[JackSpratts]

Since 2002




















In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.


Signed,


New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
































July 5th, 2008




Judge Orders Google to Turn Over YouTube Records
Miguel Helft

A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

The order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of YouTube viewers.

Viacom said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside advisers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google.

Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or could unexpectedly fall into the hands of third parties.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P., or Internet protocol, address. Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.

Google and Viacom said they had had discussions about ways to ensure the data is further protected to assure anonymity.

“We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history,” Catherine Lacavera, Google’s senior litigation counsel, said in a statement. “We are asking Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel said: “We are investigating techniques, including anonymization, to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”

Mr. Fricklas added that Viacom would not have direct access to the information Google produces, and that its use would be strictly limited. Viacom would not, for example, be able to chase down users who illegally posted clips from “The Colbert Report” on YouTube.

“The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisers who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube and Google,” Mr. Fricklas said. “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.”

In a letter sent Thursday, Google’s lawyers asked their counterparts at Viacom to agree to allow Google to remove information from the data that could potentially be used to identify individuals.

“We request that plaintiffs agree that YouTube may redact usernames and I.P. addresses from the viewing data in the interests of protecting user privacy,” wrote David H. Kramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Viacom did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

Privacy advocates said they welcomed Viacom’s commitment to using the information only for the purposes of the litigation, but they remained concerned about protecting user rights.

“Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Such right is protected by law.”

Mr. Opsahl said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific individuals. He said he believed the judge’s order violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act.

Congress passed the law to protect the video rental records of individuals, after a newspaper disclosed the rental records of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee.

United States District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton, who is presiding over Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, said that Google could “cite no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings, and their privacy concerns are speculative.” He said the information could help Viacom make its case.

“A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiff’s vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial noninfringing use defense,” he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/te...outube.html?hp





Political Freelancers Use Web to Join the Attack
Jim Rutenberg

The video blasted across the Internet, drawing political blood from Senator John McCain within a matter of days.

Produced here in a cluttered former motel behind the Sony Pictures lot, it juxtaposed harsh statements about Islam made by the Rev. Rod Parsley with statements from Mr. McCain praising Mr. Parsley, a conservative evangelical leader. The montage won notice on network newscasts this spring and ultimately helped lead Mr. McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, to reject Mr. Parsley’s earlier endorsement.

In previous elections, an attack like that would have come from party operatives, campaign researchers or the professional political hit men who orbit around them.

But in the 2008 race, the first in which campaigns are feeling the full force of the changes wrought by the Web, the most attention-grabbing attacks are increasingly coming from people outside the political world. In some cases they are amateurs operating with nothing but passion, a computer and a YouTube account, in other cases sophisticated media types with more elaborate resources but no campaign experience.

So it was with the Parsley video, which was the work of a 64-year-old film director, Robert Greenwald, and his small band of 20-something assistants. Once best known for films like “Xanadu” (with Olivia Newton-John) and the television movie “The Burning Bed” (with Farrah Fawcett), Mr. Greenwald shows how technology has dispersed the power to shape campaign narratives, potentially upending the way American presidential campaigns are fought.

Mr. Greenwald’s McCain videos, most of which portray the senator as contradicting himself in different settings, have been viewed more than five million times — more than Mr. McCain’s own campaign videos have been downloaded on YouTube.

“If you had told me we would have hit one million, I would have told you you were crazy,” said Mr. Greenwald, who said he had no ties to the Democratic Party or Senator Barack Obama’s campaign.

Four years ago, the Internet was a Wild West that caused the occasional headache for the campaigns but for the most part remained segregated from them. This year, the development of cheap new editing programs and fast video distribution through sites like YouTube has broken down the barriers, empowering a new generation of largely unregulated political warriors who can affect the campaign dialogue faster and with more impact than the traditional opposition research shops.

Already there are signs that these less formal and more individual efforts are filling a vacuum created by a decline in activity among the independent advocacy groups — so-called 527s and similar operations — that have played a large role in negative politics in the last several election cycles. Especially on the conservative side, independent groups have reported trouble raising money, and some of the biggest players from 2004 have signaled that they will sit it out this time around.

The shift has by no means gone unnoticed by the campaigns. And while strategists in both parties suspect that traditional political operatives affiliated with the campaigns or parties frequently pose as independent grassroots participants by hiding behind anonymous Web identities, few have been caught this year.

The change has added to the frenetic pace of the campaign this year. “It’s politics at the speed of Internet,” said Dan Carol, a strategist for Mr. Obama who was one of the young bulls on Bill Clinton’s vaunted rapid response team in 1992. “There’s just a lot of people who at a very low cost can do this stuff and don’t need a memo from HQ.”

That would seem to apply to people like Robert Anderson, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina whose modest YouTube site features videos flattering to Mr. Obama and unflattering to Mr. McCain, or Paul Villarreal, who from his apartment in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., has produced a harsh series of spots that attack Mr. Obama and make some claims that have been widely debunked.

Counting the audience for such videos can be tricky, as sites like YouTube list only the number of times they have been viewed, not the number of people who view them. That said, according to YouTube, Mr. Villarreal’s video was viewed about 50,000 times. And it cost him just $100 to produce, for software, he said. He said he had no connection to the Republican Party or the McCain campaign, though he said he had reached out to them and not heard back.

The better-circulated political videos have generally come from people with some production experience. One of the most widely seen anti-Obama videos was created by Jason Mitchell, who produces evangelical Christian programming in Durham, N.C.

A conservative-leaning version of YouTube called Eyeblast.tv has recorded millions of hits on the video. But as is often the case with such videos, how many of the viewers come to sneer rather than applaud is hard to tell.

“Four years ago I would just be a ‘political activist,’ ” Mr. Mitchell said. “Now, they call me a ‘communications political strategist,’ and that’s only because of the Internet.”

Mr. Mitchell, 29, said his cash expenses to make and distribute the segment were about $50, a fraction of the roughly $100,000 that it would cost to broadcast a 30-second spot on a television news program with an audience of a few million, like “Meet the Press.” “That’s dirt cheap for an ad,” Mr. Mitchell said.

Mr. Mitchell said he was motivated by what he said were deep-rooted misgivings about Mr. Obama on social issues, his level of experience and background. But it is unlikely any television station would have accepted the video if he had tried to run it.

The segment’s announcer notes that Mr. Obama’s father was Muslim, asserts that the candidate attended a Muslim grammar school in Indonesia for two years, and asks, “When we are at war with Islamic terrorism, can Americans elect a man with not one, not two, but three Islamic names?” One onscreen image shows Mr. Obama’s face morphed with that of Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Mitchell says he sticks close to the factual record, but the video has been widely criticized as over the line. Mr. Obama is a Christian. The school he attended in Indonesia was secular.

Three weeks ago, the Obama campaign started a Web site called “Fight the Smears” to, among other things, debunk portrayals of Mr. Obama as Muslim. It allows its users to e-mail the information easily to friends.

“What we’re really trying to do is knock down important things that are wrong, which also diminishes the power of the next set of rumors,” said Mr. Carol, the Obama aide.

With Web-based attacks proliferating, campaigns are leaving behind the assumption that to respond to highly negative or false accusations is to needlessly publicize them. “It poses a more complicated version of the age-old dilemma that campaigns always find themselves in,” said Phil Singer, who was the press secretary for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign. “Do you address something head on and risk making it a mainstream phenomenon? Or ignore it and risk allowing it to take on a life of its own?”

The presidential campaign of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts developed an effective if labor intensive technique. It flooded YouTube with positive videos of Mr. Romney. “The new model of response is to dominate the market share of information about your candidate,” said Kevin Madden, Mr. Romney’s former press secretary.

Several Republican communications strategists, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that was precisely what Mr. McCain might have to do. He is coming under harsh attack on YouTube in videos that, some Republicans say, take his words out of context. A simple search of his name automatically produces several negative videos. Mr. Greenwald, whose shop is responsible for many of them, said he was determined to keep it that way.

With a budget of $900,000 from donations, Mr. Greenwald has built a mini-factory of anti-McCain propaganda at his firm, Brave New Films. He takes no payment for his efforts, which are regulated by laws governing nonprofit groups and include other subjects, like critiques of Fox News.

In a darkened room here, three young assistants edit digital images on equipment that barely takes up a full desk, trolling the Web for political news and culling through Mr. McCain’s past and present statements. A system of hard drives catalogs cable news.

Mr. Greenwald was not always so politically active. He gave money to politicians or groups sporadically, but was not among Hollywood’s elite donor class.

Mr. Greenwald said he had a political awakening after Sept. 11 and dedicated himself to making liberal films, an endeavor he said he could afford having been “lucky enough to have been majorly overpaid in commercial film and television relative to any rational measure.”

His highest impact has been with his video about Mr. Parsley. The montage was created with help from David Corn, Washington Bureau chief for Mother Jones, who unearthed video of Mr. Parsley inveighing against Islam and saying, “America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.”

Mr. Greenwald’s team combined it with video of Mr. McCain calling Mr. Parsley, “one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide.” The montage spread quickly across liberal Web sites, and made its way onto ABC News. Mr. McCain released a statement rejecting Mr. Parsley’s endorsement shortly thereafter.

“For years I sat in conversations with people who said the only way we can be effective is we have to raise $1 billion and buy CBS,” Mr. Greenwald said. “Well, Google raised a couple of billion and bought YouTube, and it’s here for us, and it’s a huge, huge difference.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/us...pposition.html





Swedes Protest Sweeping E-Mail Eavesdropping Law
Malin Rising

A public outcry against Sweden's eavesdropping law reached new heights today with protesters sending more than 1 million e-mails to lawmakers, parliamentary officials said.

The law, narrowly passed by legislators two weeks ago, will let officials eavesdrop on all cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic, in what technology companies have called the most far-reaching communications monitoring plan in Europe. Sweden's government plans to implement it in January.

Opponents say the law will encroach on privacy and jeopardize civil liberties. Supporters claim it is needed to fight international crime and terrorism.

Parliamentary spokeswoman Christina Green said protesters had sent 1.1 million e-mails to lawmakers by this afternoon, after the Expressen tabloid on Sunday launched an online campaign against the law.

The legislation gives Sweden's National Defense Radio Establishment the right to scan all phone calls, e-mails and faxes crossing Sweden's borders, without a court order.

Currently, e-mail and phone surveillance in the Nordic country, known for openness and transparency, requires a court order if police suspect a crime. However, the intelligence agency is allowed to spy on airborne signals, such as radio and satellite traffic, without special permission.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9745076





Bavarian Police Can Legally Place Trojans On PCs
An anonymous reader writes

"The Bavarian Parliament passed a law that allows Bavarian police to place 'Remote Forensic Software' (Google translation) on a suspect's computer as well as on the computers of a suspect's contacts. They may break into houses in secret to install the RFS if a remote installation is not possible; and while they are there a (physical) search is permitted too. The RFS may be used to read, delete, and alter data."

The translation says that RFSs may be used in cases of an "urgent threat to the existence or the security of the Federation or a country or physical, life or liberty of a person... Even where there is a reasonable assumptions on concrete preparatory acts for such serious offenses."
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?.../07/04/1343214





Brussels to Sign Away Your Private Details to US
David Leppard

American authorities will be able to obtain greater access to private information such as credit card transactions, internet browsing habits and travel histories of people in Britain under a deal being finalised by European Union officials.

An internal report leaked to The New York Times yesterday said the EU was on the verge of agreeing to give US law enforcement and security agencies information about all EU citizens.

Talks on the new data-sharing deal have been going on since last year. Negotiators are trying to agree on minimum standards to protect privacy rights. This would include limiting access to information to “authorised individuals with an identified purpose” for their search. The Americans want to secure final agreement before President Bush leaves office in January.

This weekend, privacy campaigners said the move would allow the Americans to carry out “fishing” expeditions against anyone they deemed to be of interest and would further undermine individual privacy.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “We can barely trust our own authorities with sensitive personal information. What redress will we have on the other side of the Atlantic if our details are lost or abused?”

The Foreign Office would make no comment yesterday and an EU spokesman declined to discuss the matter. Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for policy at the US department of homeland security, said that the deal would make it easier for the US to obtain private information on individuals from banks, credit card firms and other companies in Britain and the EU.

He said many firms faced sanctions from the EU if they were deemed to have passed information to the US in breach of data protection laws. The deal would in effect give them greater protection from punishment in the future. It would apply to airline passengers and anyone whom the US government had legitimate authority to obtain information about, he added.

The internal report said negotiators had largely agreed on an “international binding agreement”. The pact would make it clear that it was lawful for European governments and companies such as internet and credit card firms to transfer private information to the United States and vice versa.

Officials have still to resolve whether European citizens should be able to sue the US government over its handling of personal data. The deal is designed to resolve conflicts over information-sharing between the EU and the US that followed the 9/11 attacks in America.

The US government demanded access to customer data held by airlines flying out of Europe and by a consortium, known as Swift, that monitors global banking transfers. American officials wanted the data so that they could search for suspicious activity.

Barry Steinhardt, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “Clearly it’s a broad exchange of data. It’s another example of the US drawing in the rest of the world to sacrifice its principles.

“The US is essentially asking the rest of the world to conform to our very limited notion of what’s private.

“It’s not a full-scale transfer of data between Europe and the United States. But it provides for wide access to data which are supposed to be protected under EU law.”

Additional reporting: Sarah Baxter
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle4232264.ece





Google in Deal with Brazil to Fight Child Porn

Internet search company Google signed an agreement with Brazilian public prosecutors on Wednesday to help combat child pornography on its social networking site Orkut, an accord that the company believes is the first of its kind internationally.

Under the agreement, Google will use filters to remove and prevent illegal content on Orkut, which has about half its users in Brazil. The company will also facilitate evidence gathering under judicial order in suspected crimes against children and teen-agers on Orkut without the need for international legal accords.

Google will also preserve for six months access logs of users being investigated for illegal conduct.

Google said it was the first such agreement that the company had signed and the firm believes it is the first internationally. Alexandre Hohagen, president of Google in Brazil, told a congressional committee, "It's an historic day not only for Brazil but for the Internet in the entire world."

Initially, Google had refused to work with prosecutors, saying it was subject only to U.S. laws, said Prosecutor Sergio Suiama. The company denied this, saying it had always been willing to cooperate with Brazilian authorities.

Brazilian prosecutors say 90 percent of illegal Internet content being investigated in Brazil involves Orkut. The site has 60 million users, half of them in Brazil.

Of 624 investigations by federal prosecutors in Sao Paulo state through the end of last year into human rights crimes on the Internet, 420 involved child pornography on Orkut.

"Orkut was lawless," said Suiama.

The accord was signed during a session of a congressional inquiry into pedophilia and follows legal battles since 2006.

Under the deal, public prosecution withdrew a lawsuit against Google, a company spokesman said.

The committee, which under Brazilian law has some police and judicial powers, ordered the investigation of 18,000 Orkut photo albums accused of harboring child pornography.

Google has more than a 60 percent share of the Web search market, according to industry figures.

(Reporting by Fernando Exman, writing by Raymond Colitt)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...37672120080702





Court: La. Internet Predator Law Constitutional
AP

The Louisiana Supreme Court says police may pose as children and young teens on the Internet to hunt for sexual predators.

It reinstated charges against 52-year-old Ray Hatton Jr. of Lafayette and sent the case back to district court. State District Judge Wilford Carter threw out charges against in October, saying the law deprived him of his right to due process.

Hatton is accused of setting up a date for oral sex with someone he believed was a 14-year-old girl, but was actually an adult police officer.

The law allows a defense of consent if a juvenile is at least 16 years old. Carter ruled that letting police pose as younger juveniles denies people that defense.
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/...EWS01/80702011





Bush Stimulates The Porn Industry With His Economic Package

When President Bush announced his economic stimulus in January, he bragged that his package was the “right size” and would “boost” the economy:

“I am pleased that this agreement meets the criterion that I set forth last week to provide an effective, robust, and temporary set of incentives that will boost our economy and encourage job creation. This package has the right set of policies and is the right size. The incentives in this package will lead to higher consumer spending and increased business investment this year.”

It sure has led to “higher consumer spending,” but not where Bush had probably hoped. The adult pornography industry reports that has seen a huge uptick in business thanks to Bush’s package. According to a press release from the Adult Internet Market Research Company:

An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans’ mailboxes across the country.

According to Kirk Mishkin, Head Research Consultant for AIMRCo, “Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30% growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market.”

Jillian Fox of LSGmodels.com (nsfw) said that in a survey to its members, “thirty two percent of respondents referenced the recent stimulus package as part of their decision to either become a new member, or renew an existing membership.”

The Bush administration has attempted to wage an aggressive fight in the War on Porn. In fact, cracking down on “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography was “one of the top priorities” of Alberto Gonzales while he was Attorney General, often coming before terrorism prosecutions.

Ironically, the porn industry is now thanking Bush for his policies. “Getting more people to buy porn was probably the last thing Bush had on his mind when he came up with his ’stimulus package,’ but we’ll take it,” said Fox.

Update
NPR reported this week that the Shady Lady Ranch in Nevada "is offering gas cards to lure people in, and the Moonlite Bunny Ranch has a deal called 'double your stimulus' for folks who bring in their federal tax rebate checks."
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/02/bush-porn/





Taiwan Establishes IPR Court
Thibault Worth

Taiwan's first IPR Court was inaugurated on July 1, marking the latest in a series of moves by the Taiwanese government to improve intellectual-property rights.

The court, which is modeled after similar courts in the United States, Japan and Germany, will have nine judges, each of whom has undergone four months of training on IPR and copyright-infringement issues.

Nine officials from the Taiwanese government's Intellectual Property Office have been assigned to the newly-established court to help judges keep track of the often complex patchwork of patents and trademarks involved in IPR litigation.

John Eastwood, a lawyer with Taipei legal firm Wenfei Attorneys-at-Law, says the court should help demystify this area of the law for the Taiwanese.

"Once the local confidence in handling IP cases is increased among judges, prosecutors and court staff, we are going to see a big improvement," he says.

However, Intellectual Property Office deputy director-general Margaret Chen says rights holders too often pursue criminal litigation against small-time infringers. She says music should develop licensing schemes that work in the local market instead of using the courts to compensate for their financial losses.

"If a rights holder can easily obtain disproportionate compensation via criminal procedures, why would he bother to set up workable commercial licensing scheme?" she asks.

But several influential groups, including IFPI and the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei, commend Taiwan's efforts to improve IPR protections over the last few years. Sources say the Office of the United States Trade Representative could remove Taiwan from its "Special 301 Watch List" of IPR trouble spots by the end of the summer.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...77d5cbfe3e2e0b





You're On Candid Camera

The Bush administration now wants to watch you from the sky.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

A Bush administration program to expand domestic use of Pentagon spy satellites has aroused new concerns in Congress about possible civil-liberties abuses.

On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment denying money for the new domestic intelligence operation—cryptically named the "National Applications Office"—until the Homeland Security secretary certifies that any programs undertaken by the center will "comply with all existing laws, including all applicable privacy and civil liberties standards."

Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on intelligence, told Newsweek that majorities in both the House and Senate intend to block all funding for the domestic intelligence center at least until August, when the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency that works for Congress, completes a report examining civil-liberties and privacy issues related to the domestic use of picture-taking spy satellites.

Harman, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans controlled Congress earlier in Bush's tenure, said she still felt burned by the president's secret expansion of domestic electronic spying after 9/11. At the time, she and other intel committee leaders were assured that the increased intelligence activity was legal, only to learn later that the basis for the new surveillance was a set of opinions by administration lawyers that are now widely considered to be legally questionable.

Because of the administration's poor handling of the electronic spying program (mainly conducted by the super-secret National Security Agency, which operates a worldwide web of electronic eavesdropping systems), Harman says she and other members of Congress will be more cautious about accepting civil-liberties assurances from administration officials. "We have to make sure this is not a back door for spying on Americans," Harman told Newsweek.

Harman said that she had discussed the administration's plans for expanding domestic use of picture-taking spy satellites—which are supposedly capable of taking very high-resolution photographs of buildings, vehicles and people—with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. According to Harman, he promised strict procedures to protect the rights of Americans, including obtaining court authorization for law enforcement-related surveillance operations where appropriate. Despite Chertoff's assurances, however, Harman said that Congress probably would not fully approve the program until the administration is more explicit about how it would operate.

A congressional aide familiar with the views of Senate Democrats said they share Harman's concerns. However, this aide, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, said that the administration is close to providing Capitol Hill with detailed new protocols for protecting civil rights and privacy when conducting such surveillance. A Homeland Security official said that the administration had hoped to begin full operations of the National Applications Office, which would be located at a secret facility somewhere in the Washington, D.C., area, in October. But Harman said that full congressional funding for the new center almost certainly would be held up until after the presidential election in November.

Earlier this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is supposed to manage federal disaster relief efforts, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which directs the operations of picture-taking spy satellites and analyzes their output, issued a statement describing how they were currently working together to help out with flood-relief efforts in the Midwest.

According to the statement, NGA is "providing analysis, unclassified commercial imagery of flooded areas and geospatial intelligence products to FEMA and emergency responders in the affected areas to aid in rescue and recovery efforts." Intelligence experts note that commercial picture-taking satellites, such as one operated by a company called DigitalGlobe, already make available for public use satellite imagery with a resolution as fine as 18 inches—meaning, said one expert, that the satellite picture can zoom in on a single car.

Classified imaging satellites, operated at NGA's direction and built by a secretive Pentagon agency called the National Reconnaissance Office, can produce pictures of even greater clarity, though precise details are state secrets. An intelligence official confirmed that information from secret Pentagon satellites is currently being made available to agencies involved in flood-relief efforts. But to protect intelligence secrets, classified spy-satellite pictures are not being provided directly to flood-relief agencies, the official said. Instead, intelligence analysts are using pictures from secret satellites to make unclassified paper maps and to produce unclassified electronic data that can be used both by emergency services and ordinary homeowners. Some of the intelligence community's flood-relief data can be viewed on an NGA website.

The intelligence official said that domestic agencies, ranging from the FBI to the Agriculture Department, have for years been able to request spy-satellite data. Such information has been used in the past not only to help organize disaster responses (to events such as Hurricane Katrina), but also to help plan security for major public events, ranging from papal visits and presidential inaugurations to sporting championships such as the World Series and Super Bowl. The official said that before intelligence agencies can spy on individual households, they must first consult government lawyers to ensure such activities are legal.

Intelligence and law enforcement experts say that under present laws, criminal investigators or intelligence operatives would probably not need a warrant to conduct surveillance on buildings or suspects from street level—or from above, using a helicopter or airplane. Nor would they need express authority to use commercially available satellite pictures. On the other hand, in a 2001 opinion authored by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that investigators had inappropriately invaded the privacy of a marijuana grower when they used information collected by an external heat-sensing device to obtain a search warrant for the man's home.

An intelligence official could not specify whether the new domestic intelligence office would be required to obtain a warrant before conducting particularly close satellite surveillance. A spokesman for NGA said the agency would have no comment on the program. But Russ Knocke, a Homeland Security spokesman, told Newsweek that fears about the program are unfounded. "We've repeatedly met with Congress to answer questions about the NAO," he said. "As we have said, the purpose of the NAO is not to expand existing legal authorities. Rather, it will allow the government to better and more efficiently prioritize the use of scarce resources in support of major disasters, homeland security efforts and perhaps—in the future—law enforcement. We have also been clear that we would brief Congress before moving to support law enforcement. Efforts to further stall the NAO are misguided and keep us from making the best use of overhead imagery for a number of public safety and security missions."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143257





FBI's Next-Gen ID Databank to Store Face Scans—A Good Idea?

Lockheed Martin is building a massive digital warehouse of criminal information, set to bring facial recognition and eye scans to local law enforcement within 10 years. The FBI may use biometric technology to bolster mug shots, fingerprints and DNA to catch crooks—but privacy advocates say there's reason for law-abiding citizens to worry.
Erik Sofge

Ten years ago, if a police department wanted to run a check on a suspect's fingerprints, someone had to mail an ink-splotched card to the FBI. The agency would then check it by hand against millions of other index cards, and it could take as long as two months for a match to return. Today, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System processes around 150,000 sets of prints per day and can respond to a request in as little as 15 minutes.

But a decade from now, fingerprints could be as quaint as the index cards on which they were once stored. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which could cost as much as $1 billion over its 10-year life cycle, will create an unprecedented database of biometric markers, such as facial images and iris scans. For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day—a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one. And for privacy watchdogs, it's a duel threat—seen as a step toward a police state, and a gold mine of personal data waiting to be plundered by cybercriminals.

For now, NGI is barely more than a concept. Lockheed Martin was awarded a multiyear contract in February to develop the system, and the company is currently conducting a trade study to determine what sort of biometric technologies should be incorporated into it. Lockheed isn't building the various scanners that police will be using to collect data, but rather is determining which ones will be compatible. “The trade study we're doing is for the matching algorithm—the guts of NGI,” says Barbara Humpton, the company's project manager for NGI. “Lockheed does not build [data] capture devices or matching algorithms, per se. And capture devices are actually outside of the bounds of NGI. Those would be managed by individual agencies. NGI is about setting up a database and standards—the format for how things come into the system.”

NGI will involve some hardware, such as a massive amount of data storage for the various high-resolution images of faces or irises that could become part of the system. Like the FBI's current fingerprint system, NGI will be software-based, providing data to whichever agency or police department has the compatible biometric collection gear. Until Lockheed's trade study is finished, there's no telling which particular devices will be folded into the project. And neither Lockheed nor the FBI will discuss the anticipated amount of storage, or other hard numbers, such as how fast the system could return results.

The FBI has confirmed that, along with adding palm prints to its existing “ten-print” records, the bureau will have to expand its photo repository. “That could be the basis for our facial recognition,” says Thomas Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division. “And it's not a true biometric [marker], but scars and tattoos, we want to be able to search those nationwide.” Some of that information could come from prisons, where scar and tattoo databases have become increasingly common. But for accurate facial recognition, mug shots aren't the best source of data. Agencies would likely have to start taking photos of suspects from more angles, and at relatively high resolutions.

According to the FBI's Bush, some departments have already begun collecting iris scans, in anticipation of a searchable national or even local database. And Lockheed is hoping to leverage existing biometric technology (such as eye scanners that use patterns in the iris to provide identification and control access to some corporate facilities), as well as research being conducted by other organizations. “The Bureau doesn't really have any research dollars,” Bush says. “We hope to change that, and get some, but most of our efforts would be toward leveraging research from other agencies, the Department of Defense and the academic world. So we'll take advantage of what little dollars we have, and try to force multiply.”

Digital rights advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the ACLU have said that the NGI technology is not far enough along to begin implementation, and that sharing vast amounts of biometric data could lead to inaccuracies. Lockheed and the FBI, however, do not claim that the system will harvest personal information from existing commercial biometric databases, or capture information without the subject's knowledge.

“We aren't going to start collecting irises from everyone and their brother,” Bush says. “We adhere to very strict privacy guidelines. We're taking more biometrics from the same people we were always authorized to take fingerprints from.” Any new images or scans will have to be collected by individual law enforcement agencies and then integrated into the NGI system. As for security concerns, the FBI says its fingerprint database has never been hacked. So while the addition of new kinds of data flowing between agencies—both in the United States and abroad, since the Bureau hopes to exchange data with other nations—could create new opportunities for hackers, there's little precedent for such breaches.

NGI could start producing results in 2010, which is when the FBI wants to have its improved print-scanning capabilities up and running. Other features will be added throughout the project's life span, and by 2018, the Bureau will presumably start working on the next generation of its steadily expanding identification database. In the meantime, biometric technology is exploding in the commercial sector, with students paying for lunch with a finger swipe and Japanese cellphones scanning their owners' eyes to initiate secure transactions. “People are beginning to accept that biometrics might be their best protection,” Humpton says. Of course, that depends which side of the law you're on.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...w/4270770.html





Magazine Photos Fool Age-Verification Cameras

With the full-scale rollout of Japan’s cigarette vending machine age-verification system just around the corner, a Sankei Sports news reporter has confirmed the existence of a minor flaw: magazine photos can be used to fool the age-verification cameras on some machines.

When the reporter went to check out the new age-verifying machines after they were introduced in the Osaka area in June, he soon discovered that the machines equipped with face-recognition cameras would let him buy cigarettes when he held up a 15-centimeter (6-in) wide magazine photo of a man who looked to be in his 50s.

The reporter also went to Kobe, where different face recognition hardware is being used. There, he bought cigarettes using an 8-centimeter (3-in) wide magazine photo of a female celebrity in her 30s. He also reportedly tried to use a 3-centimeter (1-in) wide photo, but the machines rejected it.

As part of the age-verification system, most of Japan’s 570,000 cigarette vending machines are being outfitted with RFID readers that check the purchaser’s Taspo age-verification card. Smokers without a Taspo card can now either buy their cigarettes in person over the counter or use one of 4,000 special machines equipped with face-recognition systems (these machines do not require Taspo cards). More face-recognition machines are on the way, according to vending machine manufacturer Fujitaka, who developed the face-recognition hardware.

The face-recognition machines rely on cameras that scan the purchaser’s face for wrinkles, sagging skin and other signs of age. Facial characteristics are compared with a database of more than 100,000 people, and if the purchaser is thought to be well over 20 years old (the legal age), the sale is approved. If the purchaser looks too young, they are asked to prove their age by inserting a driver’s license. According to Fujitaka, the machines are 90% accurate.

Fujitaka admits that people may, on occasion, be able to fool the age-verification cameras with photographs — but only for the time being. The company is now working on a more advanced system that will make sure each face belongs to a real human, but they are unable to say when these new machines will be put into place.
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/06/...ation-cameras/





Deep Packet Inspection and Your Privacy Online
Ben Jones

The Internet is a world penitentially embroiled in a Cold War. Now, as then, an arms race between factions is constantly ongoing, each working to counter the efforts of the other. Into this race, comes deep packet inspection, a serious threat to online privacy.

When I say Cold War, it’s not just an a reference thrown up to thrown up to invoke emotion. Like the real Cold War, it is mainly fought by proxy, one side using a third party to score hits. However, unlike the Cold War, it is not a contest between two fairly equal forces. One side has money and power, and the will to use it. The other has sheer weight of numbers, but what seems like general apathy.

One of the new weapons in this conflict, is called ‘Deep Packet Inspection‘ (DPI). An innocuous sounding name for a technology that basically means ‘Internet monitoring’. Deep packet inspection is a technology that some companies are salivating over, including advertisers and entertainment lobby groups like the MPAA. With it, their dreams can come true, some of them anyway.

There are various uses for deep packet inspection, such as its use by intelligence agencies (It’s a wiretap for the Internet) to intercept email and other web traffic, like in Sweden. However, there are two more sinister usages being rolled out that are not so good for the everyday Internet user.

With the ability to see the contents of data packets, it’s no surprise that it’s a prime candidate for traffic shaping and throttling. With ISP’s increasingly overselling their capacity, they are starting to spend money not on infrastructure, but on DPI equipment, to throttle BitTorrent traffic for example. Until recently, the processing power required to inspect data packets has made this prohibitive, as it required massive computers, and significantly slowed down network traffic. Now, though, companies like Procera Networks are selling systems capable of DPI on 40Gbps of traffic, per system. Think Sandvine, without the telltale RST packets.

The MPAA loves the idea of DPI as well. It, like other groups, figure, that if people can see the contents of packets, that it can tell if those packets contain copyrighted data. Of course, they’re oblivious to the idea that their material can be used in a non-infringing way, and staunchly against fair use (and don’t forget, Fair Use Day is only a week or two away). If this becomes a popular view, though, we may see multi-part rar files in torrents growing in popularity again.

The other, arguably more sinister usage of DPI, is the growing interest by advertising companies to use deep packet inspection to observe what Internet users are doing. Watching your browsing activity, you can gain all kinds of insights into the user behind the keyboard. Similar to spyware, but on your line not your system, it’s not a good thing, and impossible to remove. Worse, it may be able to tell who is behind the keyboard at the time, by identifying trends in connection behavior. In the case of a p2p lawsuit, these DPI-based advertising companies may end up being called to testify who their systems believe to be behind the keyboard at the time of the allegations.

With British Telecom in the UK having experimented with DPI based advertising – without telling the subscribers about it – and with Charter in the US looking into trialling it (or as has just been announced - discouraged from it) it is a pressing concern. Fortunately, some people are not exhibiting the apathy mentioned above, and are doing something about it. Alex Hanff (you might remember his tangle with the MPAA) has been studiously working against the likes of Phorm, and indeed, we linked to his dissertation on it last time. He is holding a protest outside British Telecom’s AGM next month, to protest this rape of user’s privacy for commercial gain.

While the protest might be mainly against advertising based systems, it’s a worry for all net users, and needs to be dealt with by something other than apathy. At least one torrent site admin has told me he will be there and I may be there, but the more that attend, the better. So, users of the world, it’s time to start acting for what you believe in, and stop just moaning about it.
http://torrentfreak.com/deep-packet-inspection-080629/





Broadband Internet? No Thanks

A new study suggests that attitude rather than availability may be the key reason why more Americans don't have high-speed Internet access.

Thirty-five percent of those surveyed say they're still on dial-up because broadband prices are too high.

The findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project challenge the argument that broadband providers need to more aggressively roll out supply to meet demand.

Only 14 percent of dial-up users say they're stuck with the older, slower connection technology because they can't get broadband in their neighborhoods, Pew reported Wednesday.

Thirty-five percent say they're still on dial-up because broadband prices are too high, while another 19 percent say nothing would persuade them to upgrade. The remainder have other reasons or do not know.

"That suggests that solving the supply problem where there are availability gaps is only going to go so far," said John Horrigan, the study's author. "It's going to have to be a process of getting people more engaged with information technology and demonstrating to people it's worth it for them to make the investment of time and money."

Nonetheless, the Pew study does support concerns that rural Americans have more trouble getting faster Internet connections, which bring greater opportunities to work from home or log into classes at distant universities.

Twenty-four percent of rural dial-up users say they would get broadband if it becomes available, compared with 11 percent for suburbanites and 3 percent for city dwellers.

Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's key inventors and an advocate for the idea that the government should be more active in expanding broadband, suspects that many more dial-up users would be interested in going high-speed if they had a better idea of what they're missing. He pointed out that broadband access is available from only one provider in many areas, keeping prices high and speeds low.

"Some residential users may not see a need for higher speeds because they don't know about or don't have ability to use high speeds," Cerf said. "My enthusiasm for video conferencing improved dramatically when all family members had MacBook Pros with built-in video cameras, for example."

Overall, Pew found that 55 percent of American adults now have broadband access at home, up from 47 percent a year earlier and 42 percent in March 2007. By contrast, only 10 percent of Americans now have dial-up access.

Despite the increase in overall broadband adoption, though, growth has been flat among blacks and poorer Americans.

Of the Americans with no Internet access at all, about a third say they have no interest in logging on, even at dial-up speeds. Nearly 20 percent of nonusers had access in the past but dropped it. Older and lower-income Americans are most likely to be offline.
Pew's telephone study of 2,251 U.S. adults, including 1,553 Internet users, was conducted April 8 to May 11 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The error margins for subgroups are higher -- plus or minus 7 percentage points for the dial-up sample.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/0....ap/index.html





Where the Wild Things Are: Computer Science

Professor’s breakthrough maps the cool quest
David Poratta

Like a Doppler weather map with red blotches tracking the paths of major storms, a new tracking software service co-developed by Columbia University computer science professor Tony Jebara instantly shows people where the hottest clubs or hangouts are, in real time.

Jebara’s creation, Citysense, uses advanced machine learning techniques to number crunch vast amounts of data emanating from thousands of cell-phones, GPS-equipped cabs and other data devices to paint live pictures of where people are gathering. Fed to websites such as Google or Yelp, the data reveals what’s happening at any location. Translation: if you have a Blackberry, you have instant 411 on where the cool folks are. Or, are not. (An IPhone version is coming). The technology can also show if your favorite commute route is backed up and possibly offer alternative ones. Other applications abound.

“We are providing consumers with free applications on their mobile phones for visualizing several cities: ‘where is everyone?,’ ‘where should I go eat?,’ ‘which jazz bar would I like?,’ ‘where would I like to go shopping?’ and so on,” Jebara says.

Gaining access to the hottest locales with Citysense involves a trade off for users: information on their own whereabouts is also fed into the system. While all information gathered is anonymous, the data could be a goldmine for marketers and consumer researchers looking to enhance sales pitches, learn where people actually shop, or don’t, and tweak emerging retail trends as they evolve.

Citysense is now available in San Francisco, with Chicago next on the rollout, followed by five more cities.

The brainchild of Jebara and MITs’ Alex Pentland, Citysense is an extension of the firm’s (Sense Network) Macrosense system, a far more complex data-gathering and processing application. Incorporated in 2006, Sense Network recently raised some $3 million in private funding.

"Sense Networks is indexing the real world using location data for predictive analytics,” Jebara says. “We view location (from GPS phones, cars, etc.) as the new hope for understanding people's offline behavior: where are people going, what personality type or 'tribe' they belong to and what to recommend to them... in the real world.

“Machine learning tools developed at Columbia make this possible. There is no single equation describing human activity, but by computing statistics from millions of locations and flow between them, it becomes possible to find clusters, trends, explanations and predictive patterns.”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/08/06/citysense.html





Group Suggests an Exchange to Trade Internet Capacity
Eric Pfanner

There are exchanges where you can buy and sell stocks, futures, pork bellies, wine and even pollution allowances.

Why not an exchange for the trading of digital bits and bytes?

“That is my dream,” said Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency based in Geneva that sets international communications standards.

The exchange would let telephone networks, mobile operators, satellite providers and other telecommunications companies trade capacity on their systems.

Network operators predicting bottlenecks could buy extra capacity, ensuring the smooth functioning of phone services, cellphone networks, the Internet and other communication links. Those with excess capacity could sell bandwidth, helping to limit that unprofitable downtime.

Applying a marketplace solution to the allocation of bandwidth, Mr. Touré said, could improve efficiency and reduce prices. That might help with one of his main goals, to bridge the digital divide in places like Africa, he added.

Mr. Touré, who mentioned the idea recently by telephone, is not the first person to think of such an exchange. Enron, the energy and trading company, briefly ran an electronic bandwidth exchange before the company was brought down by financial scandal in 2001.

Perhaps the notoriety of Enron explains why Mr. Touré and his aides quickly cautioned that the idea was nothing more than a dream for now and might never be created. Instead, Mr. Touré said, he was focusing on a more modest plan, one that could be a step toward an exchange: the creation of a real-time database detailing the flow of traffic on the world’s major communications networks.

Mr. Touré said the database could play an essential role in helping networks manage capacity and plan new investments at a time when telecommunications traffic is surging, and when some experts are warning that the growth of voice, data and particularly video traffic threatens to create traffic jams.

Nemertes Research, based in a suburb of Chicago, has predicted that over the next three to five years, Internet users in North America could experience “brownouts” unless telecommunications operators significantly step up their infrastructure investments.

“There are a lot of megabytes sitting in a lot of places that are underutilized,” Mr. Touré said. “It would be good to have a better knowledge of this.”

Mr. Touré said he had discussed this idea recently with telecommunications companies at an annual meeting organized by Intelsat, which operates communications satellites for use by media and telecommunications companies and governments.

At these gatherings, network operators already trade capacity: for instance, a European operator might agree to help with an anticipated spike in traffic to China or India. But for now, this happens without the structure of an exchange.

It was not clear whether network operators would want to participate in such a system. “It’s a little bit preliminary to talk about something like this at this point,” said Nicholas Mitsis, a spokesman for Intelsat.

Analysts said some telecommunications carriers might be reluctant to take part for fear of revealing sensitive information to competitors. Some might prefer to continue operating the way they do now, trading capacity as needed, usually with one counterparty, rather than making details about their networks available to all.

“The more granular they try to make this, the more difficult it would be to do it,” said John Delaney, an analyst at IDC, a research firm.

Mr. Touré said operators’ identities would be withheld to help prevent such problems.

If telecommunications providers can be persuaded, Mr. Delaney said, the database could play a useful role, helping network operators avoid the boom-bust investment cycles that have bedeviled them in the past. One of these contributed to the demise of Enron’s trading system, which suffered from a collapse in demand for trading after a multiyear investment spree by telecommunications companies left billions of dollars worth of fiber-optic networks unused.

“There is a mutual interest in getting capex to follow rather than lead demand,” Mr. Delaney said, referring to capital expenditures by operators.

The International Telecommunication Union, with the help of two software companies, Microsoft and IDV Solutions, has already created a more limited database called Global View, which tracks the spread of information and communications technologies in Africa, showing how different regions stack up in terms of mobile network coverage, broadband access and other communications benchmarks.

The telecommunications union wants to expand Global View to other continents, including Asia, Mr. Touré said. With better access to information, he said, companies will be more likely to invest in regions like Africa, where growth in mobile phone penetration has been rapid but where access to other communications technologies remains patchy.

“We’re making sure the industry is aware of the opportunities,” Mr. Touré said.

Global View could serve as a model for more ambitious plans, like the live database, he said.

“The world will benefit in knowing what traffic is going where and when,” he said. “The capacity problems are like the global food problem. It’s not because of a lack of food; it’s a lack of distribution of food.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/te...gy/30byte.html





Detecting SSH Tunnels
coderrr

Italian researchers have published a paper on the Detection of Encrypted Tunnels across Network Boundaries. I came across it in a google search because I’ve been thinking of writing a program which does something similar. It doesn’t seem like anyone else has picked up on this research yet so I thought I should mention it.

They claim their technique can differentiate between “normal” ssh or scp sessions and ssh sessions which are being used to tunnel traffic (through ssh’s port forwarding mechanism). This is accomplished through a naive Bayes classifier, which they first trained with “normal” ssh sessions. The two variables used to classify a session are the size of the packets and the difference in arrival time of two consecutive packets. With just these, they can classify with 99% accuracy whether an ssh session is a tunnel. They were also able to classify the actual protocol (P2P, POP, SMTP, HTTP) of the tunneled connection with close to 90% accuracy.

Although their research is quite interesting there are a few things which limit its practicality. They can only detect tunnels going through ssh servers which they control. This is because their detection mechanism can only handle a single authentication type whereas an ssh server can (and usually does) allow multiple (e.g. public-key or password). This requires admins of the server to limit the allowed authentication options to a single consistent choice. They also require the ssh server _and_ client to disable compression. Their technique will also falsely classify a second login attempt (after a failed login) as a tunnel and drop the connection. In their words: “However, this should not be a major problem: simply, if the user is entitled to connect, they will try again.”

So it seems the use of a tool like this would be limited to an extremely controlled environment where users are limited to a white-list set of network protocols (so that they can’t use a different tunneling mechanism, stunnel for example) and only allowed to ssh to servers under the control of the censoring party. In which case you would wonder why the admin wouldn’t just set the ssh servers’ AllowTcpForwarding option to false.

It sounds like this is just preliminary work so maybe their future research will solve all these problems. If perfected this technology could be used by ISPs to block or throttle even encrypted P2P traffic.

I’d also like to note that it would probably be easy to create a tunneling mechanism which thwarts their detection attempts. Knowing that they use packet size and inter packet intervals you could easily manipulate these to match whatever protocol type you wanted.

While looking around one of the researchers web pages (Franceso Gringoli) I found a pretty cool Linux/OSX utility called sshgate. It allows you to transparently tunnel all your connections over ssh. This is great for programs which do not give you the option to use a socks server and which do not play nice with socksification. I haven’t tested it out so I’m not sure if it actually works.
http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/06...g-ssh-tunnels/





Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible
Ernesto

Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale.

Unfortunately, these more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented by simply enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their upload speed.

The throttling works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in the swarm the Sandvine application sends a peer reset message (RST flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to. Only seeding seems to be prevented, most users are able to upload to others while the download is still going, but once the download is finished, the upload speed drops to 0. Some users also report a significant drop in their download speeds, but this seems to be less widespread. Worse on private trackers, likely that this is because of the smaller swarm size

Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn’t help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution. More info about how to setup BitTorrent over SSH can be found here.

Last year we had a discussion whether traffic shaping is good or bad, and ISPs made it pretty clear that they do not like P2P applications like BitTorrent. One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: “The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It’s an insatiable appetite.”, and another one stated: “P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”

Customers on the other hand like to fully use their connection, and don’t agree that traffic shaping is the correct solution. One reader commented: “If you pay for an internet connection, that’s what you should get from your ISP — an internet connection. Not a connection that will let you browse the web and check email, but little else. If an ISP has issues with the amount of data a customer is transferring, then the ISP needs to address that issue with that customer, and not restrict every user in one class of traffic.”

I guess this battle will go on for a while and I would advise Comcast users to try setting up a VPN connection to get around the traffic shaping, other users who find out that they are throttles might try BitTorrent encryption first, that seems to work quite well in most cases.

More details about the Sandvine application can be found here.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-thro...ng-impossible/





Virgin Media: ‘Absolutely No Possibility’ of Disconnecting File-Sharers
enigmax

Virgin Media, plagued by a recent flurry of bad publicity thanks to its policy of working with the music industry to warn file-sharers, has announced today that there is “absolutely no possibility” that it will disconnect its users from the Internet or hand over their details to the music industry.

As the war of words over file-sharing in the UK heats up, the music industry represented by the BPI has been seeking ways to stop an estimated 6 million British citizens from sharing music. It has been pressurizing ISPs to take responsibility for the actions of their subscribers, and demanding that they disconnect those who share unauthorized music, something the ISPs don’t want to do.

To its credit, one ISP, Carphone Warehouse, has refused to comply. Others are working with the music industry and at the forefront of that group is Virgin Media.

Virgin has been receiving quite a lot of bad publicity recently after it was revealed that it agreed to work with the music industry to send out so-called ‘educational warnings‘ to its customers the BPI accuse of file-sharing. Virgin has sent out hundreds of these at the behest of the music industry and they have been dropping through mail boxes up and down the country. The letters come in an envelope and printed on the outside are the words: “Important: If you don’t read this, your broadband could be disconnected” so recipients could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that, frankly, if they don’t read it, their broadband could be disconnected.

However, Virgin Media told has told Jim over at Newsbeat that the printing on the envelope was “a mistake” and there is “absolutely no possibility” of legal action or disconnection for any recipient of these letters. Nice to know.

Furthermore, Asam Ahmad from Virgin notes that they cannot be 100% sure that the person they send the letters to has actually committed any offense at all. “It is important to let our customers know that their accounts have been used in a certain way but we are happy to accept it may not be the account holder that’s involved.”

He goes on to highlight the problematic issue of incorrectly accusing someone due to a lack of solid evidence: “It could be someone else in the family or someone living in a shared house. It could even be someone stealing wi-fi. We are not making any form of accusation.”

Virgin Media has also stated that it will not hand over the personal details of anyone accused by the BPI “under any circumstances”. This is a good start by Virgin and all credit to them for taking this stance but the reality is that Virgin hands over its subscriber’s details in the blink of an eye when faced with a court order to do so. We know for a fact that they hand over the details of petty file-sharers to the likes of lawyers Davenport Lyons for the alleged sharing of one cheap game costing little more than a single album. However, the BPI has said in the past that it doesn’t want to start taking legal action against individuals.
http://torrentfreak.com/virgin-media...harers-080703/





Control on Internet Users Pushed with the New Telecom Package

An appeal from three European NGOs - La Quadrature du Net, netzpolitik.org and EDRi-member Open Rights Group - reveal some disturbing MEPs amendments to the draft directives to reform the EU framework on electronic communications (telecom package).

The review of the telecom package was merely focusing on telecom-related issues (except for discussions on the ePrivacy directive, which is the subject of another EDRi-gram article in the current issue), but some of the 800 amendments on the 5 directives that form the current package might go further than just establishing the rules for a functioning electronic communications market and could endanger the principle of the neutrality of the Internet.

Some amendments will transform the ISPs from technical intermediaries that have no obligation to prior surveillance of contents into law enforcers. Therefore they might be asked to block their users from lawful activities in the interests of their security or to work with content producers and rights-holders' organizations, including sending intimidating messages, with no judicial approval. The amendment meant to support Intellectual Property Rights owners could open the door to censorship and might mean in practice the loss on privacy on the Internet.

"The politicians who engage in these summer manoeuvres dishonour Europe and their mandate. They rely on the fact that nobody watches them few days before Parliamentary holiday, to divert the Telecom package from its primary objectives of consumer protection. They pave the way for the monitoring and filtering of the Internet by private companies, exceptional courts and Orwellian technical measures. It is inconceivable for freedom but also for European economic development. We call on all MEPs to oppose what they have already rejected." said Christophe Espern, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net).

The appeal of the three organisations comes just before the 7 July vote in the ITRE and IMCO Committees of the European Parliament on the suggested amendments to the telecom package. The plenary discussion and vote for the whole package will take place in September, but the vote in the two committees could have a significant impact on the final result.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6...ckage-internet





Write to Your MEP: Say No to “3 Strikes” Through the Backdoor
Posted by Gavin

Could Europe be drafting a new law to disconnect suspected filesharers from the internet? MEPs have already signalled their condemnation of this approach. But last-minute amendments to telecommunications legislation could bring the so-called “3 strikes” approach in by the backdoor. If you want your MEP to stick to their guns on 3 strikes, write to them today to voice your concerns.

Back in February, we reported that the UK Government was considering a law to ban illicit filesharers from the ‘net. A promised consultation on proposed legislation is yet to materialise (although we’re still hoping it will appear before the Summer recess). Meanwhile, pressure on ISPs and rightsholders to come to a voluntary arrangement has had some effect, with both Virgin and BT recently starting to “educate” those customers they believe are infringing copyright in their use of p2p networks.

As we pointed out at the time, neither the voluntary nor the statutory approach will put a penny in artists’ pockets unless accompanied by viable legal alternatives that deliver consumers what they want. A recent survey commissioned by British Music Rights indicates that 80% of those currently downloading music would pay for so-called “legal p2p” - properly licensed and competitive filesharing alternatives. Rumours that industry is close to developing such an offer are yet to be confirmed. But without it, any enforcement move is likely only to drive illicit filesharing further underground.

Over in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy (who also took over the European presidency yesterday) has put his weight behind legislation proposed by the Olivennes report. The bill, which has been delayed until the Autumn, will mandate termination of internet connections. It goes without saying that it is the subject of much controversy across the Channel.

La Quadrature du Net - a French pressure group - have been actively campaigning on the issue. They’re also tracking the progress of the Telecoms Package, a review of European telecoms law currently in the European Parliament. Ordinarily this bill would deal with network infrastructure, universal service and other purely telecoms matters.

But as La Quadrature du Net announced yesterday:

“One week before a key vote in the reform of European law on electronic communications (”Telecom Package”), La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) denounces a series of amendments aimed at closing the open architecture of the Internet for more control and surveillance of users..

…this set of amendments creates the unprecedented mechanism known as graduated response in European law; judicial authority and law courts are vacated in favour of private actors and “technical measures” of surveillance and filtering. According to rules set forth by administrative authorities and rights holders, intermediaries will be forced to cooperate in monitoring and filtering their subscribers, or they will be exposed to administrative sanctions”

If you want to voice your concerns about 3 strikes legislation brought in through the backdoor in Brussels, you have until 7 July, the date of the vote in IMCO and ITRE committees, to contact your MEP and inform them that the “Telecoms Package” amendments could bring in disproportionate and ineffective law.

You can find details of your MEPs here. Suggestions for topics to raise in your letters are here and analysis and commented amendments with other resources about the Telecoms Package are also available.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/...-the-backdoor/





Wireless Company to Allow Other Carriers' Devices
Peter Svensson

MetroPCS Communications Inc. has become the largest U.S. wireless carrier to say it will let customers bring cell phones from other carriers, which it will then reprogram for use on its own network.

This week's announcement by the Dallas-based regional carrier is one of a series of moves in the industry that amount to a gradual opening of the U.S. wireless market, giving consumers more choice over what phones to use on what networks.

Carriers generally sell phones that are locked to their own service. This protects their business model, which is based on subsidizing the cost of the phone by hundreds of dollars, then making that money back on monthly service fees.

MetroPCS's move threatens these traditional rules. It allows customers with certain models of phones from Sprint Nextel Corp., Verizon Wireless, Alltel Corp. and a few other carriers to bring their phones to MetroPCS stores, where they will be reprogrammed.

Phones from AT&T Inc., T-Mobile USA or other providers that use a technology known as Global System for Mobile, or GSM, won't work on MetroPCS's network. It is already possible to bring an unlocked GSM phone from, say, T-Mobile, and have it activated on AT&T's network, but AT&T won't unlock the phone for you.

A smaller carrier, Pocket Communications, reprograms phones for customers. Its network covers the San Antonio area.

MetroPCS's network covers 14 large cities, including Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. It had 4.4 million subscribers at the end of March.

Its network uses the Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, technology. CDMA carriers maintain databases of the serial numbers carried by phones that they have sold, and except for Pocket and now MetroPCS, won't activate phones with other numbers. They generally say that they won't let any phones on to their networks without putting that model through rigorous testing. This applies even to phones that are functionally identical to their own, like the many slight variations of the Motorola Razr sold by different carriers.

Consumer groups have been fighting the locking of phones and exclusive agreements between manufacturers and carriers that, for instance, restrict Apple Inc.'s iPhone to AT&T Inc.'s network.

Apart from locking the phones, carriers protect their business model by signing customers to two-year contracts, and charging an early termination fee if they break it. MetroPCS's move does not change that fact, but major carriers have been reducing their early termination fees this year, prorating them depending on how long a contract has been in force.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080627/...VI.IwAFBCs0NUE





Massachusetts is the Most Tech Savvy State, Again

Here in Silicon Valley, we pride ourselves in our tech-savviness, but it turns out Massachusetts is once again the top tech-savvy state in the nation beating out California, Texas, and New York. The Milken Institute's 2008 State Technology and Science Index looked at five major areas before compiling the list below, which included the state's ability to attract funding, skilled tech workers, and new businesses. Here is the list of the top ten most tech savvy states:

1) Massachusetts
2) Maryland
3) Colorado
4) California
5) Washington
6) Virginia
7) Connecticut
8) Utah
9) New Hampshire
10) Rhode Island

Massachusetts remains the "gold standard" for other states thanks to its institutions, cutting-edge firms, and ability to retain a skilled work force. Living up to its reputation, the state just passed a $1 billion life sciences bill to invest in high-tech infrastructure over the next 10 years, which puts it in the best position to achieve high economic growth from its technology assets, according to the Milken Institute study.

California, on the other hand, slipped from second place to fourth place, while Maryland jumped from fourth place to second place. Some of the reasons California is slipping, according to the report, is the state's faltering efforts to capture federal funding and failure to build a skilled work force.

On the bright side, a different report from AeA says New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas currently have the highest number of high-tech jobs. New York leads the pack with a total of 316,500 high-tech jobs, and Silicon Valley with 225,300. There may be more high-tech jobs in New York, but high-tech workers there get paid an average of $91,451, while Silicon Valley tech workers average the highest pay at $144,800.
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/hughes/32599





Nuclear Explosions Could be Key to Spotting Fake Paintings
CBC News

A Russian curator says she's developed a foolproof method of determining whether a piece of art was made before or after 1945 as a way of sniffing out fake paintings.

Elena Basner told The Art Newspaper that she has developed a method in collaboration with Russian scientists based on the idea that man-made nuclear explosions from the 1940s to 1960s released isotopes into the environment.

These isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, permeated the earth's oil and plant life and ended up in works of art made in the post-war era because natural oils, usually flax/linseed, were used as binding agents for paints.

"I wanted to find something ironclad … that couldn't be disputed, and this led me to approach scientists for ideas," said Basner.
More than 500 nuclear explosions since 1945

Basner, who now works as a consultant, says she developed the testing technique while working as curator of 20th-century art at the Russian Museum from 1978 to 2003.

"The number of avant-garde fakes out there today is unbelievable, probably more than the number of genuine works," says Basner.

She says she needed to authenticate Russian works dating from 1900 to 1930 and that's what led her and the scientists to examine the nuclear isotope idea.

The first nuclear explosion took place in July 1945 in the U.S. and from then until 1963 more than 500 were carried out by various countries.

Flax fields absorbed the isotopes from nuclear fallout, resulting in traces of the isotopes in natural oils used in paints.

At the very least works known to have been produced prior to 1945 can be authenticated because they won't have any traces of the two isotopes.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/sto...ings-fake.html





Firefox Users Most Secure on Internet, Study Reveals
Stefanie Hoffman

Mozilla Firefox fans might rest a little easier these days after a study released Tuesday revealed that its users are most secure on the Internet.

The study "Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the "insecurity iceberg," was a collaborative effort conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM (NYSE:IBM) Internet Security Services. The research offers a comprehensive analysis of Web browsers, particularly in the area of security. The study's aim was to analyze Web browser preference and behavior for people using the Internet.

Altogether, the study found that less than 60 percent (59.1) of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers. Failure update browsers exponentially increases the chance for remote attacks executed by hackers, the study found.

In recent years, the Web has become the vehicle for malicious attacks, which have enabled cyber criminals to execute code that shuts down a system or takes complete control of a user's PC. Unlike years past, hackers now are creating new malware specifically to gain access to user's personal and financial information, with the aim of committing identity theft or selling it on the black market.

The study concluded that of the hundreds of millions of users accessing Web browsers worldwide, more than 600 million were at risk of attack for not running the latest, most secure Web browser version as of June 2008.

Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox's single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said.

The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available.

Meanwhile, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)'s Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users -- 47.6 percent -- were running the most secure browser version during the same time period.

Opera ranked slightly higher than IE, with about 56 percent of users who said that they have applied the latest version of the browser to their computer. Of the four browsers surveyed, Opera ranked last in popularity, with a just 11 million users that comprise .8 percent of the marketshare.

Altogether, Safari has captured only 48 million users, equaling about 3.4 percent of the market -- a user base far surpassed by Firefox's 227 million and IE's 1.1 billion, encompassing 16.1 percent and 78.3 percent of the market respectively.

Researchers initiated the study to highlight the growing global problem of Web exploitation and the increasing number of users who log onto various Web browsers.

Among other things, the researchers aimed to address the growing number of threats launched by attackers in recent years that exploit Web vulnerabilities with stealthy and silent attacks for financial gain.

"Profit motivated cyber"criminals have rapidly adopted Web browser exploitation as a key vector for malware installation," researchers state. "As popularity of this attack vector has blossomed, there have been frequent reports of hundreds of thousands of Web sites succumbing to mass-defacement, where the defacement often consists of an embedded iFrame. These iFrames typically include content from servers hosting malicious JavaScript code designed to exploit vulnerabilities accessible through the user's Web browser and subsequently to initiate a drive-by malware download."

The researchers also stated that attacks have become so sophisticated that they are able to spread malicious code to numerous users by infecting "legitimate" high trafficked and popular Web sites, underscoring the need for users to apply the latest browser patches and updates when surfing the Internet.

Researchers also advised that in light of a more dangerous security landscape and the barrage of Trojans, botnets and other malware, users need to use the most recent version of the installed software and immediately apply the latest patches as they become available.

"With today's hostile Intent and drive-by download attack vectors, failure to apply patches promptly or missing them entirely is a recipe for disaster; exposing the host to infection and possibly subsequent data disclosure or loss," they said.
http://www.crn.com/security/208802248





Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software
David Kravets

A 19-year-old hacker is agreeing to plead guilty to masterminding a botnet to obtain thousands of victims' personal data in an anonymous scheme a federal cybercrime official described Friday as the nation's first such attack in which peer-to-peer software was the "infection point."

The defendant, Jason Michael Milmont, launched the assault last year from his Cheyenne, Wyoming residence, and anonymously controlled as many as 15,000 computers at a time, said Wesley L. Hsu, chief of the Cyber and Intellectual Property Crimes Section for federal prosecutors in Los Angeles. As part of the deal, in which a judge could hand him up to five years imprisonment, Milmont has agreed to pay $73,000 in restitution, the government said.

"It's the first time that we know of that peer-to-peer software was used as the infection point," Hsu said in an interview with Threat Level.

The malware infection became commonly known as the Nugache Worm, which embedded itself in the Windows OS.

According to the plea agreement, the worm was installed in various ways. The first incarnation of infections came from a website Milmont created that offered free installation of Limewire, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing program. He embedded that software downloads with his malware.

"Any time you download something from the internet, it's possible somebody has appended software to it that isn't supposed to be there," Hsu said.

Hsu said Milmont is expected soon to enter his plea to one count of unlawfully accessing computers in a Wyoming federal court. Milmont's attorney, Robert R. Rose, did not immediately respond for comment.

Another incarnation of the infection included using AOL instant messenger as the delivery point of his malware. The malware would spread itself via chats, with a message asking a buddy to view a photo on a website such as MySpace.com or Photobucket.com. The user would be taken to a spoofed website, and would become infected with the Nugache Worm, the plea deal said.

"All of the data stored on the compromised machines would be available to defendant, including, but not limited to, credit card information," according to the plea agreement.

The agreement also said that he took control of financial accounts of his victims.

"After obtaining this information from a victim's computer, defendant used his/her financial institution's online user name and password to access the account online," the agreement said. "Defendant then changed the victim's e-mail address to a similar e-mail that he controlled and the mailing address to an address in Cheyenne, Wyoming, typically an address that was listed for sale."

He would also change the telephone number on a victim's account to a number he controlled using Skype. "He paid for this service by using the credit card numbers harvested from his botnet," the plea agreement said.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-launches.html





Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers
Jeffrey R. Young

College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy.

One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.

"There are very few scanned textbooks in circulation, and that's what we're here to change," says a welcome message on the Textbook Torrents site. "Chances are you have some textbooks sitting around, so pick up a scanner and start scanning it!"

In response to such sites, the Association of American Publishers hired an outside law firm this summer to scour the Web for illegally offered textbooks. Already the firm has identified thousands of instances of book piracy and has sent legal notices to Web sites hosting the files demanding that they be removed. The group is looking for all types of books, though trade books and textbooks, which generally have high price tags, are the most frequent books offered on peer-to-peer sites.

"In any given two-week period we found from 60,000 files all the way up to 250,000 files," said Edward McCoyd, director of digital policy for the publishing association. Mr. McCoyd, who leads the Online Piracy Working Group, said the group has been performing periodic scans for piracy since 2001, and that it has seen a gradual increase in the number of titles available.

"It is troubling that there is a culture of infringement out there," said Mr. McCoyd. But as more publishers offer books online and readers become more familiar with digital formats, he added, more people are likely to illegally download them.

No Action Against Students

So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. "We've just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online," he said.

Albert N. Greco. a professor of marketing at Fordham University's Graduate School of Business who studies academic publishing, said that publishers expressed even greater concerns in private about piracy than they did in their public comments. "We knew that this would happen, and it has happened very rapidly," he said. "It's not going to go away—it's only going to get worse."

Individual academic publishers have also taken steps to stop book pirates. Allan A. Ryan, director of intellectual property for Harvard Business Publishing, said that the press had assigned one employee to spend much of his time looking for unauthorized book copies online. He sends out about 100 takedown requests per week. "We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content," he said.

One place their titles keep popping up is Scribd, a document-sharing Web site that opened this year. The site's policies do not allow users to post copyrighted content without permission, but some people break the rules. Jason M. Bentley, community-development director and copyright agent for Scribd, said the company quickly complies with requests from copyright holders to take down pirated books. Scribd often gets takedown requests from MIT Press, Oxford University Press, and Harvard University Press, he said. He noted that the company gets at least one takedown request each day.

The leaders of the Textbook Torrents Web site could not be reached for comment. But on the site's forums, where users list which books they would like to see uploaded, people list various reasons for seeking pirated books. "I really need this book for my report," said one anonymous user. "I looked for the Volume 2 in the bookstores around us, but it's out of stock."

Some users request the teacher's manuals for textbooks, and in some cases, the site lists those for trade as well.

Identifying Piracy

Peter Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University, edited the sixth edition of The Encyclopedia of World History, which is listed on the site. He said he had never heard of Textbook Torrents, but he was aware that such sites existed.

"I don't feel deep anger," he said. "It probably has economic impact on me, but I can't say I feel desperate about this." He said the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, would probably be more concerned than he is because it has a greater financial stake in the book.

Which it is. "We think piracy is a significant problem and a growing problem for the textbook industry," said William A. Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy for Cengage Learning, which recently acquired Houghton Mifflin's college division. The company also hires an outside firm to hunt for instances of book piracy, and investigators find between 250 and 800 each month.

Mr. Greco, the scholar studying academic publishing, praised the publishers for taking action against online book pirates and for working to make digital copies of their books available for sale so that students who want such versions have a legal alternative. But he said that going after pirated copies one at a time will not stop the practice. "You close down three people, and four more open up—it's like roaches," he said.

He said that if the problem worsens, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, such as releasing a new version of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easily—such as altering the numbers in math problems.

"They may compelled to," he said, "in order to stay one step ahead of the pirates."
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/07/3623n.htm





Coming Soon: Pirate TV Show
Ernesto

Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of the popular TV-shows ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lost’ and Matt Mason, author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’, are working on a new TV-show about piracy. The show will be based on Matt’s book, and will show how important pirates are for today’s society.

Matt recently told us that he has been working on turning the book into a TV show with Jesse Alexander, the Executive Producer of the popular TV-shows Heroes and Lost. “It all happened a few months back when I was in LA talking to Disney, Matt told TorrentFreak, adding “We are trying to get this made into a 13-part TV show.”

The upcoming show aims to educate people about the history of piracy, and how it shapes our future. Pirates are innovators, they signal market problems and lead the way to new business models. Nevertheless, they are often tagged as thieves. In many cases, piracy is helping old businesses to innovate, and it helps to create new legitimate market spaces.

Here’s a teaser.

You can find Matt’s articles on TorrentFreak here. Also, his book “The Pirate’s Dilemma” is now available as a free download, if you don’t want to pirate a copy.
http://torrentfreak.com/coming-soon-...v-show-080629/





Google and Creator of ‘Family Guy’ Strike a Deal
Brooks Barnes

Google is experimenting with a new method of distributing original material on the Web, and some Hollywood film financiers are betting millions that the company will succeed.

In September, Seth MacFarlane, creator of “Family Guy” on television, will unveil a carefully guarded new project called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.” Unlike “Family Guy,” which is broadcast on Fox, this animation series will appear exclusively on the Internet.

The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a “Cavalcade” video clip.

Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be “preroll” ads, which ask viewers to sit through a TV-style commercial before getting to the video. Some advertisers may opt for a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video clip or a simple “brought to you by” note at the beginning.

Mr. MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, has created a stable of new characters to star in the series, which will be served up in 50 two-minute episodes.

In an interview, he described the installments as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.”

For a more substantial fee, Mr. MacFarlane has been working with advertisers to animate original commercials that will run with “Cavalcade.” Google and Mr. MacFarlane would not reveal any of the advertisers, but the two said that several deals are among the largest ever landed by AdSense, which went into business in 2003.

Google, which calls the distribution service the Google Content Network, until now has only dabbled in distributing original content. In May, it announced a deal with The Washington Post to distribute real estate listings from the newspaper’s Web site in a similar manner.

But the partnership with Mr. MacFarlane represents a bold step into the distribution business, one that, if successful, will surely send shock waves through the entertainment business. “Cavalcade” is not only from a high-profile Hollywood talent, but also carries a multimillion-dollar production price tag, by far the largest amount spent on original Internet content to date.

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.

Until now, budgets for original Webisodes have peaked in the low six figures because creators have not been able to figure out a business model that allows for higher spending. Either advertisers have not wanted to pay, or it has been too difficult to attract a large enough audience to support the cost of television or movie-quality work.

But Media Rights Capital, a boutique production company that has the ability to invest about $400 million a year in movies, television and Internet episodes, thinks it has figured out a sustainable business model with the Google Content Network. Every time someone clicks on one of the syndicated videos, the associated advertiser pays a fee, with shares going to Mr. MacFarlane, Media Rights, Google and the Web site that generated the click.

“We believe the revenue could be formidable,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. “What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at.”

Media Rights sells the advertising inventory. Asif Satchu, the company’s co-chief executive, would not reveal how much advertisers were being asked to pay, except to say that it is “significantly higher” than if they were placing the same ad via AdSense.
Hollywood’s powerful Endeavor talent agency helped shepherd Mr. MacFarlane through the negotiations, which started during a recent gap in the animator’s contract with 20th Century Fox. Mr. MacFarlane said he wanted to take a stab at an original Internet program because he was feeling constrained by the “taste police,” a k a the Federal Communications Commission.

Sitting in his office wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, Mr. MacFarlane described feeling stifled as a comedian by an F.C.C. crackdown in recent years on what it views as unsuitable language and situations on television. Mr. MacFarlane said he believed that the public’s appetite for raunchy humor and coarse language was only expanding and that television networks like Fox were having a harder time capturing viewers in part because they had to tread carefully or risk fines.

“I just felt I could be a lot more honest on the Internet,” he said.

Mr. MacFarlane started the project on the assumption that he would do 20-minute television episodes and break them into segments to dole out online.

“But that seemed a little odd and a little pointless,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you just release the whole thing at once?”

Google executives also provided him with stacks of data showing how people interact with Web video, including how long the average user will watch before clicking on something new. That prompted Mr. MacFarlane to scrap his original project and rebuild the idea from the ground up.

Each installment is different, but a typical one is titled “Mad Cow Disease.” The clip, which is 38 seconds long, opens with a news anchor reporting on an outbreak of mad cow disease in a dry fashion, detailing the debilitating effects of eating tainted beef. The clip cuts to a shocked male and female cow seated in a tidy kitchen with giant steaks on their plates.

For Mr. MacFarlane, 34, the venture is more than just adding to his already sizable fortune. (His new multiyear contract with Fox, signed this spring, is valued at nine figures.) One goal is to use the venture as a testing ground for new material and a way to ignite attention. At the very least, “Cavalcade” will become a DVD, but the hope is that part of the series will click with audiences and perhaps lead to television or even animated movie projects.

Indeed, in a watch-what-you-want, when-you-want world, the standard processes of rolling out new television programs are breaking down. Even a decade ago, putting a new show on a network schedule would assure that it would be exposed to most of the country; people would either respond or they wouldn’t. Today, with television ratings in particular dwindling, creators like Mr. MacFarlane have to find new ways to introduce new material.

Nobody knows how content can catch fire in unexpected ways more than Mr. MacFarlane. In 2002, “Family Guy” was canceled for poor ratings after running for three seasons. But the irreverent series continued to make new fans through DVD sales. In 2005, Fox reversed itself, citing strong DVD sales, and “Family Guy” has gone on to be one of the biggest comedy hits on television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/bu.../30google.html





A Movie on Your TV at Home, Before You Can Rent It
Tim Arango

The very future of how we consume media rests on the movie star shoulders of Will Smith. That is Hollywood hyperbole — but it contains a speck of truth.

In an industry first, Sony Pictures’ hoped-for blockbuster “Hancock,” starring Mr. Smith as a bungling superhero, hits theaters on Wednesday and will be available — after its theater run but before release on DVD — over the Internet, directly to viewers’ television sets. That is, if they own a Sony Bravia TV with a Web connection.

The announcement is significant in what it means for the future of movie watching, and for the future of Sony itself.

On Thursday in Tokyo, Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony, mentioned the “Hancock” experiment as he ticked off the company’s growth strategy for a roomful of analysts. In doing so, Mr. Stringer provided the movie-watching public with a rudimentary glimpse of the future: movies streamed over the Internet directly to televisions, bypassing the longtime purveyors of content to the living room, cable and satellite companies.

His presentation also provided a vivid example of how the vision of Sony’s founder, Akio Morita, of content and hardware co-mingling in profitable ways is possible, despite many past failures.

“In some ways, it vanishes the memory of the failures of the Sony Walkman,” Mr. Stringer said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Since he ascended to his job in 2005, Mr. Stringer has focused on bringing together Sony’s disparate business units. “This is something that would have been unheard of five to six years ago,” he said of cooperation by Sony’s movie studio and its electronics division on “Hancock.”

Sony lost a first battle to Apple and its iPod in the drive to create a digital music device for the masses, despite the predigital age dominance of the Walkman and Sony’s ownership of one of the largest music companies in the world.

With its Internet-connected televisions and content from its Hollywood studio, Sony is aiming to avenge its loss to Apple in music by being a dominant player in home entertainment of the future. (Apple, incidentally, also has designs on home entertainment with its Apple TV device.)“One of the most interesting things about this is putting the television front and center in the living room,” Mr. Stringer said, as opposed to having a computer or a hand-held device as the center for watching streamed video.

Robert S. Wiesenthal, who is executive vice president and chief financial officer for the Sony Corporation of America and oversees corporate development for Sony, put it this way: “The Internet is not only a great place to reach Web sites, but it’s also a great way to deliver conventional content. And at the end of the day, it’s about getting entertainment back into the living room.”

Now, consumers can download movies to their computers — an often cumbersome process but one that should improve as broadband speeds increase — and to Sony PlayStations; the “Hancock” deal with televisions is a starting point to a future in which these all work together seamlessly in a home entertainment network.

“Ultimately, when all these devices are connected, you’ll be able to quite easily manage how you watch movies,” Mr. Stringer said.

Sony executives are adamant that the “Hancock” experiment is just that — an experiment that is as much about showcasing the potential of Sony’s Internet-enabled Bravia television sets as it is about the future possibilities of movie watching. It is not, they said, a push to change Hollywood’s carefully calibrated windows for the various outlets in which a film is released: theater, DVD and pay television.

In November, after “Hancock” has had its run in theaters, it will be available for a fee with the click of a remote control for consumers who own Internet-equipped Sony Bravia televisions. The Bravia Internet link adds $299 to the cost of the television.
In a research note last week, a Pali research analyst, Richard Greenfield, wrote, “While the content offered is only from Sony today, we expect other studios to follow if consumer interest becomes apparent.”

The experiment with “Hancock” suggests an obvious threat to the cable industry’s offerings, such as video on demand. But cable companies, far from blind to the possibility of other media companies’ leapfrogging them and serving consumers directly, are working on their own devices that will allow Internet video to be streamed to televisions.

In May, for instance, Glenn A. Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said at an industry conference that his company was close to offering equipment that would allow consumers to receive Web content on their televisions through cable boxes.

The cable industry still has plenty of growth from its on-demand and cable services, said D’Arcy F. Rudnay, senior vice president for Comcast.

“Comcast and much of the cable industry began providing movies and TV programming on demand years ago, because consumers want to watch movies and TV programming when and where they want it,” she said.

And Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures, assured the studio’s distribution and retail partners — cable companies like Comcast and Wal-Mart, which wants to protect its dominance over home entertainment in the DVD format — that they need not fear the experiment.

“More than anything else, what this demonstrates is how the electronics company and the movie studio are working together in the ways they were meant to,” Mr. Lynton said.

Sony recently came out the winner of Hollywood’s war over the format for high-definition DVD, as its Blu-ray became the standard. Studios have long relied on DVD sales as an important profit engine, and the sale of Blu-ray discs is still an early, unproven business. So the challenge every studio faces is how to be innovative without killing off existing businesses, and for Hollywood that means DVD sales.

“I think you have to chalk everything studios are doing right now with digital delivery to be experimentation,” said Stephen Prough, a founder of Salem Partners, a Los Angeles-based investment bank with a focus on entertainment. “No one knows what the business model will be.

“You do have to start with the premise that studios make the most money in the DVD window. And if they get enhanced pricing with Blu-ray, they will make even more money.”

Mr. Stringer said that Sony is careful to evaluate whether the digital delivery of content will have an impact on DVD sales.

“We don’t do anything without understanding the consequences for that,” Mr. Stringer said. “We don’t want to do anything to hinder Blu-ray.”

But controlling the march of technology has often proved elusive for media executives. (See: music industry, 1999 to present.)

“Mostly,” Mr. Stringer said, “this is us saying we want to be ahead of the curve rather than behind the curve.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/te...gy/30sony.html





The Internet is the New Sweatshop
N’Gai Croal

When an executive wants to sound humane during a public address to the staff, he or she will trot out the well-worn phrase, "Our most valuable assets leave the building at the end of the day." Clichés are generally true, but this one may not be, thanks to the growth of user-generated content on the Internet. Whether they're creating content for sites like YouTube and Wikipedia, viewer-submitted news services like CNN's iReport or videogames like Spore and LittleBigPlanet, today's most valuable employees will most likely never set foot inside the building—or collect a paycheck. They may be teenagers posting videos of themselves dancing like Soulja Boy, programmers messing around with Twitter's tools to create cool new applications or aspiring game developers who want to create the next big thing. But what they all have in common is a somewhat surprising willingness to work for little more than peer recognition and a long shot at 15 seconds of fame.

Yet is it really a sweatshop if none of the workers is complaining? They're certainly not complaining about Spore—unless it's about how long it's taken videogame creator Will Wright and his team to complete the universe-simulation game, which finally ships in September. Two weeks ago, Wright's employers at Electronic Arts released Spore's Creature Creator as a prelaunch promotion; seven days later, more than 1 million creatures had been created by users and uploaded to the "Sporepedia" for others to enjoy. "We wanted to give the players high diversity, as well as a huge universe to explore," Wright says. "The only way we could possibly achieve this was to, in essence, 'outsource' the majority of our content production to the players." Similarly, Sony's struggling Playstation 3 console is expected to get a boost later this year with the release of LittleBigPlanet, which lets users create their own games using a powerful but playful set of tools. "YouTube doesn't help you to make a video—it just provides a means of distribution," says LittleBigPlanet technical director Alex Evans. "Our particular take on user-generated content focuses on making the act of creation fun."

Whether these 21st-century worker bees can be said to be having fun (is it really entertaining to update a Wikipedia entry?), there's no question that their moonlighting has value even if they're not being compensated. A YouTube spokesperson informed us that 10 hours of video are uploaded to the service every minute, which she says is the equivalent of 57,000 full-length movies every week. The comedy site FunnyOrDie may have broken into the national consciousness with Will Ferrell's hilarious video "The Landlord," but it's the cumulative efforts of all the John Q. Comics that will determine the start-up's future prospects. We asked FunnyOrDie CEO Dick Glover to calculate what his site's estimated 10,000 hours of video would cost if professionally produced; at the "inexpensive" industry rate of $400,000 per half hour, it comes out to $8 billion.

Glover quickly points out that this number is somewhat meaningless because of the vast difference in production values between an Internet short and a low-end Hollywood shoot. Still, it shows the kind of scale he and his colleagues have been able to achieve in a little more than a year. Now, there are some enterprises built around user-generated content that do provide compensation to those whose work is published, like the $100 and yearlong subscriptions offered by the magazines JPG (photography) and Everywhere (travel). But as long as so many of you are willing to work for free, the proprietors of these virtual sweatshops will happily accept
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143740





Don’t Forget the Middle People
Brooks Barnes

From his break in 1992 playing Bank Nerd No. 2 in the sitcom “Married With Children,” to his supporting role on the HBO hit “Six Feet Under,” to a part in last year’s “Spider-Man 3,” Tim Maculan has navigated Hollywood more successfully than most actors.

Lately, though, Mr. Maculan, 45, says the actor’s place in the entertainment industry’s economic food chain has changed. And for middle-income working actors like him, it’s not for the better. “It’s not about networks being cheap or evil,” Mr. Maculan said. “It’s just that the industry is dramatically different than it was even five years ago.”

Mr. Maculan, a sarcastic character actor with a wicked grin, rattles off a list of industry shifts that have made it harder for middle-income actors to earn a living. Reality shows have crowded out scripted programs, comedies in particular. The studios are making fewer movies, and the ones they are making are less actor-driven. Networks like NBC have virtually stopped filming pilot episodes, meaning they are hiring fewer actors. Voice-over work, once a staple for less-known actors, is outsourced to other countries or given to A-list stars.

The Screen Actors Guild, now embroiled in negotiations with film and television producers over a new contract, has made the plight of the middle-income actor the centerpiece of its campaign for more lucrative terms. The guild is seeking increases for everything from reimbursement rates for car mileage to continuing payments called residuals. Guild leaders say the economic situation is so severe that they have no choice but to take a militant stance at the negotiating table.

The guild’s contract, which covers about 122,000 actor members, expires at midnight Monday. Because the two sides remain far apart on most issues, Hollywood has been on edge about a strike, taking care, for instance, to wrap production on films so costly location shoots are not drawn out.

But no strike can take place until about Aug. 1 at the earliest. Guild leaders have yet to call for a strike authorization vote, which must be put before the entire membership and approved by 75 percent of voters. Carrie White, a spokeswoman for the Screen Actors Guild, said on Friday that the process would take up to three weeks.

The guild has strongly indicated that it will not consider calling for a strike vote until July 8, when a second actors’ union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, releases the results of a ratification vote on its new contract. That union reached an accord with studios and networks in May and shares about 44,000 members with the Screen Actors Guild.

“Any talk about a strike or a management lockout at this point is simply a distraction,” Alan Rosenberg, the president of the guild, said in a statement Sunday. He added that guild negotiators have been “coming to the bargaining table every day in good faith.”

The two unions have been sparring in recent weeks, with each side lining up marquee stars to push its own agenda.

Aftra, the smaller of the two, wants members to ratify its deal and move on; SAG thinks the rival union negotiated a bad deal, particularly on issues of digital media, and wants to keep fighting for a better one. It worries that its leverage at the bargaining table will evaporate if Aftra members approve their contract by a solid margin.

Like most Hollywood labor organizations, SAG bears little resemblance to unions as most Americans know them.

Most unions represent workers with wallets of similar size, but SAG is a hodgepodge of wildly varying careers. On one extreme, SAG represents stars like Will Smith, who will take home well over $20 million from his coming film “Hancock” once all the receipts are counted. The bulk of its members, about two-thirds, according to some estimates, make less than $1,000 a year from acting, either because they can find no work or because they have moved on to other careers but kept up their dues.

SAG said the average annual income for its membership was $52,000 a year. The guild said it could provide no other economic statistics about its membership, however.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that negotiates on behalf of studios, said its analysis of SAG membership showed that fewer than 4,000 of its members could be considered middle-income actors, that is, people making $25,000 to $100,000 from acting in a given year. Only 5 percent of SAG’s membership earns more than $75,000 a year, according to the alliance.

The alliance rejects the notion that a richer contract is necessary to offset changes in the industry that make life harder for actors. Cast costs rose at more than twice the rate of overall production costs between the 2000-1 television season and the 2007-8 season, according to alliance statistics. Total cast costs for television rose 78.4 percent during that period, compared with a 33.6 percent increase in overall production costs.

“Making a living as an actor is ultimately a function of how often someone works, and that can’t be guaranteed by the minimum terms that are set by the SAG contract,” said Jesse Hiestand, an alliance spokesman. “Our offer to SAG contains a number of increases that will benefit actors that do work, especially guest stars.”

He added, “SAG’s negotiators should be working with us to keep scripted TV and the film business healthy so that it generates more work for their members.”

Sharon Sachs, an actress who has worked on hit shows like “Weeds” and “My Name Is Earl,” is all for keeping the business robust, but she believes there has been a shift in what studios consider healthy. Industry consolidation over the last decade has resulted in a more corporate Hollywood, one that Ms. Sachs and other actors complain puts a higher emphasis on immediate profit margins than on the industry’s long-term health.

“Before, the achievements you made artistically and financially were taken into consideration” when studios offered roles, Ms. Sachs said. “Now, it’s much more ‘take it or leave it.’ The business doesn’t flow on relationships like it used to.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/bu...rike.html?8dpc





Size didn’t matter

Judge Halts Release of Verne Troyer Sex Tape
AP

Verne Troyer successfully shut down the distribution of a sex tape featuring the "Austin Powers" actor and a former girlfriend _ for now.

The celebrity Web site TMZ posted a 25-second snipped of the video Wednesday, but pulled the clips down Friday evening after a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order requested by Troyer's attorneys.

The ruling also prevents any attempt by a porn distributor from taking orders for the full 50-minute video, and keeps TMZ from broadcasting any more clips. Troyer's lawsuit also seeks $20 million in damages and the return of all copies of the tape.

U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez wrote that Troyer's motion "demonstrated that he will suffer irreparable harm to his reputation" if the tape is distributed.

Troyer's attorney, Tracy Rane, said she, Troyer and others are "very pleased" by Gutierrez's ruling.

"Mr. Troyer is extremely distraught by the recent exploitation of his private life," Troyer's publicist, Melissa Bergera, wrote in a statement released to the AP.

TMZ did not return calls seeking comment on the case Friday. Although the video excerpt showing Troyer kissing his then-girlfriend was removed, another post describing the actor's lawsuit remained active.

Troyer, most famous for his role as "Mini Me" in two of the "Austin Powers" movies, claims the sex tape he made with a former girlfriend, which he never intended to become public, was stolen from his home some months ago.

TMZ reported that the video could fetch $100,000 from a porn distributor. SugarDVD wrote in a statement on its Web site that hoped to reach a deal with Troyer to distribute the full, 50-minute version. That statement was also removed by late Friday afternoon.

Kevin Blatt, a producer who promoted a sex tape featuring Paris Hilton, is also named as a defendant. Reached on his cell phone Friday, Blatt said he had not been served with the lawsuit yet, but called it "baseless."

Blatt said he never had the tape and only helped try to broker a deal.

The judge also indicated he may issue a more binding preliminary injunction in the case unless TMZ and other parties demonstrate why it should be released. His temporary order expires July 7.

Troyer is only the latest celebrity whose sex tape surfaced without consent, a phenomenon that began with the release of the infamous Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee honeymoon video. Since then, several others have surfaced, including Hilton, Colin Farrell, and rapper Ray-J with Kim Kardashian _ the daughter of a prominent attorney who parlayed at least some of her newfound notoriety into reality-star status.

In Anderson and Lee's case, the couple actually agreed to have the tape distributed, which resulted in a federal judge tossing out their lawsuit after the video was widely distributed on the Internet, in adult video stores, and even in hotel rooms.

Legal experts differed on Troyer's chances of long-term success keeping the video under wraps.

"I think distributing the tape is going to be very problematic," said Jack Lerner, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law.

"Any time you record something that has even a very small bit of original expression in it, that's going to be copyrighted," he said, noting that a videotape would apply.

David Gringas, a Phoenix attorney who specializes in Internet, intellectual property and First Amendment issues, wrote in an e-mail that the fact that Troyer hadn't yet applied for copyright protection could harm his case.

Troyer's suit states he intends to register the tape's copyright.

Gringas wrote that courts generally try to protect celebrities from "any conduct that's really offensive," but are also aware that the release of some tapes actually benefits the celebrity.

"However, when a private tape is truly stolen from the owner, most times courts will do all they can to protect the rights of the celebrity to control their name or image," Gringas wrote.

Both Lerner and Gringas said they doubted injunctions against TMZ would remain, since the site may argue it was simply reporting the news.

If past cases are any indication, Troyer's legal battle could be extremely swift or protracted: Anderson and Lee spent two years battling distributors over their sex tape; Kardashian's lawsuit was settled less than three months later for undisclosed terms.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062702613.html





EMI Sues Hi5, VideoEgg Over User-Uploaded Videos
Jennifer Guevin

Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it.

The music giant is suing social-networking site Hi5, video advertising start-up VideoEgg, and 10 unnamed defendants for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of those and hundreds of other pop throwbacks.

The lawsuit alleges that Hi5 users have uploaded and disseminated hundreds of music videos the company owns rights to. VideoEgg is on the hook because it's a former partner of Hi5, and those allegedly infringing videos were uploaded to its servers. (On May 31, VideoEgg stopped hosting videos uploaded by the public and refocused efforts on its ad network, prompting rumors that the company was on its way out.) The lawsuit doesn't say much of anything about who the 10 John Does are.

The companies had attempted to work out some kind of deal for more than a year, a source told TechCrunch, but those efforts eventually failed.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9979922-7.html





TV Viewers' Average Age Hits 50

Study: Median age outside the 18-49 demo
Michael Schneider

The broadcast networks have grown older than ever -- if they were a person, they wouldn't even be a part of TV's target demo anymore.

According to a study released by Magna Global's Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets' average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That's the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago -- and the first time the nets' median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo.

Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS -- the oldest-skewing network -- has remained fairly steady.

"The median ages of the broadcast networks keep rising, as traditional television is no longer necessarily the first screen for the younger set," Sternberg wrote.

For the just-completed 2007-08 TV season, CBS was oldest in live viewing with a median age of 54. ABC clocked in at 50, followed by NBC (49), Fox (44), CW (34) and Univision (34).

When live-plus-7 DVR viewing is factored in, the nets (except CW and Univision) drop by a year -- which still reps the oldest median age ever for the nets.

Sternberg notes that Fox and CW maintain median ages that are closer to the actual age of the population. The median age for U.S. households is 38.

Among ad-supported cable nets, the news nets (along with older-skewing Hallmark Channel, Golf Channel and GSN's daytime sked) sport the most gray, with Fox News Channel's daytime and primetime skeds the absolute oldest, clocking in with a median age above 65. Youngest nets are the daytime skeds for Noggin and Nickelodeon, with a median age under 10.

At ABC, youngest series was "Supernanny" (with a median age of 41), while oldest was "Women's Murder Club" (57). At CBS, youngest was "How I Met Your Mother," "Kid Nation" and the Tuesday edition of "Big Brother," tied at 45; oldest was "60 Minutes" (60). NBC's youngest show was "Scrubs" (34), and oldest was "Monk" (58).

At Fox, the youngest shows were "American Dad" and "Family Guy" (29), while the oldest was "Canterbury's Law" (55). At CW, "One Tree Hill" was youngest (26), while "Life Is Wild" was oldest (45).

Among latenight gabbers, "Tonight Show With Jay Leno" is oldest, with a median age of 54, followed by "Late Show With David Letterman" at 53. Interestingly, "Nightline" -- which should conceivably be older than those talkers, is younger, at 52. ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live," meanwhile, passed the 18-49 threshold for the first time, clocking in with a median of 50. "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" is getting closer at 46.
http://www.variety.com/VR1117988273.html





This Film Will Be Back, Strike or No Strike
Michael Cieply

The scorched earth and post-apocalyptic wreckage on a hillside just south of here carry a message for those who think the film industry has been closed down by the stalled negotiations between actors and producers: Hollywood will not give up next year’s pictures without a fight.

For all the talk of a de facto strike — a shutdown caused by studio reluctance to schedule production beyond the expiration at midnight on Monday of a contract with the Screen Actors Guild — a number of high-profile projects are simply pushing ahead.

None have done so more boldly than “Terminator Salvation.” This huge production has tantalized Albuquerque with glimpses of weird military hardware, a blast site marked by the shards of a 7-Eleven sign, and a lot full of battered helicopters, even while establishing this desert city as a manufacturing center for big-budget films.

As of Tuesday, actors’ guild leaders were reviewing a contract proposal that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents production companies, says is its “final” offer. (The producers and guild leaders were scheduled to go over the proposal’s details at a meeting on Wednesday.)

The guild has taken no strike vote. It was widely expected to delay that step until it learned the outcome of a vote by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, another actors’ union with overlapping membership, on a tentative agreement with terms that guild leaders have called inadequate. The vote results are expected to be released next week.

Set for release by Warner Brothers next Memorial Day weekend, the fourth installment in the “Terminator” series, this one directed by McG, began shooting in May. Principal photography is not set to wrap until well into August.

The movie’s cast, including the lead, Christian Bale, would be pulled off the set if actors chose to strike. (Arnold Schwarzenegger is not starring.) That would leave its independent producers — including the Halcyon Company and Intermedia Films — with half a movie and a tangled mess of equipment, sound stages, locations and crew members on hold.

Yet “Terminator Salvation,” like the “Da Vinci Code” sequel “Angels & Demons” from Sony Pictures and “Transformers 2” from Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks, has moved forward, largely because the film industry’s needs have overwhelmed any conviction that actors will actually walk out.

“Around April or May, they just started making plans,” Lisa Strout, director of the New Mexico Film Office, said this week during an interview at her Santa Fe headquarters. She was referring to a shift by studios, which earlier had promised to shut down rather than get into a game of chicken with the actors. “We’re expecting a very strong summer and fall,” Ms. Strout added.

Producers of “Terminator Salvation” referred calls to Warner representatives, who did not respond to queries.

A 100-day strike by the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West left studios scrambling earlier this year to patch holes in their movie schedules for 2009 and beyond. Warner came up short at least one potential blockbuster when troubles with the script and other matters delayed “Justice League of America,” a superhero film that was racing toward production when the writers struck last November.

That the “Terminator” sequel should be pushed into the breach — whether the actors’ guild had a contract this summer or not — owed much to a five-year campaign by Gov. Bill Richardson to build New Mexico’s film industry with unusually aggressive incentives.

His program offers a 25 percent rebate on virtually all film production expenditures in the state, without a cap. Thus the makers of “Terminator Salvation,” with a budget reported at more than $200 million, are expected to recoup tens of millions of dollars from a state government eager to showcase the production, New Mexico’s largest so far.

Recently, Lionsgate and the director Frank Miller shot “Will Eisner’s The Spirit” in Albuquerque. “No Country for Old Men,” which won last year’s best picture Oscar, was filmed near Las Vegas, N.M., and elsewhere in the state. Those and other projects have brought about $1.8 billion in entertainment-related spending to New Mexico in the last five years, according to Eric Witt, director of the governor’s entertainment development effort.

Though relatively small, with a population of about two million, New Mexico has managed to keep its budget on an even keel, thanks in part to oil-, gas- and coal-related income, which has grown as energy prices have risen.

Not incidentally, the state is expected to pick up part of the insurance costs of “Terminator Salvation.” Joe Finnegan, a vice president for entertainment insurance with Fireman’s Fund, and Steve Mangel, president of International Film Guarantors, a sister unit, declined to discuss their companies’ involvement with “Terminator Salvation.”

But in a phone interview last week, both said that industry practice was to charge higher premiums in the face of a potential strike that could leave expensive equipment sitting idle, or expose a star like Mr. Bale to possible hazards during an enforced hiatus. “That’s called underwriting,” Mr. Finnegan said.

“Terminator Salvation” has also been helped along by good will from Albuquerque Studios, a new production complex whose owners wooed the film away from Hungarian rivals shortly before a planned start in Budapest. Financed partly by union-backed entities in Chicago and Washington, D.C., the studio complex has promised to bend over backward to help should the film shut down — even if that means refusing to book small productions with SAG waivers while waiting for the labor troubles to end.

“Their walking away without a picture does me no good,” said Nick Smerigan, chief operating officer of Albuquerque Studios.

As SAG leaders were considering their response to the latest studio offer on Monday, it was business as usual on the “Terminator” sets at the complex. Carpenters hammered away on one. A truck hauling a mock-military vehicle purporting to be full of jet fuel pulled up outside another.

Even fliers from the nearby Kirtland Air Force Base have been in on the still uninterrupted movie fun.

“This show utilizes the military constantly,” said Jason Hariton, Albuquerque Studios’ vice president for operations. “I think those guys love the pyrotechnics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/movies/02term.html





NBC Offers Wide Online Access for Beijing Olympics
David Bauder

NBC is making more than 2,200 hours of live competition from Beijing available online, giving Olympic junkies more action than they could ever devour in a day.

After barely tipping its toe in the digital world during past Olympics, the network will dive into the deep end: live blogging, 3,000 hours of highlights on demand, daily recaps and analysis and even fantasy league gaming. That's in addition to the 1,400 hours of coverage planned on six television networks, more than the combined total of every previous Summer Olympics.

NBC's digital plans, however, have angered media outlets that worry the company is being heavy-handed in enforcing its rights to exclusive Olympic access.

The network launched NBCOlympics.com in 2000, but then it offered only still pictures and schedule information to drive viewers to its television coverage. A limited package of highlights from Athens was available in 2004, but those visiting the NBC site were required to enter a credit card number, even though they weren't charged, and that drove away traffic.

NBC quietly experimented by beaming live over the Internet the hockey gold-medal game from the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. The change in scope to what it is offering this year is staggering.

"We're excited about what we are putting into the fingertips of the Olympics fan," said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics. "We think it will generate a tremendous amount of engagement. We think it will generate more television viewership."

That's the danger for a TV network that offers so much online content: that people will turn off the TV in favor of the computer. Zenkel said there was worry in the past as NBC increased the level of events available on television that saturation would drive down viewership, but it turned out not to be the case.

The Associated Press has an agreement with NBC to distribute video links to the network's content online.

The computer coverage will also play a clear secondary role to TV. No events that are scheduled to be televised will be available online until after they are seen on TV, said Perkins Miller, senior vice president for digital media at NBC Sports.

The Web site will offer a full TV viewers' guide, track medal standings and give real-time results. It will have bios of more than 10,000 athletes, NBC said.

"It's not that we aren't nervous," Zenkel said. "It's not that we haven't taken an enormous amount on. But we're up to it and we're going to perform as we always have in the past."

There's been some brewing tension about the rights of other media organizations to cover the event; NBC paid $3.5 billion to the International Olympics Committee to televise the five Olympics through Beijing. Other TV networks have a limited window in which to show Olympics highlights, but no video of Olympic events is permitted to be shown on any Web site besides NBCOlympics.com.

NBC has allowed video of Olympic trials events to be shown on other Web sites, but each site is required to link to NBCOlympics.com. All of that video must come down Aug. 7, the day before the Beijing Games start.

That's going to limit the ability of Swimming World magazine, which has a heavy online component, to offer material to its users, said Brent Rutemiller, the magazine's publisher. He's also upset that limits have been placed on where other organizations can interview athletes, and that they were extended to coaches and officials.

Zenkel said NBC was being fair to other organizations.

"NBC is the organization that paid a very significant rights fee for the exclusive rights to the Olympics and for that, the exclusivity will be protected," he said. "But it's not to the detriment of the Olympics fan. In fact, it's to their benefit."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062801324.html





Fear and Loathing on a Documentary Screen
David Carr

HUNTER S. THOMPSON, who has been lionized in two feature films, served as the model for a running character in “Doonesbury” and is the subject of enough doctoral dissertations to build a bonfire, now has a documentary devoted to him, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” by Alex Gibney. Thompson, who always seemed to keep one drug-crazed eye on posterity behind his ever-present shades, would surely be pleased but not surprised.

But how to freshly document the life of a man who was his own Boswell, whose books and articles slavishly documented his own every tic, whoop and hallucination? A journalist who announced his arrival in American letters by riding with the Hells Angels and in the end choreographed a memorial from the grave that made the Burning Man bacchanal seem chaste?

Few writers have commodified narcissism so completely — his participatory style of journalism became its own genre and gives the film its title — but still we are invited to sit in the dark of the theater and have a flashback about his flashbacks. When the film opens on July 4, why will people, as Thompson would say, buy the ticket, take the ride?

The documentary by Mr. Gibney, who also made “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” does not attempt to work around Thompson’s endless self-consciousness but uses it as leverage instead. Produced by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and narrated by the actor Johnny Depp, “Gonzo” mirrors the subjectivity and immersion of the journalism Thompson and his trusty arsenal of psychoactive agents perpetrated in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Mr. Gibney eschews narrative conventions and switches point of view on a dime, creating a prism of interviews and episodes that gradually assembles into a compelling portrait.

In his long-running fever dream about America and its abundant pathologies, the bald man, with the tumbler of whiskey and head full of Schedule 1 narcotics, captured not only a mood — your government is not your friend — but many realities of civic life, most notably that if candidates were willing to do what it takes to get elected, they would probably arrive in office corrupted beyond hope.

Thompson, whose defects of character could occupy a separate ZIP code, was not just an original, he was also a patriot and a romantic. Working from the far reaches of the culture and often lucidity, Thompson, who died in 2005 at 67, changed the way that much of America thought about itself, in part because his version of journalism threw a grenade at the bland convention of formal balance and straight reporting.

“I would argue that Hunter and Tom Wolfe are the two most original voices to come out of journalism in the last century, and it’s no coincidence that they both worked for Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone,” Mr. Carter said. “No one else was willing to push it that way, to take those risks.” Mr. Gibney’s documentary plays appropriate tribute by restricting its gaze to the nascent Thompson of the ’60s and early ’70s. By the time most of America knew who Thompson was, he was pretty much washed up, having gradually been overtaken by his own legend, with steady assists from the bottle, the drugs and his coven of enablers.

August men line up to pay their respects in the documentary — Patrick J. Buchanan, George McGovern, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Hart and Timothy Crouse, the author of the campaign memoir “The Boys on the Bus” — as do the women he loved. Both his first wife, Sandy, and second wife, Anita, testify to his courage and courtliness, in between pointing out that he could be mean as a snake and far less predictable. He broke through by covering a biker gang from the inside — he “rode with the Angels,” as Mr. Wolfe puts it in the film — and took a serious beat-down on the way out. Journalism, as practiced by Thompson, was not something for sissies.

It’s clear in the documentary that what became a sort of pillar of the so-called New Journalism — nonfiction writing that borrowed from the techniques of fiction writing — began at the Kentucky Derby, when Mr. Thompson ignored the race he was there to cover. “We had come to see the real beasts perform,” those in the stands, Mr. Depp says, reading an article over Ralph Steadman’s illustrations.

In 1971 Thompson went looking for the American dream while on assignment, and rather presciently he did what many tourists do today: He went to Las Vegas. “Gonzo” borrows a lot of footage from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” the 1998 film that stars Mr. Depp as Raoul Duke, the nom de persona of Thompson in the book of the same name.

Mr. Depp developed a lasting affiliation with his subject, and narrates much of Mr. Gibney’s documentary — in one instance while holding a six-shooter at the ready — with a bit of the rumble that made Thompson’s speaking voice distinctive as well. (The film also uses some scenes from “Where the Buffalo Roam,” the biopic starring Bill Murray.)

Stylistically the documentary combs the extensive archive of tapes, both audio and video, some made by Thompson familiars who spent time with him in his bunker at Woody Creek, Colo. The rest of the film uses standard talking heads and narration drawn mostly from Mr. Thompson’s two most celebrated books, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.”

“I wanted to have some fun in the film, because nobody really appreciated me trying to put laughs in ‘Taxi,’ ” Mr. Gibney said over breakfast this month at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “It was too dark.”

Mr. Gibney said he thought of “Gonzo” as a bit of comic relief from “Taxi,” this year’s Oscar-winning documentary, which tells the story of an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American soldiers while in extrajudicial detention at Bagram Air Base. But Mr. Gibney and Thompson are both known for driving big dump trucks of truth toward power.

“As a journalist Hunter never seemed to get trapped or hoodwinked into the phony balance,” said Mr. Gibney, who agreed to the documentary after being approached by Mr. Carter even though Mr. Gibney never met Thompson. As read by Mr. Depp in the film, Thompson suggests that objectivity was for suckers, a way to allow evil to triumph: “It was the built-in blind spots of the objective rule and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.”

Sometimes that subjectivity could slip into something less benign. In 1972, when he took it upon himself to attempt to drive the presidential candidate Edmund S. Muskie slowly insane, he suggested that Muskie was hooked on Ibogaine, an obscure Brazilian drug. Thompson had made it up and seemed surprised when others took the bait. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of the McGovern presidential campaign, is seen in the film saying that that Mr. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing” book about the 1972 race, a collection of his articles for Rolling Stone, was “the least accurate and most truthful” account of the campaign.

That campaign proved to be the high-water mark of his career. Although Mr. Gibney is quick to say that Thompson wrote as he did in spite of the drugs and alcohol, the substances — hallucinogens for the vision, amphetamines to get it on the page, booze to take the edge off both — didn’t just beckon the muse, they were stamped into everything that eventually popped out. Always far past deadline of course. “Hunter could manufacture a crisis out of almost anything,” said Mr. Wenner, his friend and longtime editor at Rolling Stone. “He did amazing, amazing work, but it got to the point where it was hard for Hunter to travel, because of all the stuff he would need to take with him.”

There are extensive segments with Mr. Steadman, the long-suffering British illustrator and accomplice who could chronicle the internal and external demons Mr. Thompson spied everywhere. The poles of love and hate that characterize many great collaborations are clearly visible in the film.

As the documentary demonstrates, the bottom for the pair came when Mr. Thompson was assigned to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mr. Steadman explains in the film that in an act of enormous cocaine-assisted hubris (or perhaps fear that Mr. Ali, one of his heroes, was about to take a huge beating), Thompson gave away his tickets to the fight and went for a swim in the hotel pool. In doing so, he missed one of the greatest upsets in boxing history and, more important for a journalist, did not get the story.

By the accounts of many Thompson never recovered from that episode, gradually morphing into the character of Uncle Duke that Garry Trudeau introduced in “Doonesbury,” a cartoon figure who fired automatic weapons from his sun deck at apparitions and enemies that only he could see. He became the sum of his trademarks — the sunglasses, cigarette holder and inchoate rage — and ended up imprisoned by them.

“He was the master persona maker,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and friend of Thompson’s who serves as executor of the estate. “If Ernest Hemingway was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Hunter wanted to use a submachine gun to hunt wild boar in Big Sur, Calif. He was dangerous, like handling nitroglycerin, and he liked to keep it that way.”

In the end everyone wanted to be around Thompson except Thompson. And on a bright winter day in Woody Creek, with his son in the house — Juan Thompson sardonically terms it a “warm family moment” in the film — he called his own bluff and blew his brains out.

He was infirm at the time, spending time in a wheelchair. Given his fundamental allergy to institutions like hospitals, his decision to set the terms of his exit is unsurprising.

“Hunter was very much one to share the pain when things went wrong, but he would share the glory as well,” said Anita Thompson, who married him in 2003. “He was a generous person, but he ended up surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers. It is the curse of fame.”

It is a curse that he embraced and held dear. The theatricality of his end, followed by a huge memorial in which his ashes were shot out of a cannon while people partied below, suggested that he understood his life as a kind of performance that required one final, deadly act. Throughout the film he speaks with such specificity about his legacy and its discontents that he seems to know he is speaking from the grave.

“I’m really in the way as a person,” he said. “The myth has taken over. I find myself an appendage. I’m no longer necessary. I’m in the way. It would be much better if I died. Then people could take the myth and make films.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/movies/29carr.html






Disney Pixar's "WALL-E" Wows Box Office
Dean Goodman

Animation giant Pixar scored its ninth consecutive No. 1 on Sunday with its robot love story "WALL-E," while Angelina Jolie achieved a personal best with her violent assassination thriller "Wanted."

"WALL-E," bolstered by near-unanimous critical praise, sold an estimated $62.5 million of tickets in its first three days, said Pixar's Walt Disney Co parent.

It tied with 2001's "Monsters, Inc." to become Pixar's third-best opener. Pixar has gone to No. 1 with all nine of its movies, an unprecedented run that begin in 1995 with "Toy Story."

The company record of $70.5 million was set in 2004 by "The Incredibles." Industry pundits had forecast an opening for "WALL-E" in the $50 million to $60 million range.

"Anything north of 60 (million dollars), we were going to be ecstatic," said Mark Zoradi, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Group.

Meanwhile Jolie, whose career has been overshadowed in recent years by breathless tabloid coverage of her personal life, kicked off at No. 2 with "Wanted." The Universal Pictures release earned about $51.1 million, easily beating forecasts of an opening in the mid- to high-$30 million range.

Her previous record for a live-action movie was 2005's "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," which opened to $50 million. The General Electric Co-owned studio said "Wanted" ranks as the third-highest opening for an R-rated action film, behind "The Matrix Reloaded ($91.7 million) and "300" ($70.9 million).

Sales Soar

"WALL-E" and "Wanted," clearly aimed at disparate audiences, helped pushed overall sales to their highest level of the year, said tracking firm Media By Numbers. The top 12 films grossed $179 million, up 29 percent from last weekend, and up 20 percent from the year-ago period, when Pixar's "Ratatouille" opened at No. 1 with $47 million on its way to $206 million.

Last weekend's champion, the Warner Bros spy comedy "Get Smart," slipped to No. 3 with $20 million, taking its 10-day haul to $77.3 million. The film, which stars Steve Carell as the inept hero Maxwell Smart, should finish up with about $130 million, said the Time Warner Inc-owned studio.

Rounding out the top five, Pixar rival DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc's "Kung Fu Panda" slipped one to No. 4 with $11.7 million, taking its total to $179.3 million. The film opened four weeks ago to $60.2 million.

Marvel Entertainment Inc's "The Incredible Hulk" fell three to No. 5 with $9.2 million. The superhero adaptation has earned $115.5 million after three weeks, roughly on par with its unloved 2003 predecessor "The Hulk."

"WALL-E," a space adventure mixing an unusual love story with somber messages about the future of Earth and humankind, was directed by Andrew Stanton, who won an Academy Award for Pixar's 2003 hit "Finding Nemo."

The title character, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, is the last of a cadre of robots tasked with cleaning up piles of trash discarded by humans who abandoned the planet centuries before.

The human race set off on a luxury space cruise during a planned five-year clean-up that lasts much longer and results in unfortunate changes in the human physique and psyche.

The arrival of a sleek girl robot named Eve, sent to Earth by the orbiting humans to look for plant life, sends Wall-E on an adventure that changes his own and humanity's destinies.

Critics heaped praise on the film. According to Rotten Tomatoes, a Web site that collects reviews, an astonishing 96 percent of critics liked the film.

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune said on TV's "Ebert & Roeper" that it was perhaps "the best American studio picture of the year," but the Hollywood Reporter said "it might be too clever to connect with mainstream audiences."

Disney's Zoradi said "WALL-E" was not a conventional cartoon, but the studio was "confident from the get-go" that it would work. He declined to reveal the film's budget, in line with Disney's policy.

"WALL-E" also opened at No. 1 in six small foreign markets, led by Brazil with $1.6 million, Zoradi said. It will reach Russia and Mexico next weekend, followed by the U.K. in mid-July, timed with the school holidays in each market.

"Wanted," a $74 million comic book adaptation directed by Kazakhstan-born filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov, stars Scottish actor James McAvoy ("The Last King of Scotland") as an office drone recruited to an elite order of assassins by Jolie and Morgan Freeman. Critics were also enthused.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman and Gina Keating; Editing by Vicki Allen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...37957120080630





The Top Movies at the North American Box Office

Following are the top 10 films at the North American box office for the first three days of the weekend beginning on June 27, led by the new release "WALL-E," according to studio estimates compiled on Sunday by Reuters.

1 (*) WALL-E ......................... $ 62.5 million

2 (*) Wanted ......................... $ 51.1 million

3 (1) Get Smart ...................... $ 20.0 million

4 (3) Kung Fu Panda .................. $ 11.7 million

5 (2) The Incredible Hulk ............ $ 9.2 million

6 (4) The Love Guru .................. $ 5.4 million

7 (6) Indiana Jones and the

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ... $ 5.0 million

8 (5) The Happening .................. $ 3.9 million

9 (8) Sex and the City ............... $ 3.8 million

10 (7) You Don't Mess with the Zohan .. $ 3.2 million

NOTE: Last weekend's ranking in parentheses. * = new release.


TOTALS TO DATE

Indiana Jones ..................... $299.9 million

Kung Fu Panda ..................... $179.3 million

Sex and the City .................. $140.1 million

The Incredible Hulk ............... $115.5 million

You Don't Mess with the Zohan ..... $ 91.2 million

Get Smart ......................... $ 77.3 million

WALL-E ............................ $ 62.5 million

The Happening ..................... $ 59.1 million

Wanted ............................ $ 51.1 million

The Love Guru ..................... $ 25.3 million

"WALL-E" was produced by Pixar Animation Studios, and released by Walt Disney Pictures, both units of Walt Disney Co.

"Wanted" and "The Incredible Hulk" were released by General Electric Co's Universal Pictures. "Hulk" was produced by Marvel Entertainment Inc's Marvel Studios.

"Get Smart" and "Sex and the City" were released by Warner Bros Pictures, a unit of Time Warner Inc. The studio produced "Get Smart" with Australia's Village Roadshow Ltd.

Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures released "Kung Fu Panda," which was produced by DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc; "The Love Guru"; and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which was produced by George Lucas' Lucasfilm.

"The Happening" was released by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.

"You Don't Mess with the Zohan" was released by Columbia Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman, editing by Vicki Allen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...95881520080630





Intel’s Dominance Is Challenged by a Low-Power Upstart
John Markoff

From mainframes to minicomputers and then PCs, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.

That’s why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cellphones. An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-sized circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now commonplace. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.

As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cellphone. Many expect the resulting impact to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cellphone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excelled — is no longer the most important factor. For a cellphone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.

The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost three decades.

Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just this month at Computex, a huge computer and consumer electronics trade show held each year in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long on a battery as a similar portable machine powered by Intel’s most recent low-power chip.

Qualcomm and Nvidia share a chip design licensed from a relatively tiny British chip firm, ARM Holdings. ARM has had a big impact on the communications world. Its processors sell for substantially less than Intel’s more powerful X86 chips and are far more numerous: they are standard for the cellphone industry. Cellphones outsell PCs by about five to one.

“This battle is being fought in ARM’s backyard, not Intel’s,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile group.

In addition to Qualcomm and Nvidia, there are more than 200 licensees of the ARM processor design, including major chip makers like Marvell and Texas Instruments. Together, they supply the more than 1.1 billion cellphones, many of which use multiple ARM chips. The chips are also used in a growing array of special purpose consumer electronics like G.P.S. navigators and set-top TV boxes.

Dominating the large and growing cellphone market is only half the battle. Both the X86 and ARM camps are eagerly eyeing a new market known within the consumer electronics industry as M.I.D.’s, or mobile Internet devices. They are betting that this year represents the beginning of a boom in a new class of computing device — things like shrunken laptops called netbooks, personal G.P.S. navigators and handheld game systems, as well as an expanding array of idiosyncratic gadgets that connect wirelessly to the Internet for every conceivable purpose. For example, at Computex, one company displayed a handheld device intended solely for people looking to car-pool.

Outside the United States, the less expensive M.I.D. computers are expected to expand penetration of computers into new markets. In the United States and Europe, however, there is a debate about whether the new machine will remain a niche category.

Anand Chandrasekhar, a vice president and manager of Intel’s mobile platforms group, said he expects portable computers to be much like bicycles. Not only will people use different ones for different applications — like road bikes and mountain bikes — but they will also outgrow them.

“As a child, I had a bike for my size, and as I grew, my bike changed,” he said.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is now well aware of the threat from ARM. It is focusing vast resources on the low-power microprocessor market and says it is catching up quickly in power efficiency with its ARM competitors. This month, the first netbooks using a new Intel chip, the Atom, began to be shipped. Intel says more than 30 products will use the Atom.

Even though Intel’s chip uses more power than those of its ARM competitors, its Atom represents a tenfold reduction in the power consumption of the X86 chip family that was used in several generations of desktop PCs. Intel’s engineers achieved the power savings in part by entirely rethinking the chip’s circuit design, as well as the way individual transistors work.

One addition to the new Atom chip is the so-called drowsy transistor, a circuit that can throttle the amount of power it consumes between each tick of the processor’s clock. When the chip is not computing, entire areas of the processor can go into a sleep state, using just enough power to remember the ones and zeros for the current process.

Intel executives said the company’s advantage in the looming war with its ARM competitors is the quality of the Web experience provided by its chips. “By definition, these devices have to run the Internet as it has been developed,” said Mr. Chandrasekhar of Intel. “That happens today on X86,” he said, adding that seamless access to the Internet “won’t happen on ARM.”

Intel’s executives say that the ARM makers are also hampered by the lack of a single standard, forcing computer software developers to make changes for each product they design.

ARM manufacturers respond that Intel is overstating the importance of X86 compatibility and that their chips will provide a Web experience that rivals Intel’s but allows significantly longer battery life. Indeed, Intel’s case that only X86 chips will offer a satisfying mobile Web experience was potentially undermined earlier this month when one of its closest allies, Apple, appeared to indicate that it had chosen to design its own version of the ARM microprocessor for future handheld consumer products.

Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, said during an interview that the consumer electronics company had acquired a small Silicon Valley chip design company, PA Semi, to help design its next generation iPods and iPhones. Apple’s current iPhone is based on the ARM chip, and industry consensus is that the iPhone currently offers the best Web surfing experience in a handheld device.

Analysts and industry executives are divided on how much of a threat ARM will be to Intel. Allies like Dell are unlikely to desert the chip maker. “We’re impressed with their road map,” Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell, wrote in an e-mail message. He said it “gets interesting for smaller devices with Moorestown,” referring to the next generation of Intel’s low-power chips, planned for 2010. Dell, like Hewlett-Packard and other major PC makers, is bringing out its own mobile Internet device.

Other analysts see Moorestown as an indication of the challenge Intel faces, for the company will not be directly competitive with the ARM processors on power efficiency until then — and the ARM-allied companies insist they are not standing still.

“You’re still going to have a higher-power solution with Intel’s Atom that doesn’t have the same small footprint of the ARM chip,” said Jim McGregor, a research director at In-Stat, a semiconductor market research firm. “It won’t be a great solution for mobile devices, and ARM will.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/te...gy/30chip.html





Nvidia's Stock Bloodbath - Company Admits Faulty Chips, Shares Plunge 22%
Humphrey Cheung

Nvidia is admitting that some of its notebook chips are failing at “higher than normal rates” in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The chip failures will cause Nvidia to take a $150 to $200 million charge this quarter to cover what it calls “warranty, repair and return and replacement” for laptops with unspecified Nvidia graphics chips and chipsets. In after hours NASDAQ trading, Nvidia (stock symbol NVDA) plunged 21.94% or $3.95 to $14.08 a share. The stock had been down as much as 25% after the close of regular trading on Wednesday July 2nd 2008.

While it’s a bit too early for Nvidia to do any conclusive finger pointing, Nvidia does say that “significant quantities” of chips are experiencing thermal issues caused by possibly weak die and packaging – in essence the parts are overheating and failing. Nvidia isn’t publically saying what laptop brands and models are affected by the faulty chips, but it has issued an emergency driver that increase cooling by powering up fans immediately after the system starts (boy that’s going to be noisy).

Presumably, the bulk of the $150 to $200 million will go towards reimbursing laptop companies for any customer repairs and replacements and this is supported by Nvidia’s words. “We intend to fully support our customers in their repair and replacement of these impacted MCP and GPU products that fail,” Nvidia stated in the filing.

Nvidia is also predicting that its sales for the quarter ending July 27 will be approximately $875 million to $950 million which is a bit lower than analysts’ expectations of nearly $1 billion. Who knows if the stock will continuing tanking in the morning, but it’s definitely going to be an interesting trading day.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38237/135/





Tech Majors to Join Hands Against Patent Suits: Report

Information technology giants are teaming up in defense against potential patent-infringement lawsuits, the Wall Street Journal said on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The companies plan to buy up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them, the paper said.

The paper's sources said the companies, which include Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ericsson, are believed to have a joined a group calling itself the Allied Security Trust.

The companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization to go toward future patent purchases, the paper said.

Verizon, Cisco and Google did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. HP and Ericsson could not be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore; Editing by Jennifer Tan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/marke...11177720080630





Why do Apple Laptop Upgrades Cost 200% More than Dell's?
Rory Reid

Everybody knows Apple laptops are pricey. You know it, Crave knows it, Steve Jobs knows it. We also have a fair idea that its PC-selling counterpart, Dell, is relatively cheap. But have you ever stopped to examine just how much more you pay for Apple upgrades than you do for Dell? We have.

Having trawled the online configurator tools of both laptop makers, we've detailed just how much Apple takes the biscuit with its pricing. Base configurations look pretty similar on the surface, but when you start upgrading with faster internal components, Apple charges through the nose.

We can understand why Apple can justify charging more for its superbly designed chassis, or its excellent operating systems -- they're bespoke, and you pay more for premium designs. Fine. But we can't fathom why Apple charges so much more than Dell for simple components.

If you're thinking of buying a Mac or a Dell, or have just bought one, you should definitely check out the next page to see exactly how these two computing behemoths compare.

We've got our slide rule and paper out to compare the components that make the most difference to computing performance that we could make direct comparisons with. Let's see how they stack up (all prices were checked on 26 June 2008).

3.5-inch hard drives
Want to upgrade the hard drive in your MacBook at the time of purchase? You'll have to turn your wallet upside down. Going from a 120GB 5,400rpm drive to a 250GB 5,400rpm drive will set you back £90.01 from the Apple configurator. Doing the same upgrade with a Dell XPS M1330 costs just £30.01 on the Dell site. Here, Apple is a whopping 200 per cent more expensive than Dell.

RAM
Upgrading memory isn't cheap if you're an Apple customer. Buying a MacBook and switching from 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 to 4GB -- across two 2,048MB DIMMS -- using the Apple Web site will cost an extra £120. Doing that same swap with the Dell XPS M1330 costs just £40.01. Again, Apple is charging around 200 per cent more than Dell.

Solid-state drives
Apple's pricing for solid-state drives is on the high side, too. With Dell, going from a 250GB 5,400rpm mechanical drive to a 64GB solid-state drive in an XPS M1330 (only possible on some models) costs an extra £389.99. You can't go from a 250GB mechanical drive to a 64GB SSD with a MacBook Air, so this isn't a direct comparison, but you can go from an 80GB drive to a 64GB SSD for an extra £639.

Even if you factor in the difference between an 80GB drive and a 250GB drive -- £16 according to products listed on ebuyer -- you're still looking at a 71 per cent difference in price.

CPU
Apple isn't massively expensive for everything, though -- processors seem pretty fairly priced. Jumping from a 2.1GHz (T8100) to a 2.4GHz (T8300) CPU in a Dell will cost you £29.99. We reckon the Apple equivalent costs £30.01, although it's hard to work out. Stay with us here.

The only way to work it out is via this rather complex method. By upgrading the spec of the entry-level MacBook so it matches that of the mid-range model as close as possible (increasing hard drive and RAM, so it costs £789), you're left with two differences -- the CPU and the DVD drive, and a £40 price gap to the £829 mid-range Mac.

Comparing similar components to the DVD reader (found in the entry-level MacBook) and the DVD writer (found in the mid-range model) reveals a difference of approximately £10. Taking this into account, any price difference between the two machines should be all down to the CPU, which basically puts Apple on level-pegging with Dell at £30.

Conclusion
Apple is generally more expensive than Dell for components that are, in most cases, identical to those used in Dell machines. So why so pricey, Apple? Less buying power? Greed? Good business sense? Whatever the reason, we think it's an interesting state of affairs.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39...97849-1,00.htm





iCall App Enables GSM to WiFi / VoIP Switching On The iPhone
Alias420

iCall is a newly announced app coming out on Apple’s App Store. It promises seamless call switching between VoIP via WiFi and regular calls. There will be no hacking involved, they are fully approved Apple developer. iCall has a two tier system with a free version and a ‘pro’ version with added features. iCall is their own service provider so don’t expect to use this application with any of your current VoIP plans like Vonage. It will be interesting to see how this will compare with other services competeing for the iPhone VoIP market. Like the previously released RingFree.

Here is their very short FAQ:

1. We are part of the Apple iPhone developer program. This is not an application for you naughty jail breakers ;-)
2. We are not using any undocumented API calls. We are following every rule that developers must follow.
3. No, you can not have a copy. We are not physically capable of distributing the application to any phones except our development phones. If Steve-ness himself wanted a copy we could not provide it to him. Sorry.
4. Apple has explicitly stated that VoIP is allowed, just not over Edge networks. Steve himself answered this question in the Q&A session after the last keynote speech.
5. We are huge Apple fans and plan to release a version of iCall for OS X, but we don’t have enough developers. (see question 6).
6. Yes we are hiring. Please visit our jobs page. We’ll even pay for you to move to Greenwich, CT.

http://www.iphone-hacks.com/2008/06/...on-the-iphone/





Facebook Trademark Dispute

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Aaron Greenspan has filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, seeking cancellation of Facebook's registered trademark on the term "Facebook." He cited three reasons why Facebook never should have been granted the trademark:

Prior use by Greenspan, who used the term for a feature on his social Web project called houseSYSTEM.

The generic nature of the term within Harvard, where for generations "facebook" guides have been published for each of its dormitory "houses."

Fraud against the trademark agency itself.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





EBay to Pay Damages in Sale of Fakes
Doreen Carvajal

A French court on Monday ordered the online auction giant eBay to pay 38.6 million euros, or $61 million, in damages to the French luxury goods company LVMH, in the latest round in a long-running legal battle over the sale of counterfeit goods on the Internet.

LVMH, a maker of high-end leather goods, perfumes and other fashion and luxury products, successfully challenged eBay for a second time in the French court, arguing that 90 percent of the Louis Vuitton bags and Dior perfumes sold on eBay are fakes.

The court ruled that eBay, which earns a commission on the sales, was not doing enough to stamp out counterfeit sales.

EBay vowed to appeal the ruling in a brief statement issued immediately after the decision was announced.

“When counterfeits appear on our site we take them down swiftly, and today’s ruling is not about our fight against counterfeiting,” eBay said in a statement from Paris. “It’s about an attempt by LMVH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers every day. We will fight this ruling on their behalf.”

EBay has faced several legal challenges in France, where luxury goods companies are fiercely protective of their brands. In another recent case, a court ordered eBay to pay 20,000 euros to Hermes International in Paris for not properly vetting the sale of handbags.

That court concluded that eBay was not doing enough to combat counterfeit sales and should be forcing sellers to post more product information to guarantee authenticity, like series numbers.

The issue has resonated outside France. The jeweler Tiffany & Company has sued eBay in the United States on similar grounds; a decision is pending in the case.

LVMH has pursued other Internet companies as well, saying they help counterfeiters by provided a marketplace for the items. The luxury goods company has won several rounds against Google in France in a quest to force the search engine to remove online advertising from counterfeiters whose spots appear when the names of LVMH brands are typed in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/te...01ebay.html?hp





Department of Civil Disobedience: Google Should Deliver Its YouTube Data to Viacom in Paper Form
Erick Schonfeld

The recent court order directing Google to hand over data to Viacom about every YouTube video ever watched strikes many people as an absurd overreach of the law into the privacy of anyone who has ever used YouTube (i.e., almost everyone on the Internet). Google should definitely keep fighting the ruling if it can.

But if it can’t, perhaps it should comply with it in a creative way. The data in question are data logs containing the records of every video watched on YouTube, by whom, and at what times. The court is also ordering that Google hand over all videos that have ever been taken down for any reason. The logs alone take up 12 terabytes. Google should print them out and deliver them on paper.

It would literally fill up the Library of Congress. That is roughly the equivalent of all the printed books in the Library of Congress (by one estimate, others put it at 20 terabytes—either way, it’s a lot of paper). The court order never states what form, the data must be delivered in.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/03...in-paper-form/





On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble
Joe Nocera

Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.
Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.

At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google’s facilities and find less expensive child care.

Do you think you know how this story ends? You’re probably guessing that because it involves “do no evil” Google, Fortune magazine’s “Best Company to Work For” the past two years, this is a heart-warming tale of a good company reversing a dumb decision.

If only. Although Google is rolling back its price increase slightly and is phasing in the higher price over five quarters, the outline of the original decision remains largely unchanged. At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using.

In recent months, Google has hit the first rough patch in its short, magical life as a public company. From November to April, Google’s once high-flying stock dropped 44 percent, to $412 from $744. (It has since gained some of that back, closing on Thursday at $537.) It may be a stretch to equate the day care fiasco with the fall in Google’s stock. But maybe not.

When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft.

“There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement,” blogged Sergey Solyanik, who recently returned to Microsoft after a stint at Google. “There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid.” Starting, it would appear, with day care.

•

Google first began offering day care three and a half years ago, and perhaps it is only coincidence that this occurred not long after a woman named Susan Wojcicki returned to the company from maternity leave. Ms. Wojcicki is a figure of significant stature at Google; hers was the garage that Mr. Brin and Google’s other founder, Larry Page, rented while starting up Google. Today she is the company’s vice president for product measurement, though as I discovered in talking to unhappy Google parents this week, not many Googlers seem to know what her exact duties entail. Everybody, however, knows that she’s Mr. Brin’s sister-in-law.

From the start, Ms. Wojcicki has been a passionate advocate for Google’s day care efforts, though there is some dispute about how much decision-making authority she has. Parents who know her point out that the company’s day care approach is very much aligned with her views; for its part, a Google spokesman insists that “these decisions were not made by her; they were made by the executive management team.”

Google’s first facility, called the Kinderplex, was run by the Childrens’ Creative Learning Centers, or C.C.L.C., which, according to its Web site, offers “learning in a play-based, developmentally appropriate environment that incorporates a variety of activities and multicultural aspects in a thematic style.” That sounds perfect for Silicon Valley, doesn’t it? One of C.C.L.C.’s longtime Silicon Valley clients, Electronic Arts, sent me an e-mail statement telling me how happy it has been with C.C.L.C.’s services.

According to Google, there were numerous complains about C.C.L.C., but the Google parents I spoke to disagree. They say that at the Kinderplex, teacher-child ratios were low, teachers were first-rate, the facility was clean and upbeat, and the food — organic, naturally — was terrific.

But at least one parent wasn’t happy: Ms. Wojcicki. She is a proponent of a preschool philosophy called Reggio Emilia, the hot kiddie philosophy of the moment, which stresses even small children’s ability to chart their own learning paths.

A year after the Kinderplex opened, Google opened its second day care center, called the Woods, which Google ran itself. The Woods was an expensive undertaking; in terms of the square footage per child, the aesthetics of its toys, and the college degrees of its teachers, it put the Kinderplex to shame. It also used the Reggio Emilia philosophy.

With the Woods open, Google decided to upgrade the Kinderplex to match the salaries and the teacher-student ratios of the Woods. Google now had 200 day care spots — and such wonderful day care at that! — and was promoting this new perk as a recruiting tool. The company was growing like crazy — its work force now numbers 19,000 — its young employees were starting to have babies, and well, you can just picture what happened next. The wait list ballooned insanely, finally reaching over 700 people. New employees who arrived at Google thinking they were getting in-house day care were stunned to discover that it could take up to two years to land a coveted spot.

Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle. Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was — are you sitting down for this? — to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods! (Google says it was always planning to replace C.C.L.C.) Given that decision, the only possible way to reduce the subsidy was to raise prices through the roof.

If you are shaking your head at this point, that’s because you lack the proper understanding of Google’s culture. Having conquered the Internet, Google’s executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else — even day care. When I spoke to Laszlo Bock, the company’s vice president for “people operations” (a k a human relations), he told me that “what is really driving the cost is eliminating the two-year wait list while focusing on providing really high quality.”

Google can’t just have low teacher-child ratios — it has to have the lowest of anybody. Its teachers have to be the best. Its toys have to be the most advanced. If it costs a lot of money to provide the Greatest Day Care on Earth, well, that’s life.

Plus, the high price of Google day care solves the waiting list problem. Indeed, getting the waiting list down was a huge priority for Google; the spokesman told me that forcing people to wait two years for day care was “inequitable.” And maybe it is.

But parents who talked to me said that several times during the six-week-long day care brouhaha, Mr. Brin made comments indicating that he viewed the whole thing as a giant economics experiment. “This is a supply-and-demand issue,” he told one group of parents — adding that Google needed to charge what the market would bear. (Through a Google spokesman, Mr. Brin denies making such a statement.) Given that Google has lots of pre-I.P.O. millionaires, it can clearly charge a lot.

Indeed, at one meeting, Ms. Wojcicki, a multimillionaire herself, told the parents that she planned to keep her own children in Google day care, despite the higher cost. “I’ve had firsthand experience with the great care provided by these centers and I want as many other parents as possible to have access to it,” Ms. Wojcicki noted in an e-mail message.

Google has also started charging people several hundred dollars to stay on the waiting list; as a result the list has dropped to around 300 parents. By next fall, Google plans to open new facilities with another 300 places. See? No more waiting list.

Google, I should note, believes that it has handled the day care issue in a “Googly” way and object strongly to the criticism by the parents. The company points out that the prices are somewhat lower than originally planned, that it is expanding its day care operation, that its facilities will be state of the art and that it will be giving scholarships to parents who can’t afford to keep their children in Google day care. (Although yet to release the details of the scholarship plan, the company says that employees will have to show proof of household income to qualify.)

But here’s the real problem: providing day care isn’t an economics experiment, nor should it be just another Google perk, alongside organic food and free M&Ms. Day care matters to people’s lives in a way that few other perks do. There are many people in this country — including, I’ll bet, many Googlers — who believe that employer-provided day care, at affordable prices, ought to be like health insurance, a benefit that every company provides as a matter of course. Yet as the technology blog Valleywag noted recently, Google doesn’t even advertise day care as a benefit for its employees anymore. That’s the real shame.

Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn’t matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.

Instead, Google has shown that it thinks about day care the same way every other company does — as a luxury, not a benefit. Judging by what’s transpired, that’s what Google is fast becoming: just another company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/bu...nocera.html?hp





Bacteria Evolve; Conservapedia Demands Recount
John Timmer

Noises off

This is a story that starts in triumph, takes a detour through farce, and inadvertently ends raising some profound questions. The triumph is one of scientific progress in the study of evolution; the farce comes courtesy of those who run Conservapedia, who apparently can't believe that any scientific evidence can possibly support evolution. The questions, however, focus on what access the US public should have to the research that their tax dollars support.

Ars covered the research earlier this month, when a paper reporting it was first published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Richard Lenski and his colleagues have been conducting a long-term experiment in bacterial evolution, one that has encompassed over 30,000 generations of bacteria going back over 20 years. Many of the bacteria have evolved the ability to better utilize the sugar available in their cultures, but one strain underwent at least three distinct changes (at generation 27,000, 31,000 and 33,000) that enabled them to access citrate present in the medium—something their parents were incapable of. Lenski saved samples of every culture at intervals of 500 generations, and his paper suggested his lab was going back and sequencing the genomes of the intermediaries to try to find out the genetic basis for the evolution of this new trait.

Conservapedia meets cognitive dissonance

The denizens of Conservapedia were not amused. They apparently subscribe to the belief that acceptance of some scientific data goes against conservative values. The site tends to present the views of mainstream science and "creation science" as equally valid scientific perspectives, as evidenced by their discussion of kangaroo origins (which is actually much improved since we first checked). The site's relevant sympathies with creationism can be seen in its discussion of information, which uncritically repeats William Dembski's claim that "information cannot be created by natural (nonintelligent) causes." Despite never defining how to measure biological information, Dembski has used this claim to rule out evolutionary origins for new biological capacities.
Clearly, Lenski's bacteria appear to have evolved a significant new capacity. Fortunately, the residents of Conservapedia found a way out of this logical conundrum: Lenski was either misinterpreting his data, or he faked it. In an open letter to Lenski, Conservapedia's Andy Schlafly (an attorney with an engineering background) wrote, "skepticism has been expressed on Conservapedia about your claims, and the significance of your claims, that E. Coli [sic] bacteria had an evolutionary beneficial mutation in your study." Their solution? Show them the data: "Please post the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it, and note where in the data you find justification for your conclusions."

Lenski replied, noting that the whole purpose of scientific paper is to discuss and display data and to use them to justify conclusions; the data were in the paper itself. He also pointed out he'd placed a copy of the paper on his website for those without subscriptions to PNAS. Lenski also spent some time reexplaining some of his conclusions, and pointing out errors and misconceptions in the letter he had received. This response prompted a second letter from Schlafly, suggesting he wanted to review the data underlying the data presented in the paper, and noting that the work is taxpayer funded, giving him a right to it as a taxpayer.

Backstage drama

From here on out, standard Internet drama ensued. By the time of his next reply, Lenski had apparently read the discussion pages attached to the letters, and discovered that Schlafly hadn't actually bothered to read the paper he was demanding the data for. He has also discovered that some Conservapedia members were simply calling the whole thing a hoax, and accusing him of having engaged in research fraud. As a result, Lenski was apparently very annoyed, and his second letter is far more assertive.

Lenski again notes that the paper actually contained the relevant data, and that Schlafly's complaints suggested he wouldn't know what to do with any further data were Lenski to provide it to him. In this, he was backed up by a number of Conservapedia members, who said more or less the same thing in the attached discussion. Several of those individuals are apparently now ex-Conservapedia members, having had their accounts blocked for insubordination. In fact, anyone who questioned Schlafly's demands seem to have been branded an opponent of public access to scientific data; the statement, "I'll add your name to the list above of people who oppose the public release of data" peppers Schlafly's responses throughout the discussion.

Problems with group think and incendiary discussions are common complaints about what happens behind the scenes at Wikipedia. The irony here is that Conservapedia was ostensibly founded as a response to precisely that behavior. It appears that the victims may now be trying the role of oppressors on for size.

What should scientists share?

Lenski's primary argument is that the data needed to evaluate his conclusions are in the paper. Having read the paper, it appears that Lenski is completely correct; some of the data is depicted in graphical form instead of the raw, underlying numbers, but this appears to be largely a matter of making the data easier to interpret. In his response to Conservapedia, Lenski states (accurately) that the underlying data are in the form of the bacteria themselves, which he has stored in freezers at Michigan State. If Schlafly wants those, he can go through the standard channels. He needs to demonstrate that he can store and use them properly and that his use would serve some scientific purpose. If those conditions are met, Schlafly can go through Michigan State's standard Material Transfer Agreement procedures.

The exchange actually touches on some of the issues relevant to the free exchange of scientific data and materials, although that surely wasn't Schlafly's intent. In general, most scientists would agree that the open exchange of ideas and reagents benefits the scientific community, and that the public has a right to the know about the research they've funded. For this reason, the NIH has requested that all papers that describe research it has funded be made open access within six months of their publication; Lenski's beaten that deadline by over five months.

But his second letter raises some significant limits to how far he'll go in handing out the raw materials of his research. In addition to the issues described above, Lenski also intends to make sure he fulfills his ethical obligations as a research mentor by ensuring that his grad students and post-docs who performed the hard work of maintaining the experiment are the ones who benefit by publishing a description of it. He also made no mention of sharing the preliminary data for what his paper explicitly stated was the next step: sequencing the genomes of the new bacteria and their ancestors.

In terms of the argument over public access to taxpayer-funded data, the situation is fairly straightforward. Organizing raw data for public exchange takes time and money, which taxpayers would also foot the bill for. It's generally most efficient for the data to be organized once the gathering stage is complete; taxpayers get a better value for their money this way. In the same manner, it makes no sense for taxpayers to foot the bill for the preparation and shipping of samples to someone like Schlafly, who lacks the facilities or knowledge to do scientific work with the material.

But there's often a large gap between organization and analysis of data and its publication. Here, the ethical concerns—ensuring that the people who did the work receive credit for it via publication—often conflicts with the principles of openness and rapid progress. It's possible some other lab would be able to analyze the sequence data Lenski is gathering more rapidly and thoroughly; by fulfilling his ethical obligations, Lenski may actually be slowing the progress of science. This has been a source of tension within the scientific community for decades, one that has only been exacerbated by the fact that more data is now in electronic form and easy to exchange. It's not something I expect to see resolved any time soon.

Whither Conservapedia?

Although he's brought up some interesting issues regarding the conduct of publicly funded scientific research, Schlafly appears to remain blissfully unaware of it. Schlafly only named specific data that he felt were missing on Friday, two weeks after the exchange of letters started; his comments in the discussion attached the letter exchange suggests he primarily questions Lenski's ability to recognize when bacterial contamination crops up in the experiment. Throughout the discussion, however, Schlafly has demonstrated a scientific illiteracy that undercuts his own arguments by demonstrating that any time Lenski or his coworkers spend accommodating Schlafly would truly represent a waste of taxpayer money.

Of course, that lack of understanding might be expected from someone who seems to believe that there are distinct conservative and liberal forms of science. Still, you can sense the beginnings of a response to the fact that the situation may be spiraling out of Conservapedia's control. When a contributor suggested the exchange was making the site look bad, the response indicated that the any problems could be dismissed as a case of biased perception: "What sort of Liberal defeatism are you bound up in, and why do you assume, without examining the facts of the matter, that this has not gone well?"

As to the longer-term prospect, that Lenski's genome sequencing will actually reveal the creative power of evolution in greater detail, that's apparently nothing that can't be handled by a post-hoc rationalization. "But how are we to know," one contributor asks, "if these traits weren’t 'potentiated' by the Creator when He designed the bacteria thousands of years ago, such that they would eventually reveal themselves when the time was right?"

How indeed? It's precisely the inability to test such a contention that led the scientific community to give up on supernatural explanations in the first place.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...-foibles.ars/1





Epic mash-up

Jefferson Bible Reveals Founding Father's View of God, Faith

Nation's third president compiled the four Gospels into a single text without miracles that ends with Jesus' burial rather than the resurrection.
By Louis Sahagun

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible. It remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus.

"I have performed the operation for my own use," he continued, "by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill."

The little leather-bound tome, several facsimiles of which are kept at the Huntington Library in San Marino, continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.

The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:

"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

"He was a product of his age," said Ferrell, whose upcoming book, "The Bible and the People," includes a chapter on the Jefferson Bible. "Yet, he is the least likely person I'd want to pray with. He was more skeptical about religion than the other Founding Fathers."

In Jefferson's version of the Gospels, for example, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there's no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains Jesus' crucifixion but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.

Stripping miracles from the story of Jesus was among the ambitious projects of a man with a famously restless mind. At 71, he read Plato's "Republic" in the original Greek and found it lackluster.

Ever the scientist, he inoculated his wife, children and many of his slaves against smallpox with fresh pus drawn from infected domestic farm animals, according to Robert C. Ritchie, W.M. Keck Foundation director of research at the Huntington Library.

"For a lot of people, taking scissors to the Bible would be such an act of desecration they wouldn't do it," Ritchie said. "Yet, it gives a reading into Jefferson's take on the Bible, which was not as divine word put into print, but as a book that can be cut up."

Jefferson, a tall vigorous man who preferred Thucydides and Cicero to the newspapers of his day, was not the only 18th century leader who questioned traditional Christian teachings.

Like many other upper-class, educated citizens of the new republic, including George Washington, Jefferson was a deist.

Deists differed from traditional Christians by rejecting miraculous occurrences and prophecies and embracing the notion of a well-ordered universe created by a God who withdrew into detached transcendence.

Critics of the time regarded deism as an ill-conceived attempt to reconcile religion with scientific discoveries. For rationalists in the Age of Enlightenment, deism was one of many efforts to liberate humankind from what the deists viewed as superstitious beliefs.

Jefferson was a particular fan of Joseph Priestley, a scientist, ordained minister and one of Jefferson's friends. Priestley -- who discovered oxygen and invented carbonated water and the rubber eraser -- published books that infamously cast a critical eye upon biblical miracles. Jefferson was particularly fond of Preistley's comparison of the lives and teachings of Socrates and Jesus.

Discussions and letters between Jefferson and another friend, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, led Jefferson to compile his "wee little book." In a letter to Rush on April 21, 1803, Jefferson said his editing experiment aimed to see whether the ethical teachings of Jesus could be separated from elements he believed were attached to Christianity over the centuries.

"To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed," he wrote to Rush, "but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself."

Therefore, Ritchie said, "for Jefferson, the Bible was a book that could be made and unmade."

The Jefferson Bible remained largely unknown beyond a close circle of relatives and friends until 1904, when its publication was ordered by Congress. About 9,000 copies were issued and distributed in the Senate and the House.

Today several editions of the Jefferson Bible are available through booksellers. A few online versions exist, including one on the website of the Jefferson Monticello, www.monticello.org/library/links/jefferson.html.

It is hard to say whether Jefferson would have objected to publication of the book.

"Say nothing of my religion," Jefferson once said. "It is known to myself and my God alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,7730914.story