[JackSpratts]

Christopher Hitchens Waterboards Himself
Cory Doctorow

After Christopher Hitchens wrote a Slate article suggesting that waterboarding wasn't really torture, readers suggested that he try it himself. He did.

So what did it feel like? Hitchens recounts how he was lashed tightly to a sloping board, then, "on top of the hood, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose ... I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and - as you might expect - inhale in turn."

That, he says, "brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, flooded more with sheer panic than with water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal" and felt the "unbelievable relief" of being pulled upright.

The "official lie" about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it "simulates the feeling of drowning". In fact, "you are drowning - or rather, being drowned".

He rehearses the intellectual arguments, both for ("It's nothing compared to what they do to us") and against ("It opens a door that can't be closed"). But the Hitch's thoroughly empirical conclusion is simple. As Vanity Fair's title puts it: "Believe me, it's torture."
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/02...-hitchens.html





China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
Scott Shane

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”

The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.

Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment.

Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html





Agents Can Randomly Seize Travelers' Laptops or PDAs
Jim Puzzanghera

Bill Hogan was returning home from Germany in February when a customs agent at Washington Dulles International Airport pulled him aside. He could re-enter the country, she told him. But his laptop could not.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said he had been chosen for "random inspection of electronic media," and kept his computer for about two weeks, recalled Hogan, 55, a freelance journalist from Falls Church, Va.

Though it was a spare computer that had little important information, Hogan felt violated.

"It's not an inspection. It's a seizure," he said. "What do they do with it? I assume they just copy everything."

For several years, U.S. officials have been searching and seizing laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and other electronic devices at the border with few publicly released details. Complaints from travelers and privacy advocates have spurred some lawmakers to question the U.S. Customs and Border Protection policy.

As people store more and more information electronically, the debate hinges on whether searching a laptop is the equivalent of looking in your luggage, or more like a strip search.

"Customs agents must have the ability to conduct even highly intrusive searches when there is reason to suspect criminal or terrorist activity, but suspicion-less searches of Americans' laptops and similar devices go too far," said Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who chairs a subcommittee that examined the searches at a hearing Wednesday. "Congress should not allow this gross violation of privacy."

Authorities need a search warrant to get at a computer in a person's home, and reasonable suspicion of illegal activity to search a laptop in other places. But the rules change at border crossings. Courts have ruled that there's no need for warrants or suspicions when a person is seeking to enter the country - agents can search belongings, including computer gear, for any reason.

The latest was the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in April that agents acted properly in turning over information used to charge a traveler with possession of child pornography. His laptop had been searched in 2005 at Los Angeles International Airport.

Any routine search is considered "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment, legal scholars agree. But Feingold worries that the law has not kept up with technology.

"People keep their lives on these devices: diaries, personal mail, financial records, family photos. ... The government should not be able to read this information," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In February, the group and the Asian Law Caucus sued authorities for more information about the program.

The issue is of particular concern for businesses, which risk the loss of proprietary data when executives travel abroad, said Susan K. Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. After the California ruling, the group warned its members to limit the business and personal information they carry on laptops taken out of the country.

Of 100 people who responded to a survey the association did in February, seven said they had been subject to the seizure of a laptop or other electronic device.

Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner of customs and border protection, said in written testimony to the subcommittee that the agency would "protect information that may be discovered during the examination process, as well as private information of a personal nature that is not in violation of any law." The agency conducts "a regular review and purging of information that is no longer relevant," Ahern wrote.

Feingold said the testimony gave "little meaningful detail" about the program. He is considering legislation to prohibit such routine searches of electronic devices without reasonable suspicion.

But Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said U.S. officials have to balance individual rights with protecting the nation.

"Terrorists take advantage of this kind of technology," he said.

Hogan, the freelance journalist, said there was no reason for customs agents to think he was a terrorist. He advised people to take precautions with their laptops when they leave the country.

"I certainly would never take it again," he said.

Jim Puzzanghera writes for the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business...,3324276.story





European Lawmaker To Sue U.S. Over Data

Suit Illustrates Sticking Point in Transatlantic Pact
Ellen Nakashima

A European Union lawmaker who frequently travels to the United States is suing the U.S. government for access to her personal records, such as credit card information and travel history, that the Department of Homeland Security and other security agencies may have gathered.

The lawsuit to be filed today by Sophie in't Veld, a Dutch member of parliament, comes as the United States and Europe are working on an agreement on privacy protections for transatlantic data-sharing. The pact would permit security agencies to obtain personal information for law-enforcement purposes. One sticking point, however, is the ability of European citizens to sue the U.S. government for access to information and redress if they think the data are inaccurate or have been misused.

In't Veld said her case underscored the need for more explicit data-protection guarantees than those contemplated in the draft of the accord. It is also the first high-level legal test of Bush administration assurances that anyone may access his or her data under the Freedom of Information Act, privacy experts said. The law allows anyone, including non-citizens, to sue for access. But it provides no mechanism for correcting errors.

"The bottom line is, the U.S. is trying to give the impression in Europe that there's a simple, well-established process for records access that any European can avail themselves of," said David L. Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is filing the lawsuit on in't Veld's behalf. "But as this lawsuit shows, it's a difficult, time-consuming process that might ultimately not result in anything being obtained."

In't Veld, who helps develop transatlantic data-sharing policies as a member of the E.U.'s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee, has been flying to and from the United States for the past three years or so. She is almost always detained as she leaves the United States and sent to secondary screening for questioning and a search of her handbag and luggage.

Last October, she filed a FOIA request for access to her records at three agencies. "I don't expect to find anything specific in the files," she said in a phone interview from Utrecht, the Netherlands. "But I am entitled to know what is in them."

In March, DHS officials responded that a "comprehensive search" of files within agencies including Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned up no "responsive records."

The FBI also said it found no records. The State Department has not responded, according to her complaint.

In't Veld said "there must be something if I'm traveling in and out of the United States." A Washington Post reporter's FOIA request for personal records to the DHS yielded airline travel and reservation records for flights to and from the United States.

A DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because department officials generally do not discuss specific cases, said that in't Veld was not "on any list," including the no-fly list, and that she had not sought redress through DHS's Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP). The official could not address her records request, which is handled by a separate department.

The proposed agreement, according to a draft final report, contains 12 principles that are standard hallmarks of data privacy. They include ensuring that the information collected is relevant and timely, that it is collected for a specific and legitimate purpose -- in this case, for law enforcement, and that people have access to their data and a means to correct inaccuracies.

It specifies that anyone may have administrative redress for concerns about misuse of data and notes that FOIA allows judicial redress to anyone.

The accord has been the subject of E.U.-U.S. talks since February 2007 -- an effort to "stop the fighting," said Paul Rosenzweig, DHS deputy assistant secretary for policy, referring to difficult negotiations over the transmission of air passenger records and financial transaction data from Europe to the United States.

"The entire point of this exchange of views is for us to discuss with the Europeans what our safeguards are and for them to show us what their safeguards are so that we can be confident that the safeguards each is using are suitable," Rosenzweig said. On the U.S. side, that includes limits on access, how long data can be kept, what the information can be used for and punishment for people who violate the rules, he said.

The Bush administration hopes to finalize the accord by the end of the year.

But European parliamentarians are concerned that broad exceptions could be written into the rules and that a lack of effective redress remedies could open the door to misuse. "The whole issue is not about giving your private data to the United States but not being able to control it and not knowing who is going to protect that data, whether or not a court is going to have any power to correct abuses because abuses are going to take place," said Ignasi Guardans, a member of parliament from Spain.

One solution, he said, would be applying 1974 Privacy Act protections to European citizens, which would allow them to ask a court to force an agency to provide access to personal records held on them and to correct errors.

To do so would require Congress to amend the law, Rosenzweig said, adding that the administrative remedies are at least as effective as going to court. DHS's TRIP has cleared thousands of people off the no-fly list, for example, he said.

Moreover, the Privacy Act is no panacea, as the U.S. government generally exempts national security databases from the statute's judicial-review provision, Sobel said. "In reality," he said, "American citizens are in the same boat as Europeans are."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...063001895.html





Magnum, P.C.?

New Texas Law Limits Computer Repair To Licensed Private Investigators

Institute for Justice Texas chapter opens in Austin with challenge to statute

IJ client Mike Rife cannot compete with a government-created cartel that demands he close his businesses and complete a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator to get a state-required license to fix computers.

Austin, Texas—The Institute for Justice—the nation’s leading litigators for entrepreneurs who find their rights violated by the government—opens its new Texas Chapter today by filing a lawsuit against the Texas Private Security Board, a state agency, on behalf of computer repair shops that are being told they need a private investigator’s license to continue solving their customers’ computer problems.

Under the new law enacted in 2007, Texas has put computer repair shops on notice that they had better watch their backs any time they work on a computer. If a computer repair technician without a government-issued private investigator’s license takes any actions that the government deems to be an “investigation,” they may be subject to criminal penalties of up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine, as well as civil penalties of up to $10,000. The definition of “investigation” is very broad and encompasses many common computer repair tasks.

To get a private investigator’s license, owners of computer repair shops would have to close their business while they either obtained a criminal justice degree or completed a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed P.I.

But the repair shops are not the only ones at risk. The law also criminalizes consumers who knowingly use an unlicensed company to perform any repair that constitutes an investigation in the eyes of the government. Consumers are subject to the same harsh penalties as the repair shops they use: criminal penalties of up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine, and civil penalties of up to $10,000—just for having their computer repaired by an unlicensed technician.

The newly launched Institute for Justice Texas Chapter (IJ-TX) is challenging the new law under the Texas Constitution by filing a lawsuit in Travis County against the Private Security Board on behalf of Texas computer repair companies and their customers.

Mike Rife, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, operates AustinPCTech, a company he started more than 10 years ago. Rife has hundreds of satisfied customers and his business is thriving. Rife now operates under a cloud of uncertainty about which repairs the government will allow him to perform for his customers.

David Norelid, another plaintiff, is co-owner of Citronix Tech Services in Houston. Norelid started Citronix in Florida before moving to Texas to pursue his degree in information technology management. Norelid said, “If I was required to get a P.I. license to run my business, I’d have to shut my business down.” The flexibility of being an entrepreneur allows him to work full time while going to school.

Rife and Norelid do not doubt their ability to compete with so-called “big box” competitors in the computer repair business. What they cannot compete with is a government-created cartel that demands they close their businesses and complete a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator to get a state-required license—or risk jail time and large monetary penalties if they continue serving their customers without one.

Thane Hayhurst owns and operates Kiwi Computer Services and iTalent Consulting Group, both in Dallas. Kiwi Computer is a traditional do-it-all computer repair company that Hayhurst has operated in Dallas since 1992. More recently, Hayhurst opened iTalent Consulting, which offers IT outsourcing services to many prominent local businesses. iTalent sends employees on assignments (some lasting for many months) to clients’ businesses where the consultant works to implement on-site computer and IT solutions. Both of Hayhurst’s businesses are impacted by the new law because he and his employees are not licensed private investigators. Hayhurst is worried the government will decide he can no longer offer many of the services he currently provides to his clients. Hayhurst said, “There are thousands of computer contractors performing valuable services for almost every organization in Texas, and this law will hinder their ability to remain gainfully employed.”

Joining the computer repair companies as a plaintiff in this case is consumer Erle Rawlins, who frequently uses independent computer repair shops to keep his Dallas-based real estate buyer agency business running. Rawlins said, “This law is totally unfair. It requires using someone who is more expensive and may not be as good, and it uses government power to limit the number of competitors who are out there. It is bad for consumers and it is bad for entrepreneurs.”

The filing of this case marks the launch of IJ-TX in Austin. Lead attorney on the case is IJ-TX Executive Director Matt Miller. Miller said, “Texas is working hard to bring technology innovators to our state. Yet the government is now telling them they need to get a private investigator’s license if they want to continue working here. That is not an effective strategy to grow our technology talent pool.”

Miller concluded, “It makes no sense to require a computer repairman with 10 or 20 years of experience to get a degree in criminal justice just to continue working in his occupation. This law will drive up the price of computer repair for everyone, and that’s exactly what the private investigations industry wants.”

The Institute for Justice is a public interest law firm that advances a rule of law under which individuals can control their destinies as free and responsible members of society. IJ has additional chapters in Arizona, Minnesota and Washington state. IJ-TX litigates under the state and federal constitutions to reinvigorate economic liberty, preserve property rights, promote educational choice and defend the free flow of information essential to politics and commerce.
http://www.ij.org/first_amendment/tx...6_26_08pr.html





Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI's Historical Reliance on Phone Tap Criminality
David Price

In 1971, Ron Rosenbaum’s Esquire article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”, introduced America to phone phreaks, a subterranean network of geek explorers who probed the global phone system as the world’s largest pre-Internet interconnected machine. A star of Rosenbaum’s piece was Joe Engressia, a blind telephonic hacking pioneer with perfect pitch and a high IQ, who seized control over phone systems by whistling dual-tone, multi-frequency pitches into telephone receivers.

Before the introduction of modern phone-switching technology, audible tones were used to connect phones with distant destinations. As a young child, Engressia was obsessed with the telephone, finding comfort within the steady blare of the dial tone. At the age of 5, he discovered he could dial the phone by clicking the receiver’s hang-up switch, and at 7 he accidentally discovered that whistling specific frequencies could activate phone switches. From there, experimentation, brilliance, networking and perseverance led Engressia to probe weaknesses in the network that allowed him to make free phone calls. His mastery over this global machine was liberating, if not obsessive.

As Rosenbaum was completing his 1971 article, Engressia was arrested for theft of telephone services. At the time it appeared that the phone company had only recently become aware of his activities – though a few years earlier he had been expelled from the University of South Florida for selling fellow students long-distance calls for a dollar each.

Rosenbaum’s 1971 piece put the spotlight on Engressia, as newspapers, magazines and television programs ran features on him and his activities. Engressia became a cultural icon, or proto-hacker stereotype, as characters with his abilities were written into cyberpunk novels and Hollywood screenplays with characters like Sneakers’ Erwin ‘Whistler’ Emory.

Engressia’s IQ loomed somewhere above 170, but as an adult he wished to live as a 5 years old, founding his own church, the Church of Eternal Childhood. His wish to remain an eternal child appears to be linked to the repeated sexual abuse he reported suffering from a nun at the school for the blind that he attended as a child, as well as the academic pressures that led him to miss out on playtime as a child. In 1991, Engressia legally changed his name to Joybubbles. Until his death this last year, Joybubbles ran a phone “story line” in Minneapolis, where callers would call and hear him tell a different children’s story each week – adopting a cadence and personal style reminiscent of his hero, Mister Rogers.

When Joybubbles died last year, I used the Freedom of Information Act to request his FBI file, mostly just to see what the FBI had made of this explorer who had loved and wandered through this pre-Internet global network. I figured there might be something in his file relating to his 1971 arrest, but I hadn’t expected to find an FBI and phone company investigation of him from two years before this arrest.

An August 28, 1969, FBI General Investigative Division report describes an investigation by Kansas City telephone company of three subjects in Kansas City, Miami and Chicago, who had “discovered a means to intercept and monitor WRS and Autovon” phone lines. Autovon (Automatic Voice Network) was a Defense Communication Agency telephone network used for nonsecure military phone communication. The FBI’s report mistakenly claimed that Autovon was a “top secret telephone system utilized only by the White House”, when in fact Autovon was really a nonclassified military telephone system, designed to link military installations even under the unpleasant conditions of nuclear annihilation.

The FBI believed that Engressia was “the ‘brains’ in this matter and was an electronics genius with an I.Q. of one hundred ninety”. Even though the FBI’s investigation had “not revealed any national security aspect to their activities” and phone company officials stated that this group’s use of free phone calls had been “strictly for their own amusement and [the] harassment of [the] phone company”, the FBI’s investigation reports were filed under the heading: “Security matter – Espionage: interception of communications.”

The FBI thought a blue box may have been used to avoid tolls, though they realized that Engressia “was capable of orally emitting a perfect twenty six hundred cycle tone, which could be used to direct distance dial any phone number in the country”.

The FBI reported that without any authorization from law enforcement personnel, an employee of Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph had contacted Engressia, interviewed him, and later gave information from this interview to the FBI. This employee told the FBI that “Joseph Engressia, age twenty and blind, [was] interviewed and he admitted intense interest in telephone company systems and equipment. He is familiar with the practices as to test numbers, circuits, and operations of telephone companies. Engressia exhibited ability to whistle twenty six hundred cycle notes which is utilized by telephone company in toll network. He claimed he learned majority of information by trial and error using his touch-tone instrument. He claimed he did not wish to violate any law and that his activities with the telephone were for amusement and education.”

The FBI viewed Engressia as a real threat. On August 29, 1969, J. Edgar Hover sent a summary memo regarding Engressia’s activities to John Ehrlichman, counselor to President Nixon, to Melvin Laird, secretary of defense, and to James J. Rowley, the director of the U.S. Secret Service. While Hoover apprised these governmental bodies of his investigation and expressed concerns that Engressia had the power to undertake undetectable wiretaps, the FBI had no actual evidence that Engressia intercepted any phone calls, they only had concerns about such powers.

Fortunately, the FBI employees processing my FOIA request accidentally revealed parts of the identities of the two phone phreaks mentioned in Engressia’s file. An individual referred to as “also known as ‘Tandy Way’” is identified as a blind radio and telephone enthusiast living in Miami, and a “Mr. Jacobs” is revealed as the Kansas City resident accessing free phone calls to talk with Engressia. Jacobs had first met Engressia after seeing him on Huntley-Brinkley TV show, and contacted him first by letter, then by phone.

The FBI report indicates that the phone company had known about Engressia’s abilities for about a year:

“Joseph Engressia Jr. first came to the attention of the SBT&T Company in the summer of 1968. At about the same time there was a routine trouble report in the middle of August 1968, that was received by ___ showing a ‘blue box’ in use on the telephone number ___ Miami subscribed to by ___ Miami. ____ explained that a ‘blue box’ is a device that can be used to defraud the telephone company of the revenue from long-distance toll calls. This device produces multi-frequency tones which enable the user to make long-distance telephone calls and circumvent the billing equipment in the long-distance network”.

It is not clear if Engressia was using an actual blue box (an electronic device designed to make free calls by generating 2600 hz through a speaker) or if he simply whistled into his phone to produce the same results. This Sept. 1, 1969, report includes an account of a Canadian operator reporting Engressia for selling LD phone calls for $1.00 each at the University of Southern Florida. Engressia was suspected and fined $25.00, “however, he was reinstated with full honors shortly thereafter”.

An 8/29/69 FBI memo states that an employee “of the Florida Bell Telephone Company in Miami, Florida, illegally monitored conversations on Joe Engressia’s telephone # 274-0760. It is further alleged that these monitored conversations were divulged by ____ [presumably the Florida Bell employee] to an unnamed FBI Agent in Miami, Florida”. Later interviews confirmed that “the results of the monitoring [were] furnished to a Miami FBI Agent”. Another FBI memo reports that FBI source, employed at Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, learned undisclosed information “by monitoring telephone conversation between [Jacobs] and Engressia”.

On September 3, 1969, Jacobs wrote the FBI a detailed two-page letter extensively citing chapter and verse of the Communications Act and accusing the phone company and the FBI of violating wiretapping sections of the statute.

“I believe there has been a serious violation of the Communications Act of 1934, Section #605. Several days ago, FBI Kansas City agents ____ and ____visited my home and repeated back to me excerpts from a private conversation I had with a Mr. Joe Engressia (Tel: 274-0760) of Miami, Florida. Mr. Engressia for some time believed his phone was being monitored and in order to get the tapper to tip his hand, mentioned many words that might be of interest to the supposed tapper such as Autovon, etc. It is my information that a ____ of the Florida Bell Telephone Company has illegally monitored, recorded, and transcribed telephone conversations without the permission of the receiver and/or the sender and without a court order. ____ then divulged this conversation in the form of a written transcript to a Miami gent ____ who passed it on. Mssrs. ____ and ____ were good enough to confirm, in their visit to my home, that there had in fact been monitoring of a telephone line contrary to 47 U.S.C. 605”.

Jacobs then threatened to expose the FBI’s complicity in this illegal wiretap. He asked the FBI if they would fulfill their legal obligations to investigate his “allegations even though an FBI agent may indeed have been a part to the violation of 47 U.S.C. 605”. The letter closed with a request that the FBI advise him what a U.S. attorney will do with this information.

The FBI released no memos or files from the following few days and then, five days later, there were an odd series of unconvincing memos that appear designed to establish a paper trail of plausible deniability, claiming (in contradiction to FBI report from 8/29/69) that the FBI had been given records illegally obtained by the phone company. A September 8, 1969, memo from the Kansas City Special Agent in Charge to Hoover has the agent now claiming he doubted that the information the Bureau received from the phone company employee was reliable.

The next day the FBI produced a memo designed formalizing its “story”. A Miami FBI agent wrote Hoover claiming, “when interviewed Aug. 28 last by Bureau agents Miami, Re: Activities of Joseph Carl Engressia Jr. and [Jacobs] ____did not reveal telephone company had monitored telephone conversations between [Jacobs] and Engressia”. Given that previous FBI reports stated that their conversations had been illegally monitored by the phone company and illegally shared with the FBI, this report appears to be a ham-handed effort to manufacture records later to be used if Jacobs pushed for an investigation of illegal wiretapping.

In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Katz v. United States that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches extended to telephone conversations, but the following year Congress added provisions to the 1968 Omnibus Crime Bill that fought the court’s decision by identifying a list of specific crimes (kidnapping, organized crime, marijuana distribution, etc.) meriting wiretaps. But the phone company’s spying on Engressia was way out of bounds under 1969 laws.

For a few days, the FBI re-circulated several versions of this same report; it was obviously feathering its nest in case of further legal inquiries at some point. The projected faux sotto voce tone of the FBI memos finds them pretending to “establish” that no actual records of illegally intercepted calls is comically damning. These track-covering memos are the last records appearing in Engressia’s file.

It seems curious that an incident, which a matter of days earlier had been of such urgency that the counselor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the director of the Secret Service had been alerted, was so suddenly dropped so quickly and quietly, never to be mentioned again. That such a formerly urgent matter would be so quickly scuttled, set aside and forgotten is a strong measure of the threat Jacobs’ accusations represented to the FBI and their special relationship with the phone company.

In those years, before Judge Harold Green broke up the phone monopoly and birthed the baby bells, it was easy for Hoover’s FBI to maintain a special arrangement with the phone company - an arrangement under which the FBI ran warrantless wiretaps and pin registers largely as Hoover saw fit and with the phone company’s compliance. No questions were asked. The public inspection of such matters would have threatened Hoover’s special relationship with the phone company.

Fearing public disclosure of its illegal eavesdropping on Engressia, the phone company waited until 1971 to drop the bag on him, once some time had passed and Jacob’s threats were no longer in play.

But this tale, even 37 years later, has relevance beyond the particulars of an ingenious blind renegade phone whistler. It is but one artifact of the largely unexplored history of the FBI’s symbiotic enabling of the phone company’s illegal wiretapping – a history with increasing relevance in the present, as the White House pressures Congress to provide immunity to a historically abusive industry, long protected by the sort of formal arrangements with law enforcement documented in these files.
http://www.counterpunch.org/price06302008.html





Is the Government Tracking Us Through Our Cellphones? Lawsuit Seeks Answers
Matt Richtel

How widely is the U.S. government using cell phones to pinpoint the locations or track the movements of Americans, or people living on American soil?

In November 2007, the American Civil Liberties filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Justice seeking records related to such tracking practices. The DOJ did not provide the requested information, the ACLU said.

And so Tuesday, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit in federal court to try to force the DOJ to comply.

In a press release, the ACLU said that the information about how and how often the government tracks Americans using cell phones needs to come to light to determine if the efforts are unconstitutional.

The ACLU said it filed the initial data request after media reports showed that some government officials were claiming not to require “probable cause” of a crime being committed before getting court permission to do real-time tracking of cell phones.

Specifically, the civil-liberties group said, it based its request on an article I wrote in December 2005. That article discussed the discomfort that some courts were feeling about the government’s use of cell-phone tracking technology. In that story, legal officials said that some judges wanted government investigators to show probable cause.

As I noted in that article, the government can get such information from cellular operators, like Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which generally know the location of their subscribers within about 300 feet when their phones are turned on.

Such tracking information could be critical, prosecutors have said, to finding suspects or corroborating their whereabouts. And prosecutors have said that there already are legal protections in place to prevent law enforcement from tracking at will, without cause.

But the ACLU and the EFF, an organization that focuses on Internet and technology law, said that the public has an “overwhelming interest” in finding out how often the government is seeking to track Americans and why. If the information is withheld, it distances Americans from the decision-making process about how and when tracking should be permitted, the legal advocates said.

“Further delays will allow important privacy polices to be developed behind closed doors,” said David L. Sobel, senior counsel to the EFF.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ers/index.html





Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps
Eric Lichtblau

A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

Judge Walker’s voice carries extra weight because all the lawsuits involving telephone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program have been consolidated and are being heard in his court.

Jon Eisenberg, a lawyer for Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the plaintiff in the case, said the legal issues Judge Walker’s ruling raised were significant. “He’s saying FISA makes the rules and the president is bound by those rules,” Mr. Eisenberg said.

A Justice Department official said the department was reviewing the opinion late Wednesday and would consider its options.

Officials at Al-Haramain say they were mistakenly given a government document revealing the N.S.A. operation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded the document back, and Judge Walker’s ruling made it more difficult for Al-Haramain to use what it claims to have seen . But he refused to throw out the lawsuit, giving the charity’s lawyers 30 days to restructure their claim. “We still have our foot in the door,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The clock is a minute to midnight, but we’ve been there before and survived.”

The ruling comes as the Senate is overhauling the foreign intelligence law. The measure would reaffirm FISA as the exclusive means for the president to order wiretaps through court warrants, but it would also provide legal immunity to phone companies involved in the eavesdropping program. A vote could come Tuesday.

The immunity issue would not directly affect this lawsuit because Al-Haramain is suing the government, not the phone companies. But the nearly 40 other lawsuits against phone companies that Judge Walker is overseeing would almost certainly have to be dismissed if immunity is signed into law, legal analysts say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/wa...on/03fisa.html





Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech
Ryan Singel

An online campaign to scuttle a deal giving retroactive amnesty to telecoms that helped the government warrantlessly wiretap Americans is growing in strength, catching Senator Barack Obama between the Netroots that helped vaunt him to the nomination and a presidential campaign desire to seem strong on national security.

Last year, Obama won accolades from the netroots by vowing to fight against any bill that granted retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that helped the government warrantlessly spy on Americans.

But last week, portions of the netroots revolted when Obama changed his stance regarding the current version of the bill, saying that while he would fight against amnesty, he would vote for the final bill regardless because exanding the spying powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was necessary for national security.

Obama credied the netroots for improving the bill.

"By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act," Obama said in a written statement last week.

Those changes and words weren't enough for some his supporters, who created an action group on my.barackobama.com called "Senator Obama - Please Vote No on Telecom Immunity."

That's the senator's own site to motivate supporters to create groups that can take action on their own.

Though just created on June 25, it has quickly grown to quickly grown to being the fifth largest out of more than 7,000 groups, with more than 4,700 members as of Monday morning. That's just one place short of the Women for Obama group.

Len in Indy summed up the groups sentiment in an open letter to Obama on the group's blog, writing:

I have worked for your nomination and voted for you, as I did when I lived in Illinois. This has been the election I have been waiting for - one about hope and about change. I do hope I am right about change.

I understand politics and the need to compromise,[...]

However, there must be some point, there must be some principles, there must be some line that you do not cross. In my view, the new FISA bill is that. It is a simple attempt to camouflage the spineless response of a Democratic congress that is afraid to stand up to the President on civil liberties and is happy to allow any corporation to be blameless for violating our basic rights.

So, I ask myself, why would Senator Obama and the other Democrats cave in to the President. The answer that comes to mind most quickly is the "politics of fear". Are you afraid of being labeled "soft on terrorism"?

A quick survey of the members shows that many of them are new to the Obama site, and were likely motivated to create a profile due to posts at prominent left-leaning blogs Talking Points Memo, Open Left and Daily Kos. But the list of members also includes some of the most influential Netroots bloggers including Matt Stoller and Jerome Armstrong.

Meanwhile prominent lefty blogger Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, along with other lefty bloggers and libertarian-leaning fellow anti-immunity travelers, have raised more than $325,000 to fight the FISA bill.

Their Blue America PAC is already targeting House Democrats who voted for the bill, including placing a full-page ad in The Washington Post slamming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who claimed credit for creating the so-called compromise bill. The coalition plans to follow-up with a Ron Paul-style money bomb, which will be used to target key senators, according to Greenwald.

The Senate is set to take up the bill, along with a few amendments to limit or strike the amnesty clause, on July 8. The bill is widely expected to pass, and in February, similar amendments to strip or limit the immunity failed to pass.

That leaves a little more than a week to see how Obama, now one of the leaders of his party, responds to the new technological revolution in politics that he has championed.

As OpenLeft contributor Mike Stark writes:

The really cool thing about all of this technology? It is exactly what Barack Obama wants to see happen; it comports perfectly with his vision of an engaged electorate. Over and over again on the campaign trail, Obama has talked about what YOU have done. He aspires to represent "we, the people" and consistently disparages the old system of lobbyist-fueled special interest politics. So...

If you want to be the change you desire, take a few seconds, visit this group and sign up. It'll provide Barack Obama with an unprecedented opportunity to lead by listening to the people.

The Obama campaign did not return a call seeking comment.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...m-amnes-1.html





Obama Voters Protest His Switch on Telecom Immunity
James Risen

Senator Barack Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants has led to an intense backlash among some of his most ardent supporters.

Thousands of them are now using the same grass-roots organizing tools previously mastered by the Obama campaign to organize a protest against his decision.

In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by President Bush to expand the government’s domestic spying powers while also providing legal protection to the telecommunication companies that worked with the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to fight such legislation to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. But he has switched positions, and now supports a compromise hammered out between the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership. The bill is expected to come to a vote on the Senate floor next Tuesday. That decision, one of a number made by Mr. Obama in recent weeks intended to position him toward the political center as the general election campaign heats up, has brought him into serious conflict for the first time with liberal bloggers and commentators and his young supporters.

Many of them have seen the issue of granting immunity to the telecommunications companies as a test of principle in their opposition to Mr. Bush’s surveillance program.

“I don’t think there has been another instance where, in meaningful numbers, his supporters have opposed him like this,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Salon.com writer who opposes Mr. Obama’s new position. “For him to suddenly turn around and endorse this proposal is really a betrayal of what so many of his supporters believed he believed in.”

Jane Hamsher, a liberal blogger who also opposes immunity for the phone companies, said she had been flooded with messages from Obama supporters frustrated with his new stance.

“The opposition to Obama’s position among his supporters is very widespread,” said Ms. Hamsher, founder of the Web site firedoglake.com. “His promise to filibuster earlier in the year, and the decision to switch on that is seen as a real character problem. I know people who are really very big Obama supporters are very disillusioned.”

One supporter, Robert Arellano, expressed his anger on the Obama site.

“I have watched your campaign with genuine enthusiasm,” Mr. Arellano wrote, “and I have given you money. For the first time in my life, I have sensed the presence of a presidential candidate who might actually bring some meaningful change to the corrupt cesspool of national politics. But your about-face on the FISA bill genuinely angers and alarms me.”

For now, the campaign is trying to put a positive spin on the new FISA fight among its supporters.

“The fact that there is an open forum on BarackObama.com where supporters can say whether they agree or disagree speaks to a strength of our campaign,” said Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman.

Several activists and bloggers predicted that Mr. Obama’s move toward the center on some issues could sharply reduce the intensity of support he has enjoyed from liberal activists. Such enthusiasm helped power his effort to secure the Democratic nomination, and it has been one of his campaign’s most important tools for fund-raising and organizing around the country.

Markos Moulitsas, a liberal blogger and founder of the Daily Kos Web site, said he had decided to cut back on the amount of money he would contribute to the Obama campaign because of the FISA reversal.

“I will continue to support him,” Mr. Moulitsas said in an interview. “But I was going to write him a check, and I decided I would rather put that money with Democrats who will uphold the Constitution.”

Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer who advises the Obama campaign, said Tuesday in an interview that Mr. Obama had decided to support the compromise FISA legislation only after concluding it was the best deal possible.

“This was a deliberative process, and not something that was shooting from the hip,” Mr. Craig said. “Obviously, there was an element of what’s possible here. But he concluded that with FISA expiring, that it was better to get a compromise than letting the law expire.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us...cs/02fisa.html





Copying Issue Raises Hurdle for Bush Pick
Adam Liptak

As chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael E. O’Neill helped steer the Supreme Court nominations of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. through the confirmation process. An expert on judicial nominations, Mr. O’Neill later spoke with pride to a legal magazine about helping place “some difficult federal judicial nominees” onto the lower federal courts.

The shoe is now on the other foot. President Bush nominated Mr. O’Neill to be a judge on the Federal District Court here last month, and there are signs that his nomination might be a difficult one as well.

Last year, a peer-reviewed legal journal, the Supreme Court Economic Review, issued a retraction of an article by Mr. O’Neill in 2004. “Substantial portions” of the article, the editors wrote, were “appropriated without attribution” from a book review by another law professor. In addition, at least four articles by Mr. O’Neill in other publications contain passages that appear to have been lifted from other scholars’ works without quotation marks or attribution.

Long passages in the 2004 article are virtually identical to the book review, which was published in 2000 in the Virginia Law Review and was written by Anne C. Dailey, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.

For instance, Professor Dailey wrote: “Bounded rationality is not a refutation of the rational actor model; to the contrary, it attempts to fine-tune the model to take account of predictable cognitive limitations and biases. Despite occasional references to irrationality in the literature, there is nothing in fact irrational about bounded rationality.”

Four years later, Mr. O’Neill wrote this, without quotation marks or attribution to Professor Dailey: “Bounded rationality is not a refutation of the rational actor model; to the contrary, it seeks to recalibrate the neoclassical model to take account of predictable cognitive limitations and biases. Despite occasional references to irrationality in the literature, there is nothing especially irrational about bounded rationality.”

In an interview on Thursday in the dining room of his home in Chevy Chase, Md., Mr. O’Neill was contrite about the duplications, blaming “a poor work method.” He said he often mingled research materials and his own work in a single computer file. “I didn’t keep appropriate track of things,” he said. “I frankly did a poor and negligent job.”

Mr. O’Neill, a boyish 46-year-old who wore jeans and a wrinkled blue button-down shirt, said he had never knowingly passed off other scholars’ statements as his own. “So much of it is sort of dry and straightforward stuff,” he said. “To me, it all sounds generic and plain. I didn’t catch it.”

Deborah L. Rhode, an authority on legal ethics at Stanford, said the retraction by the Supreme Court Economic Review was “extremely unusual” and amounted to “a textbook case of conduct that casts doubt on someone’s fitness for judicial office.”

“That’s a serious form of misconduct in an academic career,” Ms. Rhode said. “I would think it would be viewed equally seriously in a judicial career. In my judgment, that would be disqualifying.”

In an interview, Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee until last year, said he had known for some time about the questions concerning Mr. O’Neill’s scholarship.

“I heard him out on it and put it in the balance of everything else I knew about him,” Mr. Specter said. “I believe he is an excellent prospect for the district court.”

“He was my chief counsel and staff director at a very difficult time,” Mr. Specter continued, referring to the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the withdrawn Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers and a host of legal issues, including civil rights, bankruptcy and asbestos litigation.

Mr. Specter said Mr. O’Neill’s nomination “has been thoroughly vetted on a number of levels,” including by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the White House. “I was told it went to the president,” he said.

Emily A. Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. O’Neill had been “completely forthcoming” from the start of the vetting process and had “expressed remorse for his actions.”

“He was highly recommended to President Bush,” Ms. Lawrimore said of Mr. O’Neill, “and the president is confident he will make an excellent judge.”

Friends and colleagues describe Mr. O’Neill as a creative, fair and exceptionally able lawyer. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and Yale Law School, and he served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He is working on a master’s degree in writing fiction.

The flawed 2004 article was not an isolated incident. Passages in the other articles by Mr. O’Neill, now an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law, also bear striking similarities to other scholars’ work.

Shown a copy of a 2000 article by Mr. O’Neill in the Brigham Young University Law Review, Gerald M. Caplan, a former Justice Department official and former dean of the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, said it included a verbatim reproduction of a passage from a 1985 article he wrote in the Vanderbilt Law Review. Mr. O’Neill did not quote or cite Professor Caplan.

“Well, he’s got me word for word,” Professor Caplan said.

“And there is some evidence that it’s not innocent or inadvertent,” he added, referring to the nature and extent of the duplication.

“It shows him to disadvantage,” Professor Caplan said. “If I were on the Judiciary Committee, I would want to know more.”

Similarly, parts of a 2000 article by Mr. O’Neill in the George Mason Law Review bear a striking similarity to a 1997 article in the Michigan Law Review by Neal Kumar Katyal.

Professor Katyal, of the Georgetown University Law Center, said he knew Mr. O’Neill and admired him.

“Mike is an innovative thinker and has always had integrity in my many dealings with him,” Professor Katyal said. “I can’t imagine that he would intentionally copy this banal point from my article.”

Daniel D. Polsby, an editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review and the dean of the George Mason School of Law, said he had learned about the similarities to the book review in a letter from its author, Professor Dailey. (Professor Dailey declined to comment.)

“It was my opinion at the time that this was negligent behavior,” Dean Polsby said, “and he was duly chastised. The idea of O’Neill committing a theft is just impossible. It’s just impossible.”

But the law school and Mr. O’Neill agreed that the lack of attribution in the article would have serious consequences for him as a law professor. “By agreement, by a handshake,” Dean Polsby said, “he stepped away from tenure and will reapply for it.”

Mr. O’Neill said the law school’s investigation concluded that his conduct had not been willful.

“The range of possible sanctions was a hug and a cookie to firing you,” he said. “They felt like it was a significant mistake on my part. They didn’t think it was intentional.”

Asked how he would have viewed a judicial nominee like himself in his old job on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. O’Neill answered elliptically.

“I’ve tried to have a decent reputation with people,” he said. “It’s certainly my fault. You’d like to be not just defined by the mistakes that you make in life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/wa...hp&oref=slogin





Limbaugh and Clear Channel in $400 Million Deal
Brian Stelter

Striking a deal estimated to be worth $400 million through 2016, the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has renewed his contract with Clear Channel Communications and its syndication subsidiary Premiere Radio Networks.

The contract renewal was announced Wednesday by the companies, and the financial details were provided by Mr. Limbaugh in an interview with The New York Times Magazine for an article to be published on Sunday. In the interview, Mr. Limbaugh said the new contract would pay him about $38 million a year for eight years. He also said he would receive a $100 million signing bonus.

The deal, which comes a month shy of the 20th anniversary of “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” reiterates Mr. Limbaugh’s position as the nation’s leading purveyor of political talk radio. His new contract is believed to be the most expensive in radio since 2004, when Sirius Satellite Radio paid Howard Stern $100 million a year for five years. That deal, however, also covered the staff, production and studio costs for Mr. Stern’s show.

“First and foremost I’m a businessman,” Mr. Limbaugh told Zev Chafets, the writer of the magazine profile. “My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”

Mr. Limbaugh reaches an audience of nearly 20 million listeners. His program is syndicated on about 600 radio stations nationwide and the contract renewal will assure that “The Rush Limbaugh Show” continues for several years to come.

Mr. Limbaugh’s existing contract, which was worth $285 million over a nine-year period, was set to expire next year.

“Broadcasters of Rush’s quality come along once in a lifetime,” John Hogan, the chief executive of Clear Channel Radio, said Wednesday in a statement. “We’re privileged to continue our relationship which is unprecedented in the history of our industry.”

Suffering from sluggish advertising sales and a consumer base that has embraced iPods and other forms of media, the terrestrial radio industry relies on a bench of heavy-hitting stars, like Mr. Limbaugh, to attract audiences.

“The terrestrial radio industry must provide the best possible programming, or it will not survive in the face of the competition on the Internet and from other new technologies,” said Michael Harrison, the editor of the radio industry publication Talkers Magazine, in an interview on Wednesday. “The industry has to make sure it has the major league stars in broadcasting; therefore, it makes sense that the most money and the longest contract would go to the biggest star in radio today, and that’s Rush.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/bu...a/03radio.html





More Politicians Ask FCC For Satellite Merger Conditions
FMQB

Three Democratic Senators and five Democrats from Minnesota are the latest politicians to support the combination of HD Radio technology with new satellite radio receivers, if the XM-Sirius merger is passed. Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) have co-signed a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, voicing their concerns over the proposed merger. The senators say that the inclusion of HD Radio technology in future satellite receivers is "an essential check against the merged entity using its monopoly power to stifle a promising new free, over-the-air technology." They also take issue with the plan to lease a number of channels to minority and non-commercial programming, asking for a greater percentage of the total spectrum to be leased, up to 20 or even 50 percent. However, the Senators conclude their letter by saying the FCC's best possible action would be to just reject the merger.

Five House Democrats from Minnesota have also written to Chairman Martin, echoing many of the same concerns. Reps. Timothy Walz, Betty McCollum, Keith Ellison, Collin Peterson and James Oberstar also suggest leasing out a larger percentage of the total satellite radio spectrum, as well as incorporating HD Radio capabilities into future satellite radios.

In other satellite merger news, Sirius announced on Monday that it sees approximately $400 million in savings for 2009, if it is allowed to merge with XM. According to Reuters, Sirius predicts the deal will close sometime in the third quarter of '08.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=771643





RIAA Suggestions for Content of ACTA

These are the substantive suggestions for provisions of the ACTA that the RIAA sent to the USTR on March 17, 2008.

Enforcement Best Practices

A.Legal Obligations
Parties shall:
1. Make deterrence against piracy and counterfeiting a priority legal matter.
2. Provide criminal sanctions for any act of copyright infringement that takes place on a commercial scale, including in the online environment, regardless of whether such acts are undertaken with a financial incentive.
3. Make it a criminal offense to import or export, manufacture, sell or otherwise distribute a device or system, or a component of a device or a system, knowing or having reason to know that the device or system is primarily used or designed to circumvent technological protection measures used in conjunction with materials protected by intellectual property rights.
4. Provide monetary fines and sentences of imprisonment for the importation, exportation, distribution, sale or other manner of making available of counterfeit or pirated goods sufficient to deter future infringements, consistent with a policy of removing the infringer's monetary incentive.
5. Provide for the availability of civil and injunctive relief against landlords that fail to reasonably exercise their ability to control the infringing conduct of their tenants.
6. In territories with high rates of production of pirated optical discs, provide for a system of licensing prior to the manufacture or export of optical discs, as well as the import or export of manufacturing equipment, and manufacturing materials, including optical grade polycarbonate, "stampers" and "masters."

B.Investigatory Provisions
Parties shall:
1. Provide law enforcement authorities ex officio powers to investigate criminal infringements of intellectual property rights and initiate criminal actions on their own initiative.
2. Permit law enforcement authorities, both at the border and internally, to seize clearly infringing copyright and trademark materials and to seize and/or place under seal equipment or materials suspected of being used to produce such infringing copies without the need for a complaint from the right holder, and without regard to whether protected materials have been recorded or otherwise registered with border authorities.
3. Allow law enforcement officials to communicate and share information with right holders with respect to material evidence of infringement of intellectual property that officials have in their possession.
4. Ensure that courts have the authority to issue ex parte search orders.
5. Provide that orders by judicial authorities need not individually identify the items subject to seizure, so long as they fall within general categories specified in the order.

C. Border Control
Parties shall:
1.Provide that goods that have been determined to be pirated or counterfeit by competent authorities at the border shall be destroyed, except in exceptional cases.
2. In no event authorize their border authorities, except in exceptional circumstances (such as to facilitate a controlled delivery or other law enforcement operation), to permit the exportation or transshipment of counterfeit or pirated goods.
3. Provide that competent authorities have the authority to initiate border measures ex officio, with respect to imported, exported, or in-transit merchandise suspected of being counterfeit or confusingly similar trademark goods, or pirated copyright goods, without the need for a formal complaint from a private party or right holder, and regardless of whether the relevant right that is being infringed is recorded with Customs otherwise registered.
4. In civil judicial proceedings concerning the enforcement of intellectual property rights, provide that judicial authorities have the authority to order a party to desist from an infringement, in order, inter alia, to prevent, immediately after they clear customs, the entry into the channels of commerce in the jurisdiction of those authorities of imported goods that involve the infringement of an intellectual property right, or to prevent their exportation.

D.Seizure of Materials
Parties shall:
1. Provide that judicial authorities have the authority to order the seizure of suspected counterfeit, pirated or other infringing goods, any related materials and implements including that used in the commission of the offense, any assets traceable to the infringing activity, and any documentary evidence relevant to the offense.
2. Provide that orders by judicial authorities need not individually identify the items subject to seizure, especially when the seizure involves a large amount of infringing items, so long as they fall within general categories specified in the order.
3. Allow for ex parte freeze orders to give the territory's authorities and rights holder an opportunity to ensure that infringer's profits are confiscated and that monetary damages are recoverable.

E. Destruction of Materials Determined to be Pirated or Counterfeit
Parties shall:
1. Provide that goods that have been determined to be pirated by competent authorities shall be destroyed, except in exceptional circumstances.
2. Provide that courts shall confiscate and destroy the equipment used for the manufacture of pirated goods in order to ensure that infringing parties do not repeat their illegal activities,
3. Provide that goods determined to be infringing are subject to forfeiture and destruction regardless of whether any action for infringement is initiated, whether civil, administrative or criminal and without any compensation of any kind to the defendant, and regardless of whether there has been any finding of liability on the part of any person.

F.Evidentiary Standards
Parties shall:
1. Provide that the person whose name is on the protected material is presumed to be the relevant right holder.
2. Provide that proof of ownership may be obtained by means of an affidavit, unless this issue is placed into question by material evidence to the contrary.
3. Provide that the presumption of ownership may be rebutted only if the defendant is able to provide concrete evidence to the contrary.1
4. As a deterrent to groundless defenses, award plaintiffs full costs and fees for overcoming frivolous challenges to titles.

G. Transparent Judicial Proceedings, Policies and Guidelines
Parties shall:
1. Provide clear, transparent, and predictable judicial proceedings, policies, and guidelines related to intellectual property enforcement.
2. Provide that final judicial decisions and administrative rulings of general application pertaining to the enforcement of intellectual property rights be in writing and state any relevant findings of fact and reasoning or the legal basis on which the decision or rulings are based.
3. Publicize information on their efforts and actions to provide effective enforcement of intellectual property rights in their civil, administrative, and criminal systems, including any statistical information that may be collected for such purpose.
4. Publish information related to respective intellectual property enforcement actions, including relevant statistical information.

H.Penalties
Parties shall:
1. Establish policies or guidelines that encourage judicial authorities to impose remedies at levels sufficient to deter future infringements and to adequately compensate right holders, particularly bearing in mind that many large scale infringements are properly understood as criminal conspiracies and/or organized crime.
2. Establish statutory minimum and maximum penalties that are adequate to deter persons that engage or contemplate engaging in acts of piracy.
3. Provide, whenever law enforcement authorities' investigatory powers are dependent on the level of minimum/maximum penalties available for criminal infringements, that criminal penalties are set at a level that ensures that law enforcement authorities have adequate powers to investigate copyright infringements. For example, penalties should be set at a level that ensures that law enforcement officials have the authority to initiate investigations, search prel1Jises, seize goods, and arrest suspects of criminal activity.
4. Continuously monitor the level of fines imposed and where necessary issue sentencing guidelines to ensure that fines imposed by the judicial authorities remove all gains from the infringer and deter future infringements.
5. Provide that right holders are entitled to recover their costs of investigation and litigation against infringers of intellectual property rights.
6. Provide that courts have the authority to close commercial outlets and manufacturing plants that have been used to manufacture or distribute pirate or counterfeit products.
7. In criminal matters, provide that competent authorities keep an inventory of goods and other materials proposed to be destroyed, and have the authority temporarily to exempt such materials from the destruction order to facilitate the preservation of evidence upon notice by the right holder that it wishes to bring a civil or administrative case for damages.

I. Monitoring Activities
Parties shall:
1. With respect to A.1 above, provide adequate safeguards against the unauthorized manufacture of infringing optical discs, and provide that facilities producing such products comply with the standards established by the association of replicators (IRMA) in their Anti-Piracy Compliance Program.
2. Compel manufacturers of optical discs in their territory to maintain complete and accurate records to enable right holders and public authorities to trace the person or entity that ordered the infringing discs.
3. Require that OD replicators apply unique source identification codes to all optical discs, including master discs and stampers. Secure and unique identifiers enable the tracing of the source of a product and provide a deterrent against piracy.

J. Online Infringing Activities

Parties shall:
1. Provide exclusive rights under copyright to unambiguously cover Internet use.
2. Establish appropriate rules regarding liability of service/content providers:
(a) Establishing primary liability where a party is involved in direct infringement; and ensure the application of principles of secondary liability, including contributory liability and vicarious civil liability, as well as criminal liability and abetting if appropriate.
(b) Establishing liability for actions which, taken as a whole, encourage infringement by third parties, in particular with respect to products, components and/or services whose predominant application is the facilitation of infringement.
3. Provide remedies and injunctive relief against any entity that:
(a) Creates or otherwise maintains directories of infringing materials;
(b) Provides "deeplinks" to infringing files;
(c) Commits any act, practice or service that has little or no purpose or effect other than to facilitate infringement, or that intentionally induces others to infringe (specifically allowing proof of "intent" by reference to objective standards--i.e. a reasonable person would surmise such an intent);
4. Require internet service providers and other intermediaries to employ readily available measures to inhibit infringement in instances where both legitimate and illegitimate uses were facilitated by their services, including filtering out infringing materials, provided that such measures are not unduly burdensome and do not materially affect the cost or efficiency of delivering legitimate services;
5. Require Internet service providers or other intermediaries to restrict or terminate access to their systems with respect to repeat infringers.
6. Establish liability against internet service providers who, upon receiving notices of infringement from content provides via email, or by telephone in cases of pre-release materials or in other exigent circumstances, fail to remove the infringing content, or access to such content, in an expeditious manner, and in no case more than 24 hours;

or

Provide that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, an internet service provider shall be considered as knowing that the content it stores is infringing or illegal, and thus subject to liability for copyright infringement, after receiving notification from the right holder or its representative, normally in writing, including by email or by telephone in the case of pre-release materials or in other exigent circumstances.
7. Establish, adequately fund and provide training for a computer crimes investigatory unit.
8. Provide injunctive relief against intermediaries whose services are used for infringing activities regardless of whether damages are available.
9. Establish policies against the use of government networks and computers, as well as those networks and computers of companies that have government contracts, to prevent the use of such computers and networks for the transmission of infringing materials, including a ban on the installation of p2p applications except, and to the extent to which, some particular government use requires such installation.
10. Consideration to be given to the following: possible rules on data retention, the right to information giving right holders access to data held by ISPs in the preparation and course of proceedings including in civil proceedings, and availability of complete and accurate WHOIS data.

K. Organizational Issues
Parties shall:

1. Establish anti-piracy units, including at a minimum Police and Customs officers. Such units will gather intelligence on IP crime in order to facilitate policy formulation and generate criminal investigations. Units would be expected to prepare annual reports on the criminal environment in the key IP sectors. This would document key facts on manufacturing sources and distribution networks, including any international links/exports. References would be made, inter alia, to key personalities, organized crime groups, and links to terror networks.
2. Establish single point of contact for law enforcement officials from other countries, as well as for afflicted right holders.
http://www.keionline.org/index.php?o...sk=view&id=190





RIAA's ACTA Wishlist Includes Gutted DMCA, Mandatory Filters
Nate Anderson

You can't see the text of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) because it's being drafted in secret, but it's not so secret that the RIAA doesn't get to submit its own wishlist to the government. Knowledge Ecology International, an NGO that works on trade and public knowledge, published the alleged list (hat tip to Michael Geist) late last week. I hope you like mandatory ISP filtering.

Filters aren't just for faucets

William Patry, Google's top copyright lawyer, wrote recently about news from several sources that indicated such ISP filtering language was making its way into the text of the treaty. The RIAA certainly hopes so, asking the government to require "Internet service providers and other intermediaries to employ readily available measures to inhibit infringement in instances where both legitimate and illegitimate uses were facilitated by their services, including filtering out infringing materials, provided that such measures are not unduly burdensome and do not materially affect the cost or efficiency of delivering legitimate services."

Of course, "repeat infringers" should also have their Internet connections cut off, and ISP liability (both direct and secondary) would be increased, and any "deeplinking" to infringing content could incur liability. That last provision should go over really well with search engines.

The RIAA's points, taken in tandem, seem aimed at gutting the best part of the DMCA (yes, it wasn't all bad), the "safe harbor" rules that gave ISPs immunity from material passing through their networks. In the RIAA's world, ISPs would themselves become filters and enforcers, cutting off users and immediately removing access to material based simply on a phone call. In addition, P2P use would be generally banned on government computers.

Lock up the polycarbonate

It's not just Internet users and ISPs that would feel the heat, though; traditional CD stampers are still targets. The RIAA suggests that countries "with high rates of production of pirated optical discs" be required to institute a licensing system that would control both the manufacture and export of discs—even supplies of optical grade polycarbonate would be restricted.

Replicators around the world would also be required to "maintain complete and accurate records" so that rightsholders could figure out who ordered a batch of infringing discs, and unique ID codes would need to stamped into each disc for easier tracking.

Don't ask, don't tell

As we've noted in our past ACTA coverage, the hysteria over "iPod-searching border guards" seems largely misplaced. The real rightsholder concerns here are to crack down on big pirate stamping operations on the one hand, and Internet P2P use on the other. Unfortunately, while rightsholders appear to have access to government treaty-makers, the public has been largely excluded from the process so far.

That might be less important when trade deals are really of concern only to specific industries, but the Internet, it's fair to say, has broader applications than swapping copyrighted songs. Is it really too much ask that the billions of users this might affect get a say in the treaty before it emerges full-grown into the light of day?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-wishlist.html





Court Hits BitTorrent Users Who Failed to Appear
enigmax

Last week, lawyers Davenport Lyons who are currently threatening hundreds of BitTorrent users with legal action, tasted victory in Central London County Court with wins in cases against four file-sharers. Fortunately, these ‘victories’ mean little, as Davenport chose not to go after people who defend themselves, instead picking on people they knew wouldn’t even come to court.

To those in the BitTorrent community, the name Davenport Lyons will be familiar. The London-based lawyers are responsible for a barrage of threatening letters sent to hundreds of alleged file sharers. They want people who they accuse of uploading Dream Pinball 3D, Colin McRae Dirt and Call of Juarez to comply with their demands, which means accepting that the highly-suspect evidence provided by anti-piracy tracking company Logistep is actually correct, promising never to share files again and then paying several hundred pounds to Davenport Lyons to call off the legal action.

Several individuals accused by Davenport in the Dream Pinball 3D case have access to some formidable resources and are actually relishing the opportunity of having their day in court. However, as we recently reported, Davenport Lyons like to carefully pick their prey - they simply cannot afford to lose a case due to faulty evidence. TorrentFreak is in contact with many people who are accused by Davenport of uploading, and it’s becoming apparent that people who dig in their heels - who refuse to be intimidated and refuse to be bullied - are mysteriously left alone and not taken to court.

But before we get carried away, here’s some sobering news. Last Friday, seemingly against all the odds and proving our previous articles completely wrong, Davenport Lyons achieved court victories against four file-sharers it accused of unauthorized distribution of Topware’s Dream Pinball 3D.

David Gore, a partner at Davenport Lyons said: “Copyright owners spend millions of pounds developing copyright works for sale to the public for their enjoyment and yet many think it is acceptable to obtain the work illegally and for free by procuring a copy on a peer-to-peer network.”

The four were hit with fines of £750 each - to be paid within a week - along with £2000 costs. Ouch. Surely these historic victories would now open the flood gates to enable the lawyers and anti-pirates to absolutely hammer the hundreds of people who also stand accused?

Well, not quite, no. Not even close.

The victories claimed by Davenport Lyons at Central London County Court on behalf of publisher Topware were all achieved by way of so-called ‘default judgment’. In basic terms, this means that as the individuals accused didn’t bother to turn up at court or even answer court documents, the court had no alternative than to hand victory to Davenport Lyons and Topware.

The remaining several hundred people accused of file-sharing by Davenport Lyons will be heartened to know that the company only has the confidence to go after people it knows will not turn up at court, assuring them of victory.

Loading up its metaphorical gun and getting ready to fire more legal bullets into a small barrel of defenseless fish, Davenport says it has more of these cases lined up to ‘win’ later on this week, while everyone else stands around yawning wondering when they’ll pick on someone who will actually fight back.

If you are one of the four who lost their case last Friday or have been served with court documents to appear in the future, please get in touch via the contact page, we want to speak with you.
http://torrentfreak.com/court-hits-b...appear-080702/





Download Revolution Busted
Thomas Mennecke

There’s an ominous shift in the copyright enforcement tactics used by the entertainment industry. While BitTorrent busts seem to come cheap these days, a significant number of the entertainment hungry populace have abandoned this protocol in exchange for file-sharing communities that use upload sites such as MegaUpload.com and RapidShare. Such was the case for DownloadRevolution.net, where nearly 30,000 individuals traded prime entertainment in a forum environment.

The diversification of file-sharing towards centralized, upload based websites like RapidShare has its benefits. Because these sites are download only, there is little concern for the end user. Downloaders have historically faced virtually no enforcement action – an action generally reserved for uploaders. Secondly, there are no upload bandwidth considerations, allowing the end user to download rather large files without consuming tremendous amounts of bandwidth. And because the files are stored in a centralized repository, there’s often times little concern whether the file will download in a manageable amount of time. Like Usenet, if the file is viable, it will download as fast as the end user’s download speed.

These incentives have driven many individuals away from BitTorrent and P2P and towards centralized resources such as DownloadRevolution.net and Usenet. However this convenience comes at a price. Today, Italian police raided the home administration of DownloadRevolution.net, arresting 4 individuals. According to one translated Italian report, 3 of the 4 individuals were “children”, however, their ages weren’t divulged. The raid on the administration’s home resulted in the seizure of 17 computers, 3 external hard disks, 1 memory card, 486 CD-ROMs and DVDs and, according to the difficult to read translation, about 5,700 unauthorized duplications. According to the police and the prosecution, their investigation revealed that over “6,405 works protected by copyright between music files, videos, games, software and various movies” were traded, most of which were music files.

The raid and closure of DownloadRevolution.net highlights the benefits and deficiencies of P2P networking. Although P2P and BitTorrent can be slow at times, its decentralized nature ensures its longevity. Centralized trading sites like DownloadRevolution.net can provide blazing speeds and near-guaranteed downloads, however, once the head is cut, the remaining community loses its cohesion. DownloadRevolution.net is gone forever, yet the desire for entertainment isn’t going anywhere.
http://www.slyck.com/story1700_Downl...olution_Busted





The Pirate Bay to Sue Anti-Piracy Agencies?
Posted by Sirius

The PIrate bay, which calls itself the world’s largest bittorent tracker, has announced its intention to file for damages against The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) an organisation which claims to represent the interests of recording industries worldwide. The website want compensation for the trafic that was blocked by a Danish ISP after a court ruled that it had assisted copyright infringement after allowing access to the site. The ruling apparently contravened European union Law.

The pirate bay has also announced that any money it recieves in settlement will be used to provide grants to Danish musicians who share their music online. Earlier, They had launched, a new website, called the Jesper bay after the head of Danish IFPI, which contained instructions on how to circumvent the block.

The original ruling has also come under scrutiny because The PIrate Bay was not involved in the Procedings at all and was not heard in court. The IFPI also had no rights over the music of some of the people it claimed have suffered as a result of file sharing, and had names them in the law suite without consulting them. It also transpired that the police officer incharge of the investigation might have been hired by Warner Bros while the investigation was in progress.

Prior to this, the PIrate Bay had also filed a police complaint against anti-piracy company Media Defender, which works on behalf of Sony, Universal, Paramount and Ubisoft amongst others. The Pirate Bay showed tha emails leaked from media defenders servers clearly showed that the company had launched illegal denail of service attack on the pirate bay’s servers, engaged in illegal hacking and repeatedly flooded them with spam.
http://techonoid.com/the-pirate-bay-...iracy-agencies





Open Letter

29 June 2008

Dear Friends of IMSLP, Former Users, Contributors and Supporters:

Some people have doubted that we would keep our word. Some people have questioned our competence. Some people have sworn, despite being sympathetic, that IMSLP was struck down once and forever.

I am here to prove them wrong.

It is with great joy that I bring you news of the resurrection of IMSLP. We continue to believe that the access to our culture and the Arts is a fundamental right of every human being. And holding this belief, we continue in our journey towards the goals of providing public access to the musical public domain, and the facilitation of the study of music, the understanding of music, and the enjoyment of music.

And in this spirit of openness and accessibility, I here officially dedicate the IMSLP to Ottaviano Petrucci, a pioneer whose achievements made music so much more accessible to musicians and music lovers for the past six centuries. IMSLP will henceforth be known as both IMSLP and the Petrucci Music Library. The domain name petruccimusiclibrary.org will soon (in the next few days) redirect to imslp.org.
* * *

Before I go into all the details that are involved in this resurrection, I would like to give proper thanks to several people and organizations that made today possible.

Obviously, this resurrection would be impossible without proper legal support, and I would like to thank the folks at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and the Stanford Fair Use Project (FUP) for providing crucial support during times of crisis, and Professors Michael Geist and Lawrence Lessig for recommending the IMSLP case to the two legal clinics. Even though IMSLP currently has other avenues of legal support, the support of the two clinics proved a godsend for both IMSLP and myself personally.

In addition, I would like to thank Project Gutenberg leader Michael Hart, and GNU project leader Richard M. Stallman. Mr.Stallman has continuously helped IMSLP, even during the darkest periods and despite what must be a frighteningly busy schedule, and for which I am extremely grateful. I am also very sorry that no deal was reached between Project Gutenberg and IMSLP, but I believe that the current outcome is the best for both parties. I will, however, be very interested in pursuing a mirroring agreement, where Project Gutenberg will have access to the entirety of the IMSLP site, and which should prove very useful in case of an emergency of any sort.

I would also like to thank all the IMSLP contributors whose work was indispensable for the resurrection of the IMSLP, which included a thorough copyright review of all 16,000+ files. I greatly look forward to working with you in the future, towards our common goal.

Last, but very certainly not least, I would like to thank everyone who supported IMSLP in some form or another. You have let your voices heard, and we have answered. IMSLP will continue.


To publishers:

I am very appreciative of the amount of support given to the IMSLP by the users and contributors of the IMSLP, which could be seen directly in the volume of e-mails I received after the shutdown of the IMSLP. But a misconception of our stance seems to have arisen. IMSLP is, by no means, an antithesis of the music publishing industry. Rather, I see some of the goals of both music publishers and the IMSLP to be in many ways the same: both are interested in the promotion and dissemination of music.

Due to this shared interest, IMSLP is very much willing to collaborate with music publishers in the promotion of new music, under a Creative Commons or similar license. I know full well how little of the overall profits come from selling actual scores (and I have no evidence that IMSLP affects those profits to any great extent, if at all), and how much comes from royalties from performances. Would it not make much more sense to use IMSLP to promote new composers, instead of attempting to sue IMSLP for composers who will be entering the public domain all over the world very soon, if not already? Considering the fact that IMSLP contributors and users are made up mainly of musicians and music lovers, isn't IMSLP precisely the audience that music publishers should be working with?

I am heartened by the fact that, indeed, many music publishers have seen IMSLP as a friend, and have indeed used IMSLP in the promotion of their contemporary composers. Perhaps ironically, IMSLP's resurrection is due in no small part to the help of several of these publishers.

However, permit me to make one point clear here in no uncertain terms. IMSLP will continue to oppose organizations who attempt to limit and restrict the already much-shrunken public domain. A primary goal of IMSLP is to facilitate public access to the musical public domain, and thus IMSLP will resist strongly any attempts to shrink the public domain, and will raise the alarm among the general public should there be such an assault upon the world's cultural heritage. The reorganized IMSLP will not be so easily silenced.

But let us not end on such a distasteful note. One member of the publishing industry with whom I have recently corresponded expressed the opinion that the classical music world is too small to fight amongst ourselves. I wholeheartedly agree.


To IMSLP users and supporters:

As you probably have noticed after a quick walk through the site, many things have changed. I have tried to make everything as intuitive as possible, but I do welcome all discussions and questions about new or preexisting features. Official documentation for some of IMSLP's new features is still in progress, but do feel free to seek help on the forums for questions, or simply to leave comments and suggestions for improving the usability of the IMSLP.

And some of you may have noticed the opening of the International Music Database Project (IMDBP). IMDBP is an offspring of IMSLP that is still very much a work in progress (just started I might add), and you can find more information about the goals and time line of the project on the IMDBP main page. There is no major change in the submission process for IMSLP due to the creation of the IMDBP, besides having to click on one extra link, so former IMSLP contributors should find the new system fairly intuitive. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you think the submission system can be improved in some way; this is one of the high priorities on my list.

There are also discussions of major collaborations between other organizations and IMSLP underway. More news on the specifics of a discussion will be posted as soon as the plan is solidified, and both the other organization and IMSLP are ready to make the discussion public.

I have started a backup system for anyone wanting to keep a portion of IMSLP usable offline. A significant amount of files will be available via this system, and anyone interested should take a look at the corresponding page. Due to a variety of concerns including privacy, we are not able to offer public backups of the text on the wiki at this time, but, as I mentioned near the beginning of this letter, we would be very willing to have a mirroring/backup plan with Project Gutenberg, which would include the text.

I have also noticed people asking how they could donate to IMSLP. I have set up a page explaining the ways to donate to IMSLP; some even without actually donating money, though money donations are obviously welcome.

The forum is still where it was before the shutdown, and a blog is well in planning. If someone is feeling generous and is willing to donate a chunk of a server for a Moveable Type blog (Perl based), I would be very grateful.
* * *

Welcome back everyone, and by all means, enjoy your stay!

Yours,
Edward W. Guo (a.k.a. Feldmahler)
Project leader
Contact: feldmahler {at} imslp.org, or leave a message on my talk page.

P.S. This open letter, like the first open letter, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Please do feel free to translate this letter, and post the translation on this wiki or the forums, so that an IMSLP admin can integrate the translation into this page.
http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Open_Letter_(Reopening)





Making Music with Verizon Wireless
Laura M. Holson

When most people think about music and mobile phones, Apple’s iPhone usually comes to mind. But other companies were hawking songs on mobile phones well before the iPhone existed.

Verizon Wireless has been doing it since 2006, when it launched VCast Music, a comprehensive mobile music service that allowed subscribers to download music to their phones. This year it is expanding that service, according to John Harrobin, the senior vice president for Verizon’s digital media marketing, who oversees the music offerings.

In an interview this week, he said he envisioned a not-too-distant future where Verizon sells more bundled products – including suites of ringtones, ringback tones and downloadable singles from favorite artists. And as paying for items via hand-held devices becomes more acceptable, mobile phone users will be able to more easily download whole albums and buy concert tickets, T-shirts and other items. Mobile phone makers like Nokia are betting on this too.

Some of this will be driven by the changing music industry. “Artists are going to go out on their own once you start seeing their music deals expire,” said Mr. Harrobin. The most successful, he added, will be iconic acts, not up-and-comers who still need distribution. But all musicians in a digital era “need the ability to mine the single,” Mr. Harrobin said. “That is where most of the money is made.”

Analysts agree that of all the wireless carriers, Verizon is the most innovative in offering its own music and entertainment services. “The others are trying to catch up,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG, a market research firm.

Last year Verizon Wireless teamed up with Fergie and issued wireless tickets to some concerts via cellphones. Concertgoers received a bar code picture message on their phones which they showed at the door to get in. At the end of the show, Fergie sent “thank you” text messages to those fans.

In February, Verizon announced plans for its first “mobile producer in residence” program, giving Timbaland that title, with the goal of introducing an entire mobile album this year. And in April, the company organized a live global mobile simulcast, with performances from Madonna’s exclusive show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City to promote “Hard Candy.”

Of course the path to mobile music success won’t be entirely lined with $100 bills. “You’ll see failed experiments too,” Mr. Harrobin said. One of those, he said, is likely to be ad-supported music downloads. “It’s fine for a radio format,” he said. “But I don’t think that will take off.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ess/index.html





The Rising Cost of Texting
Marguerite Reardon

If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, check out what's been happening to text messaging.

Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket. In 2005, Americans paid on average about $2.27 per gallon for gas compared with more than $4 a gallon today.

Last October, Sprint Nextel was the first to introduce the new price of 20 cents per text message. AT&T and Verizon Wireless soon followed with their price hikes going into effect this spring. And this week Engadget reported that T-Mobile USA will match the other big three wireless operators in jacking up SMS texting rates to 20 cents per message. The price increase goes into effect August 29.

On Tuesday, AT&T announced that texting will cost new iPhone users more than it had previously. The old iPhone plan included 200 text messages in the $59.99 voice and data plan. But plans for the new iPhone 3G that hits store shelves next week will cost $5 extra for 200 text messages, bringing the total price of a comparable voice and data plan on the new iPhone 3G to $74.99 a month. (This is with the $69.99 "Nation 450" bundle plus $5 for the 200 text messages.)

The new wave of price hikes comes just one year after all the major carriers raised individual text messaging rates from 10 cents a message to 15 cents per message.

So what's with the 100 percent price hike in two years? Well, there's nothing that has changed in terms of the cost associated with delivering this service. In fact, text messages cost carriers very little to transmit. And when compared with what carriers charge for transmitting other data services, such as music downloads or surfing the Web, the text messaging rates seem exorbitant.

Carriers limit the number of characters that can be transmitted in a text message to 160 characters. Each character is about 7 bits, which works out to a maximum of about 140 bytes of data per text message. This is peanuts compared with the size of sending or receiving an e-mail or downloading an MP3 song over a cellular network.

One blogger has done the math. If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to downloading one 4MB song it would cost the user almost $6,000 to download a single song via SMS texting.

One can easily assume that the mark-up on a text message is several thousands times what it actually costs carriers to transmit this little bit of data, considering that mobile operators are only charging $30 to $40 a month extra for mobile data plans that offer 5MB worth of data per month.

The reason that carriers are charging so much for text messages is because they can. Even at 15 cents and 20 cents a pop, people are willing to pay for it. The carriers are also trying to get consumers to sign up for text messaging packages and unlimited plans that vary in price from $5 a month extra for 200 messages to $20 a month extra for unlimited texting on AT&T's network, for example.

The massive price markup on texting and the growing popularity of texting have resulted in huge profits for mobile operators. Verizon reported that for the first quarter of 2008, its wireless customers spent $11.94 a month on data services, an increase of about 33 percent from a year earlier. The carrier didn't break out what percentage was spent on text messaging versus other services, but there's a good guess that a lot of the additional revenue from data came from texting. In total, mobile data accounted for about 20 percent of all wireless sales for Verizon's first quarter.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like consumers have much legal recourse for getting carriers to adjust their pricing to a more reasonable rate. There's nothing illegal about charging as much as the market will bear for any service.

But that doesn't mean that consumers like it. What do you think about the high cost of texting? Are you feeling the pinch in your wallet yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the "Talk Back" section below.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-99...l?tag=nefd.top





Dell Offers 'Windows Vista Bonus' to Frightened Customers

Gavin Clarke
The 'bonus' is XP instead of Vista

Dell is actively promoting a Microsoft licensing loophole to channel partners eager to keep selling PCs installed with Windows XP, after Microsoft's official cut off.

The Dell channel blog is pointing resellers to the loophole in the Windows Vista license that enables business customers to downgrade from the unwanted Windows Vista to its dated, but comfortable and better-supported predecessor.

According to the blog: "Dell can sell what we've branded 'Windows Vista Bonus' which allows us to preinstall XP Professional with a Vista license (on select system categories). This lets customer's upgrade to the Vista platform when they're ready. And yes, Dell will support both OSs."

Dell's blog points resellers to further information here.

Dell, meanwhile, is also making Windows XP available as an image to those partners using the company's Custom Factory Integration service.

The blog was designed to coincide with the last day Windows XP was officially available from Microsoft. From now on, you can only get Windows Vista. Officially.

Dell has taken a leading position in continuing to offer Windows XP. Earlier this month Dell vowed to keep selling PCs running the operating system until "at least 2009".

Dell's stance of not just offering Windows XP directly but actively telling its huge ecosystem of resellers how they, too, can game Microsoft's system and continue selling Windows XP demonstrates a significant shift in the OEM's relationship with Microsoft.

With chief software architect Bill Gates' departure fresh in the air, it should be remembered how, under Gates' tenure last decade as chief executive, Microsoft exploited its position as supplier of a popular PC operating system to play hardball with PC OEMs on licensing Windows.

During the US Department of Justice's antitrust trial, IBM revealed that Microsoft had delayed giving IBM access to Windows 95 simply because IBM refused to kill its own OS/2 operating system or agree to not bundle its SmartSuite rival to Office on IBM PCs.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200...ll_xp_channel/





Study Claims Windows Usage Market Share Could Fall Below 90% Soon
Christian Zibreg

A new study released by Net Applications indicates that a decreasing percentage of the Internet population is using Windows as their operating system. It appears that Mac OS X could soon be listed in the double digit-range, while Windows could fall below the 90% mark.

Net Applications’ most recent operating system survey is pointing to continued market share gains of Mac OS X at the expense of Windows, echoing similar figures in a recently published browser market share survey. The research firm measures market share by recording which operating systems are used to browse a set of hand-picked web sites that are described to be representative for the overall market – which means that the Net Applications survey does not provide precise market share figures in terms of sales or unit shipments, but provide trends in terms of usage. According to the research firm, the data is collected from a base of “approximately 160 million visitors per month.”

The survey lists Apple’s Mac OS X operating system market share in June with a record 7.94%, which is a 0.11 point increase over the previous month. This figure makes OS X the best-selling UNIX variant ever with the largest overall share of the market. Linux currently stands at 0.80% market share in this survey, a slight improvement over the 0.68% recorded last month. Windows machines still dominate the market and came in at 90.89%, down from 91.13 percent in the month ago. Although the lead of Windows remains unquestioned, its share has been dropping slowly but steadily over the past two years.

At the current pace, Windows could drop below the 90% in the fourth quarter of this year.

Apple’s iPhone OS X variant held steady at 0.16% market share in June. "Apple has confirmed that its online inventories for the original version of the iPhone are sold out in the US and UK,” Net Applications said. “Apple appears to be clearing out its inventories in preparation for the iPhone 2.0 release. This, in conjunction with customers holding off purchasing until 2.0 is released has temporarily leveled off the iPhone usage share."
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/cont...38232-113.html





Newspapers, Reeling from Slumping Ads, Slash Jobs

Deep job cuts, outsourcing and more asset sales coming as the newspaper industry retrenches
Seth Sutel

Even for an industry awash in bad news, the newspaper business went through one of its most severe retrenchments in recent memory last week.

Half a dozen newspapers said they would slash payrolls, one said it would outsource all its printing, and Tribune Co., one of the biggest publishers in the country, said it might sell its iconic headquarters tower in Chicago and the building that houses the Los Angeles Times.

The increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts, many of whom say it's too hard to tell how far the slump will go.

"They're in survival mode now," said Mike Simonton, a media analyst at Fitch Ratings, a credit analysis agency.

"We had very grim expectations for the sector," Simonton said, and publishers have either met or surpassed his estimates for how bad the results would be.

Last week alone, deep staff cuts were announced at The Hartford Courant and The (Baltimore) Sun -- two Tribune papers -- as well as at The Palm Beach Post and the Daytona Beach-Journal, while The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press said they hoped to reduce the head count in their joint operations by 7 percent through buyouts. The Boston Herald said up to 160 employees would be laid off as it outsourced its printing operations, and in a memo explaining the terms of its job security pledge, the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., said it is operating in the red. The week before, McClatchy Co. said companywide staff cuts of 10 percent were coming.

Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its "underutilized" real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.

Tribune has already reached a deal to sell one of its largest newspapers, Long Island-based Newsday, but ran into delays early this month in liquidating Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, when negotiations for the field's purchase by a state agency broke down over financing. Tribune is also moving to sell the Cubs.

Tribune has enough money to meet its debt requirements this year, bond analysts have said, but it must make headway on asset sales in order to meet its obligations in 2009.

Tribune's troubles reflect broader problems in the industry, where a deepening economic downturn is worsening losses from a long-term shift away from print advertising toward online, especially in classified categories like help wanted, autos and real estate, where rivals such as Craigslist, Move.com and AutoTrader.com are thriving.

Advertising is by far the most important source of revenue for newspapers. And in the first quarter, their overall ad revenue slumped 12.9 percent, led by a 24.9 percent drop-off in classifieds, compared with the same period a year earlier.

In fact, the industry group that compiles and releases ad revenue figures, the Newspaper Association of America, this month stopped putting out quarterly press releases with the numbers, though it quietly updated them on its Web site.

NAA spokeswoman Sheila Owens said in an e-mailed statement that the organization will now put out press releases only with full-year data "to keep the market focused on the longer-term industry transition from print to a multiplatform medium."

Some say complacency in the industry about the threat the Internet posed is to blame for the current quagmire.

Speaking on the CNBC business news cable channel Friday, Sam Zell, the real estate magnate who is now Tribune's CEO, said newspapers have historically been "monopolies" in their local markets and "insulated from reality," according to a transcript of his remarks provided by CNBC.

Going forward, if ad revenues continue to slide rapidly, companies including Journal Register Co., MediaNews Group Inc. and -- in the absence of further asset sales -- Tribune could then risk violating their loan terms, said Emile Courtney, a media industry credit analyst for Standard & Poor's.

Already, just two major publishers have investment-grade debt under S&P's ratings -- Gannett Co. and The New York Times Co. The industry is divided between them and "everybody else," Courtney said.

Given the current poor climate for the business, he said: "I have doubts banks will be as willing as they were in the past to waive or amend covenants."
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080629/newsp...acks.html?.v=3





Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’
Joanne Kaufman

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”

David Seaman, a P.R. stunt planner and the author of a book to be published in October, “Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz,” is a proponent of “safe,” “easy” “secret,” “trick” and “breaking” because they suggest that something is new and fresh, he said.

Anyone who read or heard the Toxic Shower Curtain Story can probably relax: the unsettling findings about possible respiratory, liver and reproductive damage were dismissed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Our staff scientist found many problems with the testing methodology, which called into question the credibility of the science,” said Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the commission.

The Center for Health, Environment and Justice stands by its study and says that it was trying to issue an earnest public warning about an environmental hazard. “It’s so important to let people know all the evidence out there when making decisions about which products to bring into their homes,” said Dianna S. Wentz, a spokeswoman for the group.

The center was founded by Lois Gibbs, who in the ’70s fought successfully against the toxic waste dump at Love Canal.

But if the organization’s testing methodology drew skepticism, its P.R. methodology was spot on.

“Anytime you have ‘toxic’ next to an item everyone has in their house and has always been assumed to be the last thing that would harm them, you can be sure it will get picked up on the news, and the Web will spread it like wildfire,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director of Landor, a corporate branding firm, and the author of “BrandSimple.”

The words that attract media attention change with the times. “Anything that speaks to long-term health risks is good these days, because there is a belief that there’s a lot of stuff out there harming us, from the cellphone on down,” Mr. Adamson said.

David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.

“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”

To aid in this endeavor, PR Newswire offers its members a so-called keyword density tool. “It lets you know the words someone would have to type into a search engine for your particular press release to be found, and helps put your release at the top of the search engine,” Mr. Armon said.

“Green” and “environment” are huge right now, he said, as is “foreclosure.” “We’ve done 412 press releases that incorporate that word so far in ’08, up from 261 last year.” For the record, Mr. Armon added, the use of the word “toxic” in news releases is up 5 percent.

The words that may help get a news release picked up vary from region to region. Brenda Baumgartner, the news director and anchor at KPVI, the NBC affiliate in Pocatello, Idaho, for example, looks for words like “fishing,” “hunting,” “Mormon” and “polygamy,” she said, “because they fit the culture we live around.” KPVI also went with the toxic curtain story. “Everybody takes showers,” Ms. Baumgartner said, by way of explanation.

Words that help elevate a news release also vary from industry to industry. For instance, Tom Gable, the head of a San Diego public relations firm, said a news release about video games could benefit from a phrase like “faster graphics.” When talking about technology, he said, it would be “ ‘cost breakthrough,’ like the $200 computer.”

In the entertainment industry, on the other hand, the most basic of nouns will do — baby, breakup, marriage, divorce — according to Cindi Berger, co-chief executive of the public relations firm PMK/HBH. “Now attach names like Madonna or Jessica Simpson,” Ms. Berger said, “and of course the assignment editor is going to pay attention.”

Perhaps because many people in public relations are former journalists, they know what grates on the Fourth Estate. Mr. Gable, who was once the business editor of The San Diego Union, has compiled a list of words that will do a news release no good whatsoever, like “solutions,” “leading edge,” “cutting edge,” “state of the art,” “mission critical,” and “turnkey.”

Mr. Gable said that his company once did a weeklong survey of the releases that came out of PR Newswire and Business Wire, a commercial news distribution service, “and most of the releases identified their company as ‘a leader’ and described their research as ‘cutting edge.’”

“They were empty, unsubstantiated and had no news value,” he said.

Ken Sunshine, the head of a P.R. firm in Manhattan, said he thought the media had an institutional bias against “hype-y terms” like “world renowned” and “once in a lifetime,” which he studiously avoids putting in his news releases. “But ‘unique’ is fine,” he said, “if something really is unique.”

Ultimately, perhaps, the whole thing is less about terms than timing.

“Was it really the issue of toxic shower curtains that fired up assignment editors?” asked Mr. Armon of PR Newswire. “Or was it just a slow news day?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/bu...a/30toxic.html





Clay Felker, Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 82
Deirdre Carmody

Clay Felker, a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine, giving it energetic expression in a glossy weekly named for and devoted to the boisterous city that fascinated him — New York — died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

His death was of natural causes, said his wife, the author Gail Sheehy. He had throat cancer in his later years.

Mr. Felker edited a number of publications besides New York magazine. There were stints at Esquire, The Village Voice, Adweek and others. He also created an opposite-coast counterpart to New York and called it New West.

But it was at New York that he left his biggest imprint on American journalism. He had edited the magazine when it was a Sunday supplement to The New York Herald Tribune founded in 1964. Four years later, after the newspaper had closed, Mr. Felker and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced New York as a glossy, stand-alone magazine.

New York’s mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short, witty ones on consumer services. He embraced the New Journalism of the late ’60s: the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth. And he adopted a tone that was unapologetically elitist, indefatigably trendy and proudly provincial, in a sophisticated, Manhattan-centric sort of way. The headlines were bold, the graphics even bolder.

The look and attitude captured the attention of the city and influenced editors and designers for years to come. Dozens of city magazines modeling themselves after New York sprang up around the country.

Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government and the high jinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sources and journalistic techniques.

A National Profile

Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and others in Mr. Felker’s stable of star writers helped give the magazine national prominence. Meanwhile, what he called its “secret weapon,” its service coverage — on where to eat, shop, drink and live — kept many readers coming back.

Mr. Felker eventually lost New York magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a bitter takeover battle in 1977. But his influence can still be felt in the current magazine, from its in-crowd tone to its ubiquitous infographics and inventive typography tailored to each article.

“American journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” Adam Moss, New York’s current editor, said in a statement yesterday. Mr. Felker, he once said, “was obsessed with power, and he invented a magazine in the image of that obsession,” one that “reported on the secret machinations of the city’s players.”

Mr. Felker’s roster of writers also included Ken Auletta, Julie Baumgold, Steven Brill, Elizabeth Crow, Gael Greene, Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, Mimi Sheraton and John Simon. Many of them called him the best editor in the country, although some said he was autocratic and took joy in hectoring and humiliating them.

“His voice, his personality, his superhuman animation were horrifying, of course, but they were also the best part of working with him,” Ms. Crow, who later became editor of Mademoiselle and who died in 2005, wrote in 1975. “Clay’s booming tenor voice was simply the most noticeable manifestation of the 100 percent in-your-face and in-your-ears and in-your-brain atmosphere he created wherever he went.”

The supercharged atmosphere of New York was a long way from Webster Groves, Mo., where Clay Schuette Felker, born on Oct. 2, 1925, grew up. (His German immigrant forebears had changed their name from von Fredrikstein to Volker and later anglicized it as Felker.) Journalism ran in his family. His father, Carl, was the managing editor of The Sporting News; his mother, Cora Tyree Felker, had been women’s editor of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch before having children.

After enrolling at Duke University, Mr. Felker left college for a three-year hitch in the Navy before returning to graduate in 1951. At Duke he edited the undergraduate newspaper and married Leslie Aldridge, another undergraduate. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Pamela Tiffin, an actress.

In 1984 he married Gail Sheehy, who first wrote for him at The Herald Tribune and who later became widely known as the author of “Passages” and other books.

After college, Mr. Felker was a reporter for Life magazine for six years and worked on the development of Sports Illustrated. He later became features editor of Esquire but quit when his rival, Harold Hayes, got the top job. In 1963 he joined The Herald Tribune and became founding editor of the supplement called New York.

A Debut Hits the Stands

When he and Mr. Glaser rolled out the revamped, stand-alone version in 1968, the reviews were mixed. “Though occasional critics find New York excessively slick and too often frivolous, the magazine undeniably generates excitement — an excitement that is winning readers not just in Manhattan but in urban centers across the country,” Newsweek said in 1970.

Others were less impressed. “Boutique journalism,” Mr. Breslin called it when he quit the magazine in 1971, fed up, he said, with its dilettante attitude. Ms. Steinem was bothered by the magazine’s East Side orientation. “When the city is falling apart, we are writing about renovating brownstones,” she said.

But Ms. Steinem stayed on as a staff writer and was rewarded when Mr. Felker helped her and others start the feminist magazine called Ms. He inserted a 40-page preview of Ms. in New York’s issue of Dec. 20, 1971, and helped finance the first issue.

Many of Mr. Felker’s writers followed him from The Herald Tribune. One, Mr. Wolfe, the magazine’s most visible stylist, shared many of Mr. Felker’s views and thrived on the freedom his boss gave him to write satiric, sometimes savage articles about what became known as the New Society.

“Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age — the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in his book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

Probably no article better captured this strain of social-history journalism than one whose title created an American idiom: “Radical Chic.” With unsparing detail and barely concealed mockery, Mr. Wolfe, exhausting 20,000 words, described a fund-raising party given by Leonard Bernstein in his glamorous Manhattan apartment, attended by rich liberals and Black Panthers, the recipients of the evening’s charitable proceeds. The article, appearing in June 1970, outraged both the liberals and the Panthers, but the issue sold out.

Mr. Felker’s New York magazine became a prime practitioner of the New Journalism, again to mixed reactions. The form’s admirers believed it represented events more truthfully than traditional objective reporting could. Conventional journalism, they said, reported what people said; the New Journalists tried to present what people really felt and thought.

“Nonsense,” its critics countered. They considered New Journalism fiction masquerading as reportage, and its practitioners as manipulators of reader responses.

One article, about a prostitute and her pimp, titled “Redpants and Sugarman,” drew heavy criticism when it was later revealed that Redpants was a composite figure created from all the prostitutes that the writer, Ms. Sheehy, had interviewed.

Mr. Felker later said he had erred in not letting readers know the truth about Redpants. He said that Ms. Sheehy had originally explained her method in the second paragraph but that he had removed it. “I felt it slowed the story down,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1995.

“But we learned a lesson,” he said. “Composite is never used any more. "

One-Borough Town

Few readers flipping through its pages would have mistaken New York as a magazine for the five boroughs. That was never the idea.

“Everybody who worked on New York lived in Manhattan,” Mr. Felker told The Times. “So it was essentially a Manhattan magazine. And I believe that print — now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media — has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.”

He added: “I’ve been criticized for being elitist, but that’s who, broadly speaking, consumes print. That was our set of values — our attitude — to understand how to make life more interesting, to explain New York life.”

In its first year as an independent publication, with an initial circulation of 50,000, New York lost $1.7 million. In the fall of 1969, still in the red, New York went public, offering 20 percent of its stock at $10 a share. The next year, with circulation at 240,000, the magazine finally broke even, and Mr. Felker became publisher as well as editor.

Demanding as his job at New York was, he was hungry for more. In 1974 New York acquired The Village Voice, the liberal New York weekly. (That same year he moved New York into new quarters on Second Avenue, complete with gym, staff dining room and full-time chef; today, the magazine, published by New York Media Holdings LLC, has headquarters in SoHo.) In 1976 Mr. Felker started a clone of New York for the California market, calling the magazine New West.

A Takeover Drama

By the end of that year, Mr. Murdoch, the Australian press baron who had just paid $30 million to add The New York Post to his chain of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, made an offer to buy New York magazine. It set off several weeks of high drama, complete with front-page coverage in the New York press.

Mr. Felker refused the Murdoch offer. Then, worried he might lose his magazine, he asked his old friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, to back him in a bid to keep the company. Mrs. Graham offered to buy out Carter Burden, the principal stockholder, who held 24 percent of the stock. Mr. Burden, who had once been the subject of an unflattering profile in Mr. Felker’s magazine, turned her down.

The next day Mr. Murdoch flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr. Burden was skiing, and made a deal. Mr. Felker immediately obtained a temporary restraining order to block the sale. Meanwhile, tales of Mr. Murdoch’s lurid tabloid journalism were causing such agitation among New York staff members that they walked off the job an hour before the magazine’s closing deadline, saying they would never work for Mr. Murdoch.

Concerned that the walkout would hurt his efforts to block the sale, Mr. Felker frantically tried to find his writers and get them back to work. After looking through bars on the East Side, he finally found them at a restaurant. But by then it was too late to meet the deadline.

And suddenly it was over: Mr. Felker was out. An agreement was signed before dawn on Jan. 7, 1977. Mr. Murdoch gained control of the company and agreed to buy Mr. Felker’s shares for $1.4 million.

Mr. Felker was never able to recreate the brio of New York. In 1978 he joined with Associated Newspapers to buy Esquire and was its editor and publisher until 1981. He became a producer at 20th Century Fox; the editor of Daily News Tonight, an afternoon edition of The Daily News in New York; the editor of Manhattan, inc., a magazine for Wall Streeters; and editor of various smaller publications.

In addition to Ms. Sheehy, Mr. Felker is survived by a sister, Charlotte Gallagher; a daughter, Mohm Sheehy of Cambridge, Mass.; a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy of Brooklyn; and three stepgrandchildren.

Although repeated surgery to address his throat cancer impinged on his ability to speak in his later years, Mr. Felker continued as a consultant to magazines. In 1994 he became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year the school established the Clay Felker Magazine Center.

The West Coast became his second home. And while he loved teaching, nothing ever quite equaled those high-living and hard-working days when New York City was his muse and New York magazine his darling.

“I know why Clay is such a good editor,” said his friend the novelist and playwright Muriel Resnick. “He works until 8 o’clock. He goes somewhere every night. He’s out with people, he talks to people, he listens to people, and he doesn’t drink.”

David Carr contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/bu.../02felker.html





Reflections: The Death of Gallium
Robert Silverberg

I mourn for the dodo, poor fat flightless bird, extinct since the eighteenth century. I grieve for the great auk, virtually wiped out by zealous Viking huntsmen a thousand years ago and finished off by hungry Greenlanders around 1760. I think the world would be more interesting if such extinct creatures as the moa, the giant ground sloth, the passenger pigeon, and the quagga still moved among us. It surely would be a lively place if we had a few tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs on hand. (Though not in my neighborhood, please.) And I’d find it great fun to watch one of those PBS nature documentaries showing the migratory habits of the woolly mammoth. They’re all gone, though, along with the speckled cormorant, Steller’s sea cow, the Hispaniola hutia, the aurochs, the Irish elk, and all too many other species.

But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

Running out of oil, yes. We’ve all been concerned about that for many years and everyone anticipates a time when the world’s underground petroleum reserves will have been pumped dry. But oil is just an organic substance that was created by natural biological processes; we know that we have a lot of it, but we’re using it up very rapidly, no more is being created, and someday it’ll be gone. The disappearance of elements, though—that’s a different matter. I was taught long ago that the ninety-two elements found in nature are the essential building blocks of the universe. Take one away—or three, or six—and won’t the essential structure of things suffer a potent blow? Somehow I feel that there’s a powerful difference between running out of oil, or killing off all the dodos, and having elements go extinct.

I’ve understood the idea of extinction since I was a small boy, staring goggle-eyed at the dinosaur skeletons in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Bad things happen—a climate change, perhaps, or the appearance on the scene of very efficient new predators—and whole species of animals and plants vanish, never to return. But elements? The extinction of entire elements, the disappearance of actual chunks of the periodic table, is not something I’ve ever given a moment’s thought to. Except now, thanks to Armin Reller of the University of Augsburg.

The concept has occasionally turned up in science fiction. I remember reading, long ago, S.S. Held’s novel The Death of Iron, which was serialized in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories starting in September, 1932. (No, I’m not that old—but a short-lived SF magazine called Wonder Story Annual reprinted the Held novel in 1952, when I was in college, and that’s when I first encountered it.)

Because I was an assiduous collector of old science fiction magazines long ago, I also have that 1932 Gernsback magazine on my desk right now. Gernsback frequently bought translation rights to European science fiction books for his magazine, and The Death of Iron was one of them. The invaluable Donald Tuck Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy tells me that Held was French, and La Mort du Fer was originally published in Paris in 1931. Indeed, the sketch of Held in Wonder Stories—Gernsback illustrated every story he published with a sketch of its author—shows a man of about forty, quintessentially French in physiognomy, with a lean, tapering face, intensely penetrating eyes, a conspicuous nose, an elegant dark goatee. Not even a Google search turns up any scrap of biographical information about him, but at least, thanks to Hugo Gernsback, I know what he looked like.

The Death of Iron is, as its name implies, a disaster novel. A mysterious disease attacks the structural integrity of the machinery used by a French steel company. “The modifications of the texture of the metal itself,” we are told—the translation is by Fletcher Pratt, himself a great writer of fantasy and science fiction in an earlier era—“these dry, dusty knots encysted in the mass, some of them imperceptible to the naked eye and others as big as walnuts; these cinder-like stains, sometimes black and sometimes blue, running through the steel, seemed to have been produced by a process unknown to modern science.” Which is indeed the case: a disease, quickly named siderosis, is found to have attacked everything iron at the steel plant, and the disease proves to be contagious, propagating itself from one piece of metal to another. Everything made of iron turns porous and crumbles.

Sacre bleu! Quel catastrophe! No more airplanes, no more trains or buses, no bridges, no weapons, no scissors, no shovels, no can-openers, no high-rise buildings. Subtract one vital element and in short order society collapses into Neolithic anarchy, and then into a nomadic post-technological society founded on mysticism and magic. This forgotten book has an exciting tale to tell, and tells it very well.

It’s just a fantasy, of course. In the real world iron is in no danger of extinction from strange diseases, nor is our supply of it running low. And, though I said a couple of paragraphs ago that the ninety-two natural elements are essential building blocks of the universe, the truth is that we’ve been getting along without two of them—numbers 85 and 87 in the periodic table—for quite some time. The periodic table indicates that they ought to be there, but they’re nowhere to be found in nature. Element 85, astatine, finally was synthesized at the University of California in 1940. It’s a radioactive element with the very short half-life of 8.3 hours, and whatever supply of it was present at the creation of the world vanished billions of years ago. The other blank place in the periodic table, the one that should have been occupied by element 87, was filled in 1939 by a French scientist, who named it, naturally, francium. It is created by the radioactive decay of actinium, which itself is a decay product of uranium-235, and has a half-life of just 21 minutes. So for all intents and purposes the world must do without element 87, and we are none the worse for that.

Gallium, though—

Gallium’s atomic number is 31. It’s a blue-white metal first discovered in 1831, and has certain unusual properties, like a very low melting point and an unwillingness to oxidize, that make it useful as a coating for optical mirrors, a liquid seal in strongly heated apparatus, and a substitute for mercury in ultraviolet lamps. It’s also quite important in making the liquid-crystal displays used in flat-screen television sets and computer monitors.

As it happens, we are building a lot of flat-screen TV sets and computer monitors these days. Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017. Even zinc, commonplace old zinc that is alloyed with copper to make brass, and which the United States used for ordinary one-cent coins when copper was in short supply in World War II, has a Reller extinction date of 2037. (How does a novel called The Death of Brass grab you?)

Zinc was never rare. We mine millions of tons a year of it. But the supply is finite and the demand is infinite, and that’s bad news. Even copper, as I noted above, is deemed to be at risk. We humans move to and fro upon the earth, gobbling up everything in sight, and some things aren’t replaceable.

Solutions will be needed, if we want to go on having things like television screens and solar panels and computer chips. Synthesizing the necessary elements, or finding workable substitutes for them, is one obvious idea. Recycling these vanishing elements from discarded equipment is another. We can always try to make our high-tech devices more efficient, at least so far as their need for these substances goes. And discovering better ways of separating the rare elements from the matrices in which they exist as bare traces would help—the furnace-flue solution. (Platinum, for example, always in short supply, constitutes 1.5 parts per million of urban dust and grime, which is ever-abundant.)

But the sobering truth is that we still have millions of years to go before our own extinction date, or so we hope, and at our present rate of consumption we are likely to deplete most of the natural resources this planet has handed us. We have set up breeding and conservation programs to guard the few remaining whooping cranes, Indian rhinoceroses, and Siberian tigers. But we can’t exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself. And once the scientists have started talking about our chances of running out of copper, we know that the future is rapidly moving in on us and big changes lie ahead.
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0806/ref.shtml





Netsukuku

http://netsukuku.freaknet.org

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1. What is this?

2. Get the code!

3. Build and install

3.1 Static Binaries and Packages

4. Kernel dependencies

5. How to use it

6. Where to get in touch with us

7. Bug report

8. Hack the code

9. License and that kind of stuff...

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**
**** 1. What is this?
**

Netsukuku is a mesh network or a p2p net system that generates and sustains itself autonomously. It is designed to handle an unlimited number of nodes with minimal CPU and memory resources. Thanks to this feature it can be easily used to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and not controlled network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls.

This net is composed by computers linked physically each other, therefore it isn't build upon any existing network. Netsukuku builds only the routes which connects all the computers of the net.

In other words, Netsukuku replaces the level 3 of the model iso/osi with another routing protocol.

The Domain Name System is also replaced by a decentralised and distributed system: the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy.

The complete features list of Netsukuku is here:
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/files/..._features_list


In order to join to Netsukuku you have to use NetsukukuD, which is the daemon implementing the Npv7 protocol.

Before doing anything, please read the documentation in doc/ or in
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org


**
**** 2. Get the code!
**

Get the tarball of the latest stable version from:
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/files/


If you want to download the development code you have to checkout it from the svn repository:
(Warning: It is highly probable the development code will not work!)

$ svn co http://dev.hinezumi.org/svnroot/netsukuku/trunk netsukuku

Once you've checked out a copy of the source tree, you can update your source tree at any time so it is in sync with the latest and greatest by running the command: # cd netsukuku/
# svn update


**
**** 3. Build and install
**

To compile the code you can use scons or just go with the old school way:

# ./configure && make && make install

But SCons is cooler:
http://www.scons.org/
(You should have installed at least the 2.4 version of Python in order to avoid dirty bugs in scons)


The code depends also on the libgmp,zlib and openssl. Generally you have already them installed on your system, but eventually you can retrieve them here:
for the libgmp: http://www.swox.com/gmp/
the openssl library here: http://openssl.org
and finally the zlibs: http://zlib.net

Then go in the src/ directory and type:
$ scons --help

That will show you all the options you can use in the build and installation process. Finally execute:

$ scons

The code will be compiled. If all went well install NetsukukuD with:

# scons install

Now you should give a look at /etc/netsukuku.conf (or wherever you installed it) and modify it for your needs, but generally the default options are good.

- Notes:

If you want to change some scons option to do another installation, (i.e. you may want to reinstall it with another MANDIR path), you have to run:
$ scons --clean


**
**** 3.1 Static Binaries and Packages
**

If you prefer to just install Netsukuku, without compiling it, you can download the static binaries suitable to your platform. They come packed in various formats (.tgz, .deb, .ipk).

The packages repository is at:
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/packages/


**
**** 4. Kernel dependencies
**

On Linux be sure to have the following options set in your kernel .config.
These options are taken from linux-2.6.14.

#
# Networking options
#
CONFIG_PACKET=y
CONFIG_UNIX=y
CONFIG_INET=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTICAST=y
CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTIPLE_TABLES=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_NET_IPIP=y
CONFIG_NETFILTER=y

and these from linux-2.6.16.19.

#
# Core Netfilter Configuration
#

CONFIG_NETFILTER_XT_MATCH_CONNTRACK=y
NETFILTER_XT_TARGET_CONNMARK=y

#
# IP: Netfilter Configuration
#

CONFIG_IP_NF_IPTABLES=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_FILTER=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_REJECT=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_NAT=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_NAT_NEEDED=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_MASQUERADE=y

If you are using modules you have to load them before launching the daemon.


**
**** 5. How to use it
**

Before doing anything do:

$ man ntkd
$ man andna

when you feel confortable and you are ready to dare type with root priviledges:

# ntkd

then just wait... ^_-

(For the first times it's cool to use the -D option to see what happens).

- Note:
The daemon at startup takes the list of all the network interfaces which are currently UP and it uses all of them to send and receive packets. If you want to force the daemon to use specific interfaces you should use the B<-i> option.

**
**** 6. Where to get in touch with us
**

> Mailing list

Subscribe to the netsukuku mailing to get help, be updated on the latest news and discuss on its development.

To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
netsukuku-subscribe@lists.dyne.org
or use the web interface:
http://lists.dyne.org/mailman/listinfo/netsukuku

You can browse the archive here:
http://lists.dyne.org/netsukuku/
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.network.p...peer.netsukuku


> IRC

We live night and day in IRC, come to see us on channel
#netsukuku
on the FreeNode irc server (irc.freenode.org).


**
**** 7. Bug report
**

{ Don't panic! }

If you encounter any bug, please report it.
Use the online bug track system:
http://bugs.dyne.org/
or the mailing list:
http://lists.dyne.org/netsukuku/
and explain what the problem is and if possible a way to reproduce it.


**
**** 8. Hack the code
**

Feel free to debug, patch, modify and eat the code. Then submit your results to the mailing list ^_-

There is a lot to code too! If you are a Kung Foo coder, get on board and help the development writing some nice poems. For a start you can take a look at the src/TODO file.

**
**** 9. License and that kind of stuff...
**

All the Netsukuku code is released under the GPL-2, please see the COPYING file for more information.

The authors of Netsukuku and NetsukukuD are listed in the file AUTHORS.


- netsukuku.org is part of Netsukuku project. Please refer to its licence for further informations –
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/?pag=about





Cracking Physical Identity Theft

Social engineering expert reveals brick-and-mortar identity theft risks in banks, ISPs, and other firms
Kelly Jackson Higgins

A researcher performing social engineering exploits on behalf of several U.S. banks and other firms in the past year has “stolen” thousands of identities with a 100 percent success rate.

Joshua Perrymon, hacking director for PacketFocus Security Solutions and CEO of RedFlag Security, says organizations typically are focused on online identity theft from their data resources, and don’t think about how the same data can literally walk out the door with a criminal posing as an auditor or a computer repairman. He once walked out of a client site carrying their U.S. mail tray with 500 customer statements inside it, he says.

“This is the forgotten and overlooked” security risk for identity theft, Perrymon says. “That’s why the first time we show [our clients] what we can do, it blows them away." But with the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) new identity theft regulations requiring banks, mortgage firms, credit unions, automobile dealerships, and other companies that provide credit to assess identity theft risks as well as add policies and procedures to pinpoint any “red flags” as of this November, Perrymon and his team are in hot demand to perform undercover social engineering exploits for banks and other firms to test their ID theft vulnerabilities.

During one recent social engineering caper for a large credit union with 15 locations, Perrymon and his team posed as federal investigators for the FDIC. They used their fake ID-making machine that spits out phony drivers’ licenses and official-looking badges and after two days of reconnaissance, they donned suits and their forged FDIC badges and went on-site at one of the credit union locations during its busiest and most hectic time of day, lunchtime. “I walked in with a camera around my neck that looks like a digital 35 millimeter, but the whole time it’s recording video, and with a clipboard. We walked right in, posing as federal auditors,” Perrymon recalls. “Ninety-eight percent of the time someone asks if I need anything or any help... At that point I sit them down and ask them thirty questions about their internal security procedures – dye bags, sound alarms, etc.”

Perrymon says he then walked around the individual offices and found one that was empty, and voila: “Most of the time customer data is right there on the desk, so I snatch that right up,” he says. “My favorite thing to do is open the credenza, take seven or eight folders and slide them right under the clipboard. Our goal is to be in and out in seven minutes.”

And that’s about how long it took him to steal -- unfettered -- sensitive identity information on seven of the credit union’s customers.

“We’ve also done [social engineering jobs] for secure hosting companies – we get into data centers and get to their drawings and internal sensitive documents,” he says. “We were able to bypass the RFID security at a hosting company.”

Another time, he posed by the door with a large vendor equipment box, and a helpful data center worker held the door for him and let him in. “I walked right in, opened the box and plugged right into the backbone of a big ISP,” he says.

And while Perrymon and his team have “drivers' licenses” and other phony IDs, they are rarely asked to present them. They even try to make the IDs somewhat inconsistent with legitimate ones to see if anyone notices -- typically no one does, he says. “What we want to see is if an employee says ‘that’s not a real badge,’” he says. “So we try not to make the IDs perfect... so they can pick up on [it]. But nine times out of ten, they’re really not going to question you.”

“Over the past five years, we have [had] a 100 percent success ratio of walking out of each engagement with at least five complete identities,” he says
http://www.darkreading.com/document....WT.svl=news1_1





Diary of a Deliberately Spammed Housewife

What happened when 'Penelope Retch' answered her spam e-mail
Ellen Messmer

For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark.

The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad on their PC.

What would be the experience in 10 countries when everyday people, armed with a PC and e-mail account McAfee provided for the Global S.P.A.M. Diaries project, clicked through the spam and chronicled the results?

Mooney — who had observed the family's PC crippled just before Christmas by a virus — was game, especially because McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She was selected to be among the 50 volunteers picked by McAfee out of 2,000 people who applied to be part of the adventure.

By the time it was all over, after every bank-account phishing scam, Nigerian bank scheme, and offer for medication, adult content and just plain free stuff had been pursued. "I was horrified," says Mooney, a realtor by profession. "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."

McAfee is releasing the results Tuesday of its free-wheeling month-long S.P.A.M. experiment, done largely to illustrate — if you didn't know already — how spam is connected to malware and criminal activity, not to mention some of the slimiest marketing ever devised. (Compare antispam products.)

Each S.P.A.M. volunteer saw an average of 70 spam messages arrive in their in-box each day, with men receiving about 15 more per day than women. That was a lot to answer, but "Penelope Retch" — the alias that Mooney chose for her S.P.A.M. adventure — answered every single message.
The spammed life of Penelope Retch

In her guise as Penelope Retch, Mooney answered the e-mail that came into her account. "I'd see an interactive spam, open it, click on it and asked to be removed. That would only make it worse," she says. "They'd say 'no.'"

Whether trying to win an iPod online, get free travel brochures, weight-loss tea or Maybelline eyeliner, the effect of entering a home address was extreme. Immediately, a deluge of mail landed at her doorstep, directed to the attention of Penelope Retch.
"One of the mail offers I got was a $7,500 credit card for Penelope Retch," Mooney says, noting that the sudden upsurge in junk mail left the neighborhood postman somewhat aghast. "It grew exponentially, so I stopped giving out my home address," she says, adding, "I am concerned about the environment."

Mooney clicked through on the phishing e-mails for fake Wells Fargo and other bank sites, sat back as the supposed government of Nigeria sought to give her an inheritance, and watched a foreign IP address go after a dummy PayPal account that had been set up as part of the S.P.A.M. experiment.

Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says.

According to McAfee, which selected five participants from each of 10 countries for the S.P.A.M. experiment, the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 messages over the course of the month.
Related Content

Brazil and Italy were in the 15,000-plus category, and Mexico and United Kingdom above 10,000. Australia, The Netherlands and Spain were in the 5,000 to 9,000-plus spam range. The S.P.A.M. volunteers in France and Germany got the least, less than 3,000 for the month. McAfee didn't even include what it calls "grey mail" (e-mail that arrived after participants signed up for a newsletter, for example) in this count.

Phishing e-mail accounted for 22% of the spam received by the Italian volunteers and 18% of the U.S. ones. In general, spam appears to still largely be delivered in English; French- and German-language spam were the only non-English spam to amount to more than 10% of spam received by the participants in France and Germany respectively.

Some oddball facts that emerged from the experiment are that fake Chase.com was the most common phishing e-mail spotted during the project, and that the British volunteers received the most Nigerian scam e-mail.

In addition to Mooney, the other S.P.A.M. participants also kept a blog about the experience, which some found amusing and others disturbing. One participant in Australia named Marika wrote, "I don't know whether I would feel safe to surf to that extent again. I tried to sign up for jobs that would generate an at-home income with what seemed like respectable sites, however these sites led to massive amounts of spam."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...xperiment.html





"Lost" Beatles Interview Uncovered

A film enthusiast has discovered a long lost interview with The Beatles from 1964 which has not been broadcast since.

Richard Jeffs came across 64 canisters of film stored in a damp garage in South London, and when he started to go through them he stumbled across a piece of pop history.

The conversation with Scottish television dates from April 30, 1964, according to the BBC, which played excerpts from the nine-and-a-half minute interview on the radio on Tuesday.

It came shortly after the Fab Four's trip to the United States during which they were besieged by fans and watched by a television audience estimated to be about half the country's population when they played The Ed Sullivan Show.

During the interview, Paul McCartney and John Lennon discussed how they came up with their tunes, and Jeffs said it shed light on the songwriting process within arguably the biggest band ever.

When asked how they collaborated, Lennon replied: "Well, you know, it depends. Sometimes we write them on old pianos, anything that's lying around."

McCartney added: "Normally we sit down and try and bash one out. But then again, there's no formula, because he (Lennon) can come up with one day completely finished. We still say we both wrote it, though."

The two also recalled where they first met.

"I was playing at a garden fete in the ... village where I lived just outside Liverpool, playing with a group, and he came along and we met," said Lennon.

Jeffs said the canisters were probably discarded after the tele-recording machine they were made on was replaced by a video machine.

The Beatles recording was on the second can of film that he viewed, he told BBC Radio.

"The first one I opened had got a clip of Cilla Black on it," he said, referring to the British television personality.

"But this was the second one that we took along to get copied, and when they copied it they said 'this must be worth millions'.

"And it is very much like being the man with the million pound note because of course there aren't millions (to be spent) in television and I can't get anyone to play the film in television."

As well as the comments on the songwriting process, Jeffs said the interview was remarkable because it was so relaxed.

"Most of the interviews from this time were them at airports being rushed from one place to the other, and this is a relaxed nine-and-a-half minute interview with them in a studio where they are very happy."

He said he was looking forward to discovering what was in the remaining 62 canisters.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; editing by Keith Weir)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...17796420080701





Online Tunes, in Service to Africa
Robert Levine

The music business is known for supporting causes with events like the Live Aid and Live Earth concerts, which generate lots of money and publicity for a relatively short time. But on Monday (RED), a nonprofit organization that arranges for companies to contribute a share of profits on certain products to fight AIDS in Africa, is starting a digital music service for that purpose, and it plans to operate for the long haul. The new venture has already arranged to release new songs from U2, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Elton John, Emmylou Harris and Death Cab for Cutie.

The still-unnamed service, which is scheduled to start in September, will deliver customers three new pieces of exclusive content a week for a monthly fee of $5. Half of that money will go through (RED) to the Global Fund, and the other half will go to the artists who contribute songs and to their record companies. As with (RED)’s branded products, like a special iPod and Motorola phone, companies will sacrifice part but not all of their profits, and consumers will know that some of the money they spend goes to the AIDS-in-Africa cause.

Each week (RED)’s service will deliver two songs in MP3 format, one from a superstar act like U2, whose frontman, Bono, was a co-founder of (RED), and one from a less established artist. The third piece of content will be a “crackerjack surprise,” a song, video or short story. The idea is to appeal to Internet users who are interested in music but alienated by commercial radio or the chaos of some online music sites.

(RED)’s president for content, Don MacKinnon, previously put together music products for Starbucks, where he had success connecting with adult consumers. “The idea, then as now, is music discovery,” Mr. MacKinnon said. “People want someone to send them music from artists they love as well as acts that are emerging.”

Bono, in an e-mail message, said, “Don MacKinnon might just be the penicillin the ailing music business needs.”

He added, “I have no doubt that some of the music software we are working on at (RED) will help change the way music is received, as well as changing the lives of Africans who will die without the AIDS drugs that (RED) can provide.”

In the past (RED) has been criticized for not funneling enough AIDS relief compared with the amount of money that companies spend promoting the (RED)-branded products. But the organization’s approach is to find businesses that can finance AIDS drugs in a sustainable way. A subscription music service that generates steady revenue would fit that approach.

Many music executives say they believe adults have trouble locating music on the Web that they will enjoy. “There’s so much music out there now, and people aren’t getting their information in the ways that they grew up with,” Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, said. “I think there’s quite an opportunity to help people keep current with music.”

(RED)’s service will provide visuals along with the music. The artists can choose 30 images that they believe evoke their songs, and users will see them as the music plays. Listeners can then choose an image, separate from those chosen by the artists, that they think represents the song; when enough do so, subscribers will be able to play the song to a stream of images that other listeners have chosen.

(RED)’s music software will deliver updates on how the organization’s money is being used in Africa. It will also encourage customers to share the service with friends and colleagues: subscribers can e-mail their friends an offer for a two-week free tryout.

(RED) will get some of its songs from “Spectacle: Elvis Costello With ...,” a music-theme talk show that will make its debut on the Sundance Channel this fall. The organization will be able to use almost all the music performed by Mr. Costello and his guests, although it will not necessarily take all of it. “If you’re going to create something,” Mr. Costello said, “it’s good to know that there’s more to it than profit.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/arts/music/30red.html





Stairway Surprise

A back-of-the-napkin analysis of the lifetime worth of the most requested rock tune in history.
Miriam Datskovsky

In the big, bad game of rock and roll, “Stairway to Heaven” is undeniably a winner. Released by Led Zeppelin in 1971, the eight-minute song is considered a musical masterpiece and is one of the most-played rock tunes of all time. Proving its longevity, “Stairway” hit the U.K. charts again last fall and was a top download in the U.S., after Zeppelin’s first downloadable album launched on iTunes. But because the band is notoriously protective of its work, “Stairway” hasn’t met its full moneymaking potential. While other artists have made big bucks by licensing songs to Hollywood and Madison Avenue—think of Bob Dylan’s “Love Sick” in that Victoria’s Secret commercial—Zeppelin has shunned most opportunities. We consulted executives in the music, advertising, and entertainment industries to come up with some numbers, real and potential, for the value of “Stairway."

PUBLISHING ROYALTIES
Zeppelin hasn’t licensed “Stairway” for movies or commercials. But songwriters Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and Warner/Chappell, the song’s publisher, make money off royalties from record sales, radio plays, and live performances. Zeppelin has played “Stairway” at every gig since 1971, yielding about $150,000 in royalties. Everyone from Frank Zappa to the London Philharmonic has also performed it, and let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of proms, weddings, and bar mitzvahs where it’s been played. (D.J.’s and venues pay a small annual fee for the right to play it.) Estimated gain: $400,000. Royalties from album and DVD sales total about $8.6 million. Plus “Stairway” has been played on the radio an estimated 2,985,000 times (equal to more than 45 years of uninterrupted airtime), netting nearly $2 million. It’s also thought to be the bestselling piece of sheet music in rock history, with royalties of $1 million.
ESTIMATED TOTAL: $12 million

THE MASTER RECORDING
In 1972, Zeppelin and its label, Atlantic Records, sparred over the band’s refusal to release “Stairway” as a single. But as a result, the public had to buy the album, known as Led Zeppelin IV, to get the song, snapping it up as if it were a single. All told, “Stairway” has appeared on four Zeppelin albums, sales of which have earned Atlantic and the band $500 million, including $56 million for last year’s downloadable album, Mothership. Sales of 2 million DVDs featuring live performances of “Stairway” have brought the band and the distributor, Warner Bros., $48 million. Last fall, Zeppelin, surprisingly, signed a deal believed to be worth $2 million with Verizon Wireless that made ringtones, alert tones, and full-song downloads of "Stairway" available. The band, publisher, and label will share a 10 percent royalty on every download.
ESTIMATED TOTAL: $550 million

POTENTIAL EARNINGS
Does the Verizon deal signal a change of heart? In 2002, Zeppelin licensed a hit for the first time: “Rock and Roll,” for a Cadillac campaign. If the band licensed “Stairway,” advertising experts say it could net as much as $8 million for just one campaign—and a lot more if Zeppelin does other deals. (Licensing songs for use in TV and movies brings in much less: about $80,000 for one deal.) Royalties from the song’s use on sites like YouTube offer a new potential earnings stream: A YouTube search for “Stairway” brought 11,000 results. But if Zeppelin wants to cash in, it should move before nostalgic baby boomers get too old. “If the target market is 45-plus, the song is extremely valuable,” says Izzy DeBellis, executive creative director at Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners. “It’s associated with every last dance you ever had. Prom—it was the makeout song. If you were still dancing slow at the end of the song, you were in.”
Estimated total: $10 million or more

THE BOTTOM LINE
Nearly 37 years after the release of “Stairway,” there seems to be no end to its revenue stream. But Zeppelin could up the total if it wants to go commercial.

VALUE OF "STAIRWAY" EARNINGS: $562 million
VALUE OF POTENTIAL LICENSING DEALS: $10 million and up
TOTAL VALUE OF "STAIRWAY": $572 million or more

Sources: Todd Brabec, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; Led Zeppelin: The Complete Guide to Their Music, by Dave Lewis; Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems and SoundScan; Recording Industry Association of America; Danny Strick, president, Sony/ATV Music Publishing; Alan Wallis, executive director of valuation and business modeling, Ernst & Young.
http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lif...irway-Surprise





Led Zeppelin Uncomfortable Lending Music to Rhythm Games
Earnest Cavalli

Despite the success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, you won't see Led Zeppelin's iconic tunes pop up in either game any time soon, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The band, specifically Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, is not comfortable giving gaming companies access to the group's master recordings -- a necessary step in adding the band to any game.

While it's depressing that we won't see "Stairway" in any of our virtual set lists any time soon, I'd definitely prefer no Zeppelin to horrendously covered Zeppelin. Activision and Harmonix's efforts to gain access to the band's master tapes at least demonstrate that the companies have finally stopped relying on terrible covers when they're unable to get the original tune.
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/07/...ppelin-un.html





Reborn for the Fourth of July
Jon Pareles

Back when punk and new wave were new, the Feelies might well have been the band with the oddest calendar: they became known for playing on holidays. They might have appeared on the Fourth of July or Flag Day or Valentine’s Day. Or not, since they also went for months or years between shows.

When they did perform, they pushed the rock ’n’ roll basics — two or three chords, an unswerving beat — toward the ecstatic. They defined those few chords with intricately interlocking parts, bearing down on them to turn repetition into a frenetic rave-up. “Our manager used to wonder if we were going to explode onstage,” said Bill Million, one of this New Jersey band’s two founding guitarists, singers and producers, along with Glenn Mercer.

The Feelies have taken nearly 17 years to resurface for two sold-out shows on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, followed by a concert opening for Sonic Youth in Battery Park on Friday, for which the free tickets disappeared in minutes online.

The band lineup is the one that gelled in 1983 and made the last three of the four Feelies albums. It has Mr. Mercer, 53, and Mr. Million, 54, on guitars; Brenda Sauter, 49, on bass; and Dave Weckerman, 58, and Stan Demeski, 47, on drums and percussion. Mr. Mercer and Mr. Million have resumed their songwriting collaboration, and the sets will include some new material.

The Feelies were a vivid apparition between 1977, when they played their debut show at a high school here, and 1991, when they released their fourth album, “Time for a Witness,” and played a final Fourth of July show at Maxwell’s. Then they disappeared. Mr. Million suddenly moved to Florida without leaving a forwarding address and gave up guitar, and the band was no more.

When the Feelies emerged — in the 1970s heyday of CBGB, Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club — punk and art rock around New York were awash in Minimalist drones and patterns and a primitivist return to the basics. The early Feelies made no secret of their admiration for the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. (Later they would tour with Lou Reed.) But where other bands were pouring on distortion and noise, the Feelies made their impact through precision. At early rehearsals they decided that a cymbal crash obscured a realm of high frequencies they wanted to explore, so they replaced cymbals with more clearly delineated layers of guitars and percussion.

“Our sound is defined by what we left out and didn’t play, as much as by what we did,” said Mr. Mercer in an interview at his basement studio here, where the band has been rehearsing. He looks studious behind large, horn-rimmed glasses, and measures his words. “I think in a loose way the idea of keeping it minimal goes beyond just the music. It’s my whole approach to everything. Don’t say too much whenever possible. We’re just trying to get the most impact out of the least amount.”

That impact has been especially strong on musicians. The Feelies’ guitar interplay and unassuming vocals now echo through collegiate and indie rock, both directly and via acknowledged fans like R.E.M. and Sonic Youth. They have also attracted film directors. Jonathan Demme had the band perform in a high school prom scene in “Something Wild,” and Susan Seidelman commissioned Mr. Mercer and Mr. Million to write the score for “Smithereens.”

The Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore recalled seeing the Feelies at the Mudd Club in the late ’70s. “They came out and proceeded to just mow the place down with their guitar playing,” he said. “And these guys were buttoned-up-collars nerd boys from the ’burbs. They were totally straight from the backyard cookout. So it was cool to be not cool.”

When Sonic Youth was asked to choose an opening act for its Fourth of July show this Friday in Battery Park, the date made Mr. Moore think about the Feelies. “I had this fond memory of the Feelies always playing on American holidays,” Mr. Moore said. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we get the Feelies? Do they exist?’ ”

That was a complicated question. Mr. Mercer, who had been playing in other groups with Feelies members, said he and Mr. Million had been talking for years about reconvening the band. “It’s not like we got mad at each other and said, ‘We broke up,’ ” Mr. Million said in a telephone interview. “We just stopped playing, as we had done periodically since we got together.”

Mr. Million said he “simply lost interest” in the music while the band was doing its 1991 shows. “I would be looking down at the set list and thinking, ‘Only a few songs to go.’ So I really had to stop because it didn’t mean the same thing.”

When he abruptly moved to Florida, he worked on security for Disney World, doing computer programming for access systems. But when one of his sons started playing guitar, Mr. Million was drawn back to the instrument. “It sounds odd to me to even call this a reunion,” he said. “It’s just that we’ve gotten together after a long break.”

Mr. Mercer said he had earned more lately from Feelies royalties than he had when the band was active. One Feelies song, “Let’s Go,” turned up in a Volvo commercial.

“We’ve had offers to play, we’ve had a lot of interest in the band,” Mr. Mercer said. “And we’ve had a lot of offers recently for licensing of songs. So it just seemed like people were interested in having us back.”

His studio, where the band worked on its 1988 album, “Only Life,” as well as on “Time for a Witness,” is a small, tidy room, barely large enough to swing a guitar, with photographs of a rock pantheon — Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bob Marley, John Lennon and an autographed Little Richard (“To Glenn, God loves you”) — on the walls.

“We’ve always been a basement band,” Mr. Million said. “We started out in my basement and eventually moved into Glenn’s basement, and we’re still in the same basement.”

The Feelies’ recording career was commercially modest. Its studio recordings reveal the blueprints of the songs, but only rarely do they hint at the guitar maelstroms the Feelies could create onstage. An early lineup — Mr. Mercer and Mr. Million, with Anton Fier on drums and Keith DeNunzio (a k a Keith Clayton) on bass — made the Feelies’ dizzying 1980 debut album, “Crazy Rhythms” (Stiff/reissued on A&M), and soon broke up, generating the first of many intertwined Feelies spinoff bands: the Trypes, the Willies and Yung Wu. The Feelies’ more stable lineup arrived with “The Good Earth” (Coyote/Twin Tone), which was released in 1986; produced by Peter Buck of R.E.M., it moved the band toward thoughtful folk-rock.

Then came the band’s major-label stint: two albums, “Only Life” in 1988, and the darker, more psychedelia-tinged “Time for a Witness,” for A&M. Its albums have slipped out of print, though the Feelies own the rights to “Crazy Rhythms” and “The Good Earth” and are negotiating to have them reissued.

The Feelies’ re-emergence is determinedly low-key. Members with day jobs are keeping them. The band has no manager, no recording contract and no tour dates planned beyond Independence Day, though that is likely to change. They have learned three dozen songs and are writing more, with the goal of recording again.

“We were never very proactive,” Mr. Mercer said. “Things would present themselves to us, and we would either go with it or not.“

Behind his glasses he ventured a half-smile. “There’s no game plan,” he said. “We don’t want to jump in too far into the deep end. Just to wade toward it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/ar...ic/01feel.html

















Until next week,

- js.

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