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Old 31-08-06, 02:19 PM   #2
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Alternative Rockers See Hobby Evolve Into Business
Susan Tuz

Members of the alternative rock group Eleven West are, from left, Andrew Lipton, Kevin Kohart, Saagar Kulkarni, Greg Autuori and Scott Erich.

Some friendships are meant to last. For five young men in Ridgefield, music has been the bond that's kept their friendship strong.

Members of the band Eleven West -- Scott Erich, Greg Autuori, Kevin Kohart, Saagar Kulkarni and Andrew Lipton -- turned their music hobby into a business, no small feat for guys who just graduated from high school.

"My parents bought me a drum set when I was 8," Kohart, 18, said. "I took lessons for two years, then we moved here, and Scott and I started peaking off of each other.""Kevin and I have played together since fifth grade," Erich, 18, said. "We ."‰."‰. picked up Andrew and Saagar in middle school. Then I moved to London at the end of eighth grade."

Kulkarni, 17, started playing the bass in fifth grade. "From there, I played in school orchestra and jazz band," he said. "I started playing electric bass in jazz band and realized I wanted to play rock and more modern styles."

Kulkarni, Erich, Kohart and Lipton all played in the jazz band rhythm section throughout middle school. Forming their own group was almost a given.

Through the years, the band went through many names and metamorphoses. Autuori joined the group in ninth grade, filling Erich's role as guitarist and singer. "As our taste in music evolved through high school, our style evolved with it," Kohart said.

Erich agreed. Returning to the band in fall of 2005, he found it influenced by groups such as Avenge Sevenfold, Thursday and Incubus.

"When we first started out, we listened to Led Zeppelin and (Jimi) Hendrix and The Doors," he said. "So we played bluesy-rock."

Eleven West's recent sound can best be described as alternative rock, and they've taken it on the road.

From January to July they played at venues including the Empress Ballroom in Danbury, The Space in Hamden, Toquet Hall in Westport and Trackside in Wilton.

"We do it all ourselves," Erich said. "Booking shows, production, song writing, promotion -- with the exception of the help of a studio engineer, Ryan Perra, in Westport, where we recorded the CD."

Their CD was cut in July as a testimonial to their time together, before they go off to college this fall. To date, they've sold 175 copies "out of the trunks of cars."

The CDs is also available at Ridgefield Music and a number of Web sites. Within a month it should be available on iTunes.

They have no big music-business ambitions.

"Our music has gone from hobby to business, and when we get back together again, it will be hobby again," said Erich, who will minor in music at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania."I think you could safely say we all have a love of music," said Autuori, 18, who put down his guitar and has done vocals with the group since Erich's return. "Anyone can pick up our CD and enjoy it," Kulkarni said. "It's not experimental. There's something for everyone."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1011599





An Eye for Cool, and Cash

In the Hunt to Fill 'Social News' Web Sites, Contributors Now Compete
Sara Kehaulani Goo

Corey Spring has a college student's dream job: He gets paid to surf the Internet.

Every morning, the 22-year-old Ohio State University senior spends at least an hour wading through 100 of his favorite Web sites -- mostly blogs and mainstream news sites -- looking for unique news items he thinks online readers would like. A few weeks ago, he scored big: He found a New York Times story that identified a woman based on the Internet searches she performed using AOL, which released its users' search data in a privacy breach earlier this month.

He quickly copied and pasted the story's Web address into an online form at Netscape.com, wrote a headline and summary of the story, then clicked the send button.

"It's nice to be the first one to get a big scoop that just came out and nobody's heard of," Spring said. "You want to be the first to say, 'Hey, look at this!' "

Spring neither reports nor writes the news, but he submits stories he finds interesting to one of several popular "social news" Web sites -- places where seeing a story first in a major publication counts as a coup. Such sites encourage visitors to share articles they find interesting, vote on items they like best and post comments about them. The idea is to digest the most current information swirling around the Internet -- as diverse as global news, celebrity gossip and tech tips -- and post it in one place, where top stories can change hour by hour.

On Friday, when many of the nation's newspapers focused on the Hurricane Katrina anniversary, Pluto's planetary status and France's decision to send troops to Lebanon, social news sites offered a far different sampling. The top stories on Digg.com included "10 things Google knows about you"; a first-person account from a man who claimed he was interrogated by D.C. police for playing with a portable video game near the Capitol; and an Associated Press report about the City of Las Vegas no longer issuing wedding licenses past midnight.

The system depends on a steady stream of contributors like Spring. Last month, Netscape said it would be the first to pay the most active contributors -- $1,000 a month to post at least 150 stories during that time to its newly redesigned Web site. The job qualifications are rather fuzzy, but an executive said active "navigators" or "social bookmarkers" provide a valuable service because they keep the site's content varied and fresh.

"This is a new field, in some ways, a new talent pool," said Jason Calacanis, general manager at Netscape, a division of AOL. "They have a different skill set analogous to other jobs out there but perhaps most analogous to 'cool hunting.' It's almost like urban archaeology, finding interesting things. In other industries it might be a talent scout, or it might be a designer or people who go out and find the latest cool sneakers. There are people in our society who get employed doing a job like this."

Indeed, some of the newly employed "navigators" found it hard to describe the skills required for the job, other than the ability to navigate the Internet very quickly. Most of them are also bloggers, but others simply love to search the Internet in their free time and like the online fame they achieve for becoming one of the most active contributors to such sites.

"I love doing this -- I love trolling around the Internet. It's all I do all day," said Sarah Gim, a 32-year-old blogger who specializes in finding unique news items about food and shopping. Netscape hired her after seeing her contributions to the food blog Slashfood. She likes that "people who look at Netscape and other navigators, they know Sarah and they think of food. I love being known as the food person."

Wayne Welch was one of the top contributors to Digg before he was lured away by Netscape's offer. "It never was or has been a goal of mine to become a top" contributor, Welch said in an e-mail. "It just kind of happened. I have made many friends from Digg who have the same interests as I do, so really to me it was a sharing of information, hey I found this cool story, what did you find. In the process of doing this many people liked the stories I was submitting and I am the same way in my personal life, I always want to share something cool with anyone who will listen."

Calacanis's offer last month created a bit of controversy in the Internet world, especially because Netscape made clear that it wanted to hire some of the top contributors to other similarly designed sites, such as Reddit.com, Newsvine.com and Digg.com, which do not pay people for submitting stories. Some users called Netscape's new employees sellouts for accepting the offer, but others said they hoped Digg and others would also begin paying their heavy contributors.

"PAYING PEOPLE to submit stories to a social news site is just plain wrong," wrote someone with the screen name Wayne Kerr, in a discussion about the matter on the Web site Postbubble ( http://www.postbubble.com/ ). Another commentator, with the screen name Thomas Aylott, disagreed, arguing that surfing for news "isn't an art, it's a skill. And now, finally, it's a marketable and profitable skill."

Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg, which helped pioneer the social news format with a focus on tech-related news, said his Web site will not pay contributors because he fears that will disrupt its online community.

He said he does not want to create an imbalance whereby one user is more valued than another. "What's important to the community is not to favor anyone," Adelson said. "If we betray that and start compensating users one way or another, you create significant hierarchies where individuals are motivated based on compensation."

But other contributors to social news Web sites think something much larger is taking shape. Derek Van Vliet, one of the top contributors to Digg who now works for Netscape, said he has been approached by another social news site to submit stories for a fee. He declined to name the company that made the offer.

"I do not think this is about paying users. I consider this paying people to contribute quality content, which is not a new concept on the internet by any means," Van Vliet wrote in an e-mail. "I expect to see more opportunities like this for people who contribute positively to social communities."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...082501308.html





Web, Reality TV Create New Celebrities
Jill Lawless

Reality TV turns nobodies into stars. Spoof Internet music videos garner millions of viewers. Television executives and program makers faced up to an uncomfortable truth Saturday at the Edinburgh International Television Festival: In the age of interactive television and user-generated online content, just about anyone can be a star.

The phenomenon is especially pronounced in Britain, where the fiercely competitive tabloid press requires a constant supply of celebrities - A-list, B-list, C-list and below.

"We don't really care how they became famous," said Boyd Hilton, television editor of Heat, the country's top celebrity magazine.

The rise of the instant star and the increasingly ephemeral nature of celebrity pose a challenge to television's traditional measures of talent. So it's no surprise that one of the most popular sessions at the Edinburgh festival was a panel discussion - titled "Don't You Know Who I am?" - that examined the changing nature of celebrity.
Hundreds of producers and programmers from around the world, from Danish TV to Disney to the BBC, packed an auditorium to hear from panelists including Rebecca Loos - a "celebrity" famous for her alleged affair with soccer star David Beckham - and "Lottery Lout" Michael Carroll, a multimillion-dollar winner with big tattoos and an extensive criminal record.

The fame of Loos and Carroll clearly irked some "traditional" celebrities, who resented the success of people with no discernible talent.

"I think I got known to the public for having a talent," said actress and singer Michelle Gayle, another panelist. "The things 'celebrities' are doing are not the things I want to do."

Gayle said she despaired "when you're speaking to kids and their ambition is to be a footballer's wife."

Loos - who garnered headlines, and a small fortune, when she sold the story of her alleged romance with the married Beckham - was unrepentant.

"My view is: You take from it what you can," said Loos, who has appeared on several reality-TV shows and says she is now developing her own TV projects.

"It has given me opportunities, certain doors that are interesting ... You have to take the good and the bad," she said.

Psychologist Marisa Peer said there had been a fundamental change in the nature of celebrity.

"The public used to like iconic celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor that they could never be like ... People now like celebrities who are like them," she said.

Panelist Jeremy Beadle, a once-ubiquitous British game show host now rarely sighted on TV, had a warning for aspiring celebs: fame is fleeting.

"I don't think the people who chase fame understand what it really is, because they will be crucified," he said. This program should be called 'Don't You Know Who I Was?'"

An even greater challenge to TV and its notions of celebrity may come from technology. Video-sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video mean that homemade clips can be seen by millions, creating instant - and usually short-lived - global phenomena.

"In this type of world, everyone is a celebrity," Marissa Mayer, Google Inc.'s vice president of search products and user experience, told delegates during another session Saturday.

"You can thank us for it or not, but it does cause things like a David Hasselhoff video to be the biggest video in the world."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-27-07-19-53





At Forbes.com, Lots of Glitter but Maybe Not So Many Visitors
Peter Edmonston

If Forbes.com was looking to create some Internet buzz last week, it succeeded.

The Web site published an article called “Don’t Marry Career Women,” which suggested that if a man did, he was more likely to be cheated on, get divorced and have a dirty house.

Responses on the Web were swift, with many blogs and sites like Salon.com attacking the posting as a sexist throwback. Forbes.com temporarily withdrew the article and later paired it with an opposing view titled, “Don’t Marry A Lazy Man.”

Forbes.com, the online sibling of Forbes magazine and part of Forbes Inc., is more accustomed to delivering the news than being the news. And despite last week’s dust-up, it is adept at it. Even as Forbes magazine has declined in advertising in the last few years, Forbes.com has thrived.

Its own ads proclaim that “more people get their business news from Forbes.com than any other source in the world,” saying that its sites drew about 15 million unique visitors in a single month earlier this year. It was a well-heeled crowd, according to Forbes.com, which says that the average household income of its users is $149,601.

Forbes’s Web prowess is a big reason Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that counts Bono of U2 as a managing director, agreed on Aug. 4 to buy a minority stake in Forbes’s publishing business. “Forbes has already won the first round” in the battle for Internet supremacy, an Elevation founder, Roger McNamee, said then.

But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about Forbes.com’s industry-leading success. For its claim of a worldwide audience of nearly 15.3 million, it has been citing February data from comScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading providers of third-party Web traffic data.

There are several problems with that statistic, though, and comScore has since revised the figure downward to less than 13.2 million as part of a broader revamping of its worldwide data for many sites. Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore Media Metrix, said the new figures were released “a couple of months ago” after it changed its methods for estimating global audiences.

There is also the question, given Forbes.com’s user figures, of where those visitors were going. According to comScore, 45 percent of its February traffic went to ForbesAutos.com, a companion Web site heavy on car reviews and photos. About three-quarters of the ForbesAutos.com traffic came from outside the United States.

Since February, comScore said, Forbes.com’s traffic has tumbled. In July, Forbes Web sites drew 7.3 million unique visitors worldwide, almost a million of whom went to ForbesAutos. That put Forbes.com slightly below Dow Jones (whose online properties include The Wall Street Journal’s Web site and MarketWatch), CNNMoney.com (which includes the sites of Fortune and Business 2.0 magazines) and sites affiliated with Reuters, each of which comScore says had some 7.6 million visitors that month.

James Spanfeller, chief executive of Forbes.com, is not backing away from the contention that Forbes.com is No. 1 in its field.

“Are we leading the pack?” Mr. Spanfeller said in an interview on Friday. “Yes.”

Asked why, as recently as last week, Forbes.com continued to cite comScore’s discarded figure of 15.3 million on its Web site, Mr. Spanfeller said that the company only learned of comScore’s new, lower number when informed of it by a reporter. He also said that the usage statistics for many of its rivals were revised downward as well, some by larger percentages than that for Forbes.com.

What about comScore’s July figure of 7.3 million, which is less than half what Forbes.com has been using? Mr. Spanfeller said comScore’s latest figures clashed with the company’s internally generated data, which still showed about 15 million visitors a month, with ForbesAutos.com accounting for about 2 million of those.

Still, Mr. Spanfeller, who is also chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade association for online media, conceded that the proliferation of Web traffic statistics could be confusing and agreed that the industry needed to deal with that issue.

Forbes.com is hardly the only site to present traffic figures that are higher than those reported by the third-party companies. And because they rely on sampling and extrapolation, even the independent companies often present vastly different results for the same site.

Faith in such data has also suffered as a result of recent restatements by the large Web-tracking businesses. Nielsen/NetRatings, comScore’s main competitor, recently reduced its April numbers for Entrepreneur.com to about 2 million visitors from a previously reported 7.6 million. (The company said it made the change to remove Entrepreneur.com pages that had popped up without the user requesting them.)

The Forbes site’s assertions that it is top dog irk its competitors. “Forbes.com is not the biggest,” Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing for Time Inc.’s business and finance network, said in an e-mail message on Friday.

His comment was seconded by L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of The Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones, who is responsible for Dow Jones’s consumer brands, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch. Both Mr. Shah and Mr. Crovitz pointed to figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, which they say undercut those from Forbes.com.

Nielsen/NetRatings’ latest audience figures in the United States — Nielsen does not provide worldwide figures — show Forbes.com with less than 6.6 million unique visitors in July, putting it below both Dow Jones, at about 7.8 million, and CNNMoney, at about 8.5 million. The largest business site was Yahoo Finance, with 12.2 million visitors, although other financial sites often choose not to compare themselves with large portals.

The debate is more than just a numbers game. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the Forbes site attracted almost $55 million in revenue in 2005, the most among business publications, including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and the business pages of The New York Times.

Some competitors argue that Forbes.com’s popularity derives in part from racy, provocative or wealth-obsessed lifestyle features that have little to do with traditional business news — examples from this year include “The Hottest Billionaire Heiresses,” “Top Topless Beaches” and “America’s Drunkest Cities.” Those kinds of articles, unlikely to appear in Forbes magazine, may be a small fraction of those that Forbes.com posts each day, but they are often featured on mass-market Web portals.

Most financial publications cover the softer side of money, hoping to cast a wide net and attract different types of advertisers. And like Forbes.com, many Web sites link up with portals to increase their traffic. Forbes.com may simply do these things better, or more aggressively, than most.

In fact, one Forbes.com rival seems to be taking a page from its playbook. In the spring, BusinessWeek Online hired away the Forbes.com lifestyle editor, Charles Dubow, to be its director of new products.

Still, some competitors say that while eye-catching lifestyle stories may attract lots of readers, those readers are more transient and less likely to be the kind of high-powered professionals that advertisers pay more to reach.

Mr. Crovitz of Dow Jones cited Nielsen/NetRatings data from June showing that the average visitor to a Dow Jones site spent 19 minutes there during the month, as opposed to 5 minutes for the Forbes.com user.

Mr. Spanfeller responded that many Forbes.com readers were busy decision-makers who cannot spend large chunks of their workday trolling the Web.

What do advertisers think? Jeff Lanctot, vice president and general manager of a marketing services company, Avenue A Razorfish, suggested that touting flashy, nonbusiness content, while not necessarily a problem, could pose risks for a site like Forbes.com if overdone.

“If it is a salacious Paris Hilton link that drops you at Forbes.com, that might be an issue” for an advertiser, he said.

But Alan Schanzer, managing partner at MEC Interaction North America, a media planning group, saw little harm in what he called Forbes.com’s occasional tongue-in-cheek approach.

Consider “America’s Drunkest Cities,” a Forbes.com posting that ranked American cities by alcohol consumption. “I would guess that was a very popular piece,” Mr. Schanzer said. “I bet lots of people in New York were trying to figure out why they weren’t higher up.” (New York was No. 32 on Forbes.com’s list; Milwaukee was No. 1.)

Mr. Spanfeller said Forbes.com’s readership had a very appealing demographic profile that had remained relatively stable even as its audience had grown.

He pointed out that Forbes.com allowed its advertisers to specify what kind of editorial material they wanted to be paired with. That way, an advertiser seeking to be associated with hard business news would not see its ad run next to, say, the article on topless beaches.

Even if advertisers do not balk at Forbes.com’s provocative postings, some readers and business leaders might. Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity.com, told Salon last week that she thought that Forbes.com’s “career women” posting was “incredibly disappointing” and that she planned to speak with people at the magazine about it.

Asked about the article, Mr. Spanfeller said it was an aberration that had “clearly failed” to give the subject the sensitive treatment it deserved.

Despite the furor, the career women posting and reaction seemed unlikely to dent Forbes.com’s standing in the Web rankings anytime soon. Yesterday, the revamped piece — renamed “Careers and Marriage” — stood at the top of the site’s list of its most popular postings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/te.../28forbes.html





Wireless Providers Poised to Win Spectrum Licenses
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel

When the government’s multibillion-dollar auction of radio spectrum licenses began two weeks ago, it looked as if newcomers might get the chance to buy their way into the mobile phone business, leading to more choices for consumers.

But now the country’s biggest cellular providers appear poised to win many of the 1,122 licenses up for auction, allowing them to expand their reach and reducing the chance that a new entrant might bring down prices.

At the same time, cable companies like Time Warner and Comcast have teamed up with Sprint Nextel to bid on chunks of spectrum to expand their limited presence in the wireless business. Analysts said the cable companies were likely to use the spectrum to offer wireless Web access, not necessarily phone service.

Of the $13.3 billion in bids registered thus far, $2.2 billion has come from the cable providers, bidding together in a consortium with Sprint, the third-largest cellular carrier. But about 60 percent of the total bids have come from Cingular, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, the first-, second- and fourth-largest cellphone companies. T-Mobile has bid nearly $4 billion, mostly for licenses in major metropolitan areas, while Cingular and Verizon have sought licenses that cover broader regions.

In throwing their financial weight around, the cellphone companies may have scared off DirecTV and EchoStar, the two largest satellite television providers, which were expected to make a charge into the wireless arena but withdrew from the auction last week.

“The kings of the hill defended the hill,” said Roger Entner, a wireless industry analyst at Ovum, a telecommunications consulting firm. “The dream of another wave of new entrants has died.”

The lack of new participants, however, could also reflect a realization that building another nationwide cellular network would be prohibitively expensive. The four largest carriers already have about 85 percent of the nation’s 218 million cellphone subscribers, and they have spent more than a decade and tens of billions of dollars building their networks.

Cable companies would also have to spend billions more to market their service in a country where most people already have cellphones. They would probably attract only about 2.5 million subscribers who would pay about $45 a month, according to estimates by Jason Bazinet, who tracks media and entertainment companies at Citigroup.

Emerging technology that lets wireless phones use data networks instead of traditional cellular networks to connect calls could give the cable companies a route into the phone market.

More likely, analysts said, cable companies are buying spectrum because they are interested in building a network of wireless hubs to let their customers log onto the Internet not just at home, but also in cafes, parks and hotels.

The cable consortium has bid for dozens of licenses, some of which cover the New York metropolitan area, where Time Warner Cable provides service, as well as Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, where Comcast is the main provider. It has also bid for licenses in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities.

While wireless data networks are cheaper to build than voice networks because fewer towers are needed, it is unclear whether the cable companies will ever make enough money from data service to offset the cost of offering it. Verizon Wireless and Sprint already sell so-called 3G, or third-generation, data services that are only just catching on, analysts said.

“I don’t think cable is going to get into mobile voice because it’s overgrazed, but they’ve drunk the 3G Kool-Aid and believe that a lot of nomadic people that they can’t reach are signing up for wireless services,” said Edward Snyder, a telecommunications analyst at Charter Equity Research. Mr. Snyder questioned this strategy, asking, “Why go head-to-head with something that’s been around for years?”

Satellite television providers may have reached that conclusion. DirecTV and EchoStar had put more than $972 million on deposit ahead of the auction, more than any other group, suggesting they were committed to buying a lot of spectrum. Analysts said the companies might want to introduce a vast fixed wireless or even mobile phone network.

But after just a week of bidding, the companies withdrew. Their early departure could have been a tactic to win more favorable terms from potential partners that already own spectrum. By showing a willingness to spend heavily, the companies could have been trying to signal that they were able to go it alone if need be, said Mr. Bazinet of Citigroup.

Still, Mr. Entner said that the satellite companies were astute in backing out of the auctions because, by his estimates, it could take 20 years or more to generate a return on their investment in spectrum.

“Their delusions of grandeur were abruptly brought to the ground,” he said. “They thought they could buy this on the cheap, but wireless is not something you can buy on the cheap.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/te...8spectrum.html





Cell Phones Spill Secrets

The married man's girlfriend sent a text message to his cell phone: His wife was getting suspicious. Perhaps they should cool it for a few days.

''So,'' she wrote, ''I'll talk to u next week.''

''You want a break from me? Then fine,'' he wrote back.

Later, the married man bought a new phone. He sold his old one on eBay, at Internet auction, for $290.

The guys who bought it now know his secret.

The married man had followed the directions in his phone's manual to erase all his information, including lurid exchanges with his lover. But it wasn't enough.

Selling your old phone once you upgrade to a fancier model can be like handing over your diaries. All sorts of sensitive information pile up inside our cell phones, and deleting it may be more difficult than you think.

A popular practice among sellers, resetting the phone, often means sensitive information appears to have been erased. But it can be resurrected using specialized yet inexpensive software found on the Internet.

A company, Trust Digital of McLean, Va., bought 10 different phones on eBay this summer to test phone-security tools it sells for businesses. The phones all were fairly sophisticated models capable of working with corporate e-mail systems.

Curious software experts at Trust Digital resurrected information on nearly all the used phones, including the racy exchanges between guarded lovers.

The other phones contained:

--One company's plans to win a multimillion-dollar federal transportation contract.

--E-mails about another firm's $50,000 payment for a software license.

--Bank accounts and passwords.

--Details of prescriptions and receipts for one worker's utility payments.

The recovered information was equal to 27,000 pages -- a stack of printouts 8 feet high.

''We found just a mountain of personal and corporate data,'' said Nick Magliato, Trust Digital's chief executive.

Many of the phones were owned personally by the sellers but crammed with sensitive corporate information, underscoring the blurring of work and home. ''They don't come with a warning label that says, 'Be careful.' The data on these phones is very important,'' Magliato said.

One phone surrendered the secrets of a chief executive at a small technology company in Silicon Valley. It included details of a pending deal with Adobe Systems Inc., and e-mail proposals from a potential Japanese partner:

''If we want to be exclusive distributor in Japan, what kind of business terms you want?'' asked the executive in Japan.

Trust Digital surmised that the U.S. chief executive gave his old phone to a former roommate, who used it briefly then sold it for $400 on eBay. Researchers found e-mails covering different periods for both men, who used the same address until recently.

Experts said giving away an old phone is commonplace. Consumers upgrade their cell phones on average about every 18 months.

''Most people toss their phones after they're done; a lot of them give their old phones to family members or friends,'' said Miro Kazakoff, a researcher at Compete Inc. of Boston who follows mobile phone sales and trends. He said selling a used phone -- which sometimes can fetch hundreds of dollars -- is increasingly popular.

The 10 phones Trust Digital studied represented popular models from leading manufacturers. All the phones stored information on ''flash'' memory chips, the same technology found in digital cameras and some music players.

Flash memory is inexpensive and durable. But it is slow to erase information in ways that make it impossible to recover. So manufacturers compensate with methods that erase data less completely but don't make a phone seem sluggish.

Phone manufacturers usually provide instructions for safely deleting a customer's information, but it's not always convenient or easy to find. Research in Motion Ltd. has built into newer Blackberry phones an easy-to-use wipe program.

Palm Inc., which makes the popular Treo phones, puts directions deep within its Web site for what it calls a ''zero out reset.'' It involves holding down three buttons simultaneously while pressing a fourth tiny button on the back of the phone.

But it's so awkward to do that even Palm says it may take two people. A Palm executive, Joe Fabris, said the company made the process deliberately clumsy because it doesn't want customers accidentally erasing their information.

Trust Digital resurrected erased e-mails and other information from a used Treo phone provided by The Associated Press for a demonstration after it was reset and appeared empty. Once the phone was reset using Palm's awkward ''zero-out'' technique, no information could be recovered. The AP already used that technique to protect data on its reporters' phones.

''The tools are out there'' for hackers and thieves to rummage through deleted data on used phones, Trust Digital's chief technology officer, Norm Laudermilch, said. ''It definitely does not take a Ph.D.''

Fabris, Palm's director of wireless solutions, said the company may warn customers in an upcoming newsletter about the risks of selling their used phones after AP's inquiries. ''It might behoove us to raise this issue,'' Fabris said.

Dean Olmstead of Fresno, Calif., sold his Treo phone on eBay after using it six months. He didn't know about Palm's instructions to safely delete all his personal information. Now, he's worried.

''I probably should have done that,'' Olmstead said. ''Folks need to know this. I'm hoping my phone goes to a nice person.''

Guy Martin of Albuquerque, N.M., wasn't as concerned someone will snoop on his secrets. He also sold his Treo phone on eBay and didn't delete his information completely.

''I'm not that kind of valuable person, so I'm not really worried,'' said Martin, who runs the www.imusteat.com Web site. ''I guarantee that three-quarters of the people who buy these phones don't think about this.''

Trust Digital found no evidence thieves or corporate spies are routinely buying used phones to mine them for secrets, Magliato said. ''I don't think the bad guys have figured this out yet.''

President Bush's former cybersecurity adviser, Howard Schmidt, carried up to four phones and e-mail devices -- and said he was always careful with them. To sanitize his older Blackberry devices, Schmidt would deliberately type his password incorrectly 11 times, which caused data on them to self-destruct.

''People are just not aware how much they're exposing themselves,'' Schmidt said. ''This is more than something you pick up and talk on. This is your identity. There are people really looking to exploit this.''

Executives at Trust Digital agreed to review with AP the information extracted from the used phones on the condition AP would not identify the sellers or their employers. They also showed AP receipts from the Internet auctions in which they bought the 10 phones over the summer for prices between $192 and $400 each.

Trust Digital said it intends to return all the phones to their original owners, and said it kept the recovered personal information on a single computer under lock and disconnected from its corporate network at its headquarters in northern Virginia.

Peiter ''Mudge'' Zatko, a respected computer security expert, said phone owners should decide whether to auction their used equipment for a few hundred dollars -- and risk revealing their secrets -- or effectively toss their old phones under a large truck to dispose of them.

What about a case like the Lothario whose affair Trust Digital discovered?

''I'd run over the phone,'' Zatko said. ''Maybe give it an acid bath.''
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...h_down&chan=tc





T-Mobile Hacker Gets Home Detention
AP

A hacker who infiltrated the network of T-Mobile USA Inc. and accessed personal information of hundreds of customers, including a Secret Service agent, was sentenced Monday to one year of home detention.

Nicholas Lee Jacobsen, 23, must also pay $10,000 in restitution to T-Mobile to cover losses caused by his acts, which took place in 2004.

The former Santa Ana resident who now lives in Oregon said he lacked "comprehension and maturity" when he targeted the network of Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile USA, uncovering the names and Social Security numbers of 400 customers.

"I did some very stupid things," Jacobsen told U.S. District Judge George King at his sentencing Monday in Los Angeles.

Jacobsen was able to read some sensitive information that Special Agent Peter Cavicchia could access through his wireless T-Mobile Sidekick device. No investigations were compromised, the Secret Service said.

"What you've done is very dangerous to others. Maybe you didn't fully appreciate that, perhaps because of your youth," King told Jacobsen Monday.

Jacobsen could have faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for the crime, accessing a protected computer.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-28-23-14-50





10 Top Tips For Protecting Yourself At Hot Spots

Wi-Fi hotspots have become ubiquitous at cafes, airports, restaurants, and other public location. In fact, more and more cities are creating hotspots that blanket entire metropolitan areas.

But every time you connect at a hotspot, you're asking for trouble. hotspots are open networks that don't use encryption, which invites hacking and snooping. In addition, when you're on a hotspot you're connected to the same network as your fellow hotspot users, they can potentially weasel their way onto your PC and inflict damage.

But don't let that deter you from connecting. There's plenty you can do to keep yourself safe at hotspots. Just follow these ten tips.

1. Disable Wi-Fi ad-hoc mode Wi-Fi runs in two modes: infrastructure mode, which you use when you connect to a network; and ad-hoc mode, when you connect directly to another PC. If you've enabled ad-hoc mode, there's a chance that someone near you can establish an ad-hoc connection to you without your knowledge, and they'll then have free reign in your PC. So when you're in a hotspot, make sure that ad-hoc mode is turned off. To do it:

1. Right-click the wireless icon in the System Tray.
2. Choose Status.
3. Click Properties
4. Select the Wireless Networks tab.
5. Select your current network connection.
6. Click Properties, then click the Association tab.
7. Uncheck the box next to "This is a computer-to-computer (ad hoc) network".
8. Click OK, and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes disappear.

2. Use a wireless Virtual Private Network (VPN). When you're at a hotspot, anyone nearby with a sniffer can see all the packets you send and receive. This means they can see your passwords, user names, email...anything you do online. A great way to protect yourself is with a wireless VPN that encrypts all the information you send and receive when you're online, so you'll be free from snoopers. My favorite is hotspotVPN. It's easy to set up and use; you don't need to download software, because it uses XP's built-in VPN software. It costs $8.88 per month, or in one, three, and seven day increments for ,$3.88, $5.88, and $6.88 respectively. You can also pay for more secure VPN encryption from the service for between $10.88 and $13.88 per month.

3. Use an encrypted USB flash drive. For maximum protection of your data, use a clean laptop that only has an operating system applications on it, and put all of the data you're taking with you on an encrypted USB flash drive. Many flash drives include encryption features. That way, even if someone somehow gets into your PC, they won't be able to read or alter any of your data.

4. Use a personal firewall. A firewall will protect you from anyone trying to break into your PC, and can also protect any spyware or Trojans on your PC from making outbound connections. The XP firewall offers only one-way protection; it doesn't stop outbound connections. So for maximum security, don't rely on XP's firewall. There are plenty of good firewalls out there, but for most purposes, the free version of ZoneAlarm is a great choice.

5. Turn off file sharing. It's fine to enable file sharing on your home network. But doing it at a public hotspot invites any of your close-by latte drinkers to start slurping files off your system. To turn it off. Turn it off by running Windows Explorer, right-clicking on the drive or folders you normally share, choosing Sharing and Security, and unchecking the box next to "Share this folder on the network."

6. Make sure the hotspot is a legitimate one. One of the latest hotspot scams is for someone to set up a hotspot themselves in a public location or cafe, and when you connect, steal your personal information, or ask you to type in sensitive information in order to log in. So before connecting at a hotspot, ask someone at the counter of the cafe the name of the hotspot, because someone may have set up another one, in the hopes of luring in the unwary.

7. Disable or remove your wireless adapter if you're working offline. Just because you're at a hotspot doesn't necessarily mean that you have to connect to the Internet -- you may want to work offline. If that's the case, remove your wireless card. If you instead have a wireless adapter built into your laptop, disable it. In XP, right-click the wireless icon, and choose Disable. If you're using the adapter's software to manage your connection, check the laptop on how to disable it.

8. Use email encryption. Much email software includes encryption features that encrypt messages and attachments. So turn on email encryption when you're at a hotspot. In Outlook 2003, select Options from the Tools menu, click the Security tab, and then check the box next to "Encrypt contents and attachments for outgoing messages." Then click OK.

9. Look over your shoulder. Sniffers and hacking techniques aren't required for someone to steal your user names and passwords. Someone only needs to peer over your shoulder to watch what you're typing. So make sure no one snoops on you as you computer.

10. Don't leave your laptop alone. Had too many lattes and need to hit the rest room? Don't leave your laptop behind. Laptop thefts are getting increasingly common at hotspots. In fact, San Francisco has been subject to a hotspot crime wave of sorts, with thieves even grabbing people's laptops while they were using them. Some hotspots have responded by including a port to which you can lock your laptop via a laptop lock.
http://www.grafdom.com/news/NewsDeta...d=5&newsid=495





Wi-Fi's 'N' to Get Industry Group Nod
Jessica Mintz

An industry group of wireless networking companies said Tuesday it will start certifying next-generation routers and network cards in 2007, a year before official standards are expected.

Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, said that without a certification program, the market could have been fragmented by the growing number and variety of pre-standard "Draft N" or "Pre-N" products claiming faster speeds and greater range. The products take their names from the 802.11n standard.

As early as a month ago, the alliance, which ensures Wi-Fi products from different companies work together, indicated it wouldn't certify the interoperability of the pre-N products. But delays within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the professional association which shepherds the standards process, prompted the Wi-Fi Alliance to rethink, Hanzlik said.

Currently, the IEEE is working on integrating thousands of comments and edits to a draft standard. Hanzlik said he expects to use the next version of the draft for testing and certification - but that if the IEEE is still bogged down, the Wi-Fi Alliance will go ahead with the plan anyway. Then, when the IEEE approves a final 802.11n standard, the alliance will conduct a second phase of testing.

At all levels, industry players seemed pleased with the decision.

"This announcement will give 802.11n a really big shot in the arm," said Michael Hurlston, the vice president of chipset maker Broadcom Corp.'s wireless LAN division. "We're expecting a market shift in terms of market share away from standards a/b/g and towards n. We think this accelerates that process."

In the absence of alliance-led certification, chip makers would have been on their own to make sure products were interoperable - a process that would have required a lot of one-on-one, under-the-radar negotiations, Hurlston said.

Intel Corp. and Atheros Communications Inc., which both make wireless chipsets, expressed support for the move, as did Airgo Networks Inc.

"Rather than having these products delivered in a vacuum, the Wi-Fi Alliance said, let's impose some rigor on the market," said David Borison, director of product marketing for Airgo. "We're all competitors. At the first sign of trouble, everybody points at someone else. That's why the Wi-Fi Alliance is so important."

Dell Inc., which recently started shipping laptops with 802.11n wireless cards, and Netgear Inc., which makes 802.11n wireless routers and cards, were also in favor of certifying pre-standard products.

Interoperability will speed the adoption of new wireless products, said David Henry, director of product marketing for Netgear's consumer products division.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-29-08-07-13





AT&T Aims to Build Network for Ill. City
Bruce Meyerson

AT&T Inc. is the lead candidate to build a citywide wireless network for Springfield, Ill., marking the company's first success in the developing market to blanket municipalities with ubiquitous Internet access.

Mayor Timothy Davlin announced Tuesday that the city intends to pursue a proposal submitted by AT&T, pending approval by the Springfield City Council. The state capital is still free to choose a partner other than AT&T.

As with a growing number of municipal wireless projects, the Springfield network's users will be given a choice of free access supported by advertisements or paying a daily or monthly fee for a connection without ads. AT&T also plans to sell the wireless capability as an add-on service for residential and business customers who already pay for DSL online access over the company's local telephone network.

The network is to be built and maintained without taxpayer dollars, Davlin said in a statement.

Hundreds of municipal wireless projects have been proposed around the country the past few years. Many have sparked protest from those who oppose any such expenditure of taxpayer money, as well as from phone and cable TV companies that would be forced to compete with a low-cost or free wireless service.

City officials frequently argue that Internet access is a vital public service akin to water and garbage collection, asserting that broad wireless access is an economic necessity for keeping and luring businesses. They also complain that the local phone and cable providers have been slow to bring affordable broadband access to low-income residents.

But in the face of heavy lobbying, the trend has veered away from the early emphasis on city-owned and city-run networks. Instead, cities have been contracting with companies such as EarthLink Inc. and MetroFi Inc. to build and operate the systems with plans to generate revenue from ads and subscriptions.

One company has rejected the ad-based model: In June, MobilePro Inc. pulled out of a deal to set up a wireless network in Sacramento, Calif., saying the city's request for a network funded entirely through advertising was not financially feasible.

AT&T has partnered with MetroFi on at least one bid for such a project in Riverside, Calif., and has been "actively involved" in seeking deals to provide wireless networks in as many as a dozen cities, said Eric Shepcaro, senior vice president for AT&T Business Services.

The Springfield network would cover between 25 and 30 square miles, delivered with a combination of Wi-Fi and longer-range technologies such as WiMax.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-29-18-11-45





Hackers Gain Data on AT&T Shoppers
AP

Hackers gained access to a computer system and obtained credit card information and other personal data from several thousand customers who purchased digital subscriber line equipment from AT&T’s online store, the company said Tuesday.

AT&T said the system was hacked into over the weekend.

The data of “fewer than 19,000 customers” were affected, the company said.

AT&T, based in San Antonio, said it closed the online store and would pay for credit monitoring services for the people whose files were broken into.

The company notified the major credit card companies whose customer accounts were affected.

It also sent notification to customers involved via e-mail messages, phone and letter.

The company said the unauthorized access was found within hours of the breach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/te...ref=technology





Disaster Simulation in U.S. Finds Computers Vulnerable
John Markoff

It would begin with a worldwide virus outbreak that had cities under quarantine, emergency workers overwhelmed and government agencies unable to cope. It would be compounded by cyberterror attacks that cut off power, phones and Internet access.

Such was the simulated crisis that teams from the Pentagon, nongovernmental agencies and several dozen technology companies set out to handle in a five-day exercise this month that was meant to showcase and test a new set of digital tools for responding to disaster.

The limitations of even the latest technology were made apparent in the simulation, when an effort to restore communications by setting up wireless networks resulted in a three-day data traffic jam.

Yet the problems encountered in the training effort, named Strong Angel III, failed to discourage the participants, a diverse group of more than 800 "first responders," military officers and software and wireless network experts - some from rivals like Microsoft and Google, working side by side.

"My view is that the value of Strong Angel is 70 percent in the social networks that will be created," said the organizer, Eric Rasmussen, a Navy surgeon and veteran of relief efforts on several continents. "What we do is try to bring people with disparate backgrounds together and ensure that they are forced to enter into a conversation."

More than $35 million in equipment was assembled in San Diego as part of the event, which was aimed at preparing for natural disasters, epidemics, terrorist attacks or the aftermath of a war.

On Aug. 21, the group began to assemble a makeshift command center at an abandoned building near the airport in San Diego. But a state-of-the-art wireless network, which was intended to route video images, satellite map coordinates and other data from an array of mobile computers, failed to come to life.

"Finally I said, 'Lights out! Everyone turn everything off and let's start over,'" said Brian Steckler, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, who was in charge of more than a dozen interlocking networks at the heart of the command center.

Hundreds of computers and even cellphones were shut down, and then the network was turned back on, segment by segment. Too many high-bandwidth applications had clogged the network, including a powerful video camera and "rogue" transmitters set up by participants intent on creating their own mini-networks.

Computer researchers call wireless networks of this type "hastily formed networks." But Steckler said his experience in the training session and in real disasters had led him to refer to them as "fragilely formed networks" instead.

But the technology roadblocks were balanced by notable successes, like the work of Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Intergraph and other companies to allow the sharing of a single set of digital satellite maps seamlessly and to overlay event data relayed from emergency workers throughout the San Diego area.

The new software capability relies on a Microsoft-designed system called Simple Sharing Extensions. It has been built on industry standards, like the Web protocol known as Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which was designed to enable one-way data streams.

Such tools are valuable for disaster- response coordinators who require real-time data feeds from a variety of locations.

The Microsoft extensions will make it possible for the feeds to display constantly changing or even conflicting data streams from multiple sources.

Moreover, the achievement demonstrated that industry rivals like Microsoft and Google could cooperatively generate useful technologies.

Small teams of programmers from the two companies sat before laptops at adjacent tables to make sure that the Microsoft software connection system would transfer information to Google Earth, Google's visual mapping tool.

"I've been talking to Google all week," said Robert Kirkpatrick, lead architect of Microsoft's humanitarian systems group.

That is the kind of teamwork that Rasmussen had in mind when organizing the Strong Angel event, the third such exercise held since 2000.

Rasmussen has become a leading figure in high-tech emergency preparedness in the United States and internationally. His expertise has been honed by experience in Bosnia and Baghdad, in African refugee camps, in Indonesia after the tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Working a decade ago in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, he began exploring the use of high-tech systems to support the emergency missions that he would serve in as a doctor.

"People are dying in really ugly ways, and it's avoidable," he said.

That led him to organize Strong Angel, which he said was not a formal disaster exercise, but rather a laboratory to experiment with technology that might prove useful in disaster settings. He likened the event to a group of musicians playing casual jazz, rather than a rigorous symphony.

That unstructured approach led to some frustrations among participants, who complained at times that they were uncertain of their duties. But Rasmussen said the situation was meant to force them to organize themselves in a leadership vacuum.

Rasmussen's effort has the support of Linton Wells 2nd, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration at the Pentagon. Wells, a military strategist, was a driving force behind a Pentagon directive last November that put "stability operations" - defined as "military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order" - on an equal footing with waging war as a primary mission for the military.

Recognizing the shortcomings of reconstruction efforts after the invasion of Iraq, the directive said that much of this work was best performed by "indigenous, foreign or U.S. civilian professionals."

"We want to be able to create a space outside of the Pentagon's network firewalls to offer assistance," Wells said. Such a shift in mission would make it easier, for example, to provide Pentagon imagery from satellites and unmanned Predator aircraft to disaster relief organizations, he said.

It took 300 e-mail messages and ultimately the intervention of a fleet admiral to get Rasmussen and two colleagues to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in the days immediately after the tsunami in December 2004. Such missions need to be on the military's checklist, Wells said.

In addition to large technology firms like Cisco Systems, Mitre and Bell Canada, smaller companies demonstrated a range of initiatives last week, tucked amid a phalanx of big trucks that had brought communications equipment to the command site.

VSee Lab, a Silicon Valley startup, brought a video-conferencing software system made to transmit video over today's cellular telephone data networks at good quality.

GATR Technologies, a two-person company in Huntsville, Alabama, brought a satellite communications antenna tucked inside a large inflatable beach ball made of ultralight racing sail cloth.

The system, designed by Paul Gierow, a former aerospace engineer, weighs a little more than 70 pounds, or 30 kilograms, and makes it possible to deploy a two-megabit Internet connection - faster than many digital phone lines - virtually anywhere.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/...s/disaster.php





Google Releasing Package For The Office
AP

Gmail is headed for the office - officially.

Starting Monday, Google will offer Google Apps for Your Domain, a free package of programs for businesses, universities and other organizations.

Workers will be able to send e-mail with Gmail, Google's two-year-old Web-based mail service, but messages will carry their company's domain name. The package also includes Google's online calendar, instant-messaging service, and Page Creator, a Web page builder.

Information technology administrators can make some customizations. "But really, the applications are exactly what you'd experience as a consumer if you use them," said Dave Girouard, VP and general manager of Google Enterprise, a division of Google Inc.

The free edition of Apps for Your Domain is, like Google's main site, supported with ads. By the end of the year, the company also plans to launch a paid version that will offer more storage, some degree of support, and likely, no ads. A price for this edition hasn't been set.

Providing e-mail and other applications for businesses moves Google closer into what has traditionally been turf occupied by Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, Google released a program that builds simple Excel-type spreadsheets but lets users access them on the Web.

Now, with e-mail, Google appears to be targeting Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange franchises - although the company plays down any such views.

"We don't see our products as an either/or thing right now," Girouard said. "Smaller businesses, it may be the case where this is the preferred e-mail and messaging solution. In larger companies, it may well be used alongside."

In February, Google launched a beta test with San Jose City College in California; by the end of the beta, the company said hundreds of universities had signed up, along with one-person businesses, medical and legal practices, even some companies with tens and hundreds of employees.

For all of Google's side projects - spreadsheets, shopping, maps - its revenue is almost entirely based on its search advertising.

While Girouard said the market for enterprise e-mail and other products is very large, he declined to speculate on the financial implications. "We tend to focus first on user adoption," he said. "The business model follows pretty successfully."

For businesses, Google hopes the suite of applications will relieve some of the cost and annoyance of administering e-mail servers and the like - and hopefully, fewer calls to internal help centers.

After AOL's recent data privacy debacle, businesses may have qualms turning their employees' data over to Google.

"Third-party hosting providers aren't necessarily any more risky than their own companies," said Girouard. "Google has hosted applications and information for individuals, and is starting to do it for organizations. We do have a very good track record," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-27-20-30-41





AOL Revamps Its Online Music Service
Alex Veiga

Internet giant AOL has revamped its Web-based music download service, adding music videos, streaming radio and user community features.

The new version of AOL Music Now is scheduled to debut Tuesday, offering some 2.5 million audio tracks and thousands of music videos, the company said.

Audio tracks can be bought individually for 99 cents, while music videos cost $1.99 each.

The service offers unlimited downloads at a monthly rate of $9.95, or $14.95 for the ability to transfer songs to compatible portable music players.

By increasing video content, AOL is putting itself in a better position to compete with rivals like Yahoo, said Phil Leigh, an analyst with Inside Digital Media.

Other established online music services also sell video content or allow computer users to view - not download - videos free of charge. But the AOL Music Now subscription plan includes unlimited music video downloads.

"The previous service was very simple in its construct with the main goal of allowing people to listen to unlimited music on demand," said Amit Shafrir, president of AOL Music Now.

"The new service has a lot more features to it. It's completely redesigned," he said.

Among the new features are more than 200 AOL radio stations and XM Satellite Radio channels along with tools for users to browse the playlists of other subscribers.

Shafrir declined to say how many subscribers the service has.

AOL first entered the online music market in 2003, launching a music download store powered by MusicNet that was available only to subscribers of AOL's Internet service.

Last year, the company acquired another established online music provider, MusicNow, and launched a preview version of AOL Music Now in November, opening the Web-based service to non-AOL members.

AOL also runs a separate music portal that offers ad-supported music news and other content for free.

The redesign of AOL Music Now comes as the field of licensed online music services has been growing.

Earlier this summer, MTV Networks Inc. launched its own music subscription service. Other online music services such as Yahoo's Music Unlimited, Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, RealNetworks' Rhapsody and Napster Inc. have also been vying for a bigger piece of the market.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-29-00-33-49





Burglary Suspect Charged With Courthouse Theft

A New Fairfield man already facing burglary and larceny charges was arrested Friday after allegedly stealing the purses of several Judicial Department employees during a court appearance.

State Police said Jason D. McNally, 35, of Route 39, was in superior court in Bantam when a marshal saw him stuff something under his shirt as he entered a rest room. The marshal confronted him when he came out, but McNally ignored her and left the building, police said.

While McNally was still in the parking lot, the marshals learned that a purse had been stolen, and one of them approached him again. But this time, police said, McNally struck the officer and fled on foot.

He was eventually apprehended by state police a short distance away.

Meanwhile, marshals learned that several other purses had been rifled, and McNally was found to be in possession of some of the stolen items, police said.
He was charged with four counts of third-degree burglary, two counts of sixth-degree larceny, a single count of fourth-degree larceny, criminal trover and assault on a public safety official.
http://newstimeslive.com/news/police.php?id=1011619





ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

Court Issues Injunction Against Utah Net Censorship Bill

A federal court in Utah has blocked enforcement of an Internet censorship bill that CDT, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a broad coalition of bookstores, independent artists and ISPs challenged as unconstitutional in 2005. The court entered a stipulated preliminary injunction that prevents the enforcement of statutory provisions amended by Utah House Bill 260. The law would force web sites to remove lawful content from the Internet or face prosecution. It would also require ISPs to block access to adult sites in such a way that many innocent sites would likely also be blocked.
Decision at <http://www.cdt.org/speech/20060829utah.pdf>

Sony Settles Canadian Class Actions Over Rootkit

Sony has settled several outstanding Canadian class action suits launched in the wake of the Sony rootkit controversy last year. Settlement terms are similar to those reached in the United States. The settlement must still receive court approval.
Settlement information at <http://cdtechsettlement.sonybmg.ca/en/>

California Passes WI-FI User Protection Bill

California's state assembly has passed a bill to require makers of Internet access gear to warn consumers of the risks of using unsecured wireless connections. Legislators in both houses of the state legislature voted overwhelmingly in favour or the "Wi-Fi User Protection Bill" to inform users how to secure networks against piggybacking, or unauthorized sharing of wireless access.
http://news.com.com/2100-7351_3-6110897.html

Critics Say RIAA Copyright Education Is Contradictory

The music industry's educational video about copyright law has been declared full of "baloney," according to several trade and public interest groups. The RIAA's video suggests that students should be sceptical of free content and that it is always illegal to make a copy of a song, even if it is just to introduce a friend to a new band.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-6111118.html





Times Withholds Web Article in Britain
Tom Zeller Jr.

If Web readers in Britain were intrigued by the headline “Details Emerge in British Terror Case,” which sat on top of The New York Times’s home page much of yesterday, they would have been disappointed with a click.

“On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain,” is the message they would have seen. “This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.”

In adapting technology intended for targeted advertising to keep the article out of Britain, The Times addressed one of the concerns of news organizations publishing online: how to avoid running afoul of local publishing laws.

“I think we have to take every case on its own facts,” said George Freeman, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company. “But we’re dealing with a country that, while it doesn’t have a First Amendment, it does have a free press, and it’s our position that we ought to respect that country’s laws.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said restricting information fit with trends across the Internet. “There’s a been a sense that technology can create a form of geographic zoning on the Internet for many years now — that they might not be 100 percent effective, but effective enough,” Mr. Zittrain said. “And there’s even a sense that international courts might be willing to take into account these efforts.

Plans were made at The Times over the weekend to withhold print versions of the article in Britain, as well as news agency and archived versions.

But the issue of the Web was more complicated.

Richard J. Meislin, the paper’s associate managing editor for Internet publishing, said the technological hurdle was surmounted by using some of The Times’s Web advertising technology. The paper could already discern the Internet address of users connecting to the site to deliver targeted marketing, and could therefore deliver targeted editorial content as well. That took several hours of programming.

“It’s never a happy choice to deny any reader a story,” said Jill Abramson, a managing editor at The Times. “But this was preferable to not having it on the Web at all.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/bu...WDNMistVn8m+BA





eBay Gambles on Google Partnership for Success of Skype, the Internet Phone Service
Saul Hansell

EBay is hoping its new partnership with Google will help it find new ways to make money from Skype, its Internet calling service. But experts wonder if enough people are willing to make the switch from traditional phones to talking through their computers.

A critical aspect of the deal announced yesterday is that Google will introduce a feature that allows users to talk to advertisers by way of Skype, instead of just clicking through to the advertisers’ Web sites. Users of this feature, called click-to-call, would also have the option of using Google’s own Google Talk system or standard telephones.

Early tests by several companies indicate there is a group of advertisers, including mortgage brokers, who are willing to pay $8 to $15 for each call from a Web searcher, roughly 10 times more than they will pay for a Web site click. Under the Google- eBay deal, money paid by advertisers for calls completed through Skype would be split between the two companies, although the proportion of the split was not disclosed.

But most of these tests so far, including those by Google, are focused on calling using regular phones, rather than calling by PC using services like Skype. Indeed, eStara, a company that provides pay-per-call advertising technology to companies including Verizon’s SuperPages.com unit, offers both telephone and PC calling options. It has found that only 10 to 15 percent of people choose to talk using their computers, and that this proportion is not increasing.

“The vast majority of consumers want calls to be landline-based,” said John Federman, eStara’s chief executive. PC calling requires computers that are equipped with microphones, and a change in customer behavior.

Alex Kazim, the president of Skype, said an increasing number of computers now came with microphones, and consumers were increasingly using them.

“We see a shift over time as users become more and more able to do voice calling on their PC’s,” Mr. Kazim said. He pointed out that Skype had 100 million users worldwide.

EBay bought Skype last year for $2.6 billion and additional payments based on its performance. It expects Skype to generate $200 million in revenue this year, mainly from fees for connecting PC calls to regular telephones and extra services like voice mail.

In an interview Sunday, Meg Whitman, eBay’s chief executive, said that the click-to-call system could substantially increase Skype’s revenue, but she declined to say by how much.

Skype and Google will begin testing the system next year. So far, most pay-per-call advertising uses one of two technologies. In some, the ads simply display a telephone number for users to call as they would any business. But the number is used only for that advertising campaign, so each call can be tracked. In others, users enter their phone number on the Web and receive a call moments later from the advertiser.

Google has tested the latter system because it can record exactly what path a user took before initiating a call.

AOL, which is using pay-per-call in its Web search ads, uses the unique phone number approach, because it is easier to understand.

“Consumers are more interested in what they are going to say to the mortgage broker than learning how to change behavior,” said Marc Barach, the chief marketing officer of Ingenio, which runs the pay-per-call system used by AOL.

Matt Booth, an analyst with the Kelsey Group, said there was a large potential market for ads that generate voice calls, especially among small businesses that do not do much business online.

“Sending someone to a Web site for a plumber is not as valuable as setting up a phone call,” Mr. Booth said.

EBay is also exploring how to use voice communication on its own auction site. So far, it has allowed sellers in some categories to add “Skype me” buttons that let potential bidders call them using Skype. It does not charge for this service, as it is seen as an alternative to e-mail, the usual way sellers have answered questions.

But eBay hopes to develop new services for marketers who are simply looking for contacts with potential customers rather than simple transactions, charging them for every call completed.

“There is a class of goods and services where the eBay transaction model is struggling,” said Mr. Kazim of Skype. “Real estate agents are not looking to sell a particular house. They want you to come in, and figure out what you need and can afford, so they can show you five houses that are right.”

The other part of the deal announced yesterday is more straightforward: Google will sell advertising that will appear on eBay pages outside of the United States. In May, eBay struck a similar deal for Yahoo to sell ads on its pages in the United States. Yahoo also agreed to use eBay’s PayPal unit as its main payments system worldwide.

Ina Steiner, the editor of AuctionBytes, a newsletter, said many eBay sellers saw little benefit from the deals with Yahoo and Google.

“It looks like eBay is milking its auction site as a cash cow to invest in PayPal and Skype,” Ms. Steiner said. “People are already seeing the tests for the Yahoo ads, and they are not happy about them because they compete with the eBay sellers.”

EBay is trying to minimize this competition by showing ads for what it calls complementary products, like accessories, rather than for the products being auctioned.

Ms. Steiner said most sellers saw the Skype Me feature as an imposition.

“Most sellers don’t want to talk to buyers,” she said. “They can barely keep up with their e-mail correspondence.”

Google’s shares rose $7.69 yesterday, to close at $380.95, while eBay’s shares rose 49 cents, to $25.79.
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtime...rtner=homepage





Radio

Women Go FM
James Brady

Can intelligent, informational, entertaining FM talk radio wean American women away from an underperforming music radio format and from TV's Oprah, the soaps, Dr. Phil and the Springer and Maury freak shows? And in sufficient numbers to provide an audience that makes commercial sense?

A cool new outfit called GreenStone Media, the creation of some high-powered dames and backed by deep-pocketed investors, certainly believes it's possible. And they'll talk about and promote this idea, and unveil their new "mass appeal format for FM radio--for women and by women," when GreenStone officially launches on Tuesday, Sept. 12, at Manhattan's Museum of Television & Radio.

Never heard of GreenStone? With a board of directors including the late media tycoon Walter Annenberg's daughter Wallis and a couple of high-profile lightning rods like Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, don't fret. You'll be hearing plenty!

The company's New York director of programming, Heather Cohen, a longtime New York WOR Radio exec who produced its powerhouse Joan Hamburg Show, first briefed me about GreenStone, named after a famous children's book by Alice Walker.

And despite Fonda and Steinem, Heather assures me "this is not a left-wing or feminist network." Her thesis: "AM talk radio tends to be highly political, and women don't like that." That surprised me; I thought women were as nutty about politics as the rest of us.

What GreenStone plans to offer is some good talk, information and lots of comedy. And terrific on-air talent, though not many seasoned radio types. Plus, an impressive management lineup bound to get industry, critical and Madison Avenue attention.

The big boss is CEO Susan Ness, who served seven years with the Federal Communications Commission, so she knows what Washington lets you get away with. For the past five years, she's been a consultant on the industry side rather the regulatory side. GreenStone's No. 2 is Edie Hilliard, chief operating officer and executive vice president--a real pro, a 30-year industry vet and something of a programming whiz in indie radio content production and syndication. Dina Dublon is the chief financial officer, following a career as CFO at J.P. Morgan Chase.

Board members include best-selling author (Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman) Gail Evans, formerly a member of CNN's executive committee; Frank Osborn, CEO of Quantum Communications; Emmy-winning anchorwoman Carol Jenkins; poet, novelist and Ms. Editor in Chief Robin Morgan; Fonda; Steinem; and Wallis Annenberg, a vice president of the Annenberg Foundation and a trustee of the University of Southern California.

Financial backers are pretty impressive as well. Among them are David Kennedy; Marta Kauffman, the producer of Friends; Jamie McCourt, the president of the L.A. Dodgers; and "radio icon" Frank Guild.

Ness and Hilliard both called to fill me in.

"We're doing nine hours of programming a day, increasing very shortly to 12 hours," says Ness.

How many stations have signed up, and are they NPR stations?

"No, they're all commercial FM stations. So far, we have Jackson, Miss.; Hartford/New Haven (Conn.), and just signed Albany, N.Y."

Any NYC area outlet?

"We're in discussion with all the groups that own commercial stations," Hilliard says, adding, "eventually, we'll be on satellite as well." Stations are apparently free to cherry-pick and air parts of the day's total programming.

Content being crucial, here's the daily GreenStone on-air lineup: The morning drive features three stand-up comics, Maureen Langan, Cory Kahaney, and Nelsie Spencer, billed as "The Radio Ritas"; from 9 to noon, best-selling author and working mom Lisa Bernbach takes over; Rolonda Watts works from noon to 3; then Mo Gaffney and Shana Wride come on with their "Woman Aloud" show.

GreenStone sounds admirably objective about the prospects in its press materials: "The Arbitron numbers are dramatic. Women are leaving in droves to find content they just can't find on radio. And the younger the demos, the bigger the loss."

Having said that, here's how Hilliard, in an interview with Inside Radio, sees the future of GreenStone: "It will take several weeks or months to polish the shows and be sure we have the right elements in place and the right balance to make for good radio. We intend to be off-Broadway through the spring (ratings) book…we also think we'll be at an average of 100 stations for each program by the end of the second year."
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/200...reenstone.html





Black Crowes Drop Keyboardist, Delay CD
AP

Keyboardist Eddie Hawrysch is no longer a part of the Black Crowes.

Hawrysch was ''released'' from the rock band because of ''personal issues,'' according to a statement issued Monday by the group's publicist, Mitch Schneider.

Hawrysch joined the band in 1991.

He will be replaced on the Black Crowes' fall tour -- which begins in Richmond, Va., on Sept. 7 -- by Rob Clores, who has played with the John Popper Band and other blues artists.

The band has delayed the release of its new double album ''The Lost Crowes.'' Originally scheduled to hit stores Tuesday, a ''recently discovered manufacturing error'' has caused the record's release to be postponed until Sept. 26.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...ck-Crowes.html





CNN `Live From...' the Ladies Room
AP

Kyra Phillips, anchor of CNN's ''Live From...,'' unwittingly upstaged President Bush's speech in New Orleans with on-the-air analysis of her husband and the marriage of her brother -- all live from a CNN ladies room.

Unaware that her wireless microphone was ''live'' during her break, Phillips could be heard overriding Bush's prepared address Tuesday as he was seen marking the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

The Atlanta-based Phillips, in conversation with an unidentified woman in an echoey room, dismissed most men with a vulgar term, but called herself ''very lucky in that regard. My husband is handsome and he is genuinely a loving -- you know, no ego -- you know what I'm saying? Just a really passionate, compassionate, great, great human being. And they exist. They do exist. They're hard to find. Yup. But they are out there.''

A few moments later, she observed that ''brothers have to be, you know, protective. Except for mine. I've got to be protective of him.''

Why? ''His wife is just a control freak.''

At that point, another voice cut in: ''Kyra.''

''Yeah, baby?'' replied Phillips on hearing her name.

''Your mike is on. Turn it off. It's been on the air.''

CNN anchor Daryn Kagan, looking flustered, then broke into the telecast with a recap of what Bush had been saying.

Phillips later apologized to viewers ''for an issue we had with our mikes'' and ''for a little bit of an interruption there during the president.''

CNN issued its own official statement, explaining the network had ''experienced audio difficulties during the president's speech today in New Orleans. We apologize to our viewers and the president for the disruption.''

The network also apologized to the White House.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...Open-Mike.html





Clip and Save Holds Its Own Against Point and Click
Steve Lohr

In an Internet age, it would seem to be a scene from the past. But for Kristine Davis, as for millions of shoppers across the country, it remains a Sunday morning ritual: retrieving the newspaper from the driveway and quickly extracting the coupon inserts.

By shrewdly using coupons, and tracking store sales, Ms. Davis says she can cut the monthly grocery bill by 30 or 40 percent for her family of four in Marietta, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta.

“It makes me feel terrible when I go to the store and don’t have a coupon,” she said. “It’s a way of life.”

It is a way of life, at first glance, that seems especially vulnerable to the relentless advance of the Internet, with its ability to aim at narrow groups of consumers and measure results. An estimated 99 percent of the roughly 300 billion coupons distributed annually in the United States — mainly in Sunday newspapers — end up in the trash, unused and unredeemed.

An Internet assault on the paper-clipping coupon business is indeed under way, and Google has now entered the fray. But while the cool logic of efficiency suggests the traditional paper coupon is in imminent peril, the marketplace tells another story — at least so far.

The coupon business is a case of new technology confronting a deep-seated commercial culture. Market practices, business relationships and consumer expectations developed over decades are not likely to be quickly swept aside.

There are, to be sure, other holdouts against the supposedly inevitable triumph of digital technology and the Internet. At one time or other, the endangered species list of commerce has included books, bricks-and-mortar stores and business travel for face-to-face meetings. But the resilience of the humble paper coupon appears particularly remarkable. Consumer surveys have shown that most American households use coupons, and that the coupon inserts are the second-most-read part of the Sunday newspaper, after the front page.

“Coupons are an ingrained part of the nation’s shopping culture,” said Charles Brown, co-chairman of the Coupon Council, a coupon advocacy group.

The paper coupon, Mr. Brown insists, is a powerful marketing vehicle to reach millions of consumers and build brands and customer loyalty. Proof of the coupon’s worth, he said, is that major companies like Procter & Gamble, S. C. Johnson, General Mills and Kraft continue to rely on traditional coupons, and that the yearly number of coupons distributed keeps rising slightly.

Some marketing experts say that while old habits resist change, the demise of the paper coupon is a sure thing. It is, they say, the marketing equivalent of a blunderbuss, while the Internet offers a laser shot.

“The paper coupon is the single most inefficient marketing tool you could imagine,” said Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola who is a marketing consultant in Sausalito, Calif. “The traditional paper coupon is going to die. It can’t survive in the Internet world.”

Two weeks ago, Google announced that it would begin offering local discount coupons to people who use its Google Maps service. The search giant is joining companies that have been distributing online coupons for years, like ValPak and CoolSavings, and Silicon Valley start-ups like Coupons Inc. and Zixxo, which are bringing new technology to the business of marketing national or local coupons over the Internet.

The use of online coupons is rising rapidly, by more than 50 percent a year, but they still account for less than 1 percent of the consumer goods coupons distributed, according to the Promotion Marketing Association, a trade group.

Coupon sites like ValPak and CoolSavings, a subsidiary of Q Interactive, offer coupons for local merchants or nationally branded products. But digital coupons are also spread across many Web sites, just as ads are. So those looking for information on baby care might see an online coupon for diapers, while a person looking at a Web site for motorcycle enthusiasts would be more likely to see a coupon for helmets or leather jackets.

That kind of selective marketing, showing consumers advertising and promotions related to their browsing interests, is the potential Internet advantage.

Digital coupons typically must be printed and physically turned in at a store. So, there is still some paper handling. The next stage, according to marketing experts, will come with the spread of digital cellphones with location-tracking and automatic short-range communication technology. Electronic coupons will be delivered to cellphone owners on demand and redeemed by whisking the phone past a cash register scanner, eliminating all paper.

“That’s going to be the nuclear explosion in the coupon business,” said Mr. Sealey, the consultant, who expects that shift to occur in five years or so.

For its part, Google is going after the local coupon market. A person types in a city name or ZIP code and a buying interest, like “pizza,” and Google Maps presents a street map with locations flagged and a list of pizza shops beside the Web map.

Google will give merchants simple Web tools for making digital coupons. It is distributing online coupons, including ones from ValPak, without charge to the local businesses. Google plans to make money mainly by selling more ads to small businesses, linked to search words.

“The economics of distributing coupons digitally is very attractive,” said Shailesh Rao, Google’s director of local search. “We think a big opportunity is there.”

Coupons Inc., a start-up in Mountain View, Calif., is trying to move the coupons for national consumer brands online. Steven R. Boal, the chief executive, recalled that he was struck by the inefficiency of distributing and handling paper coupons when he first looked at the business.

“It was a forehead slapper,” said Mr. Boal, a former vice president for derivatives technology at J. P. Morgan. “This industry is ripe for change.”

In the last few years, the company has built a Web-based system for securely offering printable coupons for many large consumer companies. The number of coupons printed on the Coupons Inc. system has increased more than tenfold this year, Mr. Boal said. The company charges a small transaction fee to the manufacturers when someone prints a digital coupon.

The big transformation of the paper coupon business came in the early 1970’s, when George F. Valassis, a printer and marketing entrepreneur, persuaded consumer product companies to offer coupons that he would aggregate in Sunday newspaper inserts nationwide.

Today, this national coupon industry is estimated at more than $6 billion a year. About half of that is in incentive payments: the amount consumers save when they redeem coupons. The rest goes to all the middlemen involved in distributing, collecting and clearing coupon transactions. Fees are paid at each stage of handling, with retailers typically receiving 8 cents for each coupon they collect and pass along. S. C. Johnson & Son, the maker of Windex, Pledge, Glade and other household products, uses billions of paper coupons annually in its marketing. The nation’s Sunday newspapers can put a coupon in more than 50 million homes, noted Pat Penman, director of marketing services at S. C. Johnson.

“Online coupons are more targeted, but the traditional coupon is a big, pervasive marketing technique,” Mr. Penman said.

And while coupon clippers, Ms. Penman added, are looking for savings, they are also browsing for new products. So last month when the company introduced its Glade PlugIns Scented Oil Light Show, an air freshener in a light that changes color, it started an aggressive coupon campaign in Sunday newspapers.

“The Internet is having a big impact in how we market,” Ms. Penman observed. “But it’s not a light switch. It’s a transition.”

Coupon fanatics, it seems, will find plenty in their Sunday papers for years to come. But even for those coupons, the Internet can be a tool. Ms. Davis, in the Atlanta suburbs, frequents Web sites like www.couponmom.com, run by Stephanie Nelson, whose “virtual coupon organizer” is a state-by-state Web database of coupon offers in newspaper circulars.

Consumer product companies issue coupons to encourage people to sample new products, to make impulse purchases and to foster brand loyalty — not to enable the coupon cognoscenti to routinely save 30 or 40 percent on the monthly grocery bills.

So the two sides — producer and consumer — use different terms to describe certain shopping tactics. Sometimes, for example, a product will go on sale weeks after a coupon is published, but shortly before the coupon expires. The resulting savings can be huge — the item can be almost free — and that is not what the product maker had in mind with promotional campaigns that just barely overlap. To companies, this tactic is “stacking,” suggesting a gaming of the system. To shoppers, it is a “double play,” a cleverly timed move.

“That’s really exciting,” Ms. Davis said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/te.../30coupon.html





No Kid, but Robert Evans Still Stays in the Picture
Ross Johnson

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

THE new broom swept unusually clean at Paramount Pictures over the last year or so. Gone are high executives like Sherry Lansing and Jonathan Dolgen, studio fixtures like the superstar Tom Cruise and the producer Scott Rudin, and legions of underlings, all cleared out as a new chief, the former talent manager and producer Brad Grey, took charge.

But one thing remains somehow unchanged on the company’s Hollywood lot.

Across a bright green lawn from the executive office building, under a familiar brown awning that would be at home on Park Avenue, the production company named for its owner, Robert Evans, still holds sway.

Having overcome financial misfortunes, a cocaine addiction and a series of debilitating strokes, Mr. Evans, 76, has also survived something as manageable as corporate regime change. His durability surely says something about the power of myth in the movie world. A boy wonder who ran Paramount in the early 70’s, he embarked on a personal odyssey that brought him back to the studio as a producer 15 years ago. But he was never quite as large as he became with the success of a 2002 documentary based on his autobiography, “The Kid Stays in the Picture.”

“ ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’ did more for me than all the films I’ve done since I returned to Paramount,” he said during one of a series of recent interviews at his Beverly Hills home.

Mr. Evans’s professional survival — at a time when most of Hollywood is chasing youth and trimming overhead — also speaks to the power of personal loyalty, an enduring value in moviedom. “It is important that Bob keeps his deal,” said Sumner Redstone, the 83-year-old chairman of Paramount’s corporate parent, Viacom, and a close friend of the producer. “Though I can’t guarantee it, I would like to think he would be at Paramount forever.”

Mr. Evans certainly gives that impression, though his company — the contract for which runs to 2008 — doesn’t appear to be at peak productivity. Mr. Evans’s last feature credit was “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” a 2003 film on which his role during production, said Lynda Obst, another of its producers, was to act as a cheerleader. He says he has no films in active development.

Still, his gift for self-promotion remains formidable. “I’m a vital force to be reckoned with. I still have great ideas. Call your article ‘Evans Reloaded,’ ” Mr. Evans declared at his home in August.

Mr. Grey, in a phone interview, said Mr. Evans’s personal saga had been a factor in his own decision to sign on as Paramount’s chairman. “Part of taking this job was thinking how romantic it was the way that Bob Evans did it when he was running the studio,” he said.

Seconding the notion that Mr. Evans can stay as long as he chooses, Mr. Grey, who said Mr. Evans’s presence improved his own morale, noted that Paramount also had deals with the producers David Brown, who is 90, and A. C. Lyles, who is 88. “Evans isn’t the oldest producer on the lot,” he said.

Mr. Evans for his part strongly rejected the idea that he was being coddled because he knows so many of the movie industry’s secrets. “I’ve been back at Paramount since 1991. The only ones back then who could have cared about buried bodies are dead and buried themselves,” he said.

A significant preoccupation of late has been “The Fat Lady Sang,” a second memoir that he says he has submitted, unsuccessfully, to three publishers in the last several years. The latest version of the manuscript is chock full of bedside scenes of him lying near death after his stroke in 1998 and being comforted by Mr. Redstone, who Mr. Evans says was one of three key participants in his rehabilitation.

The others who were vital to his recovery were Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, who was also a producer of the “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” and Brett Ratner, a film director half Mr. Evans’s age who is a frequent visitor to his home.

Mr. Redstone said his own loyalty to Mr. Evans grew from a time when the producer took Mr. Redstone under wing. “In 1967 I owned a lot of movie theaters in the Northeast, but I didn’t know anyone in Hollywood,” he explained. “When I came out here, the only one who took the time to explain the Hollywood side of the business was Bob. He asked for nothing in return.”

Mr. Carter said in a phone interview that he got to know many associates of Mr. Evans while producing the documentary. When Mr. Evans returned to the film business in 1991, “he had an enormous reservoir of good will,” Mr. Carter said. “Even his competitors were happy to see him back. I challenge you to find someone who would say that Bob did anything below the belt while he was running Paramount.”

(When asked why his magazine did not publish an excerpt of the original memoir, Mr. Carter paid tribute to Mr. Evans’s ability as a myth builder: “We were offered the chance, but I declined because Bob’s work defies fact-checking. If you’re going to publish him, it’s best to go with the unvarnished Bob rather than the unvarnished truth.”)

While “The Kid” chronicled how Mr. Evans made his bones by backing young writers like Robert Towne and directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski and Hal Ashby, “Fat Lady” laments his forced pairing with the director William Friedkin , a movie veteran, on the box-office bomb “Jade” in 1995. But Mr. Evans also goes to great lengths to describe his friendship with and admiration for Mr. Ratner, a well-known figure on the industry party circuit who’s had mixed success since he hit the radar with “Money Talks” and the “Rush Hour” series almost 10 years ago.

Mr. Ratner returned Mr. Evans’s flattery in a phone interview last week. “ ‘The Fat Lady Sang’ will be made into a film with me directing,” Mr. Ratner said. “I want either Johnny Depp or Hugh Jackman to play Bob, who I consider not only one of the greatest producers of our time, but one of the greatest philosophers. ‘The Fat Lady Sang’ will be my Oscar picture.”

Stuart Fischoff, a psychology professor who recently retired from teaching at California State University, Los Angeles, and who has written about and for Hollywood, said that Mr. Evans may be serving a purpose far beyond his utility as a producer at Paramount: he is becoming the town’s institutional memory.

“No one becomes a legend unless people need the legend and legendary figures to explain why what happened once isn’t happening anymore,” Dr. Fischoff explained.

Even so, Dr. Fischoff said he found the extraordinary attention Mr. Evans has garnered in his later years a bit of a puzzlement. “Anyone who would identify Evans more than Coppola with ‘The Godfather’ is like a golf-ball manufacturer focusing on the ball rather than on Tiger Woods to explain Woods’s success.”

It was getting dark in Beverly Hills as Mr. Evans, whose gait still bears the traces of those strokes, shuffled to a dining room window that offers a handsome view of his pool and tennis court. (His fabled backyard screening room was gutted in a 2003 electrical fire.) Mr. Evans has been angry all day — and energized — about the previous night’s episode of the HBO series “Entourage.”

Portions of the episode had been filmed at Mr. Evans’s home. He was paid $30,000 for a location fee, but said he was not present during shooting, nor was he aware of the content of the scenes to be shot. So he was surprised when he watched those scenes to find the actor Martin Landau playing an aging, forgetful and washed-up producer named Bob Ryan with a butler named Alan in the scenes shot at his home. For years, Alan Selka has been Mr. Evans’s butler. (A spokeswoman for HBO said that the Bob Ryan character was not based on Mr. Evans.)

As the day wore on, Mr. Evans’s displeasure with Mr. Landau’s “Entourage” character lessened, as did his stamina. Though he says he’s still asked to play roles of men in their 50’s, Mr. Evans looks his age as his wobbly right foot slows his gait.

Asked if he might write something new about his seven wives (he’s been divorced from six of them; the seventh marriage was annulled) he replied curtly, “I don’t want to talk about them.”

The financial success of “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” the 1991 memoir by the producer Julia Phillips, is mentioned.

“I thought Julia was a very good writer,” Mr. Evans said, “but writing that kind of stuff is not good for your mental health. Besides, no one would read my book if I did what Julia did,” he added, smiling wanly. “If I wrote the truth of what I know, the book would be 10,000 pages.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/movies/03john.html





If Hollywood Is a Game, This Player Says It’s Over
David M. Halbfinger

It’s just a throwaway line in the opening paragraph of Michael Tolkin’s sequel to “The Player” — “box office was down, it would never return” — and it’s the stuff of so much anxiety in Hollywood these days that you could hardly call it a stretch for a novelist who, between books, makes a very nice living writing and doctoring screenplays.

Mr. Tolkin’s new installment in the scheming, self-obsessed and periodically homicidal adventures of the studio executive Griffin Mill, “The Return of the Player,” has less to do with the movie business than it does with screwed-up parents, their troubled kids and the aspirations of eerily lifelike gay demicentibillionaires to make it to the next level of obscene wealth, where interest accumulates so fast that a man who pays $125 million for a painting has already made his money back an hour after he signed the check.

Yet undergirding Mr. Tolkin’s trenchant take on the small world known as the West Side of Los Angeles — undermining that world, really — is his devastatingly pessimistic vision of the future of the movie business, not to mention of planet Earth.

In 1988, when he published “The Player,” which became a 1992 movie starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman, Mr. Tolkin said he had written it as his exit strategy from Hollywood after several frustrating years as a screenwriter. This time around, it isn’t Mr. Tolkin but his now-52-year-old character, Griffin, who is looking to get out, and not just out of Hollywood or Los Angeles, but someplace far away and well above sea level, where the melting ice floes can’t get him.

After listening to Mr. Tolkin for a couple of hours, one would think he should have up and left Hollywood months ago himself.

“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,” he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.”

The source of all this creative-industrial-complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,” spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.

Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.”

The result was inevitable, Mr. Tolkin suggested. “The children’s movies — ‘Lord of the Rings,’ the ‘Harry Potter’ movies — can still follow that myth, because the kids are too naïve to be cynical about it,” he said. “But everybody else knows the story. They know what’s coming.”

That heroic story structure also happened, as Mr. Tolkin points out ominously, to suffice for an American national myth — witness Horatio Alger, James Stewart or “just the myth of the American little guy” — the myth of a hero with a sense of duty, honor, courage, righteousness and justice. But that too, he fears, is dead, and he pinpoints its demise on a spring day in 2004 when pictures of United States soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners circulated the globe.

“I don’t think America’s had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib,” Mr. Tolkin said, before clarifying that he’s talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry’s quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. “I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.”

Sitting in his spartan office above his garage in the wide-lawned neighborhood of Windsor Square, Mr. Tolkin recalled that he dreamt up “The Player” after staring at the Iran-Contra hearings and watching Elliot Abrams testify to Congress. “I was obsessed with the question of how could he sleep at night, because it was obvious that he was lying. I guess I was interested in the modern sociopath: the political sociopath, the bureaucratic sociopath.”

All these years later, Mr. Tolkin said, he chose to pick up again with his Player in the spring of 2002, several months after 9/11 had revealed the collapse of so many systems. That collapse made the kind of nightmares he has made a sub-specialty of — he shared writing credit for “Deep Impact,” and his other novels involve plane crashes and killings that unravel the lives of husbands and fathers — seem so plausible.

“The great line for that is ‘Enter the Dragon’: ‘You’ve offended me, my family and the Shaolin Temple,’ ” he said. “Me, I could defend myself. My family, we’re fine. But offending the Shaolin Temple means you’ve offended everything we stand for, and we cannot let that by. And our Shaolin Temple has been torn apart, and with it the family, and then with it even the sense of self. And Griffin, in the book, knows that. That’s why he’s panicked about the future, that’s why he wants to leave the country. Because, from the evidence of the collapse of the traditional story in Hollywood, that is the melting iceberg, the telltale sign.”

It seems odd, amid all this morbidity, to hear a character in “Return of the Player” declare that Hollywood is “the most positive force in nature.” And yet Mr. Tolkin said he believes it is.

“I do think the movies help bring people together,” he said. “If there was an Arabic cinema that was as good as the Asian cinema, there’d be less tension in the world. I believe that. When the movies were good, America was more popular in the world. The movies showed the world something really powerful, and that vision was so powerful that the movies were restricted, totalitarian regimes tried to keep the movies out because they were so powerful.

“The American myth is the little tailor that could, the yeoman who can grow up to be president, the humble log cabin leads to the emancipation of the slaves. That’s the most threatening idea in the world.”

At least it was. Now, as Griffin Mill explains, the world has turned off the fantasies that America once fed it: “When the moral lessons of the movies can’t blunt the pain or give you energy because you’re too poor or hungry or scared or trapped — so trapped that the Journey of the Hero is the story of how your oppressors won King of the Hill — you can’t be helped by anything except violence in the real world, but it’s the kind of violence the movies lay off on the villain, mass violence.”

Mr. Tolkin said his book is about “the destructive power of despair and hopelessness.” Which may just deter Hollywood producers from stampeding, as they did with “The Player,” to make the sequel into a movie.

Yet Mr. Tolkin’s watchword, borrowed from Edith Wharton, is “tragedy with a happy ending.” And so, he said, he holds onto hope. Hope that Hollywood won’t fail to find its own path to safety, that the oceans won’t rise to immerse Culver City, that the fanatics won’t inherit or blow up the Earth.

“I’m still hopeful,” he said, “but it’s an act of will now. Reason tells you otherwise.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/books/31play.html





Broadcast Chief Misused Office, Inquiry Reports
Stephen Labaton

State Department investigators have found that the head of the agency overseeing most government broadcasts to foreign countries has used his office to run a “horse racing operation” and that he improperly put a friend on the payroll, according to a summary of a report made public on Tuesday by a Democratic lawmaker.

The report said that the official, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, had repeatedly used government employees to perform personal errands and that he billed the government for more days of work than the rules permit.

The summary of the report, prepared by the State Department inspector general, said the United States attorney’s office here had been given the report and decided not to conduct a criminal inquiry.

The summary said the Justice Department was pursuing a civil inquiry focusing on the contract for Mr. Tomlinson’s friend.

Through his lawyer, James Hamilton, Mr. Tomlinson issued a statement denying that he had done anything improper.

The office of the State Department inspector general presented the findings from its yearlong inquiry last week to the White House and on Monday to some members of Congress.

Three Democratic lawmakers, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representatives Howard L. Berman and Tom Lantos of California, requested the inquiry after a whistle-blower from the agency had approached them about the possible misuse of federal money by Mr. Tomlinson and the possible hiring of phantom or unqualified employees.

Mr. Tomlinson, a Republican with close ties to the White House, was ousted last year from another post, at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, after another inquiry found evidence that he had violated rules meant to insulate public television and radio from political influence.

His renomination to a new term as chairman of the State Department office that oversees foreign broadcasts, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, is pending before the Senate.

Mr. Tomlinson’s position at the broadcasting board makes him one of the administration’s top officials overseeing public diplomacy and puts him in charge of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

The State Department report noted his use of his office to oversee a stable of thoroughbreds but did not mention one specific way in which his professional responsibilities and personal interests appear to have intersected. The horses, according to track records, include Karzai, as in Hamid Karzai, and Massoud, from the late Ahmed Shah Massoud) references to Afghan leaders who have fought against the Taliban and the Russians, as well as Panjshair, the valley that was the base used by forces to overthrow the Taliban.

In providing the report to the members of Congress, the State Department warned that making it public could violate federal law, people who have seen the report said. On Tuesday, Mr. Berman released the summary.

The lawmakers who requested the inquiry sent a letter to the president on Tuesday urging him to remove Mr. Tomlinson from his position immediately “and take all necessary steps to restore the integrity of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.”

A spokeswoman for the White House, Emily Lawrimore, said President Bush continued to support Mr. Tomlinson’s renomination. Ms. Lawrimore declined to comment on the State Department report.

In the statement issued through his lawyer, Mr. Tomlinson said that he was “proud of what I have accomplished for U.S. international broadcasting’’ and that the investigation “was inspired by partisan divisions inside the Broadcasting Board of Governors.’’

He implied that it was more efficient for him to work for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at his office at the broadcasting board. About his horse racing work, he said the inspector general had concluded that it amounted to “an average of one e-mail and two and a half minutes a day’’ at the office.

He also said he spent more time on broadcasting responsibilities at his farm and residences than he spent on his horses at the office.

“In retrospect, I should have been more careful in this regard,’’ he said.

Mr. Tomlinson, 62, is a former editor of Reader’s Digest who has close ties to Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s political strategist and senior adviser. Mr. Rove and Mr. Tomlinson were on the board of the predecessor to the broadcasting board in the 90’s. Mr. Tomlinson has been chairman of the broadcasting board since 2002.

The board, whose members include the secretary of state, has a central role in public diplomacy. It supervises the government’s foreign broadcasting operations, including Radio Martí, Radio Sawa and Al Hurra; transmits programs in 61 languages; and says it has more than 100 million listeners a week.

Mr. Tomlinson’s ouster in November from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was prompted by a separate investigation by that inspector general at the corporation. That inquiry found evidence that Mr. Tomlinson had violated rules as he sought more conservative programs and that he had improperly intervened to help the staff of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal win a $4.1 million contract, one of the corporation’s largest programming contracts, to finance a weekly public television program.

The heavily edited State Department report on Mr. Tomlinson’s activities at the Broadcasting Board of Governors did not identify the friend who received the improper employment contract. The report said that there was no competitive bidding to hire him, that he was retired and on a government pension when Mr. Tomlinson hired him and that he never filed the required paperwork with the board.

In his statement, Mr. Tomlinson identified the man as Les Daniels and said he had worked for 35 years at the Voice of America.

Mr. Tomlinson said, Mr. Daniels did important work as a liaison aide with the public and working on significant projects. Mr. Daniels was paid nearly $250,000 over two and a half years, ending last year.

Mr. Tomlinson was rebuked in the earlier report at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for improperly hiring an acquaintance from a journalism center founded by the American Conservative Union. The corporation paid the person more than $20,000 to monitor public radio and television programs for bias, including “Now,” with Bill Moyers as host.

The State Department report said that from 2003 through 2005 Mr. Tomlinson had requested compensation in excess of the 130 days permitted by law for his post. The report said that he had requested and received pay from the broadcasting board and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the same days worked on 14 occasions but that investigators were unable to substantiate whether they were for the same hours worked on the same days.

Investigators who seized Mr. Tomlinson’s e-mail, telephone and office records found that he had improperly and extensively used his office at the broadcasting board for nongovernmental work, including work for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the horse racing and breeding ventures. The material seized included racing forms and evidence that he used the office to buy and sell thoroughbreds.

Mr. Tomlinson owns Sandy Bayou Stables near Middleburg, Va., Records show that most of the horses have not been in the money, although Massoud appears to have been quite successful, earning purses of more than $140,000 over the last two years.

People who have seen the report said it noted that Mr. Tomlinson, on his lawyer’s advice, ended an interview with investigators early. One person familiar with the inquiry said Mr. Hamilton ended the interview as the investigators began to ask about using the office for horse racing business. Mr. Hamilton would not comment about the interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/wa...broadcast.html





Outshining MTV: How Video Killed the Video Star
Kelefa Sanneh

MTV outgrew music videos long ago. The network has stayed successful by showing reality dramas, celebrity specials and dating competitions. And so every year, MTV’s Video Music Awards seem slightly out of place. The network spends a night lavishly (and perhaps guiltily) paying tribute to music videos; it’s the 1980’s all over again. Then, reruns notwithstanding, it’s back to business as usual for another 364 days.

But while viewers used to complain about the dearth of music videos on MTV, that complaint itself now seems old-fashioned. Anyone who cares about music videos can find them elsewhere, sometimes courtesy of MTV itself. (The network unveiled a video-heavy site, mtv.com/overdrive, last year.) Tonight’s awards ceremony, to be broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall, is the first since the introduction of the video iPod last year. And it’s the first since the rise of YouTube.com, the most efficient video-sharing site yet. If MTV no longer plays music videos all day long, who cares?

So what do music fans do when they have cheap cameras and an easy way to share their work with other fans? They sing cover versions of their favorite songs, or show off their lip-synching skill, or do silly little dances. On YouTube this means that artists sometimes end up competing with their own fans.

In one extreme recent case, the hip-hop club track “Chicken Noodle Soup,” by the Harlem duo Webstar and Young B, became a do-it-yourself sensation. Fans learned the accompanying dance even before the duo had a major-label record deal. And by the time Universal Republic rushed out an official music video, it almost seemed like an afterthought, because there were already hundreds of homemade “Chicken Noodle Soup” videos online. For some reason a wide variety of listeners felt compelled to show the world how well (or how poorly) they wiggled in time to that same siren-driven beat.

The spur-of-the-moment music video is a relatively new phenomenon. And some of this year’s most memorable major-label music videos found ways to pay tribute to lip-synchers and bedroom choreographers. In the video for Kelly Clarkson’s “Walk Away” (RCA/Sony BMG), images of Ms. Clarkson are interspersed with images of more-or-less regular people, all of them lip-synching their hearts out. For “Cheated Hearts” (Interscope), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs invited fans to impersonate band members and lip-synch the song. In the final version it can be hard to tell the real Yeah Yeah Yeahs from the fake ones.

No band has exploited online video more effectively than OK Go, from Chicago. The video for “Here It Goes Again” (Capitol) consists of a single, low-resolution shot of the band members performing an intricately choreographed routine on a set of treadmills. Part of the appeal is that these guys don’t look anything like professional dancers. The band wasn’t nominated for any awards. (“Here It Goes Again” was released too late to be considered.) But in a tribute to the power of online video, the members of OK Go are scheduled to reprise their treadmill routine during tonight’s show. Around New York there are tongue-in-cheek OK Go posters that say “For Your Consideration: Best Treadmill Video.”

Compared to these viral videos, tonight’s nominees for video of the year seem to come from a different planet. The five nominated videos are Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man” (RCA/Sony BMG), Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” (Epic/Sony BMG), Madonna’s “Hung Up” (Warner Brothers), the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Dani California” (Warner Brothers) and Panic! at the Disco’s “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” (Fueled By Ramen). All five are glamorous productions built around performances.

In all five, the wardrobes — Ms. Aguilera’s speakeasy get-up, Shakira’s shiny red skirt, Madonna’s leotard, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ rock ’n’ roll makeovers, Panic! at the Disco’s circus-inspired suits — are more memorable than the plot or the direction. And with the exception of “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” all of these videos were commissioned by well-established acts with big budgets at their disposal.

Not too big, though. In the late 1990’s major-label acts routinely made seven-figure music videos, gambling that they would be able to make the money back through CD sales. But in an era of declining album sales, that logic seems less sensible than ever. These days, when major labels spend that kind of money, they’re not just doing it to provide MTV with free programming. They’re doing it because they want more stuff to sell.

That means more and more CD’s are bundled with DVD’s, or reissued with DVD supplements, or followed by stand-alone DVD companions. From the Arctic Monkeys (who recently released “Scummy Man,” described as “a short film inspired by the song ‘When the Sun Goes Down’ ”) to Chris Brown (whose fans are invited to buy “Chris Brown’s Journey,” a DVD cash-in), extended music videos are finding a home in record stores.

Truly ambitious (and well-financed) stars can make movies instead of videos. OutKast’s “Idlewild,” which was originally conceived as an HBO special, arrived in theaters last week. (No doubt some of the same theatergoers took in T. I.’s “ATL” this spring.) A week and a half ago Lifetime broadcast “The Fantasia Barrino Story: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale,” starring that singer. And in theaters next Friday, country fans can watch “Broken Bridges,” a feature starring Toby Keith.

And then there’s “High School Musical,” which must be the year’s most successful music video, even though you won’t hear about it at the Video Music Awards. It’s a Disney Channel movie that was a huge hit on cable and on DVD. It spawned a soundtrack CD of the same name that remains the year’s best-selling album, and also the year’s best example of how lucrative it can be to combine music and video.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to call a full-length Disney movie a music video. And certainly many more people saw Madonna’s “Hung Up” than saw all the “Chicken Noodle Soup” videos put together. But then it’s getting harder to tell exactly what a music video is or isn’t. A few of them fit on MTV, but more of them find homes on other screens, bigger ones, perhaps, or smaller ones.

There are still plenty of glamorous four-minute performance videos, and viewers will see glimpses of them tonight. But some viewers might also notice that this year’s music awards are old-fashioned in a different way. The ceremony will celebrate an old — though not quite obsolete — idea of what music videos can be. Once upon a time MTV outgrew the music video. But now it seems that the music video has outgrown MTV.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/ar...spo5tNYZn2siaQ





Hurt me.

No.

UK Mother Wins Ban On Violent Porn

A mother whose daughter died at the hands of a man obsessed with violent internet porn has won her fight for a ban on possessing such images. The government has announced plans to make the possession of violent porn punishable by three years in jail. It follows a campaign by Berkshire woman Liz Longhurst whose daughter Jane, a Brighton schoolteacher, was allegedly strangled by Graham Coutts. Mrs Longhurst's campaign was backed by MPs and a 50,000-signature petition.

Hidden body

In November last year the petition won cross-party support when it was presented to the House of Commons and was backed publicly by the solicitor general, Harriet Harman MP.

Since her daughter's death Mrs Longhurst, 74, from Reading, has fought a long campaign to ban the possession of images of sexual violence.

Mrs Longhurst said: "My daughter Sue and myself are very pleased that after 30 months of intensive campaigning we have persuaded the government to take action against these horrific internet sites, which can have such a corrupting influence and glorify extreme sexual violence."

Jane Longhurst, 31, was found dead on Wiggonholt Common, near Pulborough, West Sussex, on 19 April 2003.

She had been strangled with a pair of tights and her body kept in storage for weeks before it was found.

In 2004, musician Coutts, 36, of Waterloo Street, Hove, West Sussex, was convicted of her murder but on appeal he was ordered to serve a minimum 26 years in jail.

Trial jurors had been told of his obsession with strangulation and how he looked at internet sites connected with the fetish.

It is already a crime to make or publish such images but proposed legislation will outlaw possession of images such as "material featuring violence that is, or appears to be, life-threatening or is likely to result in serious and disabling injury".

Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker MP said: "Such material has no place in our society but the advent of the internet has meant that this material is more easily available and means existing controls are being by-passed - we must move to tackle this."

Mrs Longhurst said legislation, which would apply to all websites, would mean her daughter's death had not been "entirely in vain".

Reading West MP Martin Salter, who backed the campaign, said: "This campaign has taken a huge amount of time and effort but it has struck a chord right across the country.

The move by the government would close a legal loophole.

"It is great news that the Government has not only listened but has responded to calls to outlaw access to sickening internet images, which can so easily send vulnerable people over the edge."

The new law will not target those who accidentally come into contact with obscene pornography or affect mainstream entertainment industry working within current obscenity laws.

But the proposed legislation has drawn opposition from anti-censorship groups and organisations who represent people involved in sadomasochist activities.

Shaun Gabb, director of the anti-censorship organisation the Libertarian Alliance, said: "If you are criminalising possession then you are giving police inquisitorial powers to come into your house and see what you've got, now we didn't have this in the past."

This year five Law Lords sent Coutts' case back to the Court of Appeal to "invite that court to quash the conviction".

It was argued that jurors in the original trial should have been offered the option of manslaughter as well as a murder verdict.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...re/5297600.stm





Intimate Confessions Pour Out on Church’s Web Site
Neela Banerjee

On a Web site called mysecret.tv, there is the writer who was molested years ago by her baby sitter and who still cannot forgive herself for failing to protect her younger siblings from the same abuse.

There is the happy father, businessman and churchgoer who is having a sexual relationship with another man in his church. There is the young woman who shot an abusive boyfriend when she was high on methamphetamine.

Then there is this entry: “Years ago I asked my father, ‘How does a daddy justify selling his little girl?’ He replied, ‘I needed to pay the rent, put food on the table and I liked having a few coins to jangle in my pocket.’ ”

About a month ago, LifeChurch, an evangelical network with nine locations and based in Edmond, Okla., set up mysecret.tv as a forum for people to confess anonymously on the Internet.

The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession.

“We confess to God for forgiveness but to each other for healing,” Mr. Groeschel said. “Secrets isolate you, and keep you away from God, from those people closest to you.”

LifeChurch, which is 10 years old, tries to draw back those who may have left the faith, Mr. Groeschel said. The church hews to a conservative theology on homosexuality and abortion.

Its nine sites, in Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, draw a total of 18,000 people to weekend services. LifeChurch also has a “virtual campus” online, and it relies on technology to bind together its “campuses” through endeavors like broadcast sermons.

Still, mysecret.tv represents the first time the church has had an interactive Web site tied to its sermons, in this case a series that Mr. Groeschel began last month on the need for confession.

“I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times people have told me that ‘I’m going to tell you something, Pastor, I’ve never told anyone before,’ ” Mr. Groeschel said. “I realized that people are carrying around dark secrets, and the Web site is giving them a first place for confession.”

The Internet already offers many places to confess, from the dry menu of sins at www.absolution-online.com to the raunchy exhibitionism at sites like www.confessionjunkie.com and www.grouphug.us. It is impossible to know whether these stories, like much on the Internet, are sincere or pure fiction.

One of the best-known sites is postsecret.blogspot.com, an extension of an art project in which people write their secrets on postcards and mail them to an address in Germantown, Md.

Mysecret.tv may be singular because it gives people at LifeChurch an easy opportunity to act on the sermons, said Scott L. Thumma, professor of the sociology of religion at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“It’s not what you typically expect when a pastor delivers his weekly sermon, and you hit the back door and forget what he said,” Professor Thumma said. “Here it takes on a life of its own, and the folks that are here are not just those who go to LifeChurch.”

Since its inception, mysecret.tv has received more than 150,000 hits and more than 1,500 confessions, Mr. Groeschel said. Absolution is not part of the bargain, just the beginning of release.

“There’s no magic in confessing on a Web site,” Mr. Groeschel said. “My biggest fear is that someone would think that and would go on with life. This is just Step 1.”

The confessions are often just a paragraph or two. Some are eloquent, almost literary. Others are long, rushed and without punctuation, as if the writer needed to get it all out in one breath.

The starkness of the tersest confessions is jolting: “I have verbally and physically abused my wife.”

Another, referring to a spouse, said: “I tell you I love you everyday. Truth is I do love you, but I’m not in love with you, and I never have been. I just don’t want to hurt you and feel worthless.”

Many women speak of their regrets over having had abortions.

Other writers say they cannot shake the recurring nightmare of being sexually abused as children. Most were abused by relatives, neighbors and friends. Some went on to abuse younger children in their families. They state simply how their parents often did nothing to help. A few wonder where God is in all this.

“When I was 7, I was sexually abused by a guy,” a girl wrote. “Then, when I was 13, my mum did the same thing to me. Now I am 16 and scared. My doctor put me in a mental home. Sometimes, I think where is Jesus and why’s he not helping me.”

Because the site is anonymous, the staff at LifeChurch cannot reach out to those who are in danger of harming themselves or others, Mr. Groeschel said.

Professor Thumma pointed out that the resources section of the site could be improved. It now lists mostly religious books rather than mental health services.

Perhaps the most important activity the Web site has is letting people know that they are not alone in their suffering, Professor Thumma said. It harkens to the now rare practice of “testimony time” at evangelical churches, he said, when “you could hear stories about people overcoming problems, stories of hope, so that you felt you weren’t the only one struggling.”

Among those changed by the confessions is Mr. Groeschel himself.

“Knowing that so many people I see every week on the outside look so normal, and yet inside there is so much pain, that has been surprising,” he said. “When you hear about it in their own words, it’s hard to bear.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/us/01confession.html





Does To. Does Not.

Does the Internet improve social relationships and psychological well-being?

Well-known studies have showed that TV directly causes social disengagement and bad moods.

However, Internet is used for many social purposes — email, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc.

In 1998, Kraut et al. showed a correlation between Internet use and declines in social relationships and isolation,

Greater use of the Internet was also associated with small, but statistically significant declines in social involvement as measured by communication with the family and the size of people’s local social networks, and with increases in loneliness, a psychological state associated with social involvement.

This paper was titled the “Internet Paradox” because the Internet is heavily used for communication, yet it makes people lonelier. Strong relationships developed online are rare; most people use the internet to keep up with offline relationships.

More recently, Kraut et a. did another study on the original test group, and found that the negative effects of using the Internet had dissipated.

A second study was then done on new purchasers of computer and televisions, and it also showed that the internet had a positive effect on social and psychological well-being. Unsurprisingly, this was more pronounced for extroverts and more socially connected people.

So what accounts for the difference between the 1998 and the 2002 study?

One could argue that the Internet has changed. Online dating, discussion boards, social networking, instant messaging. It’s just a different Internet.

The other argument one can make is that the users have changed — when the first study was done, only about the third of the population had access to the Internet. Now, everyone’s online.

Interestingly, the new study showed that heavy Internet usage was associated with declines in local knowledge and interest in living in the local area. This is likely “the grass is greener on the other side” syndrome, and the paper remarks,

Unlike regional newspapers, for example, the Internet makes news about distant cities as accessible as news about one’s hometown.

Kraut, R., Kiesler, S., Boneva, B., Cummings, J., Helgeson, V., & Crawford, A. (2002). Internet paradox revisited. Journal of Social Issues, 58(1), 49-74. [PDF]

Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukopadhyay, T., & Scherlis, W. (1998). Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being? American Psychologist, 53(9), 1017-1031.
http://tastyresearch.wordpress.com/2...al-well-being/





Can the PS3 Save Sony

The company that created the transistor radio and the Walkman is at the precipice. If Sony's new $600 console doesn't blow gamers away, it may be time to say sayonara.
Frank Rose

Never try to introduce the same product twice. That was the lesson from the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May. A year earlier, at E3 2005 in Los Angeles, Sony had wowed the videogame industry with demonstrations of the upcoming PlayStation 3's unprecedented graphical muscle. The machine wouldn't be available until months after Microsoft's next-gen console, the Xbox 360. Yet based on the spectacular preview, many gamers had no problem waiting for the PS3. Then, early this year, Sony dropped a bombshell: The PS3 release would be pushed back until November. So when E3 came around again this spring, everyone trooped out to the retro Hollywood lotusland of the Sony Pictures lot – only to view the same console they'd been promised the year before. Not great.

Delays are nothing new in tech, but Sony seemed intent on making the worst of it. The crowd was kept waiting nearly an hour. Then Kaz Hirai, who heads PlayStation in North America, took the stage to declare, "The next generation doesn't start until we say it does!" He meant it as a dig at Microsoft, but to gamers who'd been salivating for a year, his words were like a bitch slap. The demos that followed were no more impressive than those the year before. Finally, PlayStation chief Ken Kutaragi came forward to make the one announcement everyone wanted to hear: the price. $600 for the high-end model? The room gasped, then fell silent. Almost immediately, the blogosphere lit up with denunciations: Sony has turned its back on gamers. The PS3 will be a failure. Kutaragi and Hirai are idiots.

PR fiascoes tend to be a sign that nobody's thinking about the customer. E3 was Sony's second in seven months. Last October, a security researcher reported on his blog that CDs from Sony BMG – the music label half-owned by Sony – contained antipiracy software that covertly embedded itself in computer operating systems, spying on their owners and leaving the machines themselves vulnerable to identity theft and zombie takeover attempts. Sony BMG pooh-poohed the problem and released a software fix that made it even worse. Millions of CDs had to be recalled. As class actions multiplied and even the Department of Homeland Security warned music labels against undermining computer security, angry consumers declared themselves ready to boycott anything with the Sony name on it.

Sixty years after its founding in the ashes of postwar Tokyo, the company that gave us the transistor radio and the Walkman portable music player is deeply wounded. Only once in the past five years has Sony's all-important electronics division posted a profit; during that same period, the company's share price has fallen by nearly half. Its hit products of the '90s – Handycams, WEGA TVs, VAIO computers – were succeeded by stillborn wonders like the AirBoard, a $1,000 videoscreen that could be carried around like a laptop, and the Net MD Walkman, a too-little-too-late attempt to challenge Apple's iPod. Neither this latter-day Walkman nor Sony Connect, the online music store The New York Times once called "Sony Disconnect," would have anything to do with MP3 files – only Sony's cumbersome and proprietary Atrac3 format would do. Now, having ceded to Apple the portable-music-player market, Sony desperately needs to stay on top in videogames. It's not just that Sony needs a win; PS3 is critical to its entire strategy.

The PS3 is much more than a game box. Kutaragi likes to say it's actually a computer, one that's designed to lie at the center of the networked home, serving up films, navigating the Internet, doing nearly everything a PC can do, and delivering jaw-dropping videogames besides. The new console relies on two extremely ambitious yet untested technologies. At its core is a highly sophisticated microchip that can cruise at teraflop speeds (equal to the fastest supercomputers of less than a decade ago) and that might someday revolutionize home electronics. Also built into the machine is Sony's new Blu-ray hi-def disc player, which is proudly incompatible with a rival format from Toshiba – and which represents a bold, some would say reckless, attempt to control the multibillion-dollar market in next-generation video discs.

All this makes for a daring strategy, but not one that plays to Sony's strengths. Sony has always been at its best as a personal hardware company, coming up with nifty gadgets that delight consumers. In recent decades, though, it's become oddly fixated on imposing its own standards – Betamax for VCRs, the Mini-Disc for digital music players, the Universal Media Disc for PlayStation Portable, the Memory Stick for anything you can think of – despite the world's unwavering rejection of those standards. And Sony has never displayed an aptitude for software or had great success with networking, the key feature Microsoft has built into the Xbox. Yet Sony has to face Microsoft not just in videogames but across the entire panoply of home electronics, which Microsoft is determined to control through software. And Sony has to do this with cash reserves of $6 billion – compared to Microsoft's $38 billion hoard – while losing hundreds of dollars in manufacturing costs alone for every PS3 sold. Eventually, Sony's costs will come down. But in the meantime, Goldman Sachs projects, Sony will lose nearly $2 billion on the PS3 by the end of this fiscal year in March.

Sony lovers – and they are legion – have been watching all of this with awe and trepidation. It's not every day that a $64 billion-a-year corporation puts its future on the line. "It's very un-Japanese," observes Rishad Tobaccowala, who tracks the entertainment business as a future-of-media specialist at the global ad giant Publicis. "It's betting the company. If this thing bombs, there is no second coming. Everything else about Sony is a sideshow. This is the show."

How did it come to this? There were missteps aplenty, but at their root is a common dynamic: What once made Sony great has worked against it in the digital age. Sony's course was fixed in the 1946 prospectus drawn up by cofounder Masaru Ibuka, when he set forth the new company's purposes of incorporation. Number one on his list: "To establish an ideal factory … where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level." To succeed, engineers would need to form small development teams and compete to build the next great gadget.

Teams of hardware engineers locked in competition: "It's the principle Sony is built on," says Shin'ichi Okamoto, PlayStation's former CTO, now a Tokyo entrepreneur. "Personally, I believe it's not such a good principle nowadays. I got this impression in the '80s, with the technological shift to semiconductors and software" – both of which require enormous development teams that collaborate with the hardware units their work is intended for. "At Sony, most engineers want to invent something new by themselves. That's a very different goal."

Phil Wiser, the former CTO of Sony's US operations, reached a similar conclusion after he was tapped to salvage Sony Connect. "With digital entertainment, you have to think about hardware, software, and services that tie them all together," says Wiser, who managed to heave Sony onto the MP3 bandwagon before leaving earlier this year for a Silicon Valley startup. "But it's very hard to quantify the advantage of good software. If you're in a hardware company and you analyze it from a financial perspective, you just want to do it as cheaply as you can. Software and services are an afterthought."

The need to replace small competitive teams with large collaborative ones did occur to a few key Sony executives. Toshitada Doi, a legendary engineer, set up a computer science lab in 1988 because he saw that the future would require networked devices and large-scale software development. Years later, then-CEO Nobuyuki Idei reorganized Sony into a series of "network companies" and charged a promising lieutenant, Yuki Nozoe, with pulling together random broadband offerings into an all-encompassing networked future. But all this talk of networks was anathema to Sony's entrenched engineering cadre. Today, Doi, Idei, and Nozoe are all gone, victims of their failure to make a difference, swept away in the boardroom coup that in spring 2005 put Howard Stringer, a longtime media exec who'd been heading Sony's US operations, in charge of the company.

The culture of the lone-wolf hardware engineer reached its apex when Ken Kutaragi triumphed over internal opposition to create the PlayStation. In the early '90s, Kutaragi burst forth with a seemingly reckless scheme to take on Nintendo and Sega, the ruling powers of the game world. Yet even then he viewed Microsoft as the ultimate enemy. Shuji Utsumi, a former PlayStation exec who now heads the Tokyo-based game developer Q Entertainment, recalls an exchange in which Kutaragi declared, years before the Xbox was introduced, that his competitor was Microsoft. "I thought, what is he talking about?" Utsumi says. "Is he nuts? But even before PlayStation was born, he was predicting a big war for the living room."

PlayStation 3 is hostage to that prediction. Because technology can be decisive in war, Kutaragi loaded the PS3 with the biggest, baddest armaments yet: the Blu-ray disc drive and the Cell microchip. He and his team had barely gotten PlayStation 2 out the door when they started conceptualizing the silicon for its successor. The result, developed in partnership with IBM and Toshiba, features a central processing unit and eight coprocessors on the same chip, working in parallel. It's optimized for high-speed networking and fast decoding of encrypted and compressed data – copy-protected video for HDTVs, for example. Game developers now have to figure out how best to unlock its powers. Sunlight on water, creatures half-hidden by fog, age lines on a human face – "for every pixel, you can do more to synthesize reality," says Steve Pearce, CTO of Activision. "But it's a big challenge – our engineers have to start thinking in a new way."

As a result, the Cell has caused a lot of headaches for developers. The Xbox 360, with its three-core PowerPC processor, has already made game development far more complicated and expensive than before. Tim Sweeney, cofounder of the North Carolina-based developer Epic Games, figures it will take at least twice the effort to fully exploit the PS3's potential as to take the Xbox 360 to the max. Until that happens, it's unlikely there'll be much discernable difference between games on the two platforms. "The Cell has more theoretical computing power," says Sweeney, "but it might be years before we see that reflected in actual performance. So it's a fundamental question whether the long-term direction in computing is with architectures like the Cell."

Blu-ray is equally fraught. For starters, the whole business of high-definition disc drives seems designed to invite cynicism. With DVD players now in 85 percent of US homes, sales fell in 2005 for the first time – so some manufacturers may need a next-gen disc player, but it's not clear consumers do. Especially after August 2005, when talks aimed at averting a standards war with Toshiba's rival HD-DVD format ended in a stalemate. Andy Parsons, who heads advanced product development at Pioneer USA (a Blu-ray supporter), says compromise was impossible: "It's kind of like saying, 'LCD and plasma – why don't you combine the two?'" True enough – but it's also true that Blu-ray offers Sony yet another chance to establish a proprietary format. During the '90s, a similar conflict over the original DVD ended with Sony's surrender and Toshiba's collection of most of the royalties on every DVD and DVD player sold. This time, Sony had the support of the big US computermakers, most of Hollywood, and nearly all the Asian consumer electronics giants – so why not call Toshiba's bluff?

Then there was the decision to build Blu-ray into the PlayStation 3. Sony's logic seemed ironclad: Not only would the hi-def drive's huge storage capacity allow for far-more-realistic and complex games, the PS3 would carry Blu-ray into millions of households and drive sales of HDTVs as well. As it turned out, however, Blu-ray has done nothing good for the PS3. Blu-ray was the main reason gamers weren't able to get the new machine last spring: The launch had to be postponed because the new format's digital rights management system did not yet satisfy every Hollywood studio. Blu-ray was also a big factor in the PS3's high price tag. Of course, with stand-alone Blu-ray players starting at $1,000, the PS3 is actually a bargain – if a Blu-ray player is what you really want. If not, $600 is a lot of money. "For rich, older people it's attractive," Utsumi observes. "But I don't know if they are gameplayers."

Kaz Hirai has heard it all before: the jitters about a new disc format, the complaints from game developers, the charges of hubris. When you're this far ahead – more than 200 million PlayStations sold worldwide, compared to just 30 million Xboxes – it comes with the territory. "With every generational change, there are going to be challenges for the development teams," he says. "If everybody said it's a piece of cake, that's telling me it's not a future-proof console, that it has no headroom to grow." And that remark at E3? "I wanted to say, look – we're the leadership company, and we take that responsibility seriously. The next huge leap in technology does not come until we launch PlayStation 3."

Hirai has a point: PlayStation 3 is as high tech as it comes in gameland. Thanks to the Cell, the console can transform raw computer code into imagery that looks startlingly, almost disturbingly, real – just ask the Tiger Woods simulacrum that popped up at E3. It can render virtual worlds of shimmering beauty and mesmerizing intensity, as Warhawk, the forthcoming update of Sony's classic flying shooter, amply demonstrates. Nonetheless, Hirai's upbeat assessment of the PS3's prospects seems dangerously at odds with the feeling in the videogame business. One prominent industry figure, not associated with a console maker, recalls having lunch a couple of months ago with a game-company development chief who wondered aloud if Sony was going to pull a Sega – that is, go from number one console manufacturer to out of the business.

At the root of Sony's precarious position – not just in the industry, but with gamers at large – is the company's overweening ambition. The PS3 is all about power. Sony has said curiously little about whether this amped-up Linux über-computer will actually be fun to play. Meanwhile, Nintendo wowed everyone at this year's E3 with the Wii, a console you can play simply by waving a wand at the screen. And Microsoft has upped the fun quotient by making it easy to play with all your buddies online.

Sony's response to online gaming is revealing. When Microsoft launched its Xbox Live online service in 2002, console gaming went from solo affair to global meet-up. Back then, Sony was actually the leader in online gaming, with over 400,000 subscribers to EverQuest, its massively multiplayer online game. But MMOGs were played on a computer, not a game console, and there was little communication between the San Diego-based EverQuest group and the Tokyo-based PlayStation group. Xbox Live now has more than 3 million subscribers worldwide; the only place it isn't big is Japan. Kutaragi never fully developed his PlayStation 2 online service, which still requires game publishers to run multiplayer titles on their own servers, because it wasn't something he saw as lacking.

Yet game developers certainly saw the need for technology that would take their games online. "It's a very important function," says Ichiro Otobe, chief strategist of the Tokyo-based game publisher Square Enix, "and we want it coming from the platform developer – otherwise, we have to build it ourselves." Eventually, PlayStation execs got the idea. For more than a year, San Diego and Tokyo have been working together to come up with an answer to Xbox Live. Even so, Hirai says, "the fundamental approach is different from Microsoft's. They name it Live and it's a big to-do. We look at it the other way: There's the entertainment experience, what you have in the box, all those good things, and – oh, by the way – we have an online component."

In Sony, Microsoft may have found the ideal opponent: large, slow, still fixated on hardware, still trying to find its footing in the networked world. When Microsoft decided to move into the game business, it was because a handful of execs saw an opportunity to do for gaming what Windows had done for personal computing: transform it from a hardware-defined industry to one governed by software. J Allard, the team's leader, argued that the success of DirectX – a Microsoft software suite that made it easy to program a PC – meant the company could simplify game development, too. Allard was just as committed to online services: If Microsoft could hook up players worldwide, it could change the nature of gameplay and make Xbox the way of the future.

"This business used to be about hardware and a cartridge you popped in," says Peter Moore, the new leader of Xbox, at his headquarters in an office park in Redmond, Washington. "But hardware is a tough business. You need it, but you also need great software and innovative services." A Liverpool native with an office full of autographed soccer memorabilia and a sleek new Aston Martin coupe in the parking lot, Moore knows the vulnerabilities of hardware all too well: He headed Sega of America when PlayStation 2 overwhelmed its Dreamcast machine and pushed Sega out of the business. Now he spends much of his time on what Microsoft calls "Dev Luv," an all-out effort to give game developers the software tools and engineering support they need to make Xbox the platform of choice.

Meanwhile, Xbox Live keeps gaining new features – most recently, user profiles that allow other players to check out your skill level and reputation within the community. (Too many "avoid this player" raps and you could find yourself shunned.) And because the Xbox 360 acts as a bridge to Windows Media Center PCs, the console can serve up music and video from your hard drive and play it on any device in the house. Still, Moore notes, "we're not driving the 360 as the hub of the home. Editing and manipulating media is better done with a keyboard and mouse."

Like the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 will get a hi-def disc drive, but it won't be built in, and it won't be Blu-ray. Last September, Microsoft and Intel announced they were throwing their weight behind Toshiba's HD-DVD, a move that prompted several companies from the Blu-ray camp to hedge their bet by accommodating both standards. Amir Majidimehr, Microsoft's point man on the decision, cites several reasons for siding with Toshiba, chief among them Blu-ray's move – largely at the behest of some copyright cops at Fox – to supplement the already draconian DRM mechanism adopted by both camps with yet another layer of protection. "We worry that this program could be hacked to do bad things," Majidimehr says, alluding to last year's Sony BMG fiasco. Blu-ray partisans say that's impossible – but in any case, Majidimehr argues, "if one or the other of these layers decides it doesn't like what you're doing, it won't let you play the movie." Was the competition with Sony a factor, too? "Of course," he says. "But our strategy is, people want to play games, so we build a game console. Sony is like, all or nothing. They're going to have a world of hurt waiting for them at the end of this year."

A couple of months ago, Howard Stringer and Ryoji Chubashi, Sony's president, reported to a luxury hotel in Tokyo's Shinagawa district to face 7,200 shareholders at Sony's annual meeting. It was not an enviable assignment. With the company in the red yet again in its most recent quarter, Japanese investors were in an unhappy mood. "I bought shares in mighty Sony," cried a woman whose holdings had lost nearly two-thirds of their value. "What are you going to do about this?"

It was hardly an unexpected question, and Stringer answered as best he could. Citing runaway ticket sales for Sony Pictures' The Da Vinci Code and the remarkable success of the Bravia digital TV line, he argued that Sony has entered a period of reemergence. But The Da Vinci Code will have no more lasting effect on the bottom line than earlier Sony blockbusters like Spider-Man, and Bravia relies on LCD technology that Sony ignored for years – until finally it had to partner with its Korean archrival Samsung to get back in the TV business. So while each was good news, they don't add up to a sign that mighty Sony is back.

Stringer's new mantra is "Sony United." It's meant to get the company to perform in the digital world, to shed its antiquated ways and embrace network thinking. Most of all, though, it's meant to get Sony to perform as a single unit. Blu-ray is the first product to get the full treatment, not just from PlayStation but from the film and music divisions as well. This will be the test of the theory that was used to justify the billions Sony spent to get into the entertainment business in the '80s – that Sony could have won the Betamax-VHS war if only it had had enough "content."

Sony has had rah-rah moments in the past – too many of them. Before "Sony United" there was "Transformation 60," which cut 20,000 jobs in hopes of returning the company to health by its 60th anniversary. Before that there was "Symphony," which was supposed to get all the different divisions to play the same tune. But the megaproducts Sony has come up with, whether the AirBoard portable TV/Internet screen or the PS3, haven't sought to fill some simple, unrecognized need, as the Walkman had done; they've sought to do many things in the best way imaginable. Simply reading their spec sheets is enough to make you suspect they were designed not to please customers but to beat Microsoft. They make you long for Nintendo's Wii, a game console whose singular appeal is that it'll be fun to play.

The Wii is a product Sony might have developed in its heyday. It doesn't try to outdo anyone on graphics muscle or computational power – in fact, it opts out of the arms race entirely. Faced with a shrinking videogame market in Japan even as it was being elbowed into third place worldwide by Microsoft, Nintendo had to do something fresh, so company president Satoru Iwata and game designer Shigeru Miyamoto put their heads together and came up with a gyroscopic controller that looks and feels like a TV remote. The Wii transforms gameplay from an exercise in button-pushing to something you do by swinging the controller through the air – pretty nifty when you're engaged in swordplay. No wonder gamers use words like "wow" and "amazing" when they try it out.

All this makes you wonder if united is the way to go. In 30 years, Sony has transformed itself from a consistently profitable consumer electronics company with annual sales of $1.6 billion to a dangerously wobbly consumer electronics-entertainment-financial services behemoth 40 times that size. Sony Electronics needs to embrace the networked world, obviously, but does it really need to be allied with a Hollywood film studio and a consumer-wary global music label in a global campaign against Microsoft? Probably not. It just needs to make cool products for the century we live in.

That shareholder in Tokyo had the right idea: Bring back mighty Sony. Please. That doesn't mean gargantuan Sony or megalomaniac Sony or rule-the-universe Sony; it means a Sony that's fun again. And for God's sake, no more wars in the living room – not unless they're the kind we can play with our friends.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/sony.html





High-Def DVDs Announced for Europe

Several movie studios announced plans Thursday to release a handful of films on high-definition DVD in Europe, continuing the slow rollout of the new format worldwide.

The Blu-ray Disc Association, which supports one of the two rival and incompatible high-def DVD formats, also announced that Sun Microsystems Inc., the creator of the Java technology, would join its board. Blu-ray uses Java to create interactive features.
Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment and News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox said they would release several current and older titles this fall to coincide with the availability of Blu-ray players in various European countries. Sony's game console, Playstation3, will also include a Blu-ray DVD drive when it goes on sale later this year.

Earlier this week, more than a dozen Hollywood studios announced that some 75 movie titles, including "The Da Vinci Code" and "Chicken Little," will go on sale in Japan later this year using the Blu-ray format.

Studios have been slowly releasing titles in the United States since the first Toshiba HD DVD player went on sale in March and the Samsung Blu-ray player followed in July. Fox said Thursday it would release its first titles in November as well as distribute MGM titles such as "Rocky."

Blu-ray is backed by a consortium led by Sony Corp. It is fighting for dominance with HD DVD, a format backed by Toshiba Corp.

Both formats deliver sharper pictures and crisper sound and hold several times the data that standard definition DVDs contain. High-def DVDs also promise interactive features such as games and menus that display while the film is playing.

Blu-ray discs can hold more data, but HD DVD is more similar to regular DVDs, which simplifies production, according to its backers. The HD DVD camp also has the slight advantage of coming to market first.

Most of the major studios have said they will release titles in Blu-ray. Several has said they would release in both formats.

Universal Studios is the only studio backing HD DVD exclusively. Fox and Sony have said they intend to only back the Blu-ray format.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-31-15-41-26





Crack this

First Quantum Cryptographic Data Network Demonstrated
Press release

A joint collaboration between Northwestern University and BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., has led to the first demonstration of a truly quantum cryptographic data network. By integrating quantum noise protected data encryption (quantum data encryption or QDE for short) with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), the researchers have developed a complete data communication system with extraordinary resilience to eavesdropping.Ads by Google Advertise on this site

"The volume and type of sensitive information being transmitted over data networks continues to grow at a remarkable pace," said Prem Kumar, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and co-principal investigator on the project. "New cryptographic methods are needed to continue ensuring that the privacy and safety of each user's information is secure."

Kumar's research team recently demonstrated a new way of encrypting data that relies on both traditional algorithms and on physical principles. This QDE method, called AlphaEta, makes use of the inherent and irreducible quantum noise in laser light to enhance the security of the system and makes eavesdropping much more difficult. Unlike most other physical encryption methods, AlphaEta maintains performance on par with traditional optical communications links and is compatible with standard fiber optical networks.

The Northwestern researchers have previously carried out several demonstrations of the compatibility and reach of the AlphaEta system in conventional wave-division multiplexed optical networks. However, in all these tests the communicating parties, called Alice and Bob, had pre-shared encryption keys for use in the AlphaEta system.

Quantum Key Distribution exploits the unique properties of quantum mechanics to securely distribute electronic keys between two parties. Unlike traditional key distribution, the security of QKD can in theory provide quantitatively secure keys regardless of advances in technology. Typically, these ultra-secure keys would be used in traditional encryption algorithms to allow for high-speed encrypted communications.

BBN has built and demonstrated the world's first quantum network with untrusted network switches, delivering end-to-end key distribution via high-speed QKD since 2004. With the Boston Metro QKD network running 24/7, it is evident that quantum cryptography works in practice and may provide a technique for building highly secure networks.

In the present advance reported here, the QKD and the QDE technologies have been interfaced together. This integration of BBN's QKD system, which constantly provides refreshed ultra-secure encryption keys, with Northwestern's AlphaEta encryption system forms a truly quantum cryptographic data network.

The combined QKD/AlphaEta system has been demonstrated in a nine kilometer link between BBN headquarters and Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The AlphaEta encrypted signal carried OC-3 (155Mb/s) SONET data between the two nodes. A fresh encryption key of about 1 kilobit was repetitively loaded every three seconds. In a separate test, the AlphaEta encrypted signal was looped back multiple times to create an effective 36 kilometer link where more than 300 consecutive key exchanges were demonstrated.

"As secure communications require both secure key distribution and strong encryption mechanisms, the combined QKD/AlphaEta system represents the state-of-the-art in ultra-secure high-speed optical communications," said Henry Yeh, director of programs at BBN Technologies.

The quantum cryptographic research project is supported by a five-year, $5.4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The communication protocol that is the backbone of today's Internet came out of a computer networking system begun by DARPA in the 1960s.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0828211555.htm





An Apple-Google Friendship, and a Common Enemy
John Markoff

When Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was named to Apple Computer’s board this week, it did more than signal a potential alliance between powerful companies. It touched off a wave of speculation about the motives of the man behind the move: Apple’s co-founder, Steven P. Jobs.

“The old social networks in Silicon Valley run very deep,” noted AnnaLee Saxenian, a leading scholar of the industry and dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “And this reminds us that Silicon Valley has a common enemy to the north.”

She did not even need to name the enemy she had in mind: Microsoft, the leading rival to both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt through most of their careers. Now, with the Internet era remaking the competitive landscape, their prospects for outdueling Microsoft’s Windows empire may be better than ever.

Even in a valley where careers leave few degrees of separation between any two companies, the Apple announcement was remarkable. Mr. Schmidt, brought in five years ago to guide Google and its young founders to a stock offering, is Silicon Valley’s consummate insider. Mr. Jobs, who spent years in the industry wilderness before retaking the helm of Apple, is its defining outsider.

But Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs, both 51, share a common outlook: that computing technologies can be remarkably disruptive forces in business and in society at large.

There are many possibilities for a complementary strategy between their companies. This week, for example, Google announced that it was beginning to weave together a number of services that could be a Web-based competitor to Microsoft Office. And Mr. Jobs has skillfully driven a wedge into the dominant PC computing standard established by Microsoft’s Windows software and Intel’s hardware — the so-called Wintel alliance — by recently adopting Intel’s processor for Apple’s Macintosh computers.

Mr. Schmidt’s appointment set off chatter about linking the Google search engine to iTunes, Apple’s online music service — reinforcing Apple’s pre-eminence in a category where Microsoft is seeking a grip.

That would also have broader implications for the entertainment industry, an industry repeatedly put on the defensive by both Apple and Google.

“The studios, and for that matter, all the copyright owners, don’t want to see only one place become their sole retail outlet — whether it is Google or Apple or Sony,” said William Randolph Hearst III, a veteran Silicon Valley executive and investor.

At Apple and at Pixar, the digital movie studio he founded, Mr. Jobs has forced the recording industry and Hollywood to follow his lead in selling products in the digital world. His alliance with the Walt Disney Company — whose board he joined this year after Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion — has given him added leverage.

Now, by moving Apple a step closer to Google, with its command over online advertising, Mr. Jobs may be positioning Apple to play an even more influential role in the converging worlds of media and computing.

“Clearly what Disney was for Pixar, Google could be for Apple,” said Tony Perkins, an entrepreneur and editor of AlwaysOn Network, a Web site for Silicon Valley insiders.

Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt refused to comment on the appointment, announced Tuesday, beyond prepared statements that they were looking forward to working together.

The appointment is Mr. Schmidt’s first move to broaden his role since coming to Google. Earlier in his career, Mr. Schmidt was a prominent Democrat and outspoken on the industry’s political agenda, but he abandoned that role when he joined Google. Now it appears that he is beginning to play on a broader stage again.

“Eric has clearly arrived as one of Silicon Valley’s new power brokers,” said William V. Joy, a partner at a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, where Mr. Schmidt was long an executive.

Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs have their roots in Silicon Valley’s second generation, the engineers and innovators who came after the early era of semiconductor pioneering. Their acquaintance dates from the early 1990’s, when Mr. Schmidt, heading software at Sun, approached Mr. Jobs, then running Next Computer, about technical cooperation between the companies.

While Mr. Schmidt’s credentials include a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, his early outlook on the industry was shaped when he worked at the Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary Xerox outpost known as PARC, where the first personal computers and modern networks were created in the 1970’s.

In contrast, Mr. Jobs, a college dropout, started out as a brash hobbyist who in the mid-70’s foresaw a market for the cobbled-together computer that his friend Stephen Wozniak had built to show off at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto. The result was Apple, which they founded in 1977. PARC was also a touchstone for Mr. Jobs, whose visit there in the late 70’s exposed him to the graphical user interface and the computer mouse, two concepts he eventually brought to market with the Lisa and then the Macintosh.

Both men experienced long periods of relative adversity outside of the limelight of computing. Mr. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 by his handpicked chief executive, John Sculley. He then founded Next, which he ran without great success until he sold it to Apple in 1996 and rejoined the Apple fold.

Mr. Schmidt left his position at Sun Microsystems in 1997 to take over as chief executive at Novell, a network computing pioneer that, like Apple, had been a victim of Microsoft’s rise to dominance in desktop computing. After four years of trying to turn the struggling company around, he left to become chief executive at Google, where his experience was meant to offer balance to the two young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Now Mr. Schmidt will bring his experience into play at Apple, in part helping Mr. Jobs add to the independence of his board while the company investigates possible irregularities in stock option grants to Mr. Jobs and other Apple executives.

Executives who know the two men say they have not been close in the past, but are part of a tightly knit fraternity that draws their companies together at the executive level. Former Vice President Al Gore is a special adviser to Google and also holds a seat on Apple’s board. Another link between the companies is William V. Campbell, chairman of Intuit, the financial software company whose Quicken and TurboTax products have prevailed against Microsoft’s challenge.

Mr. Campbell was an early and close behind-the-scenes consultant at Google and is a former Apple executive and current board member. He has long been a confidant of Mr. Jobs, and visited with him while Mr. Jobs was recovering from cancer surgery two years ago.

While Google’s and Apple’s strategies are aligned in many ways, there are also potential areas of conflict. Both companies are rumored to be developing hand-held devices known as smart phones that would potentially compete. If the two companies do cross paths, it will be part of a local tradition.

“It’s part of the classic yin-yang competition in Silicon Valley, where innovators cross-fertilize each other’s thinking and then go out and clash in the marketplace,” said Paul Freiberger, a Silicon Valley historian.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/te...sXzbzODxmf80oA





Not As Wiki As It Used To Be
Bill Thompson

Wikipedia is considering introducing a form of prior restraint on edits. Bill Thompson wonders what this means for its users

The Wikipedia entry on elephants was edited to say their numbers had tripled

For some time the people behind Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia assembled from reader contributions and edited and maintained by those who care to get involved, have been coping with the fallout from a widely-publicised failure of their quality control mechanism.

Read Bill's update to his column following comments on Wiki mailing lists

Last November US politician John Seigenthaler took Wikipedia to task in the columns of USA Today over a false and defamatory biography of him that had been posted on the site.

The biography, it eventually emerged, had been written as a prank, but it remained online for four months before it was noticed and removed.

Since Mr Siegenthaler Sr was neither controversial enough to merit consistent attention, or interested enough in what happened online to bother to Google himself regularly, his biography simply sat there unremarked, although we have no way of knowing how many school essays mention his entirely fabricated involvement in the assassination of Robert and John Kennedy.

Change management

Those of us who had been using Wikipedia for some time were, of course, well aware that not everything on it was necessarily true or accurate, and the real surprise was more about the wider media interest in the site and its content that the Seigenthaler story triggered.

Wikipedia is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, a best effort by thousands of people to create an accurate, impartial and useful repository of human knowledge. As such it has succeeded in covering more topics, in more languages, than any other encyclopaedia.

But it necessarily contains errors, some placed there deliberately by writers with a specific agenda and others simply mistakes that have gone unnoticed.

Sometimes the errors are entirely frivolous, of course, as happened earlier this month when fans of US comedian Stephen Colbert followed his joking suggestion and edited pages on elephants to say that their population had recently tripled.

The errors are not a reason to dismiss the site's usefulness or importance. While Wikipedia should never be the last place one looks for information about a specific topic, I increasingly find that it is the best starting point for an exploration of a new subject.

However the nature of the "Wikipedia" itself seems to be shifting, largely as a result of policy decisions made since the Seigenthaler case, and this may well affect its continued usefulness.

While it continues to advertise itself as "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit", in practice there have always been limits on what some users can do, and an administrative and managerial team who have greater privileges than other users.

From relatively early in its existence it has been possible to ensure only administrators edit a page, but recent changes make it harder for ordinary users to create and update pages on the site.

Over time this new layer of control could mean that its timeliness and breadth - which other encyclopaedia has a list of Muppet characters based on real celebrities? - suffer as those with something to share are deterred from doing so.

A big change at the end of 2005 was the introduction of "semi-protection" for pages which were being vandalised. Once a page was marked in this way only registered users of at least four day's standing could make changes.

Semi-protection seems like a sensible and moderate response to a major problem for the site, and it is clearly not being abused by administrators to limit debate unnecessarily.

Fresh start

But now there are suggestions that a new architecture of control will be introduced for Wikipedia as a whole, if it proves successful when it is applied to the German-language site next month, and this could have far wider implications.

Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an administrator before they become visible. Vandalism or changes which are not approved will not appear.

This is a major shift, from a "publish and fix" policy to one of prior restraint, where a cadre of privileged users will supervise what appears.

It is still only a proposal, so it is not yet clear if the new checks would be applied to every page, but this is obviously being considered seriously by Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, and the site's Wikimedia Foundation.

The large number of control features that are being added to Wikipedia, raise an interesting question for all who care about the site and its content: when does the Wikipedia stop being a wiki and just become another website?

After all, if the special thing about a wiki is that pages can be edited by any user, then introducing layer upon layer of editorial control must mean that at some point Wikipedia becomes no different from any other online publication where content is approved before it is displayed.

And then the only special thing is that the editing tools allow in-page editing rather than requiring site visitors to use special software or go to an administration section of the site as most blogging sites do.

But that's hardly the basis for a revolution in the way human knowledge is gathered and distributed, is it? It begins to look more and more like any other community website with a limited degree of user participation.

What makes Wikipedia special and encourages those of us who are registered with it to participate in the community is the sense that we can all make a contribution. Putting more and more steps between editing and publishing risks damaging that sense of engagement and, as a result, could rapidly diminish Wikipedia's usefulness.

If Wikipedia can find a way to combine community participation with greater oversight, perhaps by encouraging every registered user to check changes and edits instead of leaving it largely to the central cabal of administrators, then they may be able to make the new approach work.

Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return for better content?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5286458.stm





Everyday Scenes, Painted Every Day
Michelle Slatalla

NICK JAINSCHIGG was having a terrible time last week trying to paint a pink rose in 30 minutes. One day he said the petals looked thick as icing, and the next he just couldn’t get the bud texture right.

“Despite my best intentions, the image of a rose on a white background will always look like a greeting card,” he wrote in despair.

But Mr. Jainschigg refused to give up. And as he used different techniques — he tried big, floppy brushstrokes, he tried painting at twilight, he even changed the background to a flat chalky gray — I found myself rooting for him. And for the rose.

I was following his progress by making frequent visits to nickjainschigg.org, the Web site where he posts results of his efforts to complete a tiny postcard-size painting every day. Each afternoon, I clicked on his newest thumbnail image, hoping to see a masterpiece.

Why did I care? There were several reasons, actually, the most obvious being the empty space on the wall in the hallway that leads to my kitchen. Mr. Jainschigg is one of a growing number of artists who in the last few months have starting selling one-a-day creations online. One of his roses could look great on my wall.

Three might look even better. And suddenly, thanks to the one-a-day art movement, buying three original oil paintings is not a budget-busting proposition. Mr. Jainschigg, for instance, sells his small paintings for $100.

But beyond my instinctive shopper’s impulse to find a bargain, I was also excited to be witnessing yet another example of how the Internet has the power to upset old ideas and reshape retail markets.

Sites like acollageaday.blogspot.com (where Randel Plowman sells his 4-inch-by-4-inch collages for $25) and dailypaintings.com (where Elin Pendleton has posted her acrylic and oil paintings for prices as low as $100) remove the middleman from the transaction, connecting artists directly to collectors.

The Internet changes things fast. By most accounts, the roots of the painting-a-day movement reach back only as far as December 2004, when a painter named Duane Keiser, who also is an adjunct professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, decided to test his discipline by challenging himself to post a new creation every day on his site at duanekeiser.blogspot.com.

“I wanted to make a ritual for myself, to complete a painting in one day, every day, without any excuses,” Mr. Keiser said in a phone interview last week. “I liked the diary aspect of it, that it was like putting a time stamp on a painting. When it goes up on the blog, I know it happened on this day.”

Mr. Keiser’s experiment soon attracted the attention of boingboing.net, a popular blog that identifies online trends.

“After somebody wrote a little blurb about me for Boingboing, the whole thing just spread like, well, it was unbelievable,” Mr. Keiser said. “I would wake up in the morning and paint, say, an egg, and post it, and then some guy in India would e-mail me and it was breathtaking to realize that within a few minutes of my finishing a painting, people everywhere in the world were looking at it.”

Previously, Mr. Keiser sold most of his work through traditional brick-and-mortar galleries. “But this has allowed me the flexibility to not worry about whether a gallery will accept me,” he said.

Now there are plenty of other artists are doing the same thing. At paintingadayproject.blogspot.com, for instance, Jan Blencowe posts what she calls “small, simple still life paintings of common objects.” The artist Elizabeth Fraser sells her paintings on eBay, starting at $60; her work is online at web.mac.com/champart/iWeb.

At some painting-a-day Web sites such as justinspaintings.com and shiftinglight.com, I could subscribe to mailing lists; now I receive e-mail alerts the moment a new painting-a-day is posted.

There was a time when Mr. Keiser’s daily artworks sold for as little as $100 on his site. But since Domino magazine anointed him “the godfather of these blogs” in an article published in July, things have changed.

These days, he auctions his painting-a-day work at eBay, where last week a 5-inch-by-5-inch painting of a plate decorated with a crab got 12 bids before selling for $265. As of yesterday, a 5-inch-by-4-inch painting of a rushing river had 18 bids, and was up to $380.

But eBay frenzies turn me off. I’ve lived through too many of them.

I can remember, for example, when prices for milk-green Depression glass coffee cups were rising by the day as collectors who once were at the mercy of local flea markets’ limited inventory suddenly discovered the novelty of finding a world’s worth of collectibles at eBay.

I’m one of those people who overbid on a stack of chipped saucers. Now I look at them in the pantry and I feel the same kind of vague embarrassment that may overwhelm someone who stumbles across a Chia Pet in the attic.

Will the painting-a-day frenzy last? Or is it merely the fleeting symptom of a new Internet trend? In recent weeks, Mr. Jainschigg has sold the vast majority of the 413 painting-a-day works he posted during the last 15 months.

One of his biggest challenges now, he said, is not to cave in to the temptation to create work solely for the sake of selling it.

“All of a sudden, I realize, there are people looking over my shoulder,” Mr. Jainschigg said. “But although I do paint some fun stuff like little pretty landscapes, the occasional stuffed animal or a bug, I like to paint what I’m trying to learn. I was doing study after study of skeletons for a while when I was trying to master anatomy.”

Most of his paintings of skeletons and skulls are still for sale.

Last week, he warned his audience that he was painting his last rose for now. “This one, the final bud for the time being, was by way of declaring victory and going home,” he wrote.

Did I want to hang it on my wall? I wasn’t sure. Luckily, he’ll have something new for me to consider tomorrow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/fashion/31online.html





The Noblest Collie of All Bounds Anew in the Glen
Jeannette Catsoulis

Everything old is new again in “Lassie,” the latest film about the beloved pooch with the I.Q. of a grad student and the instincts of a boomerang. Blissfully restored to the time period and location of Eric Knight’s 1940 novel, “Lassie Come-Home” —originally filmed by MGM in 1943 — the movie sets us down in a Yorkshire mining village with World War II on the horizon and social inequality front and center.

Opening with a beautifully orchestrated sequence involving Lassie, a terrified fox and a mass of flapping laundry, the movie — the 11th Lassie film, by the producers’ count — establishes its working-class turf immediately as miners and their wives confront a pack of blue-blooded hunters. The class conflict continues when the Duke of Rudling (a twinkling Peter O’Toole) buys Lassie from Sam Carraclough (John Lynch), an impoverished miner struggling to feed his stoic wife, Sarah (Samantha Morton), and 9-year-old son, Joe (the adorable Jonathan Mason). For the remainder of the movie, Lassie will run, limp and crawl her way back to the family she loves, a journey that will require her to brave more than 500 miles of countryside and innumerable cameos by well-known British actors. You’ll be pleased to know there are no wells.

Elegantly directed by the veteran British filmmaker Charles Sturridge, best known for stiff-upper-lip fare like the television mini-series “Brideshead Revisited,” “Lassie” approaches its classic tale with old-fashioned charm and not a trace of satire. As Lassie is transported to the Duke’s summer estate in the Scottish Highlands, the movie’s theme of forced separation is doubly underlined by Sam’s heading off to war and the Duke’s granddaughter, Cilla (Hester Odgers), being packed off to boarding school. This last occasions a lovely, tart scene in the school dormitory in which a dismayed Cilla is faced with row upon row of miserably numbered cots. “Just like the army,” boasts the headmistress.

Moving easily from the breathtaking shores of Loch Ness to the busy streets of Glasgow and the hills of Northumberland (the movie was filmed in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man), “Lassie” balances cruelty and tenderness, pathos and humor without ever losing sight of its youngest audience member. And whether cringing before the Duke’s vicious kennel man (Steve Pemberton) or performing alongside a traveling puppeteer (Peter Dinklage), this Lassie exhibits a repertory of facial expressions that would put Jim Carrey to shame. When little Joe — in a scene that perfectly evokes the British school system’s once-joyful embrace of corporal punishment — gets whacked on the wrist by a ruler-happy teacher, the sight of a sorrowful Lassie licking the welts is enough to bring even the most flint-hearted viewers to their knees.

Like the best kids’ movies, “Lassie” is exquisitely tuned to the way a child sees the world. The journey from England to Scotland seems to encompass several time zones, and a glimpse of Nessie aligns our shaggy heroine with the creatures of Celtic folklore. And though adults may take issue with the film’s ultimate capitulation to the power of patronage, tykes will just be happy that Lassie has come home once more to the multiplex where she belongs.

“Lassie” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has mild violence, a bit of cursing and one dead doggie.

LASSIE

Opens today nationwide.

Written and directed by Charles Sturridge, based on the book “Lassie Come-Home” by Eric Knight; director of photography, Howard Atherton; edited by Peter Coulson and Adam Green; production designer, JP Kelly; produced by Mr. Sturridge, Ed Guiney and Francesca Barra; released by Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films. Running time: 100 minutes.

WITH: Peter O’Toole (the Duke), Samantha Morton (Sarah), John Lynch (Sam), Steve Pemberton (Hynes), Jonathan Mason (Joe), Hester Odgers (Cilla), Jemma Redgrave (Daisy), Peter Dinklage (Rowlie), Gregor Fisher (Mapes), Edward Fox (Colonel Hulton) and Kelly Macdonald (Jeanie).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/0...es/01lass.html





Some Material May Be Inappropriate or Mystifying, and the Rating May Be as Well
A. O. Scott

If you’re a regular reader of movie reviews in this newspaper, you’ve no doubt noticed that most of them end with a brief italic note, written by the critic, explaining (and occasionally mocking) the film’s rating. For some readers, this is the most important part of the review, and for this critic it is often the hardest to write. The little boxes that appear at the bottom of the print advertisements are sometimes helpful — we all know nudity or drug use when we see it — but they can also be mystifying. What is “intense adventure violence”? Are “thematic elements” harmful to children? When the box says “some language,” just how much language does it mean? And which language? Would a movie with no language be less dangerous?

“This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” a feisty, intellectually engaging new documentary by Kirby Dick (“Sick,” “Derrida,” “Twist of Faith”) does not so much answer these questions as explore just why they are so difficult to answer. The Motion Picture Association of America, which devised the current rating system and administers it, can be a remarkably secretive organization. Founded by the major Hollywood studios to head off the threat of government censorship and run for most of its history by Jack Valenti, a former staff member in Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House, the association often seems more arbitrary and less transparent in its workings than any federal agency this side of the C.I.A.

To find out who serves on the ratings board and what criteria they use, Mr. Dick hires private detectives, who park outside its nondescript offices in the Encino section of Los Angeles, scribbling down license plate numbers and taking pictures of employees on their lunch breaks. Mr. Dick even rummages through trash bags and discovers important, if puzzling, clues about why “Memoirs of a Geisha” qualified for a PG-13.

These whodunit elements are interspersed with more conventional documentary material: interviews with filmmakers and scholars, clips from movies that have run into trouble with the board, and occasional sound bites from the irrepressible Mr. Valenti, who tells us that the folks who hand out the ratings are “neither gods nor fools.” That narrows it down a bit, though not enough for Mr. Dick, who uncovers some curious inconsistencies in the association’s accounts of its procedures. Do the clergymen who sit in on appeals board meetings — along with representatives of theater chains and film sales companies — have a vote or not? No clear answer is forthcoming. Does the ratings board take a harder line on sex than on violence? On gay sex than on straight?

The evidence Mr. Dick gathers and the testimony of directors like Kimberly Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”) and Matt Stone (“South Park”) paint the Motion Picture Association as an outpost of prudishness and repression. (Bingham Ray, former president of United Artists, goes further, describing it as “fascist.”) The record of its recent decisions suggests a special squeamishness about depictions of female sexual pleasure and a picayune fastidiousness about certain body parts. A glimpse of Maria Bello’s pubic hair, for instance, threatened to doom “The Cooler” to an NC-17. But then again, “A Dirty Shame,” John Waters’s 2004 film, received the same rating just for talking about certain outré practices while showing almost no skin at all. (When Mr. Dick submitted a cut of this film, it was slapped with an NC-17, an unsurprising outcome that led to some hilarious, Kafkaesque telephone conversations between him and Joan Graves, the chairwoman of the ratings board. IFC Films, which is not owned by a major studio and therefore not required to submit its releases to the association, is distributing the film without a rating.)

These decisions have commercial as well as artistic consequences, since some of the biggest theater chains, retail stores and video outlets avoid the NC-17 rating as a matter of policy. Filmmakers who want their movies to be seen — and who often need to fulfill contracts requiring that they deliver a film with a certain rating — are thus compelled to cut their films to the association’s standards, a process that often involves guessing just what those standards are.

Mr. Dick, unabashedly on the side of the filmmakers, is particularly concerned with art films — movies obviously intended for grown-up viewing that are nonetheless subjected to a regime ostensibly designed to protect children. But — at the risk of sounding like Maude Flanders — what about the children? How are parents supposed to navigate the flood tide of popular culture that engulfs their kids at younger and younger ages? Does this ratings system help? Could it be improved?

Mr. Dick’s lack of interest in these questions is frustrating, and the narrow scope of “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” makes it more of a culture-war broadside than a nuanced work of cultural inquiry. It is, nonetheless, an engaging and entertaining movie, one that tries to illuminate an aspect of moviemaking — and moviegoing — that is deliberately left in the dark.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Kirby Dick; directors of photography, Shana Hagan, Kirsten Johnson and Amy Vincent; edited by Matthew Clarke; animated graphics by ka-chew!; produced by Eddie Schmidt; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at West Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 97 minutes. This film is not rated.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/0...sH/M+LbJYP6NWA





For a British TV Movie, a Real President Is Shot



Sarah Lyall

The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.

That is the arresting beginning of “Death of a President,” a 90-minute film to be broadcast here in October on More4, a British digital television station. And while depicting the assassination of a sitting president is provocative in itself, this film is doubly so because it has been made to look like a documentary.

Using archival film as well as computer-generated imagery that, for instance, attaches the president’s face to the body of the actor playing him, the film leaves no doubt that the victim is Mr. Bush rather than some generic president.

The movie has not yet been released; indeed, the filmmakers were still editing it on Friday and were not available for comment, said Gavin Dawson, a spokesman for More4. But the station’s announcement this week that it planned to present “Death of a President” as part of its autumn season has raised something of a furor here.

“Whilst one is aware of other films that have shown assassinations, those have been in the realm of fantasy,” said John Beyer, the director of Mediawatch-UK, which campaigns against sex and violence on television. “To use the president of the United States, the real person, in some fictional presentation, I think that is wrong.”

The United States Embassy here directed calls to the White House, which said: “We won’t dignify this with a response.”

But Peter Dale, the head of More4, said the film was not sensationalistic and did not advocate the assassination of Mr. Bush.

“It has the combination of a gripping forensic narrative and also some very thought-provoking places where you are encouraged to think about the issues behind the narrative,” Mr. Dale said.

The film is to be shown publicly on Sept. 10 at the Toronto International Film Festival. After it is broadcast on More4, a channel that is free but available only to those with digital television, it is to be shown on Channel 4, a nondigital channel that is the BBC’s main commercial competitor.

As part of its publicity campaign, More4 released a still from the film depicting the moment Mr. Bush is shot. The picture, which has been reprinted extensively in British newspapers, shows the stricken Mr. Bush slumping forward into an aide’s arms, in front of a shocked, panicking crowd; a bank of cameras flash behind. It evokes the photographs of the mortally wounded Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and also recalls John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 outside the Washington Hilton.

Mr. Dale said that the focus of the film was on the assassination’s aftermath, as the news media rush to judgment and investigators plumb America’s fear and anger, particularly in communities with most cause to be angry at Mr. Bush. Suspicion soon focuses on Jamal Abu Zikri, a Syrian-born man.

The movie, Mr. Dale said, is “a very powerful examination of what changes are taking place in America” as a result of its foreign policy.

“I believe that the effects of the wars that are being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “are being felt in many ways in the multiracial communities in America and Britain in the number of soldiers who don’t come home, and that people are beginning to ask: ‘When will these body bags stop coming back? Why are we there? When will it stop?’ ”

Two well-regarded films by the same team used the same pseudodocumentary style to imagine the ramifications of disastrous events, but were set in Britain. One, “The Day Britain Stopped,” showed Britain’s overstretched transportation system in meltdown after a series of mishaps cripples first the trains and then the roads, leading finally to the point when a passenger jet collides with a freight plane near Heathrow.

Few Britons have criticized “Death of a President,” perhaps wanting to see it before they comment. But the newspapers have been quoting upset expatriate Americans.

“It is an appalling way to treat the head of state of another country,” Eric Staal, a spokesman for Republicans Abroad in London, told The Evening Standard. “We’ve seen from early in his presidency the extremes the political left are willing to go to vilify him as an individual. This takes this vilification to a new and disturbing level.”

But The Daily Mirror, whose front-page headline on Friday was “Bush Whacked,” said in an editorial that while the film was “treading a fine line in terms of taste, it nevertheless provides dramatic food for thought.”

It added: “The undoubted furor that this will spark across the U.S. and among the handful of Bush supporters in Europe must not obscure the real question facing us all. Where is the War on Terror going? And how bad does it have to get before it gets better?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/movies/02shot.html





The Phone, The Thief, His Wife and a Chihuahua?
Sara Ledwith

If you took the photo of a Chihuahua at www.flickr.com/photos/benvoluto/216323527/, you have caused a Web sensation.

The mobile phone used to take that picture was stolen from Web designer Ben Clemens on an Amtrak commuter train in California in mid-August, he says.

Days later, thanks to software installed in the phone for Clemens' use, the Chihuahua picture and other snaps of a woman and children were automatically posted to Clemens' photo Web site for the world to see.

"Even the thief doesn't have any privacy, right?" said Clemens by telephone from his home in Berkeley, California.

His account of the incident, posted on the weblog he keeps up for friends and family, came to the attention of thousands of people and in late August ranked as one of the most popular Offbeat News items this year on "social content" Web site www.digg.com.
While some Web "vigilantes" set out to expose wrongdoers -- or other users notoriously circulate sensational fake stories to gain exposure for new products -- Clemens says his discovery of the software's potential to bust this criminal was an accident and the subsequent attention unwanted.

In "Pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account", at www.practicalist.com/archives/000183.html, the Yahoo Inc. employee tells how the software he installed on his phone was set to automatically upload pictures to www.flickr.com, a site where people post photos for friends, family, or the world to share.

The thief -- or whoever bought the phone from the thief -- appears not to have known the software keeps running even with a different user or SIM-card. So their shots were viewed thousands of times by people on the Web.

Despite assertions from the independent makers of the software that the tale is not a promotional stunt on their part, some Web users -- who may have fallen for so-called "guerrilla marketing" tactics in the past -- rounded on Clemens, accusing him of making the story up.

"This is totally a viral marketing campaign ... It's a nice implementation, with just enough flaws to be found out fairly quickly, but believable enough," says a relatively polite contributor to one of many strings of comment to the story.

"I've entered into some surreal world," Clemens told Reuters.

"People assume I'm doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I'm talking to you because I want it to be known that it's not a hoax. I'm just too ordinary. I'm just too unclever for that."

He says the experience has been a lesson in the way the modern Web works: "(On the Web today), you can no longer have a separate -- private and public -- world. It makes you realize you have to be even more honest and careful."

He has now disabled the software and says he is not seeking justice, revenge, or even his mobile phone. He would quite like his life back.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...1-ArticlePage1



















Until next week,

- js.



















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