[JackSpratts]

Working Out of a 'Third Place'
Marco R. della Cava

The fall morning is mercifully fog-free, which puts a spring in the step of Mordy Karsch as he rolls into work. In short order, he fires up the computer, turns on his cellphone and orders breakfast.

Though he has toiled on these premises for two years, he doesn't know anyone here well except for Angel Pinto, who brings him his hot coffee. That's because Karsch, 34, works out of The Grove, a bohemian eatery in this city's hip Marina district that caters to a growing army of office-less employees.

"Working from a place like this is less stressful than being in an office, and I find I get a lot more done," says Karsch, general manager of Spanish Sales Force, a Spanish-language marketing consultancy. "If you can make this work for you, you'll love it."

Call The Grove the office of the future, except the future is here.

An estimated 30 million Americans, or roughly one-fifth of the nation's workforce, are part of the so-called Kinko's generation, employees who spend significant hours each month working outside of a traditional office.

This rootless army is growing 10% annually, according to Gartner Dataquest research. The reason? Corporations are increasingly supportive of teleworking for reasons that range from saving money on office space to needing a backup in the event of a natural disaster or terror attack.

"With technology what it is, it's far easier to bring the work to the people than the people to the work," says Jim Ware of the Future of Work, a Bay Area enterprise that helps large companies such as Boeing anticipate workplace trends.

Ware says working out of a "third place" — neither home nor office, it's anything from Starbucks to the local library — does raise "a host of human resources issues related to keeping track of people you don't see much."

But in the end, "employers are realizing that it's about the work, not about the hours in an office."

You've surely seen this crowd while popping in for that morning macchiato. They claim prime tabletops and battle for electrical outlets, all with the zombie-like gaze of people who physically are there but mentally are engaged with phantoms at the other end of a wireless signal.

Just who are these people, and what are they so tuned into? Some e-mail new clients, others process incoming orders. A few surf the Web. Occasionally, there's a game of Solitaire. All in all, a wild array of mostly 40-and-under folks working in an impressive range of fields.

***

The Grove is open from 7 a.m.-11 p.m., but the teleworker crowd typically logs bankers' hours.

As work environments go, this place resembles a diner that has crashed into a flea market. Its wide wooden-plank floors look ripped from a working barn. The walls sprout antique sleds, oars and fishing nets. The furniture ranges from a bolted-down ski-lift chair to an old-fashioned school desk.

But the real lure are stiff wooden benches, behind which are tucked dozens of precious outlets.

"This is coveted real estate," says Justin Dock, 34, who is, in fact, a real estate consultant. He's here closing a deal with client Howard Epstein, 48. Dock is a regular at The Grove. It's his antidote to the "claustrophobic feeling I can get when I work from home."

He says waiters here don't hover. Instead, "there's an understanding that for every hour or so you're here, you'll buy something."

That arrangement works just fine for Keir Beadling, 38, who, when he isn't snacking, keeps the iced teas and coffees coming. As head of a company that markets Mavericks, an area big-wave surfing competition, Beadling has an office nearby. It's just that he finds he can't get any work done there.

"Here, I get the stimulation of being with others who are working, but not the distraction," he says.

That's because teleworkers tend to be exceedingly possessive of their space. Mariette Frey, 29, a regional sales representative for computer hardware and software reseller CDW, says she typically "will tell the people around me that I'll be meeting with someone and apologize in advance so we don't have to move" midmeeting.

For Frey, the odd headache — parking tickets when she forgets to feed the meter or nosy neighbors who appear to be listening in on her calls — are outweighed by the benefits of the cafe office.

"I can be here, finish a document and e-mail it to a nearby Kinko's, then pick it up on the way to the next meeting," she says. "Sitting in this spot, I have everything I need."

***

Ron Shaich adores the Mariette Freys of the world. They've fueled the growth of Panera Bread to 1,000 locations that court the office-less worker with living room-style seating, free Wi-Fi and Mediterranean-style food.

"We now live in a society where cubicles are considered the corporate equivalent of a tenement," says CEO Shaich. "What's most efficient for business and employee alike is a measure of flexibility."

But some question the permanence of such work. "It remains to be seen if this is a cultural breakthrough or a generational artifact," says Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"The obstacles remain those bosses who insist on face time and bean counters who equate being outside the office with wasted time," he says. But the reality is "most businesses run on 24-hour work cycles that follow the sun around the globe. That means it's not where you are that matters, but what you're doing."

Even the federal government is pushing hard to see that one-quarter of its mammoth workforce has the option to occasionally telework.

"Government agencies usually aren't early adopters, but they are very pro this idea," says Stephen O'Keeffe, executive director of the Telework Exchange, a public/private partnership that studies this phenomenon. "In Washington, people spend more time commuting than on vacation."

***

The unspoken teleworker/waiter code is that you give up your table if the place starts hopping.

But it's 3 p.m., and the lunch crowd has long since left The Grove. Now it's caffeine-fueled crunch time. Nearly 20 laptops are whirring away in various parts of the cafe, both indoors and out. For all this energy, you can hear an espresso spoon drop. Silent focus radiates off the faces of the cultural rainbow assembled here.

Facing each other with open laptops like two guys playing Battleship, Jeff Stecyk, 35, and Keith Thesing, 40, confer over a presentation. As a West Coast sales duo for Virginia-based software company Managed Objects, the pair revel in their freedom.

"Between Wi-Fi, a conference call on our cellphones and two beers that no one knows about, we just go out and get the job done," Thesing says with a smile. "There are no office politics to deal with. It's just all about the work."

As it is for the studious type sitting across the way. Akiba Lerner, 35, is the son of Tikkun magazine editor Rabbi Michael Lerner and a Stanford doctoral candidate working on his dissertation on religious philosophy. Although there's an Internet cafe close to his house, he makes the 20-minute trek here for "the good lighting, the right chair and the vibe of the people."

Like most of the intense folks here, Lerner tends to soak up that vibe, yet infrequently makes the leap to talk to tablemates.

An exception is Noah Lichtenstein, 23, founder of MasterCPR.com, which provides one-stop shopping for corporate first aid and disaster-planning needs.

Lichtenstein is quick to make new friends at The Grove and likens the atmosphere to that of "a cool little alcove in the Stanford library where my friends and I would hang out and study."

While his growing company now has offices, he still prefers to return here, the place where his brainchild took wing. "We'd joke that The Grove was our international headquarters," says Lichtenstein. "What I love is that you can dial into the white noise here and focus on work, or pull your head up and people-watch. Right, Si?"

A chair away, Si Katara, 28, is lost in a haze of data-entry and headphone-delivered tunes. Only a hand waved in front of his face brings him back to the real world.

"It's an energy issue," says Katara, founder of Pavia Systems, a company that provides online training programs. He has a home office but prefers to work here exclusively. "At home, I'm isolated. This, it's sort of a surrogate coworker environment."

Not to mention a gold mine: Two Grove customers became backers.

And sometimes, you get even more. Like a phone number.

Mordy Karsch usually doesn't stop his stare-a-thon with his computer to marvel at the sights. But today he can't help but talk to Nicole Chetaud, 33, a designer for California Closets who comes to The Grove regularly to draw up dream storage for strangers.

Karsch admits he's often tongue-tied in clubs. But here, "there's a commonality that makes chatting easy." Chetaud agrees. They swap business cards and smiles.

"I love this place," says Chetaud, looking out at the eclectic restaurant and its workaholic regulars. "I love everything about it.

"Except for the $5 orange juices."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/2006-10...rd-space_x.htm





Rebuilding Microsoft

Bill Gates is on his way out. Now it's up to Ray Ozzie to revive the flagging giant – and get it ready for the post-desktop era.
Fred Vogelstein

AT MICROSOFT, IT'S known simply as the Bill Review. At some point in the early stages of any major product or service launch, the richest man in the world would sit in judgment, assessing a team's progress and deciding whether the project should still get the company's backing. Engineers and executives spent days and nights preparing for this session, a grilling that could make or break a career.

The anxiety was entirely justified. The CEO (and later chief software architect) brought every ounce of his ruthless, superior intellect to the job, and he didn't suffer fools. Tallying the number of times Gates shook his head and said "fuck" became the standard metric for failure throughout the 1990s. Joel Spolsky, a former Microsoft developer, recalled making one presentation in which someone counted only four. "Wow, that's the lowest I can remember," Spolsky's colleague told him. "Bill is getting mellow in his old age."

Now the era of the Bill Review is coming to a close. In June, Gates stepped down from his role as chief software architect (though he'll retain the title of chairman). He'll spend the next two years ratcheting down his work at the company he cofounded 31 years ago, devoting the bulk of his time to philanthropic efforts. His handpicked successor, Ray Ozzie, doesn't like to curse, at least not in meetings. In fact, Ozzie is in many ways the anti-Gates: courtly, soft-spoken, as approachable as your favorite college prof.

But the two men share something important to the past and future of Microsoft: technological brilliance. As the inventor and principal executive behind Lotus Notes in the '80s and '90s, the 50-year-old Ozzie is considered one of the best software minds on the planet. In its day, Lotus Notes was among the most popular applications in corporate America. In 1997, Ozzie started Groove Networks, a company – like the one behind Lotus – created to help office workers collaborate electronically. Microsoft bought Groove in April 2005 for $120 million, and Ozzie signed on as a top executive in Redmond.

But the idea of being put on a pedestal makes Ozzie squirm. For starters, he doesn't like to be in front of crowds and used to suffer from crippling stage fright. More fundamentally, trying to manage from atop a pedestal doesn't work, he says. You lose touch with employees, and that makes it harder to lead an organization and get things done. And at Microsoft – a company many say is clinging to an outdated business model and beset by more-nimble competitors – there's a lot of hard work to be done these days.

Just listen to Ozzie describe his management style. "When I find a hairy bug," he wrote in a 2003 blog posting, "I love having the developer come in and debug it face-to-face. It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product's internals, but also, you have no idea what I learn chitchatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc. Design and implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc." He continued: "I suppose this is just classic 'walking the halls,' but I feel as though without this kind of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would lose respect for me."

It's hard to imagine how a guy this self-effacing could survive inside Microsoft's insular, hierarchical, hypercompetitive culture. Redmond is notorious for bringing outsiders into the executive ranks and promptly shredding them. But since joining the company 18 months ago, Ozzie's star has only gotten brighter. He was brought on as one of three chief technical officers, and less than two months into his tenure, he was leading a secret strategy session on how to fight competitors like Google. By November, he was the architect of a new software development strategy for the entire company. And in June of this year, he reached the mountaintop: Gates announced that he was essentially retiring and named Ozzie as the company's technology überboss.

"With Gates, everything was always a production," says one program manager who asked to remain anonymous. "You'd go to Building 34, where he and [CEO Steve] Ballmer have their own separate wings, and then you'd have to get cleared by a security guard, and then you'd have to get cleared by two secretaries – all before you made your presentation." When Ozzie was interested in learning more about a product, he would go to the program manager's conference room, and he went prepared with good questions showing that he had done his homework. And as chief software architect, he shows no signs of changing his approach.

There are, of course, two major reasons for Ozzie's ascendancy at Microsoft: Gates and Ballmer. Ozzie is one of the few technologists anywhere whom they respect; they'd been trying for years to get him to join the company. Now he's carrying their hopes for the future, and it's a heavy load. Ozzie needs to move Microsoft from selling software in a box to selling lightning-fast, powerful online applications ranging from gaming to spreadsheets. The risks are enormous. The mission is to radically alter the way the company sells its most profitable software and to pursue the great unknown of so-called Web services – trading an old cash cow for an as-yet-to-be-determined cash cow. No, Microsoft doesn't think its customers will stop using PCs with hard drives and work entirely online, but the desktop era is drawing to a close, and that promises to force some painful trade-offs.

MICROSOFT HAS BEEN in a funk since 2003. Its travails could be the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on the innovator's dilemma. The company made – and still makes – billions selling desktop software, mainly Windows and Office. But the center of gravity has moved, and desktop software is about as cutting-edge as a nightly network newscast. Instead, Web-based apps are taking hold, and devices other than the PC – smartphones, iPods, digicams – represent the growth markets for software. At the same time, new business models, like search-based advertising and low-cost software subscriptions, are beginning to generate big money.

None of this is news in Redmond. In a 1995 company-wide memo titled "The Internet Tidal Wave," Gates famously recognized the network as a disruptive tsunami. And starting in 2000, he tried to prepare his troops for yet another big shift, with a series of speeches on Web services. Even then, Gates was describing a world where desktop applications would eventually work in concert with high-speed apps delivered over the Internet. Among other benefits, he noted, "you should never have to enter the same information multiple times."

Beyond the Box

But despite all the visionary pronouncements, Microsoft has been consistently outmatched on this new battleground. Apple Computer completely controls the online music business with the iPod. (In July, Microsoft effectively scrapped its partnerships with hardware makers and has resorted to creating its own music player, named Zune, to try to compete.) Cell phones, BlackBerrys, and PDAs are now arguably the primary way we check email, yet Microsoft trails in supplying software to those devices. Microsoft's game console, the Xbox 360, has been a hit, but competition from Sony's PlayStation 2 has kept prices low, making profits elusive. And when it comes to Internet search – another hugely popular function that doesn't run on a PC – Google is widening its lead over Redmond and exploiting new advertising models that generate billions in revenue. Google is also experimenting with a collection of Web apps, including maps, video, even online word processing and spreadsheets. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been struggling with the sort of things it historically has done best – producing big, integrated software packages. Vista, its new operating system, is due out next year, but it's almost two years late and has no firm release date.

The upshot? Microsoft's stock, which generated better than 50 percent compound annual returns during the '90s, hasn't moved at all in nearly five years. Morale in Redmond, once the envy of corporate America, is the lowest it has been in company history. Employees complain of IBM-like bureaucracy that stifles creativity and innovation. And petty financial jealousies are rampant: Thanks to the stagnant share price, few are getting rich at Microsoft these days. Half the staff – those who joined the ranks in the early '90s – are worth millions of dollars from stock options. The other half – hired after 2000 – are worth a fraction of that.

Perhaps worst of all, five years after Microsoft dodged a breakup and other huge antitrust sanctions for being too aggressive, it's hard to find anyone who is scared of the company anymore. Remember when competing with Redmond used to be considered a death sentence? Now Google taunts it daily. It has hired about 100 Microsofties, half of whom work at a satellite office a few miles away from Microsoft HQ. Apple, for its part, has become so confident of consumers' preference for OS X, its operating system, and software like iPhoto and GarageBand that it now allows users to run Windows on its machines. Early reports indicate the strategy is working: Sales of Mac laptops are booming and have pushed Apple's US market share in the category to 12 percent, doubling in just six months.

Despite all this competition, however, Microsoft looks awfully healthy. General Motors would love to have such problems. The company has developed a robust server software business since the late '90s, and its Windows and Office monopolies still mint $1.5 billion a month. It has almost $35 billion in the bank.

But executives at Microsoft are smart enough to be worried. They're painfully aware of the story of IBM in the 1970s. It was the most powerful corporation in the world – so powerful that the government sued it for antitrust violations. Fifteen years later, it was on its back. In those days Microsoft was the young superstar – much as Google is today – that helped push Big Blue from its perch. Redmond doesn't want to see history repeat itself.

Ozzie's plan – laid out in a 5,000-word memo to executives last fall and in a speech to Wall Street analysts in July – is tough love. Indeed, it's a blunter assessment of Microsoft than any executive, including Gates or Ballmer, has probably ever made. To avoid being marginalized, Ozzie said, Microsoft needs to shift gears fast and concentrate on the software-services world. That means figuring out how to get new ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace faster, rethinking the way the company makes and sells applications, and spending billions of dollars on infrastructure, like giant server farms, to power all those changes. To a corporation that has built some of the most bloated, complex software ever to boot up, Ozzie gave this advice: "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." Better, he went on, to "explore and embrace techniques to reduce complexity."

In other words, instead of spending years working on giant, deeply integrated software packages and doing one big, heavily marketed release, Microsoft needs to think more like Google and other next-gen Internet companies – designing and releasing software faster and in smaller interchangeable pieces and then letting online user feedback guide improvements.

The goal is radical and risky: embrace a variety of revenue models, including monthly subscriptions and online advertising, to become more competitive. But the vision is simple: enable users to have access to their data and applications wherever they are and regardless of what device they're using – the laptop at work, the PC at home, the cell phone, the television, whatever. "It should all behave seamlessly," Ozzie says.

He's quick to point out that Microsoft will continue to sell software in a box for a long while. Business customers, in particular, still want a degree of stability and predictability in the software they use, so many may prefer an old-fashioned release cycle. These users may also wait awhile before they let someone like Microsoft – or any outsider – run their servers. It would be bad business to get too far out in front of these customers, Ozzie says.

But he sees lots of ways to use the Web to complement Windows and Office that Microsoft has barely tapped. "Take PowerPoint, for example," he tells a gaggle of analysts crowding around him at a Microsoft cocktail party in July. "Wouldn't it be great if you could hit F5 when you finished preparing a presentation and have your PC automatically upload the file to a Web address? Then people listening to your presentation by phone could see you flipping through your slides in real time, too."

OZZIE'S PLAN will take the company in the right direction. The question is how much progress it will manage to make. Microsoft is a giant corporation with 70,000 employees, and Ozzie is basically telling all of them to change how they think about their jobs. It's probably one of the hardest things Microsoft has ever attempted.

Beyond the Box

Imagine being an airline mechanic. You're accustomed to waiting for planes to roll into the hangar to be fixed. One day, someone tells you that from now on, you're going to have to maintain the planes while they're in the air. That's what Microsoft is facing. For most of its life, it rolled the Windows and Office planes into the hangar and retooled them. Now it needs to write software that can be maintained more easily on the fly. Once you turn on a service, like an online word processor, "it's on forever," one former Microsoftie says. "It doesn't ever go off. So when you add features or want to fix something, you have to do it while it's running. It changes your mindset in terms of what's possible and what's impossible."

Another challenge Ozzie faces is persuading the organization to follow him. He may hold Gates' title, but everyone at Microsoft understands that he will never hold Gates' sway. And without direct responsibility for any of Microsoft's businesses, he will have to get Robbie Bach, Kevin Johnson, Jeff Raikes, and Craig Mundie – the presidents in charge of Microsoft's three business units and Microsoft Research – to feel that it's in their economic interest to play ball.

That doesn't appear to be a problem right now. Ozzie's reputation, the public backing from Gates and Ballmer, and the fact that Ozzie's proposals don't yet threaten the bottom line have helped him get a huge amount done in a short time. At a San Francisco presentation a year ago, he announced the formation of two groups – Windows Live and Office Live – that, along with three-year-old Xbox Live, would lead Microsoft's latest charge onto the Internet. These groups have already rolled out almost three dozen products and services. Sure, a lot of it is stuff we've seen before on Yahoo or Google, like customized homepages that aggregate all the information you care about – mail, calendar, address book, news. But there are also snappy little innovations like the recently released Windows Live Writer, which simplifies the still-difficult process of adding anything more than text to a blog.

Office Live, meanwhile, expands on the old idea of allowing users to set up domains and email boxes. For $30 a month, Microsoft adds collaboration tools. You can work on a project, save it to Microsoft-run servers in a giant data center somewhere, and allow a colleague to work on it at the same time or later. Tools like this are part of the expensive server software that Microsoft sells to big corporations. But until now they haven't been available to home and small business users on the PC platform.

And company executives have successfully turned Xbox Live – Microsoft's $70-a-year online gaming service – from a secondary offering into a must-have part of the Xbox experience. In the first two years of the service, only about 10 percent of Xbox buyers used the online service. But in the wake of a major upgrade and the rollout of the Xbox 360 last year, 60 percent of the console's buyers are now playing online. Microsoft is on track to sell 10 million Xbox 360 consoles by the time Sony's PlayStation 3 hits stores in November, Gates says.

Among the most intriguing applications to come out of Ozzie's tenure, so far, developers say, is one that Ozzie and his team of a half-dozen developers wrote themselves. Called Live Clipboard, it lets you easily cut and paste elements between online services – a picture from Flickr into Picasa or a contact from your online calendar or some random Web page into Outlook. Ozzie released the elegantly simple application, which he announced in March, in a very un-Microsoft way – under a Creative Commons license. In other words, it's free for developers to use and improve upon, no strings attached. He called it "a little gift to the Web," and so far, most of the development community, long suspicious of Microsoft geeks bearing gifts, has believed him. "When I saw it, I thought, 'Wow, this is a huge innovation, and it's great to get it out so quickly,'" says Alex Hopmann, a 10-year Microsoft developer and manager who left the company 18 months ago for a startup. "It used to be that someone would come up with an idea like that and it wouldn't see daylight for two years, until the next product release."

The true test of progress, of course, will come when Microsoft demonstrates it is actually prepared to gamble with a part of its Office and Windows revenue. Will we someday be able to use portions of Microsoft Office – say Word, Excel, or PowerPoint – as free, online, ad-supported apps that run inside an Internet browser instead of on our hard drive? Will we be able to take a working Excel spreadsheet and paste it into our blog? Those things are being discussed; just don't count on seeing them tomorrow, Microsoft insiders say.

Another topic under discussion: selling cheap, stripped-down versions of Office to suit various niches. Microsoft gets loads of abuse from consumers and businesses for selling an expensive, one-size-fits-all product larded with features that most people ignore (or actively hate – AutoCorrect, anyone?). So, a few midlevel executives are wondering, why not offer customers the option of a cheap subscription with fewer features, but those tailored to their specific needs? The idea is risky for the company, which relies on Office to generate some $12 billion a year in revenue. But that's the kind of tough love Ozzie is proposing.

To see the depth of transformation Ozzie is talking about, spend a few hours with Gary Flake, one of 10 Microsoft employees to hold the coveted title of technical fellow. He joined the company last year after a year-and-a-half stint as Yahoo's head of R&D, and he's clearly a different kind of Microsoft engineer: He doesn't believe in Windows' supremacy or in the software-in-a-box concept. He's proud to tell you that he's written more than 100,000 lines of open source code, an affront to Redmond's traditional businesses. And he's quite willing to question Microsoft's ability to innovate, which would have been considered heresy a few years ago. "In addition to saying, yes, we do some innovative things, and we don't get credit for them, I'd take it a step further," says Flake, who, as head of the 100-engineer Live Labs team, is charged with getting Microsoft's breakthroughs into the marketplace faster. "I'd say we don't always do the innovative things we should do. We need to improve in that dimension."

That Flake can get away with talk like this is perhaps one of the biggest signs of change inside Microsoft. Historically, Gates & Co. have reacted with fury when their bona fides as innovators were questioned. Now Redmond seems to be facing up to the reality that its innovation machine is broken.

Beyond the Box

IT WAS LOTUS NOTES that made Ozzie's reputation – and got the attention of Microsoft chieftains. "Bill and Steve felt they should have done Notes – that it was their birthright," a former executive says. "The fact that Ray did it first earned him their undying respect."

Indeed, so far Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft's executive team have gone to great lengths to put Ozzie in a position to succeed in his new role. A year ago they streamlined Microsoft's corporate structure – compressing seven business units into three – and changed the way top executives in each division are compensated, in hopes of reducing cross-division friction. Historically, the company was organized to encourage each unit to pursue its own agenda, even at the expense of other divisions. Now executives must demonstrate a degree of company-wide cooperation to get a top bonus.

In May, Microsoft also changed its review process for rank-and-file employees, who increasingly felt that the system discouraged risk-taking. It used to be that you were graded on a curve within your group: For every top performer there had to be a subpar one. That worked fine when the company was smaller. But as Microsoft grew, the policy encouraged sloth. Why chance moving to a group of superstar engineers, people reasoned, if it meant you might go from above average status to below average? Now each employee is graded based on individual goals, regardless of how others do. These goals are reset as often as every other month to encourage engineers to ship lots of little software modules and revise them online rather than spend an entire year on one huge release.

Gates and Ballmer have shown that they will do what it takes to retain valued employees, especially those courted by Google. Microsoft's lawsuit against search expert Kai-Fu Lee last year for violating his noncompete agreement when he jumped to Google may have made Gates seem desperate at the time, but it also sent a message to potential defectors. When Google recently poached top marketing exec Vic Gundotra from Microsoft, he agreed to honor his contract and not work for a year rather than get sued. The company has also improved the food in its cafeterias, offered more concierge services like grocery delivery, and, most important, tripled the number of stock options an employee can receive as an annual bonus. One engineer says that when Google tried to hire away a friend of his in his twenties, Microsoft offered the man $250,000 in stock to stay with Redmond. He still left, but the story is an indication of how hard Microsoft is fighting back.

Top management has also pushed to make pay scales and communications in general more transparent. In the Office division, for example, compensation is now directly linked to title so employees know roughly where every colleague stands in the ecosystem.

Gates himself is trying to be more open. This year he made available to the whole company electronic copies of the papers he takes on his annual Think Week vacation. In the past, what Gates perused during his celebrated week of rumination was a closely held secret.

WILL ANY OF THIS pull Microsoft out of its funk, help it compete better with Google, or return it to a position of dominance?

There certainly are reasons to believe it's possible. Everyone in the world of high tech understands that Microsoft is at its toughest when cornered. And so the Ray Ozzie Show should be – and is – getting Silicon Valley's attention. Google may turn heads when it comes to replacing the desktop as a computing platform, says Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0 guru and founder of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media. "But if you look at how Microsoft is positioning Live, it's clear it understands this new world." In addition to rethinking its innovation process and speeding up product cycles, the company is planning to spend $2 billion more than usual next year. It hasn't explained why, but most observers believe the money is earmarked to expand its Web services and build server farms all over the world to support its new online infrastructure. No other company can bring that much financial muscle to bear so quickly.

And say what you will about incursions by competitors like Apple, Google, and Linux – Microsoft applications still claim more "eyeball time" from more people than any other high tech products in the world. Even now, after all the buzz about Google's panoply of software products, if Microsoft can match it feature for feature – say, with a good desktop search and photo management program in Vista – Redmond could, despite years of false starts, start catching up to the search giant.

But the odds are long, and history is against it. Yes, Microsoft is a unique company, but established corporations with 70,000 employees almost without exception have a hard time learning new tricks. Microsoft has done better than most, with Windows, then Office, and now its server business. But it also has been struggling to become more Internet-centric since it launched MSN more than a decade ago. And with the obvious exception of Internet Explorer, it has had decidedly mixed results. Ten years ago, the world was convinced that Microsoft would use MSN to control the Internet the same way it controlled the desktop: extracting tolls, blocking competitors, regulating which sites surfers could access. Back then, the world worried that Microsoft would take command of the entertainment business by using its cash reserves to buy the best programs and music and using its software in our cable set-top boxes to dictate what we watched. None of those fears came to pass. Instead, Microsoft has been outmaneuvered by faster, hipper competitors, from Apple and Google to Flickr and YouTube.

Ozzie believes things will be different now, thanks to what's come to be known as the cheap revolution. Because broadband, processing power, and storage are so inexpensive and ubiquitous, he says, the high tech landscape is more receptive to the seeds Microsoft is planting than at any other time in history. He also says the time is ripe because there's a business model to support a new generation of online applications – advertising – that previously didn't exist. Every Web-based startup may share these opportunities, he admits, but Microsoft has the wherewithal to capitalize on them on a massive scale.

He'd better be right. In 1995, Bill Gates foresaw the Internet tidal wave and pushed his company to adapt. At the time, that seemed prophetic. Today, Ray Ozzie is pushing the same thing, but this time it's about survival.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/microsoft.html





REVIEW

Writely Mostly Hits The Mark
Jessica Mintz

As a reporter, I'm never sure when the muse will strike or an editor will call. That's why I send copious notes and drafts of stories to myself by e-mail. As long as I'm within range of a computer with an Internet connection, I know I'll be able to tweak the latest version or do a quick fact check.

But as projects undergo revisions, my inboxes overflow and I start to feel the pain.

Then I started using Writely, a free word processor that runs in a Web browser, built by a startup called Upstartle and acquired by Google Inc. in March.

Writely is to Microsoft Word what Gmail is to Outlook: A speedy online program that retains familiar features of traditional desktop software and isn't afraid to introduce new ways of taking advantage of the Web. Unlike a boxed program, Writely runs on a server somewhere on the Internet.

But will Writely dethrone Microsoft Corp., which ships more than 90 percent of word processors used by U.S. consumers and businesses? Writely - even as a beta test - has the right stuff, but it needs some polishing.

It took less than a minute to register at http://www.writely.com and get a blank document open on my screen. As someone used to Word and OpenOffice Writer, a free desktop-based word processor, I felt comfortable playing around with formatting: familiar buttons across the top of the screen let me change fonts, indent paragraphs and cut and paste.

In fact, the first reminder I was working on the Web came when I hit save. It was done in a flash. Because it saves to a remote server, the process seemed eerily quiet without the grinding hard-drive noise I've become accustomed to. The program auto-saves often and warns me if I try to close an unsaved document. It also can save files to your desktop.

Speaking of saving: Writely stores documents without assigning any particular format. Users who want to download the document to their hard drives can save as HTML, rich text, Word, OpenOffice or Portable Document Format files.

If Writely stopped here, we'd have a solid, basic Web-based word processor. But Writely doesn't stop.

Instead of using folders, Writely offers a tagging system akin to Gmail's to keep files organized, along with a search box. When I sign in, I see an index of my files. I can assign tags, or short keywords, to my files, then use those tags to sort later.

This article, for instance, is tagged with the word "technology," and I can create an index that contains only my "technology" files, as opposed to "personal" files.

Tagging is a paradigm shift from the foldered universe of most computer desktops. But Microsoft's upcoming operating system, Vista, is said to employ some form of it, as does Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X.

Another issue Writely tries to tackle is collaboration. In the past, if five people needed to edit a report, some poor soul was stuck making sure changes were incorporated into one master document.

With Writely, documents can be shared by sending an e-mail invitation to any number of people. All can work on the same page simultaneously; Writely saves often and keeps track of revisions, highlighting changes and additions from different editors in bright colors. Cyberspace collisions are rare, unless two people are trying to change the same few words at once. When it did happen, I received a polite error message detailing the text it discarded to resolve the collision.

My editor and I did a lightweight test of the collaboration function while passing drafts of this story back and forth without any snags.

We were also intrigued by the idea that he could keep track of my writing by subscribing to a Really Simple Syndication feed of my article, but we couldn't get it to work. I chatted with Upstartle co-founder Sam Schillace and he fixed a bug in the system. But a week later, we still couldn't figure out how to get edits to show up in the editor's reader.

(Those who don't have access to the guy who built the software can post and discuss problems on a Writely discussion board or send an e-mail to tech support.)

Writely also includes two ways to make what I'm writing visible to the general public: blogging and publishing. The blog feature was straightforward, but the publish setting made me think twice. Every document I open in Writely gets assigned a URL - after all, I am typing into a Web page.

Making that URL public is a convenient way to share information, but anyone, including Web crawlers or other enterprising reporters, can find it.

There's a more fundamental concern: What happens when your Internet connection goes down?

I tested this by yanking the Ethernet cable out of my PC. I was able to keep typing, and I could copy the text in my Writely window and paste it into a regular Word document, but I couldn't save to the Writely server or download files stored there.

A few other things don't make sense to me.

Sometimes Writely opens a document in a new browser window, and sometimes inside the main window, even when I'm using tabbed browsing. And the program keeps past versions of my documents as "revisions," but it saves too many drafts for my taste, and it's unclear what criteria it uses. I'd rather determine what constitutes a revision.

With Google's backing, Writely has a jump on its competitors, which include AdventNet Inc.'s Zoho Writer and ThinkFree Corp.'s ThinkFree Write. (There are even rumors Microsoft will jump into the online word processor space.)

But as several substantial open-source alternatives have shown, it's tough to take market share from Microsoft Word. Even with the search leader's name attached, there's little danger Writely will crush Microsoft or its pricey boxed programs any time soon.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-05-16-41-26





How Did Newspapers Land in This Mess?
Richard Siklos

POOR FitzSimons — he’s got it coming at him from all directions,” Scott N. Flanders was telling me the other day. “There is zero amount of money that would have me trade places with him, not even for Eric Schmidt’s compensation package at Google.”

Mr. Flanders is chief executive of Freedom Communications, the nation’s 11th-largest newspaper company; its better-known properties include The Orange County Register in California.

He was referring to Dennis J. FitzSimons, chairman and chief executive of the Tribune Company, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and plenty of television and other newspaper properties.

The difference in their situations, in the simplest terms, is that Mr. FitzSimons presides over a public company with no controlling shareholder. Mr. Flanders runs a private company. In theory, both answer to demanding owners. But what has gone on lately at Tribune — particularly because it closely follows the rapid disappearance of Knight Ridder as the second-biggest newspaper chain — raises questions about the fraught relationship between Wall Street and the newspaper industry. It’s tempting to paint Wall Street as the bad guy in this, but the relatively brief history of the Street and the press is more complicated.

The distinction between public and private — and private equity for that matter — is relevant because Tribune has said that it has capitulated to the demands of its biggest shareholder, the Chandler family, amid a sagging stock price and worry over the growth potential of the businesses it owns.

In other words, Mr. FitzSimons announced on Sept. 21 that a committee of independent directors would explore all options for breaking up, selling or otherwise reshaping Tribune. It may even go private. Although Tribune has no majority shareholder, Mr. FitzSimons is now tacitly acknowledging that the company, as configured, no longer works.

The underlying theme in Tribune’s unraveling is that in a time of technological transition, the two publics that are served by many of the nation’s newspapers are no longer getting along so well. One is the public market — that is, Wall Street — which cares only about an attractive return on its investment. The other is the so-called public good that newspapers serve by professionally gathering and reporting news for their communities.

If there is a germ of a trend here, it is that, for now at least, being a widely held media company dependent on newspapers is probably no longer tenable. That said, a list of other newspaper companies that are publicly traded and have no controlling shareholders is awfully short. Indeed, the biggest one that leaps to mind is also the nation’s biggest newspaper company, Gannett.

The shares of Gannett, like those of many other newspaper companies, have been deflated more than 25 percent over the last three years. Gannett’s advantage over Tribune — or Knight Ridder, for that matter — is its relatively stronger profit margins. Across the industry, profits are actually better than the bad headlines suggest. But revenue growth is difficult to come by amid a bumpy transition to the Internet, where there are myriad rivals for the information and advertising that were once chiefly the purview of print newspapers.

Newspaper ownership in America exists under a wide range of structures. There are still plenty of private newspaper owners, from Cox Communications (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) to Mortimer B. Zuckerman (The Daily News in New York). A nonprofit group owns The St. Petersburg Times in Florida.

But many of the country’s best-known newspaper groups went public in the 1960’s and early 70’s, including Times-Mirror, which previously owned The Los Angeles Times; Media General, which owns The Tampa Tribune; Gannett, publisher of USA Today; The Washington Post Company; and The New York Times Company.

The Tribune Company joined the club in 1983, ending 136 years of private ownership. Like others, Tribune tapped into Wall Street to upgrade, diversify or expand. Wall Street gave Tribune the means to acquire Times-Mirror in 2000 — a move that both sides would probably take back if they could.

Another relatively recent convert to public ownership, class of 1988, is the McClatchy Corporation — publisher of The Sacramento Bee — which almost certainly would not have been able to swallow Knight Ridder and succeed it as the nation’s second-biggest daily publisher without access to public capital.

For many newspaper companies, going public was not just a way to finance growth but also a device for family members and other longtime shareholders to cash out and diversify their portfolios. Using a technique common across the media landscape — and recently emulated by Google in its I.P.O. — many of these businesses, including The New York Times Company, issued two classes of stock.

This was done to ensure that founding families maintained control over their businesses with multiple-voting shares even as their percentage of the company’s overall equity shrank. The rationale is that this would give the businesses stability and shelter them from unwelcome influences and intrusions on their public-service mission. One big question of the day is this: If stock prices keep falling, will family shareholders be compelled to cash out — the public trust notwithstanding? And is private ownership — either by rich individuals or by private-equity investors — the answer? A few wealthy Californians have put their hands up as potential buyers of The Los Angeles Times should the Tribune Company choose to sell it. One, Eli Broad, has even proposed that a coalition of nonprofit groups assume control of the paper, in the way the Poynter Institute owns The St. Petersburg Times.

Many people also talk about another alternative: private equity. Steven Rattner, a principal of the Quadrangle Group, a private-equity firm specializing in media companies, contends that firms like his are no less demanding of results then public shareholders are. And private ownership, he said, “is a mixed bag” — just look at the continuing upheaval at The Santa Barbara News-Press in California, where journalists have been at odds with the newspaper’s owner, Wendy P. McCaw.

“You substitute the demands and discipline of the public marketplace for one individual who may be wonderfully benevolent or may turn out to be pretty destructive,” Mr. Rattner told me.

I rang up Mr. Flanders at Freedom, hoping that he would put some gloss on the merits of running a family-controlled media company or one that is backed by private-equity money. Freedom happens to be both, having brought in private-equity partners a couple of years ago when some itchy family members opted to cash out.

Before taking over as Freedom’s chief this year, he was an outside board member and ran Columbia House, the music and video club business that was sold by its private-equity owners to Bertelsmann in 2005.

MR. FLANDERS was, not surprisingly, quite buoyant about private ownership. He noted, for example, that with business flat at The Orange County Register, his company opted not to revamp it but to start a breezy new tabloid called O.C. Report aimed at people who say they are too busy to read The Register. And he has some time to make it work. “We’re going to be $20 million in the hole before we’re even close to breaking even,” he said.

That said, Wall Street has served its purpose for the newspaper industry before, and it could again someday. After all, private-equity firms own assets for only a few years before they sell them and move on.

At Freedom, the plan is to generate enough profit over the next few years to buy out the private-equity backers at a premium — eventually restoring the business to family control. Failing that, it could all come full circle. Mr. Flanders also said going public is an option — though it is not currently being contemplated.

Who knows? The interests of the two publics may one day be aligned again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/bu.../01frenzy.html





Web Journals Threaten Peer-Review System
Alicia Chang

Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.

Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of Internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors' peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace.

The Web journals are threatening to turn on its head the traditional peer-review system that for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it's made public.

Next month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE, focusing on science and medicine. Like its sister publications, it will make research articles available for free online by charging authors to publish.

But unlike articles in other PLoS journals that undergo rigorous peer review, manuscripts in PLoS ONE are posted for the world to dissect after an editor gives them just a cursory look.

"If we publish a vast number of papers, some of which are mediocre and some of which are stellar, Nobel Prize-winning work - I will be happy," said Chris Surridge, the journal's managing editor.

It's too early to tell how useful this open airing will be. Some open peer-reviewed journals launched in the past year haven't been big draws. Still, there appears to be enough interest that even some mainstream journals like the prestigious British publication Nature are experimenting.

Democratizing the peer-review process raises sticky questions. Not all studies are useful and flooding the Web with essentially unfiltered research could create a deluge of junk science. There's also the potential for online abuse as rogue researchers could unfairly ridicule a rival's work.

Supporters point out that rushing research to the public could accelerate scientific discovery, while online critiques may help detect mistakes or fraud more quickly.

The open peer review movement stems from dissatisfaction with the status quo, which gives reviewers great power and can cause long publication delays. In traditional peer review, an editor sends a manuscript to two or three experts - referees who are unpaid and not publicly named, yet they hold tremendous sway.

Careers can be at stake. In the cutthroat world of research, publishing establishes a pedigree, which can help scientists gain tenure at a university or obtain lucrative federal grants.

Researchers whose work appear in traditional journals are often more highly regarded. That attitude appears to be slowly changing. In 2002, the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman created a buzz when he bypassed the peer-review system and posted a landmark paper to the online repository, arXiv. Perelman later won the Fields Medal this year for his contribution to the Poincare conjecture, one of mathematics' oldest and puzzling problems.

Editors of traditional, subscription-based journals say the peer-review system weeds out sloppy science. The traditional process isn't designed to detect fraud (referees rarely look at a researcher's raw data), and prestigious journals have unwittingly published bogus work. Last year, for example, Science retracted papers on embryonic stem cell research by a South Korean cloning scientist who admitted falsifying his results.

Work submitted to PLoS ONE, for instance, is debated after publication by colleagues who rate the research based on quality, originality and other factors. Commenters cannot alter the paper, which becomes part of the public record and is archived in databases. If there is disagreement, authors can respond to comments. To prevent abuse, the site is monitored for inflammatory language and the postings can't be anonymous.

"The fact that you get published in PLoS ONE isn't going to tell you whether it's a brilliant paper. What it's going to say is that this is something worth being in the scientific literature, but you need to look at it more closely," Surridge said.

Another open peer-reviewed journal, Philica, launched earlier this year takes a more radical approach.

Authors are responsible for uploading their research to the Web site at no cost and without any peer review. Comments are anonymous, but users whose identities have not been verified by site administrators are flagged with a question mark next to their comments. The journal, still in the trial stage, has published about 35 papers so far. About a third still needs to be critiqued.

Philica co-founder and University of Bath psychology professor Ian Walker said the system discourages authors from publishing fake studies because others can rat them out.

"Imagine if somebody puts up absolute garbage, you will have plenty of reviews that will say, 'This is terrible, terrible, terrible,'" he said.

Academics are eyeing the open peer-review experiment with interest.

Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician who heads the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center, is encouraged by the growing number of online journals. Whether they will work - he's not sure. Some researchers might only post unhelpful one-liners for fear of reprisal. Granting anonymity may boost participation, but could lead to "malicious postings from cracks," Odlyzko said.

Even some mainstream journals are toying with a tame form of open peer review. This summer, Nature allowed authors whose papers were selected for traditional peer review to have their manuscripts judged by the public at the same time. Editors weigh both sides when deciding whether to publish a paper, and rejected research can be submitted elsewhere.

Linda Miller, the journal's U.S. executive editor, said she was encouraged by the participation. More than 60 papers have been posted on Nature's site for open peer review as of mid-September including one that has been accepted for publication. Several others are on the path to being published.

Miller said Nature's experimentation with the Internet is just another way the journal is trying to reach out to the public. Two of its specialized journals on neuroscience and genetics already offer a blog-like forum for researchers to post their thoughts on published articles, though they have attracted little attention, she said.

"If we don't serve the community well, we will become irrelevant," she said.

---

On the Net:

http://www.nature.com

http://www.plosone.org

http://philica.com

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-01-22-45-13





A Reporter Who Scoops His Own Paper
David Carr

Few Washington events, save Congressional page scandals and cherry blossoms, arrive more reliably than a Bob Woodward book flap. Every other year, Mr. Woodward, arguably the pre-eminent journalist of the last three decades, will emerge from his headquarters in Georgetown with a book full of federal intrigue, gold-plated sources and the dark arts of Washington.

Within hours, various aggrieved parties will emerge to say that they were misquoted on the record and mischaracterized by those who were off, and talk shows will be preoccupied by Mr. Woodward’s latest offering. This time, the marketing bonanza preceded the publication date today of the book “State of Denial,” with The New York Times and The New York Daily News both obtaining copies last week.

Its exclusive blown, The Washington Post, the professional home for Mr. Woodward — albeit one he doesn’t visit very often — was left scrambling, as was the Bush administration. This was Mr. Woodward’s third book about the second Bush presidency. After two friendly tours — “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack” — he decided to set off a grenade deep inside the administration.

People do business with Mr. Woodward because when he is good, he is very, very good. But as an army of one, with a name that has its own purchase on the American consciousness, he can do as he pleases, writing his books, going on television, dropping into the newspaper when a story heats up.

Critics have already said that he missed the Bush story while standing in the middle of it. But his work is not so much beyond consequence as above it, held aloft by his spectacular career and a superseding contract with the reader that he will take them inside the parlor.

Blogs and podcasts may be the future, but for the time being the headlines are still coming from one of journalism’s big names, working in the fusty confines of a hardcover book. The leak was hardly a crisis for Mr. Woodward, who ended up getting an early bite of the apple. At The Washington Post, the experience of having lost the first crack at the work of its most renowned reporter — an excerpt finally appeared yesterday — is probably more sweet than bitter.

After all, having Mr. Woodward as a hood ornament on the enterprise, even one who husbands his most lustrous scoops for his books, has its compensations. Yesterday, Mr. Woodward was running out the door, but took a moment to say the relationship is highly mutual.

“The Washington Post is a great newspaper,” he said. “We have the best owners and the best editors. Being there helps me a lot, and while I focus on books, I do my best to help them in return.”

It is a marriage of very modern convenience, an exchange of brands that has little to do with a traditional employer-employee relationship. At a time when newspapers are hurting for attention, a paper will take it where it can get it. “It is an accommodation that The Post has made, and they seem to be happy with the arrangement,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. “The important thing is everybody is going in with their eyes open, but the fact still remains that under the arrangement, supremely newsworthy information assembled by one of its senior editors is not going into the paper.”

Mr. Woodward’s excerpt was not the only book by a Washington Post editor that made news yesterday. “Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell” by Karen DeYoung, an associate editor at The Post, was excerpted in the paper’s Sunday magazine. It revealed that in his final meeting with the president, the secretary of state warned of the dangers confronting the administration in Iraq.

And in August, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” a book by the Post’s Pentagon correspondent, Thomas E. Ricks, took the story beyond the newspaper as well. Much of the big news these days seems to be coming out in hardcover, a troubling development that signals that some part of the story is not making it into the daily paper. “It takes a long time to smoke these things out,” Mr. Woodward said. “You can’t do that on a daily basis.”

But the book as news vehicle also creates an issue of custody and management — both Mr. Ricks and Mr. Woodward have been rebuked by their executive editor for things they said on television while promoting their books.

Nor is The Washington Post the only one vexed by the issue. The New York Times ended up negotiating with its own reporter, James Risen, over reporting about domestic surveillance of phone calls that he used in his book, “State of War.”

No one understands the contemporary primacy of the individual brand more acutely than Mr. Woodward, who manages the arrival of his books with deftness and competitive ferocity. A fresh success might change the subject after his decision to hide the fact that he was one of the people who learned of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. agent early on, even as he criticized the prosecutor.

But to the public, he remains the B.M.O.C. of Washington, a reporter who took down one president and seems poised to maim another.

“What Americans see in Bob Woodward is a guy who hits for a higher batting average than anybody else in the business,” said Marc Fisher, a columnist at The Post.

The actual journalistic accomplishment in “State of Denial” is less than grand. It took him three books to arrive at a conclusion thousands of basement-bound bloggers suggested years ago: that the Bush administration is composed of people who like war, don’t seem to be very good at it and have been known to turn the guns on each other. Such an epiphany doesn’t seem to reflect a reporter who had rarefied access.

Given widespread appetites for public information on private matters, even the most afflicted policy wonks can’t resist reading how Colin became the odd man out or when exactly Donald started backstabbing Condi. It is not that far a walk from the throwdowns between Paris and Nicole, albeit with fewer fashion meltdowns and more policy papers. After many years of demystifying institutions like the Supreme Court and the Pentagon, Mr. Woodward has become a celebrity journalist who makes celebrities out of Beltway players.

“Woodward seems to know that the question of ‘What are they really like?’ resonates whether you are talking about Tom Cruise or Donald Rumsfeld,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia.

Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide and a Democratic strategist who has appeared in previous Woodward books and uses them in a class he teaches at Georgetown, said the books continued to preoccupy Washington because they had the virtue of being deeply reported, although the gossip couldn’t hurt.

“The fact is, a guy who has written about this administration in the most glowing terms imaginable is now of a very different view, but in that sense, that is a journey that most Americans have been on as well,” he said.

“State of Denial” is a bit like watching a replay of a marble rolling off the table. It could be argued that the last book he wrote about the administration should have been his first. Only the passage of time allows for the kind of consideration that takes the historical narrative beyond the status of a draft.

Mr. Woodward ended up breathing the same air and classified documents as his exalted sources, sharing, not exposing, the group think. (Meanwhile, Seymour M. Hersh, his journalistic contemporary and competitor, has spent time working disaffected generals and government lifers to what many consider more substantive investigative ends.)

“Some thought the books showed Bush as a strong leader because that was the evidence at the time; others drew contrary views,” Mr. Woodward said. “But it is silly to criticize a book for dealing with things that hadn’t happened yet. ‘Bush at War’ and ‘Plan of Attack’ essentially covered Sept. 11, 2001, to March 2003. The new book picks up from there.”

One of Mr. Woodward’s chief discoveries was that Donald H. Rumsfeld was not the asset that he first described him as. In “Bush at War” in 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld was described as “handsome, intense, well educated with an intellectual bend, witty with an infectious smile.” In “Plan of Attack” in 2004, he was a leader whose “way was clear, and he was precise about it.” In “State of Denial,” he is a turf-obsessed control freak whose “micromanaging was almost comic.”

Given Mr. Woodward’s tendency to fill his books with kitchen-sink detail, he maintained that the seeds of dysfunction were there to see in his previous two books. But Mr. Woodward’s time spent living in the treetops seems to have blinded him to the fact that the forest below was on fire.

“A book has a much longer arc than one day,” said David Rosenthal, executive vice president of Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher. “But it has been on sale for one day, it is already causing a ruckus, dominating the Sunday morning shows, and will determine the agenda for the weeks. It is interesting to me that in an age of blogs, Webs and texting that a book, something which is essentially a tortoise, very quaint in its own way, can carry the most immediacy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/bu...ia/02carr.html





New Media A Weapon in New World Of Politics
John F. Harris

At first glance, three uproars that buffeted American politics in recent weeks have little in common.

Former congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) ended his political career over sexually charged e-mails to former House pages. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) stumbled over his puzzling use of the word "macaca" and his clumsy response to revelations about his Jewish ancestry. Former president Bill Clinton had a televised temper fit when an interviewer challenged his terrorism record.

All three episodes, however, were in their own ways signs of the unruly new age in American politics. Each featured an arresting personal angle. Each originally percolated in the world of new media -- Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago -- before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers.

Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit.

In interviews, figures as diverse as Clinton, Vice President Cheney and White House strategist Karl Rove spoke about their experiences navigating the highly polarized and often downright toxic political and media environment that blossomed in the 1990s and reached full flower in recent years. Their comments, and those of their associates, underscore just how dramatically changes in media culture have influenced the strategies and daily routines of leading political figures.

Cheney said he often starts his day by listening to radio host Don Imus, whose trash-talking style has given him legions of fans and made his show a frequent stop of politicians. Cheney's wife, Lynne, people close to her say, is an avid consumer of Matt Drudge's online Drudge Report, which often either breaks or promotes stories with a salacious angle and in recent days has bannered every new disclosure in the Foley case.

Rove said he has benefited on occasion from the new-media echo chamber. When he gave a speech last year saying liberals want to give terrorists understanding and therapy, he delighted when Democrats howled in protest. This guaranteed that the story would stay alive for days. "I was sort of amused by it because it struck me, well, they're just simply repeating my argument, which was good," he said.

Clinton -- who regards Rove with a mixture of admiration and disdain as the most effective modern practitioner of polarizing politics -- said in an interview that he has become fixated on the problem of how Democrats can learn to fight more effectively against the kind of attack President Bush's top political aide leveled. Associates of the former president said he thinks that Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) in 2004 lost the presidency because they could not effectively respond to a modern media culture that places new emphasis on politicians' personalities and provides new incentives for personal attack.

While the Foley and Allen episodes burned Republicans, Clinton said in an interview earlier this year that he thinks the proliferation of media outlets, as well as the breakdown of old restraints in both media and politics, on balance has favored Republicans. Without mentioning Gore or Kerry by name, he complained that many Democrats have allowed themselves to become unnerved and even paralyzed in response.

"All of this is a head game, you know. . . . All great contests are head games," Clinton said. "Our candidates have to get to a point where they don't allow other people to define them as either people or as political leaders. Our people have got to be more psychologically prepared for it, and there has to be more distance between them and these withering attacks."

Associates said he regards this as his most important advice to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), if she runs for president in 2008.

In any generation, the disclosure of Foley's sexual overtures to teenage boys would have been a big story and ended his public career. But it was the confluence of new media trends and a trench-warfare mentality pervading national politics that turned the story into a round-the-clock furor.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), fighting for his career amid allegations that he did not respond properly when told of Foley's e-mails, has gone to conservative media outlets to make his case. On Rush Limbaugh's radio show, Hastert agreed when the host said the Foley story was driven by Democrats "in some sort of cooperation with some in the media" to suppress turnout of conservative voters before the Nov. 7 elections.

Limbaugh offered no evidence. But the same accusation was leveled in Hastert's interview with Hugh Hewitt, another prominent conservative radio host and blogger, who said the speaker is a "target right now of the left-wing media machine."

Those comments are a reminder that a changed media culture that creates new perils for politicians also provides new forms of refuge. For a full generation on the conservative side, and more recently among liberals, ideologues have created a menu of new media alternatives, including talk radio and Web sites. New media have also elevated flamboyant political entrepreneurs such as Ann Coulter on the right and Michael Moore on the left to prominent places in the political dialogue. New media platforms make criticism of traditional "mainstream media" part of their stock in trade.

This development usually ensures that any politician in trouble can count on some sympathetic forums to make his or her case. It often ensures that any controversy is marked by intense disagreement over the basic facts or relevance of the story, and obscured by clouds of accusation over the opposition's motives.

Clinton benefited from this phenomenon during his recent showdown with Fox News. Appearing on a network that many liberals regard as enemy terrain, he said interviewer Chris Wallace and his bosses were distorting his terrorism record to carry water for conservatives.

Kerry advisers think the most important factor in his loss was the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked his war record. The group initially received scant attention in old media outlets, but its accusations were fanned by the Drudge Report, Fox News and other new media platforms. By the end, the accusations dominated coverage in both old and new media.

Each time a similar episode occurs, it is often covered as an isolated and even eccentric event. But Clinton, in an earlier interview, said his party should understand that the ideological and financial incentives among politicians and media organizations mean that every election cycle will feature such episodes -- and it should plan accordingly.

But he said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies -- and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

"We're all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate," Clinton said. "Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

Few conservatives would make a similar miscalculation. Many of the first generation of new media platforms, including Limbaugh's show and Drudge's Web site, first flourished because of a conviction among conservatives that old media were unfair.

All this has given Republicans a comfort and skill at using new media to political advantage that most Democrats have not matched. At the Republican National Committee, leaking items to the Drudge Report is an official part of communications strategy.

During the 2004 campaign, current and former RNC staff members said, opposition research nuggets on Kerry were almost always leaked first to the Web site. Sometimes they were trivial -- such as the fact that Kerry got expensive haircuts at the Christophe salon -- other times they were controversial quotes from his days as a Vietnam War protester. All together, these and other items contributed to Kerry losing control of his public image.

Ken Mehlman, the RNC chairman and head of Bush's reelection campaign, said his operatives leaked to Drudge because it inevitably drove wider coverage, including to old media organizations: "He puts something up and they have to follow it."

Last year, a delegation of RNC officials flew to Miami Beach, where Drudge lives, for a dinner at the Forge steakhouse to introduce the Internet maven to Matt Rhodes, the party's new opposition research director.

One of those who salutes the changing landscape -- with as much passion as Clinton deplores it -- is Cheney, who said he considers the breakdown of what he called an old media "monopoly" as among the most favorable trends of his years in politics. He said the change requires politicians to grow a thicker skin. Once while shaving, he heard Imus referring to someone as "Pork Chop." Only after a few minutes did he realize the host "was talking about me. I'm Pork Chop. And I laughed like hell."

"Sometimes it's pretty trashy," he said of new media's rise. "But I guess I'd put the proposition that there's more time and opportunity for policy discussions and debate than there used to be."

The next several weeks -- in which Republicans will bear the heat of an intense media-driven scandal in the Foley case -- may test Cheney's faith in that proposition.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100501811.html





Al Qaeda Increasingly Reliant on Media
Hassan M. Fattah

AMMAN, Jordan — On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Omar received the call to jihad. Literally.

“There’s a present for you,” a voice on the other end of the phone said that morning, he recalled. It was a common code whenever his friends and colleagues wanted to share a new broadcast or communiqué from Al Qaeda over the Internet, he said.

Abu Omar, speaking on the condition that only his nickname be used, said he soon went to one of the Internet cafes he frequents in Amman and began distributing the latest video by Al Qaeda, alerting friends and occasionally adding commentary.

“We are the energy behind the path to jihad,” Abu Omar said proudly. “Just like the jihadis reached their target on Sept. 11, we will reach ours through the Internet.”

Abu Omar, 28, is part of an increasingly sophisticated network of contributors and discussion leaders helping to wage Al Qaeda’s battle for Muslim hearts and minds. A self-described Qaeda sympathizer who defends the Sept. 11 attacks and continues to find inspiration in Osama bin Laden’s call for jihad, Abu Omar is part of a growing army of young men who may not seek to take violent action, but who help spread jihadist philosophy, shape its message and hope to inspire others to their cause.

Though he does not appear to be directly connected to Al Qaeda, Abu Omar does seem to be on a direct e-mail list for groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda, making him a link in a chain that spreads the organization’s propaganda using code and special software to circumvent official scrutiny of their Internet activity.

As Al Qaeda gradually transforms itself from a terrorist organization carrying out its own attacks into an ideological umbrella that encourages local movements to take action, its increased reliance on various forms of media have made Web-savvy sympathizers like Abu Omar ever more important.

For example, this past Sept. 11, Abu Omar said, a link sent to a jihadist e-mail list took him to a general interest Islamic Web site, which led him to a password-protected Web site, then onto yet another site containing the latest release from Al Qaeda: a lecture by its No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri, threatening attacks on Israel and the Persian Gulf. Abu Omar said he then passed the video to friends and confidants, acting as a local distributor to other sympathizers.

In recent years, Al Qaeda has formed a special media production division called Al Sahab to produce videos about leaders like Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri, terrorism experts say. The group largely once relied on Arab television channels like Al Jazeera to broadcast its videos and taped messages.

Al Sahab, whose name means the cloud, has continued to draw on a video library featuring everything from taped suicide messages by the Sept. 11 hijackers to images of gun battles and bombings spearheaded by Al Qaeda and others, said Marwan Shehadeh, an expert on Islamist movements with the Vision Research Institute in Amman who has close ties to jihadists in Jordan and Syria.

But this year Al Sahab has released many more recordings than in previous years, said Chris Heffelfinger, a specialist in jihadi ideology at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, in what many analysts see as a new offensive focusing on the Muslim mainstream. Jihadi Web sites, meanwhile, have continued sprouting on the Internet, serving as a conduit for Al Qaeda’s propaganda.

Mr. Shehadeh describes Al Sahab as an informal group with video camcorders and laptops. Some news reports have described it as an organization with a mobile production unit that navigates the Pakistani provinces. “The jihadis have successfully used American technology to show the U.S. as a loser,” Mr. Shehadeh said. “This is an open-ended war, and they use media as part of their jihad against Western and Arab regimes.”

Just days before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Sahab released a barrage of videos, including images of Mr. bin Laden seated with some of the Sept. 11 suicide bombers; a documentary that some have described as a “making of Sept. 11” feature, with testaments by two of the bombers; and the lecture by Mr. Zawahri that Abu Omar said he received that morning.

What is most striking about the messages is their tone, terrorism analysts say. In the past, the group’s leaders were generally depicted as soldiers in battle, often filmed outdoors with weapons in the background. But the more recent communiqués show Al Qaeda’s leaders in the comfort of a living room or office, set against bookshelves with religious texts. The group has also taken to quoting Western authors and famous speeches, in what seems to be an effort to reach those with Western sensibilities.

“It’s a clear message: when there’s a gun in the background, they’re saying, ‘I’m a fighter like you’; when there are books in the background, it means, ‘I am a scholar and deserve authority,’ ” said Fares bin Hizam, a journalist who reports on militant groups for the Arab satellite news channel Al Arabiya. “It is a message that resonates well with an impressionable young man who is 17 or 18.”

One result, terrorism analysts say, is a militant group in transition, seeking to push ideology over direct action, franchising its name and principles to smaller groups acting more independently.

“Al Qaeda has been turning itself from an active organization into a propaganda organization,” said Mr. Heffelfinger. “They now appear to be focused on putting out disinformation and projecting the strength of the mujahedeen. They’re no longer the group that is organizing the mujahedeen. Instead, they are giving guidance to all the movements.”

Men like Abu Omar have become integral to that transformation. Mr. Shehadeh, who introduced Abu Omar to this reporter, says he has known Abu Omar ever since he was a teenager and has observed his gradual embrace of jihadist ideology. He says he has seen Abu Omar’s contributions on numerous chat boards and notes that while Abu Omar is probably not a Qaeda member, he regularly relays news and spreads the group’s message to friends and colleagues.

In Amman’s more conservative neighborhoods, Abu Omar and several analysts said, one or two jihadists tend to be the organizers, distributing messages and content to volunteers, and controlling membership in jihadist e-mail lists.

“We are typically observers, but when we see something on the Net, our job is to share it,” Abu Omar said. He no longer trusts news reports on television, he said. He even cast doubt on Al Jazeera, which typically broadcasts Al Qaeda’s videos but is, he said, still beholden to Arab governments. “We become like journalists ourselves.”

Abu Omar, who owns a computer store in one of Amman’s refugee camps, said he became involved in jihadi movements about six years ago, driven in part by his anger over the death of his father, who he said was a fighter with the Palestinian faction Fatah when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. “On the Net, you can see all the pictures of Palestine and the Muslim world being attacked, and then you see the planes crashing into one of the towers and you think, ‘I can understand it,’ ” he said.

He goes to an Internet cafe several times a week. In recent years, Jordan’s Internet cafes have begun taking increased security measures, like registering users’ identification cards, he said, but jihadists in Amman alternate among a network of sympathetic cafe owners who allow them to surf anonymously.

He never uses his own computer to search for jihadi content, and he limits his time online to about 30 minutes — not long enough for the authorities to locate him, he figures.

In 2005, Jordanian authorities arrested an 18-year-old man, Murad al-Assaydeh, accusing him of using the Internet to threaten attacks on intelligence officials. Abu Omar said several of his friends and comrades had been arrested by the General Information Department in Jordan in connection with Mr. Assaydeh’s case and in subsequent dragnets. Abu Omar said he was once called in for questioning but was released the same day.

He now changes his e-mail address frequently, he said, and he typically carries software that can delete details of his actions from a computer. “In the beginning, I thought maybe I would go for jihad in Iraq, but it was very difficult to get there,” he said. “Now I realize it’s better to work on the Net and get the message out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/world/30jordan.html





Teacher in Hiding After Attack on Islam Stirs Threats
Elaine Sciolino

A French high school philosophy teacher and author who carried out a scathing attack against the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in a newspaper commentary says he has gone into hiding under police protection after receiving a series of death threats, including one disseminated on an online radical Islamist forum.

The teacher, Robert Redeker, 52, wrote in the center-right daily Le Figaro 10 days ago that Muhammad was “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist,” and called the Koran “a book of incredible violence.”

The Redeker case is the latest manifestation in Europe of a mounting ideological battle that pits those who believe Islam and the Prophet Muhammad can be criticized in the name of free speech against those in the Muslim community who believe no criticism can be tolerated.

A recent speech by Pope Benedict XVI that seemed to link Islam and violence caused such an uproar in the Muslim world that the pope issued a rare expression of regret.

The pope expressed regret for the reaction to his remarks after Muslims demonstrated against him around the world. Just this week, a Berlin opera house decided to cancel performances of the Mozart opera “Idomeneo” because of security fears over a scene showing the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad. The decision prompted an outpouring of protest about what was seen as the surrender of artistic freedom.

In his commentary, Mr. Redeker compared Islam unfavorably to Christianity and Judaism, although he admitted that the history of the Catholic Church was “full of dark pages,” and he criticized the hostile reaction to the pope’s remarks.

“Jesus is a master of love; Muhammad is a master of hatred,” Mr. Redeker wrote, adding, “Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites forsake violence and remove its legitimacy, Islam is a religion that, in its very sacred text, as much as in some of its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred. Hatred and violence dwell in the very book that educates any Muslim, the Koran.”

Immediately afterward, Mr. Redeker, who teaches in a public high school near Toulouse and is the author of several books on philosophy, began to receive death threats by telephone, e-mail and through the online Islamist Web site known as Al Hesbah, a password-protected forum with ties to Al Qaeda. The forum published photos of him and what it said was his home address, directions to his home and his cellphone number, according to the SITE Institute, which tracks violent Islamist groups.

That day’s issue of Le Figaro was banned in Egypt and Tunisia. Mr. Redeker was denounced by a commentator on Al Jazeera television.

“I can’t work, I can’t come and go and am obliged to hide,” Mr. Redeker told Europe 1 radio in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location on Friday. “So in some way, the Islamists have succeeded in punishing me on the territory of the republic as if I were guilty of a crime of opinion.”

Mr. Redeker, who has kept in contact with news agencies by cellphone and e-mail, said that his wife and their children had also been threatened with death. He told Europe 1 that his wife was in hiding with him, but he was less clear about his three children, saying that one of them had been forced to move and that another was in a boarding school.

Asked to describe the sort of threats he had received, Mr. Redeker replied, “You will never feel secure on this earth. One billion, three hundred thousand Muslims are ready to kill you.”

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Friday called the threats “unacceptable,” adding: “We are in a democracy. Everyone has the right to express his views freely, while respecting others, of course.”

The Interior Ministry has confirmed that Mr. Redeker is under police surveillance, and that counterterrorism experts have begun a preliminary investigation into the threats, which the ministry has described as “dangerous.” Mr. Redeker complained in the radio interview that he had to arrange his own logistics and “find a place to sleep at night or live for a day or two.”

One of the threats came from a contributor to Al Hesbah, who wrote, “It is impossible that this day pass without the lions of France punishing him.”

The contributor called on his Muslim brethren in France to follow the lead of Muhammad Bouyeri, who murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh after he made a film denouncing the plight of abused Muslim women.

“May God send some lion to cut his head,” the contributor said of Mr. Redeker, whom he described as a “pig.”

Mr. Redeker’s situation echoes that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician who collaborated with Mr. van Gogh on the film and has been relentless in her criticism of some Islamic practices. The subject of numerous death threats from radical Islamists, she was put under the protection of bodyguards in the Netherlands in 2002, and currently has security protection in Washington, where she recently became a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

In the Figaro commentary, Mr. Redeker wrote, “Islam tries to dictate its rules to Europe: opening swimming pools at certain hours exclusively for women, forbidding the caricature of this religion, demanding a special diet for Muslim children in school cafeterias, fighting for wearing the veil in school, accusing free thinkers of Islamophobia.”

Mr. Redeker, who has written against Islam in the past, does not shy from controversy. At the time of the American-led invasion of Iraq, he criticized French pacifists, and he has written extensively about how watching sports competitions is worse than opium. His new book, “Depression and Philosophy,” is about to be published.

At first, Mr. Redeker did not speak out about the threats. In an e-mail message to The New York Times last Tuesday, he said it was not the right time to talk about his plight.

Then, in an interview with the local Toulouse newspaper, La Dépêche du Midi, published Thursday, Mr. Redeker described the death threats, adding, “What is happening to me corresponds fully to what I denounce in my writing: the West is under ideological surveillance by Islam.”

That interview set off a public defense of Mr. Redeker in the name of free speech and condemnations of those who threaten him, which snowballed Friday after his radio interview with Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, the president of Europe 1, who is the host of a popular interview show.

Philippe de Villiers, a far-right politician, wrote President Jacques Chirac a letter on Friday asking that Mr. Redeker be given “shelter — as a symbol — at the Élysée Palace, which is the palace of the republic, rather than let him wander,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Le Figaro, in an unusual front-page open letter on Friday signed by the editor and the publisher, said, “We condemn with the greatest conviction the grave attacks on freedom of thought and freedom of expression which this affair has provoked.”

On Thursday, Education Minister Gilles de Robien was less forceful. He expressed “solidarity” with Mr. Redeker, but cautioned that a “state employee must show prudence and moderation in all circumstances.”

But two large teachers’ unions in separate statements on Friday threw their support behind Mr. Redeker’s right to speak freely, though one of them made clear, “We do not share his convictions.”

Mr. Redeker said that he had no second thoughts about what he wrote. “No regrets,” he said in the radio interview. “I have given a lot of thought in writing this text.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/wo.../30france.html





Pirates of the Mediterranean
Robert Harris

Kintbury, England

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/opinion/30harris.html





Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
Eric Lipton

A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said.

It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.

“We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,” he said.

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.

“This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government,” Mr. Sitov said.

The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.

The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like “this spaghetti is good” and “this spaghetti is not very good — it’s excellent,” said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell.

Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive opinion than the first.

The articles in the database include work from many American newspapers and news wire services, including The Miami Herald and The New York Times, as well as foreign sources like Agence France-Presse and The Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan.

One article discusses how a rabid fox bit a grazing cow in Romania, hardly a threat to the United States. Another item, an editorial in response to Mr. Bush’s use in 2002 of “axis of evil” to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, said: “The U.S. is the first nation to have developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only nation ever to deploy such weapons.”

The approach, called natural language processing, has been under development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in a text or to create abridged versions of articles.

But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their system would include a confidence rating for each “opinion” that it evaluates and would allow an official to refer quickly to the actual text that the computer indicates contains an intense anti-American statement.

Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American policies or officials.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted 2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect terrorists by analyzing troves of information.

“That is really chilling,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “And it seems far afield from the mission of homeland security.”

Federal law prohibits the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies from building such a database on American citizens, and no effort would be made to do that, a spokesman for the department, Christopher Kelly, said. But there would be no such restrictions on using foreign news media, Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Kielman, the project coordinator, said questions on using the software were premature because the department was just now financing the basic research necessary to set up an operating system.

Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software.

“There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government,” Professor Wiebe said. “But it doesn’t mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/us/04monitor.html





Every Move You Make
Amy Joyce

If you think you're being watched, you probably are.

As more news creeps out about the complicated scheme Hewlett-Packard Co. used to spy on executives, board members and reporters to find out who was leaking information to the media, one might wonder: Is someone, right this very minute, watching my keystrokes? Or reading my e-mail? Doing background checks on me even after I'm hired? Noticing when I come and go based on my key card?

How about all of the above -- and more.

With today's technologies, more data and intellectual property is becoming available as employees willingly or accidentally share information as they e-mail, instant message, BlackBerry or just walk out of the office. And so companies are finding ways to track that incoming and outgoing data or to simply block it. Some have hired companies to track e-mail or Web site visits. Some companies keep data on employee movements thanks to electronic key cards. Others block Web sites they don't want employees visiting.

"Technology has provided a capability that we never had before to check up on employees like never before," said Manny Avramidis, senior vice president of global human resources at the American Management Association. "It's within an organization's right to monitor anything you do during work time using work tools."

According to a 2005 survey of 526 companies by the AMA and the ePolicy Institute, 76 percent of companies monitor employee Web site connections, and 36 percent of employers track content that employees are receiving and sending, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. And 55 percent of employers retain and review e-mail. All of that monitoring resulted in 26 percent of companies firing employees for misusing the Internet and 25 percent firing workers for misusing e-mail, the survey said.

Because employees understand their e-mail can be monitored, many will send information via IM, maybe with an attachment. Or they may simply use an Internet-based e-mail that bypasses the corporate server. But companies are catching on to that, as well, and hiring such companies as Websense Inc., which monitors employee Internet usage.

Websense has a tool that runs weekly risk reports that categorize Internet usage at a client by category, including adult content and bandwidth consumption. That way, companies can quickly glance at a report and see if anything (or anyone) stands out.

So if, say, one employee is going to Yahoo 10 or 15 times a day, Websense will detect that and report it back to the company client.

"Employers need tools to make monitoring Internet access easy," said Michele Shannon, senior director of product management at Websense. "If you have 1,000 or 2,000 employees sitting at a computer eight or nine hours a day, that could be impossible to track."

Websense surveys have found that more than 70 percent of companies use some kind of filtering tool to block access to specific Web sites. The market for companies like Websense is growing at about 17 percent a year, Shannon said.

Just this week, Websense took it one step further: It announced that it will soon have a tool that can block certain information from leaving the company. It can also block just some people from transmitting particular information. So if, for instance, the company is about to make an announcement it doesn't want the public to know yet, people in the public relations department may get access to send it out a day before anyone else. But if an unauthorized person, say the guy in IT, tries to send it out, he would be blocked from doing so. In addition, that public relations person could be blocked from sending the information via IM or a personal Internet e-mail account.

Marriott International Inc. has a system that blocks inappropriate Web sites, according to Stephanie Hampton, a spokeswoman. It also, like many major companies, has a corporate policy that says the Internet and e-mail should be used for business purposes only. "However, in today's complex world where we blend personal and corporate lives, it is acceptable to use e-mail and Internet for some personal use," she said.

Marriott also doesn't monitor company e-mail daily, she said, though it does have the ability to go back and look at e-mail. But, Hampton said, the company has never had a reason to do that.

But let's not take it too far, said Jamie Johnson, a partner in labor and employment law with Bryan Cave LLP. "Companies don't get any benefit out of intruding in to employees' privacy. And they generally do it when they perceive they have a very serious stake in there," he said.

Potential watching, however, doesn't just stop at employee Internet use.

Some employers are turning to extensive background checks. Companies like Taleo Corp. are hired by organizations not only to do a general background check on all new employees but also to regularly screen existing employees.

"More and more companies are doing this for all the obvious reasons," including an increase in workplace violence and embarrassing events such as RadioShack's discovery that its now-former chief executive lied on his résumé about his education, said Dave Michaud, Taleo's vice president of product marketing. The background checks are being used not only in hiring employees, but also after they are employed because a company needs to know if workers are committing crimes, he said.

Taleo, for example, recently screened 12,000 employees for a major hospital organization who hadn't gone through a Taleo pre-hire screening. It found that 198 current employees had pre-employment felonies and misdemeanors the company didn't know about and that 74 employees had post-hiring problems, including charges related to driving under the influence, prostitution, drugs, fraud and robbery.

Taleo's 620 customers include 31 of the Fortune 100 as well as small and mid-size companies.

Taleo had been a hiring and recruitment firm, but in March, after discovering that 94 percent of its clients were performing background checks on employees new and old, it began doing electronic background checks as well.

But there is another way to track employees.

You know how you barely need a key to enter an office anymore? That's right: Those electronic cards you use to get into work may also be used to track your movement.

In a study last year of six major companies by the Rand Corp., it was found that all of them stored data about who went where and when, thanks to their radio frequency identification tags. According to "9 to 5: Do You Know if Your Boss Knows Where You Are?" five of the six private-sector companies surveyed said the records collected were used to understand movements of an individual going in and out of the building and to describe the behavior of many individuals without identifying who they were. And in all cases, records were linked to other company databases -- mostly to personnel records.

Rand did not identify the companies but said each employs 1,500 or more workers.

Only one of the companies Rand studied had a written policy about how that information can be used, leaving the potential for abuse of the records wide open. And none of the companies told employees that data collected with the access cards "are used for more than simply controlling locks," the survey said.

"I think it wasn't collected with the intent of using it to snoop on employees," said Tora Bikson, one of the study's authors and a senior behavioral scientist. "But a byproduct of digital technologies is that they lay down traces. And somebody will have the 'Aha, we can use this to see who used this when that piece of intellectual property disappeared. Or to see if this person who claims to work 8 to 7 actually works here all day.' "

Taking it one step further, CityWatcher.com, a Cincinnati company that stores surveillance camera footage, implanted two of its employees and its chief executive with a microchip (on a voluntary basis) so they can enter a secure building that no one else can enter. Microchip implantation is becoming slightly more common in the United States and abroad. A handful of Americans have been implanted with microchips that provide access to their medical records. The Mexican government uses implants to give access to a select few to secure facilities. And clubs in Spain and Amsterdam have implants available for people who want to bypass the velvet rope lines.

So how far is too far?

"Employers should take advantage of their legal right to monitor employees' computer accounts," said Nancy Flynn, president of the ePolicy Institute. "But they want to follow best practices that spell out what the rules are. I have never in all my experience heard of a CEO that sits in corner office reading everyone's e-mail."

So we can all breathe a sigh of relief that our co-workers don't know of that fight we're having with the neighbors or those wild e-mailed recollections from last weekend. Right? Well, Flynn has another take, too: "I do hear of people in the IT department charged with the task of looking at employee e-mail either forwarding messages or in some way inappropriately responding to messages."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology





Tesco Moves Into Software Market

Tesco is to launch a range of budget own-brand PC software, in a move that will pitch the grocery giant against the likes of Microsoft and Symantec.

Tesco said it would offer six packages, including office software, security systems and a photo editing tool.

Britain's biggest retailer said each title would cost less than £20, challenging what it described as the current "high" price of PC software.

Tesco has been pushing aggressively into the market for non-food goods.

In August, the firm announced it was launching a new home shopping service for a range of 8,000 items including sofas, bikes, golf clubs and cameras - taking the supermarket into direct competition with retailers such as Argos.

Analysts expect Tesco to announce half-year profits later this week of more than £1bn.

More choice

Tesco said its own-brand software range, which will also include a CD/DVD burning tool, would be available in 100 of its stores from later in October.

The supermarket group said it had developed the range of titles with software firm Formjet.

"When it comes to software there is little choice and prices are high," said Tesco buyer Daniel Cook.

"Our new range of software changes this, bringing choice and value to the market that has offered little of either for too long."

Biggest player

UK's computer software market is currently worth about £8.5bn, according to Tesco.

The software and home shopping services are the latest in a growing list of non-food products offered by Tesco, which also includes finance and insurance packages and phone and broadband services.

Tesco's successful move into retail areas not previously associated with supermarkets has helped the firm hold on to its position as Britain's dominant retailer.

The latest data published last month by market retail analysts TNS Worldpanel showed that Tesco had a 31.4% share of the UK grocery market, followed by Asda with a 16.4% and Sainsbury's with 15.9%.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ss/5396488.stm





Google Buys Garage Where Empire Began
Michael Liedtke

Internet search leader Google Inc. has added a landmark to its rapidly expanding empire - the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago as they set out to change the world.

The Mountain View-based company bought the 1,900-square-foot home in nearby Menlo Park from one of its own employees, Susan Wojcicki, who had agreed to lease her garage for $1,700 per month because she wanted some help paying the mortgage.

Wojcicki, now Google's vice president of product management, didn't work for the company at the time and only knew the Stanford University graduate students because one of her friends had dated Brin.

During Google's five-month history there, the garage became like a second home for Page and Brin.

The entrepreneurs, then just 25, seemed to be always working on their search engine or soaking in the hot tub that still sits on the property. They also had a penchant for raiding Wojcicki's refrigerator - a habit that may have inspired Google to provide a smorgasbord of free food to the 8,000 employees on its payroll.

When Page and Brin first moved in the garage, Google had just been incorporated with a bankroll of $1 million raised from a handful of investors. Today, Google has about $10 billion in cash and a market value of $125 billion.

The company's astounding growth has imbued its birthplace with the same kind of mystique attached to other hallowed Silicon Valley spots like the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett-Packard Co. started in 1938 and the Los Altos garage where Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak first began to build Apple computers in the 1970s.

HP paid $1.7 million for 12-by-18-foot garage that co-founder William Hewlett first rented for $45 per month.

Google declined to reveal how much it paid for its original home, but similar houses in the same neighborhood have been selling in the $1.1 million to $1.3 million range. That's a small fraction of the $319 million that Google paid earlier this year for its current 1-million-square-foot headquarters located six miles to the south.

Although the Google garage isn't considered a historic site quite yet, it already has turned into a tourist attraction.

The busloads of people that show up to take pictures of the house and garage have become such an annoyance that Google asked The Associated Press not to publish the property's address, although it can easily be found on the Internet using the company's search engine.

Google may use the home as a guest house, but nothing definitive has been worked out. "We plan to preserve the property as a part of our living legacy," said Google spokesman Jon Murchinson.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-01-21-51-14





DVD Jon Fairplays Apple
Liz Gannes

DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it’s a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple’s devices. Instead of breaking the DRM (something he’s already done), Jon has replicated it, and wants to license the technology to companies that want their content (music, movies, whatever) to play on Apple devices. This may not be good news for iTunes the store, but it could make the iPod even more popular.

Jon Lech Johansen became famous for hacking encrypted DVDs so they would play in Linux when he was 15, making him the target of criminal charges for which he was eventually acquitted. Last year he moved from Norway to San Diego to work for Michael Robertson. But the work — a digital locker for music — didn’t captivate Johansen, so he struck out on his own at the beginning of the summer.

Twenty-two-year-old Johansen moved to San Francisco to work with Monique Farantzos, who had contacted him after reading a Wall Street Journal profile of him last fall. The two now live in the Mission District and devote their time to DoubleTwist Ventures, which is Johansen’s first major attempt at commercializing his hacking. They haven’t raised any outside money because they have already found at least one (undisclosed) paying customer.

Johansen isn’t much of a swashbuckler; he barely touched his Heineken when we were out at drinks last week. But he has a lot of chutzpah, and related the story of how he emailed Steve Jobs and set up a lunch meeting in January.

Johansen and Farantzos went down to Cupertino for an audience with King Jobs, but weren’t terribly specific about their new company’s plans (to be fair, at this point, they didn’t quite know what their plans were). Jobs apparently warned that while Apple was not a litigious company, other tech firms might not take kindly to whatever DVD Jon might be up to. Ha!

Johansen doesn’t think what he’s doing is illegal; he’s adding DRM rather than breaking it. He and Farantzos were giddy about the prospect of Apple’s iTV, hoping companies will pay up to get movies on the set-top box when it comes out, after seeing the ill effects of being shut off the iPod. Spurned by Apple? Step right up.

This is a different twist on the constant battle between DRM crackers and builders (see, just last week, Microsoft’s lawsuit against a hacker for releasing an app that strips off its PlaysForSure DRM). If successful, DoubleTwist will eliminate Apple as a middleman to its own hardware. But in doing so, it just might help Apple sell more of that hardware. Apple enjoys fat margins on its devices, and perhaps should turn a blind eye, for now.

We won’t be crossing our fingers for Jobs to keep his non-litigious promise, though.
http://featured.gigaom.com/2006/10/0...irplays-apple/





Napster Launches Japanese Service
Hans Greimel

Internet music download company Napster launched a Japanese service Tuesday aimed at tapping the growing demand for music-to-go and catching up with Apple's iTunes in one of the world's biggest music markets.

The service was to go live online at 10 p.m. Tuesday, offering more than 1.5 million Japanese and foreign tunes.

"As the second-largest music market in the world, Japan presents a very large economic opportunity for Napster," Brad Duea, the company's president, said during a pre-launch news conference in Tokyo.

The Japanese service puts U.S.-based Napster Inc. in head-to-head competition with Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and its online music store iTunes, which opened in Japan last year and became an instant hit with the country's tech-savvy younger set.

Napster Japan hits the market six months behind schedule because Napster wanted to conduct further market research and firm up local alliance with Tower Records, which will tout Napster in its stores. But the company is betting that its unlimited download subscription service and plans for downloading onto mobile phones will help it make up lost ground.

Napster Japan is a joint-venture between Napster and Tower Records Japan, with Los Angeles-based Napster owning 31.5 percent and Tower Records Japan holding 53.5 percent. The remainder is held by an investment group.

Napster is offering three different download options. The basic plan carries a monthly price of 1,280 yen ($10.87; euro8.57) and allows unlimited downloads to as many as three personal computers.

The Napster to Go service costs 1,980 yen ($16.82) a month for unlimited downloads to three computers and three portable devices, such as MP3 players or mobile phones.

The third service is an a la carte service charging 150 yen ($1.27) per Western song and 200 yen ($1.70) for Japanese songs.

Between the basic and to-go plans, Napster Japan will go online with a total of 1.9 million songs, nearly double the 1 million songs offered by iTunes when it was launched in Japan in August 2005.

While only about 10 percent of the offerings will be by Japanese artists, Napster Japan Chief Executive Hiroyuki Fushitani said he expects the number Japanese songs to increase as Napster wins over fans.

ITunes now offers about 2 million songs in Japan but runs only on an a la carte service at 150 yen ($1.27) a song.

Napster Japan hopes to outmaneuver iTunes by offering the all-you-can-download monthly subscription service.

It is also banking on a partnership with NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest mobile phone company, under which DoCoMo will roll out new handsets that will be able to download and play Napster songs in a fashion similar to Apple's iPod.

Duea said the market for mobile phones that can download music is expected to explode in coming years, a trend that will have a big impact in a country like Japan where virtually every adult owns a mobile phone.

Napster's plunge into Japan adds to company's portfolio of services in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany.

"The success of the service demonstrates not only the international capabilities of our platform, but also the international appeal of the Napster brand," Duea said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-03-21-22-16





AOL to Get a Software Makeover
Anick Jesdanun

AOL is getting a software makeover, its first since deciding to make more of its services available for free in the chase for online advertising dollars.

With Wednesday's launch of OpenRide - the name reflecting AOL's shift away from its traditional closed-door approach of charging for services and features - the company is hoping to keep broadband multitaskers glued to its key free offerings through an all-in-one program.

Unlike traditional Web browsers in which users perform one task at a time, OpenRide splits the main window into four panes - for e-mail, instant messaging, video and general Web browsing. It also has a prominent search box up top - tied to AOL's search engine.

The panes automatically resize depending on what a user is doing at the moment, while giving users a glance of all the main tasks.

For example, when checking video or other media, a pane with a built-in media player takes up most of the space, but users still get smaller panes above and to the side showing new mail, instant messaging chats and small, thumbnail versions of Web pages they have open.

And unlike previous versions of AOL's all-in-one software, users won't have to sign in until they need to access a specific service like e-mail.

"You can get right to the content," said Joel Davidson, AOL's executive vice president for access products and technology. "You don't have to go through any wall."

The software can be downloaded at http://www.aol.com/openride for free.

Davidson said AOL is counting on drawing former AOL subscribers who have gone to rival services from Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. because they didn't want to pay monthly fees of as much as $26. He acknowledged OpenRide might not appeal to "high-end geeky Web users" accustomed to mixing and matching software.

David Card, a Jupiter Research senior analyst, said AOL may have a tough time explaining to most people why they would need an integrated experience.

"It demos well, but I'm not sure what the demand for that kind of thing would be," he said. "It will be interesting to see how they will market it."

Over the past two years, AOL has been making its news articles, music videos and other services available for free in an effort to drive traffic to ad-supported Web sites to offset declines in subscription revenues. The Time Warner Inc. unit accelerated that shift in August when it also gave away AOL.com e-mail accounts and software once reserved for paying customers.

The devotion of panes to instant messaging and video in the new software reflects those services' importance in AOL's new strategy. And the prominence of an AOL search box underscores the company's desire to have people search there rather than at Google.com, even though Google provides the basic search technology for AOL and owns 5 percent of AOL LLC.

Davidson said AOL wants to ultimately integrate OpenRide with rival services as well, but for now, that is limited to e-mail accounts using the POP3 protocol. Among the major Web-based services, only Google's Gmail offers that for free.

Maribel Lopez, industry analyst with Forrester Research, said AOL still could draw traffic to emerging features like video even as it concedes that loyal users of rival e-mail services are unlikely to switch.

"A recognition the world is not an all-AOL universe is a healthy recognition," she said.

OpenRide requires Microsoft's Windows XP operating system with Service Pack 2, although AOL is planning a version for the upcoming Windows Vista. It will also offer a Vista version of OpenRide's predecessor, AOL 9.0.

The new software shares little of its predecessor's code. It takes advantage of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player technology built into Windows, and an optional desktop search component helps users find files based on their contents rather than filename alone. The software also helps users keep track of their anti-virus and other security settings.

Roy Ben-Yoseph, director of AOL access product management, said OpenRide addresses complaints raised by researchers over bundling media players and other components without adequate disclosure. He said notice is improved, and most of those components already come with Windows, so OpenRide does not need to install them separately.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-04-08-05-54





Living the Promotional Life
Stuart Elliott

CAN an affable 30-year-old conceptual artist turned comedian sell cars to his generation by using nontraditional media like blogs and Webisodes?

That is the multimillion-dollar question Nissan North America is asking as an unconventional campaign gets under way to stimulate interest in the 2007 Nissan Sentra among a target audience of youthful urbanites. Six agencies are collaborating on the campaign, which takes the fanciful tack of asking the comedian, Marc Horowitz, to spend seven days in a Sentra to bring to life the theme: “The next generation Sentra. You could pretty much live in it.”

The results of Mr. Horowitz’s week this summer inside the car that Nissan gave him will be presented to consumers in their 20’s and 30’s mostly in the media forms they favor, which include MySpace, TiVo, video clips meant to be shared with friends and the video shorts known as Webisodes.

The shorts and a diarylike blog kept by Mr. Horowitz are posted on a dedicated Web site (nissanusa.com/7days) with features about the car. Nissan’s hope is to sell considerably more than the estimated 120,000 vehicles sold in 2005.

The Nissan campaign, with a budget estimated at $40 million to $50 million, is emblematic of the growing efforts by marketers to remake their media choices to reflect the changing behavior of younger consumers, a prized demographic group because they spend freely and are mostly still figuring out their brand preferences.

These days, the media plan must be as creative as the creative part of the campaign — if not more so.

“We’re looking at how people consume media, not how we think they should consume media,” said Jan Thompson, vice president for marketing at Nissan North America in Gardena, Calif., part of Nissan Motor of Japan. “We’re inviting them, not interrupting them.”

“This is the first time we’ve had a nonlinear content approach,” she added, referring to a departure from a reliance on television.

•

To be sure, Ms. Thompson said, “there is a trade-off” in concentrating ads in the new media because it can take more time and effort to reach the intended audience and more coordination is required to keep track of all the moving parts in such campaigns.

But “there’s better engagement than you can get with traditional, linear television,” she added, “and we can measure impressions, interaction rates and view-throughs” to determine whether the new media elements are working.

Although the campaign includes old school media like TV, print and outdoor ads, the difference, Ms. Thompson said, is that “traditional is not the core of the campaign, it’s part of the campaign.”

The Nissan media agency, OMD, part of the Omnicom Group, is overseeing the media aspects of the campaign, working with sibling shops like TBWA/Chiat/Day, the Nissan creative agency. Also involved are agencies not owned by Omnicom, which include Edelman, for public relations, and the Vidal Partnership, for ads aimed at Hispanic consumers.

Another role the new media play in a campaign like this is to burnish the image of the product being advertised, by casting a hipper, contemporary halo over the brand.

“The Sentra had become a deal car, and it had to go from deal car to desired car,” said Rob Schwartz, executive creative director for Nissan at the Playa del Rey, Calif., office of TBWA/Chiat/Day.

Constantly making deals on Sentra meant that Nissan could not “get the ideal person driving the car,” Mr. Schwartz said, “the urbane, more youthful target.”

Rather, “you get a 49-year-old suburban woman smoking brown More cigarettes,” he added.

The campaign is intended to appeal to younger consumers “who live what we call the morning-to-morning lifestyle,” Mr. Schwartz said. They “get up, go to the gym, go to work, go out, and your car becomes your paradise.”

“That gave birth to the idea, ‘Hey, what if we had the guy live his life in this car?’ ” he added.

The guy is Mr. Horowitz, described by Mr. Schwartz as “a true product of our age,” who, in his off hours, “is a creator of content, including a blog, video and T-shirts,” and displayed the “curiosity and skepticism” common to his generation.

“He said, ‘I don’t know if I want to sell out,’ and we said: ‘Dude, this isn’t selling out. It’s a product demonstration,’ ” Mr. Schwartz recalled, adding that the agency found Mr. Horowitz in a casting book.

Mr. Horowitz’s résumé includes a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Indiana University, photography and video shows in San Francisco and performance-art projects like taking strangers to dinner and picking up the check.

Mr. Horowitz, who now lives in Los Angeles, said he drove to his audition in a 1990 Volvo that was “old beyond its years, a beater with 275,000 miles on it.”

“After they gave me the job,” he added, laughing, “they told me much later” that his role would involve spending a week in a Sentra.

•Nissan is, of course, not alone among automakers in turning to the new media to market cars and trucks. For instance, the Ford Motor Company is sponsoring a vlog, or video blog, to be created by Amanda Congdon, formerly of the popular rocketboom.com Web site, as she drives across the country in a hybrid Escape sport utility.

Mr. Horowitz said he had completed most of his work on the campaign; he wrote the blog entries and made the Webisodes over the summer. He may discuss the campaign on his personal blog (ineedtostopsoon.com), which he said he had been writing since 2001, and he will make personal appearances on behalf of the campaign this month.

“You’ll be able to see me driving around L.A.,” Mr. Horowitz said. “I still have the car.”

Asked what he would do if drivers began pointing at him at traffic lights, Mr. Horowitz replied: “God, I hope not. I’ll just make myself blend in. I might cover the car so it looks like a gigantic piece of bacon.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/bu...ref=technology





Radio’s ‘Dream Doctor’ in a Nightmare Illness
Eric A. Taub

The listeners were concerned. Was it possible that Charles McPhee, the syndicated radio personality, was broadcasting his show while drunk?

No, but the answer turned out to be even more devastating — Mr. McPhee is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease.

A Princeton-educated 44-year-old with movie-star good looks, Mr. McPhee had made a name for himself with a radio show that helps listeners interpret the meaning and importance of their dreams. The program, “The Dream Doctor Show,” is heard in New York on WCBS-AM, as well as on stations in Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and 22 other markets.

After his initial diagnosis in June, Mr. McPhee and his syndicator, George Oliva, president of Springhill Syndication, thought they might be able to keep the show going by using artificial voice technology. But they finally decided it would not work for them. So, Mr. McPhee’s last show will be broadcast later this month.

“I do feel the burden of what is in my head, and getting it out to the population at large,” Mr. McPhee said in an interview. Mr. McPhee, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles, first noticed a problem in May, when his voice began to falter. “Initially, I had hoarseness,” he recalled. “I had to project with more exertion. I’d be navigating a phrase and all of a sudden I’d slur.” He also noticed that during arguments with his wife, he would lose muscle tone in his face.

“We could tell he sounded tired and did not have a strong voice,” said Patrick Fant, market manager for Cumulus Media in Houston, owner of KFNC-FM, one of the show’s affiliates. “His presentation was suffering and no one knew why.”

A month later, Mr. McPhee received the diagnosis. Like the other 5,000 Americans who get the disease each year, Mr. McPhee will eventually lose his ability to speak, move his arms or legs, and even breathe without a respirator. There is no cure, and most patients die within a few years of the onset of the illness.

Throughout the illness, the mind remains alert, completely aware of the breakdown of the body that encases it. Communication with others soon becomes compromised, and eventually impossible.

Mr. McPhee and Mr. Oliva discussed the possibility of using artificial voice technology. If Mr. McPhee could type a sentence, and a computer could speak it in his own voice, listeners might not realize that they weren’t listening to the real thing.

“If they are doing this in the movies, someone must be doing it in real life,” Mr. Oliva said.

AT&T’s Natural Voices technology, a commercial product used in voice-mail systems and other markets, impressed Mr. Oliva with its natural sound. But the company that sells AT&T’s product needed $300,000 to customize the voice to sound like Mr. McPhee’s.

Instead, the two turned to Dr. Tim Bunnell, head of the Speech Research Lab at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del, for help. Dr. Bunnell’s free software, ModelTalker, (available for Windows and soon to be available for Macintosh) also allows users to customize text-to-speech software with the user’s own voice.

Dr. Bunnell developed the software to help children with diseases like cerebral palsy communicate more easily. To make the voices sound as natural as possible, users need to record many hours of their own speech. Dr. Bunnell acknowledges that his solution does not sound as natural as AT&T’s. “We have 45 minutes of speech in our bank; AT&T has six hours,” he said.

In August, while his voice still sounded fairly normal, Mr. McPhee was instructed to record 1,650 words and phrases, some nonsensical, as well as phrases that he might need to use regularly like, “I need an aspirator.”

In the end, the results were disappointing. While the voice is reminiscent of Mr. McPhee’s, it sounds robotic and zombielike.

“I was not convinced that Charles could use this,” Dr. Bunnell said. “To make the voice more realistic would require at least six hours of recorded speech. We did not want to ask Charles to spend 20 hours in a recording studio to get that material.”

Even if Mr. McPhee had found a technological solution that would work and allow him to continue his call-in radio show, he would still be faced with the inevitable fact that his ability to type quickly enough to produce sentences would soon falter. He toyed with the idea of changing the show’s format and using an associate to do most of the on-air talking, but decided against it, concerned that the intimacy of the program format would suffer.

Facing the inevitable, Mr. McPhee and Mr. Oliva decided to cancel the show. Most radio programs that are canceled disappear abruptly. But Mr. McPhee wanted his listeners to understand his circumstances. On Aug. 3, he revealed his diagnosis on the air; on Aug. 25, he discussed his future plans with his listeners. Now running selected programs from the past, “The Dream Doctor” will end its radio life on Oct. 21.

Mr. McPhee has noticed a change in his own dreams. In one, he dreamed that he was blind; his eyes had slits like those of a cat.

“I understood that I had been blind to the quickness and severity of A.L.S.,” he said. “The clock really is ticking; I need to plan.”

In the short term, Mr. McPhee is carrying on the show’s legacy by conducting live lectures with the help of a colleague, with the first two scheduled next month in Ventura, Calif., and Minneapolis.

The author of several books on dreams (and nephew of the writer John McPhee), Mr. McPhee has four more dream books that he hopes to complete. Mr. Oliva is pitching a dream-interpretation segment to the producers of a satellite radio show.

Extensive acupuncture treatments have improved Mr. McPhee’s muscle strength. He plays the guitar again, and has no difficulty swallowing.

Still, Mr. McPhee is not sanguine about the future, given the inevitable and often rapid progression of his disease. He now speaks haltingly and less clearly. He wonders how his 17-month-old daughter will fare after he dies.

“My big goal in life was to learn and understand the language of dreams. I really feel like I’ve done it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/health/02radio.html





$100 Laptop May be at Security Forefront
Brian Bergstein

The $100 laptops planned for children around the world might turn out to be as revolutionary for their security measures as for their low-cost economics.

The One Laptop Per Child project, a nonprofit begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to improve education by giving children bright-colored, hand-cranked, wireless-enabled portable computers. Governments are to buy the laptops - beginning in 2007 with up to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina - and hand them to kids for them to own.

The machines have garnered the most attention - and some skepticism - for the design elements helping to keep their price low. Among other things, the computers will employ the free Linux operating system, flash memory instead of a hard drive and a microprocessor that is slow by today's standards but requires minimal power.

But programmers also have been taking advantage of the start-from-scratch nature of the project to design security protocols that they hope will greatly surpass those found in mass-market computers today.

The designers are still testing their approach with outside security experts - which is widely considered wiser than keeping such matters secret. But already they believe the security setup could make it unnecessary for the laptops to have anti-virus software.

Standard computer design generally lets most any program access any file stored anywhere on the machine. That is one reason why flaws in programs can be exploited by outsiders to steal or erase private information.

By contrast, the $100 laptops will force any application to run in "a walled garden" and limit the files it can access, said Ivan Krstic, a software architect at One Laptop Per Child focused on security.

Even if the security were to fail, Krstic believes a specialized encryption technology will prevent the BIOS - the software that runs a computer when it is initially turned on - from being overwritten. That means the PC could not be rendered unable to boot up.

"It's essentially unbelievably difficult to do anything to the machine that would cause permanent hardware failure," Krstic said.

Extensive security measures are necessary because so many of the machines are expected to be built, making them a large target for mischief.

One particularly thorny potential problem is that the laptops can communicate with one another in a "mesh" network, sharing data and programming code. A computing Web site reported this week that Krstic had described that setup to the ToorCon security conference as "very scary."

But he contended to The Associated Press that the comment was taken out of context.

"We have code-sharing in the machines, which is really scary if we were not paying attention to it," he said. "But we think we have solutions to all of these problems."

One of the principal organizers of ToorCon, George Spillman, said Krstic's presentation was "very well received" because the $100-laptop designers have thought a great deal about security but "they're not arrogant enough to believe they have everything locked down."

Spillman believes at least some of the measures Krstic described are likely to be successful, though he cautioned: "There's always going to be some kind of a hole somewhere."

Walter Bender, a co-founder of MIT's Media Lab who is overseeing software and content on the $100 laptops, said children should be able to tinker with the laptops and learn how they work. To that end, these security measures can be turned off by the PCs' owners.

To protect against that leading to disaster, the laptops will automatically back up their data up on a server whenever the machines get in wireless range of the children's school. If a child loses data, the files can be restored by bringing the laptop within wireless range of the server.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-06-19-54-51





Marine Base Seeks Missing Laptop
AP

A laptop computer loaded with personal information on 2,400 residents of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base has been lost, authorities said Friday.

The computer was reported missing Tuesday by Lincoln B.P. Management Inc., which helps manage base housing.

The company and Camp Pendleton are investigating. As of Friday, investigators had not found evidence that the data had been accessed, the base said in a statement.

Authorities would disclose what kind of information was on the computer.

Lincoln B.P. officials were notifying residents.

''We take this matter very seriously and are working closely with Lincoln Properties to find out what happened and to safeguard the personal information of our Marines, sailors and their families,'' said Col. James B. Seaton III, the base's commanding officer.

Camp Pendleton is the Marine Corps' largest West Coast expeditionary training facility, located north of San Diego.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...ng-Laptop.html





AT&T DSL: No More Contracts
Nate Anderson

In a move that's good for consumers everywhere, AT&T has refreshed its DSL pricing and removed the 12-month contracts that used to be standard in order to get the service. Ars has confirmed that it is indeed now possible to sign up for month-to-month DSL service from the telco, and that per-month pricing is the same for both month-to-month and contract accounts (though contracts can apparently get one month of service free). Even customers currently under contract may be able to switch to the new service (I was).

Here's how the prices break down:

• Basic (up to 768 Kbps downstream; up to 384 Kbps upstream) is available for $14.99 a month.
• Express (up to 1.5 Mbps downstream; up to 384 Kbps upstream) is available for $19.99 a month.
• Pro (up to 3.0 Mbps downstream; up to 512 Kbps upstream) is available for $24.99 a month.
• Elite (up to 6.0 Mbps downstream; up to 768 Kbps upstream) is available for $34.99 a month.

The "Basic" level of service is new for AT&T; it provides a cheap way for people to get 'Net access, though it's not designed to appeal to the Flickr-and-file-sharing crowd.

The new rate scheme is a change for the company, which previously offered $12.99 introductory pricing, but then bumped this up after the first year ended. Consumers could never be quite sure what the new rates was going to be—I receive different results from the Web, an AT&T mailing, and a telephone rep (hint: the telephone rep offered me the cheapest rate).

The new plan is simpler to understand and more consistent, but the big news is AT&T's decision to drop the contract requirement. Contracts, never popular with consumers, were accepted only as a necessary evil. AT&T's month-to-month plans make it easier to try the service out, a move clearly targeted at customers who might be tempted toward cable modems but are willing to give AT&T a shot, so long as they're not bound up in contracts and termination fees.

It's also to AT&T's advantage to attract DSL subscribers, since the company requires people to have AT&T's local phone service as well. While it is in fact possible to secure inexpensive "plain vanilla" service from the company, personal experience says that this is not always easy;in fact, one rep flatly denied that it even existed. AT&T would much rather upsell you a package of services that include caller ID and voicemail.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061004-7907.html





T-Mobile Lays Out Plan For New Spectrum
Bruce Meyerson

T-Mobile USA laid out the plan Friday for the $4.2 billion in wireless spectrum it won in a recent federal auction, saying it expects to spend nearly $2.7 billion on a network upgrade that can deliver mobile multimedia capabilities it hasn't been able to offer like its rivals.

The rollout of the next generation network is scheduled to start during the current quarter and be completed in 2009, with "most of the work" completed by 2008, T-Mobile and corporate parent Deutsche Telekom AG of Germany said in a statement.

Customers in some markets will be offered new services enabled by the network upgrade starting in mid-2007. The company did not detail the technologies or services it will be deploying, or where they'll be available first. T-Mobile's network is based on the globally dominant "GSM" wireless standard, and most such carriers offer advanced multimedia services using a wireless data technology called "UMTS."

The combined cost for the new airwave licenses and the network upgrade will be at the lower end of analyst expectations voiced before the spectrum auction, and do not lead to any change in the Deutsche Telekom's announced revenue and profit guidance for 2006 and 2007, the company said. The cost of the upgrade is expected to be offset in part by reduced investment in T-Mobile's existing network as the deployment of the new systems progress.

T-Mobile was the top spender in a Federal Communications Commission auction of new licenses to use the public airwaves for wireless services, accounting for nearly a third of the $13.9 billion raised when the bidding closed last month.

Other big bidders included Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, and a partnership between Sprint Nextel Corp. and major cable TV companies including Comcast Corp.

There was little surprise that T-Mobile emerged as the most aggressive bidder, as the company has been starved for the sort of spectrum capacity needed to deliver bandwidth-heavy services such as mobile Internet access and video downloads. That has put it at a competitive disadvantage against Verizon and other rivals that already offer more robust multimedia capabilities to consumer and business users.

The company said Friday the new licenses from the auction doubled its average capacity in the top 100 U.S. markets.

"The auction and the resulting acquisition of additional spectrum here in the USA is an important step forward for us. And not just for T-Mobile USA but for the Deutsche Telekom Group as a whole, which benefits from the growth of its U.S. business," Kai-Uwe Ricke, chief executive of Deutsche Telekom, said in the statement. "We are aiming to maximize revenue market share in the U.S. and make T-Mobile USA the largest single company within the Group."

T-Mobile USA, with 23.3 million subscribers, is the nation's fourth largest cell carrier.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-06-09-10-40





T-Mobile to Launch Mixed-Signal Phone
Bruce Meyerson

T-Mobile USA is set to launch by year's end a new breed of mobile phones that can pass live phone calls between cellular and Wi-Fi networks, a top executive told The Associated Press on Friday.

Robert Dotson, chief executive of the U.S. subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, declined to disclose the specific market where T-Mobile planned to introduce the technology, known as UMA or Unlicensed Mobile Access.

But he did say it would likely be "a city near and dear to our hearts," a likely reference to the company's home city of Seattle.

UMA is designed to hand off calls without interruption from a cell network to a Wi-Fi router, or vice versa. So if a user arrives home while talking on a cell phone and the handset detects a Wi-Fi broadband connection in the house, the call is automatically switched to the wireless Internet signal.

The only difference is that the call is then transmitted using VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, the technology used by Internet phone companies such as Vonage Holdings Corp.

T-Mobile has previously acknowledged it was testing UMA, which can help ease the burden on the limited call capacity of a cellular network while also providing users a stronger wireless signal when they're inside a building.

Dotson said the company will offer handsets comparably priced to cell phones but declined to say how much the service will cost.

UMA is a natural extension for the company's offerings, he said, because more than 10 percent of T-Mobile's subscribers do not have a traditional wired home phone.

"We believe we're in a place where we can take it to a full market trial," Dotson said.

For the service to succeed, the user experience "has got to be bulletproof," Dotson said. "If the battery life is not close to a cordless phone that exists in the home today, they're not going to use it. Even the call quality can't change. We're ensuring the setup and usage is totally seamless."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-06-18-09-27





14 Tbps over a Single Optical Fiber: Successful Demonstration of World's Largest Capacity

140 digital high-definition movies transmitted in one second
Press Release

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, President and CEO is Norio Wada) has successfully demonstrated the ultra-large capacity optical transmission of 14 Tera bits per second (Tera is one trillion) over a single 160 km long optical fiber. The value of 14 Tbps (111 Gbps x 140 ch) greatly exceeds the current record of about 10 Tbps and so claims the record of the world's largest transmission capacity.

This result was reported as a post deadline paper in the European conference on optical communication (ECOC) that was held in Cannes, France from September 24 to 28.

1. Background
The present core optical network is an optical transport network with about 1 Tbps capacity. Based on the wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) of signals with the channel capacity of 10 Gbps, it uses optical amplifiers with the bandwidth of about 4THz. The data traffic has been doubling every year due to the rapid spread of broadband access. We must lower the cost and raise the capacity of the core network while maintaining its reliability as the dominant communication infrastructure.

10 Tbps transmission over a single optical fiber has been achieved in the laboratory. However, it was necessary to use linear amplifiers that covered two or three amplification bands because of the limited range of existing amplifiers, and this multi-band configuration is not cost-effective. To increase the transmission capacity, we had to achieve two goals simultaneously: WDM transmission with high spectral efficiency and optical amplifiers with greatly enlarged bandwidth.

2. Outline of experiment
Our experiment used the carrier suppressed return-to-zero differential quadrature phase shift keying (CSRZ-DQPSK)*1 format and ultra-wide-bandwidth amplifiers. 70 wavelengths with 100-GHz spacing were modulated at 111 Gbps using the CSRZ-DQPSK format and then multiplexed and amplified in the bandwidth of 7 THz. In addition, each 111 Gbps signal was polarization-division-multiplexed so the number of channels was doubled to 140. This yielded the total capacity of 14 Tbps (Figure 1). 160-km transmission was successfully achieved by amplifying these signals in newly developed optical amplifiers.

NTT demonstrated in this experiment, for the first time, that it is possible to transmit 100 Gbps signal with forward error correction*2 bytes and management overhead bytes of the OTN*3 frame over long distances allowing the construction of large capacity optical networks that offer 10 Tbps or more.

3. Core technologies
(1) CSRZ-DQPSK modulation format and high-speed optoelectronic device technologies (Figure 2)
These technologies make it possible to generate dense WDM signals with bit rates of 100 Gbps and beyond per channel and transmit them over long distances. DQPSK is a phase modulation format with four phase states. Its benefits include its high spectral efficiency and excellent receiver sensitivity; both superior to those offered by the conventional binary intensity modulation (ON-OFF-keying) format. The combination of this format with pulse modulation (CSRZ), developed by NTT, enhances the sensitivity, and enables dense WDM long-distance transmission. To realize a CSRZ-DQPSK signals at 100 Gbps or above, we had to overcome the problems of the complicated configuration of the transmitter block and the difficulty of raising the modulation speed. The Mach-Zehnder interference type, lithium niobate (LN) modulator has been used as a binary intensity or phase modulator in high-speed transmitters, but there is a trade-off between driving voltage and bandwidth and it was considered to be virtually impossible to raise the operation speed to at least 100 Gbps.

To overcome these problems, NTT newly developed a hybrid integration technology that yields silica-based planar lightwave circuits and LN lightwave circuits*4. Both devices simplify the configuration and support the fast modulation speed of 111 Gbps.

While the conventional binary intensity modulation format uses a photodiode in the receiver, the DQPSK receiver needs a pair of balanced photodetectors, usually realized by integrating two high-speed photodiodes, making it difficult to achieve high-speed operation, high sensitivity, and uniform conversion efficiency, simultaneously. NTT improved the structure of the photodetector with the result that the new balanced receiver offers high-speed operation at over 50 GHz as well as high sensitivity.

InP ICs, which can be operated at over 50 GHz were used in multiplex and demultiplex circuits and the waveform shaping part to generate high-quality 111 Gbps DQPSK signals.

(2) Ultra-wide-band inline optical amplification technology (Figure 3)
It is necessary to expand the bandwidths of the optical amplifiers in order to amplify the 10 Tbps or more signal in one optical fiber. While most fibers have bandwidths in excess of 10 THz, conventional amplifiers have bandwidths of approximately 4 THz. This means that it was necessary to divide the channels into two bands (C and L band) or three bands (S, C, and L band) *5, amplify each band separately, and then remultiplex the bands.

NTT succeeded in extending the bandwidth of an L-band amplifier so that it was 1.75 (7 THz) larger than that of convention amplifiers. By improving the amplification medium and configuration of the amplifier, NTT was able to achieve a low noise characteristic,.

4. Future schedule
NTT aims to construct a 10 Tbps-class large capacity core optical network that excels in terms of its economy and quality; it will promote the realization of a long-distance transmission system that supports 100 Gbps high-speed channels.


Terminology
*1: CSRZ-DQPSK
Abbreviation of Carrier Suppressed Return to Zero Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying. Modulation format in which CSRZ pulse modulation is added to differential quadrature phase modulation; it is appropriate for high-density WDM long-distance transmission.

*2: Forward error correction code
Code to detect an error caused during transmission and to correct it in the receiver by adding redundant arithmetic data to the transmitted signal. The international standard ITU-T G.709 recommendation adopts the Reed-Solomon (255,239) code as an error correction code for high-quality transmission.

*3: OTN
Abbreviation of Optical Transport Network. The international standard for optical network using WDM system (ITU-T G.709 recommendation).

*4: Silica PLC
Planer lightwave circuit formed on fused silica that includes an optical waveguide. This technology can integrate complex passive optical devices into small areas and is used to realize multiplex and demuliplex devices for WDM systems, Mach-Zehnder type optical switches and so on.

*5: C band, L band and S band
Wavelength band classification for optical communication standardized in ITU-T. C (Common) band is from 1530 to 1565 nm, L (Long) band is from 1565 to 1625 nm, and S (Short) band is from 1460 to 1530 nm. The current practicable bandwidth in the L-band is 35 nm (about 4THz) centered on about 1590 nm.
http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news06e/0609/060929a.html





Micron Execs to Race Video-Equipped Cars
Christopher Smith

Top Micron Technology Inc. executives seeking to demonstrate their products' durability will race cars equipped with on-board digital video memory cards in a grueling 1,000 mile off-road race down Mexico's Baja Peninsula.

If the chipmaker is successful, it would be the first time there's been an entire continuous video recording of the SCORE Tecate Baja 1000, the legendary off-road race known as the "roughest run under the sun," race officials said.

"It's the next step to use technology to bring our sport to the masses," said Sal Fish, chief executive of SCORE, the Los Angeles-based sanctioning body of the Baja series.

The largest U.S. manufacturer of DRAM memory chips for personal computers, Micron has expanded its microchip product line to include image sensors such as those for video-enabled mobile phones.

Steve Appleton, Micron's chairman, chief executive and president, will drive one of the four Micron cars in the Nov. 15-18 race. All four will record the entire 1,052-mile race from Ensenada to La Paz on solid-state image sensors and a series of 8-gigabyte Lexar flash memory cards. Sensors on each car will record both a cockpit view and a forward-looking race course view. The video will be recorded for later viewing online.

Appleton, a professional stunt plane pilot and former motocross racer, said Micron officials originally considered equipping professional racers' vehicles, but later decided to drive the Porsche-powered Baja touring cars themselves.

Appleton said he's not worried about putting himself and his executive team behind the wheels of race cars pounding over rough, remote terrain for upwards of 20 hours.

"I don't know what could be worse than being in the memory business for risk-taking," he said. "If we were in some stable, monopolistic business, I'd probably get objections from my executive staff about doing this, but they're all dying to go."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-04-20-23-07





Singing the Praises of the Non-Nano
Wilson Rothman

When Max Roosevelt wanted to rebel, he got a Dell laptop and a SanDisk Sansa MP3 player. It was not a rebellion against his parents, who had been buying Dells for years. It was a rebellion against his peers, Mac-toting iPod addicts one and all.

“I just didn’t want to have the same MP3 player as everybody else, and felt that there had to be equivalent or better players out there,” Mr. Roosevelt, an 18-year-old native of Chappaqua, N.Y., said recently from his freshman dorm room at the University of Maryland. “It’s not that I don’t like it; I just don’t like the whole cult mentality towards Apple. I don’t like how everyone gravitates toward it immediately.”

While it may seem like he is the only one not buying Apple, the iPod’s domestic market share in flash-memory players actually amounted to 68 percent during the first eight months of the year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. In other words, nearly a third of the flash-memory MP3 players sold were made by someone else. SanDisk’s products accounted for 14 percent of sales, and the remainder of the pie was shared by Creative, Samsung, iRiver and a few others.

The iPod Nano may represent an irresistible combination of enticing design, futuristic technology and sledgehammer marketing, but does Mr. Roosevelt have a point? Are there other players that are more advanced or more fun to use? An examination of four non-Nanos suggests there are praises to be sung outside of Apple’s realm.

The four MP3 players all had features not found in a Nano, like larger screens, built-in FM receivers for radio listening, and microphones for instant dictation. Each can play videos, provided they are converted to an appropriate format using PC software. None of the players are compatible with Macs, the assumption being that there is no reason for them to try to compete on Apple’s home court.

Each player is compatible with online music subscription services like Rhapsody, Napster and the new Urge, though none are compatible with files downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store.

None of the players are as slender as the Nano, though they are all small enough to fit into the front pocket of your jeans (even a tight pair). Only two, the SanDisk Sansa e200 series and, soon, the Creative Zen V Plus, promise eight-gigabyte versions for around $250, like the Nano. The other two, the iRiver Clix and the Yepp YP-T9J from Samsung, will soon have capacities of four gigabytes. When using the same earphones and the same music, each one sounds as good as the next, and all sound about as good as the Nano.

At first, similarities were more apparent than differences, but that changed after some testing. Take, for instance, those built-in radio tuners. On each device, it was easy to find a particular station (in this case, WFUV-FM, 90.7, at Fordham University). But the Sansa generated too much static along with the music, especially when held in hand.

The Zen also generated annoying static. The Yepp and the Clix maintained nearly static-free clarity, no matter where they were or how much they were waved around. Setting WFUV as a preset station was easier on some, like the Sansa and the Yepp, a bit more of a challenge on the Clix, and nearly impossible on the Zen.

Radio troubles were only the start for the spunky little Zen. The smallest, and the only one of the four that comes in a variety of colors, it could earn the cute prize when powered down. But when it is on, it is the least user-friendly. Not only did it have the smallest, grainiest screen and a text menu system that was dull compared with the animated icon menus of the other three, it also reacted slowly to the push of buttons.

Each has a different type of navigation. None are exactly like the Nano’s clickwheel, though the Sansa’s revolving wheel comes closest. Grooves on the raised wheel’s side make it easy to scroll, but since the wheel is raised, it can be difficult to press one of the four buttons surrounding it.

The Zen is driven by a four-directional joystick for the thumb — nestled a little too far into its body to get a good grip. The Samsung uses an oldie-but-goodie: four directional buttons surrounded by a big center button. Its mystique of simplicity is spoiled a bit by four specialized buttons on the side, but over all it was the second-easiest interface.

The best design is from iRiver. The Clix is a re-release of iRiver’s U10, a chunky rectangular player with no directional buttons at all. Though there are four real buttons on the side of the device, you execute nearly every command by pressing on one of the four sides of its gently tilting face.

Photo viewing quickly indicates the quality of the screen — the Yepp had the best, pixel per pixel, although the Clix provided a nice enough view on a larger screen, which earned it extra points. The Sansa was not as bright and easy to look at, and the Zen was grainier and smaller than the competition.

Video playback was the real talent show. The Sansa, the Yepp and the Zen all come with software that lets you turn most types of digital video into files you can play on them. By taking one clip — a bootleg Internet video featuring Barney the purple dinosaur rapping the verses of Tupac Shakur — and converting it for each device, it was easy to gauge the differences.

The Zen’s screen is smaller and dimmer than the others. The Sansa and the Yepp have the same size screen, but the Yepp played the video brighter and more smoothly. (Smoother playback can be a result of better video-converting software.)

The Clix was a special case. It does not come with its own software, but relies on the Windows Media Player for loading and deleting songs, photos and compatible video files. What the Windows Media Player will not do is convert video files, and for that, iRiver America directs you to the Internet, to a freeware program.

The bad news is that the program is not heavy on user-friendly interface. The good news is that because it is not a licensed product, it can do things that iRiver might not officially condone, namely compressing DVD movies — even copy-protected ones — into a Clix-friendly format.

The Clix has the largest screen of the non-Nanos; it also has by far the thickest body. The resulting design may not be Apple-esque, but it offers some real power. Video playback looks wonderful, and iRiver reports that its battery, when playing video, will last up to five hours.

Though the Clix is the best of the bunch — it also includes seven animated Flash games and a demo for the Urge music service from MTV — it has mysteriously been a poor performer in sales. Among the four, it is the one that least resembles the Nano, and perhaps that is the explanation: do those who buy a non-Nano secretly want a Nano?

Max Roosevelt says no. Many people his age download or swap music, sometimes legally and oftentimes not; though he says he buys songs from the MSN Music service from Microsoft, stores like MSN and the Apple iTunes Music Store do not seem to be much of an incentive. For over a year, he used a Rio Carbon player and listened only to MP3 files that had no copy protection.

When the Carbon broke down, he learned that its manufacturer had left the business, unable to compete with Apple. Determined to steer clear of Apple, he bought his six-gigabyte Sansa last June.

“It may look a great deal like an iPod Nano, but it isn’t one,” he said, “which is all that I really cared about.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/te.../05basics.html





This Maker of Music Players Did Think Different
David Pogue

No matter what some people say, there was nothing grammatically wrong with Apple’s slogan, “Think different.” It wasn’t telling you how to think — it was telling you what to think about. Think “Think big,” “Think thin,” or (as a skier’s bumper sticker puts it) “Think snow.”

In any case, thinking different — or differently, if you insist — was a big part of the iPod’s success. Its rivals, however, never took that motto to heart. For four years, they’ve designed their pocket music players to be as much like the iPod as possible. “We’ll get rich,” electronics executives seemed to think. “We’ll sell a player that’s just like the iPod — except it’ll be ours.”

It didn’t work. All of the iPod’s competitors put together have made only a small dent in its dominance. When will it occur to someone to fight innovation with innovation — to think different?

Samsung’s new YP-K5 adopts just this strategy. It’s a music player, all right, of the Microsoft (Windows-only) persuasion. That is, it can’t play songs from Apple’s online iTunes Store, but it does play songs you buy from any of the PlaysForSure online stores like Rhapsody, Napster or Yahoo Music. (You can buy songs for $1 each from such stores, or rent as many songs as you like for a flat monthly fee of $15 or so; when you stop paying, you lose your entire collection.)

The K5 costs $210 for a model with 2 gigabytes of memory (about 500 songs’ worth) or $260 for a 4-gig model. That’s roughly $50 more each than the corresponding iPod Nano models. Is Samsung out of its mind?

No, because the K5 has a very big ace up its sleeve: built-in speakers.

Held in your hand, the K5 looks like a black triple-thick iPod Nano (3.8 by 1.8 by 0.7 inches). It turns out, though, that it’s that thick for a reason: what looks like a shiny black slab is actually two slabs, ingeniously connected by a sliding hinge. When you push against the edge, the halves slip apart; the previously concealed bottom half reveals a silver speaker grille. At this moment, the K5’s screen image rotates 90 degrees, so that the display is upright when you set the whole thing down on a desk or table.

In that position, it looks like a cross between a teeny tiny laptop and an itty bitty boom box.

Because that’s what it is right now: a boom box. Yank the headphone cord out, and now your music plays through these tiny speakers. The sound quality from the two one-inch speaker cones will not exactly make you think you’re sitting in Carnegie Hall. The bass, for example, wouldn’t shake the rafters of a dollhouse.

Even so, these are the best one-inch speakers you’ve ever heard — much better than, say, the music-playing cellphones that pass for audio equipment these days. There’s enough power to fill a room with background music, for example.

Now, you might wonder about this idea of adding speakers to an MP3 player. Isn’t the whole iPod concept based on having a private sound bubble, playing your own personal music collection?

But that’s just the point: the K5 does not, in fact, share the iPod concept. It becomes something very different, a machine that tweaks the definition of the MP3 player.

The more you live with the K5, the more convenient you find those speakers. They’re great when you want your friends to hear a favorite new song, of course. But it’s also nice to set the thing down while you and someone (or several someones) are working together: cleaning out the garage, cooking dinner or driving down the road. Most radically, you can even have a conversation as the music plays. (Try that with earbuds on!)

The menu system (Albums, Artists, Tracks and so on) and basic circular four-button will seem familiar to iPod fans. But on the K5, there are no physical buttons at all. The controls instead are blue, glowing, touch-sensitive patches on the otherwise glossy, glassy, perfectly flat front panel. Along with the main menu, with icons that visibly morph from one to the next as you scroll through them, these illuminated buttons give the K5 a very cool, futuristic vibe.

They do not, however, give it terrific ease of use. Since you can’t feel the buttons, you have to look at the thing whenever you want to use the controls. (I actually know a college student who can call up a particular song without ever looking at his iPod. He counts the tiny clicking sounds as he turns the scroll dial in his pocket.) The K5’s buttons can be temperamental, furthermore, and not especially quick to scroll through long lists.

It’s also annoying that the K5 takes 10 seconds to start up — and that turning it on involves pushing and holding a stiff slider switch on the side.

On the other hand, having speakers means that the K5 can also wake you up with music of your choice, which is something no other self-contained music player can do — unless, of course, you sleep with your earbuds on.

The alarm module is, like everything else on this player, a little tricky to navigate, thanks to those touchy nontactile controls. But it is flexible. You can set one alarm that goes off Monday through Friday, a different one for weekends, a third that goes off only once to remind you of your meeting, and so on.

There’s even a Snooze function. At the appointed time, the player turns itself on and starts belting out your favorite tune. (At the other end of your daily consciousness cycle, there’s even a Play Me to Sleep feature.)

To sweeten the pot, Samsung has also included an FM radio. It works only when the K5’s earbuds are plugged in, because the wire inside them doubles as the radio’s antenna. (You can still listen through the speakers, though, because opening the speakers always overrides the earbuds.)

Speaking of the earbuds: they’re really weird. The parts that enter your head are black and rubberized, and shaped like your ear canal. The idea is to completely plug your ear canal for better sound — and it works; this player can be cranked to deafening volume levels. But each earbud also sprouts a weird dime-size metallic circle that protrudes from your ears and may generate some comments from onlookers.

Note, too, that the included earbuds provide very rich, bassy sound — perhaps bassier than you like it. And the K5 has no graphic equalizer that might mitigate that effect.

The K5 can also slurp in photos from your PC and display them on its tiny 1.7-inch 128-by-160-pixel screen. They don’t look especially sharp, big or bright — in fact, the K5 offers no screen-brightness control at all — and there’s no crossfading or gentle panning effects; you can’t even specify the timing of the slides. At least it’s very easy to get a basic slide show playing with music.

The K5 has its share of annoyances. The volume level resets itself to halfway every time you open the speakers. The battery life is excellent when you listen through headphones — 30 hours — but you get only 6 hours from the speakers. You can’t create playlists on the K5; you have to use Windows Media Player or the similar program provided by Samsung.

Finally, the K5’s glossy, black, featureless surface becomes gunked up with fingerprints faster than you can say “Just like the iPod.”

It’s worth remembering, too, that the K5 shares a drawback with most of the other iPod wannabes: it doesn’t come with its own ecosystem. There aren’t Web sites upon Web sites filled with compatible car adapters, chargers, carrying cases, FM transmitters, microphones, stereo-system adapters, remote controls and so on. And as memory-based players go, this one’s bulky. In other words, it’s not for everyone.

On the other hand, the K5 does things no other pocket player does: impersonates a boom box or travel alarm clock. Clearly, its designers tried to create their own interpretation of the MP3 player. They’ve thought about different — and, in general, succeeded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/te...ref=technology





Study Says no Video Games on School Nights
Eric Bangeman

As parents of two children, the older of which is in the first grade, one of the decisions we've had to make is how much screen time—TV and computer—the kids get. A new study appearing in the October 2006 issue of Pediatrics suggests that any amount of video gaming and TV is too much, if it happens on a school night.

The results come from a survey of 4,500 midle-school students in New Hampshire and Vermont. Researchers asked the students to rate their own performance in school on a scale ranging from "below average" to "excellent," instead of looking directly at their grades or other metrics of academic performance. The study also took different parenting styles into account, but did not look at specific household rules covering homework, gaming, and watching TV.

Study coauthor Dr. Iman Sharif belives that using students' own self-ratings of academic performance provided data accurate enough to draw conclusions from. Although students routinely exaggerate their academic performance when asked, according to other studies, students of all stripes over-report, leading Dr. Sharif to conclude that self-reporting is a viable means of collecting data in this case.

According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV. "They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn't seem to correlate with doing worse in school," noted Dr. Sharif.

Currently, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children watch no more than two hours of "quality" programming per day. Kids under age two should not be allowed to watch TV at all, according to their recommendations. When it comes to video games, the Academy suggests that parents monitor video game playing in the same manner that they do TV watching.

This study is sure to spark discussions similar to the one my wife and I had upon reading the results. We currently allow our first-grader one hour of video gaming (e.g., Finding Nemo, Little Bill Thinks Big) or TV on school days, with a somewhat heavier dose of cartoons permitted on Saturday morning (hey, I could watch all the 'toons I wanted on Saturday mornings as a kid and I turned out all right... mostly).

As a gamer, I'm sometimes sympathetic to requests for "just a few more minutes" when it comes to a game like Finding Nemo or Clifford's Musical Memory Games. Besides, gaming can be good: some studies have shown that certain games have a significant educational value and stimulate learning.

When it comes to studies like this which show a link between X and Y, it is important to remember that correlation does not mean causation and in the case of this particular study, the use of self-reporting may have affected the results. There may also be additional factors contributing to students' self-estimimations which are not factored into the study

One thing is clear, however. With gaming and TV watching, the key is finding a balance. This new study suggests that it's better to err on the side of no gaming or TV on school nights.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7880.html





Web Donations Help Cash-Strapped Schools
Deanna Martin

Kindergarten teacher Carolyn Freeman gets $170 from her school for classroom supplies each year - a budget quickly drained by basic items like pencils and crayons for her students, more than 80 percent of whom come from low-income families. So when she wanted $300 for phonics materials, Freeman turned to the Internet, where a philanthropic Web site - DonorsChoose.org - is making teachers' wish lists a reality.

The DonorsChoose program has raised more than $8.2 million for school projects since 2000, when it was pioneered by teachers at a public high school in the Bronx borough of New York City. The program has expanded to seven states and four major cities. DonorsChoose officials hope to eventually offer the service to teachers in all states.

Linda Erlinger, executive director of DonorsChoose Chicago and DonorsChoose Indiana, said the program provides a creative outlet for donors who support education causes.

"People want to help schools, but they don't know how," she said. "They're not going to walk over to the neighborhood school and drop off a $100 check. DonorsChoose is a way they can do it at their desk at work or at home with their kids, picking out projects together."

The wish list is long and varied: a karate program in North Carolina, an incubation kit so students can watch chickens hatch in Los Angeles, a classroom Jeopardy game for students in Mississippi, film-making equipment for a Texas school and phonics materials and ballet barres in Indiana.

Supporters say the program is a boon to cash-strapped schools, especially those with high numbers of poor students.

The program also eases the burden on teachers, who often pay for classroom supplies themselves. A 2003 National Education Association survey found that teachers spent an average of $443 of their own money annually.

At Brookside Elementary School in Indianapolis, 95 percent of the students come from lower-income families. Fourth-grade teacher Lisa Wescott received balances and weights through DonorsChoose.

"I wouldn't be doing this science project without it," Wescott said. "The students get excited about the new stuff we get."

Many donors search for projects based on their areas of interest. Sports fans might shell out money to start an after-school running club, while history buffs can support trips to a local museum. Others, like Joe Power, look for projects at their former schools.

Power, who teaches special needs children in Crown Point, donated money for a video camera at his former high school in a poor area of Alabama.

"It made me feel good to be able to give back and know that it went directly to the school," said Power, who contributed less than $1,000.

Even small donations can help, said Suellen Reed, Indiana's superintendent for public instruction.

"There are a lot of people who can't give $500, but they might be able to give $25," Reed said. "Those add up to getting projects done."

In Indiana, 36 projects have been funded so far and a total of $44,000 has been donated.

Officials acknowledge the program isn't a cure-all.

"DonorsChoose doesn't pretend to fix the challenges facing schools," Erlinger said. "But I think it's underestimated how powerful a new set of calculators or a field trip to the children's museum is for children who haven't had that."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-06-03-34-02





Sticks and Friggin Stones

Courts Are Asked to Crack Down On Bloggers, Websites

Those attacked online are filing libel lawsuits
Laura Parker

Rafe Banks, a lawyer in Georgia, got involved in a nasty dispute with a client over how to defend him on a drunken-driving charge. The client, David Milum, fired Banks and demanded that the lawyer refund a $3,000 fee. Banks refused.

Milum eventually was acquitted. Ordinarily, that might have been the last Banks ever heard about his former client. But then Milum started a blog.

In May 2004, Banks was stunned to learn that Milum's blog was accusing the lawyer of bribing judges on behalf of drug dealers. At the end of one posting, Milum wrote, “Rafe, don't you wish you had given back my $3,000 retainer?”

Banks, saying the postings were false, sued Milum. And last January, Milum became the first blogger in the USA to lose a libel suit, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, which tracks litigation involving bloggers. Milum was ordered to pay Banks $50,000.

The case reflected how blogs — short for Web logs, the burgeoning, freewheeling Internet forums that give people the power to instantly disseminate messages worldwide — increasingly are being targeted by those who feel harmed by blog attacks. In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from postings on blogs and website message boards have been filed across the nation. The suits have spawned a debate over how the “blogosphere” and its revolutionary impact on speech and publishing might change libel law.

Legal analysts say the lawsuits are challenging a mind-set that has long surrounded blogging: that most bloggers essentially are “judgment-proof” because they — unlike traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television outlets — often are ordinary citizens who don't have a lot of money. Recent lawsuits by Banks and others who say they have had their reputations harmed or their privacy violated have been aimed not just at cash awards but also at silencing their critics.

“Bloggers didn't think they could be subject to libel,” says Eric Robinson, a Media Law Resource Center attorney. “You take what is on your mind, type it and post it.”

The legal battles over blogging and message board postings are unfolding on several fronts:

•In Washington, D.C., former U.S. Senate aide Jessica Cutler was sued for invasion of privacy by Robert Steinbuch, also a former Senate aide, after Cutler posted a blog in 2004 describing their sexual escapades. The blog, titled Washingtonienne, was viewed widely after it was cited by a Washington gossip website called Wonkette. In July, Steinbuch added Wonkette to the lawsuit.

•Todd Hollis, a criminal defense lawyer in Pittsburgh, has filed a libel suit against a website called DontDateHimGirl.com, which includes message boards in which women gossip about men they supposedly dated. One posting on the site accused Hollis of having herpes. Another said he had infected a woman he once dated with a sexually transmitted disease. Yet another said he was gay. Hollis, 38, who says the accusations are false, is suing the site's operator, Tasha Joseph, and the posters of the messages.

•Anna Draker, a high school assistant principal in San Antonio, filed a defamation and negligence lawsuit against two students and their parents after a hoax page bearing her name, photo and several lewd comments and graphics appeared on MySpace.com, the popular social networking website.

The suit alleges that the students — one of whom had been disciplined by Draker — created the page to get revenge, and that it was designed to “injure Ms. Draker's reputation, expose her to public hatred … and cause her harm.” The suit also alleges that the youths' parents were grossly negligent in supervising them.

•Ligonier Ministries, a religious broadcaster and publisher in Lake Mary, Fla., has taken the unusual step of asking a judge to pre-emptively silence a blogger to try to prevent him from criticizing the ministries. Judges historically have refused to place such limits on traditional publishers.

The lawsuit cites postings on a blog by Frank Vance that described Ligonier president Timothy Dick as “a shark” and as coming from a “family of nincompoops.” The suit says the entries are false and have damaged Dick's reputation.

Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, says the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should bone up on libel law. “It hasn't happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home,” he says. “That will be the shot heard round the blogosphere.”

At its best, the blogosphere represents the ultimate in free speech by giving voice to millions. It is the Internet's version of Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park, a global coffeehouse where ideas are debated and exchanged.

The blogosphere also is the Internet's Wild West, a rapidly expanding frontier town with no sheriff. It's a place where both truth and “truthiness” thrive, to use the satirical word coined by comedian Stephen Colbert as a jab at politicians for whom facts don't matter.

Nearly two blogs are created every second, according to Technorati, a San Francisco firm that tracks more than 53 million blogs. Besides forming online communities in which people share ideas, news and gossip and debate issues of the day, blogs empower character assassins and mischief makers.

Small disputes now can lead to huge embarrassment, thanks to websites such as bitterwaitress.com, which purports to identify restaurant patrons who leave miserly tips. DontDateHimGirl.com includes postings that have identified men as pedophiles, rapists and diseased, without verification the postings are true.

“People take advantage of the anonymity to say things in public they would never say to anyone face-to-face,” Cox says. “That's where you get these horrible comments. This is standard operating procedure.”

Even so, Cox thinks the chief danger in legal disputes over what's said on the Internet is the potential chilling effect it could have on free speech. Many lawsuits against bloggers, he says, are filed merely to silence critics. In those cases, he encourages bloggers to fight back.

Last April, Cox orchestrated an effective counterattack on behalf of a blogger in Maine who was sued by a New York ad agency for $1 million. Lance Dutson, a website designer, had been blogging for two years when he posted several essays accusing Maine's Department of Tourism of wasting taxpayers' money. Among other things, he posted a draft of a tourism ad that mistakenly had contained a toll-free number to a phone-sex line.

Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, which produced the tourism campaign, said in its suit that Dutson made defamatory statements “designed to blacken WKPA's reputation (and) expose WKPA to public contempt and ridicule.”

Dutson's criticisms paled to those directed at WKPA after word of the lawsuit spread through the blogosphere. Bloggers rushed to defend Dutson, and several lawyers volunteered to represent him. The media picked up the story and cast it as David vs. Goliath. Eight days after filing the suit, WKPA dropped it without comment.

“We're not here to play nice with somebody who is trying to suppress the speech of one of my members,” Cox says.

A key principle that courts use in determining whether someone has been libeled is what damage the offending article did to that person's reputation in his or her community.

Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York who specializes in media and Internet issues, says the ease with which false postings can be corrected instantly, among other things, will force judges to reconsider how to measure the damage that is done to a plaintiff's reputation.

“Libel law depends on having a reputation in a particular town that's damaged,” she says. “Do you have an online reputation? What's your community that hears about the damage to your online reputation? Who should be sued? The original poster? Or someone like the Wonkette, for making something really famous? The causes of action won't go away. But judges will be skeptical that a single, four-line (posting in a) blog has actually damaged anyone.”

Greg Herbert, an Orlando lawyer who represented Dutson, disagrees. The principles of libel law aren't going to change, he says. However, some judges “might not think a blogger is entitled to the same sort of free speech protection others are. A lot of judges still don't know what a blog is, and they think the Internet is a dark and nefarious place where all kinds of evil deeds occur.”

Judges have indicated that they will give wide latitude to the type of speech being posted on the Internet. They usually have cited the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects website owners from being held liable for postings by others. On the other hand, under that statute, individuals who post messages are responsible for their content and can be sued for libel. That applies whether they are posting on their own website or on others' message boards.

In May, a federal judge in Philadelphia cited the act in dismissing a lawsuit stemming from a series of postings on a website operated by Tucker Max, a Duke Law School graduate whose site features tales of his boozing and womanizing.

Posters on a message board on tucker max.com had ridiculed Anthony DiMeo III, the heir to a New Jersey blueberry farm fortune, accusing him of inflating his credentials as a publicist, event planner and actor. DiMeo sued Max last March, claiming in court papers that his manhood had been questioned, his professional skills lampooned and his social connections mocked. DiMeo said Max, through the website, had libeled and threatened him, noting that one poster had written: “I can't believe no one has killed (DiMeo) yet.”

In dismissing the suit, U.S. District Judge Steward Dalzell noted that Max “could be a poster child for the vulgarity” on the Internet, but that he nevertheless was entitled to protection under the Communications Decency Act. After the decision, DiMeo ridiculers on tuckermax.com piled on. Max says more than 200,000 people have viewed various threads on his message board about DiMeo.

DiMeo has asked an appeals court to consider not only the original messages about him but also those posted since his suit was filed.

Alan Nochumson, DiMeo's attorney, says the criticism has amounted to an Internet gang attack, led by Max, that has significantly damaged DiMeo's business. Nochumson says when Internet users use Google to search for DiMeo's name, many of the first Web links that pop up direct readers to postings on Max's website that criticize DiMeo.

Max says the claim is absurd. “The Internet isn't some giant ant colony,” he says. “Different people from all over the country do things. I don't control them.”

Hollis' lawsuit against DontDateHimGirl .com could reveal how far courts are willing to go to protect website owners from third-party comments. His suit claims the site is not the equivalent of an Internet provider such as AOL or Yahoo, and that because Joseph edits the site, she should be liable for its contents.

Hollis has sued Joseph, a Miami publicist and former Miami Herald columnist, as well as seven women who posted the messages about him. Three are named in the suit; four are anonymous.

Joseph's attorney, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, says Joseph does not edit postings, except to remove information such as Social Security numbers and addresses.

“If a court were to find that the Communications Decency Act doesn't apply to Tasha, no website would be safe,” Rodriguez-Taseff says, adding that if courts start to hold website owners liable for the content of third-party postings, “the only people who would be able to provide forums (would be) wealthy people. … It would be like making the coffee shop owner responsible for what people say in his coffee shop. What this case would say is that providers of forums in the Internet would have an obligation to determine truth or falsity of posts.”

A hearing is scheduled Oct. 19.

“The Internet has a great number of valuable tools with which people can do great things,” Hollis says.

But he says he's disturbed by how such false personal information can spread so freely across the Web. “Even if I had herpes, which I don't, even if I was gay, which I'm not, would I want to have a conversation about those things with an anonymous individual over a global platform? It's utterly ridiculous.”

Even if he wins in court, Hollis says, he loses.

“Those postings are going to be out there forever,” he says. “Whenever anybody Googles my name, up comes a billion sites. I will forever have to explain to someone that I do not have herpes.”

In Cumming, Ga., about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta, David Milum, 58, is still blogging. He is appealing the $50,000 judgment against him.

Milum says he considers himself a muckraker and exposer of corruption in local officials. In the recent libel trial, his attorney, Jeff Butler, described his client as a “rabble-rouser” whose inspiration was “public service.”

Milum lost in court because he could not meet the basic defense for libel claims: He could not prove that his allegations that Banks was involved in bribery and corruption were true.

Now Milum is facing another libel suit — this one seeking $2 million — over his claims about the alleged misdeeds of a local government employee.

“I have a very wonderful wife,” Milum says. “And you can imagine how wonderful she has to be to put up with this.”
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition...over03.art.htm





A New WWWorld in Your Hands
Eric Schmidt

THE boss of search engine Google, Dr Eric Schmidt, yesterday wowed the Tory Conference with his vision of the future for the Internet. Here he writes exclusively for The Sun . . .

"FOR centuries access to information — and the ability to communicate it — has been controlled by the wealthy and the well educated.

The Internet changed all that. It has broken down the barriers that exist between people and information, effectively democratising access to human knowledge.

This has made us all much more powerful as individuals.

We no longer have to take what business, the media or indeed politicians say at face value.

By typing a few key words into a computer, it’s possible to find out about almost any subject — comparing prices, products and policies within seconds.

The Internet has rewritten all the rules of production and distribution too — bringing unprecedented freedoms to millions of people worldwide: The freedom to create and communicate, to organise and influence, to speak and be heard.

Shelf space, air time, room on the pages of a newspaper — these used to determine which artists got their records played, what TV shows we watched and which elite opinions appeared in print. Now anyone can record songs and put them online. Or shoot home movies, edit them, add special effects and broadcast them to millions worldwide.

Or start a blog, sharing opinions and comments with readers in different countries and on different continents.

Not surprisingly, people are using that power to buy better value goods and services, to hold others to account and, above all, to express themselves.

It’s the first rule of the Internet — people have a lot to say. It’s amazing but true. A new blog is created every minute of every day.

In fact, the amounts of information we are creating are simply staggering.

Most Sun readers know about gigabytes and megabytes. But it’s estimated that in the year 2002 we created five exabytes (that’s a byte followed by 18 noughts) of information.

To translate that into television hours, absorbing five exabytes of data would mean sitting in front of a screen for 40,700 years.

So what does the future look like?

As more information becomes available, the harder it’ll be to find what you are looking for, and the more important search will become.

Expect to see more personalised searches too — bringing quicker, more accurate results.

Think mobile — because people are increasingly going to access the web through their phones.

Opening emails, checking the weather, reading the news headlines — you don’t need to be at your desk to do these things.

We’re going to see the development of simultaneous translation — search in English but getting the results in Spanish.

The potential is enormous, especially for people in developing countries.

And then there’s my dream product — I call it serendipity.

It works like this. You have two computer screens. On one you’re typing, on the other comments appear checking the accuracy of what you are saying, suggesting better ways of making the same point.

This would be good for journalists and politicians too!

Impossible you might say. But I’m an optimist about human nature.

History has proven that we have the ability and ingenuity to solve problems and improve our lives if only we are given the freedom to do so.

And that’s exactly what the Internet does.

So remember, it’s a great time to be alive."
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2...60135,,00.html





Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers
Laurie Goodstein

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”

To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex.

More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.

“That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.

For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.

The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.”

Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.”

Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CD’s — one titled “I’m a Hustla.”

“Lord Jesus,” Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, “I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.”

Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in Atlanta.

“The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80’s and 90’s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,” Mr. Key said.

Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes secularism and liberal sexual mores.

The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said Lauren Sandler, author of “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement” (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust.

“This generation is not about church,” said Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com. “They always say, ‘We take our faith outside the four walls.’ For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someone’s basement.”

Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, “I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you’re not Christian in your high school, you’re not cool — kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.”

The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals and surveyed teens for his book “Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers” (Oxford, 2005).

Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of almost every other religion.

“A lot of the goals I’m very supportive of,” Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, “but it just kills me that it’s framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn’t possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It’s just self-defeating.”

The 4 percent is cited in the book “The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old.

“I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,” Mr. Rainer said.

Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist. He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barna’s methodology, however, for defining “Bible-believing” so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians.

Mr. Luce responded: “If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, it’s an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly they’re going to want different data.”

Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: “Branded by God.” Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing “Acquire the Fire” T-shirts.

“You were there? You’re a Christian?” he said the young people would say to one another. “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us...rtner=homepage


















Until next week,

- js.



















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