[JackSpratts]

Moguls of New Media

The MySpace member with a million 'friends.' The receptionist with a production deal. Some of the Web's amateur entertainers are becoming powerful players.
John Jurgensen

On the popular Web site MySpace.com, members set up profiles with information about their interests and then network across the site, recruiting other members to link to their pages. Often, the teens and 20-somethings who dominate the site have dozens or hundreds of these registered "friends."

Then there's Christine Dolce, whose MySpace page boasts nearly one million friends -- making her arguably one of the most connected people on the Internet. A 24-year-old cosmetologist who until a few months ago worked at a makeup counter in a mall, she now has a manager and a start-up jeans company and has won promotional deals for two mainstream consumer brands.NEW-MEDIA POWER LIST

As videos, blogs and Web pages created by amateurs remake the entertainment landscape, unknown directors, writers and producers are being catapulted into positions of enormous influence. Each week, about a half-million people download a comedic video podcast featuring a former paralegal. A video by a 30-year-old comedian from Cleveland has now been watched by almost 30 million people, roughly the audience for an average "American Idol" episode. The most popular contributor to the photo site Flickr.com just got a contract to shoot a Toyota ad campaign.

While online stardom can sometimes be fleeting, and some measures of audience size are subject to debate, a look at the rising stars in this world shows how the path to entertainment success is being redefined. Traditional media companies and marketers are already in pursuit of some of these new faces.

"It's an awesome feeling," says Ms. Dolce, who built her MySpace profile with a page that panders to the site's young demographic with a mix of confessional commentary, provocative photographs of herself, celebrity images and music.

She joined MySpace in September 2003, adopting the name "Forbidden" for her home page. As one of the first 15,000 members to join the site, launched in July 2003 (MySpace now has 96 million members), she built an early following that grew along with the site's membership. Because users' pages list their friends in chronological order, being an early member has also meant that Ms. Dolce appears near the top of many friend lists.

"I saw the vision that MySpace was growing bigger and bigger and I thought, wow, great," Ms. Dolce says.

While some members are choosy about whom they will accept as friends, Ms. Dolce decided after about a year on the site to accept anyone who put in a friend request. She also took on a manager -- Keith Ruby, another MySpace member with whom she developed a friendship online. A former concert promoter from Calgary, Alberta, he advised her on ways to capitalize on her online popularity. He helped broker deals with companies like Axe body spray and Zippo lighters. In recent months, she's appeared in online promotions for both brands. She commands rates of as much as $5,000 to appear at events like auto shows. In March, she quit her job at the makeup counter.

Advertisements for Ms. Dolce's outside Web site and assorted business ventures, like her jeans business, line the page. Seeing her entire home page requires pressing "page down" about two dozen times on a large computer monitor -- and that page is followed by some 24,000 additional pages holding the photos of all her friends.

Mr. Ruby says Ms. Dolce has never used a computer program to artificially boost her friend list -- a practice that has plagued sites like MySpace in the past. MySpace takes steps to prevent the use of computer-generated mass friend requests, such as limiting users to a few hundred outgoing friend requests a day. Mr. Ruby says Ms. Dolce briefly tried software that automatically accepted requests from others, but now instead relies on family and friends to help her process them all.

Popular members like Ms. Dolce represent something of a dilemma for MySpace. The site says it has no problem with the photographs and content on Ms. Dolce's page, which, while racy, stop short of being pornographic. Recently, however, MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., has been working to promote a family-friendly image to appeal to potential advertisers -- some of whom could be leery of sexually suggestive pages like Ms. Dolce's.

Ms. Dolce's commercial deals have occasionally run afoul of MySpace's rules. The service doesn't allow using the network for direct commercial gain; because of the site's regulations, Ms. Dolce is prohibited from sending mass messages to her MySpace friends about the products she's paid to endorse.

Some of the people who have emerged as digital stars online are true amateurs, people who have simply videotaped themselves in their living rooms and posted the results online. Others are quasi-professionals with some experience in the entertainment industry: writers of a TV pilot that didn't get picked up; first-time filmmakers who were praised on the film-festival circuit but never found distribution or stand-up comedians who couldn't graduate from coffee houses and small clubs.

The creators of one of the Web's most popular video podcasts fall somewhere between these categories. Each week, about half a million people watch a two- or three-minute video starring a man in a ninja costume that includes a Lycra ski mask bought for $6. He typically delivers a sarcastic comic monologue in response to a ninja-themed question a viewer has emailed in. ("Do ninjas catch colds?" was a recent topic.) The weekly series, called "Ask a Ninja," appears on the creators' Web site, as well as on iTunes and video-sharing sites like YouTube and Revver.

Its creators are Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, who first recorded the skit in November. Both in their early 30s and living in Los Angeles, the two had dabbled in the entertainment industry: Mr. Nichols had worked as a production assistant on a few TV pilots and Mr. Sarine had spent some time as a paralegal for Disney. Together, the pair, who had met in 2000 at an acting workshop, had written a script for an anime series they hoped to make for the Web, but they grew discouraged by the expense of producing it.

Then they noticed a video online. Titled "Lazy Sunday," it was a sketch that had first aired on "Saturday Night Live," but was being emailed all over the Internet: Millions of people saw it in a matter of weeks. They decided to try an online video series of their own. Around Thanksgiving, Mr. Sarine donned a makeshift ninja costume, and the two wrote and improvised a loose script. Mr. Nichols filmed Mr. Sarine against the wall of his West Hollywood apartment, using a six-year-old camcorder. He edited it on his laptop and posted it on their personal blog and on YouTube.

The skits got little response initially, but in early January, Messrs. Nichols and Sarine submitted the podcast to iTunes and launched an official Web site for it. Editors at iTunes quickly selected the series as a "new and notable" podcast, giving it featured placement on its podcasts page. That positioning landed "Ask a Ninja" a spot on iTunes's list of top-subscribed podcasts, which meant it was one of the first titles anyone browsing for podcasts came across. Mentions in a number of blogs helped to boost viewership as well.

Now the two are trying to turn their podcast into a viable business. In May, "Ask a Ninja" launched an online store and now sells about 150 T-shirts a week, Mr. Nichols says. They'll soon begin selling premium subscriptions at $1.50 a month to fans who want early access to new episodes. This month, they added their first advertisement to the series, a mention of the Sony movie "Little Man" at the end of an episode.

The ad was placed by Podtrac, an agency that links advertisers up with podcasters, and brought "Ninja" revenue "in the thousands" of dollars, according to Mr. Nichols. He hopes to draw more based on the show's popularity and viewer demographic: 90% male, between the ages of 13 and 24, according to a Podtrac survey.

In the spring, Crista Flanagan, a castmember on the Fox comedy show "Mad TV," contacted the duo through their MySpace page and the three decided to collaborate on a new podcast. The resulting series called "Hope Is Emo," features Ms. Flanagan as an emotional young woman in black clothing and eye makeup, frequently moved to tears by items like discarded pizza boxes. After being featured on the Ninja homepage and on YouTube, the first episode of "Hope is Emo" quickly drew more than one million views.

The two see branching out beyond "Ninja" as key to long-term success. "'Ask a Ninja' was always kind of a proof of concept for us," says Mr. Nichols. "We've looked at others who have been successful but they didn't know how to work with new talent and bring fresh ideas into the fold. Dick Clark makes more money in his sleep producing things than he ever does on camera."

Messrs. Nichols and Sarine are looking for a way around a problem that affects virtually every Internet star. Even if they become wildly popular, amateur podcasters and video producers can rarely make a living from their newfound fame. Podcasts and do-it-yourself videos are generally free to watch online, and even those few creators who manage to attract advertisers seldom make much money. According to research firm eMarketer, current ad spending on online video is expected to double by 2007 to $640 million, but most of that goes to large media companies rather than to amateur videos.

The greatest hope of most Web amateurs is to cross over into "old media" outlets like TV networks and Hollywood. The flagship crossover star in digital entertainment is known by one name: Brookers.

Type the word "Brookers" into the search field of YouTube.com, and a list of some 1,240 videos will appear. Thirty-one of them are videos made by 20-year-old Brooke Brodack of Holden, Mass., who has posted a range of videos starring herself under the screen name "Brookers." In large part, the other 1,200 or so are Brookers tributes, critiques and imitations, posted by Ms. Brodack's fans and detractors in response to the clips she's made.

Though Ms. Brodack's videos have a distinctly amateur feel -- they feature her lip-synching songs, dancing goofily around her bedroom and occasionally adopting silly character voices -- they inspire a passionate following. Many are drawn to her blend of good looks and unselfconscious antics. But she says she can't explain why her videos have been so popular. "I'll never understand it," she says.

Last month, Ms. Brodack, who works as a receptionist, got an email from an executive at the development company of former MTV star Carson Daly. Mr. Daly had seen her videos and liked her performances and production techniques, which typically involve wild camera angles and overlays of text and images over the video pictures. He signed her to a deal to develop entertainment ideas with his production company for TV and the Web. Mr. Daly, who has only spoken to Ms. Brodack over email, says he's still working out what exactly she'll be doing for his company. When it comes to hiring talent from the digital world, he says, "There's no manual. Everybody wants to lock them up and figure it out later."

Ms. Brodack says some of her friends have resented her newfound success. She's also dealt with a downside of viral video stardom that many people on sites like YouTube encounter. Because anyone who watches her videos can post a comment, she's constantly confronted with criticism in a public forum about issues from her appearance to her dancing skills. She sometimes responds to these comments in her videos.

Mr. Daly's company has sent her some new equipment to help her enhance her videos, including a new laptop and extra hard drive, and plans to get her a higher-quality video camera, but Ms. Brodack is nervous about professionalizing her videos. "I don't want it to look too slick," she says. "I'm trying to keep it simple and think of it the way it was eight months ago."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...l?mod=rss_free





The Next Gonzo Journalism
Chris Dahlen

I keep hearing the same gripe from the critics of the critics of pop culture: Today's writers eat it. Nobody knows how to cover music, or movies, or video games, or any of the other media that matter. We need someone to swoop in and save us: We need a new Lester Bangs, or a new Hunter S. Thompson-- one of those guys who made criticism and alternative journalism seem so vital back in the 1960s and 70s. Where they hell did they go?

Chuck Klosterman writes in Esquire about the failure of the gaming press to cough up a single critic who embodies whatever Bangs was doing when he told people to listen to the Troggs. Old school fans of music crit watch the field slip into the morass of mp3 blogs, message boards, and kids who just shout, "Hey, can you YSI that to me?" every time a new album leaks-- and they wonder, what happened to the great critics? They want a tastemaker, a voice of authority, who can put it all in perspective and knock our heads together with his or her crazy-yet-dead-on arguments.

But I think I've found the answer: We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.

Oh sure, we cover tons of stories about technology. We write up every new thing from could-be-big trends-- whatever happened to the podcast revolution, anyway?-- to tiny but buzzworthy ones, like that "personalized" Jessica Simpson download they're selling at Yahoo! Music. The problem is that every time we write about some new technology like podcasting, we go through the basic template-- explain how it works, decide whether grandmothers will care about RSS feeds, and so forth-- and we quote the same types of people: The early adopter, the industry analyst, the skeptic. And no matter what context the story falls into and how important the subject may seem, the overall tone is always the same: whatever it is, it's "neat."

In fact, all tech is "neat." Maybe we can see some ill effects on the horizon-- would federal endorsement of the destruction of embryos for stem cell research open the door to greater exploitation of humanity down the road? Can iPods damage your hearing?-- but we only throw in the storm clouds for effect, to give the story some yang and make it more engaging. In the end, science is good, and progress is inevitable-- so there's no way that the technology we're covering could be anything but good.

It was much easier for Hunter S. Thompson to write about drugs. I would argue that technology colors our pop culture far more than the drug culture affected the 60s, but let's still look at what made Thompson's job so cushy. Technology is the province of geeks, a sterile, above-board, carefully marketed phenomenon; drugs are underground, illegal, and risky. You can call Apple if your iPod falls in the toilet, but if you lose your stash, you're on your own. Hiding pot from your parents is daring, while programming their TiVO for them is not. So if you were to try to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but update it as Fear and Loathing at the E3 Expo-- well, you can tell how compelling that ain't.

But there's another reason drugs make a better subject than technology: People understand and accept how drugs affect us, but we think we're safe from our electronics. It's a cliché to write a screed about the first time you got high, or to shoot a movie that simulates or stimulates an acid trip. But with all of these drugs, we still believe they have a compelling effect on human beings. Pot makes you slow and stupid. Heroin is destructively addictive. Acid makes you smell colors and fart light.

Technology also affects us-- biologically, deeply, and psychologically. The web screwed up my short term memory; why do I need to keep movie trivia in my head if I can just look it up at imdb.com? And 9/11 was a technology story, because almost none of us were there-- but we saw the images filtered through television and the internet. I first heard about 9/11 when I booted my laptop and read a terse, text headline about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. Five years later, every morning, I still open my browser and read the headlines, and I'm always wondering: What blew up last night? When will the other shoe drop?

The pop culture we're supposed to be covering understands this better than we seem to. The Matrix and cyberpunk got us started, and it's only gotten better: The Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" combines a rigorous allegory for the war on terror with a war against technology, where the enemy is a mob of computers that knows us, imitates us, and gets inside our heads. In music, bands like the Books blur the once-obvious lines between the electronic and the acoustic to create an organic fusion of the two. And we play video games and they play us: The console and the gamer affect each other in hundreds of ways, stimulating our sight and blurring our hearing, and teasing us with the illusion of control and then yanking it away.

So what are the scribblers missing? People seem to be unhappy with modern music crit, maybe because we haven't digested the real changes in the music we're listening to: after all, nothing in music today-- from the recycling of old trends, to the flattening of the historical timeline, to the rise of self-made artists-- makes sense without the Internet, yet we've barely taken a yardstick to its impact.

Games crit is another great example. Chuck Klosterman-- and he's far from the first-- bemoaned the lack of good game critics, but of course, plenty of people make a living writing serious and sometimes striking reviews. I'm guessing the root cause of Klostermann's argument is that no great critics have emerged, and by that he means he's never been at a big lit/journo cocktail party and heard anybody say, "You've gotta read THIS WRITER. I could give a damn about gaming, but whoa, s/he writes about games like a house on fire!" Nobody has shown up with that bowl-you-over voice that takes a seemingly alien and marginal activity-- an activity that, like drugs, many in the audience will never even try-- and turns it into a must-read experience.

Instead, tech magazines are digging deeper ruts in fallow soil. Wired's devolving into Cosmo for geeks: It hypes and glosses over tech the way Cosmo turns the most spectacular human experience, the orgasm, into bulletpoints. And who else is out there in the popular press? We know that our readers probably play an Internet-enabled XBox 360 that can pipe movie trailers while they're listening to an iPod and instant messaging their friends on a laptop. But what's the real story-- that we're entertained? We almost need a refresher course in media studies, á la Marshall McLuhan. We should start with McLuhan's quote-- "After more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace"-- and step by step, relearn our relationship to the world.

‘Cause it's only getting stranger from here. On the horizon, we can already see new shifts in our self-understanding with the 3-D virtual worlds of World of Warcraft or, stranger still, Second Life. Men give birth. Gamblers lose at Russian Roulette. Celebrities pretend they're nobodies. And everybody has sex with everything. This isn't a novelty, or a fetish: It's self-psychoanalysis, and it draws on everything from sexuality to art to commerce to leisure. And as we spend more of our lives online, more of our experience of the world takes place entirely in our own heads-- and our imagination is being rewired by computers.

The tech press says we're at a buffet of gadgets and gizmos; but we should be knocking over the table and eating off the floor. We have to strip away the geekery, the gadgetry, and the consumerism, and instead of explaining why this brave new freakshow interests us, we have to understand what it's doing to us. And whoever does that, wins the title of "the next..."
http://pitchforkmedia.com/article/fe..._Your_Mouth_27





Celebrity News Site Breaks Gibson Story
Sandy Cohen

Breaking the Mel Gibson arrest story was the latest coup for Harvey Levin and his staff of 25 at the fledgling entertainment Web site TMZ.com.

On Monday, Levin spoke to more than 40 news outlets, from CNN to The New York Times, about how TMZ got the Gibson exclusive.

But this isn't the first story the site has broken. The day it was launched last November, it posted video of the fender-bender Paris Hilton and then-boyfriend Stavros Niarchos III were in outside a Hollywood nightclub. TMZ was also the first to obtain Suri Cruise's birth certificate and court documents in Michael Jackson's custody case, Levin said.

"We're not into doing these kind of wax figures on the red carpet (stories)," Levin told The Associated Press on Monday. "We're not beholden to publicists. We've kind of created our own path here."

The site, a partnership between Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Telepictures Productions, was designed to report "entertainment news in real time in an unvarnished way," said Levin, 55, an attorney who has worked as a journalist for 30 years.

Besides breaking stories, TMZ features video clips of spontaneous celebrity encounters, star gossip, music and film blogs and links to dozens of other entertainment Web sites.

"I think it's having an impact because we're not doing things the same way as everybody else," Levin said. "We're a real, functioning newsroom that publishes on demand. We don't have time periods like TV shows and we don't have publishing cycles like newspapers and magazines have."

Still, the site is scrupulous about its facts, Levin said.

"Every single word is fact-checked and also lawyered," he said.

That makes it journalism, said Bryce Nelson, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California.

"Anything that's accurate and newsworthy is journalism," he said. "If Web sites break things that conventional media is interested in, they're having an effect on journalism."

Conventional news outlets often feel pressure to match or follow stories first reported on Web sites, Nelson said.

After learning of Gibson's arrest Friday, Levin said his staff started getting tips about Gibson's inflammatory language and a possible Sheriff's Department cover-up. Even though Levin was "100 percent" sure of the story, he said he still had "a knot in (his) stomach" when he sent it into cyberspace.

Jim Bankoff, executive vice president of AOL, said he expected TMZ to be popular because of the insatiable thirst for celebrity news and the absence of a broadband video channel devoted to it.

Still, the 9-month-old site has "exceeded my high expectations," Bankoff told the AP.

Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions, said that breaking the Gibson story gives visitors an idea of the potential of TMZ, which stands for Thirty Mile Zone - a film industry term referring to the immediate area around Los Angeles where filming can occur without added out-of-town labor costs.

"The Mel Gibson story establishes us as a legitimate, credible journalism institution," he said. "We're covering the world of entertainment and celebrities but it's more than just gossip. We also cover the news in a very credible way."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-09-09-38





Google, AP Disclose News Payment Deal
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc. is paying The Associated Press for stories and photographs, settling a dispute with a major provider of the copyright news that the online search engine finds and displays on its popular Web site.

Both Mountain View-based Google and New York-based AP disclosed the business relationship Wednesday. But neither would divulge financial terms or other details because of a nondisclosure agreement.

Google indicated AP's content will serve as the foundation for a new product that will be introduced in the coming months as complement to its popular Google News service.

That aspect of the deal could be intended to support Google's long-held stance that it doesn't owe anything for simply pointing out news stories and photographs posted on Web sites - an activity that the company's lawyers maintain is protected under "fair use" protections under copyright law.

That posture prompted another news organization, Agence France Presse, to sue Google in federal court last year. It is seeking at least $17.5 million in damages for alleged copyright infringement.

Google has denied AFP's allegations, citing its fair use arguments.

"Google News is fully consistent with fair use and always has been," the company reiterated in a statement Wednesday.

Still, AFP is hoping the AP licensing agreement will bolster its argument as the suit winds its way through a Washington, D.C. court, said Joshua Kaufman, a lawyer for the French news agency.

For its part, Google depicted the AP deal as business as usual.

"Google has always believed that content providers and publishers should be fairly compensated for their work so they can continue producing high quality information," the company said in a statement.

Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said this isn't the first time the company has paid media for content, noting that the search engine already shares some of its revenue with broadcasters and book publishers to sell some of their copyrighted material on the site.

Google's deal with the AP began several months ago, said Jane Seagrave, the AP's vice president of new media markets.

Both Seagrave and Boralv declined to say if Google is paying AP a flat fee or a commission based on traffic.

Google might be using the AP agreement as a testing ground to share some of its ad revenue with organizations that produce content just as it does with Web sites that publish the information, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. During the first half of this year, Google distributed $1.5 billion to the thousands of partners participating in the ad network that generates virtually all the search engine's profits.

"I would be shocked if Google is paying for the status quo," Zittrain said.

Google has argued that news providers benefit from their stories being highlighted in its searches since it drives traffic to their Web sites, where they can earn per-click advertising revenue. The AP does not have a news site of its own and its stories typically are accessed through the sites of newspapers, broadcasters and other customers.

While AFP sued to protect its rights, the AP chose to negotiate terms with Google, which, after just seven years of existence, is nearly 10 times larger than the 160-year-old news cooperative in terms of revenue. The AP, a not-for-profit organization owned by U.S. news companies, had revenues of $654 million in 2005. Google, a publicly owned company, reported $6.1 billion in revenue last year and is on a pace to exceed $9 billion this year.

By agreeing to pay AP for content, Google falls in line with the owners of other popular news sites like Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, which have been anteing up for years.

"We are happy to be dealing with Google as we are with all the major superpowers on the Internet," Seagrave said. "We are always looking for new ways to innovate."

The AP also has been plumbing new sources of revenue more aggressively in recent years as newspapers and broadcasters - traditionally the cooperative's main source of money - have been squeezed financially by the rise of the Internet.

Seagrave said online sources now account for about 20 percent of the AP's revenue.

The percentage "is growing fast and the increase will hasten in the next few years," Seagrave predicted. "It is clear the Internet is changing the way business is being conducted."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-21-34-21





Newspapers to Use Links to Rivals on Web Sites
Bob Tedeschi

Want the latest news on Floyd Landis’s positive drug test from The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times or USA Today?

Soon, it will all be on Washingtonpost.com.

The Washington Post, The New York Sun and The Daily Oklahoman, in Oklahoma City, have contracted with an online news aggregator, Inform.com, to scan hundreds of news and blog sites and deliver content related to articles appearing on their Web sites, regardless of who published those articles. Links to those articles will appear in a box beside the site’s original article or within the text of the story.

Newspaper Web sites, which commonly post articles from sister publications, wire services and even blogs, have typically stopped short of providing generous doses of news from competitors. The move made by these papers is not a result of cooperation across the industry as it is a counterattack by publishers against Google and Yahoo, which have stolen readers and advertisers from newspapers in recent years, both with their search engines and their own news aggregation services.

“This lets us be a search engine,” said Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for Opubco Communications Group, which publishes the Oklahoman and its Web site, NewsOK.com. “We look at it like we just hired 30,000 journalists, because now we can give you our story and what the rest of the world is saying about it.”

The site’s roughly 700,000 registered users view about 36 million pages online each month, with each user viewing three to five pages per visit. And that is not enough to satisfy the demands of advertisers. Because Inform gives readers an easy way to find related stories that were published earlier on NewsOK.com, Ms. Fry said she expected the number of page views on the site to increase by at least threefold.

“People aren’t just reading one story,” she said. “They’ll click deeper because of this, and I can load ads deeper into those pages. It really beefs up the site.”

For a newspaper industry that has watched its advertisers flee to cable television, junk mail and Web sites like Google, Yahoo and Craigslist, online advertising revenues have become Topic A in boardrooms and newsrooms alike. While growing, these Web sales have not been enough to offset the cash lost to other media.

Online media outlets like Slate or Salon prominently feature their links to other sites and some, particularly blogs, are built around the strength of their links. But newspapers have been reluctant to direct readers outside their own gates. These deals with Inform are but one indication that newspapers may be reconsidering long-held beliefs about how to compete, and cooperate, with other publishers.

“Five years ago, everybody said you have to keep readers on your site, with no links out to other sites,” said Caroline H. Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of the Washington Post Company. “But ultimately, people will go where they want to go.”

“To the extent we can provide them more Washington Post video or more information from around the Web, we’re all for it,” Ms. Little added. “And we get the benefit of that, too, because we get a lot of referrals from the Web, also.”

Inform, which is privately-held and based in New York, would not say how much revenue these deals were expected to generate. The company says it was able to convince publishers to try its linking service because newspapers had already seen success in putting up related content, but found no reliable or easy way to automate the process.

This, analysts say, is the selling point of services like Inform, which costs between a few thousand and tens of thousands of dollars monthly. A site like NewsOK.com attracts frequent users, but they only read a few pages per visit, hardly the kind of audience that will help newspapers replace revenues from their shrinking paper editions.

The amount of revenue gleaned from a newspaper’s Web site varies widely depending on the publication, but according to the Newspaper Association of America, 5.5 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenues come from their online divisions.

“Newspaper sites have a lot of rich content, but they have trouble helping people see all that’s there on their sites,” said Greg Sterling, an online media analyst. “This creates many more opportunities for readers to drill down on a topic, and that means more opportunities for advertising revenue.”

Web sites that already work with Inform, like the Daily Oklahoman’s Web site, surround stories with related links from the newspaper’s current edition and its archives, as well as links to related stories, videos, blogs, slide shows and podcasts from other sites. Links also appear in the text of stories.

For instance, a story last week about an injured Marine returning home to the state was mostly bordered by links to stories from the Daily Oklahoman about the war in Iraq. But links on the left of the story and highlighted words within the story also led to a list of articles from Newsweek, The New York Times and smaller regional publications, as well as blog postings.

These links did not whisk readers away to another site. They instead opened a new window in the browser with the new story so readers could keep their original NewsOK page up.

Ms. Little said the Washington Post Web site would begin using Inform’s service in September or October, and would initially surround its stories with related content from other Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive sites, like Slate.com, Newsweek.com and BudgetTravelOnline.com. After that, it would include links to stories from around the Web, possibly from other nationally-oriented newspapers.

There are instances where the Post’s Web site already links to stories from these competitors. For instance, in the online version of his “White House Briefing” column last week, Dan Froomkin included a link to a New York Times story from the previous week. According to Jim Brady, the executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, reporters or Web producers can insert links to another paper’s site when they see fit.

“We think it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Brady said. “It seems limiting to tell people about something another news organization has reported and not point them to it. It goes against the Web’s DNA.”

But the Inform service will generate links automatically. To put a link within or near a story now (as Mr. Froomkin’s did), most publications must do so manually or at least review the link that its technology system has suggested. Inform’s technology scans each story from a client’s Web site as well as other content from the Web, then automatically inserts links on the client’s site. Inform also updates the links continuously to point readers to more recent content.

Inform’s executives said that competing publishers are generally pleased to be linked to, given that it helps attract readers they might not otherwise find.

The New York Times has no plans to use Inform, according to Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman. Ms. Mathis said the Web site planned to link to bloggers on various topics in the future, using technology from Blogrunner, which the Times bought last year for an undisclosed sum.

“So we have both of the elements of Inform,” Ms. Mathis said. Not only does the company link to related stories from within the Times organization, but “we have the ability to go outside and grab other high-quality information on related topics that would be useful to a reader.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/te...gy/31ecom.html





U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records
Adam Liptak

A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources, a federal appeals court in New York ruled yesterday.

The 2-to-1 decision, from a court historically sympathetic to claims that journalists should be entitled to protect their sources, reversed a lower court and dealt a further setback to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.

The dissenting judge said that the government had failed to demonstrate it truly needed the records and that efforts to obtain reporters’ phone records could alter the way news gathering was conducted.

The case arose from a Chicago grand jury’s investigation into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take against two Islamic charities, Holy Land Foundation in Texas and Global Relief Foundation in Illinois. Though the government contended that calls from the reporters tipped off the charities to impending raids and asset seizures, the investigation appears to be focused on identifying the reporters’ sources. No testimony has been sought from the reporters, and there has been no indication that their actions are a subject of the investigation.

“No grand jury can make an informed decision to pursue the investigation further, much less to indict or not indict, without the reporters’ evidence,” Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. wrote for majority, in an opinion joined by Judge Amalya Lyle Kearse. “We see no danger to a free press in so holding. Learning of imminent law enforcement asset freezes/searches and informing targets of them is not an activity essential, or even common, to journalism.”

George Freeman, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, disputed the majority’s characterization. Ms. Miller and Mr. Shenon, he said, “were conducting their journalistic duties by getting reaction to an ongoing story.”

Mr. Freeman added: “The move against the charities was not a surprise. No one has ever alleged that any federal agent was hindered or hurt or didn’t succeed.”

Mr. Freeman said The Times had not decided whether to pursue an appeal, either to the full appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, or to the United States Supreme Court.

Ms. Miller, who retired from The Times last year, said she was very disappointed. “That this was 2-to-1 showed how close these issues are and the need for a federal shield law to protect journalists, their telephone numbers and hence their sources,” she said.

In an unrelated case last year, a federal appeals court in Washington ordered Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine, to testify before a grand jury about conversations with their sources. They did so after receiving their sources’ permission, though not before Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald was the prosecutor in both cases, though he acted as United States attorney in Chicago in the charities case and as special counsel in the Washington case. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment yesterday.

While yesterday’s decision represented a clear loss for The Times, the majority ruled for the paper on several subsidiary points and left open the possibility that it would protect reporters’ sources in cases involving other kinds of reporting.

The majority said, for instance, that the paper had been entitled to bring a civil suit in New York to challenge a grand jury subpoena in Chicago. It also said that whatever protections the reporters had against being called to testify about their sources also extended to their phone records. And it said that “courts can easily find appropriate means of protecting the journalists involved and their sources” where “government corruption or misconduct” is involved.

But the court rejected The Times’s central argument, saying that neither the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, which considered the scope of the protections offered by the First Amendment, nor later developments in other areas of the law provided the paper with the ability to protect the phone records at issue in the case.

The majority ruled that the government could overcome any privilege that even a broad reading of the Branzburg decision allowed. It also declined to adopt a so-called common-law evidentiary privilege based on the shield laws almost all states have adopted, saying the government could similarly defeat any plausible version of such a privilege.

In seeming to acknowledge the existence of privilege, though one subject to a balancing test, the decision differed from the one issued by the federal appeals court in Washington last year that sent Ms. Miller to jail.

“There is a lot more to be heard from the courts before this issue is resolved one way or the other,” said Floyd Abrams, who represented The Times in both cases.

In his dissent, Judge Robert D. Sack said the government had not shown that the phone records contained important information that could not be obtained elsewhere. Judge Sack added a cautionary note about the consequences of unfettered access to reporters’ phone records.

“Reporters might find themselves,” he said, “as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs — by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate.”

Judge Winter was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Kearse by President Jimmy Carter and Judge Sack by President Bill Clinton.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/wa...rtner=homepage





Blog Feeds May Carry Security Risk
By Joris Evers

Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warns.

Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics, said Thursday in a presentation at the Black Hat security event here.

The problem doesn't affect only blogs--any kind of information feed using any kind of format could potentially be used to transmit malicious content to a subscriber, Auger said. People, for example, subscribe to mailing lists and news Web sites via RSS, he said, noting "this is about the entire concept of Web feeds."

SPI Dynamics examined a number of online and offline applications used to read RSS and Atom feeds. In many cases, any JavaScript code delivered on the feed would run on the user's PC, meaning it could be vulnerable to attack, Auger said. JavaScript is a scripting language that experts say is increasingly causing security concerns.

Attackers could exploit the problem by setting up a malicious blog and enticing a user to subscribe to the RSS feed. More likely, however, they would add malicious JavaScript to the comments on a trusted blog, Auger said. "A lot of blogs will take user comments and stick them into their own RSS feeds," he said.

Also, attackers could send malicious code to mailing lists that offer RSS or Atom feeds and commandeer vulnerable systems that way, Auger said. Feeds are popular because they let people consolidate information streams from multiple sites, such as blogs, in one application, called a feed reader, removing the need to surf to multiple sites.

Many of the popular feed reading applications are faulted because the designers have failed to add valuable security checks, Auger said. In particular, the applications should not allow JavaScript that is included in feeds to run. Instead, it should be filtered out, he said.

Additionally, some reader software on Windows systems uses Internet Explorer to display feed content, but doesn't use basic security settings that isolate the content. Instead, the JavaScript is downloaded to the PC and has full access, which can fully expose a person's PC, Auger said.

"A large percentage of the readers I tested had some kind of an issue," he said. In his presentation, Auger listed Bloglines, RSS Reader, RSS Owl, Feed Demon, and Sharp Reader as vulnerable.

As protection, people could switch to a nonvulnerable reader. Also, feed publishers could ensure that their feeds don't include malicious JavaScript or any script at all, Auger said. Some services, however, rely on JavaScript to deliver ads in feeds, he noted.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6102171.html





Facts Refute Filmmaker’s Assertions on Income Tax in ‘America’
David Cay Johnston

Aaron Russo, the producer of films like “Trading Places” and “The Rose,” promotes his new film, “America: From Freedom to Fascism,” which opened Friday, as having had its international premiere before a packed audience “during the Cannes Film Festival.”

The film was not on the program at Cannes, however, not even for screenings made under the festival’s aegis without being in the awards competition. Mr. Russo, the film’s director, writer and producer, just set up an inflatable screen on a beach. Photographs posted at one of Mr. Russo’s Web sites depict an audience of fewer than 50 people spread out on a platform on the sand.

Hyping films with fanciful claims is nothing new in Hollywood. But examination of the assertions in Mr. Russo’s documentary, which purports to expose “two frauds” perpetrated by the federal government, taxing wages and creating the Federal Reserve to coin money, shows that they too collapse under the weight of fact.

Still, at free showings the film has drawn long lines of people eager to watch a documentary that feeds on the estrangement many Americans feel from their government, especially those who believe they played by the rules and yet see their finances strained or broken. Many of the reviews in major newspapers have accepted as having some factual basis the film’s main contention, that the government illegally extracts income taxes, even though every court that has ever ruled on these issues has upheld the constitutionality of the income tax.

The film’s appeal, Mr. Russo said during a phone interview last week, is not left or right, but concentrated among those who see the United States evolving into a police state ruled by an oligarchy that has tricked Americans into paying taxes.

Not mentioned in the film is that Mr. Russo has more than $2 million of tax liens filed against him by the Internal Revenue Service, California and New York for unpaid federal and state taxes. Mr. Russo declined to discuss the liens, saying they were not relevant to his film.

Early in the film Mr. Russo, the narrator, asserts that every president since Woodrow Wilson and every member of Congress has perpetrated a hoax to tax people’s wages and issue them dubious currency. All of the federal income tax revenue, the film says, goes to these bankers to pay interest on the national debt, even though by the broadest measure the federal government’s interest payments are less than 40 percent of the individual income taxes, according to an examination of every federal budget since 1995.

The film opens by calling the 16th Amendment and its subsequent income tax and the Federal Reserve the product of a “silent coup d’état” in 1913 by “international bankers.” In the style of low-budget television documentaries, photographs appear on screen of J. P. Morgan, Paul Warburg and John D. Rockefeller.

The documentary includes interviews with a host of people who are presented as experts, scholars and whistle-blowers. All deny the legitimacy of the income-tax laws, including Irwin Schiff, now serving his third prison term for tax crimes.

The cornerstone of Mr. Russo’s case is whether any law requires Americans to pay income taxes on wages.

Near the film’s beginning Mr. Russo says, and others appear on screen asserting, that the Internal Revenue Service has refused every request to show any law making Americans liable for an income tax on their wages.

Yet among those thanked in the credits for their help in making the film is Anthony Burke, an I.R.S. spokesman. Mr. Burke said that when Mr. Russo called him asking what law required the payment of income taxes on wages, he sent Mr. Russo a link to documents, including Title 26 of the United States Code, citing the specific sections that require income taxes be paid on wages. Title 26 says on its face that it is law enacted by Congress, but Mr. Russo denied this fact.

“Title 26,” Mr. Russo said in an interview last week, “is not the law, it is I.R.S. regulations and to be a law it has to be passed by Congress.” Mr. Russo added that he had studied the matter closely and was confident that he had the facts.

Arguments made in court that the income tax is invalid are so baseless that Congress has authorized fines of $25,000 for anyone who makes them. But even though the penalty was quintupled, from $5,000, it has not deterred those who assert this and other claims that Congress and the courts deemed “frivolous arguments.”

The film also states repeatedly that people are tricked into paying income taxes because no law makes them liable for taxes. The tax code uses the word impose, whose definition includes the concept of liability, courts have held in published decisions.

The film includes the voice of this reporter, off camera, asking the I.R.S. commissioner, Mark W. Everson, to answer protesters outside the Treasury building who wanted to know what law makes them liable for taxes. Mr. Everson then makes rambling comments without, as the film notes, answering the question.

Mr. Russo also said that “Congress has no authority to tax people’s labor.” Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution begins with the phrase “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes.”

Only three limitations are placed on that power, none of which bars a tax on wages. One limitation, however, was a requirement that taxes be “apportioned among the several states.”

The 16th Amendment repealed apportionment, but Mr. Russo says in the film that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified and thus a tax on wages is unconstitutional. This claim has been made in various forms by thousands of tax protesters since 1913, and so far their batting average with the courts is .000.

To buttress the claim that the 16th Amendment is invalid, the film displays a quotation from a federal district judge, James C. Fox. But the transcript from which the judge’s words were taken shows that while he spoke those words, they were in the context of laying out issues and that the conclusion he reached was the opposite of the words quoted.

Judge Fox, the transcript shows, concluded that no court would accept any argument that the 16th Amendment was not properly ratified and therefore invalid.

The film includes a brief interview with Sheldon Cohen, who was I.R.S. commissioner in the Johnson administration. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Russo used editing that “ twists my views” to create a false impression. Mr. Russo said he considered the assertion laughable.

Mr. Russo was Bette Midler’s manager for seven years early in his career and has produced music as well as films. He also sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president in 2004 but dropped out because of ill health.

Despite hundreds and perhaps thousands of tax protesters going to prison, and many more losing their homes and life savings, the movement appears today to be more widespread than ever.

“The tax protest movement is like a cult,” said J J MacNab, a Maryland insurance analyst who is writing a book about protesters and who has sat through six trials of people prosecuted for refusing to pay taxes under the theories espoused by Mr. Russo’s film.

One tax protester featured in the film, Irwin Schiff of Las Vegas, is now serving his third prison sentence after being convicted of tax evasion crimes. Mr. Schiff introduced into his criminal case the notes of his psychiatrist, who wrote that Mr. Schiff was a successful tax shelter salesman until a con artist ripped him and his clients off. The psychiatrist concluded that Mr. Schiff became delusional, believing he alone could properly interpret the tax code, as a way to avoid acknowledging reality.

Later, one of Mr. Schiff’s confederates, who was also later convicted and sent to prison, sent e-mail messages to supporters saying that the psychiatrist’s notes were introduced as part of a ruse to help Mr. Schiff escape prosecution.

Ms. MacNab, who has testified before Congress, said that at each of the trials prosecutors showed how the accused took out of context sections of the law and court decisions while ignoring other sections, including those shown to them by I.R.S. agents.

“People who are drawn into this movement just refuse to acknowledge facts that show their beliefs have no basis in fact,” she said. “Most of them have failed, their business has failed, their marriage has failed, and instead of taking responsibility for it they want to blame the government.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/movies/31russ.html





Live Nation to Buy Fan-Club Web Site

Concert promoter Live Nation said Monday it would take a majority stake in Musictoday, a six-year-old company that connects music fans and artists. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Live Nation, which was spun off from Clear Channel Communications late last year, said Musictoday had more than $100 million in sales in 2005.

Musictoday runs fan-club Web sites for bands such as Nine Inch Nails and the Backstreet Boys. Its founder, Coran Capshaw, will continue to run the company, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

In early July, Live Nation agreed to buy House of Blues, which operates a chain of live music venues, for $350 million in cash.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=5892





Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, Music & Comedy
Wobbel

• Free Movies & Films
• Free Documentaries
• Free Instructional & Educational Films
• Free Cartoons & Animations
• Free Music (live concerts mostly)
• Free Stand-up & Entertainment Shows

Yup, all free & public domain, so no (more) copyrights
http://www.p2pconsortium.com/index.php?showtopic=10270






Federal Judge Throws Out Minnesota's Video Game Law
Martiga Lohn

A federal judge on Monday threw out a pending state law that would have fined minors for obtaining adult-only video games, saying it was unconstitutional.

The law - one of several attempts across the country to prevent minors from getting gruesome or sexually explicit video games - was scheduled to take effect Tuesday.

It would have fined youths under age 17 $25 for renting or buying video games designed for adults - those rated "M" for mature or "AO" for adults only. The law also would have required stores to post warning signs about the fines.

Video game makers sued to stop the law, saying it violated the right to free speech.

U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum agreed. His ruling also said the state failed to show that the graphic video games are harmful to children.

"There is a paucity of evidence linking the availability of video games with any harm to Minnesota's children at all," he wrote.

He also said: "It is impossible to determine from the data presented whether violent video games cause violence, or whether violent individuals are attracted to violent video games."

Attorney General Mike Hatch said he was disappointed by the ruling and will probably appeal.

"There's been some pretty good evidence that children who use these excessively violent video games really learn inappropriate behavior and they're rewarded for inappropriate behavior - how many people do you kill and things like that," Hatch said.

Minnesota lawmakers hoped their approach - penalizing the minors who got the games, instead of the retailers who sold or rented them - would have fared better in court than overturned state laws that went after retailers in Illinois, California, Michigan and elsewhere.

At a news conference earlier this year, the bill's sponsors played clips that showed players killing, dismembering, urinating on and setting fire to characters to score points.

"One of the most popular games in America teaches a little boy how to have sex with a prostitute and then beat her to death, and then rewards that," said Rep. Jeff Johnson, who sponsored the bill in the House. "I think some small restriction on that is reasonable."

But a 2003 ruling by a U.S. Court of Appeals panel for the 8th Circuit, which covers Minnesota, will make an appeal difficult, said Paul Smith, who represented the Entertainment Software Association and the Entertainment Merchants Association in the lawsuit.

That ruling said video games are a protected form of expression.

"The lawmakers are very much aware that they're passing laws that are of very doubtful constitutionality," Smith said. "It doesn't seem to affect their decision-making."

The video game industry has a voluntary ratings system of six categories, ranging from "EC" for early childhood to the adults-only tag.

In a prepared statement, EMA president Bo Andersen said video game retailers enforce the ratings, preventing minors from getting mature games against their parents' wishes.
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/15165094.htm





Cell phone picture called obstruction of justice

Man Arrested For Shooting Photo Of Police Activity

A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members.

The family of Neftaly Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone's camera. They told their story to Harry Hairston and the NBC 10 Investigators.

"I was humiliated. I was embarrassed, you know," Cruz said.

Cruz, 21, told the NBC 10 Investigators that police arrested him last Wednesday for taking a picture of police activity with his cell phone.

Police at the 35th district said they were in Cruz's neighborhood that night arresting a drug dealer.

Cruz said that when he heard a commotion, he walked out of his back door with his cell phone to see what was happening. He said that when he saw the street lined with police cars, he decided to take a picture of the scene.

"I opened (the phone) and took a shot," Cruz said.

Moments later, Cruz said he got the shock of his life when an officer came to his back yard gate.

"He opened the gate and took me by my right hand," Cruz said.

Cruz said the officer threw him onto a police car, cuffed him and took him to jail.

A neighbor said she witnessed the incident and could not believe what she saw.

"He opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, 'You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,'" said Gerrell Martin.

Cruz said police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones.

"They threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation, obstruction of an investigation. … They said, 'You were impeding this investigation.' (I asked,) "By doing what?' (The officer said,) 'By taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone,'" Cruz said.

Cruz's parents, who got him out of jail, said police told them the same thing.

"He said he was taking pictures with his cell phone and that was obstructing an investigation," said Aracelis Cruz, Neftaly Cruz's mother.

The NBC 10 Investigators asked the ACLU union how they viewed the incident.

"There is no law that prevents people from taking pictures of what anybody can see on the street," said Larry Frankel of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I think it's rather scary that in this country you could actually be taken down to police headquarters for taking a picture on your cell phone of activities that are clearly visible on the street."

Frankel said Cruz's civil rights might have been violated.

"He was unlawfully seized, which is a violation of the 4th amendment the last time we checked," Frankel said.

Cruz, a Penn State University senior, said that after about an hour police told him he was lucky because there was no supervisor on duty, so they released him.

"They said if the supervisor was there I wouldn't be a free man and that he is letting me go because he felt that I was a good person," Cruz said.

Police told Hairston that they did take Cruz into to custody, but they said Cruz was not on his property when they arrested him. Police also denied that they told Cruze he was breaking the law with his cell phone. Cruz's family said they have filed a formal complaint with the police department's Internal Affairs division and are requesting a complete investigation.
http://www.nbc10.com/news/9574663/detail.html





Boston Plans To Have Nonprofit Run Citywide Wi-Fi Network
Mark Jewell

The city is considering an unusual approach to creating a citywide, low-cost wireless Internet network: putting a nonprofit organization, rather than a private service provider, in charge of building and running the system.

A task force on Monday recommended that Mayor Thomas Menino assign an as-yet unidentified nonprofit to raise the $16 million to $20 million in private money that the city estimates it will need to build and begin running the Wi-Fi network.

Other cities have generally relied on a single private contractor to assume upfront costs and financial risk for a chance to expand its business.

Although Boston's strategy depends on the willingness of foundations and businesses to come forward with cash donations, officials believe having an existing or newly formed nonprofit in charge is the best way to ensure the project meets its civic goals and steers clear of special interests.

"We believe the nonprofit route may be the best way to bring low-cost service to every neighborhood while providing a platform for innovation unlike any in the nation," Menino said at a news conference where he received a task force's recommendations.

Other U.S. cities launching wireless initiatives have created various layers of oversight to ensure private contractors serve the public interest by keeping prices down, expanding access to low-income neighborhoods, and, in some cases, opening up the network to rivals.

But Boston appears poised to go further than any other U.S. city by putting a nonprofit in charge as the network's developer and owner, outside experts said.

"I'm glad they've done something a little more creative than just having a private provider do it," said Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, a Web portal for information on municipal wireless projects.

But Glenn Fleishman, editor of the daily Web journal Wi-Fi Networking News, said he was not sure other cities would mimic Boston when they are "able to put out requests for proposals and getting companies knocking on their doors with offers to pay for the networks."

Philadelphia, for instance, chose EarthLink Inc. to build, manage and own its system and act as a wholesaler and retailer. The system there could start operating next year.

Boston is one of more than 250 communities nationwide that are preparing or have deployed Wi-Fi service, which uses radio waves to connect users to the Internet at high speeds. No major U.S. city has yet begun to offer citywide service, and organizers of Boston's initiative have no estimate when they will be able to bring wireless coverage to the city's 590,000 residents spread across 49 square miles.

Boston's proposal aims to reduce the price of broadband Internet access for city residents from an average of roughly $40 a month to $15 by having the nonprofit act as a wholesale seller of network capacity to existing sellers of Internet access. Those companies could offer low-cost or free ad-supported online connections.

City officials hope that even if some Internet providers do not participate, they would face pressure to cut prices for the existing services.

"We've identified a highly disruptive business model," said Rick Burnes, one of three co-chairs of a task force that spent five months developing the proposal. "By harnessing new technologies and implementing a unique network model, we can eliminate much of the cost of delivering broadband, thus providing an inexpensive platform for entrepreneurs while also bringing cheaper service to underserved populations."
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articleA...bostonwifi.php





Wi-Fi for the Building? Depends on the Landlord
Alison Gregor

When the technology firm BlueSwitch needed new offices last year, it sought space offering wireless Internet access to minimize downtime during the relocation.

BlueSwitch, a 20-person company that specializes in Web sites and Web-based software, needed to provide services to clients continuously when relocating from its previous office in Downtown Manhattan, so the firm took about 3,000 feet at 61 Broadway, at Exchange Place. Broad Street Development, the landlord, has been retrofitting the entire 653,000-square-foot office building for wireless Internet at the request of tenants.

“We really had zero downtime,” said Alex Paskie, a co-owner and director of BlueSwitch. “We were able to access the Internet immediately, and even though we didn’t have furniture or soda to drink, we did have connectivity. For us, that’s the most important thing.”

Other companies, however, may have more difficulty than BlueSwitch in finding wireless Internet access, particularly in Manhattan. Even in a business world where executives are increasingly mobile and working on laptops, most landlords say they have not experienced strong enough demand to warrant their investing in a system to provide wireless Internet in their buildings.

Most tenants are satisfied with offices hard-wired with broadband Internet access, landlords say.

“We have reviewed Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, a number of times,” said Robert Kantor, president of Time Equities, which has office properties around the country. “Our experience has been that Wi-Fi is used by people who are transient users, and even in our own office, where we thought about putting it in, there doesn’t seem to be a need.”

The Rockefeller Group, another nationwide owner of commercial space, announced in 2003, when the technology was relatively new, that it would install wireless Internet access in five of its office buildings. The company has since backed off.

“None of our tenants were really demanding it at the time,” said Brian Mahoney, a company spokesman.

The Rockefeller Group does have Wi-Fi, however, in the sunken plaza of the McGraw-Hill Building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas. Some landlords have chosen to offer the service in lobbies or plazas to attract users to the spaces, said Stephen D. Heyman, president of Realinsight, which does project management for company relocations, including coordination of information technology services. “If you’ve got a plaza area, it’s a nice amenity to have,” Mr. Heyman said.

Some huge mixed-use complexes built by commercial development companies in recent years have included multimillion-dollar infrastructures providing wireless services, but this service seems aimed primarily at potential buyers of very high-end apartments. The Related Companies, developer of the Time Warner Center at 10 Columbus Circle, which includes the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and luxury condominiums, and Vornado Realty Trust, which built 731 Lexington Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets, which also includes luxury condominiums, have provided wireless service that goes well beyond Internet access.

These wireless distribution systems, installed by InnerWireless, a company in Richardson, Tex., cost anywhere from 75 cents to $2 a square foot to put in — which could reach into the millions of dollars for a very large development.

The antennas installed as part of such a system can be used with many kinds of wireless communications, like mobile phones and hand-held computing devices, which often lose signals in office buildings, along with two-way radios and public safety devices.

InnerWireless has also provided wireless distribution systems for a dozen large companies in New York City and the surrounding area, though company representatives would not reveal names.

When tenants need nothing more sophisticated than simple Internet access, however, many simply set up their own systems, and this may be dissuading landlords from making the investment, Mr. Heyman said. “I don’t think anybody’s looking for the landlord to do it,” he said.

He said some businesses with frequent visitors or sales agents popping in and out might benefit from the convenience of wireless Internet, but its role as a technological advance might be minimal.

“Over the years, buildings have set themselves up and called themselves ‘intelligent buildings,’ but you have to separate the whipped cream from the sundae,” he said.

Gregg Popkin, a senior managing director at the commercial real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis, said the current market for office space in Manhattan and some other major cities was so tight — with vacancy rates in the single digits — that landlords had no need to provide an amenity like Wi-Fi.

“Years ago, landlords might have sought to incorporate this type of technology into their building and then sell the service back with a markup,” he said.

Nowadays, the landlord might even charge the tenant for use of a building’s vertical riser to run the antenna needed to disperse the wireless signal. But typically, the landlord would not want to be involved in providing the service, because he “doesn’t want any liability if the system goes down,” Mr. Popkin said.

Wireless routers can cost as little as $100, so many businesses install their own. For larger businesses, with 100,000 square feet or more, installing wireless Internet access might be less costly than hard-wiring all work stations, Mr. Popkin said.

Still, Broad Street Development has received so many requests from tenants for Wi-Fi at 61 Broadway — especially smaller tenants ranging from 4,000 to 5,000 square feet — that in the future it plans to outfit all of its office buildings with wireless Internet, including a 296,000-square-foot building at 370 Lexington Avenue.

“It’s an investment into the real estate, but what we’ve found is it sets us apart in terms of appealing to tenants,” said Daniel M. Blanco, executive vice president of Broad Street Development.

The company providing the wireless Internet infrastructure at 61 Broadway, which is 33 stories tall, is Advanced Digital Networks, which typically charges $2,500 to $10,000 a building, said Tamer Zakhary, the company’s president and chief executive. While operating this system costs landlords nothing, other wireless infrastructures can have annual operating costs of 12 to 15 percent of the installation cost, he said.

Besides Broad Street Development, Advanced Digital Networks has done work for New York City landlords like the Rudin Management Company, and for commercial real estate services companies like GVA Williams, Newmark Knight Frank and Cushman & Wakefield, Mr. Zakhary said.

But, in general, New York City is said to be behind many of the country’s other large cities in offering wireless Internet to tenants of office buildings. “New York City is not even close to other cities,” Mr. Zakhary said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/re...al/02wifi.html





Choo choo ch-boogie

Wireless Train Hits Rails In California
Rachel Konrad

The nation's first mass-transit train with wireless Internet access rolled through Silicon Valley this week, offering laptop-lugging testers access to the Web and e-mail without forcing them to peck at tiny phone or BlackBerry keyboards.

Nomad Digital Ltd. and Intel Corp. outfitted the Caltrain light-rail vehicle with WiMAX-based technology, which provided continuous high-speed Internet access between the popular Millbrae and Palo Alto stations. The train reached 79 mph while testers from the companies watched streaming video, composed e-mail and completed a large file download at broadband speeds.

The system links the train to track-side wireless base stations, with radios located every few miles along the rail. Caltrain might also use the technology to monitor train speeds and security cameras.

Randy Rudolph, Caltrain's chief information officer, said the successful debut means the company can introduce the technology along the entire line, from Gilroy north through San Jose to San Francisco. It will likely be available within two months. Caltrain does not plan to charge extra for the service.

Hexham, England-based Nomad has installed similar systems in the United Kingdom and Holland, and now is working on wireless projects in China, the Middle East and South America.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-18-33-19





The Green WiFi Mission
Web Copy

Green WiFi is committed to providing solar powered access to global information and educational resources for developing nation K-12 school children striving for knowledge in a digitally divided world. There are approximately 3 billion people under the age of 15 living in developing nations. 42 percent of the developing world's population is below the age of 15. Green WiFi was founded on the principle that the welfare of our world is dependent, in large part, on providing these children with free and open access to the world's information.

As business people, we recognize the inherent infrastructure and associated cost challenges of providing free and ubiquitous internet access to developing nations. This is why Green WiFi has developed a WiFi solution that leverages low cost components, the latest advancements in solar power technologies, open source software and Java to deliver a self sustaining, self healing, WiFi grid network solution that is cost effective and easy to deploy.

Why Green WiFi? A number of non profit entities focus on addressing the digital divide by providing internet access to developing areas. Green WiFi addresses one of the biggest barriers to success: the lack of reliable electricity in developing areas required to power the network. Green WiFi has developed a low cost, solar-powered, standardized WiFi access solution that runs out-of-the-box with no systems integration or power requirements. All that is required is a single source of broadband access. Green WiFi nodes can then be deployed on rooftops to form a self-healing network that hops the source signal over a virtual 802.11b/g grid. Because these nodes require no fixed installation or power tie-ins, these nodes can form an unplanned, mobile grid that can grow or be relocated as needed. Green WiFi aims to compliment and extend the power and promise of initiatives such as the UN/MIT One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, Intel's World Ahead Program and other NGO efforts dedicated to providing affordable computing capabilities to developing areas by providing critical last mile access; last mile internet access with nothing more than a single broadband internet connection, rooftops and the sun.
http://www.green-wifi.org/





Hacked Mac

Experts Discuss Wireless Vulnerability
Dan Goodin

Some computers with wireless Internet capabilities are vulnerable to attacks that could expose passwords, bank account details and other sensitive information even if the machines aren't actually online, researchers said here Wednesday.

The researchers demonstrated the vulnerability at a computer-security conference, showing how to take complete control of a MacBook from Apple Computer Inc. But the two researchers, David Maynor, 28, and Jon Ellch, a 24-year-old who prefers to go by his hacker handle Johnny Cache, said the technique will work on an array of machines, including those that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and the free Linux operating system.

"The problem itself isn't really an Apple problem," said Maynor, a researcher at SecureWorks Inc., a network-monitoring company. "This is a systemic problem across the industry."

The technique, detailed during the first day of the Black Hat conference, has broad implications for the large number of people who over the past five years have grown accustomed to connecting to the Internet wirelessly while sitting in airports, hotels and cafes.

"It's an alarming weakness," said Phil Zimmermann, a software engineer who specializes in data security. "Now I would rather connect using an ethernet cable," he said, referring to the term for wired Internet connections.

Maynor and Cache showed a room of about 300 attendees a video in which they dropped what is known as a "root kit" into a MacBook by exploiting a weakness found in a wireless card, a component that uses radio waves to connect to the Internet. A root kit is a virtually undetectable program that criminals can use to do things such as log passwords and gain access to sensitive files.

Maynor was able to create, read and delete files on the Apple laptop. The MacBook, which was running a fully patched version of the latest Apple operating system, showed no indication that it had been compromised.

The MacBook used in the demonstration was not using the wireless gear that shipped with the computer. Instead, they used a third-party wireless card that they declined to name.

Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox declined to comment.

The researchers were not identifying the makers or models of wireless devices that are vulnerable, so that manufacturers have a leg up on criminals who might use that information to exploit the vulnerabilities. But Maynor said the flaws are so common that he'd have no trouble walking into the typical Internet cafe and finding someone vulnerable.

"I have no doubt," he said in an interview following his presentation.

He said the technique could be useful in targeting specific people or specific groups of people who are in close proximity to an attacker - for instance, a cafe that is frequented by executives of a particular company.

The researchers declined to demonstrate the attack live because they said radio receivers in the room could allow people to detect their techniques and use them to commit crimes.

A computer need not be connected to the Internet to be infected. All that's required is that it have certain wireless devices installed and that those devices be turned on.

Wednesday's demonstration came four days after Intel Corp., the world's biggest chip maker, released security fixes for wireless capabilities it includes with many of the laptop processors it sells. One of the vulnerabilities fixed would have allowed someone to gain control over a computer using the Intel wireless gear.

Maynor said during his presentation that he and Cache did not provide technical details of the attack to Intel but couldn't rule out a connection between the findings and the Intel patch.

"It's pretty interesting, the timing of it," Maynor said. "It seemed a bit suspicious."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-21-56-49





Press Release

Worst Ever Security Flaw Found In Diebold Ts Voting Machine
Alan Dechert
Reference: Pictures

“This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines,” says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the United States, it has been determined that with the flip of a single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely different manner compared to the tested and certified version.

“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS -- and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.

Open Voting Foundation is releasing 22 high-resolution close up pictures of the system. This picture, in particular, shows a “BOOT AREA CONFIGURATION” chart painted on the system board.

The most serious issue is the ability to choose between "EPROM" and "FLASH" boot configurations. Both of these memory sources are present. All of the switches in question (JP2, JP3, JP8, SW2 and SW4) are physically present on the board. It is clear that this system can ship with live boot profiles in two locations, and switching back and forth could change literally everything regarding how the machine works and counts votes. This could be done before or after the so-called "Logic And Accuracy Tests".

A third possible profile could be field-added in minutes and selected in the "external flash" memory location, the interface for which is present on the motherboard.

This is not a minor variation from the previously documented attack point on the newer Diebold TSx. To its credit, the TSx can only contain one boot profile at a time. Diebold has ensured that it is extremely difficult to confirm what code is in a TSx (or TS) at any one time but it is at least theoretically possible to do so. But in the TS, a completely legal and certified set of files can be instantly overridden and illegal uncertified code be made dominant in the system, and then this situation can be reversed leaving the legal code dominant again in a matter of minutes.

“These findings underscore the need for open testing and certification. There is no way such a security vulnerability should be allowed. These systems should be recalled”
http://openvotingfoundation.org/





Pinch My Ride

Ignition keys equipped with signal-emitting chips were supposed to put car thieves out of business. No such luck – but try telling that to your insurance company.
Brad Stone

Last summer Emad Wassef walked out of a Target store in Orange County, California, to find a big space where his 2003 Lincoln Navigator had been. The 38-year-old truck driver and former reserve Los Angeles police officer did what anyone would do: He reported the theft to the cops and called his insurance company.

Two weeks later, the black SUV turned up near the Mexico border, minus its stereo, airbags, DVD player, and door panels. Wassef assumed he had a straightforward claim for around $25,000. His insurer, Chicago-based Unitrin Direct, disagreed.

Wassef’s Navigator, like half of all late-model domestic cars on the road today, is equipped with a transponder antitheft system: The ignition key is embedded with a tiny computer chip that sends a unique radio signal to the vehicle’s onboard computer. Without the signal, the car won’t start. And Wassef still had both of his keys.

The insurance company sent a forensic examiner to check out the disemboweled SUV in an impound lot. The ignition lock, mounted on the steering column, had been forcibly rotated, probably with a screwdriver. The locking lug on the steering wheel, which keeps it from being turned when the truck is not in gear, had also been damaged. But the transponder system was intact. The car could have been shifted and steered, the investigator concluded, but the engine couldn’t have been turned on. “Since you reportedly can account for all the vehicle keys, the forensic information suggests that the loss did not occur as reported,” the company wrote to Wassef, denying his claim. The barely hidden subtext: Wassef was lying.

“I got shafted, basically,” Wassef says. He’s not the only one. US carmakers and auto-mobile insurers are unshakably certain that vehicles protected by “transponder immobil-izers” can’t be driven without the proper keys – or, at least, that circumventing those transponder systems takes more sweat and money than most auto thieves are willing to expend. So car companies advertise their security systems as unbreakable, insurers and consumers believe these assertions, and then folks like Wassef find themselves engaged in all-out war when their cars vanish.

The insurance companies have good reason to be suspicious. They lose $14 billion to auto fraud every year in the US; by some measures, 20 percent of all stolen-car reports are trumped up. But when it comes to transponders, their faith is misplaced. Auto antitheft systems are usually secure for only a few years, until thieves crack the system. “The carmakers are calling these passive antitheft systems, but they’re not,” says Rob Painter, a Milwaukee-based forensic locksmith who has testified in dozens of auto insurance court cases, for both sides. “They are just theft deterrents. Tell me a car can’t be stolen and I’ll show you how to do it.”

Two years ago, my white 2003 Honda Civic – which my wife and I had affectionately named Honky – disappeared from the street in front of our San Francisco home. It has a transponder, and all three of our keys were accounted for (including the spare valet key). Police were polite but not much help; they speculated that thieves had towed the car away or hoisted it onto a flatbed truck and broken it down for parts.

But Honky materialized two weeks later on a side street near the ocean. It was out of gas and littered with cigarette butts and pirated Pantera CDs, but otherwise undamaged. The ignition cylinder was intact, and our keys still worked. The car was a living, gas-sipping rebuke of modern antitheft technology.

Mystified, I wrote up my experience for Newsweek’s Web site in early 2004. I figured that would be the end of the story, but I got hundreds of emails from people with similar tales. I’m still getting them – type “stolen car” into Google and my article is in the top 20.

The most stirring notes were from those who got spurned by their insurance companies. John Hutton, an architect from Fairfax, Virginia, lost his Acura RSX last fall and was reimbursed only after six months of aggressive wrangling with Geico. “The inspector treated me like I was a liar and a criminal,” Hutton says. “It all kept going back to the transponder system and their belief that ‘You can’t steal it! You can’t steal it!’” Sally Nguyen’s Acura TL went AWOL last New Year’s Eve and was later found gutted and submerged in the Sacramento River. When an investigator from her insurance company, Esurance, dropped by her house, he left a business card on which he’d scrawled, “Regarding your ‘stolen’ Acura.” Six months later, Esurance denied the claim, citing her car’s security system. Esurance wouldn’t talk to me about her case. Mohammad Awan lost his 2002 Ford Explorer last year; his son wrote to tell me that his insurer, Progressive, felt the existence of a transponder system – plus other “red flags,” like Awan’s outstanding debt – amounted to enough evidence to deny the claim. “Your vehicle is equipped with an immobilizing trans-ponder system which will not allow it to start without the use of a proper transponder key,” read the denial-of-claim letter.

Perhaps no story was worse than Wassef’s as he tried to deal with his stripped Navigator. Unitrin subjected him to a day-long deposition process called an “examination under oath.” Investigators asked about his collapsing marriage and demanded financial documents and telephone records. Wassef complied, believing he had nothing to hide. By June, with no reimbursement in sight, he filed a breach of contract suit. Meanwhile, he’s still paying $825.39 a month for an undrivable car. Unitrin did not return multiple calls regarding Wassef’s case.

Compared to Wassef, I got off easy – a couple hundred dollars for a detail job to eliminate the cigarette smell. But I found myself wrestling with a high tech quandary: What really happened to Honky? In other words, how do you steal the unstealable car?

The 1986 Corvette had the first electronic antitheft system, the Pass Key I. General Motors embedded a small pellet in the base of each key blade; when the key was inserted in the ignition slot, the car’s computer detected the electrical resistance of the pellet. There were just 15 assigned values, but Pass Key still revolutionized automobile security. For the first time, a crucial piece of a vehicle’s antitheft system existed outside the car.

The high lasted only a few years. People started complaining about not being able to replace lost keys easily, so GM opened a back door. Dealers and locksmiths got permission to stock key blanks, and by the early ’90s police were arresting car thieves who had rings of all 15 GM keys.

Of course, no security system is impreg-nable. Even the toughest wall safe is rated in terms of how long it would take a sufficiently motivated crook to bust it open with tools or a torch. As thieves gain experience, they can crack the safe faster and faster. Every security system goes through the same natural history. When new, it’s nearly unbeatable. But then users ask for more convenience and the keepers of the system relax the rules, or smart attackers study the system long enough to breach it. The system begins to fail, creating an evolutionary pressure that ultimately results in the development of a new model – and the cycle starts all over again.

That’s what happened a decade ago, when the rise of eastern European black markets sent auto theft rates skyrocketing in Europe. German insurance companies asked for new security precautions, and in 1995 BMW debuted a sophisticated antitheft system based on radio frequency identification chips. US and Japanese manufacturers quickly embraced the technology in their high-end models. Most of these new transponder-immobilizing systems – including the one in my Civic – use a “fixed” code. Insert the key into the ignition and a transceiver in the steering column pings a microchip in the key’s thick black plastic handle. The chip radios back an alphanumeric identifier of up to 32 characters, one of billions of possible combinations. The signal is only strong enough to travel about 7 inches, but when the car’s computer gets the right code, it activates the other onboard electronics. More expensive cars, like some Mercedes and Lexus models, use sophisticated “rolling” codes, generated anew after each start, passed to the key, and fed back for authorization during the next ignition cycle.

Like the Pass Key, the new RFID technology was extremely effective for a few years. Thefts of the 1997 Ford Mustang, one of the first US cars with a transponder, dropped 70 percent from 1995 levels. (The rest were attributed to tow-aways and stolen keys.) Insurance firms were elated. “There was -pretty much a God-given belief that if a car with a transponder was stolen, the owner was sunk,” says Larry Burzynski, a senior special agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau. “The perception was that the theft had to be owner involvement.” Insurers pressed auto-makers to deploy the technology, and even now the most frequently stolen cars in the US were built before the transponder era – like the ’95 Civic and the ’89 Camry. Newer models make the list only when manufacturers forgo transponders.

TO car thieves, smart keys became little more than the latest challenge. By 2000, forensic locksmiths like Painter were demonstrating for juries how crooks were getting past the transponders in Fords: Pop the hood and pull a certain fuse from the power relay center in the upper left corner. Zap, you’re in.

Meanwhile, transponder-equipped cars were being resold to new owners, and keys were disappearing behind couch cushions. Auto-repair supply and locksmithing companies started selling devices like the Code-Seeker and the T-Code, which allow anyone to create a new set of keys for a fixed-code transponder-equipped car. The Jet Smart Clone (catchphrase: “Clone the uncloneable!”) duplicates any fixed-code RFID chip by reading its code and imprinting it onto the blank chip of a new key with the same mechanical cut.

In the fall of 2005, Bay Area Mercedes dealerships were targeted by a regional theft ring with a clever, seemingly primitive tactic. A thief posing as a customer would express interest in a top-of-the line model and go for a test-drive. Afterward, when the salesperson went for the paperwork, the thief would replace the car’s keyless starter transponder with an identical-looking mock-up from his own pocket. Then he’d leave and return later to nick the car.

That’s what happened in mid-November at a Bay Area Mercedes lot in Pleasanton. A $78,000 black S430 disappeared overnight; police traced the car’s GPS unit to the parking lot of a Fry’s Electronics, but when they arrived at the store, they found not the missing Pleasanton car but another S430 stolen from a Monterey car lot earlier that year. They also found its driver, a 25-year-old San Jose man named Naheed Hamed. He took off in the car, leading a freeway chase that reached 100 miles per hour and ended when he took an off-ramp too fast and rammed into a tree.

A few days later, police found the Pleasanton S430 near Hamed’s home and towed it back to the dealership. Inside the car, mechanics discovered a technological treasure trove: an original Mercedes electronic ignition system and custom Mercedes fuses, all wired with alligator clips to the dashboard and to the fuse box underneath the driver’s seat. The car also held a Pelican PDA carrying case and a wireless RFID-signal-sniffing antenna. Investigators suspect that Hamed spliced in his own ignition system and power source, then used the PDA to upload pirated software to the car’s computer to disable the transponder and swap the two cars’ GPS tracking numbers. Of course, he also believed he could beat the cops in a car chase. “Yeah, the guy’s an idiot,” says auto security expert Mike Bender, a consultant on the case. “But you have to be a brainiac to understand the stuff that this guy had.”

That kind of technology is too expensive and too complicated for your basic chop-shop crew, but they usually don’t need it anyway. For the past few years, Bay Area cops have pursued a ring of thieves that break into Hondas and Acuras with “jiggle” keys – keys with the teeth shaved down so they can turn the tumblers inside any car’s door lock. After the thieves gain access, they shuffle through the glove compartment and snatch the manual, where dealers – unbeknownst to many car owners – often leave an extra valet key.

Ivan Blackman, the manager of the Vehicle Information and Identification Program for the NICB, says that insiders are gradually getting over their dogmatic belief in the invincibility of transponder systems. “Companies are slowly realizing that the cars can be stolen,” Blackman says. Maybe he’s right – though things aren’t changing fast enough for Emad Wassef and Sally Nguyen.

I still didn’t know what happened to Honky. Maybe someone at the dealership or a valet had cloned my key with a device like a Jet Smart Clone, then showed up later to take the car. It was also conceivable that someone grabbed the vehicle identification number off the dash, went to the dealership, pretended to be me, and had an extra key produced. Still, either scenario seemed like it would require an awful lot of footwork for a Pantera- and nicotine-fueled joyride.

Then I heard about another possibility. Earl Hyser, the superintendant of State Farm Insurance’s Vehicle Research Facility, told me that some transponder-equipped cars came with a secret “cheat” code designed to allow people who lose their keys to drive back to the shop. I asked the SFPD about it and was referred to Ken Montes, famous in Bay Area street racing circles for a souped-up 1992 Honda Civic he built as part of a tuner team called the Benen Brothers. The SFPD told me the team called the car Spanky, which instantly made me feel a certain kinship.

I went to see Montes at his custom motor-cycle shop about a half hour south of San Francisco and asked him how someone could have stolen my car. He just laughed. “If I want to take your Civic, I’ll do it in 10 seconds,” he said. Then he confirmed Hyser’s story. The mythical Honda override exists: It’s a series of presses and pulls of the emergency brake. Each car, it seems, has a unique override code, which correlates to the VIN.

“You want to get yours?” Montes asked.

Sure, I said.

He called an acquaintance who worked at a Honda dealership. I listened, awestruck, as Montes fed the guy a barely credible story about a cousin who had dropped his keys down a sewer. The dealership employee was at home but evidently could access the Honda database online. I gave Honky’s VIN to Montes, who passed it along to his friend. We soon had the prescribed sequence of pulls, which I scribbled down in my notebook.

I walked outside and approached Honky. The door lock would have been easy – a thief would have used a jiggle key, and a stranded motorist would have had a locksmith cut a fresh one. I just wrapped the grip of my key in tinfoil to jam the transponder. The key still fit, but it no longer started the car.

Then I grabbed the emergency brake handle between the front seats and performed the specific series of pumps, interspersed with rotations of the ignition between the On and Start positions. After my second attempt, Honky’s hybrid engine awoke with its customary whisper.

I had just jacked my own car.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr.html





Scratched CDs? No Problem!
Ben Hayes

We’ve all been there, bought a preowned game, put it excitedly into the console, then shouted “OMFGz0rWTF!?!?” as the console wouldn’t recognise the game. Or perhaps you have a CD which contains important data, and M$ Windoze gives you a “Cyclic Redundancy Check” error (fancy way of saying ‘Your disc is bloody SCRATCHED’).

Whatever your problem is, it’s caused by the same thing: A scratch. A scratched CD or DVD is just annoying!

So I took it upon myself to perform an experiment, to determine the very best way of dealing with a scratched disc. The limit I set myself, though, was that whatever I did it with must be somewhere in my house, and can’t take longer than 5 minutes, including waiting time for things to dry, etc.

I thought of three main ways to cope with scratches:

1. Use an oily substance, or a gel, to fill in the scratch so that the laser goes straight through. This is the easiest option of the three.
2. Use a mild abrasive to round the edges of the scratches so that the laser doesn’t get scattered as much. This is probably the most feasible option of the three.
3. Somehow take off a thin layer of plastic, removing the scratches altogether. This is the hardest, and probably impossible in 5 minutes with household items.

I burnt 5 CDs with 6 songs on them:
Kings of Leon - Razz
Kings of Leon - Soft
The Libertines - What Katie Did
Kings of Leon - The Bucket
Kings of Leon - Velvet Snow
Kings of Leon - Taper Jean Girl

I then proceeded to scratch a few of the CDs with a pair of scissors, nothing deep, just enough to make the XBox in which I was playing them get annoyed.

The first thing I tried was plain old water, I know, sounds stupid… But the day before, I bought a game, which was scratched (not dirty, scratched). The first thing I tried was water, which I rubbed in gently, so that it stayed in the scratches, it then worked perfectly.

Next I had to rub it. The only way to rub something off a CD, is with a lint free cloth, going out in spokes from the centre.

Ok, so that didn’t work too well on my test discs… Next up was, deodorant. I decided to use this, because it contained something oily (isopropyl myristate) which was dissolved in something volatile (denatured alcohol, propane, butane, isobutane, basically loads of hydrocarbons). So when I sprayed it on, I was hoping for the alcohols to evaporate while the isopropyl myristate separated into isopropyl and myristic acid to become oily and viscous, and stay in the cracks.

I rubbed it in gently, just to get it into the cracks, but not to remove it, and then let it sit for two minutes. It evaporated, and when held against the light, the “rainbows” got scattered less. It looked hopeful. But it didn’t work.

Ok, next up is something I use to clean the fretboard on my guitar, Lem-oil. It’s viscous and oily, and smells of lemon. I sprayed it on and this time had to rub slightly more vigourously, as it wasn’t volatile enough to fit in with my 5 minute limit.

I rubbed it in, and it sort of worked. The XBox loaded the CD, and played it, but it was really crackly and noisy. So it kind of worked, but Caleb sounded pissed off and sort of like a monster.

Next I tried the method that a lot of people talk about: the toothpaste method. Toothpaste is a mild abrasive, and using it you should be able to round off the edges on the scratches. This method looked like it would work if I carried on, as the light was getting less scattered by the scratches, but I set myself a strict 5 minute time limit. To apply the toothpaste take the tiniest bit on the tip of your finger, and without touching the CD with your finger its self, apply the toothpaste to only the scratched area (and just around it). Now put it under the tap and dribble water on it, so that the toothpaste goes sort of mushy. Now tilt the CD over a sink very gently so that the water runs off, but the toothpaste stays. Now, like all the other methods, rub it in with a lint free cloth, but this time you really need to go to town, as you are actually trying to round off the scratches. This is my CD after the toothpaste was applied (the light makes it look really thick, but it isn’t, and the light also makes some of the dripping water look like toothpaste):

That didn’t work either. In a crazy futile attempt, I tried mixing the above four together:

That contained water, deodorant, lem oil and toothpaste. Needless to say it didn’t work.

Next I tried a mixture of 3 parts water to one part olive oil (I know they don’t mix, but shake!) That almost worked. I mean that the light wasn’t scattered when I held it against the light, but my XBox couldn’t read it, probably because it was yellow. This made me think that the oily/gel idea was the best way to go. I looked around the bathroom cupboard for somthing similar, and found this:

Yes, hair gel, and guess what… It worked!

I applied it in much the same way as the toothpaste, except I didn’t dribble water on it. I rubbed it first. Even though I applied it to one area, it ended up evenly spread around the whole disc. I then dribbled water on to loosen it up so I could rub the excess off.

So, the secret to scratch free CDs is……

Hair Gel!-Ben

DISCLAIMER: I, Ben Hayes, take no responsibility or liability for any personal damage, financial damage, or damage to property caused by the actions of the individual replicating what was mentioned in this guide.
http://www.om3ga.co.uk/2006/07/27/sc...ds-no-problem/





Super Battery
Victor Limjoco

Ever wish you could charge your cellphone or laptop in a few seconds rather than hours? As this ScienCentral News video explains, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a battery that could do just that, and also might never need to be replaced.

The Past is Future

As our portable devices get more high-tech, the batteries that power them can seem to lag behind. But Joel Schindall and his team at M.I.T. plan to make long charge times and expensive replacements a thing of the past--by improving on technology from the past.

They turned to the capacitor, which was invented nearly 300 years ago. Schindall explains, "We made the connection that perhaps we could take an old product, a capacitor, and use a new technology, nanotechnology, to make that old product in a new way."

Rechargable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce energy. "That's an effective way to store a large amount of energy," he says, "but the problem is that after many charges and discharges ... the battery loses capacity to the point where the user has to discard it."

But capacitors contain energy as an electric field of charged particles created by two metal electrodes. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. The problem is that storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery's electrodes, so even today's most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.

The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. Similar to how a thick, fuzzy bath towel soaks up more water than a thin, flat bed sheet, the nanotube filaments increase the surface area of the electrodes and allow the capacitor to store more energy. Schindall says this combines the strength of today's batteries with the longevity and speed of capacitors.

"It could be recharged many, many times perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, and ... it could be recharged very quickly, just in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of hours," he says.

This technology has broad practical possibilities, affecting any device that requires a battery. Schindall says, "Small devices such as hearing aids that could be more quickly recharged where the batteries wouldn't wear out; up to larger devices such as automobiles where you could regeneratively re-use the energy of motion and therefore improve the energy efficiency and fuel economy."

Schindall thinks hybrid cars would be a particularly popular application for these batteries, especially because current hybrid batteries are expensive to replace.

Schindall also sees the ecological benefit to these reinvented capacitors. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 3 billion industrial and household batteries were sold in the United States in 1998. When these batteries are disposed, toxic chemicals like cadmium can seep into the ground.

"It's better for the environment, because it allows the user to not worry about replacing his battery," he says. "It can be discharged and charged hundreds of thousands of times, essentially lasting longer than the life of the equipment with which it is associated."

Schindall and his team aren't the only ones looking back to capacitors as the future of batteries; a research group in England recently announced advances of their own. But Schindall's groups expects their prototype to be finished in the next few months, and they hope to see them on the market in less than five years.

Schindall's research was featured in the May 2006 edition of Discover Magazine and presented at the 15th International Seminar on Double Layer Capacitors and Hybrid Energy Storage Devices in Deerfield Beach, Florida on December 2005. His research is funded by the Ford-MIT Consortium.
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles...e_id=218392803





Vonage 2Q Loss Deepens 17 Percent
Brian Bergstein

In its first earnings report as a public company, Internet phone carrier Vonage Holdings Corp. said Tuesday its losses increased 17 percent in the second quarter as customer-acquisition costs stayed high.

The results illustrated the challenges facing Vonage, which raised nearly $500 million with a May 24 initial public offering that was disastrous for investors. The stock debuted at $17 per share and dropped immediately, recently lingering below $7.

Vonage's loss from April through June was $74.1 million, or $1.16 per share, compared with a loss of $63.6 million in the same quarter last year.

The consensus forecast of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial was for a loss of 56 cents per share this time, but the predictions fell in a very wide range, from a loss of 38 cents to a loss of $1.18.

Revenue was $143.4 million, short of Wall Street's forecast of $148.3 million. Vonage's revenue was $59.4 million in the same quarter a year ago.

Vonage shares dropped 32 cents, or 4.5 percent, to $6.77 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

A pioneer in selling inexpensive phone service using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, Holmdel, N.J.-based Vonage has attracted 1.9 million subscribers who use their broadband connections to make calls with regular phones.

But Vonage has spent heavily on marketing and is under competitive assault from cable TV companies that are using VoIP to offer attractive phone plans. Meanwhile, computer-based services such as eBay Inc.'s Skype program offer free voice chats.

As a result, Vonage's pains are expected to continue for some time. Wall Street envisions losses of $2.11 per share this year, $1.47 in 2007 and 94 cents in 2008.

Vonage's marketing costs were $90 million in the second quarter, 46 percent higher than a year ago. The cost of acquiring a new subscriber was $239, up from $236 last year.

However, Vonage's CEO, Mike Snyder, said the company sees the quarter "as a key inflection point on our path to profitability." He said Vonage expects to begin generating "adjusted operating profits" by the first quarter of 2008.

Vonage's 1.9 million subscribers at the end of the quarter marked a 16 percent increase from the previous quarter and more than doubled from 848,000 a year ago.

One important measure of how Vonage capitalizes on that base, monthly revenue per line, rose to $27.70 from $26.63 a year ago. Vonage said the increase came partly from attracting new customers to premium calling plans, but also from a new fee to recover the costs of providing 911 service. VoIP services like Vonage are not automatically linked to 911 as traditional landline phones are.

Vonage and other VoIP carriers also must soon begin paying into the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone coverage in rural areas. That figures to cut into Vonage's price advantage over traditional phone carriers - although Vonage has said customers will see only slightly higher bills, because a separate phone tax will be ending.

In the first half of 2006, Vonage showed a loss of $159.3 million on revenue of $262.3 million. In the same period in 2005, the loss was $123.6 million, with revenue of $100.1 million.

Vonage's IPO was unusual in that the company set aside 4.2 million shares for its customers to buy directly. But Vonage revealed Tuesday that as the company's shares sank, customers who had registered for nearly 1.1 million shares went back on their pledges. The company was forced to spend $11.7 million buying the shares from the IPO's underwriters and expects to pay an additional $6.2 million in underwriting expenses.

Vonage said it plans to pursue efforts to force the customers to pay up. That could prove tricky for a company that already admits customer-relations difficulties. "Churn," a closely watched measure of the number of subscribers who leave each month, averaged 2.3 percent in the second quarter, up from 2.1 percent a year ago.

Snyder told analysts on a conference call that the figure was "unacceptably high." He said Vonage's intense growth had strained customer service, but he promised a turnaround.

"Improving our metrics in customer care is our single most important priority," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-06-40-30





Life After Earth: Imagining Survival Beyond This Terra Firma
Richard Morgan

When the dust settles after World War III, or World War IX, humanity will still want to grow pineapples, rice, coffee and other crops. That is why in June on the island of Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, all five Scandinavian prime ministers met to break ground on a $4.8-million “doomsday vault” that will stockpile crop seeds in case of global catastrophe.

While it boasts the extra safety of Arctic temperatures, the seed bank is just the latest life-preservation plan to reach reality, joining genetic banks like the Frozen Ark, a British program that is storing DNA samples from endangered species like the scimitar-horned oryx, the Seychelles Frégate beetle and the British field cricket.

To a certain group preoccupied with doomsday, these projects are laudable but share a deep flaw: they are Earth-bound. A global catastrophe — like a collision with an asteroid or a nuclear winter — would have to be rather tame in order not to rattle the test tubes in the various ark-style labs around the world. What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?

Cue the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, a group that advocates a backup for humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge — the ultimate detached garage for a race of packrats. It would be run by people who, through fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah.

Far from the lunatic fringe, the leaders of the alliance have serious careers: Robert Shapiro, the group’s founder, is a professor emeritus and senior research scientist in biochemistry at New York University; Ray Erikson runs an aerospace development firm in Boston and has been a NASA committee chair; Steven M. Wolfe, as a Congressional aide, drafted and helped pass the Space Settlement Act of 1988, which mandated that NASA plan a shift from space exploration to space colonization, and was executive director of the Congressional Space Caucus; William E. Burrows, an author of several books on space, is the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at N.Y.U.

President Bush has already proposed a Moon base. “He just needs to be told what it’s good for,” Dr. Shapiro said. Dr. Shapiro has written a number of books on the origins of life on Earth, as well as “Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth,” where he unveiled the civilization rescue project.

In 1999, the same year the book came out, Dr. Shapiro wrote an essay with Mr. Burrows for Ad Astra, an astronomy journal. There, they formally laid out their plan for the rescue alliance, beginning by warning that “the most enduring pictures to come back from the Apollo missions were not of astronauts cavorting on the Sea of Tranquillity, nor even of the lunar landscape itself.”

“They were the haunting views of Earth, seen for the first time not as a boundless and resilient colossus of land and water,” they continued, “but as a startlingly vulnerable lifeboat precariously plying a vast and dangerous sea: a ‘blue marble’ in a black void.” A conversation shortly after the essay was published, Dr. Shapiro recalled, resounded with the earnest imagination of science fiction drama:

Dr. Shapiro: “We’ve got to use space to protect humanity!”

Mr. Burrows: “By God! Yes!”

The concept is not new, but there is some fresh momentum. Mr. Burrows’s new book, “The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth,” is due out this month. And the physicist Stephen W. Hawking, who is not part of the group, began arguing this summer that human survival depends on leaving Earth.

The mission of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization has also attracted the support of Col. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, who now devotes much of his time to the idea of Martian colonization.

“It takes a big reason to go to the Moon, because, frankly, it’s a lousy place to be,” Colonel Aldrin said in a telephone interview. “But this is exactly the kind of planning as a human race we need to secure our future.

“But the A.R.C. idea isn’t ahead of its time because it’s needed right now. It’s a reasonable thing to do with our space technology, sending valuable stuff to a reliable off-site location. NASA is certainly not bending backwards to do it. It’s the private people like A.R.C.”

Born and raised within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo — and he walked that distance often — Dr. Shapiro developed an early interest in biodiversity. He frets over the frailty of civilization and the planet, but he is not a pessimist. He compares the Moon-base idea to a safe-deposit box.

“It makes sense to protect the things you value,” he said. “But we, as a civilization, we don’t have anything like that.” The trouble with doomsday, Dr. Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday threats.

In 1918, an influenza strain killed some 30 million people; a possible new bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic. In January 2003, a computer virus shut down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated.

“But I’m not here to predict doomsday; I’m here for sanity,” Dr. Shapiro said. “When we’ve gained what we’ve gained, we should fight to keep it.

“And, worst-case scenario, if it’s all for nothing, we’ll have a nice museum.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/science/01arc.html





‘Talladega Nights’: The Men Are Rowdy, the Cars Are Fast and the Product Placement Is Extreme
A. O. Scott

For those still clinging to the notion that the United States is divided into Red and Blue, Nascar and Hollywood would seem to dwell on opposite sides of the cultural divide. “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” is hardly the first movie to challenge this simple-minded view of American popular culture — see also “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and of course “Cars” — but it does an admirably thorough job of debunking it.

After all, movies (and movie fans) have always had a soft spot for whining engines and screeching tires. But these days the deeper bond between auto racing and popular moviemaking lies in a shared passion for corporate sponsorship. The vehicles in “Talladega Nights” — which was made with the cooperation of Nascar — are covered with logos and brand names, and the movie itself may break new records for product placements per frame.

It’s all in fun of course. As a good-hearted spoof of the folkways of stock-car racing, the movie is happy to mock the sport’s eagerness to sell prime uniform and chassis space to sponsors like Perrier, Wonder Bread and Old Spice. It also is tickled at the eating habits of its fast-driving characters, who wash down Domino’s Pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken with Coca-Cola and Budweiser and, when they want a high-end night out, head for the nearest Applebee’s. You can be sure that all these companies paid handsomely for the privilege of such lampooning, which even extends to the movie’s single funniest joke, a suppertime blessing brought to you by PowerAde.

Really, though, the brand that powers this ragged, intermittently uproarious fusion of sketch-comedy goofing and driving around in circles is Will Ferrell, who wrote the screenplay (with Adam McKay, the director) and served as an executive producer, in addition to running around on a race track in his underpants. He does a lot more than that, needless to say, but Mr. Ferrell’s willingness to strip down to his skivvies is one of his trademarks.

It is also a rare movie-star display of solidarity with those American men who, whether out of laziness or principle, disdain sunlight, proper nutrition, body-hair maintenance and abdominal exercise. Part of Mr. Ferrell’s appeal is surely that he is one of them. O.K., one of us.

He also has a genius for sniffing out pop-cultural fixtures and embodying them in a way that goes beyond easy, obvious parody. Like Ron Burgundy, the hero of “Anchorman,” Ricky Bobby is at once a creature of pure, extravagant absurdity and a curiously vulnerable, sympathetic figure. The son of a “semi-professional stock car racer and amateur tattoo artist” played by Gary Cole, Ricky is born in the back seat of a speeding Chevelle and goes on to glory on the Nascar circuit. His sidekick and best buddy is Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), a sweet, dim fellow content to come in second behind his pal. (Their motto, “shake and bake,” may be an honest homage to a popular product rather than a paid endorsement, but who really knows?) Ricky, by turns childlike and ferociously competitive, has some unresolved Daddy issues, which unfortunately weigh down the last third of “Talladega Nights” with perfunctory sentimentality.

Ricky and Cal are from North Carolina, home of the stock car king Richard Petty, and it requires no sensitivity training to recognize that they are stereotypes of a certain kind of Southern manhood. Not that anyone is likely to be too offended; from the old “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show to the songs of Toby Keith, caricature and Rebel pride tend to keep close company.

In any case the two good ol’ boys are soon confronted with a designated bad guy who incarnates an entirely antithetical stereotype — or, rather, invents a new one: the gay French Formula One driver. Jean Girard, as this nemesis is called, is played by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Ali G” fame with a demented sang-froid that suggests a synthesis of Peter Sellers and Pee-wee Herman. Mr. Cohen proves himself to be Mr. Ferrell’s equal and opposite, a comic dialectic sealed with the summer’s best on-screen kiss.

Like most movies of this kind, “Talladega Nights” is as good as its craziest riffs, which aren’t quite strong or various enough to fill out a whole feature. The funniest scenes have some of the improvised, pseudo-vérité flavor of Christopher Guest’s “Best in Show,” but Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay are less rigorous than Mr. Guest and his collaborators, preferring easy laughs to carefully turned comic insights. Still, at the high points — when Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reilly start jawboning, when Leslie Bibb slyly steals a scene as Ricky’s frosty, gold-digging wife, when Mr. Reilly and Michael Clarke Duncan try to remove a fork from Mr. Ferrell’s thigh, or whenever Mr. Cohen opens his mouth — laughs are hard to suppress.

As a cultural artifact, “Talladega Nights” is both completely phony and, therefore, utterly authentic. Or, to put it differently: this movie is the real thing. It’s finger lickin’ good. It’s eatin’ good in the neighborhood. It’s the King of Beers. It’s Wonder Bread.

“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Like any respectable country ballad, it has cussin’, fightin’, cheatin’ and drinkin’.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/08/0...es/04tall.html





An Image Popular in Films Raises Some Eyebrows in Ads
Jeremy W. Peters

At 200 pounds plus — most of that pure attitude — she is hard to miss.

Her onscreen presence takes on many variations, but she is easily recognizable by a few defining traits. Other than her size, she is almost always black. She typically finds herself in an exchange that is either confrontational or embarrassing. And her best line is often little more than a sassy “Mmmm hmmm.”

This caricature, playing on stereotypes of heavy black women as boisterous and sometimes aggressive, has been showing up for some time in stand-up comedy routines and in movies like “Big Momma’s House’’ and “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.’’ Often, the pieces are produced by directors and writers who are black themselves.

With black creators giving more acceptability to the image, it is now starting to appear more often in television commercials as well. Most recently some variation of this character has appeared in commercials for Dairy Queen, Universal Studios and Captain Morgan rum.

But despite the popularity of such characters among blacks, the use of the image of big black women as the target of so many jokes is troublesome to some marketers and media scholars.

“It is perpetuating a stereotype that black females are strong, aggressive, controlling people,’’ said Tommy E. Whittler, a marketing professor at DePaul University. “I don’t think you want to do that.’’

To be sure, sassy overweight black women appear to represent only a small fraction of the African-American actresses who appear in commercials. Marketers have made strides in recent years toward making advertisements with a more diverse cast of characters.

Blacks regularly appear in commercials selling products as diverse as toothpaste, credit cards and erectile dysfunction medication. Indeed, according to several academic studies, over the last 15 years the number of blacks appearing in commercials has been roughly proportional to their share of the American population, about 14 percent.

“Over the years it’s evolved,’’ said Fay Ferguson, co-chief executive of Burrell Communications, an advertising agency that specializes in marketing toward black consumers. “We’ve come a long way in how we see black women in advertising.’’

Stereotypical portrayals of blacks in commercials have drawn criticism from civil rights groups for decades. Some of the earliest and most iconic examples of blacks in advertising — Rastus the Cream of Wheat chef, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben — showed blacks in subservient roles that recalled the days of slavery.

Those images have been toned down over the years (Aunt Jemima’s red bandanna, for example, was replaced with pearl earrings and a lace collar in 1989) and are no longer as overtly stereotypical as they once were. And now there are many examples of blacks presented in middle-class settings and engaged in mainstream activities.

To some, the freer use of overweight black women in comic situations suggests a welcome change that reflects a broader acceptability of blacks in the media. But others find the recurring use of the image a return to a disturbing past.

And some say these images may serve to exacerbate misunderstanding between whites and blacks.

“Not only are we being given images of who we are supposed to be, but others are also formulating their images of us based on that,” said Marilyn Kern Foxworth, an author and marketing expert who studies how blacks are portrayed in advertising. “People have already determined who we are and how we’re going to react in certain situations.”

The heavy black female makes one of her latest appearances in a commercial for the Dairy Queen Blizzard. In the spot, a man boarding an airplane sets his ice cream shake down so he can load his bag into an overhead compartment. As he reaches up, another passenger on the plane starts eating the Blizzard. Seeing this, the first man lets go of his bag so he can reclaim his Blizzard and inadvertently drops his luggage on another passenger’s head.

That unlucky passenger happens to be an overweight black woman who lets out an irritated gasp that reminds all the passengers around her who not to mess with.

Rick Cusato, executive vice president for Grey Worldwide, the firm that wrote the campaign for Dairy Queen, said the script was not written with a black actress in mind.

“We basically cast the funniest person,” he said. “We didn’t specifically cast for a black woman. We said, ‘Wow, she’s really funny.’ And she happened to be black.”

Another new Dairy Queen commercial features a similar character — played by the same actress — working as an airport security screener. When a man tries to walk through a metal detector eating a Dairy Queen burger, her eyes dart disapprovingly downward at him. Then she barks, “Uh, uh. Get on!” directing him to walk through again.

Michael Keller, Dairy Queen’s chief brand officer, said the company considered actors of all sizes and races before making a decision. “We looked at male body builders, really big tall women. We looked at just about everybody we could,” he said. “She projected an image that was everything we wanted it to be. This is just a strong woman being herself.” He added that the company had not received any complaints about the ads being racially insensitive. But to some these images are troubling.

“It’s not an accident that she’s African-American and heavy,” said Howard Buford, founder and chief executive of Prime Access, an advertising agency that creates commercials marketed toward minority audiences. “There’s certainly a long heritage of large African-American women who are kind of sassy and feisty and humorously angry. There’s a sense that this whole value system is O.K. again.”

Large black actresses have had recurring roles in commercials over the years, and often are cast in roles where their aggressiveness is a defining trait. The heavy black spokeswoman for Pine Sol was one of the first to embrace the role. Her aggression was aimed at household dirt, however, not people. In a recent commercial for Captain Morgan rum, a large black woman berates her man for playing dominoes and making her late.

In one recent Twix commercial, a full-figured black woman asks her boyfriend if her pants make her rear end look big. As the camera focuses on her plump backside (exaggerated by the camera for effect), the man stuffs his face with a Twix bar and mumbles an indecipherable answer.

Pleased with his response, the woman walks away. She is not shown being aggressive or loud, but the commercial leaves the impression that if the man had given the wrong answer, she might have erupted.

A series of Universal Studios commercials star a heavy black woman who is accompanying her children on a Jurassic Park ride. Frightened by the ride, she roars and buries the heads of her two young children in her bosom.

Black advertising executives have noticed the stereotype.

“There’s an image out there of black women being boisterous, overbearing, controlling and extremely aggressive in their behavior,” said Carol H. Williams, who runs her own advertising firm in Oakland, Calif., that specializes in marketing toward blacks. “I really don’t know why that stereotype is laughed at.”

Some have trouble with the new commercial images in part because they are being created by white writers.

“There are images of African-Americans created for white people by white people and there are images of African-Americans created for African-Americans,’’ Mr. Buford said. “And there’s a big difference.”

The lack of diversity on Madison Avenue has been a long-standing issue. In fact, the New York City Commission on Human Rights is investigating the hiring practices of advertising agencies in the city and is looking at how they have approached employing blacks.

Jannette L. Dates, dean of the communications school at Howard University, said that while whites and blacks could watch the same portrayal of a large black woman on television and laugh, they are laughing for different reasons.

Some whites, Ms. Dates said, may laugh thinking, “Wow, she’s so ridiculous. My people aren’t like that.” She added: “They wouldn’t consciously feel that way. But there is something going on subconsciously because that’s what advertising is all about. They’re trying to tap into some feeling, some emotion, some psychological hang-up.”

Blacks, meanwhile, might laugh because they can identify with the character, Ms. Dates said. “It’s for both the people who want to snicker and say, ‘See, that’s how they are.’ And for people to say, ‘There’s one of us.’ ”

Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard, amplified that point. “To the black audience, this may be, ‘You do your thing, sister,’ ” Professor Patterson said. “The white audience is laughing with her. Then they go back to reality, and they laugh at her.”

But Liz Gumbinner, a creative director at David and Goliath, the agency that developed the Universal campaign, said the broad appeal of the commercials was proof they were not insensitively playing on racial stereotypes.

Noting that a black woman in a recent David and Goliath focus group spoke up about how much she liked the Universal ads, Ms. Gumbinner said: “I wonder if sometimes when you have somebody that is less conventional, they become the most memorable. We use a lot of bald men, and it’s not like we have it out for bald men.”

Ms. Gumbinner and Mr. Cusato of Grey Advertising, however, said no black writers were involved in either of their campaigns.

As is typically the case with racial stereotypes, who is laughing and why is complex and potentially inflammatory. Black actors and comedians have profited handsomely from creating bumptious female characters on TV and in movies, raising the issue of whether they, too, are perpetuating the stereotypes that many find offensive.

Tyler Perry, the filmmaker and actor, created a series of plays and movies, including the huge hit “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” in which the main character Mable (Madea) Simmons is a no-nonsense overweight matriarch. Mo’Nique, a full-figured comedian, has built a routine on being outlandish, brash and, at times, downright crude.

Mr. Buford, of Prime Access, said part of what makes the comedy of Mr. Perry and Mo’Nique acceptable is that it is written from a personal experience common to many blacks.

“Authenticity makes a lot of difference,” he said. “It’s authenticity born of having lived that life versus having been cast in that role.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/bu...ia/01adco.html





Kohlberg and Private Partner Seen as Close to Deal for Chip Maker
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Alex Berenson

In the latest bidding war between private equity firms, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company and Silver Lake Partners appeared close to a deal last night to acquire the semiconductor unit of Philips Electronics.

People involved in the deal said the two firms would pay about eight billion euros, or more than $10.2 billion, for the unit, surpassing bidders that included the Texas Pacific Group and the Blackstone Group, and a group that included Bain Capital, the people involved said.

It was unclear last night when the deal could be finalized and announced, according to these people, who did not want to be identified because the talks were continuing. They also cautioned that the deal could fall apart or another group could come in with a higher offer.

Representatives of Kohlberg Kravis and Silver Lake had no comment last night. A spokesman for Philips could not be reached for comment.

The sale would come as Philips has started to focus on relatively stable and fast-growing businesses like medical imaging.

The company ranks eighth among all semiconductor makers, with 2.5 percent of the global market, according to Gartner, the research firm.. But the division’s sales grew only 4.7 percent in 2005, lagging the overall industry, which grew 5.7 percent, Gartner said.

In June, Philips announced a spinoff of the division, but the unit lacked the size to compete on its own, so a buyer was sought from the outset.

The unit makes specialized semiconductors used in cellphones, music players, small appliances and automotive parts. It has some valuable intellectual property, analysts say, especially in cellphone applications.

In Europe, several companies and carriers are experimenting with the use of cellphones as more secure substitutes for credit cards, and Philips makes the custom chips that enable cellphones to securely handle electronic transactions. A user whisks his or her cellphone past a point-of-sale scanner in a store, and punches in a personal identification number or a fingerprint reader on the phone to authorize a purchase.

Credit card companies in the United States and wireless carriers are also interested in this emerging business.

“This is an intellectual property play before that market has really taken off, but it’s very promising,” said Rob Enderle, an independent technology analyst.

The $10.2 billion price would be above the $7 billion to $9 billion that analysts had forecast for the unit, which had about $6 billion in revenue in 2005, Gartner said.

In a research report on July 24, a Citigroup analyst, Simon Smith, wrote that he did not think Philips could find a buyer willing to pay $10 billion, a price valuing the unit at a 20 percent premium to ST Microelectronics, a publicly traded semiconductor company. But Mr. Smith wrote that the deal would be “bullish if true.”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/te...gy/02chip.html





Books

Where Do Babies Come From? In the 17th Century, Scientists Laid Myths to Rest
William Grimes

In the 17th century, scientists didn’t believe that the stork delivered babies, but they might as well have. Reproduction remained a deep mystery, its processes the subject of wild speculation and absurd flights of fancy. Otherwise sophisticated intellects believed that carp grew from reeds and that it was possible to create mice by putting a dirty shirt and a few grains of wheat into a sealed jar and letting it sit for 21 days.

These and other follies, the received wisdom of centuries, were debunked in a brief but startling burst of scientific creativity lasting from about 1665 to 1680. A loosely bound network of scientists, empowered by the experimental method and new technologies like the microscope, overturned the old theories of Aristotle and Galen, parted company with the alchemists and laid down the basic framework for our modern understanding of reproduction. This is the story that Matthew Cobb tells in “Generation,” his competent if less than enthralling reconstruction of the bold experiments, intellectual alliances and bitter battles that led to a new scientific frontier.

Mr. Cobb, an animal behaviorist at the University of Manchester, tries to place his scientific material in historical context, pulling the camera back for some panoramic shots of the Dutch and English Wars, or the London of Samuel Pepys. To enliven his narrative, he plays up the personal drama involving Jan Swammerdam, Niels Stensen and Reinier de Graaf, fellow students at the Leiden University who made key discoveries about animal and human reproduction and who function as Mr. Cobb’s protagonists.

Much of this is wasted effort. Mr. Cobb’s strong suit is science. His pages come alive when he delves into experiments, published scientific works and the cross-fertilization of ideas made possible by new scientific journals and societies. Here, fortunately, he has a wealth of material, starting with the speculations of William Harvey, who first argued that all animals emerge from an egg, and ending with Leeuwenhoek’s groundbreaking microscope studies of spermatozoa.

This is a tale worth telling. In a mad rush of inspired inquiry, researchers throughout Europe, trading ideas and sharing observations, established that all species bred like to like, that insects do not generate spontaneously, that all life forms develop according to observable laws, that ovaries contain eggs, and that human life begins when an egg is fertilized by the male sperm.

Such knowledge did not come easily. “Confusion about the processes involved in sex and growth was so great that conception, reproduction and embryonic development were all collapsed into one unknown and mysterious phenomenon: ‘generation,’ ” Mr. Cobb writes. The great William Harvey referred to conception as a “dark business,” and even leading researchers tended to advance only so far before lapsing into old habits of airy speculation and reliance on classical authorities. Nevertheless, step by step, through repetition and correction, progress was made.

Mr. Cobb can be breathtakingly obtuse on larger historical questions. He seems to think that readers will be startled to find out that the Netherlands was once a great political, cultural and economic power. (Similarly, he explains that the host is “the piece of bread which Catholics claim has been transmuted into the body of Christ.”) But he is in his element describing the critical role played by informal salons and formal scientific societies in pushing research on generation, and the role of copper-plate engraving and new instruments like the microscope in propelling discoveries.

It was in Paris, at the private academy presided over by Melchisedec Thévenot, that Stensen, better known as Steno, used his skill at dissection to refute Descartes’s theories of the brain, and where, with Thévenot’s encouragement, he and Swammerdam first turned their attention to the problems of generation.

Steno moved on to Florence, where he became the star of Grand Duke Ferdinando de Medici’s scientific academy. After dissecting dogfish and rays, he proposed that the ovaries of the human female likewise contained eggs that passed into the uterus.

Swammerdam, meanwhile, focused on insect development, demonstrating to an astonished audience at Thévenot’s academy that the wings, head and proboscis of a future butterfly could be seen inside a silkworm caterpillar, which he slit open with a scalpel. The butterfly, in other words, developed rather than emerging fully formed from the decaying carcass of the caterpillar. “In the whole nature of things,” he would write, “there is no generation by accident, but by propagation and the growth of parts, in which chance has no part.” De Graaf, the youngest of the three, concentrated on female and male genitalia, dissecting the testicles of the dormouse to reveal the structure of the testes for the first time, and locating the human egg precisely in ovarian follicles, pioneering work that was brilliantly supplemented by Leeuwenhoek’s observations of sperm through the microscope.

After Leeuwenhoek, momentum stalled. New puzzles replaced old ones. “Despite 150 years of research, no one had any real idea what egg and spermatozoa were, what they represented, or what they contained,” Mr. Cobb writes. “From this point of view, generation remained as great a mystery at the end of the 1830’s as it had been in the 1670’s.” Rearguard actions were being fought as late as the mid-19th century, when Louis Pasteur faced off against Félix Pouchet to prove conclusively that spontaneous generation was a myth. As poets have long known, a persuasive metaphor can often be more powerful than a fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/books/02grim.html





Rowling Stays Silent on Harry’s Future
Steven McElroy

The authors John Irving and Stephen King both appealed for Harry Potter’s life yesterday in a joint news conference with the woman who holds the teenage wizard’s fate in her hands, Reuters reported. The two writers appeared with J. K. Rowling at Radio City Music Hall before “An Evening With Harry, Carrie & Garp,” a charity reading scheduled last night to support two nonprofit organizations: the Haven Foundation, devoted to helping performing artists who have had accidents or illnesses that leave them unable to work, and Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian group that delivers emergency aid in more than 70 countries. “My fingers are crossed for Harry,” said Mr. Irving, far left with Ms. Rowling and Mr. King. Ms. Rowling did not say whether their appeals were too late; she is already at work on the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series and has already said that two characters would die. “A couple of characters I expected to survive have died, and one character got a reprieve,” she said, but she did not elaborate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/books/02potter.html





Helena Bonham Carter Joins 'Potter' Cast
AP

Helena Bonham Carter has signed on to play fanatically evil Lord Voldemort devotee Bellatrix Lestrange in the next ''Harry Potter'' film.

The Oscar nominee joins incoming composer Nicholas Hooper, who will create the score for ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' the fifth film adaptation of author J.K. Rowling's epic series, according to a statement released Wednesday by Warner Bros.

Directed by Hooper's longtime collaborator David Yates, the movie also includes newcomers Imelda Staunton as frumpy Dolores Umbridge and Evanna Lynch as Luna ''Loony'' Lovegood.

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson return as teen wizards Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

''It's going to be a really cool cast,'' said Carter's publicist Jay Waterman.

Carter's film credits include 2005's ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'' and 1997's ''The Wings of the Dove,'' for which she received a best actress Oscar nomination.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...le-Carter.html





A Skeptic on 9/11 Prompts Questions on Academic Freedom
Gretchen Ruethling

Sipping on a bottle of water and holding a book about the history and future of Islam, Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an “inside job.”

As children zoomed by on tricycles and shot basketballs at a community center near his home, Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations (the French daily newspaper Figaro and Radio France International, in fact) had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. “The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon,” said Mr. Barrett, who has been a teacher’s assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. “The 9/11 commission has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours.”

Mr. Barrett’s views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsin legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus long known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism.

“They apparently have no limits to what can be taught in the classroom,” Representative Steve Nass said of the university’s decision to allow Mr. Barrett to teach a class this fall titled “Islam: Religion and Culture.”

“Barrett has got to go,’’ Mr. Nass, a Whitewater Republican, said. “It is an embarrassment for the state of Wisconsin. It is an embarrassment for the university.”

The week of July 24, Mr. Nass, who is up for re-election this year, sent a resolution signed by 61 state legislators — all but one of them Republican — to Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, and university officials condemning Mr. Barrett’s “academically dishonest views” and demanding that his one-semester contract to teach the class for a salary of $8,247 be terminated.

Mr. Barrett, a co-founder of a group called Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, argued that he had never presented his personal opinions in class and that he was free to offer those opinions on his own time outside the classroom.

“Why is liberal Wisconsin going bananas over an $8,000-a-year lecturer who’s not even teaching his own views in the course?” Mr. Barrett asked. “I go out of my way to bring in diverse interpretations for students to look at.”

The university’s chancellor, John D. Wiley, said that he was baffled by Mr. Barrett’s beliefs but that they were irrelevant in the classroom, where he must stick to a syllabus that has been approved by the department. That syllabus includes a week devoted to the war on terror.

A 10-day university review had determined that Mr. Barrett presented a variety of viewpoints and that he had not discussed his personal opinions in the classroom, Mr. Wiley said.

“I think it would be a serious mistake for legislators to try to get in and micromanage curriculum,” said Mr. Wiley, who added that university officials would keep an eye on Mr. Barrett by meeting with him throughout the semester. “We don’t go around and question all our instructors to find out what all their views are.”

At the University of Colorado, a committee voted in June to fire Ward L. Churchill, an ethnic studies professor who had compared some victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to a Nazi official. Professor Churchill appealed this month to keep his job.

And early this year at Northwestern University, Arthur R. Butz, a tenured professor of engineering, drew strong criticism after saying he agreed with the belief of the president of Iran that the Holocaust was a myth.

Patrick V. Farrell, the provost of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the university was not focusing on Mr. Barrett’s political views but on the teaching and learning experience in the classroom.

“I want to avoid as much as we can creating some kind of a political test for instructors or faculty, to say that only those whose thinking fits within some predetermined mold are well equipped to teach our students,” Mr. Farrell said. “I think that creates a dangerous precedent.”

Some Wisconsin students said they thought it was a crucial part of a college education to learn about a variety of theories, including radical ones, before forming opinions on a topic.

“It’s a student’s decision in a class whether they believe what a professor is saying,” said Jillian Alpire, 22, who graduated this year. “Just because he said his opinions on a radio station does not mean that’s what the course is going to be about.”

Ben Kopish, 20, a junior, said that such a controversial discourse should be welcomed at a public university that is known for fostering outspoken academic debate.

“If it doesn’t happen somewhere like the Madison campus,” Mr. Kopish said, “then I don’t know where else it would happen.”

But Katherine Brown, 20, who had finished a summer course on Islam, questioned the role of such a political discussion in a religion class.

“I just feel like it isn’t relevant because Islam is a religion,” said Ms. Brown, who added that she agreed with her own professor’s decision not to discuss the war on terror. “It’s not about what’s going on currently in politics so much.”

Mr. Barrett’s ideas place him squarely within a loose confederation of skeptics who think the American government had a role in the Sept. 11 attacks and whose theories are spread through the Internet and other means.

Mr. Barrett and Chancellor Wiley both said the controversy might actually be helping provide Mr. Barrett with a larger platform to voice his ideas. It has sparked curiosity in students like Ms. Brown, who said she was interested in finding out more about why Mr. Barrett believes what he does.

Although Ms. Brown said she did not believe that the government could have been involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, she added, “So many very important things that we know now were considered radical when they were first presented as ideas.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/ed...352&ei=5087%0A





Las Vegas Hosts Computer Security Events
Dan Goodin

The middle-aged G-men who wear crisp suits and consort with teenage hackers sporting purple hair can make the two conferences that will converge in Las Vegas this week look like a scene from a science-fiction movie.

In fact, the gatherings are the most important in the world of computer security, drawing a "who's who" list of leaders from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., government agencies including the FBI and underground groups that act as a neighborhood watch for the Internet.

The motley band of researchers, federal agents and cyberhobbyists come to learn how to fortify networks against the latest attacks, share research on new vulnerabilities and recruit people in a field where competition for talent is growing increasingly fierce.

Laced with an abundance of raucous parties and high-tech pranks, the five-day event is equal parts boot camp, hard-core technical forum and carnival of bacchanal proportions.

"This is a circus with many rings," said Richard Thieme, whose book "Islands in the Clickstream" explores the effect computers and other machines have on society and individuals. "There's a constant exchanging of energy and information, morning, noon and night, and that's what is so powerfully attractive to hackers and anyone who wants to learn."

Black Hat, which runs Wednesday and Thursday, is more the university: In its 10th year, it is a corporate-driven event, with an admission fee as high as $2,500.

By contrast, Defcon is the fraternity party. Held every year since 1993, the Friday-Sunday show thrives on chaos, loud parties and a crowd that's decidedly more anti-establishment.

True to the insatiable curiosity at the heart at the hacker ethos, the events keep participants on their toes, lest they fall victim to high-tech pranks of fellow attendees.

In past years, pay phones have been said to disappear off hotel walls and hotel TV billing systems and wireless computer networks have been penetrated, allowing those with the technical know-how to one up their fellow attendees.

Bo Holland, the founder of several startups that work with large financial services companies, said he was cruising the floor of last year's Defcon when he came upon an automated teller machine that had a skull and crossbones and the conference logo displayed on its monitor. Upon closer inspection, he noticed someone had attached alligator clips to the cable on the ATM's backside and run a wire into the ceiling.

"I lost a real sense of security," said Holland, who had long assumed ATM networks were invulnerable. "I came away with a real appreciation for the powers these hackers had developed."

Other pranks have included dye that, in different years, has turned hotel pools purple, orange and blue. A large "wall of sheep" displays names and partial passwords sniffed from unsecured computers that connected to wireless networks.

A few years ago someone disguised a wireless network to look like the one officially sanctioned by Defcon. When unwitting attendees connected to the rogue network, their Web pages were appended with vulgar images.

"An awful lot of what you will see is people gleefully poking holes in things," said Jon Callas, a longtime attendee and chief technology officer of encryption software maker PGP Corp. "It's a cross between a computer security conference and a punk rock concert."

Although some of the events clearly cross the line into illegality and good taste - past pranks have included pouring cement into toilets, setting off smoke bombs and stealing hotel satellite dishes - the conferences have been known to expose weaknesses in products made by some of the world's most powerful companies.

At last year's Black Hat, Cisco Systems Inc. tried to stop researcher Michael Lynn from speaking about a vulnerability that he said could let hackers virtually shut down the Internet.

Cisco managed to get pages documenting the flaw torn out of all 2,000 conference binders, but ultimately the biggest maker of Internet routing and switching equipment was unable to squelch Lynn's talk.

The tension between hacker activism and corporate interests may generate more friction this year as two researchers demonstrate ways to hijack some of the most popular brands of laptop computers by exploiting a flaw in their wireless connections.

A third researcher plans to demonstrate software that can drop undetectable programs for snooping into computers running Windows Vista, the next generation of Microsoft's operating system.

But there are signs that technology companies may be getting more comfortable discussing the security of their flagship products. Microsoft scheduled a day of talks for Thursday on new approaches to hardening its products; it also wants feedback from participants.

And a Cisco executive is scheduled to sit in on a panel that includes people who have criticized the company in the past.

Adam Laurie, chief security officer of Thebunker.com, a U.K.-based site for storing sensitive information, said past conferences are partly to thank for the growing willingness of Microsoft and Cisco in disclosing potential weaknesses in their key products.

"We are having this stuff forced upon us, and you can't choose not to have it," said Laurie, who goes by "Major Malfunction." "If they don't do it properly, that puts me at risk."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-01-20-11-30





AOL Makes More Services Free
Anick Jesdanun

Stepping up the chase for online advertising dollars, AOL will give away e-mail accounts and software now available only to its paying customers in a strategy shift likely to accelerate the decline in its core Internet access business.

The decision, announced Wednesday by AOL parent Time Warner Inc., removes the few remaining reasons for AOL subscribers to keep paying when they already have high-speed Internet access through a cable or phone company.

"We've listened to our customers, and many of them want to keep using these AOL products when they migrate to broadband - but not pay extra for them," said Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner's president and chief operating officer.

The move marks the end of an era for a company that grew rapidly in the 1990s by making it easy to connect online, giving millions of Americans their first taste of e-mail, the Web and instant messaging through discs that continually arrived unsolicited in mailboxes.

"This is the final goodbye to the days when AOL was the king of the Internet," said Jeff Lanctot, general manager of aQuantive Inc.'s Avenue A/Razorfish, an agency that places some ads on AOL sites. "They now know they are the underdog."

AOL hopes that by making services free, it can draw Internet users to its ad-supported Web sites and keep them from defecting to Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which have offered free e-mail for years.

Lanctot said AOL could pull off the strategy shift given its "tremendous potential" to tap video and other resources from other Time Warner units as well as a sizable subscriber base - which, while dwindling, still makes AOL the leading Internet access provider.

AOL will still offer dial-up accounts at $26 a month for unlimited use, but the company no longer will aggressively market the service. That's likely to mean the end of promotional CDs and an unspecified number of job cuts in marketing and customer service.

Free e-mail accounts are available immediately, while some other features, primarily parental controls, won't become free until early September.

Subscribers who dropped AOL within the past two years will be able to reclaim their old AOL.com e-mail addresses.

The changes were announced as Time Warner reported a profit Wednesday of $1 billion for the second quarter. Its cable TV business grew thanks to more high-speed Internet and digital phone customers, offsetting weakness at AOL, which saw a 2 percent drop in revenue.

AOL accounts for one-fifth of Time Warner's revenue, and most of that contribution comes from subscription sales. So the bet here is that advertising can rise fast enough to supplant the declines in subscription revenue - a trend possibly already in action. In the second quarter, AOL's ad sales rose 40 percent, while subscription revenue dropped 11 percent.

"A small percentage of a big something is better than a whole lot of not much," said Jonathan Gaw, a research manager at IDC.

AOL has about 6.2 million U.S. subscribers who have broadband but pay extra - generally $15 a month - for AOL services, meaning AOL could lose more than $1 billion in annual revenue, on top of what it would have lost anyway from customers dropping dial-up plans.

Advertising, meanwhile, grew last quarter by $129 million from the same period in 2005, or $516 million over a full year if it can sustain the growth rate.

That's still a gap of about $500 million, although AOL will save an unspecified amount from payroll, network and other costs. Implementing these changes is expected to cost $250 million to $350 million through 2007, about half for employee severance.

Although millions of subscribers are now likely to drop their paid accounts, AOL has little choice. AOL lost 976,000 U.S. subscribers in the past quarter alone even with the premium offerings. As of June 30, AOL had 17.7 million subscribers, a 34 percent drop from its peak in September 2002.

AOL's European units also lost 218,000 subscribers, dropping to 5.6 million. Time Warner said Wednesday it was considering a sale of those units and anticipates a deal this year.

The number of unique U.S. visitors to AOL sites has remained steady, while its three chief rivals all saw gains in June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. And comScore Media Metrix found that in June, pages viewed at the main AOL sites - by subscribers and free users - dropped 44 percent, while Yahoo increased 23 percent.

Nonetheless, AOL officials see good opportunities with emerging features like online video. On Friday, AOL is revamping its video portal to give visitors one-stop access to free and for-pay clips from around the Internet, including those at rival sites like YouTube. The company hopes that by creating a user-friendly experience, the market would grow for everyone, including AOL.

Besides e-mail, AOL will give away its proprietary software for accessing the once-premium offerings, as well as safety and security features such as parental controls.

"This is the next logical step for AOL to capitalize further on the explosive rise in broadband usage and online advertising," Bewkes said. "With its robust and rapidly expanding advertising operation, we expect to put AOL back on a growth path."

Investors have been cautious about Time Warner's prospects. Even as word of the new strategy circulated in news reports, Time Warner stock prices have been hovering near a 52-week low of $15.70 in recent weeks. The shares rose 40 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $16.65 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

AOL actually began moving away from its roots as a walled-garden service emphasizing exclusive content in 2004, making most of its news, music videos and other features available for free on its ad-supported sites.

The move was driven by the fact that as more Americans turned elsewhere for high-speed service, they no longer needed AOL for dial-up access and didn't find the exclusive content enough to justify the price.

Although the company tried to keep some customers paying by giving free e-mail accounts only with less-desirable AIM.com addresses, many subscribers defected to free offerings elsewhere.

AOL also tried to keep its proprietary software a premium offering, but that only made the transition difficult for those who dropped subscriptions but still wanted AOL's free content. They had to learn new tools, and in doing so, could more easily discover rival offerings.

Jonathan Miller, AOL's chairman and chief executive, said the strategy shift would help the unit "maintain and deepen our relationship with many more members who are likely to migrate to broadband. Providing them with their familiar AOL software and e-mail for free, over any broadband connection, will be critical to our future success."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-10-33-59





Cable/broadband up, but AOL, TV/film studios down

Time Warner Reports $1 Billion Profit for Quarter
AP

Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media company, reported a $1 billion profit for its second quarter Wednesday and said it would revamp its AOL business to offer many services such as e-mail for free.

The profit contrasted to a loss of $409 million in the same period a year ago, when the company recorded a charge for settling securities litigation. Strength in cable TV and filmed entertainment offset weakness at AOL, which lost nearly 1 million subscribers in the quarter.

The company, whose properties also include HBO, Warner Bros. and the Time Inc. magazine publisher, earned 24 cents per share in the April-June period versus a loss of 9 cents per share a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, the earnings were equivalent to 20 cents per share in the most recent period, a penny better than analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting. On a similar basis, the year-ago earnings were 16 cents per share.

Time Warner also said the AOL revamp, which had been expected, wouldn't hurt its earnings this year. Time Warner's shares rebounded 37ents, or 2.3 percent, to $16.62 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, having slumped over the past month as reports emerged about the overhaul plans.

Revenues edged up 1 percent to $10.7 billion from $10.6 billion.

On an operating basis, income before depreciation and amortization rose 7 percent to $2.7 billion as gains in cable TV, cable networks and filmed entertainment offset weaker results at AOL and magazine publishing.

In the year-ago period, the company took a $3 billion charge for legal reserves related to settling securities litigation in the wake of the sharp tumble in the company's share price following AOL's deal in 2000 to buy Time Warner.

Separately, the company also announced changes in its AOL division, saying it would make its software, e-mail and other parts of the service free to high-speed Internet users, but no longer aggressively market its dial-up subscription service.

The move is part of AOL's strategy to refocus on the booming area of online advertising and shift away from dial-up Internet access subscriptions, which are declining. By allowing AOL members to continue to use the service for free after switching to broadband, ''we will finally position AOL to take advantage of very compelling online trends,'' Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons told analysts on a conference call.

In its quarterly regulatory filing, which was also made Wednesday, the company said it expected to reach a deal to sell the Internet access services of its AOL Europe unit in the second half of this year.

Time Warner said it had completed more than half of its $20 billion share buyback program announced last year, paying about $11.7 billion since the program started to buy 14 percent of its outstanding shares.

The AOL division posted a 2 percent decline in revenues and a 4 percent fall in profits as it continued to lose dialup subscribers, offset partly by more gains in advertising. The quarter also included $15 million in charges to close one customer service center and scale back another. As of the end of the quarter, AOL's subscriber rolls fell 976,000 to 17.7 million. Time Warner said in its regulatory filing that it expects a faster rate of decline in its subscribers, as well as a corresponding decline in both subscription revenues and network costs.

Time Warner's cable TV business, the second largest in the country after Comcast Corp., recorded a 15 percent gain in revenues and a 16 percent rise in profits on more growth in premium services like highspeed Internet, digital phone and digital video. This week Time Warner Cable closed a deal to acquire, together with Comcast, the cable systems of Adelphia Communications Corp.

Time Warner said the additional cable systems would add several percentage points to its full-year growth rate in operating profits, which is now expected to be in the low double-digit percentage range, off a base of $10 billion last year -- a figure that was adjusted to reflect the sale of its book publishing division. That rate also accounts for the consolidation of Court TV and the shutdown of the struggling WB network.

The company's movie and TV studios -- Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema -- posted a 10 percent decline in revenues on lower home video sales and other factors. Profits rose 10 percent on lower costs as well as contributions from syndication sales of ''Seinfeld'' and ''Without a Trace.''

Time Inc., a major magazine publisher that puts out Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Money and many other titles, turned in a 2 percent decline in revenues and an 11 percent fall in profits.

Revenues and profits from cable TV networks both rose 9 percent, partly as a result of the consolidation of Court TV, a network it had half-owned with Liberty Media Corp.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/busi... tner=homepage





Postal Service Finds a Friend in the Internet
Katie Hafner

At a recent conference that attracted 15,000 eBay fanatics to Las Vegas, the main sponsor was a big advocate of online shopping: none other than the United States Postal Service.

“I have one message today for the entire eBay community,” said Postmaster General John E. Potter in a speech to the crowd. “We, the Postal Service, we love you. We love every buyer, every seller, every power seller. Thank you for shipping with the United States Postal Service.”

Thank you indeed.

As people send e-mail and e-cards instead of handwritten letters and greetings, as they pay more bills online and file tax returns electronically, the Postal Service has started to seem like a drab and tired reminder of the old way of doing things.

Yet the Internet is actually injecting new life — and a sorely needed source of revenue — into the Postal Service. And it is happening with packages — millions of them shipped every day, in a journey that starts with a few mouse clicks and ends a day or two or five later at a customer’s door.

In 2005, revenue from first-class mail like cards and letters, which still made up more than half the Postal Service’s total sales of $66.6 billion, dropped nearly 1 percent from 2004. But revenue from packages helped make up for much of that drop, rising 2.8 percent, to $8.6 billion, last year, as it handled nearly three billion packages.

It is impossible to say how many of these were online orders, but Postal Service officials give e-commerce a lot of credit.

“Six years ago, people were pointing at the Internet as the doom and gloom of the Postal Service, and in essence what we’ve found is the Internet has ended up being the channel that drives business for us,” said James Cochrane, manager of package services at the Postal Service.

There are other beneficiaries of online shopping: FedEx, D.H.L. and the United Parcel Service have all gotten a boost. “E-commerce has clearly benefited all the companies in the package delivery business,” said Robert Dahl, the project director of the Air Cargo Management Group, an aviation consulting firm in Seattle.

But nobody needed the new business more than the Postal Service, which now works closely with some Web giants. As early as 1998, when Amazon.com was first grappling with the challenge of volume shipping, William J. Henderson, then postmaster general, talked business with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, Mr. Henderson recalled recently.

Patty Smith, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com, said: “We love the U.S. Postal Service. They’re critical in helping us get packages out. They hit the customer every day, whether it’s with an Amazon package or not.”

Netflix, which rents DVD’s through its Web site, is so dependent on the post office that when the company needed to fill the job of chief operations officer, it turned not to a general logistics expert but to someone with an intimate knowledge of how mail gets delivered: Mr. Henderson.

Netflix ships 1.4 million movies every day, and it expects to spend some $300 million on postage this year. Mr. Henderson is “the only guy on the planet who looks at our volume of mail and thinks of it as quite small,” said Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif. “It’s a trickle of mail to him, where to anyone else it’s a torrent.”

Since arriving at Netflix, Mr. Henderson has helped the company take advantage of discounts available to companies that presort their mail, and improved efficiency at its 40 shipping plants sprinkled around the country, all of them near a mail-sorting center. Netflix plans to offer electronic delivery of movies, but Mr. Hastings said the company expected to keep mailing DVD’s for some time.

One of the biggest boosts for the Postal Service has come from eBay, the online marketplace, whose sellers ship millions of packages every year.

“Shipping is an incredibly important part of trading on eBay,” said Meg Whitman as she introduced Mr. Potter at the Las Vegas conference. “The men and women of the United States Postal Service are really the unsung heroes of the eBay community.”

According to a study conducted by Forrester Research for Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, online sales of items that are shipped are expected to rise 20 percent this year from last year, to nearly $132 billion.

EBay shippers, said Mr. Potter in a recent interview, have accounted for more than $1 billion worth of postage since the Postal Service started working with the company in 2004.

“They’re very helpful,” he said, by way of understatement.

Mr. Potter added: “We’re finding a lot of synergy between what we have to offer and what some of the companies on the Internet are trying to do.”

That synergy has given rise to some innovations for both the Postal Service and eBay. Consider the routine annoyance of going to the local post office and waiting in line to have a package weighed. Enter the $8.10 flat-rate box, introduced in late 2004 and big enough to hold five hardcover books, as well as an assortment of services for shippers on the Postal Service’s Web site.

“Shipping was obviously of some concern to our sellers who don’t have big warehouses and shipping departments,” said Chris Tsakalakis, vice president of advanced solutions at eBay. “Obviously the Postal Service knows their business inside and out, and we know our sellers fairly well.”

Roy Schott, an eBay seller in Phoenix with enough sales and endorsements from buyers to have reached the rank of “power seller,” grows positively romantic when talking about his newly streamlined interactions with the Postal Service.

“I think the post office is an absolutely fabulous partner to eBay,” Mr. Schott said. “Without the post office, satisfying customers would be much harder. I have delighted customers.”

Mr. Schott, who sells Zippo lighters and other pieces of vintage Americana, much of it to collectors overseas, does most of his shipping preparation from home.

The Postal Service and eBay provide him with boxes in a variety of sizes that bear their logos, delivered free by his mail carrier. He is an enthusiastic user of the flat-rate box, and everything else he weighs on his own postage scale.

Using a feature on the Postal Service Web site called “Click to Ship,” Mr. Schott fills out his labels online, as well as international customs forms, has the postage deducted from his account with PayPal (an eBay service), and prints everything out.

“I have tried to embrace each innovation,” said Mr. Schott, who has been an eBay seller since 1997, when shipping was far more cumbersome.

Mr. Schott said he used FedEx or U.P.S. only for unusually large items, and for those that exceed the Postal Service’s 70-pound limit.

Shoes, it turns out, are an oft-shipped commodity. So at the eBay conference in June, Mr. Potter unveiled a new shoe-size shipping box. The Postal Service has already distributed 250,000 of them.

Even FedEx depends on the Postal Service to handle some e-commerce deliveries. FedEx now has a service called FedEx SmartPost for high-volume shipping from online retailers like L. L. Bean. FedEx uses its planes and trucks to get packages to a nearby postal facility, and they are then delivered by the Postal Service, taking advantage of its expertise in handling the “last mile” of mail delivery.

“They’re most efficient walking down the sidewalk,” said Bram B. Johnson, executive vice president for FedEx Ground, referring to the Postal Service. “They go to every single address every single day. No one else does that.”

Mr. Dahl of Air Cargo Management warned that the package delivery business alone would not help the Postal Service offset shortfalls in other areas.

“If you look at the bread and butter for the Postal Service, those segments have been declining,” he said. “So obviously it’s to their benefit to look for other kinds of opportunities.”

Mr. Potter is sanguine about the other opportunities coming his way.

“If you look back at the history of Postal Service, there’s always been a threat,” Mr. Potter said. “The telegraph, the telephone, the fax machine. Any new form of communication has been viewed as, oh wow, it’s the beginning of the end. But I take great reassurance that the American public always seem to find new ways to use the mail.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/bu...rtner=homepage





Congress' Broadband Battles

Politicians are busy overhauling federal telecommunications laws for the first time since 1996, and there's zero consensus so far on controversial topics like Net neutrality, copy protection and Web censorship.

To help clear things up, CNET News.com has prepared a reader's guide to various provisions of the Communications, Consumer's Choice and Broadband Deployment Act (that's what it's called in the Senate) and the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (its name in the House).

The full House of Representatives voted on its version June 8, and on June 28, a Senate committee cleared its version for a floor vote, which could happen at any time. But because the bills are different, they'll have to go before a conference committee before a final version is negotiated.

Net neutrality
Senate: A Senate committee rejected proposed Net neutrality regulations by a tie vote, 11 to 11, on June 28. Democrats are backing extensive Internet regulations, which Republicans largely oppose. One Democratic senator, Ron Wyden, has pledged to block the bill from coming to a vote unless Net neutrality regulations are inserted. House: The House voted by 269-152 on June 8 to reject extensive Net neutrality regulations backed by Democrats and technology companies. Republicans voted against the regulations by a 20-to-1 margin. Final: Nothing yet.

Broadcast flag
Senate: A Senate committee approved on June 27 a proposal requiring audio and video broadcast flags. House: The telecommunications bill the House approved on June 8 does not include a broadcast flag provision. Final: Nothing yet.

Municipal broadband
Senate: A Senate committee approved the telecommunications bill's existing language on municipal broadband without amendments on June 27. That language says no state may prohibit its own municipalities from offering broadband services. Before a municipality may offer its own broadband service, it must publish a 30-day notice and solicit bids from the private sector. But it's not required to accept any of the bids. House: A measure approved by the full House on June 8 is not as regulatory. It merely says municipalities must not grant special regulatory treatment to broadband providers that it owns or controls. Final: Nothing yet.

Web labeling
Senate: A Senate committee approved an amendment on June 27 that requires Webmasters of sexually explicit sites to post labels or face 5-year prison terms. House: The telecommunications bill that the House approved on June 8 does not include mandatory Web labeling. Final: Nothing yet.

Net taxes
Senate: A Senate committee approved an amendment on June 28 that would prohibit state and local governments from levying Internet access taxes. House: The telecommunications bill that the House approved on June 8 does not include a prohibition on Internet access taxes. Final: Nothing yet.
http://news.com.com/Congress+broadba...32.html?tag=nl





Paris Homes Test Very High-Speed Broadband

France Télécom lays fiber to 100 homes in trial of connection with a maximum data rate of 2.5Gbps
Peter Sayer

France Télécom has laid new optical fiber connections direct to 100 homes in and around Paris to test a very high speed broadband access service, the company said Tuesday.

For €70 ($88) a month, customers participating in the fiber trial get Internet access, digital television broadcasts, and unlimited telephone calls over an optical connection with a theoretical maximum data rate of 2.5Gbps downstream, and 1.2Gbps upstream. The price includes installation and activation of equipment at the customers' homes, and the first two months' access are free.

During the trial, France Télécom also plans to offer interactive television services and videoconferencing, and will test new content-sharing and gaming services, it said.

Former monopoly operators in other countries are eyeing similar strategies. German operator Deutsche Telekom, for example, is laying fiber to the curb in front of German homes, and plans to use VDSL (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line) technology over the last few meters to deliver broadband services to the homes at up to 50Mbps. It wants the service to be exempt from regulation, on the basis that it is a new market. German parliamentarians will debate a new telecommunications law that could decide such an exemption after the summer recess.

France Télécom, meanwhile, has laid 100 kilometers of new fiber, connecting its network direct to houses and apartments in six of the 20 arrondissements (administrative districts) in Paris, and in the nearby towns of Asnières-sur-Seine, Boulogne-Billancourt, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Rueil-Malmaison and Villeneuve-la-Garenne. The service is delivered over a Giga Passive Optical Network (GPON), the company said. The GPON standards were developed by the International Telecommunication Union, beginning in 2003.

Delivering new broadband services using fiber to the home would be attractive for France Télécom, as in the market for existing consumer broadband services it is hemmed in by competitors and regulations. Using unregulated fiber would allow it, and other former monopoly operators in markets where copper infrastructure is heavily regulated, to offer something their younger competitors can't.

France Télécom owns the decades-old copper infrastructure that links most homes to the French telephone system, but is obliged to rent it at a closely regulated price to competitors wishing to offer DSL services. They, in turn, typically undercut France Télécom's retail prices to offer a better, cheaper service over its own infrastructure.

For example, France Télécom bundles Internet access at up to 18Mbps and digital television service for around €40 a month, with unlimited telephone calls costing €10 a month more. Meanwhile competitor Iliad, through its subsidiary Free, bundles Internet access, digital TV and unlimited calls to European and North American destinations for around €30 a month. On Wednesday, Free announced it will increase the maximum speed of connections to 28Mbps for users of its newest modem, with no change in price.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/...ghspeed_1.html





Colleges Warn About Networking Sites
Justin Pope

Incoming college students are hearing the usual warnings this summer about the dangers of everything from alcohol to credit card debt. But many are also getting lectured on a new topic - the risks of Internet postings, particularly on popular social networking sites such as Facebook.

From large public schools such as Western Kentucky to smaller private ones like Birmingham-Southern and Smith, colleges around the country have revamped their orientation talks to students and parents to include online behavior. Others, Susquehanna University and Washington University in St. Louis among them, have new role-playing skits on the topic that students will watch and then break into smaller groups to discuss.

Facebook, geared toward college students and boasting 7.5 million registered users, is a particular focus. But students are also hearing stories about those who came to regret postings to other online venues, from party photos on sites such as Webshots.com to comments about professors in blogs.

"The particular focus is the public nature of this," said Tracy Tyree, Susquehanna's dean of student life. "That seems to be what surprises students most. They think of it as part of their own little world, not a bigger electronic world."

The attention colleges are devoting to the topic is testimony both to the exploding popularity of online networking on campus, and to the time and energy administrators have spent dealing with the fallout when students post things that become more public than they intended.

Northwestern temporarily suspended its women's soccer program last spring after hazing photos surfaced online, while athletes at Elon University, Catholic University, Wake Forest and the University of Iowa were also disciplined or investigated. At least one school, Kent State in Ohio, temporarily banned athletes from posting profiles on Facebook, and now allows them to do so only with restricted access.

Non-athletes at numerous schools from North Carolina State to Northern Kentucky have been busted for alcohol violations based on digital photographs. Students at Penn State were punished for rushing the field at a football game. A University of Oklahoma freshman's joke in Facebook about assassinating President Bush prompted a visit from the Secret Service.

"I think they don't realize that others have" so much access, said Aaron Laushway, associate dean of students at the University of Virginia, which first incorporated the topic into orientation a year ago.

Many colleges tell students they won't actively patrol online profiles to look for evidence of wrongdoing - but they are obliged to respond to complaints (at Susquehanna, Tyree says, rival fraternities like to rat each other out by pointing out photos involving alcohol to administrators).

The real concern, they are trying to persuade students, is the unintended off-campus audience.

Unlike MySpace - a social site that many incoming freshman are already familiar with - Facebook users generally need a ".edu" e-mail address and can view complete profiles only of users at their colleges unless identified as a "friend" by the profile's owner. So most students feel confident they are addressing an audience of peers. Maybe they shouldn't be so sure.

Police are increasingly monitoring the sites. And it's not hard for prospective employers to get a ".edu" e-mail address from an alumnus or an intern, and recruiters are increasingly trolling the Internet to scope out prospective hires.

"They may be looking at these sites wondering if there's a personality fit with their company culture," said Tim Luzader, director of Purdue's center for career opportunities. A recent survey there found that a third of employers recruiting there ran job applicants' names through search engines, and 12 percent said they looked at social networking sites.

News reports of online stalkers warn there are potential personal safety issues, too. Tara Redmon, who oversees the orientation program and transition program at Western Kentucky, said one inspiration for adding the topic this year was talking to a student who had put her dorm address and room number on a posted profile, never considering the risk.

College administrators say they can't - and wouldn't want to - keep students off sites such as Facebook. Many welcome the kind of community-building the sites facilitate, and they recognize they have become an important, and usually harmless, venue for the kind of identity formation and presentation that's an important part of the college experience.

The sites actually help with one of the major goals of orientation: bonding. At Birmingham-Southern, dozens of members of the incoming class of about 350 had already formed a Class of 2010 Facebook group long before the start of school.

"That's great," said Renie Moss, the school's dean of students. "That's what should be happening, forming that camaraderie. But we're hoping to just maybe give the students a moment to pause and make sure they put out something they can be proud of."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-02-17-18-26





Tony Bennett at 80, Keeping the Flame
Stephen Holden

A quintessential Tony Bennett moment comes at the end of “It’s a Wonderful World,” the tender duet he recorded with K. D. Lang for their 2002 Louis Armstrong tribute album, “A Wonderful World.” After they swap greeting-card doggerel celebrating “trees of green,” “skies of blue” and “clouds of white,” Mr. Bennett remarks with a boyish enthusiasm, “Don’t you think Satchmo was right?”

Ms. Lang responds by crooning a final, dreamy “what a wonderful world,” whereupon her partner, speaking in the quiet, choked-up voice of a man visiting the grave of a beloved father figure, declares, “You were right, Pops.”

This gentle burst of affirmation melts your heart and reminds you that sincerity, a mode of expression that has been twisted, trampled, co-opted and corrupted in countless ways by the false intimacy of television, still exists in American popular culture. It can even salvage “trees of green,” “skies of blue” and “clouds of white” from the junk heap of pop inanity.

Mr. Bennett, who turns 80 tomorrow, has steadfastly remained the embodiment of heart in popular music. He pours it into every note he sings and every phrase he swings with a sophistication that deepens his unguarded emotional directness. In the polluted sea of irony, bad faith and grotesque attitudinizing that pop music has become, he is a rock of integrity.

That integrity has carried him through the ups, downs and ups of a musical career that now spans more than half a century. After the death of Frank Sinatra in 1998, Mr. Bennett immediately became the leading caretaker of the literate American song tradition that runs from Kern to Ellington to Rodgers. You couldn’t ask for a more reverent keeper of the flame.

Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett’s have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades. It has been said that Sinatra’s journey from skinny, starry-eyed “Frankie,” strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered his noir period in the mid-1950’s, his romantic faith gave way to a soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting “the good war” into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream to bring utopia.

Mr. Bennett is something else altogether. A native New Yorker and man of the people, he never strayed far from his working-class roots in Astoria, Queens, where he was born Anthony Benedetto. Although he came out of the same tradition of Mediterranean balladry as Sinatra, he retained the innocence and joie de vivre of his youth. Disappointment is not in his vocabulary. We don’t go to him for psychological complexity, but for refreshment and reassurance that life is good.

Believing in the power of art to ennoble ordinary lives, he sings what he feels with a rare mixture of humility and pride: humility in the face of the daunting popular-song tradition he treasures and pride that he is recognized as its custodian. Gratitude and joy, gruffness and beauty balance each other perfectly in singing that has grown more rhythmically acute with each passing year.

To attend a Tony Bennett concert is to find yourself in the presence of a performer who exudes a rough-hewn natural elegance, devoid of airs. Singing a song like “Mood Indigo,” he transmutes its sadness into the exuberance of a man who acknowledges having the blues but embraces resilience. He can still end a song like “Fly Me to the Moon” or “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” with an old-fashioned, quasi-operatic crescendo, but he makes these corny triumphal endings stick in your heart.

Late next month, Columbia Records will release “Tony Bennett: Duets/An American Classic,” which includes 18 of his old hits and favorite album cuts rerecorded with everybody from Bono (“I Wanna Be Around”) to Tim McGraw (“Cold, Cold Heart”). The album belongs to the dubious Grammy-seeking category of event records that includes “Frank Sinatra Duets” and Ray Charles’s “Genius Loves Company,” albums that aren’t about interpreting songs but are about pop royalty putting on a show of chumminess while strutting arm in arm down the red carpet.

Everyone involved in these orgies of mutual admiration pretends for the moment that there are no ethnic, generational or stylistic boundaries in music. Mr. Bennett handles his chores on “Duets” with a casual, offhand grace that goes a long way toward undercutting the ceremonial pretensions.

It is an official marker in a career that can be divided into three phases. The first is defined by four early-50’s hits: “Because of You,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Blue Velvet” and “Stranger in Paradise,” which stand as the gorgeous final flowering of the high-romantic style invented in the 40’s by Sinatra and his arranger, Axel Stordahl. Pure and throbbing, Mr. Bennett’s voice adds a semioperatic heft to Sinatra’s more intimate crooning style. Male pop singing since then has never been this unabashedly sweet.

Phase two began in 1962 with the hit “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which rejuvenated Mr. Bennett’s flagging career. Singing songs like “I Wanna Be Around,” “The Good Life” and “The Shadow of Your Smile,” the 30-something singer infused these more adult, bittersweet ballads with a current of worldly nostalgia.

At the end of the 1960’s, Mr. Bennett, like many of his peers, became an instant relic rudely shoved to the perimeter of the pop marketplace in the vindictive generational coup that thrust rock to the forefront of American pop. Leaving Columbia Records in 1972, he spent the next decade and a half in semi-exile, recording excellent but obscure albums (including two mid-70’s masterpieces with Bill Evans) for smaller labels before returning to Columbia Records in 1986.

Mr. Bennett’s resurgence under the management of his son Danny has been a double-barreled triumph of marketing and artistry: of marketing in the case of his “MTV Unplugged” record, which shrewdly cast him as an avuncular elder statesman of rock and won him the Grammy for album of the year in 1995, and of artistry in the deluge of lovingly conceived and executed tribute albums he has put out over the last decade and a half.

Those records include “Perfectly Frank” (a Sinatra tribute), “Steppin’ Out” (Fred Astaire), “On Holiday” (Billie Holiday), “Hot and Cool: Bennett Sings Ellington,” “Playin’ With My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues” (easy-listening pop-blues duets performed with stars like B. B. King, Ray Charles and Bonnie Raitt) and “Here’s to the Ladies” (his versions of the signature songs of 17 women, from Mabel Mercer and Blossom Dearie to Sarah Vaughan and Barbra Streisand).

This legacy equals Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook albums of the 50’s and 60’s, which were instrumental in codifying the American songbook. These albums honor the performers as well as the music they recorded. Listen to any or all of them, and you may find yourself nodding your head and agreeing with Mr. Bennett: “You were right, Pops.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/arts/02benn.html





For Tom Hanks, Just Another Day at the Office
Lorne Manly

SEEMINGLY every Hollywood studio and production company coveted “Mamma Mia!,” the international musical that had been planting Abba’s infectious songs inside theatergoers’ craniums since 1999. But Judy Craymer, the musical’s global producer, had rebuffed all advances — even Tom Hanks’s.

On the eve of the show’s Los Angeles premiere five years ago, Gary Goetzman, Mr. Hanks’s partner in the production company Playtone, met with Ms. Craymer at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills. Mr. Hanks’s star power wasn’t enough, though: Playtone received the same polite no as all the rest.

So the people at Playtone applied the full extent of their trademark charm. Mr. Hanks called Ms. Craymer to convey his personal interest in the project. Rita Wilson, his wife, sent her a note gushing about the production the couple had seen in London. Mr. Goetzman, the sort of Hollywood dude who’s partial to calling everyone he meets dude, kept in touch too, even paying a visit to her home in London last fall. All along, the message was low-key but clear: In Playtone’s hands the movie would be faithful to the campy, winking stage show, and the members of the main creative team behind the original would be full partners.

It wasn’t until last year that Ms. Craymer said she felt ready to go ahead with a movie, and by that time she had come to regard the folks at Playtone — who had since produced “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” — as friends. And uncommonly resourceful friends, at that: during his visit to her home, Mr. Goetzman arranged for Harrod’s to deliver her drink of choice (Champagne, Dom Perignon in this case) and his favored Belvedere vodka. When they failed to arrive, he rushed to the store — which had already closed for the night — and sweet-talked the security guards into letting him inside to find his parcel.

“I thought, I have to work with this man,” Ms. Craymer said. “No raised voice, no kicking in the door.” He and his colleagues simply got things done.

Over the last several years they have gotten a great deal done, quietly turning Playtone into one of Hollywood’s most prolific filmmaking entities. Mr. Hanks is characteristically self-deprecating about its growth. “It just happens. It’s not like I sat down and had a meeting on the Death Star with my crack advisers,” he said with a laugh, then lowered his voice into movie-villain mode: “Now, we make our move.”

On Friday the company’s animated feature “The Ant Bully” was released on 3,050 regular and Imax screens by Warner Brothers. Lined up behind it are nearly three dozen projects. The ambitious mix includes studio movies like “Mamma Mia!,” which is being developed with Ms. Craymer’s company and Universal Pictures; independent films like “Starter for Ten,” a British comedy about a working-class student; a sprawling HBO mini-series about President John Adams; and a big-screen production tentatively called “Baseball 3-D: The Imax Experience.”

Playtone has attracted top-tier talent to many of its projects. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” about a Texas Congressman who helped arm the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, stars Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman alongside Mr. Hanks, and is directed by Mike Nichols. “The Great Buck Howard,” about a young man who becomes a magician’s assistant, stars John Malkovich. And Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” is being turned into a movie directed by Spike Jonze.

All this as studios are slashing the number of actor-run production companies, many of which were little more than vanity projects, places for stars to hang their Kangol hats and pretend they were movie moguls. According to Variety, in 1998 some 60 actors, including Sylvester Stallone, Ice Cube, Jason Patric, Julia Ormond and Demi Moore, had production deals with studios; by last year that number had dwindled by half, and none of those actors still had deals. Meanwhile two of the leading companies — George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s Section 8 and Brat Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s Plan B — are dealing with aftereffects of divorces of the professional and personal kind. (Mr. Clooney recently announced that he would form a new company, Smoke House.)

Mr. Hanks was initially reluctant to be interviewed for this article. “Why would I want to — so I could see my name in the paper tomorrow?” he joked. “I get my name in the paper when I go out and buy socks. I go to Gray’s Papaya in New York and I’m on Defamer.com.” Both he and his partner said they hate to talk about themselves or their strategy. “We’re more for having fun and doing things that are important,” Mr. Goetzman said. “We just want to tell good stories.”

But associates and competitors were less reticent, identifying Playtone’s devotion to projects that reach above the lowest common denominator, as well as a light touch with its own celebrity, as reasons the company has flourished.

I THINK actors are motivated to make better movies,” said Michael Shamberg, co-chairman of Double Feature Films, who with his partner, Stacey Sher, ran Jersey Films with Danny DeVito for 13 years. “They don’t always succeed of course, but the last thing an actor-producer does is just package cheesy movies.”

That hyphenated role first emerged in 1919, when three of the silent era’s biggest stars — Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin — started United Artists, along with the director D. W. Griffith. As the studio system began to crumble in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, individual performers like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster formed companies, largely to produce their own star vehicles.

By the 1980’s the Creative Artists Agency (which represents Mr. Hanks and Playtone) and other top talent representatives made the studio production deal a routine component in a star’s career apparatus. In flush times studio executives were happy to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on an office, a development executive and some assistants if it also bought the loyalty of the star.

But it often didn’t. Actors, it turns out, go where the best parts and biggest paychecks are. And their passion projects weren’t always easy for the studios to swallow. “You have the worst of both worlds,” said Peter Guber, who cut many such deals as chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and who is now the chairman of Mandalay Entertainment Group and one of the hosts of “Sunday Morning Shootout” on AMC. “You have the ego of the actor, and they have your money.” Under the new Hollywood calculus — slowed revenue growth and increased corporate oversight — that combination no longer made sense.

But Playtone was something different: a company that had interest and experience in the nuts-and-bolts process of making successful movies. “They’re focused and precise,” said Donna Langley, president for production at Universal Pictures. “They don’t throw a lot of things up against the wall and see what sticks.”

Playtone’s roots stretch back to “Philadelphia,” the 1993 AIDS drama in which Mr. Hanks starred. He was in the midst of a career transformation, having gone from cross-dressing (in the sitcom “Bosom Buddies”) to comic run-ins with a mermaid (“Splash”), a donkey (“Bachelor Party”) and a giant danceable keyboard (“Big”).

Mr. Goetzman, who as a child played Dick Van Dyke’s son in “Divorce American Style,” had since made a name for himself in the music business, co-writing songs for Smokey Robinson and composing and producing songs for the likes of Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan and the Staple Singers. He was also learning the movie business, and was working on “Philadelphia” as executive producer. When Mr. Hanks made his writing and directing debut with “That Thing You Do!,” about a 1960’s pop band, he turned to Mr. Goetzman, not just to write some of the fictional group’s songs but to produce the movie.

After winning an Oscar for “Philadelphia,” Mr. Hanks went on to “Forrest Gump” (and another Oscar), “Apollo 13,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Green Mile” and “Cast Away,” thus cementing his position as a new generation’s Jimmy Stewart. And to capitalize on that position, in 1998 he and Mr. Goetzman formed Playtone, using the name of the record label in “That Thing You Do!” Mr. Hanks had had development deals in the past, but this time he had a real producer on his side. “Without that, there’s no reason to have an office,” Mr. Hanks said, “except to make long-distance calls and use the postage machine.”

Playtone currently has 18 employees in a Santa Monica office, a soon-to-be-renewed deal with Universal for about $2 million a year, and a record label with Sony BMG.

The first movie under the Playtone logo — “Cast Away,” based on an original idea by Mr. Hanks — took in more than $233 million at the domestic box office after its release by Fox and DreamWorks in 2000. But it was a film he never appeared in that proved the company’s true vitality.

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” Nia Vardalos’s comedy about a young Greek-American woman and her wacky extended family, found a champion in Ms. Wilson, who had seen Ms. Vardalos’s one-woman show in Los Angeles. But it was hard to raise enough money for even a small-budget version. HBO’s theatrical movie division, for example, had already passed. Then Chris Albrecht, who was then a top HBO executive and is now the cable channel’s chairman and chief executive, got a call from Mr. Goetzman. “He said, ‘I really want to do this. If I can get half of the $5 million, will you put up the rest?’ ” Mr. Albrecht recalled.

Mr. Albrecht said yes, though he hadn’t yet read the script.

It helped that HBO had worked with Mr. Hanks on the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon” (for which Mr. Hanks did much of the writing). It had also joined with Playtone and Steven Spielberg to produce “Band of Brothers,” the $120 million mini-series about a rifle company in World War II. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” went on to make $241 million at the domestic box office.

Smooth working relationships — and substantial financial returns — have persuaded many of Playtone’s first-time partners to sign up for more. HBO turned to Playtone to handle the day-to-day production of “Big Love,” its dramatic series about a polygamist family in Utah. The two companies are also collaborating on a seven-hour mini-series about John Adams, and reuniting with Mr. Spielberg for a companion series to “Band of Brothers,” about the war in the Pacific. (Development of a sitcom based on “Lloyd: What Happened,” a satirical novel about the corporate world by Stanley Bing, dragged on for several years before the project died.)

Imax, another regular Playtone collaborator, created 3-D versions of “Polar Express” and the newly released “Ant Bully,” as well as the Imax original “Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D,” and is considering a more formal alliance with Playtone to produce shorter giant-screen films. “I want to hitch my wagon to them,” said Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment.

And Picturehouse, which is releasing “Starter for Ten,” is negotiating a distribution deal with Playtone for several films a year, each budgeted at less than $15 million, Mr. Goetzman said.

“Tell good stories for a good number,” he said, “and that is what’s really going to help the movie business more than anything.”

MORE than a few hard-boiled Hollywood veterans have been beguiled by what they describe, without embarrassment, as Playtone’s penchant for niceness.

A little less than four years ago, for instance, Diana Ossana found herself, along with her longtime collaborator Larry McMurtry, in Playtone’s Santa Monica offices. Mr. Hanks had read Mr. McMurtry’s post-Civil War novel, “Boone’s Lick,” on a camping trip in Idaho; when he got home he called the author to talk about turning it into a movie.

Five minutes into a subsequent meeting, Ms. Ossana said, Mr. McMurtry — a skeptic about business dealings — knew he wanted to work with the Playtone folks. It wasn’t the passion for manual typewriters that he and Mr. Hanks share. (The actor’s collection is on view at the company’s offices.) It was how serious and intelligent the Playtone executives seemed. And, Ms. Ossana said with a laugh, “they never interrupted when we spoke.”

The Playtone principals will, however, push back when necessary. One example: Mr. Goetzman argued that the polygamy stories in “Big Love” should not overwhelm the other aspects of the main character’s life. “He was kind of a lone voice in the room,” said Mr. Albrecht, who sided with Mr. Goetzman.

But they are loyal, said Mike Nichols, who starts production on “Charlie Wilson’s War” in September: “Whatever wall would come up at the studio, they would find a way around it. Tom will say, instead of getting into a long negotiation, ‘Take it out of mine.’ Or Gary will say, ‘We’ll give in on that.’ ”

Though Mr. Hanks and Mr. Goetzman profess discomfort with discussing their creative choices, certain interests and themes are clear. American history, from the Revolutionary War to modern days, for instance, has driven many acquisitions, including the recent purchase of the movie rights to David McCullough’s best seller “1776” and David Maraniss’s Vietnam War book, “They Marched Into Sunlight.”

“The thing about Tom is that he happens to be a movie star, but he could have been the greatest history professor you’ve ever had,” said Nora Ephron, who directed him in “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

A love for music shows up in movies like “Mamma Mia!” and Jonathan Demme’s documentary “Neil Young: Heart of Gold.” And well-known children’s books to which they have aqcuired the movie rights, like “Amelia Bedelia” and “The Spider and the Fly” define another niche.

Playtone also has what some describe as a commitment to classic storytelling: “Main characters who go through some sort of awakening and become proactive in their lives,” said Cary Granat, president of the Anschutz Film Group, which through its Walden Media and Bristol Bay units is producing two movies with Playtone, “City of Ember” and “The Great Buck Howard.” In “The Ant Bully,” a young boy takes out his frustrations on an anthill. But when he’s shrunk down to the size of the ants, he must help save them from the annihilating spray of a bug-ridden exterminator.

While Playtone’s movies may strive to be about more than rollicking car chases, saw-wielding maniacs or flatulence jokes, that doesn’t mean the company sneers at commercial viability. “I don’t think they’d ever want to do a movie that didn’t do well,” said Mr. Foster of Imax.

Or as Mr. Guber said of Mr. Hanks: “He’s not going to do the movie about a proctologist from Mars. Unless it’s starring Adam Sandler.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/movies/30manl.html





‘Miami Vice’: Operatic Passions, Yet Cool in the Heat
A. O. Scott

IF there is a lesson to be extracted from the visual glories of “Miami Vice” — the painterly compositions of tropical sea and sky, the glowing, throbbing nightclub set pieces, the meticulously choreographed deployments of lethal force — it might be that love and work don’t mix. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the South Florida municipal employees whose labors preoccupy this movie (as they did its predecessor television series two decades ago), have pretty complicated jobs to begin with.

They impersonate highly skilled, business-minded drug couriers in the interests of bringing down far-reaching criminal enterprises, which means that they must be adept at handling fast boats, suitcases full of cash, small planes and large guns. Their private lives don’t take them far from the job. In his spare time Tubbs keeps company with a vice squad co-worker (Naomie Harris), while Crockett pursues a reckless affair with a drug kingpin’s wife and business associate (Gong Li), and these entanglements give the undercover work an extra jolt of intensity. By the time the final showdown with the bad guys comes around, Crockett and Tubbs have long since crossed the line that divides the professional from the personal.

But in the world of Michael Mann — a guiding creative force behind the small-screen “Miami Vice” and the writer and director of this movie version — no such line really exists. Whatever their particular jobs, his major characters tend to be men whose commitment to their professions transcends mere workaholism and becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic passion.

These men might be television producers or paid assassins, boxers or cabdrivers, cops or robbers or frontiersmen, and they might relate to one another as partners, antagonists or uneasy allies, but they all seem to share this essential trait. It is impossible to separate who they are from what they do. Crockett and Tubbs are not in it for the pension plan or the dental coverage, not for the planes and the boats and the cool sunglasses, not even for the righteous thrill of fighting crime. Their devotion to their work is irrational, risky, extravagant: you might even say crazy. They insist on doing it their own way, tolerating no interference from, for instance, some pencil-pushing F.B.I. suit (Ciaran Hinds).

In other words, they’re a lot like the detectives played by William L. Petersen in “Manhunter” and Al Pacino in “Heat,” or like Tom Cruise’s hit man in “Collateral,” to name just a few. Which is also to say that, like most of Mr. Mann’s men, they betray a telling resemblance to the man himself. Never one for compromise or restraint, this filmmaker throws himself into every frame, turning genre movies into feverish spectacles of style and feeling.

With “Miami Vice” he clearly had money to burn, and the flames are beautiful to behold. Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. “Miami Vice” is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.

I’m not exaggerating about the art. Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.

The camera, with leisurely, voluptuous sensuality, ranges from crowded cities to the open sea, from billowy thunderheads to the rippling muscles on Mr. Foxx’s back. Like “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” was shot in high-definition digital video, which Mr. Mann, in collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer Dion Beebe, treats not as a convenient substitute for film but as a medium with its own aesthetic properties and visual possibilities. The depth of focus, the intensity of colors, and the grainy, smudged finish of some of the images combine to create a look that is both vividly naturalistic and almost dreamlike.

Not that the narrative makes too many concessions to realism, apart from the occasional swatch of untranslated law-enforcement jargon (“Our op-sec has been compromised”) and the rumpled, workaday presence of the wonderful Barry Shabaka Henley as Lieutenant Castillo, the down-to-earth commanding officer played on television by Edward James Olmos.

There is a basic setup involving white-supremacist methamphetamine dealers that is a red herring and the foreshadowing of a later surprise, but before too long we’re in the familiar world of heartless Latin American drug lords (in this case a retiring fellow played by Luis Tosar) and their sadistic minions (John Ortiz, looking like an especially disgruntled graduate student). The case requires elaborate cover, buckets of money and the finest, fastest air and sea vessels the taxpayers of Miami can afford. Not really, of course. The actual operating budget for the Miami police department in fiscal year 2005 was around $100 million, a good $50 million less than the reported production costs of “Miami Vice.”

The action jumps from Paraguay to Haiti, from Colombia to Cuba (impersonated, as usual, by the Dominican Republic), where Crockett and his lady friend drop in for cocktails one evening after work. The movie’s swirl of danger, glamour and professionalism expands the central conceit of the series, which was to imagine a pair of urban cops who looked, dressed and acted like movie stars.

After the show became a hit, real movie stars would occasionally swing by for a visit. Still, the old Crockett and Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, carried a lot of baggage onto the set: divorces, dead partners, Vietnam, the N.Y.P.D. Their new, improved selves, by contrast, travel light and sleek, with no back stories to burden the picture with exposition. Except for something about Crockett’s daddy and the Allman Brothers, which explains Mr. Farrell’s mustache, if not his peculiar accent.

When the show made its debut in 1984, Mr. Johnson was a has-been — or never-quite-was — movie star, which helped give his character a grizzled, disappointed element of soulfulness. In the movie version, though, only real movie stars, who command attention simply by allowing the camera to behold them, will do. Mr. Foxx, sly, taciturn and effortlessly charismatic, certainly fulfills the requirement, as does Ms. Gong, a goddess of global cinema whose every word you hang on even when you can’t understand a single one. If there is any justice in the world, Ms. Harris (who can also be seen this summer in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”) will join their ranks before long.

Mr. Farrell, however, is a movie star only in the sense that Richard Gephardt is president of the United States. He’s always looked good on paper, and he’s picked up some endorsements along the way — from Oliver Stone, Joel Schumacher and Terrence Malick, among others — but somehow it has never quite happened. Here he squints and twitches to suggest emotion and slackens his lower lip to suggest lust, concern or deep contemplation, but despite his good looks he lacks that mysterious quality we call presence.

Mr. Mann’s script has its share of silly, overwrought lines, but they only really sound that way in Mr. Farrell’s mouth. (Did he really say, “I’m a fiend for mojitos”? ¡Dios mío!) When he’s not on screen, you don’t miss him, and when he is, you find yourself, before long, looking at someone or something else. Gong Li. A boat. A lightning bolt illuminating the humid summer sky.

Yet the flaws in “Miami Vice” are in the end part of its pulpy grandeur. It is in some ways an entirely gratuitous movie: the influence of the original series can be seen in any number of big car-chase-and-fireball crime thrillers, from “Bad Boys” to “Bad Boys II.” There isn’t much to add. But the irrelevance of this project makes Mr. Mann’s quixotic devotion to it seem perversely heroic. This was not a job that anyone needed to do, but then again no one could have done it better.

“Miami Vice” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has heavy swearing, heavy breathing and heavy gunplay.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/07/2...es/28vice.html





Entangling the Web
Timothy B. Lee

AFTER a decade of explosive growth, a revolutionary new technology transforms the American economy. It allows people to communicate and do business across great distances faster than ever before. Critics, however, contend that access is controlled by a few large corporations eager to abuse monopoly power in order to gouge consumers and crush competition. Congress responds by enacting anti-monopoly rules and authorizing regulators to enforce them.

That might sound like a happy ending for the current debate on “network neutrality,” in which Congress is being encouraged to restrain the appetites of the biggest Internet service providers. But it actually describes a similar drama from 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads, the high-tech industry of the day.

Unfortunately, the story is a cautionary tale. After President Grover Cleveland appointed Thomas M. Cooley, a railroad ally, as its first chairman, the commission quickly fell under the control of the railroads, gradually transforming the American transportation industry into a cartel. By 1935, when it was given oversight of the trucking industry, the commission was restricting competition and enabling price increases throughout virtually the entire surface transportation industry. Decades later, in 1970, a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the commission as “a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.”

It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

Economists have dubbed this process “regulatory capture,” and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970’s. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition.

Of course, incumbent broadband providers do have some limited monopoly powers, and there is cause for concern that they might abuse them. Last fall, the chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, argued that Internet giants like Google and Microsoft should begin paying for access to his “pipes”— never mind that consumers already pay AT&T for the bandwidth they use to gain access to these services. If broadband providers like AT&T were to begin blocking or degrading the content and services of companies that didn’t pay up, both consumers and the Internet would suffer.

But enforcing such a “pay to play” scheme might be more challenging than Mr. Whitacre suspects. As every music-downloading student knows, there are myriad ways to evade Internet filtering software. Moreover, an Internet service provider that denies customers access to content risks a serious consumer revolt. Unlike a one-railroad Western town, most broadband customers can choose between cable and D.S.L., and a growing number have access to wireless options as well.

With several promising new technologies on the drawing board, the market for broadband will grow only more competitive. Congress should let the marketplace develop rather than constrain it with regulation. Lawmakers should certainly be mindful of unintended consequences. The Interstate Commerce Commission’s regulations on transportation lingered for decades after their usefulness expired. Any neutrality regulations passed by Congress this year are likely to have a similarly dismal future. Choice and competition will do a better job of protecting Internet consumers than government bureaucrats ever have.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03lee.html





Black Hat: Researcher Creates Net Neutrality Test
Robert McMillan

A Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for Net neutrality.

Dan Kaminsky will share details of this technique, which will eventually be rolled into a free software tool, today at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas. The software can tell whether computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others -- dropping data that is being used in voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls or treating encrypted data as second-class, for example.

The U.S. Congress is presently debating whether to enact Net neutrality laws that would prevent this from happening. Net neutrality would force Internet service providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. to give all Internet traffic the same quality of service. Advocates of these laws say they are essential to preserving the openness that has made the Internet a success. Broadband providers say that such laws could prevent them from developing a new generation of services.

Kaminsky calls his technique "TCP-based active probing for faults." He says that the software he's developing will be similar to the Traceroute Internet utility that is used to track what path Internet traffic takes as it hops between two machines on different ends of the network.

But unlike Traceroute, Kaminsky's software will be able to make traffic appear as if it is coming from a particular carrier or is being used for a certain type of application, like VoIP. It will also be able to identify where the traffic is being dropped and could ultimately be used to finger service providers that are treating some network traffic as second-class.

At this week's Black Hat conference, Kaminsky will show how to perform a basic version of TCP-based Active Probing using currently available tools. He said in an interview yesterday that he will release his own, more sophisticated software sometime within the next six months as part of a free suite of tools called Paketto Keiretsu Version 3.

The security researcher said he is curious to see what people do with his software. "People are going to start looking [at networks] and who knows what they are going to find," he said.

Already, a handful of carriers have tried blocking certain types of Internet services. In March 2005, the Federal Communications Commission fined Madison River Communications Corp. $15,000 for blocking Vonage Holdings Corp.'s VoIP service. Since then, the FCC has changed its broadband carrier requirements, and it's unclear whether it would again issue a similar fine.

Kaminsky said he believes that Net neutrality will eventually become law and that the type of software he is developing will help keep the carriers honest. "If you're going to enforce by law that networks be neutral, the question becomes, 'How do you test for this?'" he said. "I'm going to make sure that the tools are going to be in place."

Kaminsky plans to post information on TCP-based active probing for faults at www.doxpara.com.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...&taxonomyId=13





Hotter than shoes

Technology Is a Girl's Best Friend: Study

Diamonds are no longer a girl's best friend, according to a new U.S. study that found three of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace.

The survey, commissioned by cable television's Oxygen Network that is owned and operated by women, found the technology gender gap has virtually closed with the majority of women snapping up new technology and using it easily.

Women were found on average to own 6.6 technology devices while men own 6.9, and four out of every five women felt comfortable using technology with 46 percent doing their own computer trouble-shooting.

``People make the assumption that women are not as advanced as men when it comes to technology and I was surprised at the parity men and women now have in terms of technology,'' Geraldine Laybourne, chairman and chief executive of Oxygen Network, told Reuters.

The Girls Gone Wired survey of 1,400 women and 700 men aged 15 to 49, which was conducted by market researcher TRU, found that given the choice, women would opt for tech items rather than luxury items like jewelry or vacations.

The study found 77 percent of women surveyed would prefer a new plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace and 56 percent would opt for a new plasma TV over a weekend vacation in Florida.

Even shoes lost out. The study found 86 percent would prefer a new digital video camera to a pair of designer shoes.

The study found over the next five years women see themselves increasing their activities in six tech areas: digital cameras, cell phones, e-mail, camera phones, text messaging and instant messaging.

Laybourne said this increasing use of technology among women was expected to continue -- with advertisers needing to ensure they addressed women's increased usage and knowledge.

``Women don't feel like they have been given credit for what they know and they are condescended to,'' Laybourne said.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...echnology.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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