Milestones
Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Dies at 73
Michael Cieply
Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa” were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, said a representative of the family.
Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.
Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).
Last fall, Warner Brothers released “Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day One,” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) The picture received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and a Best Actor nomination for Mr. Clooney.
Mr. Pollack became a prolific producer of independent films in the latter part of his career. With a partner, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella, he ran Mirage Enterprises, a production company whose films included Mr. Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” and the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released last year, the last film directed by Mr. Pollack.
Apart from that film, Mr. Pollack never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, “The Slender Thread,” released by Paramount Pictures in 1965, starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. In his next 19 films — every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, “Tootsie” — Mr. Pollack worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Ms. Streisand and others.
Sydney Irwin Pollack was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and reared in South Bend. By Mr. Pollack’s own account, in the biographical dictionary “World Film Directors,” his father, David, a pharmacist, and his mother, the former Rebecca Miller, were first-generation Russian-Americans who had met at Purdue University.
Mr. Pollack developed a love of drama at South Bend High School and, instead of going to college, went to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who was in charge of its acting department, and remained for five more as Mr. Meisner’s assistant, teaching acting but also appearing onstage and in television.
Curly-haired and almost 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Pollack had a notable role in a 1959 “Playhouse 90” telecast of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an adaptation of the Hemingway novel directed by John Frankenheimer. Earlier, Mr. Pollack had appeared on Broadway with Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and with Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power in “The Dark Is Light Enough.” But he said later that he probably could not have built a career as a leading man.
Instead, Mr. Pollack took the advice of Burt Lancaster, whom he had met while working with Frankenheimer, and turned to directing. Lancaster steered him to the entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, and through him Mr. Pollack landed a directing assignment on the television series “Shotgun Slade.”
After a faltering start, he hit his stride on episodes of “Ben Casey, “Naked City,” “The Fugitive” and other well-known shows. In 1966 he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.”
From the time he made his first full-length feature, “The Slender Thread,” about a social work student coaxing a woman out of suicide on a telephone help line, Mr. Pollack had a hit-and-miss relationship with the critics. Writing in The New York Times, A. H. Weiler deplored that film’s “sudsy waves of bathos.” Mr. Pollack himself later pronounced it “dreadful.”
But from the beginning of his movie career, he was also perceived as belonging to a generation whose work broke with the immediate past. In 1965, Charles Champlin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, compared Mr. Pollack to the director Elliot Silverstein, whose western spoof, “Cat Ballou,” had been released earlier that year, and Stuart Rosenberg, soon to be famous for “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Mr. Champlin cited all three as artists who had used television rather than B movies to learn their craft.
Self-critical and never quite at ease with Hollywood, Mr. Pollack voiced a constant yearning for creative prerogatives more common on the stage. Yet he dived into the fray. In 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” his bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression, based on a Horace McCoy novel, received nine Oscar nominations, including the one for directing. (Gig Young won the best supporting actor award for his performance.)
Two years later, Mr. Pollack made the mountain-man saga “Jeremiah Johnson,” one of three closely spaced pictures in which he directed Mr. Redford.
The second of those films, “The Way We Were,” about a pair of ill-fated lovers who meet up later in life, also starred Ms. Streisand and was an enormous hit despite critical hostility.
The next, “Three Days of the Condor,” another hit, about a bookish C.I.A. worker thrust into a mystery, did somewhat better with the critics. “Tense and involving,” said Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.
With “Absence of Malice” in 1981, Mr. Pollack entered the realm of public debate. The film’s story of a newspaper reporter (Sally Field) who is fed a false story by federal officials trying to squeeze information from a businessman (Paul Newman) was widely viewed as a corrective to the adulation of investigative reporters that followed Alan J. Pakula’s hit movie “All the President’s Men,” with its portrayal of the Watergate scandal.
But only with “Tootsie,” in 1982, did Mr. Pollack become a fully realized Hollywood player.
By then he was represented by Michael S. Ovitz and the rapidly expanding Creative Artists Agency. So was his leading man, Dustin Hoffman.
As the film — a comedy about a struggling actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a coveted television part — was being shot for Columbia Pictures, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Hoffman became embroiled in a semi-public feud, with Mr. Ovitz running shuttle diplomacy between them.
Mr. Hoffman, who had initiated the project, argued for a more broadly comic approach. But Mr. Pollack — who played Mr. Hoffman’s agent in the film — was drawn to the seemingly doomed romance between the cross-dressing Hoffman character and the actress played by Jessica Lange.
If Mr. Pollack did not prevail on all points, he tipped the film in his own direction. Meanwhile, the movie came in behind schedule, over budget and surrounded by bad buzz.
Yet “Tootsie” was also a winner. It took in more than $177 million at the domestic box office and received 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture. (Ms. Lange took home the film’s only Oscar, for best supporting actress.)
Backed by Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Pollack expanded his reach in the wake of success. Over the next several years, he worked closely with both Tri-Star Pictures, where he was creative consultant, and Universal, where Mirage, his production company, set up shop in 1986.
Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his career pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” Released by Universal, the film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a period drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.
Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year. And he developed a reputation for caution when it came to directing assignments. Time after time, he expressed interest in directing projects, only to back away. At one point he was to make “Rain Man,” a Dustin Hoffman picture ultimately directed by Mr. Levinson; at another, an adaptation of “The Night Manager” by John le Carré.
That wariness was undoubtedly fed by his experience with “Havana,” a 1990 film that was to be his last with Mr. Redford. It seemed to please no one, though Mr. Pollack defended it. “To tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong, I’d have fixed it,” Mr. Pollack told The Los Angeles Times in 1993.
“The Firm,” with Tom Cruise, was a hit that year. But “Sabrina” (1995) and “Random Hearts” (1999), both with Harrison Ford, and “The Interpreter” (2005), with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, fell short, as Hollywood and its primary audience increasingly eschewed stars for fantasy and special effects.
Mr. Pollack never stopped acting; in a recent episode of “Entourage,” the HBO series about Hollywood, he played himself.
Among Mr. Pollack’s survivors are daughters, Rachel and Rebecca, and his wife, Claire Griswold, who was once among his acting students. The couple married in 1958, while Mr. Pollack was serving a two-year hitch in the Army. Their only son, Steven, died at age 34 in a 1993 plane crash in Santa Monica, Calif.
In his later years, Mr. Pollack appeared to relish his role as elder statesman. At various times he was executive director of the Actors Studio West, chairman of American Cinematheque and an advocate for artists’ rights.
He increasingly sounded wistful notes about the disappearance of the Hollywood he knew in his prime. “The middle ground is now gone,” Mr. Pollack said in a discussion with Shimon Peres in the fall 1998 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. He added, with a nod to a fellow filmmaker: “It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/mo...d-pollack.html
At World’s End, Honing a Father-Son Dynamic
Charles McGrath
ERIE, Pa. — Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Road,” takes place in a world that, because of some unexplained catastrophe, has just about ended. The sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams, Mr. McCarthy writes, “ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”
For the crew that has just finished filming the movie version of “The Road” — a joint production of 2929 and Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films, set to open in November — that meant an upending of the usual rules of making a movie on location. Bad weather was good and good weather bad. “A little fog, a little drizzle — those are the good days,” Mark Forker, the movie’s director of special effects, remarked one morning in late April while the crew was shooting some of the final scenes in the book on a stretch of scraggly duneland by the shore of Lake Erie here. “Today is a bad day,” he added, shaking his head and squinting.
The sky was blue, the sun so bright that crew members were smearing on sunscreen. A breeze was carrying away the fog pumping feebly from a smoke machine. Even worse, green grass was sprouting everywhere, and there were buds on the trees. Some of the crew had hand-stripped a little sapling of greenery, but the rest of the job would have to be done electronically by Mr. Forker, who was also in charge of sky replacement.
“The Road” began filming in late February, mostly in and around Pittsburgh, with a later stop in New Orleans and a postproduction visit planned to Mount St. Helens. The producers chose Pennsylvania, one of them, Nick Wechsler, explained, because it’s one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story’s main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.
The director of “The Road” is an Australian, John Hillcoat, best known for “The Proposition,” and many crew members were Aussies as well. In conversation the “Mad Max” movies, the Australian post-apocalyptic thrillers starring Mel Gibson, came up a lot, and not favorably. The team saw those movies, set in a world of futuristic bikers, as a sort of antimodel: a fanciful, imaginary version of the end of the world, not the grim, all-too-convincing one that Mr. McCarthy had depicted.
“What’s moving and shocking about McCarthy’s book is that it’s so believable,” Mr. Hillcoat said. “So what we wanted is a kind of heightened realism, as opposed to the ‘Mad Max’ thing, which is all about high concept and spectacle. We’re trying to avoid the clichés of apocalypse and make this more like a natural disaster.” He imagined the characters less as “Mad Max”-ian freaks outfitted in outlandish biker wear, he added, than as homeless people. They wear scavenged, ill-fitting clothing and layers of plastic bags for insulation.
The script for “The Road,” by Joe Penhall, is for the most part extremely faithful to Mr. McCarthy’s story of a father and son traveling alone through this blighted landscape and trying to keep alive the idea of goodness and civilization — the fire, they call it. The script does enlarge and develop in flashback the role of the man’s wife (played by Charlize Theron), who disappears quite early from the novel, choosing suicide rather than what she imagines will be starvation or worse. And of course the script lacks Mr. McCarthy’s heightened, almost biblical narrative style.
Some of that could be suggested by the look of the film, Mr. Hillcoat said, but mostly the nature of the bond between the man and the son, who in the script, as in the book, speak to each other in brief, freighted moments, would have to come out in the performances.
Viggo Mortensen, who plays the father, said the same thing. “It’s a love story that’s also an endurance contest,” he explained, and quickly added: “I mean that in a positive way. They’re on this difficult journey, and the father is basically learning from the son. So if the father-son thing doesn’t work, then the movie doesn’t work. The rest of it wouldn’t matter. It would never be more than a pretty good movie. But with Kodi in it, it has a chance to be an extremely good movie, maybe even a great one.”
Kodi is Kodi Smit-McPhee, an 11-year-old Australian who plays the son and bowled everyone over when he tested for the part, greatly reducing the anxiety filmmakers feel when casting a child. Some of the crew privately referred to him as the Alien because of the uncanny, almost freakish way that on a moment’s notice he switched accents and turned himself from a child into a movie star. Days after the filming of a climactic, emotional scene, people on the set were still marveling at Kodi’s performance. A couple said they had puddled up just from watching the monitor and needed to sneak a tear-dabbing finger behind their sunglasses.
In the novel the father and son have a relationship that is both tender and businesslike; they’re trying to survive against great odds, after all, and there isn’t much time for small talk. Both on and off the set Mr. Mortensen and his co-star behaved much the same way. In Erie, while Kodi’s father was away for a bit, Mr. Mortensen, who has a grown son of his own, moved from his suite to Kodi’s room, a double, where they jumped on the beds together. During filming Mr. Mortensen, protective of Kodi, worried, for example, about yanking or dragging him too hard, but also treated him as an equal, a fellow professional who happened to have a very different way of working.
Once he emerged from his trailer, Mr. Mortensen more or less stayed in character all day — bearded, gaunt, wound up and intense, going off by himself every now and then to smoke a cigarette. Kodi, on the other hand, wearing a ratty sweater, a wool cap and a pair of pants much too big for him, wandered around and hummed to himself between takes. He also engaged in lengthy fencing and stick-breaking contests with Jimi Johnson, a video assist operator.
For a scene in which the father, carrying the son on his shoulder, chases down a sandy road after a man who has stolen their belongings, Mr. Mortensen did wind sprints and jogged in place to make himself seem breathless and exhausted. Kodi simply turned limp on cue, and Mr. Mortensen snatched him up like a sack.
The next scene — in which the father and son catch up to the thief, and the father forces the man to take off his clothes, leaving him naked and freezing — took forever to set up. Like neighbors at a barn raising, the crew members erected a canopy over the road to cast an end-of-the-world shadow, and a while later, when the sun had moved, they had to reposition it. While waiting, Mr. Mortensen came back and fretfully studied the monitor. Kodi, meanwhile, dug for sand beetles, showing an especially plump one to Mr. Mortensen.
“Looks like good eatin’,” Mr. Mortensen said, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether he was joking or talking as a man who was supposed to be starving.
The thief was Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar on “The Wire”), one of a string of brand-name actors who turn up briefly in the film. (Robert Duvall is an old, dying man, and Guy Pearce is another father wandering with his family.) Mr. Williams brilliantly improvised while taking off his rags and plastic bags, pleading for his life in a way that causes the boy to take his side. When the first take was over, even before a wardrobe assistant could get there, Mr. Mortensen rushed over to help Mr. Williams pick up his clothes and get dressed again.
“He’s a good actor,” Kodi said.
Mr. Mortensen said, “Yeah, he’s good, isn’t he?”
The rest of the day ticked by slowly, in a way that was a reminder that filmmaking may be the last vestige of 19th-century artisanal labor: hours and hours to capture what on screen would last just a few minutes. When Mr. Hillcoat called it a wrap, a weary Mr. Mortensen headed for the makeup trailer, where he served wine from a stash he kept there. A while later, his face scrubbed of grime, his cheeks flushed a little, Kodi gave Mr. Mortensen a hug before heading out. Mr. Mortensen kissed him on the forehead.
“It was hard to get a rhythm out there today because of the sun,” Mr. Mortensen said on the way back to his trailer, decorated with a Mets banner, a Montreal Canadiens jersey and the flag of the San Lorenzo soccer team of Argentina. “But Kodi was unflappable, as usual. I don’t even think of him as a kid. There are things he’s done on this movie that I’ve never seen anybody do before. And there are many adult actors who never have a moment like he has every day. I can’t say I’ve ever worked with a better partner.”
He stopped to snatch a hamburger, no bun, from the catering table, and after wolfing half of it, he added: “I think of Kodi as a friend. We’re kind of like an old married couple. That’s what our relationship is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html
Student Researching Al-Qaida Tactics Held for Six Days
• Lecturers fear threat to academic freedom
• Manual downloaded from US government website
Polly Curtis and Martin Hodgson
A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the "psychological torture" he endured in custody.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.
The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a "prevent agenda" against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.
Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator's computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir's family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.
Dr Alf Nilsen, a research fellow at the university's school of politics and international relations, said that Yezza is being held at Colnbrook immigration removal centre, due to be deported on Tuesday.
"If he is taken to Algeria, he may be subjected to severe human rights violations after his involvement in this case. He has been in the UK for 13 years. His work is here, his friends are here, his life is here."
Of his detention, Sabir said: "I was absolutely broken. I didn't sleep. I'd close my eyes then hear the keys clanking and I would be up again. As I realised the severity I thought I'd end up in Belmarsh with the nutcases. It was psychological torture.
"On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried."
Bettina Rentz, a lecturer in international security and Sabir's personal tutor, said: "He's a serious student, who works very hard and wants a career in academia. This is a great concern for our academic freedom but also for the climate on campus."
Students have begun a petition calling on the university to acknowledge the "disproportionate nature of [its] response to the possession of legitimate research materials".
A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of "material of this nature". The spokesman said it was "not legitimate research material", but later amended that view, saying: "If you're an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn't send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry."
At its annual conference next week the University and College Union will debate a motion on "assaults on academic freedom by the DIUS [Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills]". Sally Hunt, general secretary of the UCU, said: "If we really want to tackle problems like extremism and terrorism, then we need to be safe to explore the issues and get a better understanding. The last thing we need is people too frightened to discuss an issue or research a subject because they fear being arrested or reported."
The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said: "The government does not want to or has never asked for staff or students to spy on their colleagues or friends. We want universities to work with staff and students on campus to isolate and challenge the very small minority who promote violent extremism."
Sabir's solicitor, Tayab Ali, said: "This could have been dealt with sensibly if the university had discussed the issue with Rizwaan and his tutors. This is the worrying aspect of the extension of detention [under the Terrorism Act]. They can use hugely powerful arrest powers before investigating."
http://education.guardian.co.uk/high...282045,00.html
Emscher 0.6.2b Released
Posted by toni66
Quote:
Changes:
Emscher v0.6.2b
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BUGFIX: Trayicon-menu has not been shown on click
BUGFIX: Hubs were not added to Hublist after asking a WebCache
Emscher v0.6.1b
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BUGFIX: Error while loading Webcaches
BUGFIX: Webcache-List has not been cleared before showing Webcaches
Emscher v0.6b (Protocol Version: v0.13)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADD: Settings-Form replacing the Settings-Tab(Now the settings will only be overwritten
if an user has clicked on "OK")
ADD: Network-Thread(In charge of sending/receiving, en-/decrypting and other
connection-management)
ADD: Linkchecker-Thread(Checks in a defined interval if a user has clicked on
an emscher-link)
ADD: Emscher-Corethread(To seperate the GUI from the Core-parts)
ADD: User can seed all files in a certain directory and its subdirectoies
ADD: Openfile-Menuitem in Filemenu
ADD: A double klick on a file opens it
ADD: Now it is possible to select multiple files and to start,stop,recheck or delete them
CHANGE: Webcache- and Chkversion-thread rewritten. They do not need the indy-
component TIDHttp anymore
CHANGE: main.pas rewritten
CHANGE: ID-Generator rewritten(Using less information to generate id)
CHANGE: Waiting time between sent signals is 10ms now because of the id-generator
(because fast calling in a row returns the same id)
CHANGE: Because of the new socket-library the chunk length is 64KB and the Block-length
1KB(1024 Bytes) now
CHANGE: HTL-Maximum is 255 now
CHANGE: Get sources(doing hash-search) if file is not complete
BUGFIX: You could not open a downloaded file for reading only, but writing only
BUGFIX: Everytime you recheck a file it will be copied to the incoming dir
REMOVE: Settings-Tab
REMOVE: All kinds of 8-Byte-IDs
|
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ems...0&big_mirror=0
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ems...2&big_mirror=0
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=24528
$20 Million Dollar Experiment to See if You'll Rent a Song for 10 Cents
Michael Robertson
A music experiment will soon begin with the ambitious attempt to reinvigorate people to buying music online. For just 10 cents you'll be able to select a song to add to your Music Locker to play whenever you like. These aren't obscure or unknown Indie bands like those you'd find on Amie Street, but include nearly the entire music library of the major record labels. This upcoming service has a big backer which might just surprise you.
Here's how the innovative site works. Over 5 million well known songs are browsable in a web layout. Songs are ranked by the number of listens they have received - similar to the strategy MP3.com invented 10 years ago. Each song can played one time in its entirety with the built in flash player. Subsequent plays are limited to 30 seconds. Next to every song is an "Add" button which for a single credit will add the tune to your personal collection. Credits cost 10 cents and each new customer gets 50 credits for free.
Once a song is added it is accessible from your "My Collection" area where it can be listened to an unlimited number of times. The songs are not downloadable so they are not useful for portable players or your mobile phone. There is also no ability to play the songs on Internet radio, game console and DVR devices (like Tivo) as you can with the Locker from MP3tunes. These 'web songs' are trapped in a tab of your browser.
While the advertisements talk about "buying" songs it is more akin to a rental model. The songs and the permission to play them are stored on a remote machine by a company that may discontinue the service at anytime - like a landlord who can change the rules whenever they feel like it. The first time I wrote about this issue I gave the example of the Coke Music store going flat. Then the Virgin Music store ceased operation and most recently the MSN Music Store announced they would pull the plug on August 31st and all purchased songs would go into the coffin as well. If Microsoft, the richest technology company in the world, cannot keep their store going that indicates you need to expect any store to be in jeopardy of shutting down.
The financial backers of this dime-a-song rental concept might surprise you - major record label Warner Music Group. They quietly invested $20 million into a company called Lala late last year (2007) when they devised this strategy. At that time they also agreed to put printed advertisement for Lala into 25,000,000 CDs in exchange for the right to greater ownership. (WMG also sells CDs plus digital tracks through Lala - a concept I first tried with limited success.) Lala has raised a substantial $34.7 million in investment money to date. At the time of this writing, the service is not yet public but it will be eventually at Lala.com's main page.
Will people pay ten pennies for a restricted web song with pseudo ownership? I have serious doubts. People prefer free stuff on the net and there's plenty of it. You can get full length streaming versions of U2's Pride on Napster, Imeem or even better your choice of 6 videos from YouTube for free. So what would convince someone to buy the Lala version?
WMG and Lala's song rental is an admirable concept with a solid design and interface. And it is a positive sign to see the major labels agreeing for songs to go into a personal locker area - (albeit a highly restrictive one). But any locker needs to be open to the world via an API so the music can flow to the car, phone, portable player as well as multiple PCs like we have at MP3tunes. A successful model needs to give more to paying customers not less to compete with free and the omnipresent black market of piracy.
You can try this dime-a-song rental concept before it is publicly launched via this "
hidden URL". Let me know if you think people will pay 10 cents to rent a song in the forum.
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/arch...?minute_id=265
'Give It Away And Pray' Isn't A Business Model... But It Doesn't Mean That 'Free' Doesn't Work
Mike Masnick
I've been noticing an interesting trend lately. While more folks aren't totally averse to the idea that they need to somehow embrace "free," they're mishandling what they do with "free" and then going on to complain how "free" doesn't work. The basic problem is this: they hear about the importance of "free" and so they give something away for free. But they don't have a business model around the free content. They don't understand the economic forces at work. They just give stuff away and pray... and then whine when nothing happens. As we've pointed out before, no one says that "free" by itself pays the bills. You need to have a more complete strategy than that -- and it involves a lot more than "give it away and pray." It's good that they're at least trying, but if they don't understand the real issues and fail at the experiments, they suddenly come back and claim that "free" isn't the answer, and suddenly rule out all business models involving free. And that is a real recipe for failure.
The latest to head down this road is NY Times columnist David Pogue, who bashes the idea of digital publishing of books by pointing to a long and interesting blog post from author Steven Poole, who did the "give away and pray" option along with a tip jar. It didn't make him much money. That shouldn't be any surprise, because tip jars aren't a real business model. But, because Poole seemed to have an expectation in his mind, he ends up being quite disappointed, noting that 1 out of every 1,750 downloads (0.057%) left some money. What's left implicit here is that that figure is too low. What this really means is that Poole didn't really give away the book for free. He had an expectation that people would magically pay for it. But, that's not a business model. That's not tying the free and infinite good to other scarce goods that will help you make money.
Unfortunately, both Pogue and Poole then use this to bash the entire concept of free-based business models, with Poole getting unnecessarily offensive in his response:
"I'll call it, for short, "the Slashdot argument". It says that books, music, films, software and so on ought to be freely distributed to anyone who wants them, simply because they can be freely distributed. What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can't earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you're one of those musicians who plays live), or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of "value-added" service. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Many such arguments seem to me to be simple greed disguised in high-falutin' idealism about how "information wants to be free". Perhaps it's not empty pedantry to point out that "information" doesn't want anything in and for itself. The information in which humans traffic is created by humans. And most information-creating humans need to earn dollars or yuan to survive.
While I'm sure there may be some Slashdot-types who may make this argument, it doesn't mean that it's an accurate representation of the more important discussion of these business models. The main problem is his use of "ought," as in people saying things "ought" to be free. It's not that things ought to be free because they can be free -- but that things will be free because that's just basic economics. Price gets driven to marginal cost in a competitive market, and the reason it happens is because others do learn to put in place business models that work, and then if you're the lone holdout, people start to ignore you. Also, I'll note that that Poole brushes off the (indeed, simplistic) business model suggestions as being "high falutin' idealism" but fails to actually try out any real business model.
And then he weakly follows it up by implying that you can't earn money by giving away stuff for free. But, again, he's blaming the wrong thing: he's blaming free for his own failure to use a real business model where the free offering was closely tied to additional scarcity he could sell. He continues, getting even more insulting as he goes:
In any case, I think the Slashdot argument can actually be disposed of rapidly with one rhetorical question, as follows.
Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?
Didn't think so.
This misleading and mistargeted argument has been debunked so many times, it's disappointing to see both Poole and Pogue repeat it. But, since it needs a response, let's do it again: you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good. No one is saying that everything needs to be free -- they're saying that infinite goods will be free, because of it's very nature in economics. In fact, Poole's argument is particularly weak when it comes to programmers, because most programmers don't earn any kind of royalties for the software they write. They are paid a salary, for their time -- but not for the software itself (which is an infinite good). And, I won't even get into the number of programmers who work on open source projects for free... or the fact that Poole is blogging for free...
Again, Poole and Pogue are so focused on free, that they fail to distinguish between infinite and scarce goods or the business models involved in what's going on. Poole then weakly dismisses the Radiohead experiment:
Perhaps I could have tried distributing Trigger Happy the Radiohead way, making sure you had to pay a minimum to get the goods. Would I still have attracted 30,000 readers like that? I doubt it. The sublime In Rainbows seems to have been a nice little earner for Radiohead, but that's because they're Radiohead -- and they became Radiohead through the nasty old music-industry business model. So did Nine Inch Nails, whose recent internet release of (the excellent) Ghosts was very clever -- the first nine songs of a triple album for free in compressed mp3; the whole thing in a lossless format for $5. But if there's been a comparable success by a band that hasn't already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I'd like to know about it.
Poole and Pogue (who quotes the same snippet) both miss the fact that in both cases described above, the bands in question didn't "give away and pray," but both put together real strategic business models that were focused on using the infinite goods (the music) to sell more scarce goods. In the case of Radiohead (despite some claims to the contrary) at the same time Radiohead announced the downloads it also told fans that it would be selling a beautiful "discbox" for the album as well. This was a very valuable scarce good -- that the free music made a lot more valuable by increasing the demand for it. As for Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor offered a tiered system of scarce goods that were all made more valuable by the availability of the music -- proven by the fact that Reznor quickly sold out of his limited edition deluxe offering.
And I still chuckle about the argument that these models "only work for big bands." That's because a few years ago, when we pointed out how this worked for some small up-and-coming bands, people would whine "but that only works for small bands -- big bands would be screwed!" The model, when well designed works for small bands just as well as big bands. No, it might not turn around millions in a week, but it can certainly help an artist make a living. Witness the case of Maria Schneider, who ended up making a Grammy-winning album using some the concepts discussed around these parts. And, of course, we've worked out the details of the type of business model that an up-and-coming band could use to embrace these concepts to grow.
So, it's nice to see someone at least willing to explore the concept of free without shutting out the possibility. But free alone isn't a business model. And it's wrong to blame free for the lack of establishing a complete business model. Just because "give it away and pray" isn't a workable business model, that doesn't mean that there aren't business models that do work. Hopefully, Poole and Pogue will eventually recognize that they're dismissing the wrong thing. They shouldn't be complaining about free (or making misleading accusations about those who simply recognize the economic forces at work) -- they should be complaining about a failure to put in place a real business model to take advantage of what will be free.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080522/1545021204.shtml
Here's a Script That Lets You Download Any Song You Want
Anonymous Coward
Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;
die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/AutoComplete/songAutoComplete";
my $content = get "$root_url?prefix=$ARGV[0]";
my $ref = from_json($content);
my $num = 0;
foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{list}}) {
print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
$num++;
}
print "Download which? > ";
my $req = <STDIN>;
die "not valid" if ($req < 0 or $req > $num);
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("wget -O '$filename' $download_link");
It's quick, it's dirty, but it works:
Code:
perl download.pl tiesto
0 : Tiesto - Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
1 : Tiësto - Forever Today
Download which? > 0
Getting: http://cfs-listen-52.lala.com/contentfs/content?t=NjU1MzVVNDM2OTE1OQ%3D%3D-vSOzDPPcV8VwbKW6Bwdv%2FQ%3D%3D
Downloading to Tiesto-Ten Seconds Before Sunrise.mp3
--2008-05-27 18:16:09-- http://cfs-listen-52.lala.com/contentfs/content?t=NjU1MzVVNDM2OTE1OQ%3D%3D-vSOzDPPcV8VwbKW6Bwdv%2FQ%3D%3D
Resolving cfs-listen-52.lala.com... 209.237.235.158
Connecting to cfs-listen-52.lala.com|209.237.235.158|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 3609494 (3.4M) [audio/x-mpeg]
Saving to: `Tiesto-Ten Seconds Before Sunrise.mp3'
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?...7&cid=23563999
Here's a Better Version that Gets Many More Results from a Different Webservice. Apparently the Front Page One is Very Limited
This one will do paging, use n/p to go next/previous when prompted.
Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;
die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $ref;
my $offset;
my $req;
while(1) {
$req = "";
my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/SearchUtils/search/v19.110.0-24?Q=$ARGV[0]&sortKey=relevance&sortDir=desc&Nb=100&Sk=$offset&webSrc=lala";
my $content = get $root_url;
$content =~ s/new Date\((\d+)\)/$1/g;
$ref = from_json($content);
my $num = 0;
foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}}) {
print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
$num++;
}
print "Download which? > ";
chomp($req = <STDIN>);
if ($req =~ /n/) {
$offset+=100;
next;
}
if ($req =~ /p/) {
$offset-=100;
$offset=0 if $offset<0;
next;
}
if ($req !~ /\d+/ or $req < 0 or $req > $num) {
print "Invalid!\n";
next;
}
last;
}
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("wget -O '$filename' $download_link");
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?...7&cid=23564837
Here's a Fixed One That Uses Utf-8
Aarku
Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;
$|=1;
die "$0 <search param>" unless $ARGV[0];
my $ref;
my $offset;
my $req;
while(1) {
$req = "";
my $root_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/SearchUtils/search/v19.110.0-24?Q=$ARGV[0]&sortKey=relevance&sortDir=desc&Nb=100&Sk=$offset&webSrc=lala";
my $content = get $root_url;
$content =~ s/new Date\((\d+)\)/$1/g;
$ref = from_json($content, {utf8 => 1});
my $num = 0;
foreach (@{$ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}}) {
next if $_->{playType} eq "Sample";
print "$num : $_->{artist} - $_->{title}\n";
$num++;
}
print "Download which? > ";
chomp($req = <STDIN>);
if ($req =~ /n/) {
$offset+=100;
next;
}
if ($req =~ /p/) {
$offset-=100;
$offset=0 if $offset<0;
next;
}
if ($req !~ /\d+/ or $req < 0 or $req > $num) {
print "Invalid!\n";
next;
}
last;
}
my $download_url = "http://next.lala.com/api/Player/getTrackUrls?flash=true&webSrc=lala&widgetId=LalaHeadlessPlayer&T=" . $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{playToken};
my $play_url = get $download_url;
my $play_ref = from_json($play_url);
my $download_link = $play_ref->{data}->[0]->{url};
print "Getting: $download_link\n";
my $filename = $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{artist} ."-" . $ref->{data}->{songs}->{list}->[$req]->{title} . ".mp3";
print "Downloading to $filename\n";
system("curl -o '$filename' $download_link");
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?...7&cid=23565771
Sigur Rós Offers New LP Details, Free "Gobbledigook" Download
Meghan Jones
Sigur Rós isn't releasing its fifth album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, until June 23. But you can get a sneak peek at one of the first tracks off the album-- the Icelandic title of which translates to English as With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly-- this very afternoon.
Can it be true? Já! "Gobbledigook" will be played as a world exclusive on Radio 1 this afternoon with DJ Zane Lowe, and then the band will release it-- at 7:30 GMT (2:30 EST)-- as a free download on their website, SigurRós.com.
And that's not the only bonus material Sigur Rós is offering with this new album. A pre-sale for With a Buzz... will begin on June 2, also through the band's website, and anyone who pre-orders the album will then have access to a streaming version of the album beginning June 9.
With A Buzz... is the first album Sigur Rós made outside of its homeland of Iceland, recording in New York, London and Havana as well as Reykjavik. It will also mark the first time vocalist Jón Thor Birgisson sings a track in English. Bet you can guess which one that is. The rest of the album will be in Icelandic, sounding mythical and eerily beautiful, as per usual.
With a Buzz... tracklisting:
1. Gobbledigook
2. Inní mér syngur vitleysingur
3. Góðan daginn
4. Við spilum endalaust
5. Festival
6. Með suð í eyrum
7. Ára bátur
8. Illgresi
9. Fljótavík
10. Straumnes
11. All alright
http://www.pastemagazine.com/article...ownload-t.html
Rowling Offers Glimpse Into Harry Prequel
The secret of what happened before boy wizard Harry Potter went to Hogwarts will be revealed through the unusual channel of a charity auction next month.
Author JK Rowling has penned an 800-word outline of a prequel to the seven book series that has made her into a billionaire which will be sold at the auction on June 10 by bookseller Waterstones.
The outline, which ends with the line "From the prequel I am not working on -- but that was fun!" is one of 13 story outlines written for the auction by famed authors including new Bond writer Sebastian Faulks and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.
"What's Your Story? just gets more and more exciting -- all these brilliant works by amazing writers and illustrators, every one a small masterpiece," said Waterstone's chief Gerry Johnson.
"We never dreamed that JK Rowling would donate something so precious, and we're incredibly grateful."
The money raised will go to charities English PEN and Dyslexia Action.
Other authors who have donated outline works are Lisa Appignanesi, Margaret Atwood, Lauren Child, Richard Ford, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Michael Rosen, Axel Scheffler, Tom Stoppard and Irvine Welsh.
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Paul Casciato)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/...t-rowling.html
Is Google Violating a California Privacy Law?
Saul Hansell
UPDATED 5/30, 8:45 AM After I wrote about Google’s spat with an advertising trade group over the company’s refusal to put a link to its privacy policy on the home page of Google.com, I discovered that there is actually a California law on the subject.
The California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003 requires the operator of a commercial Web site that collects personal information about users to “conspicuously post its privacy policy on its Web site.”
How conspicuously? The site needs to link to the policy “located on the homepage or first significant page after entering the Web site.” And the law has some rules for how prominent the link must be.
Google certainly knows about the law. Just before it took effect in 2004, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company expanded the disclosures in its privacy policy in order to comply, according to a report by CNet.
Google, which wants to keep its home page very simple, puts a link to its privacy policy on a page called “About Google,” to which it links from its home page. Steve Langdon, a Google spokesman, said in an e-mail that Google interprets the law as allowing the company to use other methods to provide notice of its privacy policy:
By having a link to our privacy policy one click from our home page, and because the privacy policy is easily found by using the search box on the home page, we comply with this statute.
I don’t see any discussion of any alternatives to a home-page privacy link in published analyses of the law. For example, a 2004 analysis by law firm Cooley Godward Kronish doesn’t list any other option for conspicuous notice other than placing the privacy policy itself or a link to it on a site’s home page. And the California Office of Information Security and Data Protection offers this recommendation to Web sites:
Use a conspicuous link on your home page containing the word “privacy.” Make the link conspicuous by using larger type than the surrounding text, contrasting color, or symbols that call attention to it.
I’ve left a phone message for and sent an e-mail to Joanne McNabb, the chief of California’s Office of Privacy Protection, seeking more clarification of the law. I’ll post her response if I hear from her.
Does Google’s decision to do something different really matter? Google argues that anyone who is curious about its privacy policy can simply search Google to find it. Moreover, privacy policies are more about fine print and legal mumbo jumbo than information that is really useful to people. Also, it’s worth noting that Google says it makes far less use of the data it collects about its users than many other big Web companies. Yahoo and AOL, for example, display advertising based both on information provided by users and on the users’ online surfing behavior. Google doesn’t.
On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard for Google to put a single seven-letter word somewhere on its home page to help those who want to know more about its privacy practices.
Privacy experts say Google is under the microscope because it collects and retains so much information about so many people.
“It wouldn’t be a big privacy issue if it wasn’t Google saying everyone else may be doing this but we don’t need to,” said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
UPDATE (FOR THOSE THAT LIKE LEGAL DETAILS):
I had asked Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow with the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. to help me understand Google’s argument. The company pointed out that the law presents some options that include placing the link to the privacy policy on the “first significant page” after the home page. And it allows more flexibility to “online services” than to Web sites.
Here is what Mr Hoofnagle wrote back:
Okay, I think Google is in violation.
They’re not an “online service” for purposes of the act. That term, I believe from analyzing the history of AB 68, was used to broaden the related term “operator” so that the law would cover websites and other online tools (such as chat, adware, etc), but not ISPs. The idea behind including “online service” was to cover information-collecting internet-based services. These services had to be differentiated, because they might not be able to present a privacy policy through a webpage, as the law requires.
See:
http://info.sen.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postq...use=B&site=sen
It takes 3 clicks to get to Google’s privacy policy. The provision concerning “first significant page” is to deal with websites that have “splash” pages. It’s hard to believe that the “first significant page” on Google is its “about” page:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/about.html, which you have to click on to get to the privacy policy introduction, before you can get to the actual privacy policy.
It’s pretty obvious that the first significant page on Google is the search results page. But that page doesn’t contain the privacy policy or a link to it either.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...law/index.html
A Letter from the CEO and Founders
Dear Plaxo member,
We are excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo. Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services. We've got at least a few months to go before the acquisition is completed, but we wanted to send you this note to let you know what's coming up and how it affects you and your account.
Plaxo will remain an independent brand, organization and entity. We've been busy at work on our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse (if it's been a while, please come back and check out all the new features). And, through additional projects with Comcast, we'll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own... including the TV, phone and more.
If you'd like to read more about some of the great new things we're planning, please read our official announcement.
So, what does this mean for current Plaxo members like you? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue to exist, but will also continue to evolve and improve. We will continue to make our basic services free, and we will continue to serve customers in multiple languages across the world. But, we'll now be able to invest even more in our services, and we will enhance them with more users and more content available across a wider array of devices.
We will also continue to protect your privacy and give you control of your information. We will continue to protect your data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will remain in effect even after the transition. And, we'll continue to be a strong advocate for the open social web.
We've put together a quick Q&A about your privacy, account and your data.
Last, we'd like to extend an enormous thank you. Whether you've been a Plaxo user for a long time or just recently joined Pulse, we'd like to thank you for making Plaxo a vibrant network. We are excited to open a new chapter today and look forward to helping you keep in touch with the people you care about.
Sincerely,
Ben Golub, Chief Executive Officer
Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect
Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products
This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix
Noam Cohen
FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife ... please.”
Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog — it can be done, but the frog dies.
Still, he plays along, explaining that “sudo” is a command in the Unix operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: “The humor comes from people who have encountered typing a command and having the computer say ‘No,’ and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, sudo says,’ and the computer does it. Kind of like ‘Simon says.’ ”
Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, “Make me a sandwich,” only to be told, “No.” Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, “Sudo make me a sandwich,” and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.
Mr. Munroe, a physics major and a programmer by trade, is good for jokes like this three times a week, informed by computing and the Internet. By speaking the language of geeks — many a strip hinges on crucial differences between the C and Python programming languages — while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world.
The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month. (Why “xkcd”? “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation,” his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.)
Mr. Munroe has become something of a cult hero. He counts himself as among the fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web who make a living at it.
At Google headquarters, a required stop on the geek-cult-hero speaking tour, he recently addressed hundreds of engineers, some of whom dutifully waited for him to sign their laptops. He said he had only wanted a tour of the place but had instead been invited to speak. The real thrill, he said, was that a hero of his, Donald Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and a programming pioneer, was in the front row.
“It’s comparable to Bill Gates’s being in the front row,” he said. “I got to have lunch with him. He’s in his 70s, but people he is in touch with must have told him about it.”
While the comics play on the peculiarities of code, they are as much about escaping the clear, orderly world of commands to engage a chaotic sphere known as real life, or perhaps merely adulthood.
So one comic has a graph showing “my overall health” entering a steep decline “the day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I wanted.” Or, in one of Mr. Munroe’s favorites, a stick-figure couple revel in an apartment filled to the brim with playpen balls, “because we are grownups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means.”
And, in a rare lapse from his plain-and-simple drawing style, a pair of stick figures walk in an increasingly beautiful landscape after first declaring: “I feel like I’m wasting my life on the Internet. Let’s walk around the world.” At the foot of a gorgeous mountain, however, one turns to the other and says, “And yet, all I can think is that this will make for a great LiveJournal entry.”
Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to running a business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the Web site out of their Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they recently hired an employee to handle e-mail.
“People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well as posters.
“We’ve been getting a lot more efficient,” he said. “We were losing money on every T-shirt sold overseas for a while.” (But you can make it up in volume, I helpfully suggested. He moved on.)
A fan of newspaper comic strips since childhood, Mr. Munroe can simultaneously call himself an heir to “Peanuts” while recognizing that his quirky and technical humor would never have made it in newspapers.
On the Internet, he said, “You can draw something that appeals to 1 percent of the audience — 1 percent of United States, that is three million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have.”
In that way, and many others, the Web has been a salvation. “People doing comics on the Internet are free of all the baggage that goes with being with a syndicate,” he said, “the editorial control, the space limits, the no control over what can be done with your cartoon.”
The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that is exceptional. They re-enact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in his strip. A case in point was the strip called “Dream Girl.” It recounted a dream in which a girl (stick figure with flowing hair) recites a bunch of numbers into the narrator’s ear.
“The xkcd person is the kind of person who would take that and run with it,” he said. The numbers were coordinates and a date months in the future.
The strip’s narrator says he went there and no one came. “It turns out that wanting something doesn’t make it real,” the strip concludes.
But on that day in real life, hundreds of fans met in a park in Cambridge.
And then they all ordered sandwiches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/bu...ia/26link.html
Belgian Copyright Group Demands Google Pay Up to €49 Million
Aoife White
Belgian French-language newspapers said Tuesday they want search engine Google Inc. to pay up to €49 million (US$77 million) in damages for publishing and storing their content without permission.
The newspaper copyright group Copiepresse said it had summoned Google to appear again before a Brussels court in September that will decide on their claim that they suffered damages of between €32.8 million (US$51.7 million) and €49.2 million (US$77.5 million).
The group called on Google to pay a provisional amount of €4 million (US$6.3 million).
The world's largest search engine said it could not comment because it had not yet received the legal documents. Copiepresse said the May 22 summons would be delivered to Google's U.S. headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Last year Google lost a lawsuit filed by the newspapers that forced it to remove headlines and links to news stories posted on its Google News service and stored in its search engine's cache without the copyright owners' permission.
Copiepresse said in its summons that Google had violated Belgian copyright law by reproducing and publishing part of newspapers' stories and by storing the full versions of archived stories in its cached pages.
It said the losses were calculated by a professor at the University Libre de Bruxelles and damages should be based on articles stored via Google Search since April 13, 2001 and Google News since it launched in Belgium in 2006.
It suggested setting up a panel of Belgian experts to examine the figures if Google wanted to contest the case.
Copiepresse also wants Google to publish — without any commentary — a copy of the ruling against it on google.be and news.google.be for 20 days or pay a daily fine of €1 million (US$1.58 million).
The Brussels Court of First Instance ruled in February 2007 that Google could not call on exemptions to copyright law, such as claiming "fair use" for Google News' publication of press articles when it displays headlines, a few lines of text, photos and links to the original page.
The company claims its Google News service is "entirely legal."
http://www.smartmoney.com/news/ON/in...27-000446-1249
The Guessing Game Has Begun on the Next iPhone
John Markoff
Can Steven P. Jobs top the iPhone ... with another iPhone?
Last June, Mr. Jobs began selling what has become one of the most talked-about consumer products in history. Now he faces a new challenge as Apple prepares to introduce an updated version of the phone next month.
After almost a year of strong sales that have made it one of the dominant smartphones in the United States, the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company.
Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., had shipped about 5.5 million phones by the end of March, the most recent figures it has released. It sold just 1.7 million phones in the first three months of this year, meaning it must sell more than 8 million phones to reach Mr. Jobs’s publicly stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.
“They’re going to have a difficult time” hitting that number, said Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research. He said that Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone’s introduction.
So what could Apple’s impresario have up his sleeve to pick up the pace — and to keep the second-generation iPhone from being a letdown?
Although the company will not publicly confirm the arrival of a second iPhone, Apple watchers have concluded that a new version will be introduced June 9, the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
Apparently in preparation for the event, stocks of the existing iPhone have been dwindling in the last month.
Although AT&T stores still have phones in stock, according to a company spokesman, the supply has largely dried up in Apple’s retail outlets, and the phones are no longer available through the company’s online store.
Apple may be trying to avoid the anger it faced last September when it cut the iPhone’s price by $200 just two months after it went on sale, making early buyers feel cheated. Mr. Jobs offered those customers a $100 store credit.
Cutting down on supply means fewer angry buyers when their new phone is suddenly obsolete.
“You can say what you want about Steve Jobs, but he’s learning from his mistakes,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Nielsen, a market research firm. “They are cleaning out the supply channel.”
Even as supplies shrink, Apple has been signing a series of deals with cellphone network providers around the world. On Tuesday the cellular operator TeliaSonera said it would offer the iPhone in seven countries, including Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The only major countries without an iPhone distribution agreement are Japan, Russia and China.
Meanwhile the Apple rumor mill has wound up to a fever pitch in recent weeks with speculation about the new phone’s features.
One Web site that tracks imports even decided that shipping manifests indicated that the company had already brought millions of iPhones into the country in dozens of seaborne shipping containers. Industry executives, however, said this would be an odd move for Apple, which in the past has introduced products by air — shipping the first batch at the last moment.
Both Mr. Jobs and Randall L. Stephenson, the chief executive of Apple’s partner AT&T, have promised a new iPhone model this year that would run on a high-speed wireless data network. AT&T is building such a network, which uses technology known as 3G and is intended to support a range of new applications, including mobile digital video. The company said last week that the network would be largely finished by the end of June.
But analysts say faster downloads may not be enough to touch off a new wave of consumer interest in the iPhone.
“Subscribers don’t care what the radio interface of their cellular phone is,” Mr. Snyder said.
If he is to rekindle the excitement that greeted the iPhone’s introduction, Mr. Jobs is likely to need something else. So far, he has been successful in hiding any surprise features from the dozens of Web sites and bloggers that track the company’s new products.
There has been speculation about a higher-resolution camera, possible support for digital video recording, a slightly bulkier and more curved case, and the addition of a global positioning system receiver that would allow new Web services tied to a person’s location.
Mr. Jobs is certain to make much of the availability of many new iPhone programs that Apple will begin selling through its iTunes store in the coming months. He could also accelerate sales by cutting the phone’s price or letting operators offer subsidies, as they do with many other phones. In the United States the phone now costs $399 or $499 depending on the amount of memory.
Bells and whistles aside, the new phone may have a few new shortcomings as well. Company executives have acknowledged that the new 3G networks will be a challenge for its engineers, because using them burns up more battery power compared with the slower Edge networks used by current iPhones.
IPhone users have turned out to be prodigious consumers of wireless data. For example, the iPhone customers of T-Mobile, the German cellular operator, consume 30 times more data than its other wireless customers, according to Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless industry analyst.
Mr. Sharma estimates that iPhone users in the United States consume two and a half to three times more data than users of other cellphones. Faster networks could widen that gap and further extend the iPhone’s influence in the telecommunications world.
“IPhone is not only having an impact on data revenues,” he said, “but also on device design, mobile advertising road maps, and applications and services that are being contemplated for the future.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/te...8apple.html?hp
China Takes Playoff Games off Air
NBA playoff games have been taken off air by China's state television network because they are considered too entertaining for a nation still recovering from the Sichuan earthquake.
All entertainment in China was stopped last week for three days of national mourning for the victims of the 7.9 magnitude quake that struck the western province on May 12.
State TV sports channel CCTV 5, like most other stations, returned to normal programming last Thursday and showed the Western Conference finals game between the Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio Spurs on May 22.
But subsequent encounters in that series and the Eastern Conference playoff finals between Detroit and Boston were not shown.
"These games are not in accordance with the atmosphere of the nation after the devastation of the earthquake. They are too entertaining" Jiang Heping, director of the state TV sports channel, told Reuters.
"We did show one game but then we were informed not to continue," Jiang added.
Basketball is one of the most popular spectator sports in China and NBA games have been shown on CCTV for more than 20 years.
When Chinese exports Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian faced off for the first time in the NBA last November, the television audience for the game between Houston and Milwaukee was estimated to be between 100 million and 200 million.
Jiang said he hoped games would be back on air by the time the NBA championship series starts next month.
The Sichuan earthquake is already known to have killed more than 67,000 people and injured nearly 362,000 others.
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney; Editing by Ken Wills and Ed Osmond)
http://www.reuters.com/article/sport...14592420080528
Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
Steve Lohr
When Microsoft joined the One Laptop Per Child project earlier this month, I wrote an article noting the change in heart by both sides. The O.L.P.C. project, intended to bring cheap computers to children in poorer nations, had been committed to using the freely distributed Linux operating system, an open-source alternative to Microsoft’s Windows. And Microsoft had resisted joining anything that promoted open-source software.
Walter Bender, a longtime collaborator of Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the nonprofit laptop group, left O.L.P.C. in April. Mr. Bender oversaw software development for the project. His departure had been the subject of blog posts that suggested his exit was because a pact with Microsoft was in the works.
When I wrote the news article, I sent Mr. Bender an e-mail, asking him why he left. He replied that he decided his efforts to advance the cause of open-source learning software “would have more impact from outside of O.L.P.C. than from within.”
I also asked Mr. Negroponte about Mr. Bender’s departure, and he called it “a huge loss.” Mr. Negroponte said that, in his view, some people had come to see open-source software as an end of the project instead of a means. “I think some people, including Walter, became much too fundamental about open source,” he said.
After the article was published May 16, Mr. Bender sent a letter to the Times, taking issue with Mr. Negroponte’s comment and elaborating on his own views: “Mr. Negroponte is wrong when he asserts that I am a free and open-source (FOSS) fundamentalist. I am a learning fundamentalist.”
I talked to Mr. Bender last Friday to discuss his views at more length and give them a broader airing.
“Microsoft stepping in is the symptom, not the disease,” he said in the interview. The issue, in his view, is whether the tools that bring computing to children are “agnostic on learning” or “take a position on learning.”
“O.L.P.C. has become implicitly agnostic about learning,” he said. The project’s focus, he said, is on bringing low-cost laptop computers to children around the world. “It’s a great goal, but it’s not my goal,” he said.
Mr. Bender is a founder of Sugar Labs, a new organization whose goal is to continue developing and promoting the use of Sugar open-source education software.
The Sugar software, which provides the user interface for O.L.P.C. laptops, is the means toward the end of a “constructionist learning model,” said Mr. Bender. It’s an approach that builds on the conceptual work of Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and developmental theorist, and the practical research of his intellectual descendants like Seymour Papert, the M.I.T. computer scientist, educator and inventor of the Logo programming language, designed for education.
The constructionist model, put simply, says people learn best by building things — solving problems by “constructing” answers as active agents — instead of by being passive recipients of facts and received knowledge.
Computing is potentially an ideal tool for constructionist education because a computer is a universal machine and software is a building material without material constraints. (In fairness, Mr. Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab, has also been a champion of the constructionist education agenda over the years.)
Mr. Bender said he thinks the collaborative, interactive learning environment embodied by Sugar could be “a game changer in how technology and education collide.” He says he wants to see the Sugar software run on many different kinds of hardware and software platforms, even on Windows, if the Sugar experience is not sacrificed.
“It’s not about Microsoft being evil,” Mr. Bender said. “It’s about optimizing the chance of having a positive impact on education, and that is what Sugar is about. And that mission would be endangered by being too tightly coupled to one hardware vendor, O.L.P.C.”
O.L.P.C. says that Sugar will continue to be offered on its machines, and the project has announced it plans to work with outside developers to port the software to Windows. “I’m not sure what that means,” Mr. Bender said. “I can’t do it, and I’m not going to work on it.”
However, Mr. Bender said that in the last two weeks, he has talked to four laptop manufacturers he won’t name, including major PC makers, about making Sugar-based machines — with no Windows in the recipe.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...-am/index.html
Web Start-Up a Joint Israeli-Palestinian Venture
Dina Kraft
Nibbling doughnuts and wrestling with computer code, the workers at G.ho.st, an Internet start-up here, are holding their weekly staff meeting — with colleagues on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
They trade ideas through a video hookup that connects the West Bank office with one in Israel in the first joint technology venture of its kind between Israelis and Palestinians.
“Start with the optimistic parts, Mustafa,” Gilad Parann-Nissany, an Israeli who is vice president for research and development, jokes with a Palestinian colleague who is giving a progress report. Both conference rooms break into laughter.
The goal of G.ho.st is not as lofty as peace, although its founders and employees do hope to encourage it. Instead G.ho.st wants to give users a free, Web-based virtual computer that lets them access their desktop and files from any computer with an Internet connection. G.ho.st, pronounced “ghost,” is short for Global Hosted Operating System.
“Ghosts go through walls,” said Zvi Schreiber, the company’s British-born Israeli chief executive, by way of explanation. A test version of the service is available now, and an official introduction is scheduled for Halloween.
The Palestinian office in Ramallah, with about 35 software developers, is responsible for most of the research and programming. A smaller Israeli team works about 13 miles away in the central Israeli town of Modiin.
The stretch of road separating the offices is broken up by checkpoints, watch towers and a barrier made of chain-link fence and, in some areas, soaring concrete walls, built by Israel with the stated goal of preventing the entry of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Palestinian employees need permits from the Israeli army to enter Israel and attend meetings in Modiin, and Israelis are forbidden by their own government from entering Palestinian cities.
When permits cannot be arranged but meetings in person are necessary, colleagues gather at a rundown coffee shop on a desert road frequented by camels and Bedouin shepherds near Jericho, an area legally open to both sides.
Dr. Schreiber, an entrepreneur who has already built and sold two other start-ups, said he wanted to create G.ho.st after seeing the power of software running on the Web. He said he thought it was time to merge his technological and commercial ambitions with his social ones and create a business with Palestinians.
“I felt the ultimate goal was to offer every human being a computing environment which is free, and which is not tied to any physical hardware but exists on the Web,” he said. The idea, he said, was to create a home for all of a user’s online files and storage in the form of a virtual PC.
Instead of creating its own Web-based software, the company taps into existing services like Google Docs, Zoho and Flickr and integrates them into a single online computing system.
G.ho.st also has a philanthropic component: a foundation that aims to establish community computer centers in Ramallah and in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel. The foundation is headed by Noa Rothman, the granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister slain in 1995.
“It’s the first time I met Palestinians of my generation face to face,” said Ms. Rothman, 31, of her work with G.ho.st. She said she was moved by how easily everyone got along. “It shows how on the people-to-people level you can really get things done.”
Investors have put $2.5 million into the company so far, a modest amount. Employing Palestinians means the money goes farther; salaries for Palestinian programmers are about a third of what they are in Israel.
But Dr. Schreiber, who initially teamed up with Tareq Maayah, a Palestinian businessman, to start the Ramallah office, insists this is not just another example of outsourcing.
“We are one team, employed by the same company, and everyone has shares in the company,” he said.
At G.ho.st’s offices in Ramallah, in a stone-faced building with black reflective glass perched on a hill in the city’s business district, employees say they feel part of an intensive group effort to create something groundbreaking. Among them are top young Palestinian programmers and engineers, recruited in some cases directly from universities.
The chance to gain experience in creating a product for the international market — a first for the small Palestinian technology community — means politics take a backseat to business, said Yusef Ghandour, a project manager.
“It’s good we are learning from the Israeli side now,” Mr. Ghandour said. The Israelis, he said, “are open to the external world, and there is lots of venture capital investment in Israel, and now we are bringing that to Palestine.”
The departure of educated young people mostly to neighboring Jordan and the Persian Gulf states is a major problem for the Palestinian economy and has been especially damaging to its technology industry. Since the Oslo peace process broke down in 2000, a wave of Israeli-Palestinian business ties have crumbled as well.
Political tensions make it somewhat unpopular for Palestinians to do business with Israelis, said Ala Alaeddin, chairman of the Palestinian Information Technology Association. He said the concept of a technology joint venture across the divide was unheard-of until G.ho.st opened its doors. A handful of Palestinian tech companies handle outsourced work for Israeli companies, but most focus on the local or Middle Eastern market.
“It’s much easier to have outsourcing than a partnership,” Mr. Alaeddin said. “A joint venture is a long-term commitment, and you need both sides to be really confident that this kind of agreement will work.”
Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with offices in Israel, invested $2 million in G.ho.st. Michael Eisenberg, a general partner at the firm, said Benchmark was “in the business of risky investments,” but that G.ho.st presented entirely new territory.
Recalling his discussions with Dr. Schreiber, Mr. Eisenberg said: “Frankly, when he first told me about it I thought it was ambitious, maybe overly ambitious. But Zvi is a remarkable entrepreneur, and I started to feel he could actually pull this off.”
The video hookup runs continuously between the offices. Chatting in the Ramallah conference room, two Palestinian programmers wave hello to Israeli colleagues conferring over a laptop in the Modiin office.
“We are doing something across cultures and across two sides of a tough conflict,” Dr. Schreiber said. “I was prepared for the possibility that it might be difficult, but it hasn’t been.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/te...29compute.html
Ultra-Tight Ticket Security Gets Ready for Beijing Olympic Ceremonies
AP
China has ratcheted up surveillance and security in every phase of the Beijing Olympics - even the tickets.
In a move unprecedented for the Olympics, tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies are embedded with a microchip containing the bearer's photograph, passport details, addresses, e-mail and telephone numbers.
The intent is to keep potential troublemakers from the 91,000-seat National Stadium as billions watch on TV screens around the world. Along with terrorists, Chinese officials fear protesters might wreck the glitzy ceremonies, unfurling Tibet flags, anti-China banners or even T-shirts adorned with strident messages.
Aside from concerns about privacy and identity theft, the high-tech tickets also threaten chaos at the turnstiles.
Tickets for the Aug. 8 opening ceremony are the most expensive of the Games - with a top price of US$720 - and many are in the hands of dignitaries and friends. Delays could create terrible publicity on opening night.
"They should be concentrating on sniffing out the kinds of dangerous stuff rather than worrying about the identify of the people with the tickets," said Roger Clarke, an Australian security expert. His Xamax Consultancy in Canberra advises businesses in online security and identity authentication.
"The way in which you recognize an evildoer, somebody who wants to throw a bomb, somebody who wants to unfurl a Tibet flag is not on the basis of their identity," Clarke added. "It's the act that they perform and it's the materials they carry with them."
China has toughened visa restrictions and increased checks at hotels and entertainment areas - all designed to keep track of foreigners as the Games approach. Several large public gatherings have been cancelled. Thousands of closed-circuit TV cameras will be deployed in and around the venues. Organizers have acknowledged that some security officials will be dressed in volunteer uniforms. Passengers riding the subway and major bus routes will also undergo strict checks.
China has developed some of the world's most advanced RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, some aimed at keeping tight control over its citizens and borders. It's used on Chinese driver's licences and ID cards.
Chinese authorities initially considered tying all 6.8 million tickets to individuals, which was attempted two years ago for soccer's World Cup in Germany. German officials eventually backed off the plan - it made tickets difficult to transfer or resell - and scanned only 500-1,000 tickets at each game rather than all tickets.
The plan was aimed at deterring scalpers and soccer hooligans. But initially it caused long lines and criticism from fans and soccer's world governing body, which said it was too strict and elaborate.
Microchips are embedded in all Beijing Olympic tickets, but only opening and closing tickets contain the photos and passport data. This makes them - in theory - nontransferable. The other tickets are transferable, and the RFID technology is being touted as a deterrent and an anti-counterfeit device. That's useful in China, which produces fake products from DVDs to heart medicine.
Ticketmaster China, the official ticketing provider for the Games, predicts every event in every venue will be sold out - an Olympic first.
"We noticed the problem in Germany in 2006, and we learned a lesson from them," said Yang Yichun, director of the technology department for the Beijing organizing committee. "We have made contingency plans to deal with any potential problems."
One fan of the system is Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang, who attended a World Cup game in Dortmund two years ago and is confident Beijing's technology is better.
"We're fully prepared and we are confident we can overcome all the difficulties," Wan said.
Clarke, the Australian security expert, said inaccurate data, ticket holders mixing up tickets and the possibility for identity theft were likely.
"If somebody is handing out six tickets to six people, they somehow have to shuffle these tickets successfully to get the right ticket in the right hands," Clarke said. "If they fail and then people are separated in the queue, we'll get enormous delays at the gates."
The International Olympic Committee has said it is comfortable with Beijing's ticketing security. IOC spokeswoman Emmanuelle Moreau said the RFID technology was "tested thoroughly by BOCOG this summer and satisfied both BOCOG and the IOC that the technology is sound."
Xu Chaoying, one of China's leading experts in RFID, is the general manager of Beijing Dalang Telecom Co. Ltd., which lost in a bid for the Olympic RFID contract. Xu called RFID "mature technology" and discounted the comparison to Germany.
"For the 2006 World Cup, I think the main problem was about privacy," Xu said. "People doubted whether the data in the tickets would be completely deleted. But as for the technology, there shouldn't be any problem."
Xu said it was possible the wireless technology could be disrupted, but he said any problems would be easy to fix.
Clarke disputed this. He said if Chinese officials choose to use a rudimentary RFID system, it would expose the data to easy theft. A more secure system using encrypted data would add complexity and more possibilities for chaos at the gate.
He said the high-tech ticket might also distract from procedures like frisks and bag checks, both more likely to uncover contraband entering the stadium.
"There's always a risk when you start putting efforts into an inappropriate mechanism that you deflect resources away from the important ones," Clarke said. "You reduce your effectiveness in finding flags and bombs and weapons because you've got too many people spending too much time worrying about other things."
http://canadianpress.google.com/arti...c9SKKHck3Hz_iA
Blackberry Spurns Indian Spy Call
The Canadian manufacturer of Blackberry mobile phones has rejected demands by the Indian government that it help decrypt suspicious text messages.
Research in Motion says its technology does not allow any third party - even the company itself - to read information sent over its network.
The Indian authorities have been reluctant to allow the widespread use of Blackberries in the country.
They fear militants and criminals may take advantage of the secure system.
A number of other countries around the world have expressed similar fears.
Master key
"The Blackberry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for Research in Motion (RIM) or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances," the company was quoted by Times of India newspaper as saying.
The Indian government's department of telecommunication and the security agencies have asked the Canadian firm to provide the master key so that they can access the contents transferred between the handheld devices.
In India, Blackberry services are provided by Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone and BPL Mobile.
The country has only about 115,000 Blackberry customers at the moment, but it is a rapidly growing market.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ia/7420911.stm
Republicans Shift, a Little, on Surveillance Bill Standoff
AP
A months-long logjam over a new government surveillance bill may be coming to an end, with Republicans offering a compromise that would let people who think they were illegally spied on by the government have their day in court - albeit a secret one.
House and Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled their latest proposal aimed at resolving the roughly 40 civil lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated in the so-called warrantless wiretapping program.
The Republican proposal makes other concessions. It would:
-Allow an inspector general investigation of the warrantless wiretapping program.
-Allow a secret court to review in advance a government's plan for the surveillance of non-U.S. citizens abroad to make sure the privacy of Americans they may come in contact with is protected.
-Confirm that the new law would be the exclusive authority to conduct electronic surveillance - essentially outlawing a revival of the warrantless wiretapping in the future.
House and Senate staff from both parties said the proposal represents a real shift toward the House Democratic surveillance bill.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said he received the GOP proposal Wednesday and is reviewing it.
The most important shift comes in the matter of the telecom lawsuits.
The companies allegedly allowed the government to eavesdrop in the United States on phone and computer lines for nearly six years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks without the permission of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court created 30 years ago precisely for that purpose. Those lawsuits are pending before a single federal court.
The White House favors the Senate version of an electronic surveillance bill that grants full immunity to the telecommunications companies. The House-approved version would let the cases go to court, leaving it up to judges to determine whether the companies acted illegally.
The new Republican proposal- which Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri said is backed by the White House and intelligence agencies- would allow the FISA court to decide. It would require the attorney general to certify that the companies acted lawfully and at the request of the president.
The court would be allowed to read the requests to telecom companies for the wiretaps to be placed, and the plaintiffs could file their complaints with the court. The court could dismiss the lawsuits if it finds that supported by "a preponderance of the evidence."
"We have to draw a line in the sand and say we've compromised enough," said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
Smith said at a Republican news conference that he and other lawmakers were coming forward to pressure Democrats to accept their proposal.
"There's not a whole lot farther you can go without seriously damaging" national security, said Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
Hoyer called Republican "rhetoric" at the news conference "unhelpful."
The American Civil Liberties Union says the Republican compromise language on telecom immunity is not an improvement over the original Senate bill. The FISA court is still not empowered to determine whether the warrantless wiretapping program was legal- just whether the attorney general sent a letter to the companies requesting assistance.
The compromise "just says that the existence of an order - whether legal or not - is enough to dismiss the cases," said Michelle Richardson, a legislative consultant with the ACLU.
The new surveillance law is intended to help the government pursue suspected terrorists by making it easier to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails between foreigners abroad and Americans in the U.S and remove barriers to collecting purely foreign communications that pass through the United States- for instance, foreign e-mails stored on a server.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1
Move to Protect Canadians' Privacy on Net Irritates Police, Attracts Others
Sweeping changes to Canada's home on the World Wide Web will put the country on the vanguard of Internet privacy.
But while law enforcement isn't happy about potentially losing an important investigative tool, the half-million Canadians whose personal information is currently publicly available on the Internet shouldn't rest easy that they are safe from wired snoops.
It's long been standard for website registrars to publicly provide detailed contact information for individuals who own domain names under dot-ca and dot-com through an easy Internet search called a Whois (pronounced who-is).
The Canada Internet Registration Authority says it will buck the trend by June 10, instituting new privacy policies that will protect private information from roaming eyes.
The existing Whois system provides the domain owner's name, home address, phone number and e-mail.
It's a treasure trove for spammers, said Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law.
"We're talking about one of the largest freely available online directories of personal information in the country," he said.
Domain names, heralded as the real estate of the 21st century, are becoming commonplace for a generation of computer-savvy Canadians eager to own their own spot on the World Wide Web.
The number of Canadian domain names hit the one million mark in April, and has been increasing by about 650 each day since then.
About 70 per cent of those are owned by upwards of 600,000 Canadians, says the registration authority.
"This will put us at the forefront of individual privacy protection in the world," said ByronHolland, president of the authority.
Canada's 2004 Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act didn't exist when the first dot-ca domain name, upei.ca, was registered by the University of Prince Edward Island in 1988.
The law regulates how private-sector organizations collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of commercial business.
Holland said the changes to the Whois will bring the registration authority in line with the legislation.
"It's (currently) consistent with the letter of the law, because it's made clear that information is released, but I don't believe it's consistent with the spirit of the law."
Geist said the changes have raised the ire of law enforcement and intellectual property lawyers, who have used the Whois search to track down sexual predators and copyright violators.
"They've sought to maintain the status quo though it arguably violates privacy legislation."
But he said bringing the Internet authority's policies in line with the law on June 10 will let potential whistleblowers - or those worried their political blog postings will lead to a home visit from a dissatisfied Internet user - breathe a little easier, Geist said.
Knowing that such personal information is currently available with a few clicks of a mouse has created a quandary for privacy seekers, he said.
"Those who criticize a company or their own employer (on their own website) often do it at great personal risk," he said.
"They're between a rock and a hard place: If they post accurate information they get to keep the domain but may suffer consequences at work, but if they post fake information they may be safe at work but they run the risk of losing the domain."
Canadians who already own domain names won't enjoy the same luxury of privacy right away. Given that their Whois data are already available on third-party websites, there's little the registration authority can do to reign in that information.
Holland says it's not a cause for concern, as any edits made to existing information after June 10 won't be publicly available.
There's also little risk of the dot-ca becoming a place for the rest of the world to stash its electronic dirty laundry, Geist said.
Only Canadian residents or companies can register the unique domain names, and personal information will still be collected and available to the registration authority.
Domain names also have the potential to be extremely valuable as online advertising revenue rises into the billions. Ownership of the lucrative domain name sex.com, for example, went for a record $12 million in 2006.
While the Internet authority's change is unlikely to make anyone rich, the president of authority said Canadians' predilection for privacy means they may begin to snap up dot-ca domains instead of the generic dot-com.
"Given that we will be the world leader in the space, absolutely, it'll make Canadians more likely to choose a dot-ca (versus other domains)."
The change won't affect businesses and organizations, which will still have their information publicly available.
Dot-ca is a country code, and Canada owns all names that end with .ca. It costs about $10 per year to register a domain.
http://canadianpress.google.com/arti...yCBNXclu1m8W-w
Russian Court Suspends Ingushetia Website
A court in Moscow suspended the main opposition website in the troubled south Russian region of Ingushetia on Monday while prosecutors investigate regional government's accusations it spreads extremist material.
The government of Ingushetia brought the case against the ingushetiya.ru website owned by local businessmen Magomed Yevloev. Ingushetia has tried to control media outlets as it struggles to contain growing violence in the region.
"Today the Kuntsevsky district court in Moscow upheld a motion by the Republic of Ingushetia ... to order Magomed Yevloev to close his Internet activities," the court's statement said of the investigation.
Yevloev's lawyer, Kaloi Akhigov, said the accusations were political.
"The website shows Ingushetia as it really is and they don't like it," Akhilgov said.
"We are going to challenge this court order."
Akhilgov said the ingushetiya.ru website is hosted in the United States, meaning that the court has to order all Internet providers in Russia to switch off the website -- a logistical challenge by the June 5 deadline, he said.
Ingushetia borders Chechnya, a scene of two separatist wars since 1994. While Chechnya has calmed, violence has increased in the neighbouring regions of Ingushetia and Dagestan.
Ingushetia's government wants to present a picture of normality in the region and control the information flow. Eyewitness said police beat journalists at anti-government meetings and confiscated cameras earlier this year.
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...62585820080526
In-Flight Surveillance Could Foil Terrorists in the Sky
Michael Reilly
CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and passenger aircraft could be next.
A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and "Big Brother" software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.
The European Union's Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project uses a camera in every passenger's seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect developing terrorist activity or "air-rage" incidents, by tracking passengers' facial expressions.
The system performed well in tests this January that simulated terrorist and unruly passenger behaviour scenarios in a fake Airbus A380 fuselage, say the researchers that built it.
Systems to analyse CCTV footage – for example, to detect violence (with video) or alert CCTV operators to unusual events – have been designed before. But the SAFEE software must cope with the particularly challenging environment of a full aircraft cabin.
Threat indicators
As crew and passengers move around they often obscure one another, causing a risk the computer will lose track of some of the hundreds of people it must monitor. To get around this, the software constantly matches views of people from different cameras to track their movements.
"It looks for running in the cabin, standing near the cockpit for long periods of time, and other predetermined indicators that suggest a developing threat," says James Ferryman of the University of Reading, UK, one of the system's developers.
Other behaviours could include a person nervously touching their face, or sweating excessively. One such behaviour won't trigger the system to alert the crew, only certain combinations of them.
Ferryman is not ready to reveal specifically which behaviours were most likely to trigger the system. Much of the computer's ability to detect threats relies on sensitive information gleaned from security analysts in the intelligence community, he tells New Scientist.
Losing track
But Mohan Trivedi of the University of California, San Diego, US, is sceptical. He has built systems that he says can track and recognise individual people as they appear and disappear on different floors of his laboratory building.
It correctly identifies people about 70% of the time, and then only under "optimal conditions" that do not exist inside an airplane cabin, he says.
"[Ferryman's] research shows that a system detects threats in a very limited way. But it's a very different thing using it day in and day out." Trivedi says. "Lighting and reflections change in the cabin every time someone turns on a light or closes a window shade. They haven't shown that they have overcome these challenges."
Ferryman admits that his system will require thousands of tests on everyday passengers before it can be declared reliable at detecting threats.
The team's work is being presented this week at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems in Greece.
http://technology.newscientist.com/c...n-the-sky.html
Billboards That Look Back
Stephanie Clifford
In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.
Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.
“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.
Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.
“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”
Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.
Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.
“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.
Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. Both Quividi-equipped boards were installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements.
“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.
“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”
And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.
The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.
For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”
TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.
Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.
The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.
“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.
“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”
Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Association, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.
Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.
There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.
Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.
Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”
But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.
Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/bu...billboard.html
Weak Economy Bolsters Sales of Picture-Tube TVs
Eric A. Taub
The slowing American economy has had an unexpected effect on the television business: a resurgence in the popularity of the standard picture-tube TV.
According to new sales figures from the DisplaySearch research firm, tube TVs edged out plasma models to become the second-most-popular technology during the first quarter of this year. In the fourth quarter of 2007, it was plasma that enjoyed the number-two spot, after L.C.D.
The reasons are simple, according to Paul Gagnon, the company’s director of North American TV research. It all has to do with price sensitivity and the sense among consumers that they should purchase a cheap digital-capable set before the nation switches to all-digital broadcasting next year.
Enjoying the boom in picture-tube TV sales are the low-cost mass marketers like Wal-Mart. Tube sets have all but disappeared from big-box consumer electronics retailers, like Best Buy, Circuit City and even Costco. In terms of revenue, the venerable RCA brand, owned by China’s TCL, has captured a 46 percent market share, putting it in first place.
And while picture-tube TVs may be hard to find here, that’s not the case in the rest of the world. Tube TVs still outsell L.C.D. sets worldwide, although the two technologies are now neck and neck. In the first quarter of this year, 22.1 million tube TVs were sold worldwide, compared with 21.1 million L.C.D. sets.
For those who still want to buy a flat-panel TV, the economy has also caused consumers to rethink their need for the biggest and best.
Television sales normally fall after the holiday buying boom, and this year was no exception. But unit sales of sets 40 inches and larger dropped by a larger-than-expected 36 percent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the last quarter of 2007. Meanwhile, sales of sets smaller than 40 inches in size decreased only 33 percent. “With the Super Bowl in January, typically sales of larger sets do well in the first quarter,” Mr. Gagnon said. “Sales of TVs in the 30- to 37-inch size were stronger than expected.” Smaller sets mean lower revenue for the manufacturers.
On the plasma front, Panasonic remained the sales leader, even though plasma now accounts for just 6 percent of worldwide TV sales. And in the United States, Vizio, the low-cost manufacturer, has seen its plasma market share almost double from the fourth quarter of last year, from 5.7 percent to 10 percent. (Panasonic’s first-place share of the U.S. plasma business dropped from 38 to 35 percent.)
One bright spot for the industry: sales of still-pricey TVs 50 inches and larger “was stronger than expected,” Mr. Gagnon said. If the rich do not always get richer, so far at least many seem to have retained their ability to buy big TVs.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ture-tube-tvs/
Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3
Jim Louderback, CEO
As many of you know, Revision3’s servers were brought down over the Memorial Day weekend by a denial of service attack. It’s an all too common occurrence these days. But this one wasn’t your normal cybercrime – there’s a chilling twist at the end. Here’s what happened, and why we’re even more concerned today, after it’s over, than we were on Saturday when it started.
It all started with just a simple “hi”. Now “hi” can be the sweetest word in the world, breathlessly whispered into your ear by a long-lost lover, or squealed out by your bouncy toddler at the end of the day. But taken to excess – like by a cranky 3-year old–it gets downright annoying. Now imagine a room full of hyperactive toddlers, hot off of a three hour Juicy-Juice bender, incessantly shrieking “hi” over and over again, and you begin to understand what our poor servers went through this past weekend.
On the internet, computers say hi with a special type of packet, called “SYN”. A conversation between devices typically requires just one short SYN packet exchange, before moving on to larger messages containing real data. And most of the traffic cops on the internet – routers, firewalls and load balancers – are designed to mostly handle those larger messages. So a flood of SYN packets, just like a room full of hyperactive screaming toddlers, can cause all sorts of problems.
For adults, it’s typically an inability to cope, followed either by quickly fleeing the room, or orchestrating a massive Teletubbies intervention. Since they lack both legs and a ready supply of plushies, internet devices usually just shut down.
That’s what happened to us. Another device on the internet flooded one of our servers with an overdose of SYN packets, and it shut down – bringing the rest of Revision3 with it. In webspeak it’s called a Denial of Service attack – aka DoS – and it happens when one machine overwhelms another with too many packets, or messages, too quickly. The receiving machine attempts to deal with all that traffic, but in the end just gives up.
(Note the photo of our server equipment responding to the DoS Attack)
In its coverage Tuesday CNet asked the question, “Now who would want to attack Revision3?” Who indeed? So we set out to find out.
Internet attacks leave lots of evidence. In this case it was pretty easy to see exactly what our shadowy attacker was so upset about. It turns out that those zillions of SYN packets were addressed to one particular port, or doorway, on one of our web servers: 20000. Interestingly enough, that’s the port we use for our Bittorrent tracking server. It seems that someone was trying to destroy our bittorrent distribution network.
Let me take a step back and describe how Revision3 uses Bittorrent, aka BT. The BT protocol is a peer to peer scheme for sharing large files like music, programs and video. By harnessing the peer power of many computers, we can easily and cheaply distribute our huge HD-quality video shows for a lot less money. To get started, the person sharing that large file first creates a small file called a “torrent”, which contains metadata, along with which server will act as the conductor, coordinating the sharing. That server is called the tracking server, or “tracker”. You can read much more about Bittorrent at Wikipedia, if you really want to understand how it works.
Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores.
But someone, or some company, apparently took offense to Revision3 using Bittorrent to distribute its own slate of shows. Who could that be?
Along with where it’s bound, every internet packet has a return address. Often, particularly in cases like this, it’s forged – or spoofed. But interestingly enough, whoever was sending these SYN packets wasn’t shy. Far from it: it’s as if they wanted us to know who they were.
A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.
Now why would MediaDefender be trying to put Revision3 out of business? Heck, we’re one of the biggest defenders of media around. So I stopped by their website and found that MediaDefender provides “anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention industry.” The company aims to “stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the internet and peer-to-peer networks.” Hmm. We use the internet and peer-to-peer networks to accelerate the spread of legally traded materials that we own. That’s sort of directly opposite to what Media Defender is supposed to be doing.
Who pays MediaDefender to disrupt peer to peer networks? I don’t know who’s ponying up today, but in the past their clients have included Sony, Universal Music, and the central industry groups for both music and movies – the RIAA and MPAA. According to an article by Ars Technica, the company uses “its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.” Another Ars Technica story claims that MediaDefender used a similar denial of service attack to bring down a group critical of its actions.
Hmm. Now this could have been just a huge misunderstanding. Someone could have incorrectly configured a server on Friday, and left it to flood us mercilessly with SYN packets over the long Memorial Day weekend. If so, luckily it was pointed at us, and not, say, at the intensive care unit at Northwest Hospital and Medical Center But Occam’s razor leads to an entirely different conclusion.
So I picked up the phone and tried to get in touch with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard. I eventually had a fascinating phone call with both Dimitri Villard and Ben Grodsky, Vice President of Operations at Media Defender.
First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.
Second, and here’s where the chain of events come into focus, although not the motive. We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of “Hi”s brought down our network.
Grodsky admits that his computers sent those SYN packets to Revision3, but claims that their servers were each only trying to contact us every three hours. Our own logs show upwards of 8,000 packets a second.
“Media Defender did not do anything specific, targeted at Revision3″, claims Grodsky. “We didn’t do anything to increase the traffic” – beyond what they’d normally be sending us due to the fact that Revision3 was hosting thousands of MediaDefender torrents improperly injected into our corporate server. His claim: that once we turned off MediaDefender’s back-door access to the server, “traffic piled up (to Revision3 from MediaDefender servers because) it didn’t get any acknowledgment back.”
Putting aside the company’s outrageous use of our servers for their own profit, and the large difference between one connection every three hours and 8,000 packets a second, I’m still left to wonder why they didn’t just tell us our basement window was unlocked. A quick call or email and we’d have locked it up tighter than a drum.
It’s as if McGruff the Crime Dog snuck into our basement, enlisted an army of cellar rats to eat up all of our cheese, and then burned the house down when we finally locked him out – instead of just knocking on the front door to tell us the window was open.
In the end, here’s what I know:
• A torrential flood of SYN packets rained down on Revision3’s network over Memorial Day weekend.
• Those packets – up to 8,000 a second – came primarily from computers controlled by MediaDefender, who is in the business of shutting down illegal torrent sites.
• Revision3 suffered measurable harm to its business due to that flood of packets, as the attacks on our legitimate and legal Torrent Tracking server spilled over into our entire internet infrastructure. Thus we were unable to serve videos and advertising through much of the weekend, and into Tuesday – and even our internal email servers were brought down.
• Denial of service attacks are illegal in the US under 12 different statutes, including the Economic Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Although I can only guess, here’s what I think really happened. Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender’s servers freaked out, and went into attack mode – much like how a petulant toddler will throw an epic tantrum if you take away an ill-gotten Oreo.
That tantrum threw upwards of 8,000 SYN packets a second at our servers. And that was enough to bring down both our public facing site, our RSS server, and even our internal corporate email – basically the entire Revision3 business. Smashing the cookie jar, as it were, so that no one else could have any Oreos either.
Was it malicious? Intentional? Negligent? Spoofed? I can’t say. But what I do know is that the FBI is looking into the matter – and it’s far more serious than toddlers squabbling over broken toys and lost cookies.
MediaDefender claims that they have taken steps to ensure this won’t happen again. “We’ve added a policy that will investigate open public trackers to see if they are associated with other companies”, promised Grodsky, “and first will make a communication that says, hey are you aware of this.”
In the end, I don’t think Media Defender deliberately targeted Revision3 specifically. However, the company has a history of using their servers to, as Ars Technica said, “launch denial of service attacks against distributors.” They saw us as a “distributor” – even though we were using Bittorrent for legitimate reasons. Once we shut them out, their vast network of servers were automatically programmed to implement a scorched earth policy, and shut us down in turn. The long Memorial Day weekend holiday made it impossible for us to contact either Media Defender or their ISP, which only exacerbated the problem.
All I want, for Revision3, is to get our weekend back – both the countless hours spent by our heroic tech staff attempting to unravel the mess, and the revenue, traffic and entertainment that we didn’t deliver.
If it can happen to Revision3, it could happen to your business too. We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.
- Jim Louderback
CEO - Revision3
UPDATE
We’ve received several requests for some technical data to illustrate the specifics of the attack. So we’ve provided a text file with some more “under the hood” data.
This file represents every packet we identified as being part of the DoS for a period of time less than .02 *seconds* on Monday morning. If you count, there’s a total of 96 packets. (We removed 12 legitimate packets from the trace). We used a combination of tcpdump and wireshark to gather this information. (this particular trace is from tcpdump)
View the text file:
rev3packettrace.txt
http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29...pled-revision3
Until next week,
-
js.
Current Week In Review
Recent WiRs -
May 24th,
May 17th,
May 10th,
May 3rd,
April 26th,
April 19th
Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.
"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black