia. Remember Asia? Where 60% of the world's population lives?" There's no telling in what parts of the world Mr. Gjertsen's work has found an audience. But a sampling of video responses and comments (more than 4,600 and counting) suggests a global viewership.

And what about that art school teacher who dismissed Mr. Gjertsen's original stop-motion music video? Does he know about Mr. Gjertsen's rise to prominence on YouTube? "I hope so! I really hope so," Mr. Gjertsen says. "I haven't heard anything from him though."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





The D.J. Who Moves the Movers and Shakers
Eric Konigsberg

Somewhere between eating the caviar wraps and ducking outside to smoke his fifth Dunhill International Mild Blue of the evening, Tom Finn realized he was going to be O.K.

This was last weekend, at the New York Botanical Garden’s annual holiday benefit, the Winter Wonderland ball. Mr. Finn, who for almost every year in its nine-year history has been the D.J. of the event, had left his platform at the edge of the dance floor — where he’d been laying out some of his musical selections in advance — to mosey around the conservatory for cocktail hour.

“This is unnerving — the group has really turned over the past year or two,” Mr. Finn said. “I don’t know who this set is.”

But as he stood near the bar to get his bearings, he recognized a friendly face, and then a few more. He winked at Tara Rockefeller. Then Alexandra Lind Rose, whom Mr. Finn identified as a member of “the A-crowd, obviously,” told him it was nice to see him again. Another such lady, Alexandra Kramer, came over to administer an air kiss.

“You’re gorgeous, baby,” Mr. Finn told her.

Yes, he was going to be O.K.

Mr. Finn has reigned as the court D.J. to New York’s high society for more than a decade. “About seven years ago, Vogue called me the new Lester Lanin,” he said. “It’s different, because he led an orchestra and I’m playing CDs, but the social role is the same.”

Mr. Finn certainly knows his way around plates of jellied madrilène and the distinctions among black tie, white tie, morning dress and national costume. Working an average of 70 nights a year, and charging from $5,000 to $12,000 a night, he is as much a fixture of first-tier benefits and galas as the Boardmans (Serena and Samantha), the Hearsts (Amanda and Lydia) and the young lady known to some as the Tinz (that’s Tinsley Mortimer, or Mrs. Robert Livingston “Topper” Mortimer, to you).

He has been the D.J. for everything from the New York City Ballet’s opening-night benefit last month to the Young Fellows of the Frick Collection’s gala to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute ball. He played at the 1995 wedding of Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece and Marie-Chantal Miller, the middle daughter of Robert W. Miller, the duty-free shopping tycoon.

“A lot of people hire a D.J. instead of a band nowadays for the flexibility,” said Dayssi Olarte de Kanavos, a philanthropist and a local floor-committee stalwart. “If a band isn’t a hit with the audience, it’s difficult for them to change. Tom is very good at reading a crowd.”

Jill Kargman, a novelist, a screenwriter and a staple of the charity-ball circuit (her father is Arie Kopelman, the chief executive of Chanel), said, “The great thing about him is he doesn’t aspire to be some kind of a turntablist.

“He basically says to this set, ‘I’m perfectly happy playing Michael Jackson, and you can get up there and do your white-man’s overbite,’ ” she said.

For his part, Mr. Finn attributes his successful run much more to party skills than to musical instincts, or even taste (though he possesses those as well). And for an evening to be successful, he says, his single goal — getting as many people as possible to dance — depends on a familiarity with his audience.

“The women are young this year, but they’re all wearing white fur stoles — very fancy, obviously,” said Mr. Finn, who is 58 and nearly bald and wears Buddy Holly-style glasses with tinted lenses.

These simple observations, he said, signaled him to start with a standby at the Winter Wonderland ball. As the guests, most of them married couples, glided single-file into the heated tent where the dinner was to be served, Mr. Finn donned his headphones, played the Leroy Anderson Pops Orchestra standard “Belle of the Ball,” and waved his hands like a symphony conductor.

Photographers from the society pages snapped away. The women stopped, turned, tossed their heads, smiled. It was glamorous enough to make one wonder if a moment like this was an implicit promise of the $5,000-a-table fee.

“It’s not that hard, actually,” Mr. Finn said, permitting himself a moment’s satisfaction. “These people don’t want anything very uptempo at first, but the women still need to feel sexy, sexy, sexy. I’m scoring the mating rituals for today’s society. You can call these parties whatever you want, but it’s really a WASP breeding party.”

Mr. Finn describes himself as a teenage runaway from Brooklyn who spent time in foster care, and he is quick to acknowledge that his chosen milieu was always an object of wonder as well as his intended destination. “When I was young, I used to go to the library and read about Princess Grace Kelly,” he said. “I fantasized about rich people and their big mansions.”

It was rock ’n’ roll that provided the first means of escape. In 1965 when he was 16, he formed the band the Left Banke, with three friends in Greenwich Village. He played bass and traded off on vocals, and although the group disbanded after recording only one album, they did score a Top-5 hit the next year with the single “Walk Away Renee.”

The song — you’ve heard it, whether you realize it or not — was written about Mr. Finn’s girlfriend at the time (Renee), and a couple of years ago was ranked by Rolling Stone as the 220th greatest rock song ever written (No. 221 was “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed; No. 222: “Oh, Pretty Woman,” by Roy Orbison). It is especially memorable for a baroque string arrangement and the flute solo.

A chance encounter with Steve Rubell in 1982 led to a guest job spinning records at Studio 54, and thus Mr. Finn’s D.J. career was born.

At the Wonderland ball, he kicked off the dessert hour with Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You,” then, halfway through it, segued into “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Baby” by Barry White. Three couples took to the dance floor and did a few modest twirls.

Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” prompted a few more women to drag their husbands and dates onto the checkerboard, and they held the trains of their dresses and swung their elbows. Mr. Finn played “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer — “Paris Hilton’s mother loves when I play this, and I always play it with the vocals low, because she likes to take the microphone and sing over it,” he said — and then Madonna’s “Vogue,” “Dancing Queen” by Abba and “Bust a Move” by Young MC.

By the time he got to “What I Like About You” by the Romantics, just about everybody who was still in the tent — perhaps 175 of the original 250 guests — was cutting a rug. In particular, Chris Cuomo of “Good Morning America,” whose wife, Cristina, was one of the evening’s co-chairwoman, seemed to be living out several rock ’n’ roll fantasies at once.

“I learned at Studio that yuppies really like to dance to the music of their adolescence,” Mr. Finn said, as if to apologize for the lack of originality in his selections. “It’s not my job to educate them.”

Nearly two hours later, Mr. Finn closed with Roxy Music’s “Avalon,” threw on his overcoat, and ran to his car before the song had even finished. “I like to get out before anybody can start making those ‘just one more song’ requests,” he said. “The thing with this crowd is, both sides should know not to wear out their welcome.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/ny...n er=homepage





Revisiting a Bleak Album to Plumb Its Dark Riches
Ben Sisario

Lou Reed refers to it with an understatement that borders on dismissal.

“It was just another one of my albums that didn’t sell,” he said dryly at a West Village cafe recently.

But get him talking a little — and a little talk is all one can expect from Lou Reed — and it becomes clear that “Berlin,” his bleak, Brechtian song cycle from 1973, which he is performing in full for the first time at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn for four nights beginning tomorrow, is a treasured high point in a what has been a lifelong project of pushing at the aesthetic boundaries of rock ’n’ roll.

“It’s a great album,” he said. (He has also called it a masterpiece.) “I admire it. It’s trying to be real, to apply novelists’ ideas and techniques into a rock format.” He mentioned William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Allen Ginsberg and Raymond Chandler as literary models.

“But it sounds so pretentious saying that.” he added. “It just sounds too B.A. in English. Which I have. So there you go.”

Mr. Reed has gathered a starry group of friends to help turn “Berlin” into a semitheatrical, multimedia performance. Julian Schnabel has created sets and will be filming the show, and Mr. Schnabel’s daughter Lola has shot film scenes with the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, which will be projected onto the stage. Bob Ezrin, who produced the original album, will be doing musical direction with Hal Willner. The indie darling Antony will appear with a children’s choir and will also sing backup with Sharon Jones, queen of the local retro-soul scene.

For Lou Reed fans it is a dream come true, and the concerts have long been sold out. But Mr. Reed, now 64, said he is surprised that many listeners remember the record at all.

Sometimes called the most depressing album ever made, “Berlin” is the story of Caroline and Jim, a lowlife couple in the title city — she is promiscuous, he beats her, and they both do lots of drugs — and the tragic dissolution of their relationship. The demimonde of drugs and sadomasochism glamorized in songs by the Velvet Underground, Mr. Reed’s visionary 1960s avant-rock band, is shown with miserable consequences, as in “The Bed,” when Caroline commits suicide and Jim remains bitterly numb:

This is the place where she lay her head

When she went to bed at night ...

And this is the place where she cut her wrists

That odd and fateful night

And I said oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling

The album was made at a high point in Mr. Reed’s career. His second solo record, “Transformer,” produced by David Bowie and released in 1972, had become a glam-rock keystone, and the song “Walk on the Wild Side,” from that album, was a major hit. (It remains his only song to have reached the Top 40.) Looking to continue Mr. Reed’s commercial success, his record label enlisted Mr. Ezrin, who, though only 23, had already made several hit records with Alice Cooper.

“The expectation was that I was going to do something very commercial with him,” Mr. Ezrin said from his office in Toronto. “Sort of Alice Cooper-ish, real mainstream. In reality I had become mesmerized by the poetry and by the art of Lou. Maybe I lost sight of my mandate. Honestly I can look back and say I probably didn’t do what I was hired to do.”

Recorded in London with a group of high-profile musicians including Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce, the songs of “Berlin” are rock filtered through a Brecht-Weill sensibility, with piano at the center of arrangements for band, horns and strings. Songs like “The Bed” and “The Kids” are among the most joyless Mr. Reed has ever recorded, but also some of his most delicate and intense.

The album has a narrative that stretches over 10 songs, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Ezrin had dreams of staging it. “We were bordering on genius with this work,” Mr. Ezrin said. “We were doing things that you’re just not supposed to do with rock music.”

But the album was, as Mr. Reed puts it, “a monumental failure at the time it came out — commercially, critically, you name it.” Reviewers savaged it. A reviewer for Rolling Stone, appalled at its seediness, called it “a disaster”; one critic described the vocals as “like the heat-howl of the dying otter.” (Not all writers were so cruel, though. John Rockwell of The New York Times praised it as “one of the strongest, most original rock records in years,” and Rolling Stone took the unusual step of publishing a rebuttal to its own review, saying that “prettiness has nothing to do with art, nor does good taste, good manners or good morals.”)

Though it stalled at No. 98 on the charts and drifted in and out of print, over time “Berlin” has built a passionate cult audience. One of its most ardent fans is Mr. Schnabel, who called the album the soundtrack to his life. “This record was the embodiment of love’s dark sisters: jealousy, rage and loss,” he said. “It may be the most romantic record ever made.”

For the show at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which is being co-produced with the Sydney Festival in Australia (where “Berlin” travels next month), Mr. Schnabel has created sets based on some of his recent paintings, which are meant to evoke the “greenish walls” of the fleabag hotel where Caroline lives. “Lou calls it the Berlin Wall,” he said.

“Berlin” also became a life’s accompaniment of a different sort for 25-year-old Lola Schnabel. “I just remember that soundtrack at the moment my parents were getting divorced,” she said. “It wasn’t that the music was disturbing; it was what was happening with the music. But it’s part of my childhood.”

The album was recorded when Mr. Reed’s own first marriage was collapsing. “This kind of anger didn’t come from a made-up place,” Mr. Ezrin said. “It is from deep within Lou’s psyche. We’ve all been through relationships where we’ve been disappointed by a partner and been hurt and wanted to hurt them back.”

When asked about the circumstances of its creation, Mr. Reed said, “I don’t remember.”

After years of prodding from Susan Feldman, the artistic director of Arts at St. Ann’s, which operates St. Ann’s Warehouse, to perform the album, Mr. Reed relented once he saw how dearly it was loved by Mr. Schnabel and other of his friends. “I just never wanted to do it,” he said. “I wasn’t itching to do anything in particular. I usually just try to do new things.”

As for the title, Mr. Reed is typically blunt when asked why he chose to set the story in the once-divided city of Berlin instead of, say, New York.

“I’d never been there,” he said. “It’s just a metaphor. I like division.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/ar...ic/13reed.html





Ahmet Ertegun, Music Executive, Dies at 83
Tim Weiner

Ahmet Ertegun, the music magnate who founded Atlantic Records and shaped the careers of John Coltrane, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and many others, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 83.

A spokesman for Atlantic Records said the death was the result of a brain injury suffered when Mr. Ertegun fell backstage at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Oct. 29 as the Rolling Stones prepared to play a concert that marked former President Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday. He had been in a coma since then.

“Few people have had a bigger impact on the record industry than Ahmet,” David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, said yesterday in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, “and no one loved American music more than he did.”

Mr. Geffen said that Mr. Ertegun “started me in the record business” in 1970 by helping to finance his first record company, Asylum, “just as he gave many independent entrepreneurs the chance to start their own companies.”

Mr. Ertegun was the dapper son of a Turkish diplomatic family. He was equally at home at a high-society soiree or a rhythm and blues club, the kind of place where, in the 1950s, he found the performers who went on to make hits for Atlantic Records, one of the most successful American independent music labels.

He was an astute judge of both musical talent and business potential, surrounding himself with skillful producers and remaking R&B for the pop mainstream. As Atlantic Records grew from a small independent label into a major national music company, it became a stronghold of soul, with Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, and of rock, with the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Yes.

Ever conscious of the music’s roots, Mr. Ertegun was also a prime mover in starting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. In a music career marked by numerous lifetime achievement awards, he was inducted into the hall in 1987.

Mr. Ertegun said he fell in love with music when he was 9. In 1932, his older brother, Nesuhi, took him to see the Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway orchestras at the Palladium Theater in London. The beauty of the jazz, the power of the beat and the elegance of the musicians made a lasting impression.

His instincts were not impeccable. He lost out on chances to sign the Beatles and Elvis Presley. But in an industry in which backstabbing is commonplace, Mr. Ertegun was admired as a shrewd businessman with a passion for the creative artists and the music he nurtured.

Along with a partner, Herb Abramson, Mr. Ertegun founded Atlantic Records in 1947 in an office in a derelict hotel on West 56th Street in Manhattan. His initial investment of $10,000 was borrowed from his family dentist.

By the 1950s, Atlantic developed a unique sound, best described as the mixed and polygamous marriage of Mr. Ertegun’s musical loves. He and his producers mingled blues and jazz with the mambo of New Orleans, the urban blues of Chicago, the swing of Kansas City and the sophisticated rhythms and arrangements of New York.

Mr. Ertegun often signed musicians who had been seasoned on the R&B circuit, and pushed them toward perfecting their performances in the recording studio. Every so often, with his name spelled in reverse as Nugetre, Mr. Ertegun appeared as the songwriter on R&B hits like “Chains of Love” and “Sweet Sixteen.”

In 1954, Atlantic released both “I Got a Woman” by Ray Charles and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” by Joe Turner. (Mr. Ertegun was a backup singer on “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”) The songs had a good beat, and people danced to them. They were among the strongest roots of rock and roll.

After his brother Nesuhi joined Atlantic in 1956, the label attracted many of the most inventive jazz musicians of the era, including Coltrane, Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Ornette Coleman. In 1957, Atlantic was among the first labels to record in stereo.

By the 1960s, often in partnerships with local labels like Stax in Memphis, Mr. Ertegun was selling millions of records by the leading soul musicians of the day, among them Ms. Franklin and Mr. Redding. Ms. Franklin had recorded previously for Columbia Records, but her hits for Atlantic — which merged her gospel roots with an earthy strength and sensuality — were the ones that made her the Queen of Soul.

Mr. Ertegun’s music partnerships, he sometimes pointed out, were often culturally triangular. He was Turkish and a Muslim by birth. Many of his fellow executives, like the producer Jerry Wexler, were Jewish. The artists they produced, particularly when the label began, were black. Together, they helped move rhythm and blues to the center of American popular music.

Mr. Ertegun and Ioana Maria Banu were married on April 6, 1961. Known as Mica, she became a prominent interior designer. She survives him, as does a sister. Nesuhi Ertegun died in 1989.

The Ertegun brothers and their partner, Mr. Wexler, sold the Atlantic label to Warner Brothers-Seven Arts in 1967 for $17 million in stock. Four years later, the brothers took some of the money and founded the New York Cosmos soccer team.

But Mr. Ertegun kept making records. When Kinney National Service — a conglomerate of parking lots, funeral parlors, rental cars and other unmusical enterprises — completed the acquisition of Warner Brothers-Seven Arts in 1969, he and his label kept going.

Mr. Ertegun was now a rock mogul. Atlantic Records signed the Stones to a distribution deal when the band’s contract with Decca Records ended; Led Zeppelin; and Crosby, Stills & Nash, who became Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young after Mr. Ertegun persuaded Neil Young to join the group. The corporations changed — Kinney turned into Warner Communications, which became Time Warner — but Atlantic and its founder still flourished.

It remained one of the only record labels of the 1940s to survive the multibillion-dollar mergers and acquisitions of the 1990s in more than name only, with its founder still in charge. Mr. Ertegun reduced his daily corporate duties in 1996 but remained an inveterate night-clubber, avid concertgoer and insatiable music maven well into his 80s.

Ahmet Ertegun was born in Istanbul on July 31, 1923. His father, Mehmet Munir, was the legal counselor to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

In 1925, Ataturk sent the elder Ertegun to serve as the Turkish representative to the League of Nations. In the next 20 years, he was the Turkish ambassador to Switzerland, to France, to the Court of St. James under King George V and to the United States during the Roosevelt administration. The young Ahmet grew up in that worldly realm. His father, then the dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington, died in 1944.

That year, at 21, having earned a bachelor’s degree at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., Mr. Ertegun was taking graduate courses in medieval philosophy at Georgetown University.

“In between, I spent hours in a rhythm and blues record shop in the black ghetto in Washington,” he told the graduates of Berklee College of Music in Boston on receiving an honorary degree in 1991. “Almost every night, I went to the Howard Theater and to various jazz and blues clubs.”

“I had to decide whether I would go into a scholastic life or go back to Turkey in the diplomatic service, or do something else,” he said. “What I really loved was music, jazz, blues, and hanging out.” And so, he told the students, he did what he loved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/ar...rtner=homepage





Milestones



A Mogul Who Helped Mold Pop Culture
Jon Pareles

The sheer improbability of Ahmet Ertegun’s career makes it an all-American success story: the tale of an outsider, from Turkey no less, who loved African-American music so much that he became a major force in pop history. Points of friction in American culture — class, ethnicity, race, religion — mostly provided him with sparks.

Mr. Ertegun, who died on Thursday at 83, was an old-school music mogul, a self-invented character with the urge to start a record company. He was, by all accounts, a charmer: a man of wealth and taste who had stories to tell, a shrewd business sense and a keen appreciation of all sorts of pleasure. He wasn’t a musician, but he had an ear for a hit, one that served him for half a century.

When Mr. Ertegun and a partner floated Atlantic Records in 1947 with a $10,000 loan from a dentist, it was one among many small independent labels trying to serve the taste of postwar America. But as the others had their handfuls of hit singles and disappeared, Atlantic kept growing. With Mr. Ertegun as chairman, the job he held until his death, it was a major label by the 1960s, the home of multimillion-sellers like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones in the 1970s and the core of the Warner Music conglomerate that continues to survive in the currently embattled recording business.

David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, said yesterday that he had once asked Mr. Ertegun how to make money in the music business. Mr. Ertegun said he would demonstrate, got up from his chair, hunched over and shuffled slowly across the room. Mr. Geffen didn’t understand, so Mr. Ertegun did it twice more. Finally he explained: “ ‘If you’re lucky, you bump into a genius, and a genius will make you rich in the music business,’ ” Mr. Geffen recalled. “Ahmet bumped into an awful lot of geniuses.”

He looked for those geniuses in places where no one would expect to find the European-educated son of a Turkish diplomat. Living in a segregated Washington, Mr. Ertegun was drawn to jazz and to rhythm and blues, and he began a lifetime habit of going to dives to hear the real thing. Mr. Ertegun moved easily between high society and the kind of ghetto basement club where he first heard Ruth Brown, whose hits through the 1950s were the label’s bulwark. He sought out singers who had something startling, something untamed, in their voices: singers like Ms. Brown, Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, the Coasters, Solomon Burke and Aretha Franklin.

He cherished the down-home passion he heard. But his outsider’s ear may have helped him produce music that could aim for an audience beyond what the record business was calling “race music.” Even on low-budget recordings — for years, Atlantic’s Midtown Manhattan business office by day was its recording studio by night — he and his control-room collaborators sought a sonic clarity and definition that made Atlantic’s singles stand out on the radio. Unlike his 1950s contemporaries at Chess Records (home of Chuck Berry) and Sun Records (where Elvis Presley made his debut), Mr. Ertegun didn’t gear Atlantic’s songs particularly toward teenagers. Although Ruth Brown sounded girlish in a song like “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” many of Atlantic’s 1950s rhythm and blues songs were simply steeped in the blues.

Part of what Mr. Ertegun also heard in his cherished singers was the sound of the gospel church. Mr. Charles merged the beat and the call-and-response of sanctified church music with considerably more secular implications in songs like “What’d I Say.” Mr. Ertegun, who was born a Muslim, worked with church-rooted African-American musicians and Jewish producers, notably Jerry Wexler, on many Atlantic hits; that interfaith coalition helped forge soul music. Before her stint at Atlantic, Ms. Franklin had made albums for Columbia Records, but she had sung ballads and jazz standards. When she recorded for Atlantic, her sound moved back toward the church and she became the Queen of Soul.

After the 1950s, Mr. Ertegun was more a deal maker than a control-room producer. But his ear stayed reliable. Atlantic picked up the Southern soul of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and when British rockers began recycling American blues and rhythm and blues, he latched on to bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin. Atlantic’s R&B pedigree helped bring the Rolling Stones to the label for their commercial heyday in the 1970s, leading to decades of society-column photos of Mick Jagger with Mr. Ertegun. (Mr. Ertegun died after being injured in a fall backstage before a Rolling Stones concert on Oct. 29.) But Mr. Ertegun didn’t abandon his business judgment. When the Stones received a lucrative offer from Virgin Records for their next contract, Mr. Ertegun let them go.

Like other labels of the ’40s and ’50s, Atlantic made contracts with its early artists that now seem exploitative. On the eve of the label’s 40th anniversary, Ruth Brown made loud public complaints about her lack of royalties, and Atlantic agreed to waive unrecouped debts for Ms. Brown and other musicians on its early roster, and to pay 20 years of back royalties. The label also contributed nearly $2 million to start the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which pressured other labels toward royalty reform and gave money to needy musicians.

Mr. Ertegun was also a prime mover in starting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, another nod to history. In 2005 he told the online magazine Slate that he wanted his legacy to be that “I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.”

Through the decades, Mr. Ertegun never stopped visiting his beloved dives, from R&B lounges to punk clubs. He always stood out, dressed in his bespoke suits and expensive shoes; he never lost his Turkish accent. But he was an outsider who had become something more than an insider, an American phenomenon who proved the best way to cross boundaries was with the promise of a good time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/ar...ic/16erte.html


















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