[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Fuck that. I am keeping them up." – Alex Phillips


"It's not 1692, it's 2008. Santa Fe needs to embrace this technology, it's not going away." – Ron Trujillo



































May 24th, 2008




Danish Copyright Censorship Proposal Revealed
Ben Jones

In February a Danish court forced ISP Tele2 to block its subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay, following a similar order late last year to block allofmp3.com. A new proposal before the Danish government would mean that such actions would be quick and easy to do, without the need for a single court hearing.

Back in February we reported on the IFPI forcing, via the Danish courts, an ISP to block its subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. This case was the third occasion where an industry lobby group had flexed its muscles to block a website, a similar measure was used to block allofmp3.com and mp3sparks.com. However, the legality of these actions under European law, specifically the Infosoc directive, is dubious at best.

Nevertheless, two of the largest opposition parties in Danish parliament think it is a good idea – despite the ineffectiveness of the block – to streamline the process, making it quicker and easier to do. A proposal (Danish) before the government seems to create a tribunal to handle these cases.

Whereas in the past cases have involved a rights holder suing an ISP and forcing a block through the courts, this proposal creates a tribunal to do it instead. This tribunal will apparently consist of members appointed by government ministers, who will then rule on blocks with no judicial oversight. Any sites blocked would have to go through the courts to appeal and the site would remain blocked unless and until successful.

If that was not bad enough, there is also talk of a secretariat that would handle ’simple’ cases, so the appointed tribunal would not even have to hear the majority of cases. Cases would be put to the tribunal by copyright holders that feel they have had their rights infringed by the target site. As with the court cases, though, it’s extremely unlikely that the accused site will be invited or even made aware of any such proceedings, and allowed to state their case.

“This is a wet dream for organizations like IFPI,” is the view of Ole Husgaard, chairman of the Danish Pirate Party. “This isn’t even a law proposal, so there is not all the work usually done in our parliament when passing laws; this can be passed in a month or two. If it is, I would guess that we will have at least 2000 sites on the blocking list within 12 months - without a single court case having been decided, if any get started at all.”

He’s not alone in his pessimism. “It’s blatant censorship of course.” is the opinion of The Pirate Bay’s brokep. “It’s not in the interest of the citizens, so I hope the government understands that if they go against the people like that, they should be replaced. It is also not a huge step before they start censoring other stuff - let’s say political parties that have thoughts about changing the current government.”

As analysis of the Pirate Bay block has found it contrary to EU laws, it’s curious as to the motivation behind this proposal. The only rational one would be bribery – either legal or not – and so the question we are forced to ask is, are Danish politicians cheaper to buy than those in New York?
http://torrentfreak.com/danish-copyr...oposal-080517/





US Plots "Pirate Bay Killer" Trade Agreement
kdawson

An anonymous reader sends word that Wikileaks has revealed that the United States is plotting a 'Pirate Bay killing' multi-lateral trade agreement, called 'ACTA,' with the EU, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland and New Zealand.

"The proposal includes clauses designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of copyrighted information exchange on the Internet, which would also affect transparency sites such as Wikileaks. The Wikileaks document details provisions that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. If adopted, the treaty would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools."
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/23/1251202





Linking to Movies Leads to $4 Million in Fines
Jacqui Cheng

Hollywood has been granted another victory in its war against piracy, this time at the expense of two linking sites that the Motion Picture Association of America believes profited from enabling copyright infringement. Both ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net have been hit with multimillion dollar judgments recently for copyright infringement of various movies and TV shows.

Even though ShowStash and Cinematube didn't host any of these files, both were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, according to the judges' opinions, because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows. Aside from monetary damages, both sites are now prohibited from engaging in further activity that would infringe upon the studios' work.

The damages totaled $2.7 million for ShowStash and $1.3 million for Cinematube, neither of which were particularly well-known to the general Internet community. The MPAA doesn't seem to care much that it gives free publicity to these tiny sites when it makes announcements of its litigation plans, however. The organization apparently hopes that others will merely feel threatened by the prospect of paying out millions of dollars and shut down voluntarily.

"Our goal is to stop this kind of blatant and illegal activity," MPAA executive VP John Malcolm said in a statement. "These judgments indicate that the studios will not hesitate to vigorously pursue litigation against this type of site."

The MPAA announced the two judgments just two weeks after the organization was awarded $110 million in damages from TorrentSpy. The MPAA hailed the decision as a clear victory for the movie studios that served as the icing on the cake after TorrentSpy's announcement that it would shut down for good on March 24.

With two more (albeit relatively small) victories under its belt, the MPAA is even more confident in its stance against sites that merely link to potentially copyrighted material. It wouldn't be surprising to see ShowStash and Cinematube eventually mirror TorrentSpy's decision to shut down, too.

It's not uncommon to find illegal movies being hosted on servers outside the US, which is why sites based in the US have not hesitated to merely tell users how to get to them. The increase in lawsuits against sites that point to illegal movies, however, may push more of them to move operations overseas too in order to skirt further litigation.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-in-fines.html






RIAA Victorious: Guilty Sentence for Online Music Pirate
Michael Bordash

The beginning of the end of the wild west.

Barry Gitarts, 25, was found guilty of criminal copyright infringement on Thursday May 22, 2008, a violation of the NET ACT. Based in Brooklyn, NY, he was part of the APC ("Apocalypse Production Crew"), a piracy group responsible for distributing downloads of pre-release movies, music, software and games.

This is a landmark case as Mr Girarts is the first accused pirate to try his case in front of a jury, according to the RIAA. The trial was held for only three days in Alexandria, Virginia. U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg summed up the result quite simply: "Music piracy is stealing and, unless you want to end up in a federal prison, don't do it."

This trial was a result of the U.S. Justice Departments international effort "Operation Fastlink" that targeted violators of the NET ACT. This act made it a crime to infringe on copyrights for financial gain, illegally distribute $1,000 or more in music within a 6-month period and to distribute any pre-release content. Overall, the operation netted 200 search warrants in 15 countries.

Gitarts faces a up to five years in prison and will be sentences on August 8th 2008.
http://www.internetdj.com/article.php?storyid=996





FCC Hearing Speakers Lash Out at Comcast

The FCC hearing brought together a number of disparate interest groups and dozens of speakers condemning Comcast for infringing upon the neutrality of the Internet.

Comcast has been accused of interfering with connections on users who send large personal files through the Internet, particularly digital video and audio music using BitTorrent peer-to-peer filesharing software.
Greg Kell

The FCC public hearing, in a session hosted by Stanford Law School, focused on its fact finding mission on broadband network management practices. Several large Internet service providers attended, including Comcast Communications, AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon.

Several free Internet access advocates and representatives of radio stations were also present before the Federal Communications Commission.

Comcast, the nation's second-largest ISP, has been accused of interfering with connections on users who send large personal files through the Internet, particularly digital video and audio music using BitTorrent peer-to-peer filesharing software.

This practice was condemned by a number of interest groups and dozens of speakers who accuse the Internet Service Provider of infringing upon the neutrality of the Internet.

Comcast has claimed that users who send large audio and video files absorbs bandwidth which interferes with users who send only email and other lightweight data forms. The company also has claimed that it is graciously helping to put a stop to online illegal pirating.

However, most speakers didn't see it that way. Most speakers argued that Comcast service practices on frequent users of BitTorrent cause inbound connections to disconnect during midstream from computers.

Comcast installed new software or equipment on its networks that began selectively interfering with some of its customers' TCP/IP connections around May 2007. The most widely discussed interference was with certain BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing communications, but other protocols have also been affected.

"No one should be messing with the openness of the Internet," Commissioner Michael Copps said. "It's going to be a major fight with powerful forces on the other side."

Copps said he favors "an enforceable principle of non-discriminatory behavior to our Internet policy statement. This won't be easy, but that's exactly why we need a for-sure enforcement process ... to sift through the complaints... and over time establish a precedent."

"I think what the commission is focused on is 'What are the appropriate policies from a consumer perspective, making sure that consumers continue to have access to all the information that's available over the Internet.' And I think that we'll continue to end up focusing on that underlying principal, which harkens back to the networking principles we adopted back in 2005," FCC Chairman Martin said.

"I just want to make sure that we did try to make this as open and transparent as possible," he said.

There is no timetable for FCC action at this time. The commission will remain in fact-finding mode for at least several months.
Comcast has been accused of interfering with connections on users who send large personal files through the Internet, particularly digital video and audio music using BitTorrent peer-to-peer filesharing software.
http://www.halflifesource.com/fcc_he...rticle2395.htm





Comcast Invests in P2P Video-Delivery Startup

Comcast Corp., which is under federal investigation for blocking some file-sharing traffic, is investing in a startup that delivers high-definition video using file-sharing techniques.

Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are "friendly" to Internet service providers.

Comcast, the country's second largest Internet service provider, hampers some file-sharing traffic by its subscribers in an attempt to keep the traffic from slowing down Web surfing by other subscribers. Complaints by consumer groups and legal scholars that the company is discriminating against particular software have led to an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

Comcast has said that it will stop targeting specific types of traffic by the end of the year. It has also reached out to file-sharing companies to try to develop mutually acceptable techniques.

Tony Werner, Comcast's chief technology officer, said Monday that Comcast is "working hard" with technology companies and the Internet Engineering Task Force to improve the efficiency of peer-to-peer file sharing.

File-sharing applications like BitTorrent are frequently used to spread pirated movies and music. But GridNetworks and a dozen other startups are instead developing the technology as a way to deliver legal files, like rented high-definition movies, cheaply over the Internet.

In October, GridNetworks raised $9.5 million in capital, with Cisco Systems Inc. as one of the investors.

The Comcast deal was announced at the Cable Show in New Orleans, hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080519/...UWTFL9VGas0NUE





Time Warner, Cable Unit Unveil Separation Details
Merissa Marr

Time Warner Inc. (TWX) unveiled details of its planned spinoff of Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC), a step that will transform the media conglomerate into one more focused on movies, TV programming and magazines.

As part of the separation - expected to take place in the fourth quarter - Time Warner is set to reap a $9.25 billion windfall from a special $10.27-a-share dividend to be paid by the cable company.

Time Warner Cable's board cleared the terms of the deal at a meeting Tuesday. Time Warner, whose board gave its stamp of approval Thursday, plans to distribute its stake in the cable company to its investors. The separation is the first big move by Time Warner's new chief executive, Jeff Bewkes, who has been under pressure to kick-start the company's stock price. Not only will it make Time Warner more content-focused, it will free up management to find a long-term solution for the company's AOL Internet unit.

With the split, Time Warner is losing a major generator of cash. But cutting loose the cable company has big benefits. It allows Time Warner to slash its $34.6 billion debt load, which includes cable debt, by two-thirds. Time Warner Cable has net debt of $13 billion and will borrow to pay the $10.9 billion dividend. Time Warner could use its windfall to cut its debt further, buy back shares or make an investment.

As an independent company, Time Warner Cable will be free to chart its own course in a market where it faces competition from phone and satellite-TV companies. Its freedom also could make acquisitions easier, at least in the long run.

Wednesday, Bewkes said, "After the transaction, each company will have greater strategic, financial and operational flexibility and will be better positioned to compete." He added, "Separating the two companies also will help their management teams focus on realizing the full potential of the respective businesses and will provide investors with greater choice in how they own this portfolio of assets."

Time Warner Cable will start life as a stand-alone company with significant debt - courtesy of the special dividend. Its ratio of debt to earnings, a key indicator in the cable industry, will rise to around 3.75 times from around 2.3 times, according to people familiar with the situation.

Several analysts had anticipated a one-time dividend as part of the separation, but of a lower sum. In a research report last month, Citigroup analyst Jason Bazinet predicted a $6-a-share dividend, which implied a debt ratio within the 3.25 range the company has been targeting. Time Warner Cable likely will tap its strong cash flow to pare its debt.

The mechanics of the parting are complicated by several factors, including Time Warner's complex ownership of Time Warner Cable. Time Warner is also eager to complete a separation in a tax-efficient way.

The split will take place in three steps. The first involves unwinding a related holding company called New York Group, which will increase Time Warner's cable stake to 85% from 84%.

Next, Time Warner Cable will pay the dividend, effectively shifting debt onto its balance sheet. Time Warner then will allocate its Time Warner Cable stake to its shareholders "in a tax-efficient manner" - likely through a stock dividend or some other means. "The exact form of the distribution will be determined shortly before the closing of the transaction, based on market conditions," the company said Wednesday.

In addition, Time Warner has agreed to provide a commitment for a supplemental two-year term loan of up to $3.5 billion in case the cable company can't refinance a two-year $9 billion loan Time Warner Cable is taking out to pay the lion's share of the dividend.

Shares of Time Warner closed Tuesday at $16.15 and rose to $17.01 in recent premarket activity. Time Warner Cable shares closed at $30.22 and saw no premarket trading.

(Donna Kardos of Dow Jones Newswires contributed to this report.)
http://www.lloyds.com/CmsPhoenix/Dow...aspx?id=392254





Cable Hedges its Wireless Bets
Marguerite Reardon

It's mobile or bust for cable operators that seem to be trying anything and everything to get into the wireless market.

One of the biggest shifts over the next decade in the cable market is likely to be a move toward wireless services. As cable operators face stiff competition from phone companies, cable operators large and small are looking for ways to take their services mobile.

Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., talked up his company's investment in a new joint venture to blanket the country with 4G, or fourth-generation, wireless at the industry's trade show in New Orleans this week.

Earlier this month, Comcast and Time Warner joined forces with Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to form a company that will build the next-generation wireless network using a technology called WiMax. Comcast is fronting $1.05 billion as part of the deal, and Time Warner Cable is putting in $500 million to help make the new network a reality.

Roberts said during his keynote speech Sunday that he sees the network as a way to open up new applications and devices for the company.

But Comcast and Time Warner aren't the only cable operators getting into the wireless game. Cablevision recently announced it will expand its Wi-Fi hot-spot service to create an outdoor Wi-Fi network throughout its existing cable footprint. The idea is to extend its Optimum broadband service to customers on the go.

So why are cable companies, which have no history of successfully doing anything in wireless, so hot to get into the market? The answer is simple. They have to if they want to compete with AT&T and Verizon Communications.

The phone companies have introduced TV service and faster, fiber-based broadband services into cable's territories. Services like Verizon's Fios are gaining market share. And even though the phone companies haven't integrated wireless into their offering yet, it's coming.

But with the cell phone market already 84 percent penetrated--according to the CTIA--the cable industry recognizes it needs to offer a new kind of wireless service. As wireless networks get faster, consumers are taking many of their broadband applications, like e-mail, Web surfing, and social networking, on the go.

"The delineation between wireline and wireless services is starting to blur," said Mike Roudi, group vice president of wireless services for Time Warner Cable. "And we think about mobility as a long-term opportunity that occurs when new networks are built that can deliver true broadband speeds wirelessly."

Roudi said this is why Time Warner has joined Google and Intel as investors in the new Clearwire.

Comcast's head of wireless, Tom Nagel, echoed Roudi's comments.

"Customers are already showing us that mobility and wireless are important," Nagel said. "And with wireless we can let them enjoy our products inside and outside the home with ubiquitous connectivity to a high-speed network."

Cablevision is taking a slightly different route. The company is using Wi-Fi to extend its existing broadband network to more customers, a smart choice considering the number of Wi-Fi devices already in the market. Not only do most laptops come with Wi-Fi embedded in them, many cell phones are also getting Wi-Fi. In fact, in the next three years some 1.2 billion Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets will be in the market, according to IDC.

"As more and more devices become Wi-Fi enabled, whether they be laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys, or other portable devices, we believe we can create a compelling broadband wireless network throughout our footprint for our Optimum Online high-speed data service customers," Tom Rutledge, Cablevision's COO, said during the company's conference call with investors this month.

Cablevision will build the new network in the same footprint as its existing cable infrastructure. And the network, which will take two years to deploy, will deliver 1.5 megabits per second. The service will be an extension of it broadband service and will be offered free of charge.

Cablevision already has Wi-Fi hot spots up and running in 15 highly trafficked areas, such as tourist destinations. For example, Cablevision's Wi-Fi is available on all three Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Ferry boats that connect Long Island, N.Y., to Bridgeport, Conn., a popular summertime route for many Optimum Online customers.

Risky business for cable

While it makes sense for cable operators to get into the wireless market, there's no guarantee that any of the plans that have been announced will actually work. In 2005, Comcast and Time Warner, along with Cox Communications and Advance/Newhouse Communications, formed a joint venture with Sprint Nextel called Pivot that was supposed to develop wireless services that the cable operators could bundle and resell to their customers. Two and a half years later, Comcast and Time Warner have pulled out of the partnership and Pivot is essentially dead.

Executives at the cable companies say the new Clearwire deal is different from the Pivot relationship.

"When we did Pivot it was a co-marketing arrangement with Sprint," Time Warner's Roudi said. "From a retail perspective, Time Warner was selling a Sprint-branded service and device. But with Clearwire, we will control the customer relationship including the service and phones. We will handle pricing, marketing, customer care, and billing."

Comcast and Time Warner believe that they each learned a great deal from the Pivot experience. And the companies believe they won't make the same mistakes in the new Clearwire partnership.

But many of the same challenges that the companies faced before haven't gone away. For instance, Comcast and Time Warner still need to figure out how to integrate their existing services and platforms into a wireless network. And while they may be marketing and selling the service themselves, technological integrations are still difficult when working with a partner that controls the network.

Even AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which essentially own their wireless networks, are still trying to figure out how to integrate their services.

Cable's "plan C"

But if the Sprint Nextel/Clearwire investment doesn't pan out, Comcast and Time Warner still have another shot at the wireless market with 20 megahertz of spectrum they acquired from the Federal Communications Commission's Advanced Wireless Spectrum auction held in 2006. Through a consortium called SpectrumCo., Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable operators spent $2.37 billion on a large swath of wireless spectrum that covers about 99 percent of the country.

Comcast's hiring last month of Dave Williams, the former CTO of Telefonica O2 Europe and former vice president of strategic planning at Cingular Wireless, prompted speculation that the company may be considering building its own wireless network or even buying a wireless company. But so far the company remains mum on its plans for the spectrum.

"Wireless spectrum is a valuable commodity," said Comcast's Nagel. "It's like holding the rights to oil or water. It will always have value. And it gives us flexibility for the future. We don't have any specific plans now, but over time we'll understand how to best use or monetize the spectrum."

But as cable companies, like Comcast, look to invest in new wireless networks, they might be overlooking a big opportunity. In cities, such as Philadelphia and New Orleans, citywide Wi-Fi networks built by EarthLink are being shut down as the Internet service provider abandons the network service market.

Comcast, which serves Philadelphia, and Cox Communications, which serves New Orleans, could easily buy these assets for a fraction of what EarthLink paid to install them. (EarthLink spent $20 million to build Philadelphia's network, which is 80 percent complete.)

For example, Comcast could test new wireless services using the existing network. It could see how customers use wireless broadband services outside their home, and then apply the lessons learned to services it plans to develop for the Clearwire WiMax network.

But so far, Comcast has not shown any interest in the network. The reason is likely political. Comcast was among the most vocal opponents to the Philadelphia Wi-Fi network. So justifying the purchase of these assets might be too difficult to spin.

But as other citywide Wi-Fi networks falter, cable operators in different parts of the country might consider picking up the assets. According to The Wall Street Journal, MetroFi, a Wi-Fi service provider, is also struggling. It has networks in Portland, Ore.; Aurora, Ill.; San Jose, Calif.; and other Silicon Valley towns.

"These citywide Wi-Fi networks could let cable companies put their toe in the water," said Craig Settles, an independent consultant specializing in municipal Wi-Fi. "Wi-Fi networks in many cities have failed because of the business models, not because of the technology. Cable companies already have the customer base and the services that could be rolled out onto these networks. So it makes sense."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-994...?tag=ndfd.lede





Group Wants Wi-Fi Banned from Public Buildings

A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.

Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.

"I get chest pain and it doesn't go away right away," he said.

Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The city attorney is now checking to see if putting up Wi-Fi could be considered discrimination.

But City Councilor Ron Trujillo says the areas are already saturated with wireless Internet.

"It's not 1692, it's 2008. Santa Fe needs to embrace this technology, it's not going away," Trujillo said.

The city attorney hopes to have a legal recommendation by the end of the month.
http://kob.com/article/stories/S451152.shtml?cat=517





MetroFi Shutting Down WiFi Service in Bay Area Cities
Bay Area News Group

Wireless Internet service provider MetroFi, the company providing much-touted citywide service, is logging out of the business. The Mountain View-based company said it's discontinuing its free WiFi service because the business model of online advertising as its primary income has not worked out financially. It provides WiFi service to Foster City, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Concord, Portland, Ore., and Naperville, Ill. MetroFi notified the cities by letter May 13, offering to sell its equipment so the cities could assume control of the systems, look for someone to buy each system or dismantle the equipment spread around the cities - including streetlight-mounted antennas that transmit a wireless signal. "We are hoping to hear back from these cities no later than the end of this month," said Lucie Poulicakos, MetroFi's vice president of operations. The company is considering bankruptcy and other options, she added.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9343626





Cable Prices Keep Rising; Customers Keep Paying
Matt Richtel

Americans discouraged by higher gas prices and airline fares may decide to spend more vacation time at home, perhaps watching television.

But that, too, will cost them more than ever.

Cable prices have risen 77 percent since 1996, roughly double the rate of inflation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month.

Cable customers, who typically pay at least $60 a month, watch only a fraction of what they pay for — on average, a mere 13 percent of the 118 channels available to them. And the number of subscribers keeps growing.

The resiliency of cable is all the more remarkable because the Internet was supposed to change all things digital. Technology has led to more choices and lower prices for news and music as well as cellphone and landline minutes — not to mention computers, cameras, music players and phones themselves.

Yet here is a rare instance where Silicon Valley has failed to break a traditional media juggernaut. And not for lack of trying.

Technology companies keep insisting they will provide new low-cost ways to get video into the home, but so far their efforts have created more black boxes to stash under the TV, not real competition for cable that could bring prices down.

“A couple of years ago, there was a thesis that we were at the twilight of Comcast as the gatekeeper,” said Craig Moffett, a cable industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “That thesis still titillates some. But technologically and economically, it’s probably not going to happen.”

So why hasn’t technology had a bigger impact? One answer is the alliance between cable companies and Hollywood producers of content to sell channels in bundles, rather than letting consumers pay only for the channels they want.

The producers of cable television content share $15 billion to $20 billion a year in fees from cable subscribers, roughly equal to the $20 billion they receive in advertising revenue, Mr. Moffett said.

Without those fees, the cable companies say, prices would go up.

“If each channel depended on individual consumers electing to pay individually for it, this would slash potential viewership and seriously hurt the ability of most channels to attract their current level of advertising dollars,” said Jenni Moyer, a spokeswoman for Comcast. “Lost ad revenue would have to be replaced by higher license fees.”

The industry says the digital era has brought its customers better image quality, more on-demand services and solid value through packages that combine cable, phone and Internet service. It also says consumers are actually getting more viewing value for their dollar, at least relative to inflation. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association says that from 1998 to 2006, the price consumers paid for each viewing hour was essentially flat.

The chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission, Gregory S. Crawford, disagrees, saying the industry is not factoring in the real cost of the programming that subscribers are watching. By his analysis, the increase has been around 50 percent from 1997 to 2005.

The F.C.C. and some politicians have been in a pitched battled with the cable industry, trying to get it voluntarily to offer so-called à la carte pricing. But cable companies insist that this is not economically feasible.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the F.C.C., said in an interview that since 1996, when Congress increased competition in telecommunications, prices have dropped for many other services.

“We’ve seen the opposite occur in the cable industry,” he said. “The dramatic increases in pricing we’ve seen are one of the most troubling issues from a consumer point of view.”

In 2007, average monthly revenue for each Cablevision subscriber was $75, up from $65 in 2005, according to SNL Kagan, a research company. At Time Warner it was $64, up from $54.50.

The cable industry has never felt the pricing pressures the music industry is feeling. The most obvious reason is that Internet speeds have not been fast enough to permit easy downloading of movies and other video material.

That is changing, though. People are viewing millions of videos online each month — albeit mostly short video clips, and not Hollywood movies. At the same time, the use of file-sharing tools like BitTorrent to download illegally popular movies and television shows is growing.

Another factor helping the cable industry is the difficulty of getting video from the computer onto the TV. That may not be a deterrent for those who have grown accustomed to watching movies on their laptop. But the last thing many consumers want to do is hook up wires or program a new box before sitting back to relax and watch TV.

In that sense, the lure of cable appears to have a sociological component. In a stress-filled life, cable television is easy to use.

“I work eight hours a day facing a computer. When I come home, the last thing I want to do is mess with another computer,” said Eric Yu, 24, a college student in San Francisco who pays around $80 a month for cable.

Mr. Yu said he watches only a handful of channels, including some in high definition like National Geographic. But to get them, he has to pay for a premium package. “I just pay the bill and try to forget about it,” he said. “It lessens the pain.”

Evelyn Tan, 22, a friend of Mr. Yu, takes a different approach. She pays Comcast $33 a month for Internet access and does not get cable television — but she does watch TV programming.

In fact, she watches ABC shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Gray’s Anatomy,” which are free on the Web. When she wants to watch shows or movies that are not readily available online, she says she easily pirates them. “I would not pay for cable TV at all,” she said.

Broadcast networks like ABC, NBC and Fox are starting to put their programming on the Internet. But most cable channels do not because they depend on subscriber revenue.

Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney-ABC Television Group, said the industry was trying to prepare for an era in which more video is watched on computers.

“It wasn’t lost on us what happened to the music industry,” Mr. Cheng said. Even though the audience is growing for ABC shows online, he said, this is supplementing, rather than undercutting, the television audience.

Enter Silicon Valley. It is trying to marry the content people want with their preferred setting for viewing it. There is a host of new set-top boxes and consumer devices aimed at bringing video and other content from the Internet to the TV.

Apple’s iTunes store offers 20,000 episodes of some 800 shows at typically $1.99 or $2.99 an episode, effectively creating an à la carte option. But consumers must either watch on their computers, wire the computer to the television or get an Apple TV.

This week Roku, a Silicon Valley start-up, began selling a $99 box that streams movies from Netflix straight to the TV. And this summer Hewlett-Packard is expected to introduce a device called the MediaSmart Connect, a sleek box connecting computer and TV that lets users watch Internet videos as well as rent or buy some 6,000 movies through CinemaNow, an H.P. partner.

But the box will also demonstrate how much of a gap still separates the computer screen and the TV screen.

Carlos Montalvo, vice president for marketing of connected entertainment at H.P., said the MediaSmart Connect and similar devices would not offer much of the programming provided over cable, or even programming that content companies allow to be delivered over the Internet to computers. The reason, he said, is that this content is licensed to be shown only on a computer, not delivered via computer to a TV.

“Simply because the technology is there doesn’t mean that the large opus of content — both television and movies — that is available on the two-foot screen can move automatically to the large-screen TV,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/te...y/24cable.html





Bell Canada Opens Online Video Store as P2P Debate Rages On
Nate Anderson

P2P competition?

Sometimes I get the itch to work in PR. No, it doesn't happen much, but once in a while I see the sort of inexplicable corporate decision that makes me long to have been in the room when it was being discussed. Case in point: yesterday's announcement from Bell Canada that the telecom behemoth was officially launching its downloadable video store... just as Bell is caught up in a government inquiry into its traffic-shaping practices. It's hard to imagine a time at which touting your own downloadable video store makes less sense than when you're on the hot seat for throttling all P2P traffic, much of which competes with Bell to offer video (including entirely legal BitTorrent downloads from the CBC). Yes, you could look worse as a company, but puppies and shotguns would probably need to be involved.

Calling all wormherders

Bell Canada's announcement wasn't a complete surprise, as the company has had the store in beta for a year now. But officially launching the store now poses unavoidable comparisons to the FCC investigation of Comcast in the US, where a company called Vuze accused the cable giant of throttling its legal P2P video sales while at the same time just happening to compete with Vuze by offering unthrottled video-on-demand through its cable system.

Canada's CRTC is currently investigating Bell for the throttling it recently rolled out across its entire data network, including bandwidth sold on a wholesale basis to smaller ISPs. Although the regulator declined to make the company change its ways while the hearing is in progress, the recently-released list of pointed questions for Bell shows that the CRTC is committed to truly understanding the issue, and it wants to see hard data to back up Bell's decisions.

Launching a video store in such a climate is guaranteed to bring out the (justified or not) conspiracy theories. In fact, only a day after the announcement, those theories are running rampant round the 'Net. The Globe & Mail's Jack Kapica even posted a roundup of them last night on his blog, and he called the Canadian reaction to the news "loud and immediate."

No one appears to believe that Bell will filter or degrade its own video traffic, and that has led to charges of unfair behavior. As Kapica put it, "There are restraint-of-trade laws that are created to stop this kind of nonsense. And if those laws can't stop this kind of behavior, there is an army of people out there who are pushing hard to make such practices illegal... With the opening of the Bell Video Store, Bell has opened a can of worms that is net neutrality in Canada. And those worms can't be herded back into the can easily."

"Several of us have Macs at home..."

The store itself is roughly what you would expect, with a small selection of high-profile movies from Paramount and other "major Hollywood studios" like Eros Entertainment (which, surprisingly, does not produce porn films).

Of course, it doesn't work with Macs or Linux machines because the site uses Windows Media DRM. Not even the creators of the store like this solution; on the FAQ page, in answer to the inevitable question about Mac compatibility, the answer begins, "First off, several of us have Macs at home and this is just as frustrating for us..." It then goes on a bit plaintively, "We're hoping that one day Microsoft, Apple, the content owners and video sites like ours will have a big group hug and we can all share content.... Please share any ideas on how we can get MAC [sic] and PC to play nice together."

The store does work with XP or Vista, and the content can be streamed to media extender like the Xbox 360 or downloaded to a handful of portable devices from Archos. iPods are not covered; neither, apparently, are Zunes, so this should be a really useful feature for most users.

The move does give Canadians one more option when it comes to grabbing online video content, since iTunes in Canada doesn't yet offer movies. But given the restrictions on the service and the fact that it is launching with a mere 1,500 pieces of content (much of this television shows, concerts, and the like), it's no great leap forward, and it seems to have launched at just the right moment to tap into a wave of anti-Bell, pro-net neutrality sentiment.

We've already noted that the P2P throttling issue is leading to a "net neutrality showdown" in Canada, so it's simply amazing to watch as Bell takes one of the guns from its holster, points it right at the tip of its boot, and blasts away. Limping into a gunfight with a fraction of your available ammo isn't a strategy for victory, but we'll have to wait another couple of months to see whether the move will incense regulators in the same way it has the blogosphere.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-rages-on.html





Banks’ Terms Imperil Deal to Buy Out Bell Canada
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced

The $51.8 billion takeover of Bell Canada, the largest leveraged buyout ever proposed, appeared to be in trouble over the weekend as the Wall Street banks that committed to finance the deal sought to renegotiate the lending terms, people on both sides of the transaction said on Sunday.

The deal for Bell Canada, Canada’s largest telecommunications company, is the latest buyout to run into trouble since the credit market started tightening last summer. Over the two prior years, banks had rushed to finance giant private equity deals, reaping lucrative fees along the way.

But those banks now find themselves largely unable to resell the debt, leaving them staring at billions of dollars in potential losses because many have already suffered from losses tied to subprime mortgages.

As a result, they have sought to back away from their financing commitments again and again, even as they risk angering buyout firms, some of their largest clients.

More than a dozen buyouts over the last year have been revised or have collapsed, including those for the student lender Sallie Mae, the equipment operator United Rentals and the mortgage provider PHH.

Just last week, Clear Channel Communications agreed to lower its takeover price to $18 billion as part of a legal settlement among its two buyers and a group of six banks that had balked at financing the deal.

The negotiations over the Bell Canada buyout began to fray late Friday, said people on both sides of the deal, who were in closed-door discussions all weekend.

The banks backing the deal, led by Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland, sent revised terms to the consortium of buyers. The new terms included higher interest rates, tighter loan restrictions and stronger protections for the banks, far exceeding the original terms, these people said.

Members of the buyers’ group — the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan; the buyout firms Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity; and Toronto-Dominion Bank — held several conference calls over the weekend to discuss their options. Among the possibilities is filing a lawsuit against the banks to force them to complete the deal on its original terms, these people said.

“It’s patently obvious that the banks have no intention of closing the deal,” one executive who read the revised terms said.

Another executive called the situation “Clear Channel, the sequel.” Several members of the Bell Canada bank group, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and R.B.S., were also involved in the earlier deal.

Even the banks themselves have made explicit comparisons to the Clear Channel deal. As part of their legal briefs, Clear Channel’s buyers said that one Deutsche Bank executive joked to a Citigroup banker that they should “just slap a (redacted by banks) logo” on materials for a Clear Channel meeting and “send them up to Providence” — a reference to the banks’ apparent efforts to also escape their commitment to finance the Bell Canada deal. Such evidence may complicate banks’ legal defenses should the dispute head to court.

The fight for Clear Channel, a radio broadcaster, concluded only after a rancorous legal row that could have led to bitter court battles in New York and Texas, where Clear Channel is based. The settlement of that fight had given hope to Bell Canada shareholders: Shares in its parent company, Bell Canada Enterprises, rose 4.1 percent over the last week.

Analysts and investors in Canada have speculated that the Bell Canada deal, which is scheduled to close by June 30, may be repriced. Shares in the company, which is based in Montreal, have traded consistently below the offered price of 42.75 Canadian dollars a share. The shares closed at 38.80 Canadian dollars on Friday. Canadian and United States dollars are roughly equal in value.

Joseph McKay, an analyst at Desjardins Securities, wrote in a research note last week that the deal’s price may fall as low as 39.25 Canadian dollars a share.

What follows next may largely be a retread of previous buyout battles like the one over Clear Channel. That company filed suit against the banks in its home state, Texas, claiming that those firms sought to interfere with its takeover agreement. Bell Canada may try a similar move, jockeying for home-court advantage by suing in Canada. And the Ontario pension fund, the lead investor in the deal, may be able to rally political support to close the deal on favorable terms.

The banks may be split among themselves as well. Toronto-Dominion, one of the buyout’s backers, may feel additional heat at home to try to broker a revised deal. (By law, Bell Canada cannot be owned by foreigners.) A settlement effort by Morgan Stanley, one of the banks in the Clear Channel deal, helped broker that transaction’s compromise.

Already, the Bell Canada deal appears to have surmounted two major obstacles. After reworking its board structure, the company won conditional approval from Canada’s broadcast regulator.

In March, a Quebec court approved the transaction, dismissing efforts by some of the company’s bondholders to kill the buyout. But those bondholders are appealing the decision.

Ian Austen contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/bu...ss/19deal.html





Bell Canada Takeover Is Blocked
Ian Austen

Uncertainty surrounding a proposed $51.8 billion leveraged buyout of Bell Canada increased Wednesday after an appeals court sided with angry bondholders in a ruling.

In an unanticipated move, a five-judge panel of the Quebec Court of Appeal found that Canada’s largest telecommunications company “never attempted to justify the fairness and reasonableness of an arrangement that results in a significant adverse economic impact on the debenture holders while at the same time it accords a substantial premium to the shareholders.”

Within minutes of the release of the decision early Wednesday evening, Bell said that it would appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada and suggested that it would extend the current June 30 closing date for the deal.

“The judgment overturning the Quebec Superior Court decision rewrites Canadian law relating to the duty of Canadian boards of directors to maximize value for shareholders in the context of a change-of-control transaction, as well as to the entitlements of bondholders,” Martine Turcotte, the company’s chief legal officer, said in a statement.

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which is leading the buyout group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Bell said that the closing date for the deal now depended on the supreme court’s willingness to hear the case and the timing of any hearing that could result.

In Wednesday’s decision, the appeal court set aside a lower court ruling that allowed the deal, the largest leveraged buyout in history, to proceed. It returned the case to the lower court for a new hearing.

The decision to take the company private disturbs bondholders because it will burden Bell with about 30 billion Canadian dollars in additional debt. That will most likely depress the price of current bonds because of concerns that a debt-laden Bell is a riskier investment.

In its decision, the appeal court noted that before agreeing to the buyout, Bell executives, including Michael J. Sabia, the president and chief executive, emphasized the company’s interest in maintaining a high credit rating.

Other recent developments have also raised questions about the deal’s viability. Last week a consortium of banks providing financing for the deal proposed substantial alterations to the terms of their loans to the purchasers, who also include Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity and the Toronto-Dominion bank, according to people knowledgeable about the deal.

The sweeping revisions sought by the banks, including proposals to change interest rates, suggested to some investors and analysts that the banks were trying to escape the lending commitments, which they made last June, before the start of the current turmoil in credit markets.

The legal turmoil surrounding the case, if it continues for any extended period of time, might provide the bankers with at least an argument for walking away. Under the sale terms, Bell is required to resolve all regulatory issues and do its best to wind up litigation related to the purchase.

The widespread expectation among legal specialists in Canada had been that the appeal court would follow the trial judge’s lead and dismiss the bondholders’ complaint.

Shortly before the decision was released, Lionel David Smith, a professor specializing in commercial law at McGill University in Montreal, described the bondholders’ case as “an uphill battle.”

It is not clear if the supreme court will hear Bell’s appeal. Professor Smith said that much of the bondholders’ case was based on a legal concept known as oppression that is relatively untested by the high court in Canada.

Oppression cases have usually involved disputes between owners or shareholders of relatively small companies or partnerships, he said, and involved actions that, while legal, were outside of the partners’ or owners’ private understandings. The appeals court did not address the oppression arguments directly.

While Professor Smith said that it was quite possible that the supreme court would hear the case, that is not likely to happen before the deal’s deadline date.

Bell shares have been trading below the takeover price of 42.75 Canadian dollars. There is some hope in the investment community that Telus, the dominant telephone company in Western Canada, might make another attempt to acquire Bell if the private equity bid failed.

Telus looked at Bell last year but did not bid, apparently because of Bell’s reluctance to provide access to its internal financial data.

A purchase by Telus might also raise serious competition questions, particularly given that the government is now seeking to lure more operators into the wireless phone business, which is now split between Telus, Bell and Rogers Communications.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/bu...ess/22bce.html





$50 Billion Telecom Deal Falls Apart
Heather Timmons

The world's largest corporate deal in an emerging market, a tie-up worth nearly $50 billion between two telecommunication companies, Bharti Airtel in India and MTN Group in South Africa, came to a screeching halt Saturday.

Bharti called off negotiations after MTN turned Bharti's takeover plan upside down, proposing to take over Bharti instead. After bankers from both sides agreed in principle to a Bharti-controlled structure on May 16, MTN's board met this week and proposed a different transaction, in which Bharti Airtel would become a subsidiary of MTN, Bharti said Saturday.

"This convoluted way of getting an indirect control of the combined entity would have compromised the minority shareholders of Bharti Airtel and also would not capture the synergies of a combined entity," Bharti said in a statement.

"More importantly," Bharti added, "Bharti's vision of transforming itself from a homegrown Indian company to a true Indian multinational telecom giant, symbolizing the pride of India, would have been severely compromised." The situation was "completely unacceptable," Bharti said.

MTN Group had no immediate comment.

A combination with MTN would have been Bharti Airtel's first major foray outside India. The two companies have roughly the same number of subscribers and market capitalization, so any deal was expected to be more like a merger of equals, bankers and analysts said. Bharti seems to have been unwilling to cede control of the deal, though, they said.

Bharti said Saturday that discussions had gone on until late Friday night "without a breakthrough" and that it had decided to "disengage" from the discussions.

The lead bankers from Bharti and MTN had agreed to structure the deal so that Bharti Airtel would be the parent company. MTN's counterproposal would have made Bharti Airtel a subsidiary of MTN but given Bharti's parent company, Bharti Enterprises, a controlling stake in the combined company, said one Bharti executive briefed on the negotiations. Even though Bharti Enterprises would control the new telecommunications giant, that was not acceptable to Bharti, he said. "Our vision is to become a global Indian telecom," he said, adding that the collapse of the deal was "really about Indian pride."

The collapse of the deal is likely to be a major blow for Sunil Bharti Mittal, the chairman and managing director of Bharti Airtel, and founder of Bharti Enterprises, an Indian conglomerate with ambitious international plans. It is also likely to take a heavy toll on MTN's stock price. The company's shares have traded up more than 16 percent in the past month on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on talk of a deal.

Bharti said Saturday that more than a dozen bankers from the United States and Europe had given it "confident letters of funding" of over $60 billion. The company said it would continue to look for international expansion opportunities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/te...bharti.html?hp





Sandvine Gets Agnostic About Bandwidth

Bandwidth-management vendor offers ‘application agnostic’ system
Todd Spangler

Sandvine, the Canadian company whose technology has been at the center of the storm surrounding Comcast’s peer-to-peer bandwidth-throttling practices, has created an extension to its platform that will scale back Internet connections in what it calls an “application-agnostic” fashion.

The FairShare system, which works with Sandvine’s network switches, allows service providers to curtail bandwidth based on subscriber-usage metrics from various sources to balance available bandwidth and resources among all subscribers.

The idea is to improve the overall “quality of experience” for subscribers by smoothing out spikes in bandwidth usage, according to Tom Donnelly, Sandvine’s executive vice president of marketing and sales.

“Ultimately, not all bits are equal,” he said. “A file transfer that takes 1 hour instead of 55 minutes is not really less satisfactory. But a voice call that doesn’t go through is unacceptable.”

And, he said, while the original impetus for Sandvine’s system was to control floods of P2P file-sharing, other applications are now consuming sizable chunks of bandwidth too.

“It’s not just about focusing on one class of traffic anymore,” he said. “There’s a diversity of applications that need to be taken into consideration.”

But FairShare also seems designed as a response to the brouhaha over Comcast’s bandwidth-management techniques, which use Sandvine’s Policy Traffic Switch to slow down P2P traffic. (Comcast has never confirmed that it is using the Sandvine system.)

After advocacy groups complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the practice, the agency launched a probe into whether Comcast violated its Internet management principles. Cox Communications, meanwhile, was fingered last week by German research team as similarly “blocking” peer-to-peer connections.

In March, Comcast said it would work collaboratively with BitTorrent and that it planned to “migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic”--indicating the cable operator may decide to drop Sandvine.

Donnelly, asked about the possibility Comcast may pick a new bandwidth management platform, responded: “We feel reasonably confident in our relationships with our largest customers. Our products are widely deployed throughout the network. We’re talking about a very large number of devices.”

Sandvine, based in Waterloo, Ontario, claims to have 100 service provider customers worldwide, serving 50 million broadband and 10 million wireless subscribers. Its key competitors are Cisco Systems, Arbor Networks and Allot Communications.

Donnelly said FairShare has already been deployed by a North American service provider, but he declined to identify the customer.

FairShare uses technology from two companies Sandvine acquired last year, CableMatrix Technologies and Simplicita Software.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6561982.html





Cold, Dark Countries Whipping US in Broadband Usage
Nate Anderson

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has released updated broadband data that finds the US still in 15th place worldwide. While that's not a total catastrophe, the US has been sinking for several years (it was fourth in 2001) and has yet to show any real signs of improvement. But broadband in general is booming, growing 187 percent since 2004 in OECD countries. During that same period, average advertised speeds rose from 2Mbps to 9Mbps and prices plunged. Broadband remains red-hot, even in the coldest climates, and nothing is hotter than fiber-to-the-home, which now accounts for 8 percent of all OECD broadband connections.

We reported on an earlier OECD paper that outlined why fiber optics would be the backbone of the broadband future, even when the last-mile link is delivered by cable or DSL. The new OECD data shows just how quickly fiber direct to the home is progressing; it now makes up a stunning 40 percent of all broadband connections in Japan and 34 percent in Korea. The US comes in 11th in FTTH with a percentage point or two.

A common complaint made by those who defend US broadband progress is that the decline in OECD rankings can largely be explained by geography, as countries with high population densities build out infrastructure cheaply and quickly. While we've debunked that idea in the past when it comes to broadband in general, the new report shows that it doesn't hold water when it comes to FTTH, either.

The report notes that "some of the key developments in fibre deployments have been away from the main city centres. The previous three years have seen a surge in the number of smaller communities investing in fibre-to-the-home infrastructure. For example, the town of Nuenen in the Netherlands with 8,000 homes is reported to have passed 7,200 in the town and signed up 6,500 subscribers for FTTH services."

Two of the countries above the US on the FTTH chart, Norway and Sweden, have substantially higher fiber rollout levels (almost 8 percent of Sweden's connections are fiber optic) despite lower population densities. When it comes to overall broadband connections, the link between density and high-speed Internet lines breaks down even further; five of the 14 countries ahead of the US on the overall broadband chart actually have lower population densities.

As the chart above makes clear (the red line is population density, the blue is broadband usage), Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland all have lower population densities and yet are managing to beat us in broadband penetration.

Come to think of it, all five of them are also quite cold and dark for long periods of time; perhaps huddling inside around a monitor all winter provides more impetus to meet up with friends, shop, and search for entertainment online. We're in dire need of a national broadband strategy; maybe it's as simple as cooling the country and blotting out the sun.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...and-usage.html





The New York Times Calls For Network Neutrality Legislation
Sarah Lai Stirland

Network neutrality advocates' lobbying efforts were thrust into the national spotlight on Monday when The New York Times' opinion pages ran an editorial urging rapid passage of a bill on the subject.

Wrote the NYT:

Users of the Internet take for granted their ability to access all Web sites on an equal basis. That could change, however, if Internet service providers started discriminating among content, to make more money or to suppress ideas they do not like. A new “net neutrality” bill has been introduced in the House, which would prohibit this sort of content discrimination. Congress has delayed on this important issue too long and should pass net neutrality legislation now.

The Times goes on to make the argument that net-neutrality advocates have been making all along -- that heading down the path of discrimination will end up stifling innovation. The Federal Communications Commission, the author of the editorial argued, should actively enforce anti-discrimination policies.

But the question at issue isn't so much the content as the kinds of applications that get blocked, as the recent skirmishes and subsequent truce between the file-sharing company BitTorrent and Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, illustrates.

Under that deal, Comcast and BitTorrent have agreed to work together to find both hardware and software solutions to enable BitTorrent's peer-to-peer system to run more smoothly over Comcast's network architecture.

BitTorrent has also promised to publish information about what it's doing online to make the process more transparent.

And that's the keyword: Transparency. Net Neutrality advocates continue to pound on the word "discrimination," because network owners' traffic management practices seem so arbitrary and inexplicably opaque.

Indeed, if we want the internet to retain its original open nature, network owners should not be allowed to retain sole decision-making control over what kind of protocols should run over their networks, argued Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale during a recent panel discussion on the subject matter at The Technology Policy Summit in Hollywood.

"Under a common-carrier-like regime for internet access, the network manager isn't making those decisions, everyone else is making those decisions," she said.

Perhaps, as many of the network neutrality advocates suggest -- the rule concerning network neutrality should be transparency.

Network providers and applications builders should always be required to publicize their design decisions so that the rest of the world can understand how networks are being managed, and why traffic is flowing the way it is flowing.

I'm not sure if this makes sense, but it's an idea that the presidential candidates could start discussing.

Barack Obama has already started the discussion. He has said that he is committed to ensuring network neutrality, and his aides have said that an Obama administration would make the kind of blocking activity that Comcast engaged in against BitTorrent illegal. (It's not really clear how it would do this, though.)

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have sponsored pro-network neutrality legislation, although Clinton has been criticized by some advocates for not speaking out more forcefully on the subject matter.

John McCain has been vague about network neutrality both in congressional debates and on the campaign trail. He simply says that the issue is one that can be addressed by market forces.

Absent the relevant information and a consistent level of disclosures about how networks are run however, it's difficult to see how market forces can operate efficiently. In the case of Comcast and BitTorrent, the truce was only reached after pressure mounted through public outcry, the threat of litigation, and a high-profile investigation by federal regulators.

Perhaps McCain's senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin would like to answer this question at this week's annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in New Haven when he discusses the next administration's technology policy priorities.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...w-york-ti.html





Cable Execs: We Won't Throttle P2P
Steve Donohue

Following some tests showing that P2P delivery can be optimized within their networks, Comcast and Verizon say they won’t block or throttle Internet traffic delivered via peer-to-peer networks.

Verizon and file-sharing firm Pando Networks shared the results of a trial that Verizon ran with Pando and other firms in February in which they tested how P2P files are delivered if an ISP teams up with a P2P company.

Pando CEO Robert Levitan said before February’s test, 98 percent of the data delivered to users in the P2P test came from outside Verizon’s network. During the P2P test, the amount of P2P content delivered to Verizon subscribers from inside its network grew from 2 percent to 50 percent, Levitan said.

The data appears to indicate that network providers can "manage" or optimize the P2P traffic without hitting the user consumption. Executives from the major high-speed Internet providers said it shows that ISPs need to work with P2P companies to improve content delivery and manage network traffic.

“Network congestion does present a series of unique challenges. It’s critical for the industry to recognize those challenges and have collaboration across all of the interest groups,” Comcast vice president of Internet services Barry Tishgart told attendees at a panel here Tuesday afternoon.

Tishgart acknowledged that P2P networks could help Comcast and other broadband ISPs improve the delivery of video to subscribers. “Video on the Internet has the potential to provide tremendous customer benefits. Obviously P2P plays a very large role in that, and the future growth of video on the Internet,” he added.

In the Pando test, the hop count -- or the distance data had to travel on Verizon’s network -- was reduced by 80 percent, from 5.5 hops to 0.89 hops, Levitan said.

Comcast plans to run a similar P2P trial next month, Levitan said. The fact that Comcast and Verizon are partnering with P2P firms -- a sector once denigrated by major ISPs -- is significant, Levitan stressed.

“If you told anybody a year ago that the largest ISPs in the world would be sitting down with P2P companies and talking about how to improve P2P delivery -- nobody would believe you,” Levitan added.

But while ISPs are beginning to collaborate more with P2P companies, convincing major content providers to use P2P technology to deliver programming to consumers remains a challenge, Comcast’s Tishgart and Verizon senior technologist Doug Pasko said.

“A lot of big issues are still out there on digital rights management,” Pasko said when asked why more major content providers aren’t relying on P2P networks.

Levitan said the damage to the reputation of P2P companies will impact content providers.

“There’s certainly been some reputation damage that’s gone on. Enterprises and certain content companies might have some bias towards it,” Tishgart said. “I think that’s going to be a challenge, and finally some of the technical challenges to overcome.”

Also Tuesday:

• Pasko said Verizon is investigating how to use P2P technology to deploy new features on its FiOS TV set-top boxes.

• Pando’s Levitan maintained that delivering video through P2P technology is much more efficient than streaming video from a server. “The online video business model does not work. For most people, if you want to deliver high quality video, the more video you deliver, the more [money] you lose. In order to... make money on video delivery, that’s where peer-to-peer comes in."

• Wachovia Video Network vice president Patty Perkins said the bank relies on P2P technology to deliver five-minute videos to 70,000 employees each day.

• P2P technology can be used by content providers for the live delivery of programming, Levitan said.
http://www.contentinople.com/author....&doc_id=154410





Mininova Faces Legal Action: Filter or Else
Ernesto

No torrent site on earth is more popular than Mininova. Surprisingly, however, all the legal pressure seems to have been focused on sites such as The Pirate Bay. Mininova - against all the odds - appears to have stayed under the radar. All that changed today as Mininova is now facing legal action by Dutch anti-piracy agency, BREIN.

BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit responsible for shuttering or forcing torrent sites such as Demonoid overseas, has announced that it will take BitTorrent-behemoth Mininova to court. BREIN hopes the court will force Mininova to filter its search results, so that all .torrent files which may point to unauthorized content are removed.

Mininova is currently the largest BitTorrent site with over 30 million unique visitors per month. Mininova displays user submitted torrents and carries legitimate premium content from publishers such as CBC. Unlike The Pirate Bay, the site does not have their own BitTorrent tracker.

It transpires that BREIN and Mininova have been secretly trying to reach a mutually beneficial agreement for more than a year now, but when one side believes they are acting within the law and the other side believes the opposite, a legal clash seems inevitable.

Erik Dubbelboer, one of the co-founders of Mininova, told TorrentFreak that Mininova will not cave in to pressure from BREIN. He expects to have more details about the upcoming lawsuit later this week: “We will proceed to court with full confidence. We operate within the law, as we maintain our ‘notice and take down’ policy. That is, we remove search results if a copyright holder asks us to.”

Sites like YouTube operate in a similar manner - if the site receives a demand from a copyright holder that it should take content down, it does so under its DMCA obligations and there is no further action. Mininova doesn’t even host any unauthorized content, only .torrent files, which should make it even less of a target than YouTube. Typically, BREIN doesn’t see it that way.

Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said that Mininova’s business model is based on illegal activity. “A notice and take down procedure is absolutely insufficient for a site that makes use of unauthorized files, structurally and systematically,” he added.

The announced legal action will focus on the question whether Mininova has to filter their search results or not. BREIN wants Mininova to install such a filter, Mininova on the other hand doesn’t want to censor the search results. The outcome of the case is likely to have a huge impact on the future of other BitTorrent sites, and even sites such as Google and YouTube.
http://torrentfreak.com/mininova-fac...r-else-080519/





Cubit an Approximate Matching Peer-To-Peer Overlay

Approach

Cubit is a scalable peer-to-peer system that can efficiently find the k closest data items to any search key. The central insight behind Cubit is to create a keyword metric space that captures the relative similarity of keywords, to assign portions of this space to nodes in a light-weight overlay and to resolve queries by efficiently routing them through this space. The system comprises a protocol for object and node assignment, a gossip-based protocol for maintaining the overlay, and a routing protocol to efficiently route queries.

Figure 1: The edit-distance between keywords. The five keywords create a keyword space that cannot be accurately embedded into a plane.
A keyword is any word that appears in the title of an object stored in Cubit. In order to fully specify the problem of approximate string matching, we need to choose a notion of distance between two keywords, or more generally between two text strings. Such distance should correspond to our intuition on which strings are similar and which strings are very different.

Cubit uses the most common notion of distance on strings, the edit-distance. It is equal to the minimum number of insertions, deletions and substitutions needed to transform one string to another. The keywords then lie in the keyword space, illustrated in Figure 1, a metric space induced on keywords by the edit-distance.

Node ID Assignment

Cubit nodes are distributed in the same space as keywords. Each node in Cubit is assigned a unique string ID chosen from the set of keywords associated with previously inserted objects in the system. Specifically, at join time each node independently selects a random keyword, ensuring uniqueness by detecting ID collisions. The ID of a node determines its "position" in the keyword space. This position determines how a given node is used in Cubit. First, each Cubit node is responsible for storing the set of keywords for which it is the closest node. Second, Cubit implements a distributed protocol which navigates through nodes in the keyword space, gradually zooming in on a neighborhood of a given (possibly misspelled) keyword, and thus locates nodes that store possible matches.

Figure 2: In this example, the solid circles represent peers in node A's peer-set, the empty circles represent other peers, and the squares represent object keywords in the system. The shaded region depicts the sub-space that is closer to A than any other node.

Navigation

The navigation protocol is the core component of Cubit. To support this protocol, Cubit creates and maintains a multi-resolution overlay network on nodes such that each node has several peers at every distance from itself; the peers at a given distance are chosen to maximize the coverage of that region. Such overlay design is inspired by the small-world construction in which a grid is augmented by a sparse set of randomly chosen edges, with roughly the same number of edges for each distance scale. In the resulting graph a simple greedy routing algorithm (which on each step minimizes the distance to target) succeeds in finding short routes to any given target.

The desired property of the search protocol is to obtain the k closest objects to the set of keywords, as measured by the phrase distance metric. For each keyword in the search phrase, the protocol obtains the k closest objects from each node which meets the following edit distance criterion: its ID is within an edit-distance of q from the keyword, where q is the product of the keyword length and the expected number of perturbations per character (which is a parameter in the system). The protocol selects m closest nodes if fewer than m nodes meet edit-distance criterion, where m is called the search fan-out. The keyword search protocol is illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The Cubit search protocol operates iteratively to collect more and more information of the target region. In this example, x is the location of the search term in the keyword space, the solid circles are node A's peers, empty circles are additional nodes in the space, and the circle around x are all nodes within edit-distance q of x. Node A first finds the m = 2 closest nodes to x from its peer-set, and request their m closest nodes. In this example, two new closer nodes are discovered and subsequently sent the same query. The protocol terminates when all nodes within the circle around x, or the m closest nodes have been discovered. These nodes are queried for their closest objects to x.

Load Balancing

Since search terms tend to follow a Zipf distribution, the resulting skewed load distribution can lead to excess routing load on nodes within the vicinity of popular keywords.

In Cubit, if the load generated by queries for a popular keyword w overwhelms the available resources of node i, the node can send an off-loading request to its closest neighbors requesting them to create a synthetic node located at w. Nodes receiving such a request create a synthetic node at w whose IP address and port correspond to their own, thus enabling queries for that portion of the keyword space to be terminated at any one of the moff neighbors. The original requester is then tasked with keeping the virtual nodes updated with changes to objects in the off-loaded region as well as changes to its leaf-set. This off-loading operation disperses hot-spots in keyword popularity without requiring global information or coordination. Figure 4 illustrates the protocol.

Figure 4: In this example, the keyword "love" is closest to node A and is generating a high degree of load. Node A creates a virtual node centered around the keyword love, which includes its leaf set and all objects in the region within p edit-distance from love. This virtual node is sent to A's nearest neighbors. Queries that arrive at these neighbors for keywords within an edit-distance p of love can be answered without node A
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~bwong/cubit/approach.html





Justin Frankel’s latest

About REAPER

REAPER is reasonably priced Windows software for multitrack audio production.

REAPER requires no dongle, has no copy protection, and can be evaluated with full functionality.

• Portable - supports running from USB keys or other removable media
• 64 bit audio engine
• Excellent low-latency performance
• Stunning multiprocessor performance
• Direct multi-track recording to many formats including WAV/BWF/W64, AIFF, WavPack, FLAC, OGG, and MIDI.
• Extremely flexible routing
• Supports a wide range of hardware (nearly any audio interface, outboard hardware, many control surfaces)
• Support for VST, VSTi, DX, DXi effects
• ReaPlugs: high quality 64 bit effect suite
• Tightly coded - installer is just over 3MB

Editing features

• Tool-less mouse interface -- spend less time clicking
• Drag and drop files to instantly import them into a project
• Support for mixing any combination of file type/samplerate/bit depth on each track
• Easily split, move, and resize items
• Each item has easily manipulated fades and volume
• Tab to transient support
• Configurable and editable automatic crossfading of overlapping items
• Per-item pitch shift and time stretch
• Arbitrary item grouping
• Markers and envelopes can be moved in logical sync with editing operations
• Ripple editing - moving/deletion of items can optionally affect later items
• Multiple tempos and time signatures per project
• Ability to define and edit project via regions
• Automation envelopes

For more information on the developer of REAPER and its moderately altruistic goals, visit Cockos Incorporated.
http://www.reaper.fm/





5 Groovy Sites for Free Music Downloads

Want to fill up your MP3 player for free without facing the wrong end of an RIAA lawsuit? These five sites offer DRM-free downloads from exciting artists.
Emru Townsend

Short of "free food" and "free beer," "free music" is one of the sweetest phrases you can hear. But getting tunes gratis doesn't have to mean ending up on the RIAA's Most Wanted list. These five sites will let you easily fatten up your music collection with tracks that creators and recording labels are giving away--all in DRM-free, MP3 format. An extra bonus: None of these sites require an e-mail address or any kind of registration.

What's the catch? Well, don't expect to find much top-40 material here; the four major labels are still pretty tight-fisted with their properties. But that's not really much of a catch: Saying good-bye to Mariah Carey and Madonna means saying hello to independent artists (some of whom have been in the business just as long) who will round out your most-played list quite nicely.

1. Venzero Mixtape

Some audio player manufacturers will happily give you music, on the condition that you buy their product first. German company Venzero is a bit more generous, having launched the Venzero Mixtape: a rotating collection of MP3 tracks by "exquisite bands" that anybody can download. Or at least that's the theory. Since launching the Venzero Mixtape, the company has changed the lineup only once. The nine tracks that make up the current mixtape are a pleasure to listen to, however, so even if Venzero never gets around to picking up where it left off, you still come out ahead.

2. Epitonic

My favorite brick-and-mortar record stores--I can call them that because they still have plenty of vinyl--not only offer a wide variety of music but also have staff who can talk intelligently about what they offer. Even when I walk in just to say hi, I usually end up walking out with a new CD and new knowledge.

The closest experience to that in the online world is Epitonic, where you don't get just free music--you get free schooling too. The site features extensive writeups on all the featured artists (including links to similar acts), streaming audio, and at least one free MP3 per album.

Unfortunately, Epitonic hasn't really been updated for almost two years. But the site has enough content that you can still spend hours, if not days, exploring new musical avenues.

3. Mush Records

Like other independent music labels, Mush Records has artists who cover a lot of stylistic ground (they describe their range as "electronic instrumental, underground hip-hop, downtempo, abstract hip-hop, experimental, indie-rock, jazz-based grooves, turntablist compositions, electronic pop, saturated folk, left-field, dreamy stuff, more versions of hip-hop, and on and on"). And Mush is not afraid of giving away music and videos for free, since the company expects visitors' interest to be piqued enough for them to spend a few dollars on a CD.

Unlike Epitonic, Mush Records separates the areas where you learn about artists from where you download media. On the one hand, it makes music discovery a little less organic. On the other hand, the site's extensive archive of articles written about their artists gives a more textured look at their work. Either way, a collection of 70-plus free tracks is nothing to sneeze at.

4. iSound

If you're a musician, iSound seems like a dream come true: The site provides tools for artists to create their own pages to promote and sell their music online. If you're a music fan, iSound seems like a potential nightmare--you'd expect to have to wade through plenty of questionable material to find one gem.

Both of those perceptions are accurate, but what separates iSound from similar online services are three features that let music fans quickly zero in on what they like. First is a search tool that finds bands based on their similarity to three artists you enter; second is a list of the 200 most popular tracks; and third is an icon that tells you if a band has any downloadable MP3s before you click through to their page. Using these tools I easily racked up more hits than misses.

5. The Live Music Archive

The top two reasons I love going to concerts are the feeling of camaraderie (I'm surrounded by people who are into the same music, though I run the risk of a Coke spilling on my shirt) and the chance to hear my favorite songs performed outside of a studio setting, sometimes arranged in new and creative ways. The next best thing to being there is a concert recording, but relatively few bands make recordings available for sale, and many bootlegs are kind of iffy soundwise.

Then there are the bands that don't mind exploring the gray area in between. The Live Music Archive features high-quality concert recordings from bands that are cool with noncommercial distribution of their performances. Dip into the extensive roster, and you'll find names like Robyn Hitchcock, Billy Bragg, and the godfathers of sanctioned bootlegs, the Grateful Dead.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146009/article.html





Apple Wants More Mobile Music From Labels
Saul Hansell

As part of Apple’s efforts to improve on the shortcomings of its popular iPhone, the company has approached some of the major music labels to try to expand the variety of ringtones and other musical features available on the device, several label executives said last week. The negotiations are very active right now and a final deal has not been set, said the executives, who requested anonymity so as not to disrupt the ongoing talks.

“They want a big launch in June,” said one label executive familiar with the discussions. That executive said that a deal may come after June 9, when Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, speaks to the company’s developers conference, a logical date for the introduction of the next generation of iPhone. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the company’s plans.

Ringtones are a very profitable corner of the music business these days, as the price for a short segment of a song is higher than for the full song. Right now, Apple offers ringtones as a 99-cent upgrade to its regular 99-cent music tracks, but not all tracks can be converted into ringtones. Apple is looking to expand its inventory, the executives said.

The company is also hoping to add answer tones, also known as ringback tones — songs that a caller hears instead of the “ring ring” sound while waiting for someone to answer. In some cases, these command an even higher wholesale price than ringtones.

Also under discussion is whether Apple can sell songs from its iTunes store directly to iPhones over the cell-phone broadband network. With the next generation of phone expected to use much faster 3G technology, this is technically feasible. Here too, music labels argue that they should be paid more for an over-the-air download than a standard track bought over the internet, where the wholesale price is about 70 cents.

All sides understand the stakes are significant. Apple, which is the dominant player in digital music, is growing fast as a mobile phone maker. Expectations are high (maybe impossibly so) for the next generation of iPhone. Apple has arranged deals with carriers in most of the world. (Piper Jaffray estimates that Apple now works with carriers that reach 575 million cellphone users, up from 153 million potential customers in the six countries in which the iPhone is now sold.)

But the wireless market is vast, and other carriers and handset makers are trying to add music features to their phones and services. So if Apple holds out for terms that the labels won’t agree to, it risks losing momentum on music on phones. That’s particularly true in Europe where Nokia and Sony Ericsson are strong and the initial reaction to the iPhone has been tepid.

A label executive told me that the current negotiations, which only began a few weeks ago, may be the opportunity for the music companies to press Apple on some of their other longstanding requests. Top among them is the flexibility to set different prices on individual tracks. Right now, Apple sells all tracks for 99 cents. (Apple does allow for variable prices for full album downloads as well as various bundles. The labels love to add extra artwork, bonus cuts or other features that add a few bucks to the price of a digital album.)

Apple has loosened its pricing structure a little bit. It is selling some television shows from HBO at $2.99, above the $1.99 it sells all other TV shows for. The music labels would like to argue that this should open the door to their being able to charge more than 99 cents for hit songs and less for older works. But there’s no evidence that Apple sees it that way.

Meanwhile Universal Music Group is still pressing to get Apple to consider bundling a monthly music subscription with some of its iPhone and iPod models. Under this idea, an iPhone might come with the right to download and listen to any song from the major labels for a period of a year or two. Two executives said this was still under discussion, but it is unlikely to be part of whatever mobile music deals are announced in June. The gap between what Apple wants to pay and what the labels think such a service is worth is still far too high, the executives said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...c-from-labels/





Napster Rolls Out All-MP3 Download Store
Alex Veiga

Napster Inc. (NAPS) begins selling MP3s Tuesday, a move the online music service hopes will lure iPod users and turn around Napster's sliding fortunes.

The company is the latest to make the switch to the unrestricted file format, which makes it music tracks compatible with virtually any music player or other device.

"It's great that we have finally gotten here," said Chris Gorog, Napster's chairman and chief executive. "It is really the beginning of a level playing field, which I think is essential for Napster, but also for the health of the digital music business in general."

Tracks downloaded as part of Napster's subscription service will continue to have copyright restrictions.

For much of the decade, major record labels refused to license their music for downloading as MP3s. But steep annual declines in CD sales and the growing dominance of Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s iPod music players and its iTunes Music Store led the labels to ease that position last year to remain competitive.

Amazon.com is the only other retailer offering MP3 downloads from all the major record labels.

ITunes began selling MP3 versions of recordings from artists on EMI Group PLC labels last year, but the tracks are more expensive and higher quality than standard copy-protected versions.

Napster MP3s will be priced at 99 cents each, while full-album downloads will start at $9.95, the company said.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, said he can't picture many iPod and iTunes users shifting to Napster, since iTunes software is so integrated with Apple music players.

The exception may be someone looking for a track that Apple doesn't offer, he said.

Napster might have a better shot competing against Amazon, which isn't solely focused on selling music downloads.

"Napster's brand and focus on the medium should give it an advantage," Enderle said.

Gorog said Napster plans to differentiate itself from rivals through a modest marketing campaign that emphasizes it has the biggest catalog of music licensed for downloads.

Napster boasts a catalog of more than 6 million tracks. Amazon says its catalog exceeds 5 million tracks.

Los Angeles-based Napster, which first disclosed its plan to shift to MP3s earlier this year, is also betting that an all-MP3 download store will entice some buyers to sign up for its all-you-can-eat music subscription offerings - the firm's bread and butter.

Napster recently said it had about 760,000 subscribers as of March 31.

Napster shares closed at $1.54 Monday after rising a penny, or 0.65 percent. In the past year, the stock has traded between $1.33 and $3.92.
http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...D90P5BBG0.html





Napster Goes DRM-Free
Antony Bruno

As promised, Napster has stripped DRM from all paid downloads on its digital music service in favor of unprotected MP3s. As of today (May 20) all six million songs in the Napster catalog are now available to purchase without DRM protection. The company first announced plans to make the switch in January.

The new MP3 files will be of higher quality than the DRM version (256 kbps compared to 192 kbps). But will still cost only 99 cents. And unlike other digital retailers also making the switch over to DRM-free files -- such as Wal-Mart -- Napster has the support of all four major labels as well as all its existing indie label and aggregator deals.

Most notably, Sony BMG is on board, replicating the "agency" model it started using with the AmazonMP3 store.

The move gives Napster the largest catalog of legal MP3s on the Internet, far outpacing the 2 million songs on AmazonMP3. However Napster at heart remains a subscription service.

"We're really focused on subscription and driving subscribers as our business model," says Napster COO Christopher Allen. The MP3 store, he says, is designed to not only sell more a la carte singles, but eventually convert customers to its monthly subscription plans.

"It's a way for us, through MP3s, to get some exposure to our subscription service," he continues. "They may be initially attracted to the MP3s... and I think it will result in more subscribers over time."

The profit margin on a monthly subscription fee is much better than that of an a la carte download, which is why Napster will continue making subscription its core model. The company is gambling that the proliferation of Internet-connected devices -- such as mobile phones, home stereos and eventually car radios -- will some day convince music fans that a monthly subscription to access all the music they want from any device is more compelling than buying it.

Until that time comes, however, selling digital music in an interoperable format like MP3 is a fairly compelling offer. Napster still allows users to listen to any song in its library in full for free up to three times. Adding the option to purchase any song as well in a manner that is fully interoperable with any device is considered a much-needed development.

"It's great that they're doing it," says Jupiter Research analyst David Card. "Back in the day, they originally thought selling singles and albums would be a good way to get people used to their product and then upsell them on subscriptions. That just has never played out. But part of the reason was that when you bought those songs, they couldn't play on the most popular device-the iPod. So this will be a chance to really test that, because the service isn't crippled anymore."

The DRM-free move however has not yet made it to the Napster Mobile service, which is the default mobile music service for several wireless operators worldwide, including AT&T Mobility (which also counts eMusic as a digital music provider). As of now, music purchased via Napster mobile will still be encoded in the Windows Media DRM.

But Allen says that will change "soon." Like all other mobile music services, Napster Mobile operates a "dual-delivery" model-sending one copy of any song purchased from a supporting mobile phone to the users PC, and another to the phone itself, both wrapped with Windows DRM.

Allen says Napster and its carrier partners are currently testing a new system that would send a DRM-free version to users' computers, and another copy to the phone without the Windows technology. Napster president Brad Duea has previously stated such a system would make Napster Mobile available to 12 million phones compared to the 12,000 it is today.

Napster said it would continue to support all Windows Media DRM files purchased to date, unlike the now-defunct MSN Music service. However there is no program or promotion to let customers replace their previously purchased DRM-laden files with the new unprotected versions.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...9d4bee4dc1d1b1





Killed by the courts, reanimated by Redmond

Microsoft Confirms Windows Adheres to Broadcast Flag
Greg Sandoval

Microsoft has acknowledged that Windows Media Centers will block users from recording TV shows at the request of a broadcaster.

"Microsoft included technologies in Windows based on rules set forth by the (Federal Communications Commission)," a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "As part of these regulations, Windows Media Center fully adheres to the flags used by broadcasters and content owners to determine how their content is distributed and consumed."

The software company was responding to questions about why some users of Windows Vista Media Center were prevented from recording NBC Universal TV shows, American Gladiator and Medium on Monday night.

The "rules," in which the spokeswoman is apparently referring to are those proposed by the FCC, which would require software and hardware makers to honor "broadcast flags." The flags are code that broadcasters can insert into the data stream of TV shows that typically require restrictions on the recording of the shows. What she didn't say is that the "rules" aren't rules at all.

The courts struck down the FCC's proposal in 2005, saying the regulator lacked the authority to tell electronics makers how to interpret the signals they receive. Since then, Microsoft and other manufacturers have retained the option of whether to honor the flags.

News that the world's largest software maker has voluntarily agreed to help broadcasters control the recording of their shows is bound to outrage enthusiasts of digital video recorders, as it represents the biggest threat to the practice known as time shifting since the FCC's attempt to require flag adherence.

"Microsoft has put the requirements of broadcasters above what consumers want," said Danny O'Brien, a staffer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users that is looking into Monday's block. "They've imposed restrictions way beyond what the law requires. Customers need to know who Microsoft is listening to and how that affects their equipment. Right now, the only way customers know what Microsoft has agreed to is when the technology they've bought suddenly stops working. Microsoft needs to come clean and tell its customers what deals it has made."

The question of whether NBC Universal issued a flag for American Gladiator has yet to be answered. NBC Universal said last week that it needed time to look into the matter. Microsoft's spokeswoman did not offer any information on whether NBC Universal activated a flag. The software company did, however, inform us that accidents do happen.

"In some cases content may be incorrectly flagged in the actual broadcast, which may affect the consumer's TV experience," Microsoft's spokeswoman wrote. "The success of the entire distribution chain is dependent on all involved maintaining the necessary checks and quality control so that coding is correctly applied thereby avoiding any unexpected outcome."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-994...l?tag=nefd.riv





NBC Admits "Inadvertent" Broadcast Flag Use, Still Doesn't Explain Why it Actually Worked
Richard Lawler

Just an update on the broadcast flag controversy: NBC has copped to an "inadvertent mistake" in flagging the broadcast of American Gladiators as content prohibited from recording, while Microsoft stated it is only following the FCC's rules, and "fully adheres to flags used by broadcasters". This conveniently ignores the fact that there is no legal requirement for Windows Vista Media Center to recognize the broadcast flag and disable recording, but it does.

Errant metadata can and does happen, but for such a "feature" to be buried within one's software unknowingly is troubling.

Expect to hear more from the EFF and others questioning why Media Center unnecessarily turns parts of itself off at a broadcaster's command, and rightly so.

What's most disturbing, and likely to go sadly without protest is that someone out there is actually watching, and trying to record for later, American Gladiators. The more you know indeed
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/20/n...-doesnt-expla/





Digital Rights Misery: When Technology Is Designed to Fail
Jeff Porten

When I was reporting from CES in Las Vegas last January, one of the more interesting technology experiences I had was away from the show floor, back in my hotel room. After a long night and little sleep, I decided to watch a little television; apparently this is common in Vegas, as my budget hotel considered a 42-inch plasma TV to be normal furnishing for a room that omitted a couch and a comfortable chair.

There were a few dozen local and cable channels on the menu, and if I found those boring, I had plenty of on-demand movies to choose from. Most amusing: the $40 daily package for both wireless Internet and the entire library of, ahem, adult entertainment. That's a bundle that knows its target (expense-accounting) audience.

But I had other options, in case there was nothing on, or if the remote control was too far away from the bed. My new Palm Centro had both SprintTV and MobiTV installed; for a few bucks a month, I could catch about 100 channels there. Meanwhile, my MacBook was on the night table, and I had a few movies and a season of The Simpsons on the hard drive.

Then I realized that the cable TV that I pay for is 2,000 miles away; if only I had had the foresight to buy a Slingbox, I could have watched my home Comcast lineup on either my MacBook or my Palm.

I love technology, but this is just whack.

Brave New Digital World -- What made all of this particularly interesting was a video that the Consumer Electronics Association was distributing, titled "DTV 101." Don't bother looking for a copy yourself; it's the most boring video you can imagine. Here's the summary of what the CEA wants you to know:

• On 17-Feb-09, analog TV broadcasts in the United States will be cut off and replaced by digital-only transmission.
• That will free up all of the current analog broadcast spectrum that is now being used for Law and Order episodes and Head-On commercials. The CEA strongly wants to imply that this spectrum will go to police and firefighters, as opposed to making billions of dollars for consumer electronics industries.
• The CEA repeats ad nauseam that you'll continue to get free broadcast TV, and all you need to do is add a converter box to your old TV. That will cost around $50, but there will be a $40 coupon from the federal government. This is starting now, in 2008, in an apparent bid to drive voters to the Libertarian Party when they realize Uncle Sam is buying everyone a new gadget.

But if you're a member of a typical American family, your home is populated with more televisions than people, and each of your older sets will need its own converter. Charmingly, even then your old TV is probably the wrong aspect ratio (4:3 versus the increasingly common 16:9; your widescreen Mac is 16:10, just to make it more confusing), so 25 percent of your screen will generally be filled with thrilling black bars.

Reading between the lines, you won't be forced to buy one or more new TVs next year, but you're probably going to anyway. Eventually, your analog sets will go the way of TVs with UHF dials. Note to younger TidBITS readers: "UHF channels" are where we used to go, late at night, to watch really bad movies and sitcom reruns. This is why your parents still think cable TV is niftier than you do, and why we're amused when you choose to watch TV Land and really bad movies.

The truth is that you will see a vastly improved experience with the new technology. In the past we've seen upgrades from black-and-white to color, and from broadcast channel selection to the far greater bandwidth of coaxial cable; digital television, likewise, is the sort of change that will eventually make you wonder how you ever got by in the old days.

Unfortunately, the upgrade is coming with a cost, and one that's greater than the mere price of a shiny new TV.

Complexity by Design -- For example, take a look at this screen capture from the CEA video, showing a standard digital-to-analog converter setup. Look closely at that remote control on the right, which is just for the converter. The people who stick with their old TVs are the demographic least likely to be able to navigate yet another 100-button remote control, but they're going to be stuck with them. My parents, who lovingly drove me insane with their technology choices, decided that the universal remote control I bought for them was too complicated; instead, they Velcroed three remotes to a triangular Lucite block. For families like mine, it's time to buy a bigger chunk of Lucite.

The pernicious issue is that my parents, like most people, saw 400-button remotes as nothing more than an annoying inconvenience. This is extremely odd considering how central television has been to our culture: Americans average over four hours a day watching the tube, and for most people it's their primary source for news, politics, and what remains of a shared experience in a highly fractured culture. Most of this is true in all modernized societies. Yet for some reason we continue to think that discussion of technologies we use to control television is frivolous.

We have been carefully and methodically trained to believe it's our fault when important technologies make us feel inadequate and incapable. We have accepted the creation of a category of digital have-nots, who either rely on tech-savvy friends and family, or who do without.

This is not an accident. The seeping loss of control from the individual naturally places that control in the hands of the providers of media and the manufacturers of technology.

A perfect example came when I took the screen capture of the converter that I provided earlier. When I was watching the CEA DVD through Apple's DVD Player, Mac OS X's Grab application gave the following error message: "Screen grabs are unavailable during DVD playback." Due to agreements between the creators of commercial DVDs and computer manufacturers, including Apple, a standard feature of the Mac is disabled during this special case to prevent copyright infringement. In other words, Grab is designed to fail deliberately. As a geek member of the digital "haves," I knew this issue was easily resolved by watching the same DVD with Videolan's VLC, which does not trigger the automatic failure.

Take a moment to think about what is occurring here. The consumer electronics industry produces a DVD for the express purpose of writers like me using it to write articles like this one, but my consumer electronics are designed to prevent me from using it. Then I find that I can use it regardless - but only because I am proficient with the technology.

It can only be seen as ludicrous when CEA policy, as implemented in the shipping technology, blocks the usage of CEA's own media outreach. But ludicrous does not mean laughable or unimportant. The technology is attempting to control how I may use this media; for most people, and many other journalists, that control would be successful.

Control Means Ka-Ching -- You're probably already familiar with one way in which the industry uses technological control to create revenue streams. Let's say, back in that hotel room, I was struck with a sudden urge to watch Spider-Man 3. I could watch it on Sprint TV, where it would cost $5.99 for a three-day rental, streamed at 320 by 172 resolution. I could purchase (but not rent, as of a few weeks ago) the movie from the iTunes Store for $9.99 and watch on my MacBook. I could rent it on-demand in my hotel room, which would give me a plasma screen picture, but would cost $11.99 for 24 hours. Or with my MacBook and MasterCard in hand, I could wander down the street and rent a DVD with all the extras from a kiosk for $1.99. Of course, if I already owned the DVD, and had left it at home, that wouldn't have mattered at all; the cost to rent another copy remains the same.

Unless, of course, I spent 30 seconds setting up an illegal Internet download, which would give me a permanent copy, at an arbitrarily high resolution (up to and including Blu-ray, if I had the patience), that I could watch anywhere regardless of whether I had purchased the physical media, or had it with me.

Most of us have in some sense already paid for Spider-Man 3, as well as hundreds of other movies: they're part of a river of programming that show up on our television systems. But unless you've set up some form of digital recording system, unless you've figured out how to move those videos from there to your computer, unless you've mastered converting those videos into other formats, those videos stay locked in their own walled gardens. Many of us have done all of the above, but the vast majority have not and cannot. This allows Columbia Pictures to claim that mechanism is as important as content, which is why the same movie can be $12 in one place, $2 in another, and time-limited everywhere.

This is great for the studios, but it's not how the audience thinks (or should think) of their product. Paying for some form of content should directly connect to real received value: a performance of a movie in a theater. A DVD with additional commentary and deleted scenes. And yes, convenient on-demand availability, when appropriate. But too often, the "value" is based upon an indirect conspiracy to make it difficult or impossible to use the media you've already paid for, making the end result a tax on the technological have-nots.

Going forward, this situation is primed to worsen steadily. As I mentioned earlier, there are Trojan horses in the digital television picture, as copyright protection mechanisms such as HDCP are unavoidably bundled with new hardware. Already it is clear that the technological elite will always be able to circumvent such mechanisms, and if not, will probably continue to be able to "borrow" content from the Internet in formats that allow the freedom that can't be paid for.

Free Speech, Not Free Beer -- I want to be clear which argument I am not making. We do not and should not have unlimited rights to any and all media. I'm not arguing for the abolition of copyright; even authors who serially release their works into the public domain or Creative Commons would insist upon their right to continue to choose to do so.

Likewise, it's a diversion from my argument to frame this solely in terms of economic cost. Cost is an issue, of course, but not the primary one; there is nothing unethical about Columbia Pictures attempting to charge me $12 to watch a movie in a hotel room. What is unethical, in my view, is the crippling of essential technologies for the sole purpose of allowing that $12 tax on the technologically unsophisticated to exist. The question we need to ask ourselves is not how we need to protect the creators of content, but rather, what societal costs are we paying when technology is designed to fail because we value protecting a movie over all other uses the technology may have?

There should be a way to create consensus on how we should interact with media. Restrictive technologies, computers that are designed to fail, and punitive laws that prop up those technologies do not advance that discussion or society in general. The more we tolerate such activities, the more we purchase these products with no argument, the greater the danger that we allow the 21st century to develop with corporate control trumping our rights to free speech amongst ourselves. There's more to come, so stay tuned.

[Special thanks for valuable commentary on drafts of this article go to Adam Engst, Tarleton Gillespie, Peter Hirtle, and Fred von Lohmann. Jeff will be presenting a talk on this topic to IEEE Philadelphia on 20-May-08.]
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9611





How Do We Fight Corporate Control of the Internet?
Annalee Newitz

Last week I wrote about the premise of Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press). He warns about a future of "tethered" technologies like the digital video recorder and smartphones that often are programmed remotely by the companies that make them rather than being programmed by users, as PCs are. As a partial solution, Zittrain offers up the idea of Wikipedia-style communities, where users create their own services without being "tethered" to a company that can change the rules any time.

Unfortunately, crowds of people running Web services or technologies online cannot save us from the problem of tethered technology. Indeed, Zittrain's crowds might even unwittingly be tightening the stranglehold of tethering by lulling us into a false sense of freedom.

It's actually in the best interest of companies like Apple, Comcast, or News Corp to encourage democratic, freewheeling enclaves like Wikipedia or MySpace to convince people that their whole lives aren't defined by tethering. When you get sick of corporate-mandated content and software, you can visit Wikipedia or MySpace. If you want a DVR that can't be reprogrammed by Comcast at any time, you can look up how to build your own software TV tuner on Wikipedia. See? You have freedom!

Unfortunately, your homemade DVR software doesn't have the kind of easy-to-use features that make it viable for most consumers. At the same time, it does prove that tethered technologies aren't your only option. Because there's this little puddle of freedom in the desert of technology tethering, crowd-loving liberals are placated while the majority of consumers are tied down by corporate-controlled gadgets.

In this way, a democratic project like Wikipedia becomes a kind of theoretical freedom -- similar to the way in which the U.S. constitutional right to freedom of speech is theoretical for most people. Sure, you can write almost anything you want. But will you be able to publish it? Will you be able to get a high enough ranking on Google to be findable when people search your topic? Probably not. So your speech is free, but nobody can hear it. Yes, it is a real freedom. Yes, real people participate in it and provide a model to others. And sometimes it can make a huge difference. But most of the time, people whose free speech flies in the face of conventional wisdom or corporate plans don't have much of an effect on mainstream society.

What I'm trying to say is that Wikipedia and "good crowds" can't fight the forces of corporate tethering -- just as one person's self-published, free-speechy essay online can't fix giant, complicated social problems. At best, such efforts can create lively subcultures where a few lucky or smart people will find that they have total control over their gadgets and can do really neat things with them. But if the denizens of that subculture want millions of people to do neat things too, they have to deal with Comcast. And Comcast will probably say, "Hell no, but we're not taking away your freedom entirely because look, we have this special area for you and 20 other people to do complicated things with your DVRs." If you're lucky, Comcast will rip off the subculture's idea and turn it into a tethered application.

So what is the solution, if it isn't nice crowds of people creating their own content and building their own tether-free DVRs? My honest answer is that we need organized crowds of people systematically and concertedly breaking the tethers on consumer technology. Yes, we need safe spaces like Wikipedia, but we also need to be affirmatively making things uncomfortable for the companies that keep us tethered. We need to build technologies that set Comcast DVRs free, that let people run any applications they want on iPhones, that fool ISPs into running peer-to-peer traffic. We need to hand out easy-to-use tools to everyone so crowds of consumers can control what happens to their technologies. In short, we need to disobey.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/86205/





Zuneral this Saturday!

We regret to report the sudden, unexpected death of Digital Rights Management. Details of the tragedy at present remain unclear, but he was rushed to the hospital following a direct collision with an oncoming future last week at 10 PM. He was seven years old.

Zuneral Services
May 24th (this Saturday)
6:30 PM
JFK Park, Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA

Yesterday, in preparation of the public funeral that will take place this Saturday, members of Harvard College Free Culture entombed the recently-deceased Digital Rights Management in Quincy Courtyard at around 5 PM. As part of the healing process, all the attendees took part in saying goodbye to DRM by constructing its coffin.

The decedents are encased into their pourable-but-not-too-liquidy coffin

The final funeral and burial services for the recently deceased will take place at 6:30 PM on Saturday, May 24th in Cambridge’s JFK Park. A reception will follow to give attendees the chance to reminisce of the short life and accomplishments of DRM and to grieve together.
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~freecult...this-saturday/





Netflix Player by Roku

CNET Editors' Rating
7.7/10
Very good

Product Summary

The good: Streams Netflix Watch Now titles to your TV; affordable $100 price tag; unlimited viewing with no additional charge beyond standard ($8.95 or higher) monthly Netflix fee; PC-free movie watching; simple setup; includes built-in wired and 802.11g Wi-Fi networking; works with all TVs; upgradeable firmware allows for new features, interface improvements, and bug fixes.

The bad: While growing, the number of Watch Now titles currently available for streaming is still pretty paltry, especially when it comes to popular recent releases; video quality doesn't come close to DVD or HD; far too many titles don't appear in their original wide-screen version; no surround sound; can't manipulate queue via TV screen; yet another box under the TV.

The bottom line: While it's still a work in progress--and currently lean on quality content--the Netflix Player's simple operation, overall convenience, and cheap price makes it a compelling option for Netflix subscribers looking for instant gratification.
http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-medi...-33018087.html





Magicians Ask: What’s Up His Sleeve?
Stephanie Rosenbloom

Los Angeles

CHANCES are you’ve never heard of John Gaughan.

He doesn’t advertise. He doesn’t have a Web site. There is no street entrance to his workshop, a former 1930s aircraft school alongside railroad tracks on a dry, industrial stretch of road that straddles the city limits of Los Angeles and Glendale. Visitors must drive around back, past stacks of steel beams and cans of spray paint, toward a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

That Mr. Gaughan, 68, is not easily found befits an artisan who has spent most of his life creating large-scale illusions for many of the world’s most famous magicians and illusionists: Siegfried & Roy, David Blaine, Criss Angel, David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Mark Wilson, Ricky Jay.

He has also created stage illusions for enchanters of a different sort: Jim Morrison, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper, Barbra Streisand, Cher.

Yet while Mr. Gaughan’s artistry has, for instance, helped Mr. Angel seemingly jump through the body of another man, Mr. Gaughan doesn’t get the glory. In the world of legerdemain, his are vital but unseen hands.

“You know, in the old days of comedy there was a Charlie Chaplin and then there were the rest of the comedians,” said Milt Larsen, who in 1963 founded the Magic Castle in Hollywood, the clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts, which promotes the art and history of magic. “In music, there was Irving Berlin and then there were the rest of the composers. There’s always some king of the pack, and as far as I’m concerned, Johnny Gaughan is the king of the pack.”

In online forums, where science and magic buffs debate how illusionists seemingly defy the laws of physics, there are those in the know who succinctly answer: “All I have to say is John Gaughan.”

Follow Mr. Gaughan out of the sunlight, beneath an arch of iron griffins and into his warehouse. He shares it with a pair of shrieking parrots: Luther (retired from a circus in Buenos Aires) and Max (who used to wow the crowds at Busch Gardens). The space is filled with satyrs’ heads, masks, handcuffs used by Harry Houdini, a glass box penetrated with swords, a videotape labeled “floating heads.”

Discomfortingly human-looking automatons, frozen at a chess board or on a trapeze, peer from dusty corners.

“It’s pretty spooky at night in here,” said Mr. Gaughan, winding across uneven floors toward a little office practically wallpapered with 18th- and 19th-century magic props (wands, wooden hands, tiny cages, a spirit bell to conjure the dead).

In the digital age, when magicians have slick rock-style television programs and their illusions are on YouTube, Mr. Gaughan runs a low-tech operation. Three men work in his shop, and much of what is there is from another era, when a magician could send a chill through an audience by simply evoking Mephistopheles (as opposed to having himself run over by a steamroller like Mr. Angel has done).

“The way we do it here, we just get a piece of plywood and just start cutting and whaling on it,” said Mr. Gaughan, who in the abracadabra industry is known for “big magic,” such as levitating and morphing a beast into a prince in Broadway’s “Beauty and the Beast.” “We don’t even draw pictures or anything because it has to be built for your eye and in all different directions.”

He helped create illusions and props ranging from the trick wheelchair that concealed Gary Sinise’s legs in the film “Forrest Gump” to levitations at the Kabuki-za Theater in Tokyo. For a television show with Mr. Blaine, Mr. Gaughan worked on an illusion in which a woman’s watch vanishes and reappears down the street in the display window of a jewelry store. Mr. Blaine then picks up a piece of newspaper, holds it to the store window and pulls the watch out without cracking the glass.

Mr. Blaine said in an e-mail message that Mr. Gaughan is “a magical genius.”

Mr. Gaughan said he admires Mr. Blaine’s integrity: “He doesn’t use any stooges at all.”

Stooges, or audience plants, are commonly used by magicians and stunt performers. “That’s kind of the assumption,” Mr. Gaughan said. “You know, I can’t really say one way or the other because of — I just shouldn’t.”

Keeping secrets, not only from the public but also from other illusionists, is essential to Mr. Gaughan’s reputation.

“The reason people come to John is that they trust him,” said Jim Steinmeyer, an illusion designer who has collaborated with Mr. Gaughan. “They would stop coming to him if they didn’t.”

Mr. Copperfield and Siegfried & Roy, through publicists, declined to comment for this article. A publicist for Mr. Angel did not respond to interview requests.

Nowadays Mr. Gaughan is one in a circle of elders of magic. But growing up in Dallas he was just another boy who hung around a shop called Douglas Magicland.

“I was the demonstrator and he was the kid who would come in,” recalled Mark Wilson, 79, the magician who produced and starred in network television’s first weekly magic series, “The Magic Land of Allakazam,” shown on CBS and ABC in the early 60s.

Before long, Mr. Gaughan, then 14, began working for Mr. Wilson and his assistant (and wife), Nani Darnell. “He would help us put magic kits together that we would sell in department stores,” said Mr. Wilson, who has taught the likes of Cary Grant, Dick Van Dyke and Johnny Carson to perform tricks.

In 1961, Mr. Gaughan followed Mr. Wilson to Los Angeles, where he also studied industrial design at California State University. As Mr. Wilson’s star rose, he opened his own workshop in a house on Venice Boulevard. During the Watts riots, Mr. Wilson said, “Johnny went to the house and stayed all night to be sure everything was safe.” (Mr. Gaughan said he was perched on the roof with a fire extinguisher.)

Eventually, Mr. Wilson moved his operation to the space that is Mr. Gaughan’s shop (though he is relocating to another site about three miles away).

Mr. Gaughan is also a top collector of magic memorabilia, restoring antique devices and replicating lost creations such as the Turk, a famed 1700s chess-playing automaton that rarely lost a game, trouncing Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, according to legend. It was destroyed in a fire in 1854. Using a couple of pieces that survived the fire, Mr. Gaughan succeeded in building a working replica of the automaton after some 25 years.

“There are 8 or 10 people that build illusions,” said Mr. Steinmeyer, who is the author of “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear.” “To me, what’s unique about John is his interest in historical work.”

Mr. Steinmeyer and other professionals credit Mr. Gaughan with unraveling enduring mysteries and reintroducing them to modern magicians. “What’s a shame is that secrets fall out of fashion,” Mr. Steinmeyer said.

IN describing Mr. Gaughan’s abilities, his peers point to a 20th-century illusion called “Impossibilities” created by Dr. Samuel Cox Hooker, which, as Mr. Wilson described it, has “fooled every major magician in the country.”

Mr. Gaughan acquired the illusion from Dr. Hooker’s estate, cracked its secrets and performed it twice at the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History. Playing cards rise and lower at his command, and a disembodied teddy bear head floats off a table.

Mr. Wilson had read about the illusion and thought: “Well, of course if I see it I’ll understand it. I’ll know how to do it.”

But that was not the case.

“He just fooled the hell out of me,” said Mr. Wilson, quickly apologizing for his enthusiastic language. Even so, he said, “I don’t think I want to know how to do it because I enjoy being fooled.”

And Mr. Gaughan enjoys fooling. Standing beside the legendary chess-playing Turk, he said: “There’s been over 800 different books and articles and plays, even films, about this piece, and no one ever got it right. The way I got it was I found some letters in one library written to another guy that was in another museum and put them together and it kind of told the story.”

The resurrected automaton has been on tour, including to Hungary, the homeland of its builder, Wolfgang von Kempelen. “It still fools people,” Mr. Gaughan said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/fashion/18magic.html





Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull Review

After nearly twenty years, Dr. Jones is back in cinemas. And how is he liking the fifties, we wonder...?
Mike Jennings

The world of entertainment has been awash with high-profile comebacks in the last couple of years. Doctor Who, of course, has proven to be a huge success on the small screen, and Led Zeppelin have joined a veritable festival of bands to embark on money-spinning tours. Next week, another blockbuster will be delivered to our screens in the form of ultimate chick-flick, Sex and the City.

Sure, they’ve been successful – some hugely so. But this is an entirely different trove of treasure. It’s Indiana Jones, and there will be hell to pay if Spielberg has screwed it up.

I’m happy to report that he hasn’t, not by a long shot. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an absolute triumph, and a picture-perfect tribute to one of cinema’s great action franchies. It’s also a little deeper than that, too, pleasing fans with self-referential wry humour and a dollop of sensible direction alongside some of the more lunatic elements of the story.

Not to give anything away, but the plot is a little bit mental. Sure, Raiders of the Lost Ark had its Nazis, The Temple of Doom had human sacrifice and The Last Crusade had, well, the Crusades, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull could well top that for having an odd, out-there plot. But it fits in this movie – the plot is as over the top as some of the action, and that’s what makes it such a joy to watch.

And plenty of action there is, too. Reams of set pieces are torn from the screen and practically land in your lap, leaping from celluloid to eyelid with vivacity, weight and huge amounts of enjoyment.

A conscious decision in production was made to steer clear of CGI effects when possible and perform stunts the old-fashioned way, and it’s certainly paid off – everything, from sword-fights on duelling jeeps to motorcycle chases and mad dashes through ancient ruins and treasure-filled warehouses feels suitably weighty and satisfying.

Punches make ridiculous sounds – it’s not so much Sylvester Stallone punching sides of beef as Thor giving Zeus a damn good hiding with his hammer – and it makes for a hugely enjoyable couple of hours.

The rest of the stunts are fantastically done, exhibiting plenty of the old imagination and endeavour that’s made the Indiana Jones franchise such a powerful force. It’s also endearing to see that most of the cast performed their own stunts – even Harrison Ford. Watching the cast close-up during these moments is always better than gazing at the back of some stunt-man’s head.

Of course, Harrison Ford has gotten a little bit older since he last appeared as the legendary Dr Henry Jones Jr. This is referenced several times throughout – often by the surprisingly excellent Shia LeBeouf, as Mutt – and contributes to several funnier moments. It’s gratifying that his aging hasn’t been ignored, and Indy hasn’t been painted as an immortal action hero whose wrinkles have been removed in post-production. It’s a far better movie for it.

Ford’s older, wiser Jones isn’t just a comedy addition to an established individual; it’s been used to develop the character, too. Often, it’s through regression: watching Indiana hurtle around caves and use his ingenuity to fight off fifteen guys is total escapism and harks back to the old days. But he’s also got the older, wiser cynicism and grumpiness that you might expect of someone that age.

LeBeouf has come in for criticism before the film’s even hit cinemas, and for no reason other than that a fair few people didn’t seem to enjoy his performance in Transformers. As Indiana’s sidekick he’s generally excellent, bringing a new, paternal dimension to the pairing.

Ray Winstone is also good, acting some action to his CV alongside the countless gangster movies. Karen Allen even reprises her role as the superb Marion Ravenwood, easily slipping back into the role she made her own back in Raiders of the Lost Ark. John Hurt and Jim Broadbent appear, too, and are great, as usual.

In fact, the only real weak link in the cast is Cate Blanchett, playing the typically evil Russian villain. It’s pretty much the only depthless character in the movie, and it shows – everything seems geared towards mimicking the classic Communist cliché, and that seems to have been enough for Spielberg. She’s especially weak in the first half of the movie, coming into her own as the slightly ludicrous ending draws nearer.

Luckily, her performance is often masked by the stunning and atmospheric surroundings. Globe-trotting has often been Indiana’s forte, and there’s no shying away from that here, with dank caves, epic ruins, lush jungles and Indy’s college campus all featuring.

Each is produced with aplomb, too, looking as though you could reach out and touch them. Several scenes also highlight the superb lighting that lends the various sets an extra layer of adventurous atmosphere. They’re thick with cobwebs, dust, and thousands of years of dirt and grime – and that’s just Indy’s grizzled face. Luckily, his surroundings follow suit.

One minor complaint could be, potentially, the ending, which may feel a little rushed – quite a lot happens in a pretty short space of time and just about shoe-horns the film under the two hour limit. However, it’s almost forgivable here; Indiana Jones is about break-neck action and an endless soppy ending – I’m thinking Return of the King – probably wouldn’t feel right at all. It’s a tidy way to wrap things up, but leaves you especially aching for more.

Blanchett and the rushed ending aren’t huge issues, though, in the face of a true summer blockbuster. It’s everything an Indiana Jones film should be: stunning action sequences, a silly – yet riveting – plot, Russians, curses, tombs, caves, jungles, whips and Fedoras, allied with a mountain of adventure and a truckful of nostalgia.

It’s released on Thursday, so do yourself a favour and step back in time to the Indiana Jones classics of a couple of decades ago: it’s two hours of pure entertainment and escapism. And after all, it’s a hell of a lot better than Sex and the City.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/5698..._review.ht ml





Call Him the Worst Director (Then Duck)
John Schwartz

This seems to pain Mr. Boll, a gregarious 42-year-old German whose best-known movies are based on video games. So he has shared the pain with his critics, literally, challenging several to a series of boxing matches in 2006. Mr. Boll, a former boxer, thumped them handily.

But what he really wants is respect.

There is a Web site called StopUweBoll.org, with a petition demanding that he stop making movies. The petition had drawn only 18,000 names until last month, when Mr. Boll told the horror-movie Web site FearNet.com that he would quit making films if a million people signed. With his own version of “bring it on,” the list has now grown to more than a quarter of a million.

Why play along? “I have to live with it,” Mr. Boll said with an unhappy smirk. “It’s better to make fun with it,” as an alternative to “being depressed, sitting at home, slowly crying.”

We won’t even talk about UweBollIsAntichrist.com.

During a lunch interview in New York, he pressed a freshly copied DVD into a reporter’s hands. It was a rough cut of a serious film he’s been working on, about a brutal prison rape in Germany in 2006. “I would be interested to see what you think about it,” he said.

He also noted that there are counterpetitions urging him to keep making films. At least part of what is going on, he argued, is an online pile-on, a “can you top this?” game with Mr. Boll on the bottom.

“Is it the movies are all so bad?” he asked. “Something is not fitting together in the story, that I’m the worst of the worst.”

Mr. Boll’s most recent film, “Postal,” might not be the best vehicle for winning respect. The first sequence of the film, which opens on Friday, portrays 9/11 hijackers squabbling over the precise number of virgins who will be awaiting them after their martyrdom. The scene switches to a World Trade Center’s-eye view of an oncoming jet.

As the movie’s scattershot plot rocks along, the audience gets a long full-frontal look at a nude Dave Foley, the boyish comic best known for his work in the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe and on the television show “News Radio,” who portrays a sleazy satyr of a cult leader. By the time the film’s protagonist, played by Zack Ward, uses a cat for a silencer, the boundaries of good taste have been left so far behind that the Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t spot the border signs.

Considering the gross-out and sexual-humor quotient of many recent films, “Postal” could well find an audience. The raucous crowd at a screening presented by the New York City Horror Film Festival last month erupted in laughter for every startlingly transgressive joke. As a couple left the theater, a woman told her date, “It made no sense, but it was hysterical.”

“Postal,” like Mr. Boll’s “BloodRayne,” “Alone in the Dark” and “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale,” originated as a violent video game. Many of the reviews for those films have been startlingly negative. A reviewer for Entertainment Weekly wrote of “Alone in the Dark,” which starred Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff, “Far be it from me to dismiss a man’s effort in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value.”

As vicious as many of the professional reviews have been, video gamers’ online critiques are even more vituperative, and largely unprintable. Some of their complaints sound a bit like those of Jane Austen fans who decry adaptations that miss the essence of their beloved author’s canon. Except that instead of lamenting, say, the way the filmmakers behind “Northanger Abbey” completely misunderstood the importance of the humorous references to Anne Radcliffe’s masterpiece, “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” they excoriate Mr. Boll for shifting the story of “BloodRayne” from Nazi Germany to 18th-century Romania. They also think Rayne’s outfit is not hot enough.

The reaction of gamers is not based solely on the faithfulness of the way the games are interpreted, said Daniel Morris, publisher of the world’s best-selling PC-games magazine, PC Gamer. “One thing to understand is that gamers face a certain geek stigma,” he said. “And it’s certainly not helped when movies come out based on games, and the movies are just no good.”

Mr. Boll’s defenders do not claim that his films are great art. But they do say he’s not that bad.

Sam Beddoes, a freelance Web designer in England who has a Web site, HooplaNet (hooplanet.co.uk), that runs reviews and humor, said in an e-mail interview, “I don’t think anybody deserves the kind of abuse the Internet gives Uwe.” (It’s pronounced OO-veh.) Although he called Mr. Boll’s “House of the Dead” “laughable (Sorry, Uwe!),” he said he found his other films “far better than anybody has given credit for.”

Mr. Boll’s films have been compared to the output of Troma Entertainment, which includes “The Toxic Avenger” and “Surf Nazis Must Die.” Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder of Troma, said he found “Postal” “pretty funny” and called it “a kind of Troma fromage” — or, rather, hommage. Mr. Boll, he said, is “heroic, and a genuine independent spirit,” but also safe for reviewers to attack because he is not tied to the big Hollywood companies and the advertising dollars they wield. “They can’t say that Michael Bay is a no-talent.”

The film industry is certainly not helping Mr. Boll. Earlier this month he received an e-mail message from the chief buyer for the Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater chain in the country, informing him that Regal would not be exhibiting “Postal”: “While I have respected your past work this film falls short of the type of product the Regal Theater Group would consider commercial.”

Mr. Boll denounced the decision as politics. (The film portrays President Bush as not only in league with Osama bin Laden but also in love with him.) “We still aim for 1,000 screens,” he said. (Mr. Boll’s own company is distributing the film.)

Mr. Boll said his business model can take such disappointments. The films may perform modestly at the box office (“In the Name of the King,” for example, has brought in $11.8 million worldwide), but that represents about 15 percent of his revenues, with television, DVD rights and video on demand bringing in the rest. Provisions in the German tax code allow his investors to benefit through write-offs. And he stays away from the Hollywood system, producing the movies himself.

“Because I don’t have in-between people,” he said, “I make more money.”

Mr. Boll’s defense of his work is equally straightforward. “I don’t make political decisions that can destroy the earth,” he said. “I make movies.”

Which is not to say that he won’t wallop those who ridicule him. The boxing matches, in September 2006, left one of his opponents vomiting and sucking oxygen from a tank. One of the people he fought, Rich Kyanka of the comedy Web site Something Awful (somethingawful.com), complained at the time that Mr. Boll had suggested the match was only for show.

Mr. Kyanka, via e-mail, declined comment. “The guy’s essentially a real life troll,” he wrote. “Boll wants people to talk about him so he can get free publicity.” He added, “I’m not going to feed him.”

Those who have worked with Mr. Boll say they see a different man. Mr. Foley said he found him, in person, to be “quite a sweet guy” but tough.

Why work for the director called the worst in the world? “I knew nothing about Uwe Boll” at first, Mr. Foley said. He watched “BloodRayne,” he said, and found it so over-the-top gory that “it made me laugh.” It had, he said, the absurd feel of a Terry Gilliam film.

Mr. Boll is “like a quintessential German intellectual artist who has almost taken film arbitrarily as the medium he’s going to work in. The art form is, almost, in being hated,” Mr. Foley said. Comparing him to the comedian Andy Kaufman, he added, “It’s his relationship with the audience that is his creation, his relationship with the critics, more than the movies.”

What, then, does that make an actor like, say, Dave Foley?

“A pawn, I suppose, a bit of pigment on the canvas,” Mr. Foley said.

“This is either going to be the worst movie I’ve ever been in, or it’s going to be brilliant,” he said. “There’s not any middle ground.” Of course, he added, “I hope it’s brilliant.”

The creator of the StopUweBoll.org petition is Bert Harvey, a 29-year-old game designer at Flying Lab Software, near Seattle. “I really think that he is the P. T. Barnum of our generation, and even bad press is good press for him,” Mr. Harvey said.

If Mr. Harvey’s petition tops a million signatures, Mr. Boll says, he will insist on a careful examination of the results. “I cannot accept that this is, like, a hundred thousand people voting 10 times,” he said. But if that total isn’t reached, critics will still have the consolation that Mr. Boll will appear as a character in the upcoming video game Postal III.

“They can kill me every day of their life,” Mr. Boll said. “As long as I’m able to make movies, I’m happy.”

John Metcalfe contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/movies/18schw.html





Heavy Metal, Light on the Success
John Anderson

AT the opening night party of the recent Hot Docs film festival in Toronto the crowd mostly consisted of the usual suspects. City bigwigs, nonfiction filmmakers, Canadian academics, programmers, the press. But there were also what appeared to be members of a biker gang. And that guy over there, wasn’t he in the film drinking a beer through his nose?

If movies are supposed to bring people together, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” was fulfilling its mission, working pan-cultural magic on the Hot Docs crowd, just as it had in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was an out-of-competition hit and the talk of the shuttle buses. The story of a 30-year-old unheralded heavy-metal band (and a few of its fans; see above), “Anvil!” has been chosen as the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Film Festival next month. And the film and band land in Brooklyn on May 31, as part of the Sundance Institute at BAM series.

Like the vapor trail of a rock-arena smoke machine, uncommon fellowship has followed “Anvil!” since its germination in a Toronto restaurant four years ago. At that dinner was an unusual trio: Sacha Gervasi, a suave British screenwriter (“The Terminal”); Rebecca Yeldham, a producer attending the Toronto Film Festival in support of her film “The Motorcycle Diaries”; and the lead singer-guitarist for the largely unheralded Canadian heavy-metal band Anvil, Steve Kudlow, called Lips, who in the 1980s liked to appear onstage in a bondage harness, playing slide guitar with a sex toy.

Mr. Gervasi and Ms. Yeldham had been looking for a project to do together, but as Mr. Gervasi recalled, Ms. Yeldham’s eyes glazed over at the Anvil idea.

“I had no interest in metal music,” Ms. Yeldham said. “In the ’80s I was listening to the Go-Gos.”

At some point during their meal Mr. Kudlow made a melancholy admission: During one of his many less-than-glamorous, non-rock ’n’ roll careers, he had delivered fish to that same restaurant. After all those years of lugging in the snapper and cod, this was the first time he had sat in the dining room.

“Rebecca knew then,” Mr. Gervasi said, “that there was a movie here.”

Summarized by some as a real-life “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Anvil!” tracks Mr. Kudlow, the drummer Robb Reiner and their long slog through a morass of record company rip-offs, incompetent management, under-publicized tours, changing tastes, a reunion with the former producer and the creation of a new album. The film wasn’t sold in a Sundance price war and hasn’t yet made anyone’s career (although traffic and CD sales have increased on the band’s Web site, anvilmetal.tk).

And yet for everyone involved, it has been a success. “Whatever happens with the movie from here on in is sort of irrelevant,” said Mr. Gervasi, who worked as an Anvil roadie when he was 15. (Later he worked for Ted Hughes, the British poet laureate, as an assistant.) “It’s already a success in terms of achieving what we wanted to achieve.”

Money was never Anvil’s motivation. “I can’t envision myself being a millionaire,” Mr. Kudlow said, “but I can envision myself going to a gig every night and making enough money to make ends meet. I want to be the biggest bar band in the world and work endlessly.”

Given Anvil’s snake-bit history — its original lead singer was killed in a highway accident when a shipping container fell off a truck — it’s unwise to speculate about where the movie will take the group. As the tongue-in-cheek title “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” implies, Anvil takes itself less seriously than Metallica, Iron Maiden, Anthrax or any of the other heavy metal bands for whom blinding guitar speed, studded leatherware and general bombast proved a route to success. Anvil never achieved fame and fortune, but it never stopped playing either.

For three decades Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Reiner have kept Anvil together, entertaining hope that the band might return to its brief mid-1980s glory, though even that never involved big paydays. Mr. Kudlow said the band was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties by record companies he would rather not name. Mr. Gervasi noted with a smile that one of the companies that rejects the band in the movie recently expressed an interest in signing it.

“I think they find that hilariously ironic,” Mr. Gervasi said. “And a couple of years ago they might have jumped at the chance, but Lips told me all a label does is market a band, and since they have the movie to do that, why on earth would they sign their lives away?”

Mr. Gervasi, who mortgaged his home in the Hollywood Hills to finance this film, said he made it with Ms. Yeldham “because I needed to make a statement I was in control of.”

“That doesn’t mean,” he added, “I’m not grateful for having the greatest, most highly paid day job in the world.” But “The Terminal,” which was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Tom Hanks, “became their movie,” Mr. Gervasi said. “I couldn’t have had a bigger Hollywood experience, but I want to make stories that connect with people and feel they come from me and it was really hard for people to hear what I had to say because —— ”

“The voice got lost along the way,” Ms. Yeldham interjected.

The appeal of “Anvil!” is that it’s about dreams being neither realized nor abandoned. The band’s story is also about opposites — Mr. Kudlow, for whom the glass is always half full, and Mr. Reiner, who isn’t so sure — not just attracting, but staying together.

“My initial reaction to the film was, ‘Who cares about this?’ ” Mr. Reiner said by phone. “The Toronto Sun here did a big blowout on the movie being at Hot Docs and a big picture of the band. I’m shocked at what’s going on. And when I saw how audiences reacted at Sundance, it opened my eyes that this movie has something else to it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/movies/18ande.html





Regal Plans to Add 3-D Movie Screens

The Regal Entertainment Group, the world’s largest cinema operator, has reached an agreement to equip 1,500 screens to show three-dimensional films.

The accord, with Real D, will allow Regal to show 3-D movies in most American markets, the company, based in Knoxville, Tenn., said in a statement on Tuesday.

Regal will install the technology once Digital Cinema Implementation Partners, a group of theater exhibitors, completes plans for an industry conversion to digital projectors.

Studios are producing more films in 3-D. DreamWorks Animation SKG and Walt Disney’s Pixar unit pledged to make 3-D versions of every film starting next year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/bu.../21cinema.html





Hip-Hopper Is Pardoned by Governor
Kirk Semple

During a federal immigration hearing in 1995, Gov. David A. Paterson, then a New York State senator, testified on behalf of the hip-hop pioneer Ricky Walters, who was facing deportation to his native Britain for convictions on attempted murder and weapons charges.

The immigration judge decided to block the deportation of Mr. Walters, known as Slick Rick, who had shot and wounded a relative and another man in 1990. But an immigration appeals court overturned the decision later that year, prompting a renewed effort by federal immigration officials to deport him.

On Friday, 13 years after he first took the stand on behalf of Mr. Walters, Mr. Paterson again came to the musician’s defense, granting him a rare pardon of his criminal convictions.

In issuing the pardon, Mr. Paterson cited Mr. Walters’s clean record during his prison term as well as his community volunteer work and antiviolence counseling of young people. Mr. Walters, the governor said, “has been living without incident in the community for more than 10 years.”

The pardon allows Mr. Walters, 43, to seek federal relief from deportation and permission to remain in this country, where he has lived since 1976. Under federal law, a resident alien convicted of an aggravated felony or weapons offense can be deported.

The pardon erases the attempted murder conviction as grounds for deportation, his lawyers said, but Mr. Walters must still seek a waiver for the weapons conviction. His lawyers do not expect opposition by immigration officials to his request.

“This has been a long and difficult road and I am happy for this to be settled once and for all,” Mr. Walters said in a statement issued by a public relations firm. “I look forward to enjoying this time with my family and friends and to continue leading an honest and productive life.” Mr. Walters, who lives with his wife and two children in an apartment building he owns in the Bronx, declined to be interviewed.

Michael Krinsky, one of Mr. Walters’s lawyers, said he planned to submit a request for a waiver of deportation on behalf of his client within the next two weeks.

The pardon was only the 10th issued by a New York governor since the administration of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, said Erin Duggan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paterson. Of the 10 pardons, 4 were intended to help thwart a deportation, she said.

Some lawyers hailed the pardon as a victory for immigrants at a time when the federal government is being far more aggressive about deportation.

“I think it’s clearly an important recognition by the governor of the need to prevent yet another injustice occurring as a result of draconian immigration laws,” said Steven Banks, the chief attorney of the Legal Aid Society, which represents immigrants with criminal records facing deportation. “Today’s pardon establishes the principle that rehabilitation is to be valued.”

Manuel D. Vargas, senior counsel with the Immigrant Defense Project of the New York State Defenders Association, said that Mr. Walters’s fame clearly helped his case. “Sadly, there are lots of folks who are in the same situation with similar favorable equities who don’t have this opportunity,” he said. “But it’s good to see that at least this one individual is getting this opportunity.”

Mr. Walters’s troubles began in 1990 when he shot and wounded his cousin and a bystander in the Bronx.

Mr. Walters, who gained worldwide fame with his 1988 hip-hop album “The Great Adventures of Slick Rick,” said that the cousin, Mark Plummer, had been extorting money from him and had arranged at least one attempt on his life.

Mr. Walters pleaded guilty to attempted murder and weapons charges. He served about five years in prison and was on work release for about a year and a half.

In 1995, Mr. Walters nearly won the right to stay in the United States. An immigration judge granted him permission to stay in the country, according to an account issued on Friday by Mr. Paterson’s office.

That year, the Board of Immigration Appeals also found that allowing Mr. Walters to remain in the United States “appears to be in the best interest of the country.”

But the appeals board had to vacate its decision on a technical ground: Mr. Walters had served five years and 33 days in prison and the law did not permit convicts who had served more than five years in prison to receive relief from deportation. Mr. Walters continued his legal fight all the same, was released on parole in 1997 and discharged from parole supervision in 2000.

Over the years, many legal, political and entertainment figures have come to Mr. Walters’s defense. Governor Paterson, who in the 1980s and ’90s knew people in the hip-hop industry, had testified in 1995 after hearing Mr. Walters speak at a church, about his “mistakes and lost opportunities,” Ms. Duggan said.

Entertainers like Will Smith, Chris Rock, Russell Simmons and Jay-Z; numerous New York legislators; the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson; and even Mr. Walters’s parole supervisor have written supportive letters to Mr. Paterson, citing Mr. Walters’s clean record and his contributions to American society, according to the governor’s office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/ny.../24pardon.html





Say it ain’t so Nick

OLPC's a Con - Former Insider

Departing software chief stings Negroponte
Andrew Orlowski

The former security director of the One Laptop Per Child non-profit has blasted the project for losing sight of its goals, accusing chairman Nicholas Negroponte of deceiving the public. It's all about shipping kit, says Ivan Krstić in an incendiary essay.
"I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward," writes Krstić.

"Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work."

Ouch.

Negroponte's decision to embrace Windows has seen top-level resignations from the OLPC project. CTO Mary Lou Jepsen left in January, and former software chief and president Walter Bender departed in April. Krstić resigned in March.

OLPC is a poster child for free software innovation, with critics acknowledging value in its advances in mesh networking and the radical task-based UI Sugar. But the F/OSS ideals are now being jetissoned, writes Krstić, along with the crown jewels:

"In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He's told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its 'availability' as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster."

Not everyone thinks Sugar is a successful UI - judge for yourself in our extensive hands-on.

You can read more of this wide-ranging and thoughtful essay here.

"I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies," adds Python language author Guido van Rossum in the comments.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/16/krstic_olpc/





Analysis: Should YouTube Censor Al-Qaida?
Shaun Waterman

Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., called Monday for YouTube to take down al-Qaida videos that users had posted, but the site said most of the videos his office had flagged did not contain material that violated their guidelines and rejected his request that they act to remove all material from U.S. designated terror groups.

In a letter to Eric Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive officer of Google Inc., which owns YouTube, Lieberman urged the popular video-sharing service to enforce its own "community guidelines" against "graphic or gratuitous violence" and said the company should change its rules "to address violent extremist material."

In the letter, released to the media and dated Monday, Lieberman wrote that removing videos produced by al-Qaida and other extremist groups should be straightforward, because "so many of the Islamist terrorist organizations brand their material with logos or icons identifying their provenance."

In a blog posting, YouTube said it welcomed the dialogue with Lieberman but noted that "most of the videos" his office had drawn to their attention "did not contain violent or hate speech content" and had therefore not been removed from the site "because they do not violate our Community Guidelines."

YouTube, which hosts millions of videos posted every day by its user-community, also rejected the idea that it should pre-screen content for videos produced by al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

The blog posting said the site "encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds."

A Lieberman aide said the material he was concerned about went beyond the bounds of acceptable free speech.

"It is not reasonable, let alone legal, for an al-Qaida spokesman to visit the United States and try to recruit and build support here," the aide told UPI. "Why is it reasonable for the same person to do that in this virtual community?"

Al-Qaida and other groups are using YouTube in their efforts to legitimize their violence, spread their ideas and recruit potential terrorists. "Shouldn't the community guidelines ban (U.S.-)designated (foreign terrorist organizations) from using the service?" the aide asked.

The answer Lieberman's critics offer is that he is misunderstanding the nature of the Internet. "There is nothing YouTube or Sen. Lieberman can do to keep these videos off the Internet," John Morris, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told UPI, adding that many of the propaganda videos produced by al-Qaida and other groups "contained nothing that is illegal."

Morris pointed out that removing such material automatically might not be as easy as it seems. "The idea that they would have to review every video (posted), even by a semi-automated process, is not a practical reality."

"If automated means were used to identify material, would a news report or documentary containing the same material … be blocked or removed simply because the logo (of al-Qaida or another terror group) appeared (in it)?" asked Ben Venzke of Intel Center, a private sector contractor that monitors extremist Web communications for clients including the U.S. government.

Venzke said most were not posted on YouTube by the groups themselves, but by individuals who had found them elsewhere, "and may not even support the terrorists' goals."

"The core underlying issue," he said, "is that whether you take these videos off YouTube or not, they will always be available at numerous other locations online. New outlets are popping up constantly, and when you take one down, 10 more simply appear to fill the gap. The problem is the very nature of the Internet itself. It makes controlling and denying access to information simply impossible."

Nonetheless, Lieberman's aide said the senator was just asking the company to enforce its own rules and that many of the videos YouTube declined to take down "are in our opinion clearly in violation of the community guidelines. … YouTube is still not enforcing its own rules."

In his letter, Lieberman quoted the community guidelines: "Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone getting hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don't post it."

Many of the videos produced by al-Qaida's media arms in Iraq and Afghanistan "show attacks on U.S. forces in which American soldiers are injured and, in some cases, killed," wrote Lieberman.

Even though many roadside bomb attacks against coalition vehicles are shown in the mid-distance, there are plenty of other videos that show more graphic scenes. But Morris, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, noted that "top-selling movies have scenes depicting extreme violence" and that it was appropriate that YouTube should enforce its own guidelines.

The company is "quite insulated from legal liability by the U.S. Criminal Code," and "any effort to legislate (to get videos made by designated foreign terror groups off the Internet) would be struck down on First Amendment grounds."

Lieberman's aide said that Google's responsibility not to post terrorist videos was something the company "has to wrestle with. … They are the dominant player in this (video-sharing) market."

But Venzke echoed the feelings of several intelligence professionals UPI has spoken to about this issue -- that Lieberman is barking up the wrong tree. "Removing material from YouTube would have little to no effect on key terrorist groups' primary dissemination efforts," he told UPI. "There are no major jihadi groups … using YouTube as their primary release point."
http://www.upi.com/International_Sec...al-qaida/6060/





The Last Roundup: MAIN CORE
Kevin

In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.

—Russell Tice, Former NSA SIGINT Officer


I’m going to provide a one paragraph summary, just to make sure that the implications of this are clear to everyone:

The U.S. Government has, almost certainly, established a database and tracking system for something like eight million Americans who have been designated as threats to national security. The system is called MAIN CORE and it is being run under the auspices of highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) operations. MAIN CORE uses a variety of intelligence sources as inputs, including your email, web activity, telephone and private financial information. In the event of a major national security crisis, it is alleged that Americans listed in the MAIN CORE database, “Could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

The Last Roundup, by Christopher Ketcham, appeared in the May/June 2008 issue of Radar Magazine. (Full text here and here.)

Below are some excerpts from The Last Roundup. I have provided explicit pointers to the related materials on Cryptogon:

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” [See: AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance]

He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

…

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

…

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets’ behavior and tracks their circle of associations with “social network analysis” and artificial intelligence modeling tools. [See: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation]

“The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,” he says. “Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.” An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that “it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.”

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as “warrantless wiretapping.” [See: NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite]

In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor “huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records.” Authorities employ “sophisticated software programs” to sift through the data, searching for “suspicious patterns.” In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it’s notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. “The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed,” the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. “Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.”

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local “intelligence” reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; “commercial databases”; and unidentified “private sector entities.” Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used “to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time.” Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, “What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be.” A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: “Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that ‘Main Core’ database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project.”

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. “If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues”—the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—“so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints.” Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. “It’s clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear.” Giraldi continues, “I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons—quite likely, including the two of us.”
http://cryptogon.com/?p=2590





Welcome to America

When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security ...
Elena Lappin

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. "What do you want?" he yelled. I said I didn't feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.

Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.

None of this had been on my mind the night before, when I boarded my United Airlines flight from Heathrow. Sitting next to an intriguingly silent young man who could have been a porn star or a well camouflaged air marshal, I spent most of the 11-hour flight daydreaming about the city where he so clearly belonged and that I had never visited. My America had always been the east coast: as tourist, resident, journalist, novelist, I had never ventured much past the New York-Boston-Washington triangle. But I was glad that this brief assignment was taking me to sunkissed LA, and I was ready to succumb to LA's laid-back charm.

The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.

"I'm here to do some interviews," I said.

"With whom?" He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. "So you're a journalist," he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. "I have to refer this to my supervisor," he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be "processed". Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I'd have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, "It seems that we will probably have to deport you."

I'm not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? "Why?" I asked, incredulously.

"You came here as a journalist, and you don't have a journalist's visa." I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media ("You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program").

My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. "You don't care, do you?" I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be "interviewed", and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents' names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue - I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, "You are Russian, yet you claim to be British", an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, "Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I'd have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their "rules" demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me. In the middle of this, my husband rang from London; he had somehow managed to locate my whereabouts, and I was allowed briefly to wipe the ink off my hands to take the call. Hearing his voice was a reminder of the real world I was beginning to feel cut off from.

Three female officers arrived to do a body search. As they slipped on rubber gloves, I blenched: what were they going to do, and could I resist? They were armed, they claimed to have the law on their side. I was an anonymous foreigner who had committed a felony, and "those were the rules". So I was groped, unpleasantly, though not as intimately as I had feared. Then came the next shock: two bulky, uniformed and armed security men handcuffed me, which they explained was the "rule when transporting detainees through the airport". I was marched between the two giants through an empty terminal to a detention room, where I sat in the company of two other detainees (we were not allowed to communicate) and eight sleepy guards, all men. I would have been happy to spend the night watching TV with them, as they agreed to switch the channel from local news (highlight: a bear was loose in an affluent LA neighbourhood) to sitcoms and soaps. Their job was indescribably boring, they were overstaffed with nothing to do, and so making sure I didn't extract a pen or my mobile phone from my luggage must have seemed a welcome break. I listened to their star-struck stories about actors they had recently seen at LAX. We laughed in the same places during Seinfeld, an eerie experience. I was beginning to think I could manage this: the trip was a write-off, of course, but I could easily survive a night and a day of this kind of discomfort before flying back. But then I was taken to the detention cell in downtown LA, where the discomfort became something worse.

Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."

On a more practical level, this obsession, when practised with such extreme lack of intelligence (in both senses of the word), as in the case of my detention, must be misdirecting valuable money and manpower into fighting journalism rather than terrorism. Ordinary Americans, rather than the powers that be, are certainly able to make that distinction. According to an editor at the LA Times, there has been a "tremendous" response from readers to the reporting on my case, and I have received many emails expressing outrage and embarrassment. The novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote, "On behalf of the non-thuggish American majority, my sincere apologies."

These would have been comforting thoughts the following morning when I was driven back (in handcuffs, of course) to the communal detention room at LAX, and spent hours waiting, without food, while the guards munched enormous breakfasts and slurped hot morning drinks (detainees are not allowed tea or coffee). I incurred the wrath of the boss when I insisted on edible food. "I'm in charge in here. Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? This isn't a hotel," he screamed.

"Why are you yelling?" I asked. "I'm just asking for some decent food. I'll pay for it myself." A Burger King fishburger never tasted so good. And it occurred to me that a hotel or transit lounge would have been a better place to keep travellers waiting to return home.

As documented by Reporters Without Borders and by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) in letters to Colin Powell and Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens - not journalists! - can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days. According to Asne, this policy "could lead to a degradation of the atmosphere of mutual trust that has traditionally been extended professional journalists in these nations". Asne requested that the state department put pressure on customs and immigration to "repair the injustice that has been visited upon our colleagues". Someone must have listened, because the press office at the department of homeland security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still needed (and I've just received mine), new guidelines now give the "Port Directors leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security". Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat?

Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at LAX, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. "No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004...5/usa.weekend7





Report Details Complaints Over Interrogations
Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane

F.B.I. agents complained repeatedly, beginning in 2002, about the harsh interrogation tactics that military and C.I.A. interrogators were using in questioning terrorism suspects, like making them do dog tricks and parade in the nude in front of female soldiers, but their complaints appear to have had little effect, according to an exhaustive report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The report describes major and repeated clashes between F.B.I. agents and their counterparts over the rough methods being used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq — some of which, according to the inspector general, may have violated the Defense Department’s own policies at the time.

It also provides new insight into the intense debates at senior levels of the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council over what should and should not be allowed — a debate in which the Defense Department prevailed.

The inspector general found that in a few instances, F.B.I. agents participated in interrogations using pressure tactics that would not have been permitted inside the United States. But the “vast majority” of agents followed the bureau’s legal guidelines and “separated themselves” from harsh treatment.

For instance, F.B.I. agents expressed “strong concerns” about the abusive treatment by the C.I.A. in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al Qaeda figure, leading to tense discussions between senior officials at the two agencies over how such important prisoners should be handled.

Still, the bureau “had not provided sufficient guidance to its agents on how to respond when confronted with military interrogators who used interrogation techniques that were not permitted by the F.B.I.,” and that fueled confusion and dissension, the report said.

“In sum, while our report concluded that the F.B.I. could have provided clearer guidance earlier, and while the F.B.I. and DoJ could have pressed harder for resolution of F.B.I. concerns about detainee treatment, we believe the F.B.I. should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations in the military zones in Afghanistan,” in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay, the report said. DoJ refers to the Justice Department, the bureau’s parent agency.

Jameel Jaffer, who tracks detainee issues for the American Civil Liberties Union, took a more critical stance. “The report confirms that senior F.B.I. officials knew as early as 2002 that other agencies were using abusive interrogation methods,” Mr. Jaffer said. “The report shows unequivocally, however, that the F.B.I.’s leadership failed to act aggressively to end the abuse.”

He said the report documents “a failure of leadership” at the bureau, and “only underscores the pressing need for an independent and comprehensive investigation of prisoner abuse.”

The report said that several senior Justice Department Criminal Division officials raised concerns with the National Security Council in 2003 about the military’s treatment of detainees, but saw no changes as a result of their complaints.

John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general’s office of the department he had headed, an unusual refusal and one that hampered investigators’ attempts to learn of discussions inside the council, the report said.

A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate comment on the report.

The inspector general’s office started its investigation in late 2004, following widespread public attention to the question of detainee treatment spurred by graphic photographs of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The American Civil Liberties Union, through a lawsuit, also unearthed numerous internal e-mail messages from the bureau about agents’ complaints of rough interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, which proved central in the Justice Department’s review.

The investigation examined about a half-million documents and included surveys of 1,000 F.B.I. agents regarding their experiences with interrogation tactics by military and C.I.A. interrogators, as well as interviews with hundreds of other bureau personnel, officials said. The investigation centered on the accounts of what the agents witnessed in the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and how those complaints were handled. The Justice Department’s inspector general does not have jurisdiction over the Pentagon.

The bulk of the report was completed last year, but its public release by the inspector general was bottled up for months because of concerns from the Defense Department about the disclosure of sensitive information centering on interrogation tactics. The final report from the inspector general, unlike some earlier terrorism investigations, was released with relatively few blacked-out sections.

The bureau stationed agents at Guantánamo Bay and other military detention sites to assist in the questioning of detainees taken into custody after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but the rough tactics by military interrogators soon became a major source of friction between the bureau and sister agencies. Agents complained to superiors beginning in 2002 that the tactics they had seen in use yielded little actual intelligence, prevented them from establishing a rapport with detainees through more traditional means of questioning, and might violate bureau policy or American law.

One bureau memorandum spoke of “torture techniques” used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.

Ultimately, the bureau ordered its agents not to participate in or remain present when such tactics were used. But that directive was not formalized until May 2004, and it governed only the bureau’s own agents. Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., told Congress that he was not made aware of his agents’ concerns until 2004.

Democrats in Congress have been anxiously awaiting the findings from the inspector general as they seek to push for answers from the Bush administration about how interrogation policies were developed. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who leads a House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution and civil right, told reporters on Monday, in advance of the report’s release, that he sensed a “a reluctance to confront senior administration officials” about interrogation policies from the bureau and elsewhere. He said the report should help answer key questions about how policies were executed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/wa...detain.html?hp





10 Ways You Might be Breaking the Law With Your Computer
Debra Littlejohn Shinder

For many years, the Internet was the “final frontier,” operating largely unregulated — in part because of the jurisdictional nightmare involved in trying to enforce laws when communications crossed not just state lines but also national boundaries. That was then; this is now.

Legislation that affects the use of Internet-connected computers is springing up everywhere at the local, state, and federal levels. You might be violating one of them without even knowing it.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the existing laws and some of the pending legislation that can affect how we use our computers and the Internet. Nothing in this article should be construed as legal advice; this is merely an overview of some of the legislation that’s out there, how it has been interpreted by the courts (if applicable), and possible implications for computer users.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

Most computer users have heard of this law, which was signed in 1998 by President Clinton, implementing two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties. The DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any kind of technological copy protection — even if you don’t violate anyone’s copyright in doing so. In other words, simply disabling the copy protection is a federal crime.

There are some exemptions, such as circumventing copy protection of programs that are in an obsolete format for the purpose of archiving or preservation. But in most cases, using any sort of anti-DRM program is illegal. This applies to all sorts of copy-protected files, including music, movies, and software. You can read a summary of the DMCA here.

If you’re a techie who likes the challenge of trying to “crack”DRM,” be aware that doing so — even if you don’t make or distribute illegal copies of the copyrighted material — is against the law.

#2: No Electronic Theft (NET) Act

This is another U.S. federal law that was passed during the Clinton administration. Prior to this act, copyright violations were generally treated as civil matters and could not be prosecuted criminally unless it was done for commercial purposes. The NET Act made copyright infringement itself a federal criminal offense, regardless of whether you circumvent copy-protection technology or whether you derive any commercial benefit or monetary gain. Thus, just making a copy of a copyrighted work for a friend now makes you subject to up to five years in prison and/or up to $250,000 in fines. This is the law referred to in the familiar “FBI Warning” that appears at the beginning of most DVD movies. You can read more about the NET Act here.

Many people who consider themselves upstanding citizens and who would never post music and movies to a P2P site think nothing of burning a copy of a song or TV show for a friend. Unfortunately, by the letter of the law, the latter is just as illegal as the former.

#3: Court rulings regarding border searches

Most Americans are aware of the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures. In general, this means that the government cannot search your person, home, vehicle, or computer without probable cause to believe that you’ve engaged in some criminal act.

What many don’t know is that there are quite a few circumstances that the Courts, over the years, have deemed to be exempt from this requirement. One of those occurs when you enter the United States at the border. In April of this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of Customs officers to search laptops and other digital devices at the border (the definition of which extends to any international airport when you are coming into the country) without probable cause or even the lesser standard of reasonable suspicion. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other groups strongly disagree with the ruling. You can read more on the EFF Web site.

Meanwhile, be aware that even though you’ve done nothing illegal and are not even suspected of such, the entire contents of your portable computer, PDA, or smart phone can be accessed by government agents when you enter the United States. So if you have anything on your hard drive that might be embarrassing, you might want to delete it before crossing the border.

#4: State laws regarding access to networks

Many states have criminal laws that prohibit accessing any computer or network without the owner’s permission. For example, in Texas, the statute is Penal Code section 33.02, Breach of Computer Security. It says, “A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.” The penalty grade ranges from misdemeanor to first degree felony (which is the same grade as murder), depending on whether the person obtains benefit, harms or defrauds someone, or alters, damages, or deletes files.

The wording of most such laws encompasses connecting to a wireless network without explicit permission, even if the wi-fi network is unsecured. The inclusion of the culpable mental state of “knowing” as an element of the offense means that if your computer automatically connects to your neighbor’s wireless network instead of your own and you aren’t aware of it, you haven’t committed a crime — but if you decide to hop onto the nearest unencrypted wi-fi network to surf the Internet, knowing full well that it doesn’t belong to you and no one has given you permission, you could be prosecuted under these laws.

A Michigan man was arrested for using a café’s wi-fi network (which was reserved for customers) from his car in 2007. Similar arrests have been made in Florida, Illinois, Washington, and Alaska. See

#5: “Tools of a crime” laws

Some states have laws that make it a crime to possess a “criminal instrument” or the “tool of a crime.” Depending on the wording of the law, this can be construed to mean any device that is designed or adapted for use in the commission of an offense. This means you could be arrested and prosecuted, for example, for constructing a high gain wireless antenna for the purpose of tapping into someone else’s wi-fi network, even if you never did in fact access a network. Several years ago, a California sheriff’s deputy made the news when he declared “Pringles can antennas” illegal under such a statute.

#6: “Cyberstalking” laws

Stalking is a serious crime and certainly all of us are in favor of laws that punish stalkers. As Internet connectivity has become ubiquitous, legislatures have recognized that it’s possible to stalk someone from afar using modern technology. Some of the “cyberstalking” laws enacted by the states, however, contain some pretty broad language.

For example, the Arkansas law contains a section titled “Unlawful computerized communications” that makes it a crime to send a message via e-mail or other computerized communication system (Instant Messenger, Web chat, IRC, etc.) that uses obscene, lewd, or profane language, with the intent to frighten, intimidate, threaten, abuse, or harass another person. Some of the lively discussions on mailing lists and Web boards that deteriorate into flame wars could easily fall under that definition. Or how about the furious e-mail letter you sent to the company that refused to refund your money for the shoddy product you bought?

Closely related are the laws against “cyber bullying” that have recently been passed by some states and local governments.

The best policy is to watch your language when sending any type of electronic communications. Not only can a loss of temper when you’re online come back to embarrass you, it could possibly get you thrown in jail.

#7: Internet Gambling laws

Like to play poker online or bet on the horse races from the comfort of your home? The federal Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 criminalizes acceptance of funds from bettors — but what about the bettors themselves? Are they committing a crime?

Under this federal law, the answer is no, but some state laws do apply to the person placing the bet. For example, a Washington law passed in 2006 makes gambling on the Internet a felony. The King County Superior Court just recently upheld that law, although challengers have vowed to take it to the Supreme Court.

Be sure to check out the state and local laws before you make that friendly online bet.

#8: Security Breach Disclosure laws

A California law passed in 2003 requires that any company that does business in California must notify their California customers if they discover or suspect that nonencrypted data has been accessed without authorization. This applies even if the business is not located in California, as long as you have customers there, and no exception is made for small businesses.

#9: Community Broadband Act of 2007

This is a piece of pending federal legislation that was introduced in July of 2007 as U.S. Senate Bill 1853. In April 2008, it was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders and is still winding its way through the legislative process. This federal law would prohibit state and local governments (municipalities and counties) from passing laws that prohibit public telecommunications providers from offering Internet services.

This is in response to laws passed in a few states, as a result of lobbying from the telecom industry, that prohibit cities from installing and operating public broadband networks, such as public wi-fi networks. The big telecom companies have a vested interest in preventing cities from establishing networks that could compete with their own services by providing free or low cost Internet services because the public services are partially or wholly taxpayer-subsidized.

If this law passes, it could make it easier to find free or low cost ISP services in cities that choose to build public networks. On the other hand, it could (depending on how it’s funded) cause tax increases for those who live in those municipalities, including those who don’t use the public networks.

#10: Pro IP Act

Back on the copyright front, the House of Representative recently approved by an overwhelming majority HR 4279, which imposes stricter penalties for copyright infringement. It creates a new position of “copyright enforcement czar” in the federal bureaucracy and gives law enforcement agents the right to seize property from copyright infringers.

This may all sound fine in theory, but when you look at the way other seizure and forfeiture laws have been applied (for instance, the ability of drug enforcement officers to seize houses, computers, cars, cash, and just about everything else that belongs to someone tagged as a suspected drug dealer — and in some cases not returning the property even when the person is acquitted or not prosecuted), it makes many people wary. Read more about the bill here.

Some local jurisdictions have already established seizure authority for piracy. See this article for more information.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=356





China's All-Seeing Eye

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.
Naomi Klein

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port — to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada's favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to "suggest and illustrate the process of the market." A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.

Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China's telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen's disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: "You call that a superstore?") McDonald's and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.

American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black Honda. "It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now," he says. "It's the crime — they are too easy to steal." He quickly adds, "Since the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease in crime in Shenzhen."

After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns. This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished products.

Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment has already paid off tenfold. That kind of growth isn't unusual in the field he has chosen: Zhang's factory makes digital surveillance cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in "homeland security." The other half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China's market for surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump of 24 percent from 2006.

Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers, most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny cables and bulbs. At the end of each line is "quality control," which consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof, the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box.

The workers at FSAN don't just make surveillance cameras; they are constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four, one every few yards. One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.

In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other "entertainment" venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a wider surveillance project known as "Safe Cities," the effort now encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen.

But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. "The big picture," Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, "is integration." That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do. "The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole," Zhang says. "It's all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it's proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland."

In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.

When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government's own measure, there were at least 87,000 "mass incidents" — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.

This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a halt.

At the same time, the success of China's ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers.

But while China's cities need these displaced laborers to work in factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, "The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don't want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!"

With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country's elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: "Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability."

During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn't mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms.

During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren't the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 "most wanted" Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive "streetlamp" view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China's major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.

The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a "nightmare" for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn't happen.

Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government's high-tech web.

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.

In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. "It's called the 10-million-faces test," he tells me.

Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government's massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao's, have been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for that now."

The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: "It will happen next year."

When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government.

To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company's proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to "capture the image," Yao explains. Next is "finding the face."

He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company's database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can "find a face" even when the face has changed significantly with time. "

It took 1.1 milliseconds!" Yao exclaims. "Yeah, that's me!"

In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao's programmers and engineers take each other's pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. "Everyone is preparing for the test," Yao explains. "If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China."

Every couple of minutes Yao's phone beeps. Sometimes it's a work message, but most of the time it's a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. "Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!" He shrugs: "She likes designers."

Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for regular safety." He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as "the internal-security people." They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of "some protesters, some dissidents." They wanted to know if Yao's facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos. Yao was sorry to disappoint them. "Honestly, the technology so far still can't meet their needs," he says. "The photos that they show us were just too blurry." That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government's goal is not repression: "If you're a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive," he says. "So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is."

Until recently, Yao's photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid's birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH. When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition "should be the next dot-com."

Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field. He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts.

In 2006, Yao tells me, "I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail." For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company's proprietary software, allowing him to "build a lot of development software based on L-1's technology." Since then, L-1's partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn't really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: "We'll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China." Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company's research headquarters in New Jersey. ("Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It's such a historic place.") L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. "It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results."

L-1's enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company's ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world. But here's the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1's Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to "some large international opportunities," not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou.

After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1's involvement in China's homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company's head of research. "We have nothing in China," she tells me. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don't have any relationships at all."

I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She'll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: "Absolutely, we've sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test." Yao's use of the technology, she said, is "within his license" purchased from L-1.

The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment." That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the "detection instruments" that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents.

"The intent of that act," a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, "was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China."

Pixel's application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban's intent. By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1's software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone "every day" with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. "Because we are representing them," he says. "We took the test on their behalf."

In other words, this controversial U.S. "crime control" technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao's goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will "pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales."

When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if "they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item." Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban.

When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, "I don't know anything about that." Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, "I really don't want to comment, so there is no comment." Then she hangs up.

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security's massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department's "largest facial-recognition database system"; and produces driver's licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in "extremely general" terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company's CEO would only say, "Stay tuned."

It is L-1's deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn't just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it's U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1's China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.

Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1's electronic fingerprinting tools are "banned from entering China" due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to "catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily." He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department's list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of "face prints" — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government.

Whatever the legality of L-1's participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying "enormous pressure to open the floodgates."

The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of China's powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?" Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying hardware for China's Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan protesters on their Chinese news portals.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq.

"We're at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending," according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor newsletter in Baltimore. "And just as we need to be aware of how to profit from the growth in China's commodity consumption, we need to be aware of companies that will profit from 'security consumption.' . . . There's big money to be made."

While U.S. companies are eager to break into China's rapidly expanding market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of China's top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than 10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by 100 percent a year. When I meet the company's fidgety general manager, Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is "We are going public at the end of this year. On the Nasdaq." It also becomes clear why he has chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: "Help, help, help!" he begs me. "Help us promote our products!"

Zheng, an MBA from one of China's top schools, proudly shows me the business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell's IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off the company's security cameras. Its pages are filled with American iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the Aebell logo.

I ask Zheng whether China's surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng's deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. "If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways," he says, staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn't be afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid."

One of the first people to sound the alarm on China's upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists. The paper he produced was called "China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China." It exposed how big-name tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese government to construct "a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and Internet surveillance technologies."

When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute's staff to strategize about how to release his explosive findings. "We thought this information was going to shock the world," he recalls. In the midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the context of their work had changed forever.

Walton's paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was "mined for ideas" by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a "virtual, centralized grand database" that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. "It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for," Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: "Operation Noble Shield."

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints," then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Such efforts have provided China's rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with China's Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI's massive e-mail-mining operations. "It is clear that any country's legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information," he said. "We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front." Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. "Bush helped me get my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China's horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, "There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay."

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China.

"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy."

Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."

China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush's America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

What is most disconcerting about China's surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn't just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

"Are you making a copy?" I ask.

"No, no," he responds helpfully. "We're just sending a copy to the police."

Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won't let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that "we not only know who you are, we also know where you are." Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives "this kind of data to government authorities" — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics..._allseeing_eye