[JackSpratts]

Movie Swappers to Go Without Charges in Korea
Chung Ah-young

The prosecution has tentatively decided not to bring criminal charges against 82 Internet users for copyright violations involving downloading movie files from file sharing Web sites.

An investigator said Thursday that police raided a peer- to-peer (P2P) program operator in Seoul after securing the identities of the Internet users by combing their log- in records since last month.

``Currently, 57 users have been summoned and questioned by prosecutors and the remainder are being traced,'' the investigator said.

The action came after Media Film International (MFI), a film copyright holder for ``Lord of War,'' lodged a complaint against the perpetrators for copyright infringement.

The Internet users, mostly teenagers, are suspected of illegally downloading the files of the Hollywood blockbuster, which was released last year. The movie is an action adventure story set in the world of international arms dealings.

Under current copyright protection law, the prosecution and police are only allowed to investigate and punish individuals or companies that distribute content without authorization when the copyright holders file a complaint.

The investigation came amid recent moves by the film industry and relevant portal sites to introduce the so- called ``youngparazzi,'' a system whereby ordinary Internet users can report illegal downloading of copyright materials in return for a reward.

However, most of the 82 Internet users are likely to go unpunished as the prosecution tentatively decided not to charge them, considering that many of them deleted the files immediately or settled the case with the accuser.

Prosecutors also said that the law enforcement authorities would be lenient to teenage suspects.

Investigators are also considering whether to set the guidelines for movie file downloading in accordance with music file downloading.

Prosecutors plan to introduce relevant guidelines for coping with complaints of illegal movie file downloading.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office set the guidelines for accusing those who violate copyright laws via the Internet in January.

Under the guidelines, Internet users suspected of illegally circulating and swapping music files for commercial purposes will be subject to criminal charges.

Also, a local court ordered Soribada, the country's pioneering music swapping site, to shut down the first version of its file-sharing software and computer servers last year.

Online file-sharing through peer-to-peer networks has become an increasingly contentious issue in Korea, where more than 70 percent of households have Internet connections.

Despite the ruling, piracy of copyrighted material is still widespread nationwide as high-speed Internet programs make it possible to quickly download full- length movies or music files.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nati...8175211990.htm





Facing the music over file-sharing

File-Sharing Customers Facing Expensive Court Fights
Aman Batheja

Dave Greubel stared at the Star-Telegram article in astonishment. There was his name, sandwiched into a list of strangers. The headline on the Aug. 25 article: "10 sued over downloads."

Greubel, 51, of Arlington, learned from the article that he was being sued by a group of record companies and accused of distributing copyrighted music online.

Greubel isn't alone. Despite the popularity of legal download service iTunes, illegal music sharing is still widespread. Since 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America has sued more than 18,000 people nationwide, including more than 60 people in Tarrant County. More than 4,000 cases have been settled. None has gone to trial.

Unlike most of the other RIAA suits, Greubel's has received international attention. That's because he's fighting the case, and a well-connected music executive is footing the bill.

"The RIAA cannot take advantage of people like this," Greubel said.

After receiving his summons in October, Greubel consulted a lawyer and learned of his limited options. He could settle the case for $4,500 or fight it for significantly more and risk losing.

Greubel, a single father of four, felt that he was being blackmailed. By January, he was on the verge of settling the suit just so it would go away. As much as he hated to give in, he couldn't afford to fight and lose.

"They are going after everyday people who just cannot afford what they're doing to them," he said.

Many of the music industry's fans have griped about the RIAA suing its own customers.

Several artists have taken up the cause as well, including the Brooklyn, N.Y., rapper MC Lars.

MC Lars wrote a song devoted to the issue, titled Download This Song. It takes record labels to task for thwarting file-sharing rather than seeing it as the industry's inevitable business model.

"Hey Mr. Record Man, your system can't compete/It's the new artist model, file transfer complete," he sings in the chorus. He has made the song available for free on the popular Web site MySpace.com.

Greubel's 15-year-old daughter, Elisa, heard the song online and was moved. Without telling her father, she e-mailed the rapper and thanked him for siding with his fans.

"My family is one of many seemingly randomly chosen families to be sued by the RIAA. No fun," Elisa Greubel wrote. "You can't fight them, trying could possibly cost us millions. ... I'm not saying it is right to download, but the whole lawsuit business is a tad bit outrageous."

MC Lars passed the e-mail on to his manager, who forwarded it to Terry McBride, chief executive of Nettwerk Music Group, a label based in Vancouver, British Columbia, whose roster of artists includes MC Lars and Avril Lavigne. Rather than hurting sales, McBride said, the label sees file-sharing as one of the best ways of promoting an artist.

McBride contacted Greubel and made a startling offer. He told Greubel that if he was willing to fight the case, Nettwerk would pay all of the legal fees. If Greubel lost the case, Nettwerk would pay the fines as well.

Greubel accepted. (Ironically, McBride later learned that one of the songs Greubel had allegedly distributed was Lavigne's "Sk8r Boi.")

"That was a tipping point," McBride said. "By suing these kids, you're actually destroying the future of my artists."

Although the label is based in Canada, Nettwerk is a member of the RIAA. McBride hopes that his move will convince the RIAA to stop suing its customers.

"They're sort of shooting themselves in the foot by doing this," McBride said.

Greubel isn't the first to fight one of the RIAA's lawsuits. In New York, a single mother has reportedly spent more than $20,000 fighting a similar suit, asserting that she barely knows how to use the Internet, let alone download music. Running out of money, she dismissed her lawyer and is representing herself. The case has yet to go to trial.

In Chicago, a woman recently tried to fight a similar suit. She didn't deny having downloaded the songs, but she said it wasn't illegal because she was just "sampling" the music. A federal judge in December upheld a $22,500 judgment against her.

Two other people in Tarrant County are fighting similar suits. Staci Shearer of Fort Worth and Albert Taulton of Arlington have disputed complaints alleging that they distributed music online illegally. Neither would return calls from the Star-Telegram.

Greubel's lawyer, Charles Mudd Jr., has filed a motion to dismiss the RIAA's complaint on several grounds, including that the record companies have failed to provide evidence that the songs Greubel allegedly made available online were ever downloaded by others, meaning there's no evidence that any copyrights have been infringed.

"There was use of the alleged family computer for music file-sharing." Mudd said. Neither he nor Greubel would say whether any copyrighted works had been distributed through the computer.

Can't afford to fight

Mudd, who practices law in Chicago, has represented more than 100 people across the country who have been sued by record companies for illegally distributing music online. Almost all of his clients have settled their cases because they can't afford to fight, he said.

In Tarrant County, more than a dozen people have settled cases with the RIAA.

Tony Blanco, 32, of Benbrook paid $3,500 to settle a case against him last year. Blanco said he and former roommates had downloaded songs over the course of a few years with a file-sharing program.

"I thought, how can it be illegal? Everybody's doing it," Blanco said.

Court papers alleged that he had shared 1,396 files. Blanco consulted two lawyers and was told that he could lose tens of thousands of dollars if he fought the case and lost.

"They definitely scared me," Blanco said. "I wondered if everything I ever worked for in my life was going to be on the block because I downloaded a few songs."

Blanco, who works as an information-technology recruiter in Dallas, opted to negotiate a settlement himself.

"They offered $7,000. I said I've got $3,500. They said fine. I didn't even have that much. I had to borrow it," he said.

Since the settlement, Blanco has stayed away from file-sharing programs and has repeatedly warned friends off of them.

Such stories are the RIAA's main argument for pursuing so many lawsuits against illegal file sharers.

"Without question, these lawsuits have helped to arrest the tremendous growth of peer-to- peer use," said RIAA spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen.

Engebretsen pointed to a study by the NPD research firm saying that from 2003 to 2005, the number of households downloading music via peer-to-peer software has declined even as broadband Internet access has soared.

But some analysts dispute that finding. BigChampagne, a firm that measures the actual activity on file-sharing networks, has found that the number of users on the networks has increased annually since 2002.

BigChampagne Chief Executive Eric Garland said the growth in broadband access has also increased new ways of distributing music files, such as through e-mail and instant- messaging programs.

"All of the tools that are most popular for communicating are also popular for file-sharing," Garland said.

Matt Kleinschmit, a digital music analyst with marketing firm Ipsos Insight, said the lawsuits may have compelled some to try digital music sellers such as iTunes, but that doesn't mean they've stopped sharing files. The average person using fee-based services buys eight songs a month, he said.

Kleinschmit said the biggest effect of the lawsuits has likely been how they have increased awareness that sharing copyrighted works is illegal.

Regardless, the RIAA is continuing its lawsuits.

Bobby Bienski of Fort Worth got a letter in January from Charter Communications saying that a record company has sought information about his account because it had been used for sharing copyrighted works.

Bienski soon found that daughter had been using a service called LimeWire to download music. She didn't know that it was illegal, he said. Most of her friends also use the service.

Bienski quickly deleted the software and the songs.

If he gets sued, he said he will probably settle if fighting the case proves to be too costly.

"If you know there's a lot of other people out there doing it, and you get singled out for doing it, you wonder why me," Bienski said.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/14081472.htm





The Pirate Bay: Here to Stay?
Ann Harrison

Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America announced one of its boldest sorties yet against online piracy: a barrage of seven federal lawsuits against some of the highest-profile BitTorrent sites, Usenet hosts and peer-to-peer services. Among the targets: isoHunt, TorrentSpy and eDonkey.

But, as always, one prominent site is missing from the movie industry's announcement (.pdf), and it happens to be the simplest and best-known source of traded movies -- along with pirated video games, music, software, audio books, television broadcasts and nearly any other form of media imaginable. The site is called The Pirate Bay, and it's operated by a crew of intrepid Swedes who revel in tormenting the content industries.

"All of us who run the TPB are against the copyright laws and want them to change," said "Brokep," a Pirate Bay operator. "We see it as our duty to spread culture and media. Technology is just a means to doing that."

A quick look at The Pirate Bay's lineup suggests which side is winning the piracy wars. Among the site's most popular downloads are recent Oscar nominees and winners like Closer and Brokeback Mountain, Steven Spielberg's Munich, the latest Harry Potter film and even stinkers like Underworld: Evolution and The Pink Panther. Downloading doesn't require users to register or install spyware -- if one has a BitTorrent client installed, anything listed is just a click away.

To international observers, The Pirate Bay's defiant immunity from copyright lawyers is somewhat baffling. But in Sweden, the site is more than just an electronic speak-easy: It's the flagship of a national file-sharing movement that's generating an intense national debate, and has even spawned a pro-piracy political party making a credible bid for seats in the Swedish parliament.

Founded in 2003 by a loosely knit crew of file-sharing advocates called Piratbyrån, or Pirate Bureau, The Pirate Bay began life as a Swedish-language site occupying a second tier among popular torrent trackers. Then the MPAA's groundbreaking 2004 crackdown on torrent hubs changed everything. As famous sites like SuprNova and LokiTorrent went under, their users crowded onto the surviving hubs like pelicans on a reef. When the storm passed, The Pirate Bay remained.

According to "Anakata," one of the site's operators, subsequent MPAA lawsuits have continued to drive more users to The Pirate Bay, which today boasts 1 million unique visitors a day. The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers.

That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment.

Viborg credits The Pirate Bay's seeming immunity to the basic structure of the BitTorrent protocol. The site's Stockholm-based servers provide only torrent files, which by themselves contain no copyright data -- merely pointers to sources of the content. That makes The Pirate Bay's activities perfectly legal under Swedish statutory and case law, Viborg claims. "Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we'll continue our activities. Relentlessly," wrote Viborg in an e-mail.

MPAA spokeswoman Kori Bernards insists The Pirate Bay violates copyright laws around the world. "Copyright laws are being enforced and upheld in countries all over the world and when you facilitate the illegal file swapping of millions of people around the world, you are subject to those laws," said Bernards. "The torrent and torrent tracker is something that points people to various files that make up a copyright that is protected under the law."

That legal claim is untested in the United States, according to Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In Sweden, the legality of the trackers is a topic of considered debate.

Magnus Martensson, a legal adviser for the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, insists that The Pirate Bay does infringe on Sweden's copyright law, or at least qualifies as contributory infringement. "Pirate Bay has been on our radar screen for a couple of years and it is a great concern for our member record companies that we take some action," said Martensson. "The activity carried out by The Pirate Bay is damaging the record labels' business."

But that argument isn't finding the most fertile ground among Sweden's wired citizenry. According to Martensson, polls indicate that more than 10 percent of Sweden's 9 million people participated in file sharing in the last quarter of 2005. He said file sharing is widespread in Sweden because almost every household owns a computer and can get a cheap 100-Mbps broadband fiber connection from their ISP for 70 euros a month. "My guess is that Sweden is one of the worst places in the world when it comes to illegal sharing," said Martensson.

Until recently, downloading copyright material for personal use wasn't even illegal in the country. Bowing to international pressure, the Swedish government finally changed that last July, implementing the EU Copyright Directive, which outlaws the copying, distribution, uploading and downloading of copyright material without the copyright holder's permission.

A month before the law went into effect, The Pirate Bay -- now officially independent of Piratbyrån -- registered its opinion of the measure by launching an improved version of the site. Among other enhancements, the website now supports 25 languages, and offers a breakdown of the top 100 torrents, selectable by content category.

"The relaunch of the site was at first needed for withstanding the huge amount of traffic, but we decided to launch it when we did to make a political statement as well," said Brokep.

While The Pirate Bay is raising the Jolly Roger, the group that founded it is embracing grass-roots activism and political legitimacy. Piratbyrån today has 57,000 registered members committed to its belief that file trading is a means of sharing culture and making new art.

So influential is Piratbyrån that Sweden's leading anti-piracy organization defines itself by its opposition to the group. The MPAA-funded Svenska Antipiratbyrån uses its own software to keep logs and track IP address of suspected file sharers. Together with other copyright organizations, it has sent more than 400,000 letters to Swedish ISPs protesting their users' alleged file-sharing activities.

"We don't want to stop the exchange of culture, we are just saying that the creators have to be paid," said Henrik Pontén, an attorney for Antipiratbyrån. "It is the copyright laws that pay for new games and movies."

Last spring, Antipiratbyrån's tactics inspired some 4,000 Swedes to complain through e-mail to the Swedish Data Inspection Board that the group's IP tracking violated data-privacy laws. The board granted Antipiratbyrån a temporary exemption to continue the practice. Pontén said a final decision about whether an IP address is private data is still pending.

Antipiratbyrån said it helped provide evidence against two Swedes who were recently fined $2,000 for trading copyright files, in a case that made national news in Sweden. According to Viborg, the only proof in the case was screen dumps submitted by Antipiratbyrån, which he said could be easily manipulated. Pontén said the courts looked at the evidence in the case and found that the screen dumps hadn't been tampered with, adding that Antipiratbyrån had no motivation to do so.

Piratbyrån protested the screen-dump convictions by creating The Evidence Machine -- software that lets users produce fake evidence of file sharing against anyone by inserting an IP address and file name.

Antipiratbyrån set off another firestorm when it convinced local police to raid Swedish ISP Bahnhof last year and confiscate four servers containing 23 terabytes of copyright material. A group called The Angry Young Hackers retaliated by hacking the Antipiratbyrån website and mail system, unearthing e-mails, log files and chat messages suggesting that Bahnhof had been infiltrated by anti-piracy operatives. "Swedes were just laughing and shaking their heads," said Bahnhof founder Oscar Swartz.

Charges were dropped when Bahnhof accused Antipiratbyrån of uploading the files itself.

"It has in many ways been obvious to the public that the anti-piracy lobby is also operating in their own, very doubtful, legal gray zone," said Piratbyrån member Rasmus Fleischer. "They are dependent on the existence of police officers willing to give priority to the hunting of file sharers over real criminality."

Pontén denied that Antipiratbyrån broke any laws. He said the group's aim in the investigation was to stop a pirate group from uploading material to the Bahnhof server. "The Pirate Bay is at the bottom of the piracy world," said Pontén. "We haven't focused so much on them because if you can stop the sources of piracy, the copyrighted material won't come to The Pirate Bay."

According to Pontén, some hard-core pirates resent The Pirate Bay and have offered to help Antipiratbyrån because they want to keep the movies within their own small group. Moreover, Pontén is convinced that Sweden itself is on the verge of a sea change that will capsize sites like The Pirate Bay. "I think it is more and more accepted in Sweden that we have copyright laws on the internet and in the real world," he said.

Antipiratbyrån's efforts to halt file sharing have prompted Sweden's outspoken pirates to run for office as the Pirate Party. Party spokesman Mika Sjöman said pirates are alarmed by both the IP tracking and Sweden's newly expanded surveillance and wiretapping laws.

"People are getting scared," said Sjöman. "The two issues are really connected because copyright organizations are telling the government you have to invade the right to privacy if you want to defend copyright. That's really destructive for democracy because when you make lists of people that will be the end of privacy."

It may sound like a joke, but Sjöman said the Pirate Party has 1,500 members, and has gathered enough signatures to participate in the Swedish general election in September. He said the government estimates that there are 1.2 million file sharers over the age of 18 in Sweden, and the Pirate Party needs only four percent, 225,000 votes, to get seats in the country's parliament. According to Sjöman, the success of The Pirate Bay illustrates just how embedded file sharing has become in Swedish culture.

"File sharing is the library of today and they want to take that away from us and make us start paying for every single thing that we go to the model library to get," said Sjöman. "People have gotten used to that library and if they take the applications away from us they will take away the basic tools that people think are normal."

If elected, the Pirate Party promises to strengthen Swedish privacy protections, weaken copyright laws, abolish the EU Data Retention Directive and roll back government surveillance legislation, said Sjöman. The party plans to hold its first convention in April, aboard a pirate ship.

"We are the new movement for this century," said Sjöman. "We have these views that copyright is hurting the economy and our right to be citizens and express yourself and get information."

Notwithstanding the debate in Sweden, Bernards said the MPAA still believes that those who use and operate The Pirate Bay are simply thieves. "Like any other business, we aim to protect our product, and aiming at some of the larger offenders like The Pirate Bay is a goal," said Bernards. "We will continue to pursue cutting off the head of piracy and at the same time educating people about the consequences of piracy and getting involved."

"We're also into educating people about the consequences of piracy," Pirate Bay operator Brokep shot back in an e-mail. "We're teaching them how to do it."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...tw=wn_index_12





P2P Search Engine Defends Itself
Tim Lohman

IsoHunt has moved to defend itself following the filing of a suit against the peer-to-peer (P2P) networking search engine by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) last month.

As reported in IT News, IsoHunt, and fellow search engine TorrentBox.com, was sued for allegedly providing links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows.

In an email interview, IsoHunt owner and webmaster, Gary Fung, acknowledged that his search engine helped in the distribution of copyrighted material, but argued that the act of doing so was not itself wrong.

“Nowadays, everything is copyrighted on creation, by default,” Fung argued. “Open source software relies on licenses which are based on copyright laws, and software like Linux proactively uses BitTorrent for distribution of operating system images.

“There are also non-copyrighted, public domain materials, which we index as well. Independent entertainment producers are now looking to promote and distribute their content using P2P services.”

While the MPAA was probably over-reacting with its prosecution of P2P search engines, the industry body’s strategy was to be expected, Fung said.

“Big business naturally resists change to their current business models and practices, because change means uncertainty to their bottom line,” he argued.

“If they really want to protect their profits, they should be going after ‘real’ pirate DVD sales instead.”

Fung said IsoHunt would fight the claims against it by finding a way to work with the MPAA in distributing its members' content.

“If we were the MPAA we would market and sell our content to the millions of BitTorrent and P2P users by promoting ‘premium’, protected content that's higher quality and downloaded faster than what's currently available on P2P,” he said.

“Ease, consistency, quality and legitimacy would be on our side, and there's no reason we wouldn't have the same success as iTunes does, with costs further lowered by P2P.”

The legitimacy of content could be ensured using digital watermarks, rather than digital rights management (DRM) technology to give users the freedom to play purchased content on any device, while still deterring mass piracy, Fung said.
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.a...&src=site-marq





Law Firm Lets RIAA Deal Play Out

Denver firm takes over industry's piracy cases
Mark Kind

Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP has shut down a Kansas City lawsuit factory, transferring hundreds of federal cases against file-sharing computer users to a Denver law firm hired by the Recording Industry Association of America.

"Our contract with them ran out, and they have moved on to a new firm," said Trent Webb, chairman of Shook's intellectual property litigation practice group.

The file-sharing cases targeting online music piracy are a potential cash cow for firms capable of handling them.

Two defense lawyers said Shook typically demanded about $4,000 per defendant to settle them, and an RIAA spokeswoman said it has pursued 18,000 separate defendants.

But the cases, filed in dozens of states, can be expensive to manage: Shook hired a subcontractor to operate a phone bank handling inquiries about the cases, and defense lawyers said the firm may have spent thousands of dollars pursuing judgments against defendants with little money.

Webb said he didn't know how many cases Shook pursued during its year on the job, and he declined to describe the law firm's work for the RIAA or say why the firm did not bid on renewing the contract.

Denver lawyer Richard Gabriel of Holme Roberts & Owen LLP said the firm replaced Shook as of Feb. 1.

An RIAA spokeswoman said that the group's litigation strategy would not change despite the change in lawyers and that the RIAA's members would continue suing suspected music file sharers.

A Chicago defense lawyer has fought several cases brought by Shook.

Scott Lundhagen of the Law Offices of Charles Lee Mudd Jr., said the suits typically began with a letter from Shook Hardy & Bacon to a customer whose Internet connection had been used to access a folder on a file-sharing service.

Many of the letters directed the customers to call a "settlement support center," lawyer Charles Mudd said.

Defense lawyer Ray Beckerman of Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLC in New York said settlement terms were rigid and required payments of about $4,000, plus signing a one-sided agreement admitting copyright law violations.

With Shook's direction, RIAA lawyers refused negotiation offers even when it had no proof that the named defendant had used an Internet connection to share copyrighted files, he said.

Beckerman said he hopes RIAA's new legal team will be easier to work with than Shook Hardy & Bacon has been.

"I was glad to see them go," Beckerman said.

He said that with Shook, RIAA's legal team even pursued a home health aide who had never bought or operated a computer.

The lawyers insisted on conducting discovery to determine whether she allowed others to use an Internet connection at her house for file sharing, Beckerman said.

"They were like pit bulls. They were like attack dogs," Beckerman said.

Webb said, "We aggressively represent our clients on every case, including the RIAA work."

Shook did not let any intellectual property lawyers go when it gave up the RIAA account, he said.

"Our IP litigation practice is continuing to expand and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future," Webb said.
http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascit...13/story2.html





Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Music Industry
Nate Anderson

People have complained about the price of recorded music for decades. It's always seemed a little fishy that there was no price competition between the labels, and that CDs have always remained more expensive than cassettes, even though the discs are now dirt cheap to make. When music went digital, why did we see so few price points for individual tracks? Today, why are all the major labels simultaneously making noise about wanting Apple to offer variable pricing? The whole situation fueled paranoid claims about industry collusion and price-fixing that later turned out to be totally justified.

You may remember that the industry was busted for off-line price-fixing a few years back. It was also outed (again) for a major payola scandal last year. This year, the industry is under the microscope for its pricing practices related to digital music. The feds have already launched an investigation and New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer is making his own inquiries.

Like a shark smelling blood in the water, the latest round of investigations has attracted the lawyers. Prominent California attorney William Lerach has now launched a class action suit against the labels on behalf of consumers who have allegedly been overcharged for music. This in itself is not particularly surprising given the ongoing federal investigation into the same topic, but the lawsuit does contain some interesting tidbits. For instance, the suit claims that the music labels fought tooth and nail against the arrival of online music stores, and that they did so by launching their own poorly-conceived (on purpose) online ventures.

The suit also alleges that the record labels sought to shut down online music pioneer Napster at the same time they were introducing their own joint ventures to sell online music. MusicNet and pressplay "were not serious commercial ventures, but rather attempts to occupy the market with frustrating and ineffectual services in order to head off viable Online Music competitors from forming and gaining popularity after Napster's demise," according to the suit.

If this lawsuit gains any traction, it could be a major headache for the music industry, because similar suits could wind up being filed in countries all over the world. Given that many of the price-fixing allegations center on Apple's iTunes Music Store, the labels could find themselves in trouble in more than twenty countries. After all, intense dislike of getting screwed is not just an American phenomenon.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060313-6368.html





RIAA: Who Are The Pirates? Free and Uncut!
Zeek Greko

It seems to me that every few days there is yet another article on the Web about the recording companies' attempts to bring rampant pirates to justice. I think the RIAA's idea of justice might be a little one-sided and a double standard. Fact is, the recording companies have been flying the Jolly Roger since Day One. They have been perpetrating an injustice on all consumers of their products for decades and I see no indication they are going to correct it.

There is a scene in the movie "Men in Black" where Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith are at the alien receiving center, in the alien technologies room. Tommy Lee Jones is showing Smith these new technologies and he picks up what looks like a one-inch-in-diameter CD-ROM for playing music and says, "I guess I'll have to buy the Beatles' White Album again."

Using this example, why is Tommy Lee Jones saying "I guess I'll have to buy the Beatles White Album again"? He obviously already owns it; the word "again" indicates that. What he is really saying is "I already have a full license to listen to and enjoy the music that is on the Beatles White Album that I now have on CD. But things being what they are with the greedy, pirate recording companies, in order to get the Beatles White Album on this new one-inch disk medium, I'll have to buy another license as well. Come to think of it, being as old as I am, I paid for a full license for the original 12" vinyl LP, the Eight-Track Tape, the cassette, and the CD. No, wait! I just remembered. I bought the eight-track twice and the cassette three times. Those old tape players ate a lot of good music." In this scenario, you might expect Will Smith to ask:

1) Isn't there a way to return the CDROM and pay for just upgrading to the new one inch medium ?

A) The record companies have at no time in the past nor are they likely in the future to (without buyers boycotting) implement any form of new media format exchange program.

2) What happens if the CD cracks or gets scratched (which is hard to avoid)? Can you get it replaced, or do you have to buy a full license every time?

A) You are out of luck, you have to buy a full license every time.

3) Is there any way to make a backup? That way you can store the original in a safe place and replace the backup when it becomes unplayable.

A) Currently (amid much pig squeeling in the background) you can make backups with your computer, but the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) using the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copright Act) is working furiously to plug that hole with DRM (Digital Rights Management) which if implemented, will cripple your computer so that you can't. Already Windows XP users are crippled to some degree. (Microsoft is leading the charge, trying to establish themselves as the de-facto DRM "Copy Cops").

4) What happened to all of those old legally licensed copies you bought?

A) The dollar value of legal, legitimate, licensed music on unusable media that has ended up in dumps and landfills over the years is undoubtedly huge and probably staggering. I don't have a figure, but ask yourself how many times you have had to replace a tape or a disk because it became unusable. If you're young, ask your folks how many trash cans they could fill up with LPs, 45s, eight-tracks, cassettes, DVD's, VHS cassettes, Betamax cassettes, and CD-ROMs that became unusable over the years. The generally universal answer would be "a lot"! Now multiply that times millions of homes in the U.S. alone. Yup, "a lot" fits quite well!

Conclusion:

We have to get out of the mindset that we are buying disks or tapes. We are purchasing licenses. The physical media that it is on is just a way of conveying it to you the purchaser. When you purchase dowloadable music online, you never see a CD-ROM because it is conveyed to you the purchaser by electronic media. Even Microsoft doesn't make you buy a new license for Windows because of unusable media. They are only interested in COA's and Product Keys. The recording companies like it just fine that we buy the same licenses over and over again. They are absolute zealots at trying to stop us from making backups of the media we purchase on flimsy, unprotected, easily damaged disks but have never once offered a remedy for the reason we need to make backups.

It is more than reasonable for us to expect to purchase only one license for any artist's particular work, and that sellers of recording licenses should be obligated to assist us purchasers in maintaining those licenses on current, usable media. Even more so if they're going to try to prevent us from making our own backups.

To end this injustice, the recording companies should consider changing its tactics and make available through their distributors:

1) Replacements for broken or unusable media for the cost of the media: If it got cracked, chipped, eaten, scatched, folded, melted, or just plain worn out, or like U.S. currency, anything over half is whole anything under half is zero.

2) Media format upgrades and updates: If it's on an LP, 45, eight-track or cassette, etc., bring in the original for an upgrade to the current media format for the cost of the media.

That would be justice!

The recording companies would actually make money on these exchanges. Even at an exchange rate of $1 or $2, they would make money because they are just replacing the media. They don't have to pay out royalties to artists. They are just repackaging a license on new, fresh media. They could even replace just the actual disk in a sleeve instead of shipping the jewel boxes. It would even help stop bootleggers because the purchasers would know they wouldn't ever be able to return or exchange the media when they became unusable.

Local brick and mortar recording stores could be revived from the slow death they are experiencing because it makes more sense to exchange media at a local shop (lower shipping costs) rather than having each individual packing up and shipping disks or tapes one at a time. They would become relevent again. They would become our backups. ("Oops! My Queen BR CD is fried, so I'll be on my way to my local recording Shop for a replacement. While I'm there, I'll have a look around for something else I might like to buy.")

Is it an assault on common sense to think that getting people into your store for exchanging broken media, could lead to the purchase of something ?

The recording company executives have been struck stupid by their greed. In this slow economy, why don't they institute the above media exchange policy? It's the right thing to do and it's a source of income. I personally have $500 to $600 worth of broken media or formats to upgrade. The RIAA might even experience a precipitous drop in their so-called "rampant piracy."

How much of this so-called rampant piracy is simply people upgrading or replacing media on licenses they already own? Maybe just downloading the contents of one of their muddy sounding, worn-out cassette tapes so they can enjoy that legally licensed music again. And who could really blame them for "taking some digital justice"? Just my humble opinion.
http://trends.newsforge.com/article....4/05/03/161237





'Adapt to New Technology or Die,' Murdoch Tells Newspapers

The newspaper industry needs to embrace the technological revolution of the Internet, MP3 players, laptops and mobile phones or face extinction, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch said.

"Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall," he said in a speech to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

"That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet. Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry -- the editors, the chief executives and, let's face it, the proprietors.

"A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it."

Murdoch, whose News Corporation empire ranges from newspapers and magazines to television and film interests across the globe, described the 21st century as "the second great age of discovery".

The greatest challenge for the traditional media now is to engage with more demanding, questioning and better educated consumers, adapting their products for new technology, the Australian-born media mogul said.

"There is only one way. That is by using our skills to create and distribute dynamic, exciting content," he said.

"But -- and this is a very big but -- newspapers will have to adapt as their readers demand news and sport on a variety of platforms: websites, iPods, mobile phones or laptops.

"I believe traditional newspapers have many years of life but, equally, I think in the future that newsprint and ink will be just one of many channels to our readers."

Murdoch sparked one of Britain's most bitter industrial disputes over the introduction of new computer technology for journalists and printers.

In January 1986, he moved his British newspapers The Times, The Sun and The News of the World overnight from their historic home on Fleet Street, central London, to a purpose-built facility in Wapping, in the east of the capital.

It was credited by some with not only breaking the stranglehold of print unions on a hitherto unprofitable industry crippled by strikes but paving the way for developments such as colour printing, supplements and websites.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060313...y_060313192945





The Enemy Within The Firewall
Louisa Hearn

Employees are now regarded as a greater danger to workplace cyber security than the gangs of hackers and virus writers launching targeted attacks from outside the firewall.

That is the perception of 75 per cent of Australian information technology managers who took part in an international IBM security survey.

With email and instant messaging proving increasingly popular and devices such as laptop computers, mobile phones and USB storage devices more commonplace in the office, the opportunities for workplace crime are growing.

"People are becoming the weakest link. A fluid work force with diminished loyalty to organisations is being exacerbated by the fact that people do not always realise the value of information that they deal with," said Claudia Warwar, managing consultant at IBM BCS Security and Privacy Practice.

Ms Warwar believes that the rise in internal security attacks has come about because outside criminal gangs realise that recruiting or tricking employees to hand over insider knowledge is less expensive and traceable than other forms of cybercrime.

And it seems the perception of this phenomenon is even worse in Australia than elsewhere in the world, with 11 per cent more respondents here identifying internal staff as their greatest threat.

Ms Warwar explained that one reason for this could be that in a larger country, where you might normally have ten staff working in team, here you might only have one, granting closer access to important information. "Employees here get to see more of the big picture and are closer to the whole business loop," she said.

But in spite of the threat, companies still allocate more of their security budgets to external threats.

While 32 per cent of survey respondents were intent on upgrading firewalls, only 15 per cent planned to invest in awareness and education training for employees and only 10 per cent restricted the use of mobile devices such as wireless handheld computers not specifically sanctioned by the IT staff.

"Organisations need to understand what are the key pieces of information that need to be protected and be able to track who has had access to them," she said.

Looking more broadly at the issue of cyber crime, the survey also found that regardless of who had caused it, 49 per cent of local businesses believed it represented a larger threat than physical crime.

The three most common types of cyber crimes are hacking, denial of service attacks, and viruses and malware, which target different types of organisations.

"One of our clients had a virus bouncing around network for quite a few days which did quite a bit of damage, whereas a denial of service attack is more likely to target those transacting and doing a lot of business online. If a hacker really knows where they are going within say a large financial company then they can also really hit the jackpot," said Ms Warwar.

A recent security report from antivirus company Symantec said cybercrime represented today's greatest threat to consumers' digital lifestyle and to online businesses in general.

"While past attacks were designed to destroy data, today's attacks are increasingly designed to silently steal data for profit without doing noticeable damage that would alert a user to its presence," the company said.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaki...98393208.html#





27 Charged in International Online Child Pornography Ring
Gretchen Ruethling

Federal and international authorities have charged 27 people in nine states and three other countries in connection with an Internet child pornography ring that federal authorities say is one of the worst they have discovered.

Live video images of children being molested were transmitted over the Internet, the authorities said.

"The behavior in these chat rooms and the images many of these defendants sent around the world through peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and private instant messaging services are the worst imaginable forms of child pornography," Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said at a news conference in Chicago, where the indictments were announced Wednesday.

Federal and state charges, including the manufacture, possession and distribution of child pornography, have been filed against 13 people in Illinois, Tennessee, Michigan, Nevada, Florida, New York, Arizona, Hawaii and North Carolina. Charges have also been brought against 14 defendants in Canada, Australia and Britain.

"Some of the aspects of this case are truly horrifying," said Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at the news conference. "It's hard to find cases more heinous than those that involve the exploitation of children."

Mr. Gonzales said one of the victims was under 18 months old.

The defendants are accused of trading thousands of images of child pornography over at least the past year in a private Internet chat room called Kiddypics & Kiddyvids. Four of them are also accused of molesting seven children, who are now in protective custody, Mr. Gonzales said.

Ms. Myers said the case reflected three larger trends that are becoming more common in child pornography rings.

One is the increasing prevalence of "home-grown" pornographic images that are produced by predators themselves and include live streaming video images of children being molested, not just the circulation of repeated images, she said.

Another trend is the growing use of sophisticated security measures and of peer-to-peer networking, where participants can share files with one another on their computers rather than downloading them off a Web site, she said. The group used encryption and data destruction software to protect the files and screening measures to ensure only authorized participants could enter the chat room.

A third trend is the increasingly violent and graphic nature of the images involving the molesting of younger children, Ms. Myers said.

The international investigation began in May 2005 with the arrest of a participant in Edmonton, Alberta.

According to indictments returned Tuesday by a grand jury against four defendants in Chicago, participants shared files and used instant messaging to transmit images under screen names like Big_Daddy619, Lord Newbie and A_School_Teacher.

Many of the defendants had "ongoing access" to children, said Deputy Chief Tony Warr of the Toronto Police Service, which was involved in the investigation. He said investigators used software specially developed by Microsoft to track and identify hits on pornographic sites.

The chat room's primary host, Royal Raymond Weller of Clarksville, Tenn., was arrested last week. Mr. Weller, 49, a service repairman whose screen name was G.O.D., used a strict security system and would kick out participants if they used forbidden words like "incest" or "cam" in their messages, said Paul M. O'Brien, an assistant United States attorney in Nashville. Mr. Weller has not entered a plea.

All 27 defendants face child pornography charges in the United States or abroad or have already been prosecuted abroad. One defendant is a fugitive.

Theo Emery contributed reporting from Nashville for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/national/16porn.html





Black Sabbath, Blondie Enter Rock Hall
David Bauder

Between an ugly feud among Blondie members spilling over onstage and a rancorous letter from the absent Sex Pistols, the latest Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class did not enter quietly on Monday.

The animosity even made Ozzy Osbourne, inducted with Black Sabbath, seem sedate.

As midnight arrived under the chandeliers of the Waldorf-Astoria's grand ballroom, Lynyrd Skynyrd was performing the song that launched countless cigarette lighters, "Free Bird," to celebrate their own induction. Famed jazz trumpeter Miles Davis completed the honorees.

When Blondie, the most commercially successful band to emerge from a fertile New York rock scene that also produced Talking Heads and the Ramones, reformed after 15 years, they didn't include former members Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison. They sued unsuccessfully to join.

Infante, Harrison and Gary Valentine, another former member left behind in a business dispute, were barely acknowledged by former chums Deborah Harry, Chris Stein and Clem Burke as they received their awards.

Infante begged to perform with the band.

"Debbie, are we allowed?" he pleaded before Blondie performed their hits "Heart of Glass," "Rapture" and "Call Me."

"Can't you see my band is up there?" Harry replied. The three rejected members walked offstage, but not before Infante groaned into the microphone.

Punk rockers the Sex Pistols had turned down the honor in a profane letter that compared the hall to "urine in wine." Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner read the letter, and invited the band to pick up their trophies at the rock hall in Cleveland.

"If they want to smash them into bits, they can do that, too," Wenner said.

Behind the unnerving stare of singer Johnny Rotten and the lacerating lyrics of "God Save the Queen" and "Pretty Vacant," the Sex Pistols appeared the most shocking of the first punk-rock generation in the mid-1970s. The Pistols imploded after one album, with Rotten saying, "ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" before walking offstage after their last show for decades.

Osbourne may be better known now as an addled reality TV star, but his musical legacy with Black Sabbath got its due with the band's induction.

Osbourne has badmouthed the hall of fame for waiting a decade to induct Sabbath, a cause taken up by Metallica member Lars Ulrich in his induction. Metallica guitarist James Hetfield and Ulrich both said their band would not exist without the example of Black Sabbath.

"If there was no Black Sabbath, I could still possibly be a morning newspaper delivery boy," Ulrich said. "No fun."

Osbourne, Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward did not perform, but Metallica rattled the walls with versions of "Iron Man" and "Hole in the Sky."

"Thank you to all Sabbath fans everywhere," Ward said. "Hopefully our induction tonight will add to the validation ... (and) hard rock and heavy metal will have an enduring and everlasting place in rock history."

Osbourne thanked his wife, Sharon, who sat in the ballroom with their daughters Kelly and Aimee.

Davis was inducted by fellow jazz musician Herbie Hancock, who said the trumpeter often played with his back to the audience simply because he was conducting the band.

"He was a man of mystery, magic and mystique," Hancock said. "It was often said he was an enigma. I would venture to say that many who said that just didn't get it."

Southern rockers Skynyrd, whose name was a deliberately misspelled "tribute" to a hated high-school teacher, made much of its memorable music before a 1977 plane crash killed singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines.

"No one deserved to be here more than Ronnie Van Zant," said his widow Judy, "and he would truly be honored."

Johnny Van Zant, who replaced his brother as the lead singer, joined Kid Rock in a duet of the band's hit "Sweet Home Alabama," such a well-known prideful statement of Southern heritage that the title was later swiped for a Reese Witherspoon movie.

Each of the acts is still active. Blondie and the Sex Pistols reformed after long dormant periods, and so did Sabbath, who frequently headlined the popular Ozzfest summer concert tours.

The hall also is giving a lifetime achievement award to Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, founders of the influential A&M Records label that bore their initials and signed artists like the Police, Supertramp, John Hiatt, Cat Stevens and Alpert's band, the Tijuana Brass.

"I haven't seen this many people since I played bar mitzvahs years ago," said trumpeter Alpert.

Inductees are honored at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum in Cleveland. Highlights of the 21st annual ceremony will be shown on VH1 on March 21.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Archive of Starforce Forum Posts That Linked to Torrent

submitted by NoOneButMe 1 day 14 hours ago (via http://rapidshare.de/files/15369236/Star-Force.zip.html)

Since i managed to catch the Star-Force drama before it was edited to remove the links to torrents, I decided to save the pages before they were edited. I've http://rapidshare.de/files/15369236/Star-Force.zip.html ]upped a zip[/url] containing the pages before, and after they were edited for comparison.
http://digg.com/search?search=starforce&submit=Submit





France Weighs Forcing iPods to Play Other Than iTunes
Thomas Crampton

In the digital music market, France is singing a different tune.

A bill under debate in the French Parliament may require iPods to be able to play music purchased from competing Internet services, not just Apple Computer's own iTunes Music Store, forcing changes in the business model that gave rise to the revolution in legal digital music downloads.

The outcome of the debate, which began as an update to French copyright law, is far from clear. But taken to one logical conclusion, amendments to the copyright bill could lead Apple, the market leader, to leave the French music business, said Jonathan Arber, a research analyst in London at the technology consultancy Ovum.

"My gut feeling is that Apple will simply pull out of France if these amendments get through," Mr. Arber said. "Weighed against breaking their business model for all markets, it doesn't make sense for Apple to continue operating with the iPod and iTunes in France."

Debate lasted late into Thursday night; a vote in the National Assembly is set for next week. The bill, which also proposes to turn individual digital piracy into a violation no more serious than a parking ticket, would go next to the Senate, where it is unlikely to be altered significantly, political analysts say.

Some critics say the plan is technically unworkable, unfairly undermines Apple and opens the door to more piracy by crippling technology that protects copyrights. Supporters see France setting a long- overdue legal precedent that opens Apple's closed iPod-iTunes digital music system to competition.

Apple would not comment on the legislation. Led by Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive, Apple persuaded the world's major record labels in 2003 to sell songs over the Internet at 99 cents each through the iTunes Music Store.

But the price of making it inexpensive, easy and attractive for consumers to buy online — rather than sharing songs on the Internet without compensating record companies or musicians — was the use of Apple's proprietary formats, making song buyers beholden to Apple and its players, which account for more than 70 percent of all devices sold.

The broad backing of Apple by music industry executives has turned into public and private griping over the company's control over the price of iTunes downloads and the domination of the highly profitable iPod, at what they see as the industry's expense.

The amendments proposed by the government, tacked onto what is being called the author's rights law, originate in part from a European view of the economy that makes it more acceptable there than in the United States for governments to order competition in the marketplace for the benefit of consumers.

Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the minister of culture, told the Paris newspaper Libération, "I want to give the Internet world and the cultural industries a secure legal structure to permit a real development — or even explosion — of online cultural offerings." He added, "Everyone will be able to choose."

France is the third-largest digital music market in Europe, after Britain and Germany, according to GfK, a market research company based in Nuremberg, Germany. Downloads in France last year totaled 20 million songs worth $23.3 million, while 4.7 million digital music players were sold, the company said.

As of Thursday, the copyright bill still had more than 400 amendments, many of them having to do with how devices interoperate. The most prominently affected device would be the iPod, but Sony's Walkman digital music players operate on a similar principle. In both cases, purchased online music can be transferred to the hardware only from a site owned by the same company — the iTunes Music Store for iPods and Sony Connect for the Walkman. Sony declined to comment.

The development is especially rich in irony for Microsoft, a target of European antitrust action, which licenses its digital music format, called WMA, to any company willing to pay for it. Most non-Apple digital music players, like those produced by Samsung, Creative and Archos, allow WMA songs, while most online music merchants, like Rhapsody from RealNetworks, Music Now from America Online and Napster, sell songs in that format.

But technically, the French government's aim of making music playable on all digital devices is challenging at the least, said Mark MacGann, director general of the European Information and Communications Technology Industry Association, a trade group in Brussels whose members include Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

In addition, the cross-border implications are enormous, he said. "Governments cannot operate in a technology policy vacuum with a global industry," he added, saying that decisions should be made at least on a European level. "You cannot decide overnight to create a nirvana."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/te...y/17ipod.html?





Not music to your ears

High School Students Report More Symptoms Of Hearing Loss Than Do Adults, Poll Finds
Curtis L. Taylor

Your teenager just might not be tuning you out on purpose after all.

A new poll released yesterday found that more than half of the high school students surveyed reported at least one symptom of hearing loss associated with the use of portable music players, portable DVD players and other devices.

The poll found that high school students are more likely than adults to say they have experienced three of the four symptoms of hearing loss: turning up the volume on their TV or radio; saying "what" or "huh" during normal conversation; perceiving that people's voices are mumbled or muffled; and, having tinnitus, or ringing in the ears.

As a result, health advocates were calling yesterday for more safety measures to be put in place to minimize this potential risk of hearing loss.

"The message is that these are potentially dangerous sounds that these devices are capable of," said Brenda Lonsbury-Martin, director of the Science and Research Program for American Speech-Language-Hearing-Association, which commissioned the study.

Students and adults were nearly equally likely to use their Apple iPods with the volume turned loud, with students twice as likely as adults to play it very loud. Adults were more likely to use their MP3 players longer.

Sharieff Fisher, 13, of Central Islip, said he was not concerned about hearing loss.

"I don't turn it up full max," said Fisher, an iPod owner for three years. "It is sort of scary when you think about it," he said of hearing loss. "I turn it up loud sometimes, but then you can't hear if somebody wants to talk."

In Brooklyn, George Panchana, 13, said that his Nano iPod was a traveling companion on his commute to and from school.

"I don't like it loud because I can't understand what anybody is saying and I get a headache after a while from the loud music," Panchana said.

There is no medical therapy to reverse hearing loss once it has occurred, hearing experts said.

City Councilwoman Melinda Katz (D-Forest Hills) said that calls for regulation were premature. Katz, an iPod user who had hearing problems as a child, said she was sensitive to safety concerns "but people need to be careful and use their own judgment."

The findings for high school students were based on a national telephone survey with a target sample of 301 interviews and a margin of error of plus or minus 5.8 percentage points. For adults, the results came from a national telephone survey of a target sample of 1,000 interviews. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

The poll looked at the habits of high school students and adults who use portable music and DVD players that used ear buds or earphones. The poll, conducted by Zogby International, also asked responders about potential hearing loss from such devices and the most effective way to issue warnings about potential hearing loss.

Dr. Mary Bradley, director of speech and hearing at Stony Brook University Hospital, said decibels over 85 were above the safety limits, with some MP3 players on the market as high as 120 db.

"I think we are going to see these teenagers over the course of years, when they are young adults, having hearing loss caused by this loud exposure to noise," Bradley said.

Eighty decibels is considered safe.
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/n...news-headlines





DRM killed the battery star

MP3 Insider: The Truth About Your Battery Life

We deliver the truth behind one of the most questionable manufacturer specs in the latest MP3 Insider.

One of the key specs you mustn't ignore before purchasing an MP3 player is its battery life. This number, whether it's 14 hours (the 30GB 5G iPod) or up to 35 hours of audio playback (the 30GB Cowon iAudio X5L), gives you an estimate of how long your gadget will play tunes on a single charge--in the best-case scenario.

For most manufacturers, the perfect scenario requires that you play only MP3s encoded at 128Kbps; you're wearing bundled earbuds; your volume level is at about 50 to 75 percent; the backlight of your screen turns off automatically within 5 to 10 seconds; your equalizer setting is flat or normal; there are no DSP settings (such as the iPod's Sound Check) enabled; you listen to your music in one, maybe two sessions; and if applicable, you don't view any photos or videos. Given that these conditions are rarely ever met in the real world, you'll never achieve the number x in "up to x hours."

That's OK. If battery life is your primary concern--and it may be for world travelers--then you'll naturally go with a player that has at least 20 hours of rated battery life per charge or AA (or AAA) battery, as stated in the player specifications. This figure is rarely ever left out of specs, by the way. The best hard drive-based players last more than 20 hours--such as the Sony NW-HD5 and the Cowon iAudio X5L; the best flash players--such as anything from Sony, Samsung's YP-T6, and iRiver's T10--last more than 40 hours.

You may read MP3 player reviews to verify battery life. Here at CNET, we drain MP3 players using a methodology that's similar to those found in the preceding paragraph. We know which players and brands outperform or underperform. Apple iPods typically outperform the company's ratings. In our tests, the 30GB 5G iPod lasted 14.5 hours, 30 minutes longer than what Apple claims. The Cowon iAudio X5L, on the other hand, tested at 27 hours when it was rated for 35. Factors such as sound quality, features, format compatibility, and looks may overshadow battery life, but when your player runs out of juice, it doesn't really matter which features it has or how good it sounds.

In the real world, there are plenty of factors that will help drain your battery much quicker than you'd like. For example, while the iPod's 14-hour audio-only rating is acceptable (the first iPods had 8 to 9 hours per charge), I never get that many hours, and in fact, I average less than 8 hours. My battery isn't dying prematurely; rather, I like to have my screen on and browse photos, as well as watch an occasional video and crank the volume up.

Adding to the battery drain is my tendency to use big headphones, which draw serious juice and therefore increase noise and distortion, and the fact that I am the type of user who constantly browses and switches tracks, which basically means my hard drive is in constant motion. My music library consists of higher- bit-rate MP3s, purchased iTunes tracks, and even a few WAV and Apple Lossless tracks--all of which require more decoding/processing power than a vanilla 128Kbps MP3. The same applies to variable bit-rate files.

Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them. Take, for instance, the critically acclaimed Creative Zen Vision:M, with a rated battery life of up to 14 hours for audio and 4 hours for video. CNET tested it at nearly 16 hours, with MP3s--impressive indeed. Upon playing back only WMA subscription tracks, the Vision:M scored at just more than 12 hours. That's a loss of almost 4 hours, and you haven't even turned the backlight on yet.

We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent. What I'm saying is that while battery life may not be a critical issue today, as it was when one of the original hard drive players--the Creative Nomad Jukebox-- lasted a pathetic 4 hours running on four AA nickel-metal-hydride rechargeables (and much worse on alkalines), the industry needs to include battery specs for DRM audio tracks or the tracks we're buying or subscribing. Yet, here's another reason why we should still be ripping our music in MP3: better battery life, the most obvious reason being universal device compatibility.

Sony is one company that's been more up front about digital audio playback times. The company's players tend to have the best rated battery life, consistently more than 40 hours, but this is playing its own format, ATRAC3, at a lower-than-typical bit rate. The box of the NW-HD5 states that the device can get up to 40 hours of continuous playback when playing 48Kbps ATRAC3plus tracks, which are not the most common tracks. But it also states that actual battery life "may vary based on usage patterns." Basically, rated battery life should be used as a guide and never be taken literally.
Link





HOW TO: Run Skype From Your iPod

There has been quite a bit of buzz recently surrounding so-called "portable apps". Portable storage devices such as USB flash sticks (and to a lesser extend, micro HD drives) are dropping rapidly in price/GB, so why just store stuff on them? There's even an industry consortium to promote a standard (U3, see www.u3.com ) to facilitate running apps off portable storage devices. Turns out, you don't actually need a "U3 smart drive" to do this.

There are a number of reasons for not wanting to install a particular piece of software directly onto your computer's hard disk (be it privacy, portability etc), but instead carry it around with you wherever you go and have it ready when you need it. Enter the "Skyppod" (sort of).
Podding Skype HOW TO (the quick and dirty way, here for Win XP):

1) Download a stable version of Skype that doesn't need to be installed on a PC first. Version 1.4.14.84 from the U3.com site works well for that purpose and supports /datapath /removable parameters to be passed to the app: http://software.u3.com/Product_Detai...x?ProductId=56

2) Rename the downloaded file .u3p (which is as a matter of fact, a zip file) to .zip and extract it to a folder.

3) Enable disk/manual mode in iTunes- so the iPod doesn't try to sync and enables disk mode ( iPod Options > manually manage ... ). The experience reported here is with an iPod mini 4GB (2nd generation model), which actually has a Hitachi MicroDrive inside, not flash memory; this might be the better choice for using Skype in conjunction with portable storage devices, given the fact that the app itself accesses the storage device several times per minute ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype ) and flash is known to have limited re-write capability.

4) Create a folder eg, "skype14" on the iPod.

5) Copy the Skype.exe file from the "host" folder (located in the downloaded/extracted
folder) to the "skype14" folder on the iPod.

6) Copy the "data" folder (located in the downloaded/extracted folder) to the "skype14" folder on the iPod.

7) Create the following 2 lines in a batchfile "StartSkype.bat" with Notepad:
@echo off
start Skype.exe /datapath:"data" /removable

(save as StartSkype.bat to "skype14" folder on the iPod).

8) Optional cosmetics:

In "skype14" create a shortcut of StartSkype.bat and move it to where you'd like to have it, eg, on the desktop. Rename to something like "StartSkype" from "Shortcut to StartSkype.bat". In Right mouse click > Properties: Change Run to Minimized (so you don't see the command promt) and click Change Icon to select something appropriate like the little telephone icon. Click on the little icon and run Skype from your iPod!

Note: Remember to log out from Skype when you're done and quitting Skype in the task bar before unmounting/ejecting the iPod.
http://forums.makezine.com/comments....nID=252&page=1





Asus introduced its Wi-Fi Skype-phone
Press Release



Skype-phone has become ever more popular and many companies do have them in their product lines. The makers use wireless connection with PC via Wi-Fi, so it is comfortable to handle the phone.

At the CeBIT 2006 show Asus has introduced its Wi-Fi Skype-phone, which looks like an ordinary handset. The device supports 802.11g protocol and has a 128x65 pixels LCD with blue backlight. Battery life in standby mode makes up 25 hours, in talk mode – up to 2 hours. It’s possible to recharge the phone via USB interface or with the AC adapter. There is one more interesting function of the phone – remote control of Windows Media Player.
http://www.aloda.info/content/view/1754/174/





ACLU Releases First Concrete Evidence of FBI Spying Based Solely on Groups’ Anti-War Views
Press Release

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Pennsylvania today released new evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting investigations into a political organizations based solely on its anti-war views.

Two documents released today reveal that the FBI investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice just because the organization opposed the war in Iraq. Although previously disclosed documents show that the FBI is retaining files on anti-war groups, these documents are the first to show conclusively that the rationale for FBI targeting is the group's opposition to the war.

“It makes no sense that the FBI would be spying on peace activists handing out flyers,” said Jim Kleissler, Executive Director of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice. “Our members were simply offering leaflets to passersby, legally and peacefully, and now they’re being investigated by a counter–terrorism unit. Something is seriously wrong in how our government determines who and what constitutes terrorism when peace activists find themselves targeted.”

According to the documents released today, the FBI initiated a classified investigation into the activities of the Thomas Merton Center, noting in a November 2002 memo that the center “holds daily leaflet distribution activities in downtown Pittsburgh and is currently focused on its opposition to the potential war on Iraq.” The synopsis of the document is provided to “report results of investigation on Pittsburgh anti-war activities.” The FBI memo points out that the Merton Center “is a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism.”

“All over the country we see the FBI monitoring and keeping files on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to free expression,” said Mary Catherine Roper, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “These documents show that Americans are not safe from secret government surveillance, even when they are handing out flyers in the town square – an activity clearly protected by the Constitution.”

The documents come to the ACLU as a result of a national campaign to expose domestic spying by the FBI and other government agencies. The ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act requests in 20 states on behalf of more than 150 organizations and individuals. In response to these requests, the government has released documents that reveal monitoring and infiltration by the FBI and local law enforcement, targeting political, environmental, anti-war and faith-based groups.

“From the FBI to the Pentagon to the National Security Agency this administration has embarked on an unprecedented campaign to spy on innocent Americans,” said Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the national ACLU. “Investigating law-abiding groups and their members simply because of their political views is not only irresponsible, it has a chilling effect on the vibrant tradition of dissent in this country.”
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/...s20060314.html





Salut Guys!
DickC

I have a news for you which I bet you don't wait! Some of us is using BitTorrent for downloading files. And I was told today that George Bush opened his own torrent site, unbeleivable, but the fact is:

http://www.bushtorrent.com

and it's done very well: a lot of working torrents, blog runned by Bush and his quotations and photos, very funny.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22522





Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest
Jim Dwyer

In five internal reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New York City police commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used "proactive arrests," covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be employed at future gatherings.

Among the most effective strategies, one police captain wrote, was the seizure of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue who were described as "obviously potential rioters."

The reports provide a rare glimpse of internal police evaluations and strategies on security and free speech issues that have provoked sharp debate between city officials and political demonstrators since the Sept. 11 attack.

The reports also made clear what the police have yet to discuss publicly: that the department uses undercover officers to infiltrate political gatherings and monitor behavior.

Indeed, one of the documents — a draft report from the department's Disorder Control Unit — proposed in blunt terms the resumption of a covert tactic that had been disavowed by the city and the federal government 30 years earlier. Under the heading of recommendations, the draft suggested, "Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds."

Asked about the proposal, Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said yesterday: "The N.Y.P.D. does not use police officers in any capacity to distribute misinformation."

Mr. Browne also said that the "proactive" arrests referred to in the report — numbering about 30 — involved protesters with pipes and masks who he said presented an obvious threat.

In another report, a police inspector praised the "staging of massive amounts" of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of the demonstrators, writing that the sight "would cause them to be alarmed."

Besides the draft report, the documents released yesterday included four final reports written by commanders to assess police performance during the World Economic Forum, which met in New York from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2002.

The economic forum, a private organization that normally meets in Davos, Switzerland, and draws a grab bag of leaders from government, business, and academia — as well as protesters from a miscellany of causes and movements — was moved to the city as a gesture of solidarity after the terror attack.

Security was extremely tight around Midtown Manhattan, where the delegates were meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, and demonstrators were kept blocks from the hotel. Officials spoke of violence during antiglobalism protests at other high profile gatherings in Seattle and Genoa, Italy. In the end, though, as one of the police reports noted, "the amount of confrontation and number of arrests were lower than expected."

Parts of that document and others were made public, over the objections of the city, by a federal magistrate, Gabriel W. Gorenstein, who said the excerpts went to the heart of a lawsuit brought by 16 people who were arrested at an animal rights demonstration during the economic forum. The police said they were blocking the sidewalk and had refused to obey an order to disperse; the demonstrators said no one told them to move.

Many of the issues in the animal rights case, which challenge broad police tactics and arrest strategies, resonate in well over a hundred other lawsuits brought against the city by demonstrators who were arrested at war protests, bicycle rallies and during the Republican National Convention.

Daniel M. Perez, the lawyer representing the people arrested at the animal rights demonstration, argued that the police tactics "punish, control and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities." The Police Department and the city have said that preserving public order is essential to protecting the civil rights of demonstrators and bystanders.

Mr. Perez maintains that the police documents, taken together, show a policy of pre-emptive arrests. The draft report discussed how early arrests could shape future events. "The arrests made at West 59th Street and Fifth Avenue set a 'tone' with the demonstrators and their possible plans at other demonstrations," the report stated.

The disorder control unit's commander, Thomas Graham, is listed as the author of the report, but the document is not signed and the word "draft" is handwritten across the top.

The same tactic is cited in another report, dated Feb. 8, 2002, and signed by Capt. Robert L. Bonifaci, commander of the Queens North Task Force. Captain Bonifaci wrote, "It should be noted that a large part of the success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters."

Elaborating on the report, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that plainclothes officers saw a group of demonstrators put on masks as they drew near the Plaza Hotel, then take out metal pipes and try to rush police lines.

"In addition to mainly peaceful protesters, the W.E.F. attracted hard-core, violent elements that were surveilled by the N.Y.P.D.," Mr. Browne said, citing the incident at the Plaza. "Yes, we used surveillance techniques to track and hopefully disrupt violent elements. That's proactive."

About 30 people were arrested there, and virtually all their cases are now sealed, indicating that the charges were either dismissed by prosecutors or dropped after six months without further incident.

The Police Department report from Michael E. Shortell, a deputy inspector who headed a narcotics command in northern Manhattan, included a list of "positive aspects" of the Police Department's approach. Among them: "The staging of massive amounts of equipment in the key areas (e.g. armored vehicles, command posts, prisoner wagons, Department of Correction buses, city buses)."

Capt. Timothy Hardiman also took note of what he saw as the helpful presence of city corrections buses, which are used to transport prisoners and have reinforced windows, protected by metal grids.

"It was useful to have buses with corrections officers on hand," Captain Hardiman wrote. "They also had a powerful psychological effect."

Mr. Browne said the main reason buses were on hand was to quickly move prisoners from an arrest scene. "If a corrections bus had a deterrent effect on someone contemplating a violent act, then that's value added," he said.

However, the draft report stated that the emphasis on quickly moving prisoners had not been helpful. "This hastened the process adding to the confusion and increasing the potential for mistakes to be made," the report stated.

Mr. Perez said the show of force sent a deliberate warning to people expressing their opinions. "The message is, if you turn out, be prepared to be arrested, be prepared to be sent away for a long time," he said. "It sounds like something from a battle zone."

Demonstrators arrested during the economic forum were held by the police for up to 40 hours without seeing a judge — twice as long as people accused of murder, rape and robbery arrested on those same days, Mr. Perez said.

Mr. Browne of the Police Department said that the arrests were processed as quickly as possible, and that protesters were not singled out for longer detention.

The reports, which were heavily edited at the request of the city, also discuss the use of undercover officers at the protests. Captain Hardiman wrote that "the use of undercovers from narcotics provided useful information." And on Inspector Shortell's list of positive aspects of the strategy, he listed "the use of undercover personnel in the ranks of the protesters."

The power of the police to secretly monitor political gatherings was tightly controlled by a federal court between 1985 and early 2003, the result of a lawsuit by political activists from the 1960's who charged that police undercover officers had disrupted their ability to express their opinions. Many of the restrictions from that case, known as Handschu, were eased at the request of the city in 2003.

The proposal to use undercover officers to spread misinformation — which the Police Department says was not adopted — recalled the origins of the Handschu lawsuit, which was based in part on the actions of undercover agents and officers who instigated trouble and spread lies among a group of military veterans who opposed the Vietnam War.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/ny...rtner=homepage





Warning: Photos Contain Disturbing Images Of Violence, Abuse And Humiliation.
Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin

These photos were taken using cameras owned by Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II. Most of the photos depict detainees shackled naked in stress positions with women's underwear or hoods on their heads. In addition to the detainees, the pictures show Graner, Frederick, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, civilian contractor Adel Nakhla and a soldier the Criminal Investigation Command (CID) identifies as Sgt. Cathcart.

In the fall of 2003, the military police at Abu Ghraib systematically abused detainees using interrogation techniques similar to those once approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- forced nudity, stress positions, hooding and sleep deprivation, to name a few. Rumsfeld had approved harsh interrogation methods on Dec. 2, 2002, in a then classified memo for interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The memo was leaked to the media and eventually released by the White House in June 2004, sparking heated debate, domestically and internationally, about whether these tougher U.S. interrogation policies amounted to approval of torture and violation of international law.

In the year following Rumsfeld's memo, the Bush administration's legal framework for employing these interrogation techniques, and the approved techniques themselves, changed multiple times. The techniques Rumsfeld approved ostensibly were intended for use only on suspected terrorists and so-called unlawful enemy combatants, with trained interrogators receiving case-by-case approval. Instead, they spread widely through the military's interrogation operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and spiraled out of control, Army documents show. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, U.S. soldiers and intelligence personnel began to use these techniques in Iraq, where they were informally "accepted as SOP [standard operating procedure] by newly arrived interrogators," according to an August 2004 report on Abu Ghraib abuses by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay. By September 2003, Gen. Geoffrey Miller had arrived at Abu Ghraib, allegedly with a mandate to "Gitmo-ize" interrogation procedures at the prison.

The official guidance for proper interrogation techniques in Iraq became confused, even contradictory. "By mid-October, interrogation policy in Iraq had changed three times in less than 30 days," explained Fay. An Army investigation by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones found that the military command in Iraq, led by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, failed to provide proper oversight of interrogators at Abu Ghraib, contributing to the abuse. Some soldiers involved were inadequately trained in interrogation, investigators found.

These failures set the stage for many of the abuses apparent in these photographs. Military intelligence officers and civilian contractors began ordering military police to "set the conditions" for interrogations, Army investigators found. "This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agendas assigned to each of these respective specialties," Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba said in his March 2004 report.

"It is clear that pressure for additional intelligence and the more aggressive methods sanctioned by the Secretary of Defense memorandum resulted in stronger interrogation techniques. They did contribute to a belief that stronger interrogation methods were needed and appropriate," concluded a Defense Department review of detainee operations, led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and released in August 2004. "We cannot be sure how much the number and severity of abuses would have been curtailed had there been early and consistent guidance from higher levels. Nonetheless, such guidance was needed and likely would have had a limiting effect."

The abuses at Abu Ghraib that were photographed on Oct. 18 and 19, along with detainee testimony, show the visceral effects of the interrogation tactics once sanctioned for detainees at Guantánamo by Rumsfeld. Many of the photos depict a single detainee shackled naked to a bed with underwear on his head. A July 1, 2004, report on Abu Ghraib by the Army's CID said this man was "possibly" a detainee named H-----. Graner, however, whose camera was used to take most of these photos, told CID investigators on April 6, 2005, that these pictures showed another detainee named W-----, whom Graner called "Taxi Driver." Graner said he was ordered by a civilian interrogator working at Abu Ghraib to strip, shackle and hood the detainee as part of a sleep deprivation program.

Regardless of which detainee these pictures show, both H----- and W----- told eerily similar tales to Army investigators. "They stripped me of all my clothes, even my underwear," H----- told CID investigators on Jan. 18, 2004. "They gave me woman's underwear that was rose color with flowers in it, and they put the bag over my face. One of them whispered in my ear, 'Today I am going to fuck you,' and he said this in Arabic."

"I faced more harsh punishment from Grainer [sic]," H----- continued. "He cuffed my hands with irons behind my back to the metal of the window, to the point my feet were off the ground and I was hanging there for about 5 hours just because I asked about the time, because I wanted to pray. And then they took all my clothes and he took the female underwear and he put it over my head. After he released me from the window, he tied me to my bed until before dawn."

W----- gave a similar account of being hung up by his hands -- like the detainee pictured here -- in a statement to CID investigators on Jan. 21, 2004. "[T]he American police, the guy who wears glasses, he put red woman's underwear over my head. And then he tied me to the window that is in the cell with my hands behind my back until I lost consciousness," he said in a statement.

The Fay report found that there was "ample evidence of detainees being forced to wear women's underwear." Fay concluded that the use of women's underwear may have been part of the military intelligence tactic called "ego down," adding that the method constitutes abuse and sexual humiliation.

The Fay report also indicates that W----- was a military intelligence detainee "of potentially high value." Fay concluded that it was difficult to ignore the circumstantial likelihood that military intelligence had ordered the military police to "set conditions" for interrogation. "MI [military intelligence] should have been aware of what was done to this detainee," Fay wrote.

On Oct. 21, a few days after most of these photos were taken, the International Red Cross began a three-day tour of Abu Ghraib to evaluate the conditions for detainees. At the end of the visit, the Red Cross told the military leaders at the prison about incidents of "handcuffing, nakedness, wearing of female underwear and sleep deprivation," according to the Fay report.

The military took no action, initially. Two months later, on Dec. 24, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the head of military police at Abu Ghraib, sent the Red Cross a letter that glossed over the problems "close to the point of denying the inhumane treatment, humiliation and abuse," according to Fay.
http://salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/200...r_1/index.html





The banality of evil?

Lawyer Thrust Into Spotlight After Misstep in Terror Case
Stephen Labaton and Matthew L. Wald

In a city of lawyers, Carla J. Martin has become the most talked-about lawyer in town.

Ms. Martin, an obscure official in the counsel's office at the Transportation Security Administration, now appears to bear responsibility for undercutting the government's long-running effort to execute the only man tried in an American courtroom for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Known among her peers as an aggressive, largely behind-the-scenes courtroom strategist, she is said by the judge in the case to have committed a potentially devastating blunder of the sort that law students are routinely warned about: coaching witnesses.

Dealing a major setback to the government's prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled on Tuesday that because of three significant instances of misbehavior by government lawyers during the trial, most notably the missteps by Ms. Martin, she was barring the prosecutors from using any testimony or evidence from a handful of government aviation officials.

Ms. Martin has declined to explain her actions in court or to reporters, and Judge Brinkema said Ms. Martin's lawyer expected his client to invoke her right against self-incrimination. But e-mail messages made public in the Moussaoui case this week, along with accounts from colleagues and supervisors, paint a picture of a lawyer who was often well regarded but also had a reputation for sometimes pushing too hard.

Ms. Martin, 51, is a former flight attendant at World Airways, where she often flew between the United States and Germany because she spoke German. She began working at the Federal Aviation Administration before she completed law school at American University's Washington College of Law in 1989.

Ms. Martin has almost no experience in criminal prosecutions because most of her work has involved defending the government in civil lawsuits. She moved to the Transportation Security Administration when it was created in 2002.

Some lawyers who have worked with Ms. Martin in other cases said they were stunned by the events in the Moussaoui case.

"She's articulate and forceful and aggressive and smart," said Thomas J. Whalen, an aviation lawyer at Condon & Forsyth who has worked on her side in some cases and against her in others. "I'm really surprised about what's happened. It's more than being tough and aggressive."

In the Moussaoui case, her communications with witnesses, and new evidence that surfaced Tuesday that she told some witnesses not to cooperate with defense lawyers, puts the prosecution in the position of having to investigate and sharply criticize a government lawyer who has worked on the case.

In a different case, in which Ms. Martin tried to keep vital evidence out of the hands of a lawyer on the ground that he had been associated with a civil rights group, she was accused by the other side of overstepping court boundaries and running roughshod over standard courtroom procedure in a zeal to protect national security.

Ms. Martin's mother, Jean Martin Lay, said she spoke to her daughter Monday night.

"She was so devastated," Ms. Lay said in a telephone interview from her home in Knoxville, Tenn. "She said she just didn't hear the judge."

Ms. Lay said her daughter was in the courtroom when Judge Brinkema issued the order on handling witnesses, but was probably concentrating on something else "instead of being mindful."

The judge's written order was issued last month, and Ms. Martin's contact with the witnesses occurred last week, according to e-mail messages made public by the court. The order was meant to sequester witnesses so their testimony would not be corrupted. It barred the witnesses from receiving the testimony of other witnesses or receiving any news accounts of the trial. The e-mail messages and the recent testimony show that Ms. Martin provided testimony and advice to seven witnesses.

Ms. Martin's mother said her impression was that her daughter found her work at the Transportation Security Administration "not the most satisfying or rewarding type job" because it did not involve any big cases. Her current salary, according to a government employee database, is about $120,000 a year.

Others, some speaking for attribution and others not, said they could see why Ms. Martin would find herself in trouble.

Claudio Manno, who at the time of the Sept. 11 attack was the assistant administrator for security at the F.A.A., testified Tuesday that Ms. Martin had taken up too much time second-guessing him and bombarding him with e-mail messages and requests.

"She tended to go off target and wasted our time," Mr. Manno said. "We didn't think it was pertinent."

A. P. Pishevar, a Maryland lawyer who tangled with Ms. Martin in another case, said her conduct in that case "sticks out like a sore thumb."

According to court records, she led an effort on behalf of the government to try to intervene in a defamation, discrimination and malicious prosecution lawsuit brought against Lufthansa by one of Mr. Pishevar's clients. The client was Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, an Iranian-born doctor, now an American citizen and associate professor of medicine at U.C.L.A. who was arrested and spent a night in jail after complaining about discriminatory treatment by Lufthansa officials at Dulles International Airport.

Lufthansa tried to have the case dismissed by filing a secret motion that said it had detained Mr. Kalantar to follow a secret F.A.A. security directive. According to court records, Ms. Martin urged Lufthansa to withhold the summary judgment motion and the security directive from both Mr. Kalantar and his lawyer, Mr. Pishevar.

Court records show that Ms. Martin said to one Lufthansa lawyer that ordinarily much of the evidence would be available to lawyers for a plaintiff. But she said the government sought to keep all the material from Mr. Pishevar, an American citizen and member of the bar in Washington, Maryland and the United States Supreme Court, because he had worked for an organization that fights discrimination in the United States against Iranians.

Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of the Federal District Court in Washington ultimately denied the effort to dismiss the case and directed the government to turn over the material, which remains under seal, Mr. Pishevar said. The case has not yet been set for trial.

Mr. Pishevar said he still felt numb from his experience with Ms. Martin, who he said was "from behind the scenes, trying to pull many of the strings."

Told about the latest developments in the Moussaoui case, Mr. Pishevar paused, then said, "Res ipsa loquitur," a Latin legal term meaning, "The thing speaks for itself."

Others describe a more positive experience with Ms. Martin.

One of her earliest assignments was to monitor the trial brought by the survivors of those who died when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Her main job, according to a news account at the time and a lawyer involved in the case, was to get the judge to close the courtroom any time sensitive information was to come out.

James P. Kreindler, an aviation lawyer representing the survivors, said he could not account for what had happened in the Moussaoui trial. "When one is caught up in a massive bureaucracy, you may lose part of your perspective," Mr. Kreindler said. "She may have lost a proper perspective on the proper role for any attorney involved in either the criminal or the civil justice system."

"Carla is in my experience certainly not a bad person," he added, "and this is a very, very unfortunate thing to see happen."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/na...rtner=homepage





U.S., Google Set To Face Off In Court
Michael Liedtke

The Bush administration will renew its effort to find out what people have been looking for on Google Inc.'s Internet-leading search engine, continuing a legal showdown over how much of the Web's vast databases should be shared with the government.

Lawyers for the Justice Department and Google are expected to elaborate on their opposing views in a San Jose hearing scheduled Tuesday before U.S. District Court Judge James Ware.

It will mark the first time the Justice Department and Google have sparred in court since the government subpoenaed the Mountain-View, Calif.-based company last summer in an effort to obtain a long list of search requests and Web site addresses.

The government believes the requested information will help bolster its arguments in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration hopes to revive a law designed to make it more difficult for children to see online pornography.

Google has refused to cooperate, maintaining that the government's demand threatens its users' privacy as well as its own closely guarded trade secrets.

The Justice Department has downplayed Google's concerns, arguing it doesn't want any personal information nor any data that would undermine the company's thriving business.

The case has focused attention on just how much personal information is stored by popular Web sites like Google - and the potential for that data to attract the interest of the government and other parties.

Although the Justice Department says it doesn't want any personal information now, a victory over Google in the case would likely encourage far more invasive requests in the future, said University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law.

"The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally," Berman said. "While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be."

Google seized on the case to underscore its commitment to privacy rights and differentiate itself from the Internet's other major search engines - Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s America Online. All three say they complied with the Justice Department's request without revealing their users' personal information.

Cooperating with the government "is a slippery slope and it's a path we shouldn't go down," Google co-founder Sergey Brin told industry analysts earlier this month.

Even as it defies the Bush administration, Google recently bowed to the demands of China's Communist government by agreeing to censor its search results in that country so it would have better access to the world's fastest growing Internet market. Google's China capitulation has been harshly criticized by some of the same people cheering the company's resistance to the Justice Department subpoena.

The Justice Department initially demanded a month of search requests from Google, but subsequently decided a week's worth of requests would be enough. In its legal briefs, the Justice Department has indicated it might be willing to narrow its request even further.

Ultimately, the government plans to select a random sample of 1,000 search requests previously made at Google and re-enter them in the search engine, according to a sworn declaration by Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley who is helping the Justice Department in the case.

The government believes the test will show how easily it is to get around the filtering software that's supposed to prevent children from seeing sexually explicit material on the Web.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Researchers: Impact of Censorship Significant On Google, Other Search Engine Results

Indiana University researchers devise Web site to identify differences.
Network World staff

Indiana University researchers have created a Web site that highlights differences in query results provided by country-specific search engines, such as the version of Google built to accommodate China's free-speech restrictions.

The idea behind CenSEARCHip is to determine the impact countries' censorship laws have on search results. The project was largely inspired by the google.cn system that Google decided to create earlier this year for China (Yahoo and MSN have followed suit).

"We wanted to explore the results returned by major search engines and in so doing to foster an informed debate on the impact of search censorship on information access throughout the world," said Filippo Menczer, associate professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, in a statement. He spearheaded the project, along with Mark Meiss, a computer science doctoral student.

The CenSEARCHip site shows side-by-side query results from the different countries' search engine versions. It uses "tag clouds" to highlight terms used more or less often by the different search engines.

Indeed, the search engines do produce significantly different results on searches about political topics, such as human rights and democracy, Meiss says. A search on Tiananmen Square, for example, results in many text references and images of the Chinese government crackdown on protesters in 1989 on the U.S. search site, but mainly hotel and tourist information on the Chinese version.

Limited access to information is not exclusive to the Chinese versions of the search engines though, the researchers said. French and German sites, for instance, commonly block neo-Nazi hate sites.

Separately, Google will likely have to turn over search-engine usage records to the Department of Justice following a hearing Tuesday in which the judge indicated he will probably order the company to comply with a government subpoena, according to published reports.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...c=netflash-rss





U.S. Limits Demands on Google
Katie Hafner

After the Justice Department drastically reduced its request for information from Google, a federal judge said on Tuesday that he intended to approve at least part of that request.

The government first subpoenaed Web data from Google last August, as part of its defense of an online pornography law.

At a hearing in Federal District Court here, Judge James Ware said that in supporting the government's more limited request, he would nonetheless pay attention to Google's concerns about its trade secrets and the privacy of its users.

The government is now requesting a sample of 50,000 Web site addresses in Google's index instead of a million, which it was demanding until recently. And it is asking for just 5,000 search queries, compared with an earlier demand for an entire week of queries, which could amount to billions of search terms.

A Justice Department lawyer said at the hearing that the government would review just 10,000 Web sites and 1,000 search queries out of those turned over.

It intends to use the data in a study to measure the effectiveness of software that filters out pornographic Web sites. The government says it is not seeking information that would "personally identify" individuals.

"It is my intent to grant some relief to the government," Judge Ware said, "given the narrowing that has taken place with the request and its willingness to compensate Google for whatever burden that imposes."

He said, however, that he was well aware that the request for individual search terms from Google had raised privacy concerns. He appeared to be less troubled about the release of Web site addresses.

He said he was particularly concerned about perceptions by the public that Web searches could be subject to government scrutiny, "so I'll pay particular attention to that part of it." The judge said that he would issue a full decision shortly, but did not give a date.

Google stock closed at $351.16, up $14.10, or 4.2 percent.

Three of Google's competitors in Internet search technology — the America Online unit of Time Warner, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online service — have complied with subpoenas in the case. None of those companies have indicated how much data was turned over to the government.

Albert Gidari, a lawyer representing Google at the hearing, said in an interview afterward that he had been surprised by the large reduction in the number of Web site addresses, or U.R.L.'s, and search queries the government was requesting.

The revised request appeared in a footnote to a declaration filed with the court on Feb. 24 by Philip B. Stark, a statistician the Justice Department had hired to study search engine data.

The reduced data request had not come up in direct discussions between Google and the Justice Department. But it appears that Google's well-publicized resistance forced the department to modify its position.

The new request substantially mitigates Google's concerns over trade secrets, Mr. Gidari said, adding that "99.99 percent of Google is unexposed, and this teeny sliver will tell them nothing."

"This would have been a very different case if the government walked in the door and said, 'We need 50,000 U.R.L.'s and a thousand searches,' " Mr. Gidari said. "It's doubtful we would have been in court. We got to where we wanted."

The Web data study is part of a continuing lawsuit in which the government is defending the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law under which it is a crime to make "material that is harmful to minors" commercially available on the Web. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, among others.

The act has faced repeated legal challenges. Opponents contend that filtering software could protect minors effectively enough to make the law unnecessary.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction blocking the law's enforcement and returned the case to a district court for further examination of Internet-filtering technology that might be another way to achieve the law's aims. At a trial scheduled to begin in October, the government will try to prove that filters are ineffective.

"Given the slight amount of information now sought by the government, Google's burden arguments seem less persuasive than they might be," said Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

At one point in the hearing, Judge Ware asked Joel McElvain, the lawyer for the government, why the Justice Department needed the Google data when it already had information from three other companies. Mr. McElvain said that although the government had enough information to do its study, it "would be substantially improved if we had the data from Google" because Google commands nearly half the search market.

Judge Ware appeared to sympathize with Google's concern that it could become entangled in the underlying lawsuit over the Child Online Protection Act, although it is not a party to the suit.

The judge also sought specific assurance from Mr. McElvain that the government would not use information contained in search queries for other investigations.

If a search query appeared to suggest a connection between a particular person and Osama bin Laden, the judge asked him, "are you telling me the government would ignore that and not use it?" Mr. McElvain assured him that the government would not.

Mr. McElvain said at the hearing that the government would pay Google for the effort needed to put the information together.

"We're very encouraged," said Nicole Wong, associate general counsel at Google. "At a minimum we have come a long way from the government's initial subpoena. If it had started this way, it would have been a very different discussion."

Still, Ms. Crawford said that even the relatively small amount of data demanded posed a troubling prospect. "The government has been able to commandeer private parties to assist it in its research, and the next request may be far broader," she said.

Aden J. Fine, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, was more optimistic.

"The mere fact that Google has stood up to the government is a positive thing," Mr. Fine said. "The government cannot simply demand that third parties give information without providing a sufficient justification for why they need it, and that's the theme that will hopefully resonate from this hearing, whichever way the judge rules."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/te.../15google.html





How to Spam Google News
Richard Wiggins

This is a story that I'm convinced will cause some significant ripples in general, and for Google in particular. But I've learned that it's a subtle story by demonstrating the phenomenon to friends -- it takes a few minutes to explain what's going on. So if you're reading this blog entry, let me give the punch line up front: You can insert your own "news article" into Google News, for thousands or millions to discover and read.

Pretend you'd like to appear in the news. Imagine that there might be a way for you to write a story -- a story about anything, any topic under the sun -- and have your tale appear in a news archive.

It turns out that you can. It's trivial. Just type your story into one of the Internet-based "PR agencies" that Google News includes in its index, and poof, your story is part of the news.

You'll have to read the story to learn how this works.

Several months ago I happened to be in Chicago when a Southwest Airlines jet ran off the runway at Midway, killing a boy. National media were obsessed with the story; Chicago TV and newspaper outlets were especially so. Watching the news unfold, I wondered how long local and national media would pay attention, so I set up a Google News alert for "Southwest Airlines".

To my surprise, Google News soon alerted me to this:

Condolences for the Tragic Southwest Airlines crash at Chicago ...I-Newswire.com (press release) - 2008 Presidential Contender Daniel Imperato expressed his condolences for the people that lost their lives during Thursday night's plane crash in Chicago...

Huh? What was this all about? A 2008 presidential contender comments on the Southwest tragedy? Here’s some of the text of his press release:

(I-Newswire) - West Palm Beach, FL - December 12, 2005 - Today, 2008 Presidential Contender Daniel Imperato expressed his condolences for the people that lost their lives during Thursday night’s plane crash in Chicago.A Southwest Airlines jet slid off the runway during a heavy snowstorm at Chicago's Midway Airport and crashed into at least one vehicle at a nearby intersection on Thursday night, a spokeswoman for Chicago's Department of Aviation said.“My sincere condolences go out to the family that was in the vehicle that was struck by Southwest Airlines Flight Number 1248 that took the life of the boy, as well as the passengers of the flight and their families. I reach out for the American people to have a moment of silence and prayer for the affected parties,” stated Imperato.

I wondered “Who is this Daniel Imperato?” Is he really a contender for a presidential bid? What is his background? What has he done in life? Who supports him? What does he stand for?

Some casual searching revealed that he claims to be a global entrepreneur based in West Palm Beach, with a background in Boston. I couldn’t find out much more. So I set up another Google Alert, looking for any new "news" items about Mr. Imperato.

To my astonishment, every day or so, Google News fired off an alert pointing to a new press release about Mr. Imperato, with pronouncements on his presidential bid, his thoughts on issues of the day, and word of support he’d garnered from various folks both domestic and international. Here are some examples:

Google Alert for: "Daniel Imperato"

2008 White House Contender on United States and Yemen Jailbreak ...Open PR (press release) - Hamburg,Germany(openPR) - West Palm Beach, FL -- February 28, 2006 - Today 2008 White House Contender Daniel Imperato brought the current situation in Yemen to the attention ...

Abu Dhabi: The Arab League Chairman for Strategic Studies & Ex ...Open PR (press release) - Hamburg,Germany(openPR) - Abu Dhabi - February 18, 2006 - Today 2008 Leading Presidential Candidate Daniel Imperato received support from Former President of South Yemen, Ali ...

Daniel Imperato Announces Nationwide Vice Presidential Search for ...Open PR (press release) - Hamburg,Germany(openPR) - West Palm Beach, FL -- February 14, 2006 - In his daily address, 2008 Presidential Candidate Daniel Imperato announced that he is conducting a ...

Imperato Sends Well Wishes to Mormon Leader Gordon Hinckley Open PR (press release) - Hamburg,Germany... FL -- February 2, 2006 -- After learning of the recent hospitalization of Gordon Hinckley, 2008 independent Presidential Candidate Daniel Imperato sent his ...

MEDIA ALERT: i1connect Learns Imperato FilesI-Newswire.com (press release) - USAIn an unconfirmed report today, global public relations group, i1connect, has unofficially reported that Daniel Imperato has filed for the office of President ...

2008 White House Contender Imperato on Sharon's Health, Abbas ...I-Newswire.com (press release) - USA In light of the recent events concerning the health of Israeli Prime Minsiter Ariel Sharon, 2008 US Presidential Contender Daniel Imperato urged everyone to ..

Imperato Speaks Out About WMD and Supposed Bush Lies I-Newswire.com (press release) - USATonight Daniel Imperato spoke out about the recent stream of press regarding whether or not President George W. Bush lied about our intelligence and Iraq ...

It all makes for fascinating reading. Every day or so, Imperato issues a press release. He offers condolences after a tragic event. He comments on a foreign policy crisis. He criticizes Bush. He praises CNN’s Lou Dobb’s, noted of late for pandering on U.S. border security. Sometimes his thoughts were far-raging: “2008 Presidential Contender Daniel Imperato on New Orleans, Cronkite, Iraq, and Mayor Nagin’s Martin Luther King Day Comments.”

And every time, every press release calls him a 2008 contender for President of the United States.

Who is this guy? Is he for real? Is he Pat Paulsen, Harold Stassen, or a real contender?

Imperato seemed to use Internet-based press release agencies to send out his frequent statements on matters of the day. But was the press actually covering any of these press releases? Or do the press releases alone just appear on Google News, without the actual media ever picking them up?

So I decided to test the system. I wrote up a press release about my recent trip to Key West, throwing in just enough legitimate quotes to make it appear to be serious. I used one of Imperato's channels, i-newswire.com, which purports to be a “free press-release distribution center” based in Fountain Valley, California. i-newswire has free and for-fee services; I paid the $25. (Imperato also uses openPR.com, based in Hamburg, Germany, so I sent a copy to them as well.)

After waiting a few hours, I found that my entire press release had been indexed by Google News. For instance, I could search for myself:

I could also search for any of the main search terms in my planted press release, and voila! There was the article on the Google News hit list. This worked, for instance, when I searched for Katie Hafner, the reporter for The New York Times that I mentioned in the article.

So this is how Imperato inserts himself into the Google News stream at will. I showed this phenomenon to friend and colleague Trevor Barnes, who runs one of the most popular message boards for fans of the Michigan State Spartans. In less than an hour, he'd posted his own press release, wishing Michigan State luck in the Big Ten basketball tournament.

And voila! Within an hour he was on Google News.

Trevor didn't bother to used the premium service fee, and not only did he get indexed in Google News; his press release went almost to the top of the hit list when you search for "Michigan State"!

But then, emboldened by Trevor's success, his friend Dave Mulder submitted a press release proclaiming his view of the NCAA basketball tournament as a "noted analyst" ...

Dave is a student at Michigan State, a serious sports fan, and a contributor to Spartantailgate.com. But he readily says that "In no way am I a nationally known sports analyst." Yet right now, as I write, Google News lists "article" as the most prominent article on the state of the number one team in the nation. Excerpts from the press release from this "noted sports analyst" :

(I-Newswire) - As college basketball fans around the nation get ready for the NCAA Tournament, noted sports analyst David Mulder offered his predictions for the “big dance.”

“The two big favorites, as everyone has said all year long, are Connecticut and Duke,” said Mulder, “Nothing has changed there.” But what has changed are the outlooks of the other 63 teams which will participate in the NCAA Tournament.

Before the season began, Duke, Connecticut, Texas, Villanova, and Michigan State were the top five teams in the country, according to the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll. This week, the Spartans are not even ranked nationally, although they did receive votes.

The bracket has not even been picked by the Tournament Selection Committee, but Mulder is already offering a short list of teams from which the national champion will emerge. In addition to Duke and Connecticut, “Texas, Villanova, and Memphis are the teams with the best shot of cutting down the nets in early April,” said Mulder.

So who’s it going to be?

“There’s no denying that the [Duke] Blue Devils were the overall favorite heading into this season, but they’re not going to win this thing. Connecticut- with Rudy Gay, Josh Boone, and Marcus Williams- this is their year, they have an incredible amount of talent and some experience to back it up. The Huskies and Jim Calhoun are going to win the national championship.”

Why should David Mulder’s opinion be worth anything compared to the hundreds of other analysts? For one thing, he’s correctly predicted the NCAA Tournament champion for the last seven years.“I’ve been right a lot, and this year I feel as strongly as I ever have.”

The examples of Barnes and Spartantailgate, of "noted analyst" David Mulder, of my own -- and let us not forget Mr. Imperato -- clearly demonstrate that it is trivially easy to insert content into Google News.

Obviously this raises a lot of questions about what sources are indexed by Google News and whether Google News hasn't grown way beyond the parameters of an index of bona fide media outlets.

In any event, once word gets out on this, I can imagine lots of bloggers submitting "press releases" with their daily blog entries, enhancing their visibility by spamming Google News.

Hmm... wait a minute! Now that's an idea!
http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/...ogle-news.html





Google News Credibility Foiled By 15-Year Old
Jim

Sometimes the most well thought out practical jokes trigger an uneven brand of justice that falls under the laws of unintended consequences. While not formally codified and ill defined, the law of unintended consequences is very real, as a Google-focused prank pulled by 15-year old Tom Vandetta amply illustrates.

Reading through SEO focused blog entries, Vandetta found an article that explained how to fool Google's news system by writing fake press releases. Sensing an opportunity to experiment and play a joke on his friends, the self-described "Google fanboy" decided to see what would happen if he submitted a fake Google press release claiming the 15-year old New Jersey student was Google's youngest employee.

The press release was issued through the free service I-Newswire and contained a number of spelling mistakes. Short and to the point, the release, which appeared to have been sent by a Google spokesperson Sonya Johnson (who's actually existence is unconfirmed and is assumed to be imaginary), read:

"(I-Newswire) - 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant's offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw's in Google's beta e-mail service, "Gmail". Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student's blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta's expertise in JavaScript and AJAX."

A few hours after posting the fake press release, Vandetta logged into the news search tool Digg after receiving an automated email from MAKEBot (Digg's Spider), to find his practical joke had become a credible international tech story. Google was even displaying reference to the press release in Google News and at in the news results placed above search results relating to Google employment or hiring. According to his confessional blog posting, "At that moment, I felt my stomach knot up and my heart drop. I knew exactly what happened and knew that I would end up regretting posting that."

The prank has made Vandetta temporarily famous. His Gmail account received almost 400 emails in the first few hours. Vandetta has since had to open new Gmail and MySpace accounts. His parents are changing their phone number and he is working to re-establish a workable online identity. On the brighter side, he has received a few emails from Google employees assuring him he has not dashed his dreams of one day working for Google, as he thought he might have.

While the prank was a juvenile as it was creative, Vandetta's fake press release has exposed a credibility problem for Google and might introduce new costs for search marketing firms that use legitimate press releases as a means of promotion. His experiment exposed the fact the automated system that is Google News does not verify press releases before publishing them as factual news pieces.

Google engineers are almost certainly working overtime to institute stronger spam filters and shore up the credibility of the Google News system, as they have over the years when SEOs have exposed exploitable characteristics of the organic ranking algorithm.

SEOs who use press release submission services should expect to have to submit a lot more identifying information about themselves and their clients. Requiring information such as phone numbers, addresses, contact names and positions that can be verified by electronic spiders are the most likely filtering options being discussed by Google's tech-team.

Another filter might be the disempowering or "delisting" of free-for-use press release services such as I-Newswire.com. This measure would present a hindrance to smaller companies and SEO firms, most of which use press releases properly. By raising the cost of communication, Google risks pushing many smaller entities away from an important arena. SEOs are rarely happy to present extra costs to their clients, many of which are small businesses using search advertising to even the playing field against much larger competitors.

Whatever the outcome, Google has to move to close gaps in its News aggregation system quickly.
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2006/...iled-by-15.php





Google Wins A Court Battle
Elinor Mills

In a legal win for Google, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results.

The lawsuit was filed by Gordon Roy Parker, also known as Ray Gordon, who publishes his writings under the business name of Snodgrass Publishing Group. Parker, of Philadelphia, also posted a chapter of one of his e-books on the Usenet bulletin board network, a collection of thousands of discussion forums called newsgroups.

In his 2004 lawsuit against Google, Parker alleged that the search giant violated copyright law by automatically archiving a copy of his posting on Usenet and by providing excerpts from his Web site in search results.

However, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled on Friday that under case law, Google's activities, akin to those of an Internet Service Provider, do not constitute infringement (click for PDF of court documents).

"When an ISP automatically and temporarily stores data without human intervention so that the system can operate and transmit data to its users, the necessary element of volition (willful intent to infringe) is missing," the court said.

The ruling cited a January decision in the Field v. Google case in federal court in Nevada that concluded that cached versions of Web pages Google stores and offers as a part of many search results do not infringe copyright.

The ruling comes after a decision last month in which a federal judge in Los Angeles said that portions of Google's image search feature, which displays thumbnail versions of images found on adult photo site Perfect 10 and others, likely violate U.S. copyright law.

The search engine also faces copyright lawsuits filed last year by authors and publishers groups over its controversial Library Project book-scanning plans, and a lawsuit filed by Agence France-Presse and threat of litigation from the World Association of Newspapers for aggregating headlines and photos without permission or compensation.

In a legal blow to Google earlier this week, a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., said he would grant federal prosecutors at least part of their request for excerpts from Google's index of Web sites. Google is challenging a subpoena from the Department of Justice for a random sampling of Internet addresses and search queries that the DOJ says it needs to help defend a measure designed to hold Web sites liable if minors can access pornography on them.

In his lawsuit, Parker also claimed Google was liable for defamation because the search company archived allegedly defamatory messages posted by Usenet users and that Google was invading his privacy by creating an "unauthorized biography" of him, the court said. However, the court said Google is immune because it either archived or provided access to content that was created by a third party.

Most of the 11 claims in the lawsuit, which also included racketeering, negligence, abuse of process and civil conspiracy, were dismissed for failure to state a claim. Others were dismissed because Google was found not to be held liable under certain statutes.

The ruling also complained about the "rambling" and "unwieldy" lawsuit, which named "50,000 John Does" as defendants. Parker, a former paralegal, said he wrote the complaint himself and does not have a lawyer.

Parker said he will appeal the decision. "The court is confused about what cache means," he said in a telephone interview. "Google really is a third-party republication."

"Google takes my content, uses it to bolster its search engine and attracts traffic to which they pitch advertising from my competitors," Parker complained.

"The Parker decision is one of several recent rulings finding that Google's services are consistent with principles of copyright law. Indeed, Judge Surrick relied in part on Judge Jones' decision in Field v. Google," Michael Kwun, litigation counsel for Google, wrote in an e-mail. "We are very pleased with this decision."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6050667.html





Study Says Chips in ID Tags Are Vulnerable to Viruses
John Markoff

A group of European computer researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to insert a software virus into radio frequency identification tags, part of a microchip-based tracking technology in growing use in commercial and security applications.

In a paper to be presented today at an academic computing conference in Pisa, Italy, the researchers plan to demonstrate how it is possible to infect a tiny portion of memory in the chip, which can hold as little as 128 characters of information.

Until now, most computer security experts have discounted the possibility of using such tags, known as RFID chips, to spread a computer virus because of the tiny amount of memory on the chips.

The tracking systems are intended to improve the accuracy and lower the cost of tracking goods in supply chains, warehouses and stores. Radio tags store far more data about a product than bar codes and can be read more quickly. They have even been injected into pets and livestock for identification.

The chips have already prompted debate over privacy and surveillance, given their tracking ability. Now the researchers have added a series of worrisome prospects, including the ability of terrorists and smugglers to evade airport luggage scanning systems that will use RFID tags in the future.

In the researchers' paper, "Is Your Cat Infected With a Computer Virus?," the group, affiliated with the computer science department at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, also describes how the vulnerability could be used to undermine a variety of tracking systems.

The researchers said they realized that there are risks associated with publishing security vulnerabilities in computerized systems. To head off some of the possible attacks they described, they have also published a set of steps to help protect RFID chips from such attacks.

The group, led by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, an American computer scientist, will make the presentation at the annual Pervasive Computing and Communications Conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Mr. Tanenbaum is the author of the Minix operating system, an experimental project that became the heart of the Linux open-source operating system.

The researchers asserted that the RFID demonstration had not used the commercial software that collects and organizes information from RFID readers. Rather, it used software that they designed to replicate those systems.

"We have not found specific flaws" in the commercial RFID software, Mr. Tanenbaum said, but "experience shows that software written by large companies has errors in it."

The researchers have posted their paper and related materials on security issues related to RFID systems at www.rfidvirus.org.

The researchers acknowledged that inside information would be required in many cases to plant a hostile program. But they asserted that the commercial software developed for RFID applications had the same potential vulnerabilities that have been exploited by viruses and other malicious software, or malware, in the rest of the computer industry.

One such standard industry problem is a software coding error referred to as a buffer overflow. Such errors occur when programmers set aside memory to receive data temporarily, but fail to require a check on the size of the value that is moved to the allocated space. A larger-than-expected value can cause the program to break and trick the computer operating system into executing a malicious program. "You should check all of your input all of the time, but experience shows this isn't the case," Mr. Tanenbaum said.

Independent computer security specialists also said RFID systems were potential problem areas.

"It shouldn't surprise you that a system that is designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible is designed with no security constraints whatsoever," said Peter Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI International, a research firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

Mr. Neumann is the co-author of an article to be published in the May issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the risks of RFID systems. He said existing RFID systems were a computer security disaster waiting to happen.

He cited inadequate identification for users, the potential for counterfeiting or disabling tags, and the problem of weak encryption in a passport-tracking system being developed in the United States. But he said he had not previously considered the possibility of viruses and other malicious software programs.

An industry executive acknowledged that the companies that make computerized tracking systems faced potential security problems.

"We are very actively looking at the different way the technology is used," said the executive, Daniel P. Mullen, president of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility, an industry trade group. "It's an ongoing dialogue about protecting information on the tag and in the database."

The association has a working group of experts assessing both security and privacy challenges, he said.

There are many types of RFID tag, and some of the sophisticated versions include security features like encryption of the identifying number carried by the chip.

But the Dutch research group warned that in a variety of situations it is possible for attackers to alter the information in an RFID tag to subvert its purpose.

"RFID malware is a Pandora's box that has been gathering dust in the corners of our 'smart' warehouses and homes," they write in their paper.

In one example they offered, a virus from an infected tag on luggage passing through an airport could be picked up when it is scanned by the luggage-handling control systems and then spread to tags attached to other pieces of luggage.

Such an attack, they suggest, might spread luggage contamination to other airports. It might also be used by a smuggler to cause a piece of luggage to avoid security systems.

They also described situations of counterfeit RFID tags possibly being be used to subvert pricing and other aspects of commercial sales systems, or a virus could be inserted into RFID tags used to identify pets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/technology/15tag.html





Maryland House Votes To Oust Diebold Machines

It would replace $90M worth of e-voting machines with systems offering a paper trail
Marc L. Songini

The state of Maryland stands poised to put its entire $90 million investment in Diebold Election Systems Inc. touch-screen e-voting systems on ice because they can’t produce paper receipts.

The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.

The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 to $16 million for the two elections.

Healey is the vice chairwoman of the Maryland House Ways and Means Committee, which recommended the passage of the bill.

The bill was sent on to the State Senate for a vote after the House action, she said.

Healey said the effort was inspired in part by concerns raised by officials in California and Florida that the Diebold systems have inherent security problems caused by technological and procedural flaws.

“We’ve been hearing from the public for the last several years that it doesn’t have confidence in a system without a paper trail,” Healey said. “We need to provide that level of confidence going forward.”

If the bill becomes law, the state’s Diebold systems will be placed in “abeyance” and the vendor will be required to equip them to provide the requisite paper trail, she said.

Healey said the law would require the vendor to provide a paper trail before the 2008 elections or risk losing its contract to supply machines in the state.

The bill also requires that any leased optical-scan system be equipped to accommodate the needs of handicapped voters, to ensure compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act statutes.

Healey said she expects the Senate to vote on the bill sometime in the next few weeks, before the legislative session ends.

A Diebold spokesman said the company will “certainly work with the state of Maryland, as we always have, to support their elections as they see fit.”

The spokesman noted that Maryland has been using Diebold machines for several years without problems. The state first contracted with the company to provide the systems in January 2002.

Maryland is following in the footsteps of several other states in expressing concern over the lack of a paper trail in the Diebold machines.

Earlier this month, Florida adopted a new set of security procedures for users of e-voting systems from all suppliers of e-voting machines.

The implementation of these new procedures in Florida was largely a response to reports issued last month by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson that tests of the Diebold systems found them vulnerable to external access via hacking or bugs.

Nonetheless, McPherson has granted conditional certification for the Diebold machines in California’s elections — with the proviso that supervisors adhere to new security guidelines when using the gear.

The guidelines require that administrators reset the cryptographic keys on every AccuVote-TSx machine from the factory-installed default before every election. Additionally, each memory card must be programmed securely under the supervision of the registrar of voters.

Over an unspecified long term, Diebold must fix the security vulnerabilities to retain the California certification.

In a statement, Diebold said it “wholeheartedly agrees” with the proposed security procedures and said it plans to improve the security of the optical-scan firmware in its machines and create digital signatures to detect tampering.
http://www.computerworld.com/governm...109436,00.html





E-vote case puts actor in limelight

Diebold Software Leak Makes Whistle-Blower A Folk Hero To Activists
By Ian Hoffman

One night early in 2004, a few weeks before the presidential primary, a Van Nuys actor making ends meet temping as a word processor listened on headphones as a young lawyer laid out a defense for Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s use of unapproved voting software in Alameda County.

Sitting at a computer terminal on the 45th floor of a Los Angeles skyscraper, Steve Heller transcribed the lawyer's taped memo suggesting that Diebold could claim the software was a new, "experimental" voting system, even though it had handled two Alameda County elections in 2003.

Heller led a quiet life in the San Fernando Valley with his wife, dog and an occasional supporting role in film, TV or commercials, usually cast as someone's neighbor or dad, which is what he looks like. He was an "experienced and competent" word processor but no "heavyweight" in the eyes of his night-shift supervisor, who doubted Heller knew his computer commands were recorded.

Heller is a self-confessed "news junkie." In an interview, he declined to talk about the case but said, "I would not describe myself at all as an activist" on electronic voting or anything else.

Yet the night after hearing the Diebold defense proposal, according to investigators who recreated his actions from computer logs, Heller went back to work inside the word processing center at the law firm Jones Day and began printing every document he could access that its attorneys had created for Diebold — 107 memos, charts, actions plans and e-mails.

One memo warned that Die-bold could be prosecuted for illegally handling votes on Election Day. In a draft letter, Jones Day attorneys studiously avoided telling California elections officials of Diebold changes in a voting system component that ended up failing in presidential elections. In one e-mail, Jones Day advised Diebold of the need for sweeping civil and criminal defenses, billed at up to $450,000 a month.

In a meeting in a Ventura County park, the documents landed in the hands of Diebold's most vociferous critics at BlackBoxVoting.org. From there, some were faxed to a documentary filmmaker for attempted hand-delivery to then-California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley in Manhattan.

The Oakland Tribune reported on the memos, and almost overnight they appeared on Web sites from Washington to California to New Zealand, then elsewhere. Two weeks later, Shelley withdrew his earlier approval of Diebold's flagship touchscreen voting system, calling the firm's behavior "fraudulent" and "despicable." It took more than two years and numerous improvements before Diebold again could sell its electronic-voting products in California.

Heller himself remained largely unknown until two weeks ago when the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office charged him with a computer crime, second-degree burglary and receiving stolen goods — offenses carrying up to four years in prison — and propelled him to folk hero status among voting reform advocates, computer scientists and critics of electronic voting.

The case poses the value of whistleblowing about an industry that zealously guards its secrets and counts the nation's vote against a bedrock principle of the legal profession, the sanctity of confidentiality that allows clients to share their troubles with their lawyer.

Publication of Jones Day's confidential Diebold work, firm lawyers told investigators, was "a grievous violation" that damaged a top 25 client worth millions of dollars a year in billings.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some leaders of the Association of Computer Machinists, the nation's oldest group of computer engineers and scientists, are seeking pro-bono defense for Heller.

"He found evidence that the problems that people were complaining about, and that Diebold was belittling, were real and that Diebold was skirting the rules," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.

"I think people are really heartsick," she said. "This is a guy who the people of California should be thanking and yet he's facing litigation titled 'People vs. Heller.'"

Protest e-mails and phone calls have been pouring into the offices of the Los Angeles district attorney, most of them from outside California.

Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, set up a legal defense fund for Heller, starting with $10,000 of $76,000 that she and colleague Jim March received from Diebold as part of a $2.5 million settlement of a lawsuit alleging the firm used false claims to get its machines approved and sold in California.

Harris told investigators that she met Heller in a Ventura County park and was handed 500 pages of documents. She told this newspaper that she was asked to "get them to the right place."

"He's really one of the purest whistleblowers I've ever met. He's never one of the people who looked for any attention or any gain in any way. His only concern was for protection of voters and the vote," Harris said.

Heller is being prosecuted for offenses similar to those that the California State Bar tried in 2002 to exempt from its own ethics rules, at least for government attorneys. The state Legislature also approved a similar whistleblower measure that year for government attorneys.

Both bodies approved measures freeing government lawyers to report "serious misconduct" if unaddressed in their own organizations.

"This rule, we think, is the best possible rule," said State Bar governor Ann Ravel of San Jose. The amendment "will be helpful to public lawyers."

But the Supreme Court found the new rule conflicted with state statute and rejected it, and then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the Legislature's change to the statute.

"While this bill is well intended, it chips away at the attorney-client relationship which is intended to foster candor between an attorney and client," Davis said in his veto message. "The effective operation of our legal system depends on the fundamental duty of confidentiality owed by lawyers to their clients."

Jones Day lawyers in charge of the internal investigation identified Heller as their chief suspect and pressed the district attorney's office for prosecution, beginning in July 2004.

John Majoris, a Jones Day partner in Washington who manages the firm relationship with Diebold, told investigators that Diebold was a "pillar client," ranking in the top 25, often top 10 for billings, amounting to "millions of dollars each year for legal services."

"Jones Day was fearful that Diebold was going to fire Jones Day due to the compromise of the documents," a D.A.'s investigator wrote in summarizing his interview with Majoris. "This will cost Jones Day more than $1,000,000 in fees refunded to Diebold."

Daniel McMillan, a Jones Day partner who led the Diebold casework in California, told investigators the impact of the compromise of the documents was "devastating" and a "grievous violation" of attorney-client confidentiality.

"He now has a hard time trusting others at working, including both contractors and other Jones Day employees," the investigator wrote. "McMillan's 20-year legal career is in jeopardy due to the act of the criminal who was working at Jones Day."

Attorneys for the California Attorney General's Office and the Secretary of State said the documents did not influence their actions regarding Diebold, nor did they see Jones Day's conduct as unethical.

California has some of the strongest whistleblower laws in the nation, but none apply to criminal acts.

A whistleblowing defense boils down to an argument of necessity — one had no choice but to commit the crime — and "it rarely works as a defense," said Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor who teaches criminal law and legal ethics at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

"He may have the best motivations but that's not necessarily an excuse to violate the law," Levenson said. "This is really called stealing. Even when people have a good motive, it can still be a crime."

Attorney-client confidentiality is considered sacrosanct and can be broken only when a lawyer believes the disclosure would prevent a violent crime, according to Stephen Bundy, who teaches legal ethics at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law.

"The employee, if they're properly contracted, would have the same obligations," Bundy said.

The evidence gathered by the district attorney's investigators includes a copy of Jones Day's confidentiality agreement, signed by Heller on Feb. 11, 2004. By then, it appears, Heller had been working in the firm's offices, handling its documents, for more than five weeks. Computer logs say someone working his hours at his terminal printed documents two more times before Heller left Jones Day.

"Here there was whistleblowing on the client, and since he's an employee, he takes on the obligations of the lawyer," said University of San Diego legal ethics professor Fred Zacharias, an expert on attorney-client confidentiality rules in California. "You can see why the rules have to be that way because otherwise lawyers have to operate without support staff. The moment you get into disclosing clients' secrets you get into problems, then your rights are limited, just like the lawyer's."

Heller's case could ride on jury nullification — on finding at least one like-minded juror willing to set aside the law.

"It may help him in terms of jury sympathy if he can get this in front of a jury," said Loyola's Levenson, "because sometimes jurors decide they like a defendant more than they like the law or the victims."

At dawn Friday the 13th of August 2004, Heller and his wife Michele awoke to someone pounding on the front of his house and ringing the bell. Ten police officers and investigators confronted him with shouted demands for a search.

"I couldn't believe it. I thought it must be a mistake," he said. "I kept thinking they had the wrong house, that they were after someone else ... It was just very frightening, it was so surreal."

The agents seized his address book listing Bev Harris as a contact. His computer contained bookmarks to voting Web sites, as well as the document postings, plus a letter about electronic voting and an e-mail that they said "boasted" of taking the documents.

Heller declined to answer the agents' questions and hired Blair Berk, a Harvard-trained defense lawyer. He was fired from the temp agency. Legal fees exhausted the couple's personal savings, and they took out a second mortgage.

"I have a lot of confidence that ultimately I'll be given a chance to defend myself. I just hope I'll be able to do that without losing my house," he said. "It's strange to be under this scrutiny from authorities and other people who are interested. It's uncomfortable. I just want to book some (acting) work now and then, go to my day job and have my little life with my wife and dog."

"For what he's alleged to have done, there was nothing in it for him," filmmaker and friend Peter Soby Jr. wrote last week on Huffington Post. "No financial gain (in fact a serious financial loss, because he got fired from his job, and he's had to pay 10s of thousands of dollars to his lawyers, and owes them 10s of thousands more). And he's now at risk of over 3 years in state prison. It's insane."

Officials at the district attorney's office say Heller has no criminal record and probably would get probation if convicted. But he would lose his right to vote.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_3597037





Media Laws - Government Just Doesn't Get It ...
Chris Abood

The coming twelve months appear to be a watershed year for the media industry. Channel Nine has appointed one of its celebrities to run the network, the ABC will be looking for a new managing director - who will need to be pure of heart - and the Federal Government will once again try to change the cross-media laws.

Whether the network bosses and government are able to comprehend the changing way consumers access their entertainment will remain to be seen. Eddie McGuire is concentrating on cost reductions and chasing the retirement market. The ABC’s sole strategy seems to be to get more money from the government. Helen Coonan will look at changing the cross-media laws that will end up not doing much at all to help the industry or consumer. The signs that they will be able to comprehend the new media paradigms are not looking good.

No one seems to be focusing on delivery mechanisms of entertainment to consumers. An increasing army of consumers are turning to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks to get the shows they want as networks take anywhere from six months to two years to broadcast, and then at irregular, shifting times. Add to the mix the Internet (especially online communities, blogs and gaming), home theatres and game consoles, and one would question why the networks are moving so slowly to lock in their viewers from moving to other forms of entertainment and entertainment delivery.

Some of the reasons why people are turning to P2P downloads are they want to watch a particular show now, they forgot to set the VCR or they want to get the whole season and watch it over the weekend. People also want to watch old shows that have not been released on DVD or are too expensive on DVD.

Some have tried to offer downloads but have not understood the new paradigms. The most notable is Telstra’s latest attempt. It is about to find out that people will not pay video store prices for movies, released three months after they have been released to video stores, to be deleted within a few days and at download speeds which are 200 times slower than the OECD standard. Consumers will soon realise that for a few dollars more they can purchase the DVD. A subscription service with unlimited downloads might work though.

For the networks, a model that might work is as follows. The networks have a large back catalogue plus some great new shows. They need to get the new shows on air when first released. They should also look to allow their viewers to download these shows. The show can be in a proprietary codec with a rolling encryption algorithm to stop copying. The show will be viewed by a proprietary viewer on a TV screen.

By getting viewers to register for downloads, the networks could place themselves in a position to provide relevant advertising. When you go to downloaded the TV show, relevant advertising could be interlaced into the download. This way, consumers would not need to pay for the download. Networks would then be able to offer a much wider range of viewing schedule. A fast forward button would be a no-no and a click-here-to-know-more button would allow advertisers to really zero in on their prospective consumers.

One thing the networks need to realise is that the current advertising revenue model based on the ratings system is no longer relevant. The current ratings system does not give a true indication of the popularity of a show or whether the people watching are part of a target demographic. At the time of writing this article, Commander in Chief is due to première; however, I know many who will not be watching and will not appear in the ratings, as they have seen the episode over a month ago via P2P.

The ABC is a problem child. The government is not happy with it, nor was the previous government. Many of the public are also not happy with being forced to be pay (via their taxes) for a network that less than one in five watch (fewer still for radio). The government is not going to give the ABC the funds it requires to move into the 21st century. The ABC will always have to defend itself against accusations of bias, but the idea that a government owns a media enterprise should be anathema to free speech advocates. All media outlets are biased to some degree, but they are not funded on taxpayer dollars.

The government should either make the ABC a true people’s network where all citizens have access to broadcast their views or it should set the ABC free. I believe it is time that the ABC was privatised. Then it would be able to stand on its own two feet, go in the direction it wishes and raise the funds it requires to reach there.

The government’s media strategy seems to be based on three outcomes: digital TV, cross-media laws and not upsetting the three commercial network owners. Digital TV or high definition TV is great; 16:9 format with surround sound is a true pleasure to watch. However, there are two problems with the government's version of digital TV. I am in an income bracket that can afford this luxury, but many are not. It will be a brave (and soon extinct) government that will switch off analogue transmissions before everyone is in a position to switch over. The government will either have to provide these set-top converters free or give set-top converters tax deductibility status. The second problem is that we, the consumers, are not going to benefit from the true advantages of digital TV such as multi-channelling. This is because the network bosses don’t want it.

I cannot see how changing the cross-media laws will benefit the consumer. We will still be stuck with the same TV stations, radio stations and newspapers with different owners. If the government were serious it would open up the media to competition. Iraq, where the population is only six million more than Australia, has 41 TV stations.

The way we access our entertainment is rapidly changing. It is likely that the existing players will be left behind as consumers abandon them and the government blunders through legislation changes that will benefit no one.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4268





Hate Website Fine A First

A Human Rights ruling says Internet servers are as liable as their clients for hate material.
Randy Richmond

For the first time in Canada, an Internet service provider has been found guilty and fined for hosting websites that spread hate messages against blacks, Jews and Muslims.

In the landmark ruling by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal yesterday, southern Ontario's white supremacy movement also took a hit, with two leaders and one group found guilty of violating the Canadian Human Rights Act and ordered to pay $8,000 in fines and compensation.

The Internet service provider, Affordable Space. com, was fined $5,000.

"The ruling sends a very strong message that Internet servers, if they are aware there is hate content and don't take timely action to remove it, can be held liable," said Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman, who filed the complaint in February 2002.

The ruling was the third victory in as many tries for Warman in efforts to shut down Internet hate and a boost to his complaints against several other London-area white supremacists.

"I am absolutely thrilled," he said. "This is proof human rights laws work."

The ruling also shows that online pseudonyms, used by both men in the case, are no protection against the law, said Monette Maillet, the Canadian Human Rights Commission lawyer who argued the case before the tribunal.

"The ruling shows Canadians have no tolerance for hate," Maillet said.

In the ruling, ex-Londoner James Scott Richardson was fined $1,000 for several Internet postings, including one calling for attacks on Jewish and Muslim agencies, temples and residences.

Longtime white supremacy leader Alexan Kulbashian of North York was fined $1,000 for his hate messages.

Kulbashian must also pay $5,000 to Warman for online attacks against the lawyer.

Reached at his parents' home near Toronto, Kulbashian expressed anger at media coverage of the issue.

"My comment for you is shut up," said Kulbashian, before hanging up.

Richardson, now living in Hamilton, couldn't be reached for comment.

Richardson and Kulbashian were members of the Canadian Ethnic Cleansing Team (CECT), now defunct, which also must pay a fine of $3,000.

The CECT website and a related web forum were hosted on Affordable Space.com.

Kulbashian may be on the hook for the $3,000 fine against Affordable Space.com, because he owned the company.

The CECT web forum was "littered with statements of extreme ill will to various ethnic, racial and religious groups," ruled tribunal members Athanasios Hadjis,

Some of the material suggested whites use any means possible to ensure the "white race prevails."

"I find that the material in question constitutes hate messages," Hadjis said.

The Human Rights Act prohibits the communication of messages over the Internet likely to expose people to hatred or contempt based on religion or race.

The two men, the group and the server must "cease and desist" sending similar material over the Net, Hadjis ruled.

The ruling is backed by the federal court, which can fine or imprison the two men for contempt if they break the order, Warman said.

Warman and the commission had also sought penalties against a website called tricityskins.com.

Hadjis dismissed the complaint because the extent of Richardson and Kulbashian's involvement with the site or a group with the same name was never made clear.

At a February 2005 tribunal hearing in Oakville, Richardson threatened several times to walk out and he and Kulbashian accused London police and Maillet of lying.

The two men vowed earlier to fight the allegations, but decline to offer any evidence in their own defence at the hearing.
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Loc...f-1482485.html





How the Masses Will Innovate
Stacy Perman

The newly appointed head of MIT's Media Lab envisions a time soon when millions will play a stronger role in societal advances, thanks to technology. And MIT is helping to plant the seeds

Launched in 1985, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab has engaged in the innovations that helped drive the digital revolution of the late 20th century. Such breakthroughs
as digital ink, wearable computers, and advanced prosthetics got their start there.

The Media Lab, with an annual budget that exceeds $30 million, also helped spawn such companies as Squid Labs, an innovation and design outfit that has developed technologies from printed electronics to high-performance kites.

Frank Moss, an entrepreneur and former CEO of Tivoli Systems, was named head of MIT's Media Lab in February. Moss, also the co-founder of Stellar Computer and Infinity Pharmaceuticals, has some big shoes to fill. He succeeds Nicholas Negroponte, who will focus on One Laptop per Child, the nonprofit organization that he helped launch while at Media Lab. One Laptop provides $100 computers to children in developing countries (see BW Online, 10/04/05, "Help for Info Age Have-Nots").

Moss, who earned a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online staff writer Stacy Perman about his vision for the Media Lab as it enters its third decade. He offers advice for would-be entrepreneurs and explains why more companies are likely to pursue what he calls a "societal business model." Edited excerpts follow:

How do you view your role as head of the Media Lab?
I think my role is to understand where the world is going to be 20 years from today. I call it living in the future. (Also,) to work with the team here to create the technology that will help shape that future.

How do you view the nexus between technology and entrepreneurialism?
It is hugely important. In fact, entrepreneurs are really the primary vehicle for innovation in our society. They've played an incredible role. Thirty years ago, the primary source for innovation was large corporate labs. That is where all of the money went. Then, 20 to 25 years ago, the source of ideas and creativity shifted to venture funds and startups.

Over the past 20 years, we've seen the economy and society change due to innovation from small independent efforts outside of corporate labs. Technology has enabled startups to have a big influence, and consequently they have had a tremendous effect in the technology scene today.

What role will startups play in the future?
I see tremendous economic growth from startups from 10 years ago. Entrepreneurs will go from the 1,000 startup ventures funded in the last 10 to 20 years to ideas coming from people working together in network-based environments, using computers to dream up innovations in a way they never did before. It could be people in developing countries with low-cost computers.

The Media Lab has given a start to many entrepreneurs. What would be your advice to would-be entrepreneurs in today's environment?
Resist the current temptation to make incremental changes to attract funding. It might get you off the ground, but I don't think it will get you very far. Today, the funding climate has changed. The successful (entrepreneurs) will look for fundamental disruptive change. I encourage them to take risks, rather than just polish the faucets. There will always be an appetite for game-changing technology.

Moving forward, what are the major areas in technology where academic institutions and venture capitalists will be channeling resources and investments?
The societal business model. Companies are now paying attention to some of the major socioeconomic problems in the First and the Third World. We have a billion people using computers in the First World. It is still limited to wealthier societies.

In the next 20 years we will see the adoption (increase) to 5 billion to 6 billion. And the kinds of killer apps that are important in that world are not those necessarily centered on communication and commerce.

I think as we experience the problem of aging populations we will need to supply different ways to educate, and traditional schools are not the way to go. We will see technology dramatically change the way kids learn. We will see health care without hospitals. That is where the action will be. Just another tweak to a telephone or a handheld device will happen, but it will not be a major source of growth. That is becoming a commodity.

What new directions will you pursue as head of the Media Lab?
The Media Lab has done a lot to shape the world of technology. We will continue to develop and find brand-new areas. One is between humans and computers, and how the computer relates to people and expresses itself in ways it never has before. For instance, (this means) giving computers common sense and reasoning like people, not just crunching numbers, but having an emotional intelligence as well.

We will (help) to break barriers between a much broader adoption of technology and solutions to the problems facing society today.

We talk about how to make life more pleasant and fulfilling for the aging. We have drugs now that can increase people's lives until their 90s and 100. This is an untapped resource –- the incredible wisdom and knowledge that resides in seniors' brains. We will develop ways to extend their capabilities with technology.

We will improve mental and cognitive abilities. It is esoteric, but think about the problem of aging. People tend to weaken physically as they age, but if we can expand their minds to contribute to society, it will greatly enhance the experience of aging.

You talk about education and the bottom-up effect that millions more people will play in societal advances. How do you see this unfolding?

We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop, and bootstrap the way they learn outside of school. We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.

Creative expression (is another area). No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them. Easy-to-use programs allow kids to compose everything form ringtones to full-fledged operas. It will change the meaning of creative art in our society.

We are already seeing early signs of it in blogs. The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts.
http://cache.directorym.com/creative...e=AB_Context_B





Alive and Well in Silicon Alley
Warren St. John

THEY arrived in crisp button-downs and pleated Dockers, 150 or so, nearly all men in their 20's and 30's, few of whom would probably object to being called a nerd.

The event, the New York Tech Meetup — part technology conference, part Showtime at the Apollo for geeks — was a monthly gathering where entrepreneurs are invited to access their inner Steve Jobs by describing their companies for a discerning and occasionally rowdy audience of technologists and venture capitalists.

As Drew Robertson, a suited executive from an Internet company called CallinSearch, learned the hard way, it can be a tough crowd.

Mr. Robertson took the podium to give a strictly timed five-minute pitch for CallinSearch, a program that allows Web surfers to make phone calls and send instant messages to sites turned up by search engines. He began by asking his tech-savvy listeners simplistic questions about their knowledge of the Web.

"You're going to get booed off before you start," shouted Scott Heiferman, a founder of the social networking company Meetup and the organizer of the Tech Meetup.

Prescient words, it turned out. Mr. Robertson faced a barrage of withering questions and eventually slunk offstage to mocking laughter from the audience.

"I got ambushed," he said afterward. "I didn't know it was a 'Gong Show' thing."

Rambunctious technology gatherings in Manhattan? Venture capitalists on the prowl? Geeks having fun at the expense of suits? What was this, 1998?

In fact, it was last Tuesday, and the bustle around the New York Tech Meetup, which began with just four attendees a little more than a year ago, is but one bit of evidence that reports of the death of Silicon Alley may have been greatly exaggerated.

Though few new-media entrepreneurs would say it loudly for fear of jinxing themselves, Silicon Alley is buzzing again. In recent months a number of Manhattan new- media companies have been involved in heady high-dollar deals that carried a faint but alluring whiff of the good old days. Start-ups are once again popping up like mushrooms in Manhattan, and last May the New York Software Industry Association opened a technology incubator at its headquarters at 55 Broad Street. It now houses 14 new companies.

And while blog publishers like Gawker Media have garnered much of the attention in the last couple of years, the action on the Alley extends far beyond blogs to software companies, e-mail newsletter publishers and online entertainment companies.

At the Tech Meetup, there were presentations from a new search engine company called Transparensee, a company called Loto that translates Web pages between Chinese and English, and Homethinking, a site that ranks real estate brokers based on sales histories.

"Everything is cranking up," said Nicholas Butterworth, a member of the original Silicon Alley generation of the mid-90's who is himself starting a new technology company. "There is definitely something in the air. It's not exactly the same as it was the first time around, but it's got some of that same spirit."

Mr. Butterworth, a founder of the online music site SonicNet back in the day, is soon to move into an office at the Broad Street incubator. Sounding very 1995, he declined to discuss his new venture on the grounds that he is in stealth mode.

The surest sign of renewed life in Silicon Alley — a broad term for New York's digital media scene, most of it located in lower Manhattan — has been the deals. Last week the women's portal iVillage, a survivor of the first boom and bust, was sold to NBC Universal for $600 million. Last fall AOL bought Weblogs Inc., a publisher of blogs including the popular technology site Engadget, for $25 million.

In January, Heavy.com, an online entertainment company aimed at young men, took on $10 million in venture capital. On Thursday, Mr. Heiferman's Meetup announced it had sold a 10 percent stake to a group of investors that included eBay.

But perhaps the news that set the Manhattan digital scene most atwitter was a report in The Wall Street Journal last month about a potential sale by Robert W. Pittman, the former MTV and AOL executive, of Daily Candy, an e-mail newsletter about fashion, dining and travel trends. According to The Journal, Mr. Pittman, who paid roughly $3.5 million for a majority share of Daily Candy in 2003, was putting the company on the block for upward of $100 million, about 9 or 10 times its earnings, a conservative multiple by technology industry standards.

But the mere notion of a sum that large was enough to paralyze some aspiring Alley entrepreneurs between present-day hopes and the cold reality of just a few years ago.

"It's great for Daily Candy and exciting for the industry," said Sascha Lewis, a founder of flavorpill, a publisher of e-mail newsletters about cultural happenings. "But what we have to do today is keep the lights on. You've got to learn from the lessons of the past. All that is just noise until things happen."

Not so long ago Silicon Alley was all but obliterated. Dozens of companies went out of business during the burst of the technology bubble, and the economic slow-down following the 9/11 attacks took still more. Employment in information technology in New York City plummeted to around 35,000 at the end of 2005 from around 50,000 in 2000, according to the New York State Labor Department.

Along the way any semblance of a digital community in New York dissolved as well. Launch parties gave way to pink slip-parties and then to no parties at all. The Silicon Alley Reporter, a trade publication, folded, and the New York New Media Association, a focal point for the tech community during the boom, quietly closed its doors in 2003. Nerds went underground.

"In 2002 it was definitely embarrassing to say you were doing Internet stuff," said Mr. Heiferman, who founded the Web advertising firm i-Traffic in 1995 and Meetup in 2002. "It seemed so passé."

A number of factors have contributed to the rebound, investors and online executives said. Start-up costs and overhead for running a consumer-oriented Internet company have plummeted, as hardware prices have fallen and packaged or open-source software has taken the place of the programming departments that once had to build sites from scratch.

New forms of targeted advertising from companies like Yahoo and Google have allowed small companies to sell adds online without sales staffs. And large established companies with hefty marketing budgets have been spending more on online advertising.

But perhaps the biggest change on the Alley has been the shift from a culture of profligacy to one of financial discipline. While first-generation Web entrepreneurs once boasted of mountains of venture capital, massages for staff and Aeron office chairs for all, the current crop of Alley executives can't let a conversation go by without pointing out how utterly miserly they are.

"I was crazy cheap," said Dany Levy, the founder and editor in chief of Daily Candy, explaining how she built her business. She said she has long urged employees to print on both sides of a sheet of paper, and that she bought candy for her company's media kits in bulk from Duane Reade just after Halloween, when it was on sale.

In the SoHo offices of Thrillist.com, a three-man start-up that aims to be a kind of Daily Candy for men, Ben Lerer, 24, one of its founders, said his business plan "is all about saving every possible penny." He said he and his partner, Adam Rich, 25, pay their sole employee, a writer named David Blend, "beer money," a claim Mr. Blend disputed.

"Actually it's half my beer money," Mr. Blend said.

During the dark years, some first-generation Silicon Alley companies held on by laying off employees and cutting costs. Rufus Griscom, the chief executive of Nerve, the sexy literary site and Web community, said he employs half the number of people he did in 2001.

Other true believers started pared-down companies from the rubble of the bust. Mr. Lewis and Mark Mangan, for example, were partners in an e-commerce company that sold furnishings and accessories and went belly up in 2001. As part of their marketing campaign, the two published a weekly e-mail letter about cultural events, which they called flavorpill. They continued to publish the newsletter from their part-time jobs — Mr. Mangan as a Web developer and Mr. Lewis as a D.J. — and organically built an audience before pitching big companies for advertising business.

Since then, flavorpill has run ads for American Express, Audi and Anheuser-Busch. The company now publishes nine e-mail letters with 300,000 subscribers, and it has been profitable for the last three years, Mr. Lewis said. Last year revenues were close to $2 million.

"It's the classic 'learn from your mistakes and move on,' " he said. "All of us who were here for the first go-round understand how the hype and hysteria allowed for an overzealousness and a lack of focus."

Mr. Griscom of Nerve has had a similar turnaround, he said, adding that Nerve has increased its revenues by an average of 37 percent a year for the last five years. "Compared with 2001, we now have half the staff, half the buzz, and more than five times the revenue," Mr. Griscom said.

Another sign of change: Mr. Griscom said employees are again agitating for stock options. "After 2001 nobody ever asked me about options," he said. "There wasn't that sense of opportunity." He said his company unveiled an options package for employees last week.

Because of their organic growth and lean budgets, many successful companies have little or no need for venture capital, the lifeblood of the first round of Manhattan new media companies, which tended to spend first in the (sometimes vain) hope of earning later. Josh Abramson, a founder of CollegeHumor.com, said some weeks he gets daily feelers from venture capitalists eager to invest in his company, which had $6 million in revenue last year, up from $2 million the year before. He tells them all the same thing: no thanks.

"We make enough to finance our growth on our own," he said. "The reason we've been successful so far is because we've been pretty stingy. We haven't spent any money we didn't have."

The preferred exit strategy has changed in Silicon Alley as well. The first time around, initial public offerings of stock were the holy grail of Internet executives, a mentality that resulted in countless paper millionaires who were never able to cash out their shares.

The more common exit these days is to follow in the footsteps of the photo-sharing service Flickr or the social bookmarking company del.icio.us, both of which were bought by Yahoo for undisclosed sums. Dodgeball, a mobile-phone-based social networking service founded by a graduate student at New York University, was bought by Google last May. A private sale to a larger Internet or media company can end with in cash in hand, if at less astronomical sums than during the bubble years.

A lot could go wrong to derail the momentum of New York's technology scene. Advertising spending could drop. A shortage of talented programmers could slow the speed of development, Mr. Butterworth said. And it's unclear whether big Internet companies will continue to pay large sums for individual companies like Flickr and Dodgeball that are essentially one-off features for their sites. With these uncertainties and the memories of the bust not entirely faded, Ms. Levy said she planned to stay cheap.

"There is all this buzz about valuations," she said. "But you never know."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/fa...12silicon.html





Can This Man Save The Movies? (Again?)

In the digital era, is film dead? As audiences gravitate to DVDs, Hollywood wonders if the movie theater can survive. The rebels are surging. Can the Empire strike back?
Richard Corliss

Here's a magic glimpse into the future of movies. A big blockbuster opens. Some people see it in sparkling digital clarity on wraparound screens in ultraswank theaters; others watch the same movie the same day on an 8-ft.-wide screen in their home media center; still others get it transmitted instantly through their computer, iPod or cell phone. It's a looking-glass scenario that could happen in a future near you--if the people who finance and exhibit Hollywood movies want it to.

On Oscar night last week, though, the looking glass was not a crystal ball but a rearview mirror. Hollywood's gentry celebrated the past--the misty history of cinema, evoked with montages of ancient genres and deceased artistes. From the films honored, you would hardly have noticed that under the academy members' smartly shod feet, a seismic shift was taking place.

We are at the bright dawn of the movies' digital age, but the Hollywood establishment still has its shades drawn. In the Oscar show at the Kodak Theatre (named after a company that is crucially invested in the film-stock status quo), the most popular live-action digital movie in history, George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith, won no awards, not even one for technical achievement. The year's boldest, most innovative digital experiment, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City, got no nominations at all.

The Oscar revelers seemed unaware that movies have two big problems: the way they're made and the way they're shown.

It has often been noted that if Henry Ford were to come back today, he would wonder why no one had come up with a better idea than the internal combustion engine. A similar thought may occur to any visitor to a movie shoot. Dozens, maybe hundreds of technicians adjust the lights, apply the makeup and dress the set, much the way it was done almost 100 years ago. And as in D.W. Griffith's day, the film still runs through a camera, then is processed, reproduced many times and sent to theaters.

The addiction to doing things that way baffles Lucas. "Do you still use a typewriter?" he asks a TIME movie critic. "Do you go to a library and consult books for most of your research? Is your story set in type, letter by letter? No. Your business takes advantage of technological advances. Why shouldn't my business?"

Well, for one thing, say the movie atavists, film has a more human texture, an emotional weight. "Digital is just too smooth," says M. Night Shyamalan, writer-director of The Sixth Sense and a defender of the film tradition. "You almost have to degrade the image to make it more real. If you take a digital photo and I take one on film, there's just no way you're going to compete with the humanity that I can create from my little Hasselblad. Yours will be smoother, crisper, perfect in every way, and mine will be grainy, but you would definitely grab my picture over the digital one."

Directors who have worked in digital don't agree. They say it's capable of a chromatic subtlety that film can't match. Michael Mann, whose 2004 Collateral was, he says, "the first photo-real use of digital," is using the same process to shoot the big-screen version of his old Miami Vice TV series. "In the nightscapes in Collateral, you're seeing buildings a mile away. You're seeing clouds in the sky four or five miles away. On film that would all just be black."

What Mann pioneered is now a trend. "When we shot Collateral, we were one of the first," he says. "This year there were about 25 films shooting digitally." That number is bound to mushroom as young directors, whose computers were their boyhood buddies and who have no nostalgic attachment to film, come to the fore.

One is Rodriguez, 37, the Lone Star maverick who writes, directs, shoots, cuts and scores his own movies as well as supervises the special effects, doing it all at his home ranch on the Pedernales River and at a small Austin, Texas, studio. Using high-definition cameras, he shot his Sin City actors against a green screen, filling in the backgrounds digitally, and rarely went beyond a second or third take. That's one secret to making a gorgeous all-star movie for $40 million--less than half the average Hollywood budget.

It was Lucas who turned Rodriguez on to digital after a visit to the elder's Skywalker Ranch more than five years ago. All Lucas had done was perfect the modern blockbuster and create the first major special-effects company (ILM) and the first digital-animation outfit (which became Pixar). He changed the way movies were made and marketed. Now the richest, most influential maker of movies had found in Rodriguez an apt pupil, another "regional" filmmaker who could buck the system.

In one aspect of moviemaking--crew size--Rodriguez has outstripped Lucas. The two most recent Star Wars movies, made digitally, employed as many on-set crew members as did the last filmed episode, The Phantom Menace. (Lucas offers that as an argument that Hollywood technicians need not worry that a switch to digital would put them out of work.) But do-it-himself Rodriguez has a crew that is tiny and tight. "It's nice because you don't have this huge army," he said in 2003. "It's a commando group of people really into the project." Rodriguez loves his outlaw status, boasting, "I'm years ahead. The professionals are not paying attention."

But the independent directors are. Many of them have used digital equipment for years. Steven Soderbergh shot his indie movie Bubble with the same camera, a Sony F950, that Lucas used on Sith and Rodriguez on Sin City. And indie imp-guru Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) notes, "There is a Panasonic camera, the 100, that gives a picture that's about as good-looking as 16-mm or 35-mm film. The kids today who are making their do-it-yourself features are doing it with high-definition video. If I was shooting Clerks today, I'd probably use that camera."

Smith wanted to use a digital camera for Clerks II, the sequel to his 1994 debut hit, but his director of photography didn't feel comfortable with the process. "A lot of directors and directors of photography are resistant to put down what they're familiar with," Smith says. Besides the shock of the new, there's the love of the old. "Most people in film have a great affection for film stock, for the medium. And they feel that moving in a digital direction is kind of leaving their history behind. It's more sentimental than anything else."

If moviemakers won't shoot digitally, they'll edit digitally, citing ease and efficiency. But Steven Spielberg and his longtime editor Michael Kahn don't. "Michael and I are the last persons cutting movies on KEMs," he says, referring to the German flatbed machine that is no longer manufactured. "I still love cutting on film. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor with mini-strands of film around his neck. The greatest films ever made were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process."

Once a film is shot and cut, it has to be copied, sent to theaters and put on the screen--steps that are expensive and risky. Print quality, for example, can vary drastically from frame to frame and print to print. The quality of projection may also vary. "There are still theaters that run the projector lamp at less than proper brightness," says Mann. (A digital projector is much more accurate.) Finally, film degenerates, the way a vinyl record does under a stylus or a videocassette does with frequent use. "With film you have degradation problems," Smith says, "where the stock starts breaking down. Frames get lost when they cut reels together." The digital look will stay fresh for the life of the theatrical run.

If there's an argument for digital that Hollywood can get behind, it's this: it's far cheaper than film--cheaper to shoot, cut and duplicate. But the big savings come in getting the product to the public. Says Lucas: "Making a big movie, a Harry Potter or a Spider-Man, you're spending $20 [million] to $30 million for the prints just to strike them and ship them to the theaters. Smaller movies have to spend a huge part of their budgets on prints." Digital would cut print and shipping costs about 80%. Even Spielberg, who wears many hats, sees the efficacy of digital. "I may be the last person as a director to accept it," he says, "but I won't be the last person to accept it as someone who runs a film company."

So who doesn't love the new movie deal? Well, some studio chiefs, who are worried that a movie on disc is much easier to dupe, and piracy is a huge drain on their income. But mainly theater owners. When they hear the word digital, they reach for their digitalis. Already feeling the hit from the 13% slump in moviegoing over the past three years, they aren't eager to spend the more than $3 billion or so that it would cost to convert approximately 36,000 film projectors to digital.

"Digital cinema is probably a lot further away than most people would think," says Kurt Hall, president and CEO of National CineMedia, the marketing arm of AMC, Cinemark and Regal Entertainment Group. "There's still a lot of work to be done on the technology, both in making it secure [from piracy] for the content owners and in making sure that the systems work and can be operated efficiently by the theater circuits."

In the late '20s, when talking pictures replaced the silents, theaters converted to sound within two years. But the coming of sound was immediately and immensely popular. Today, although films shown on the giant IMAX screens make money and although computer-made animated features have been spanking the butts of traditional cartoons, there's no conclusive evidence that the billions it would cost to go digital would be repaid by a box-office surge. "Our research shows that the audience generally isn't going to pay more and isn't going to go more," Hall says. "So there's no financial model that creates an incentive for the exhibitor to make this investment."

Lucas has tried for years to be the irresistible force to the exhibitors' immovable object. In 2002, when he released Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones, he opened it on 63 digital screens in North America, along with the thousands of screens showing the film version, and declared that in three years, when Revenge of the Sith came out, it would play only digitally. He says he even offered the exhibitors a financial incentive: "It costs about $1,200 for a film print and about $200 for a digital print. So what you do is charge the distributor the same $1,200 they would ordinarily be charged, and $1,000 of it goes into a pot that eventually pays for all the projectors and everything. In about five years you would reconvert the entire industry." And who bought in? "No one's bought in yet. But they will. It's just a matter of time." Digital Sith played on 111 screens in the U.S. and Canada--still a tiny slice of the total number of venues.

Lucas and other directors don't subscribe to the cheap-date theory of movie attendance--that kids go to get out of the house, to be with their peers and away from their parents. Directors also ignore the complaints about moviegoing--the glop on the floor, the indifferent projection, the half an hour of ads and in the row behind you a nattering couple rehearsing their Jerry Springer act. No, to directors, moviegoing is an almost religious act: a Mass experience. You walk into a cathedral, feel your spirit soar with hundreds of other communicants and watch the transubstantiation of images into feelings. The audience becomes a community, the movie the Communion.

"A 65-ft.-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie--there is nothing like that experience," says Mann. Shyamalan sees it as a mystic conversation. "With enough strangers in the room," he says, "you become part of this collective human soul--which is a much more powerful way to watch a movie" than seeing it alone at home.

But will they still go--if day-and-date distribution comes to pass, that is--when they can buy a DVD the same day and see it with a bunch of friends on a 45-in. screen? Much was made of Soderbergh's experiment with Bubble--a minimalist, low-budget, no-star movie that opened nearly simultaneously in theaters, video stores and homes. And people didn't go for it in any format. Shyamalan sees a lesson there: "Bubble had $10 million worth of free publicity. Bubble had the advantage over any independent movie of its same ilk. It had so many advantages, and still it didn't perform. If Bubble did well, wouldn't that have been evidence that day-and-date works? Well, they tried it, and they failed."

Lucas, who thinks day-and-date is an inevitable step to fight piracy, also believes it won't hurt the box office. Moviegoing, he says, "is like watching a football game. Who in the world would go out in 20-below weather and sit there and watch a football game where you can barely see the players? Football games are on TV, and it doesn't affect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater."

Some blame the shrinking theater audience on the narrowing gap between a movie's premiere in theaters and its debut in video stores--from six months a few years ago to about four months or less today. "With the window getting smaller and smaller," says Smith, "people don't want to leave the house. The audience is being trained that they don't have to run out to the theater to see something." For many viewers, especially adults, the kids who see the big blockbusters and the critics who review the little indie films have essentially become focus groups that help them decide whether they should see a movie--when it comes out on DVD.

The genius of late 20th century entrepreneurism was to get people to pay a lot for things they were used to getting cheap (coffee) or free (water). A quarter-century ago, Hollywood made most of its money from showing films in theaters. Now the biggest bucks come from DVDs and pay TV. Producers also got something for nothing by packaging recent and old TV shows for the DVD market. All those revenue streams give folks more reasons to stay home, encased in their all-media cocoons, in some cases chained to the desktop deity that can never get enough attention. Just as the computer helps them do many things that used to take them out--work, shopping, buying books, renting movies--so will it soon allow them to download movies to watch on it. As Smith notes, "It's tough to cram three or four people in front of a computer to watch something. But no doubt Steve Jobs is working on this."

If the Internetting or iPodding of movies does take over, that would be a strange revolution indeed. It's one thing to miniaturize phones and radios for easier use. It's another to reduce the 65-ft. movie-palace dream images of old--the ones revived for last week's Oscar show--onto a screen the size of Dick Tracy's wristwatch.

Directors say they frame a shot with the big--not the small--screen in mind. "I only paint on the one size sheet of paper," Spielberg says. "I make my movies for a movie theater, and I like to imagine how big that screen is. But I also realize on a laptop on an airplane or, even worse, on an iPod, they are never going to see that character, and an element of the story will be lost." Whatever is lost on the smaller screen, DVD has become, in Smith's words, "historically the final record of your movie. That's the one people watch over and over." Rodriguez has said that the "real versions" of his movies are the extended, unrated ones on DVD.

So what can lure us to a movie theater? One thought: better movies! But by better, most directors mean "more sophisticated technically." Because with Star Wars in 1977, Lucas spurred another revolution: the triumph of the special-effecty, kid-friendly fantasy blockbuster. With space-age technique and retro, '40s-serial content, the film made so much money, it seduced the studios and fired the imaginations of directors. "The great thing about computerized effects," says Spielberg, "is that now we can do anything our imaginations tell us." Absolutely--if your imagination runs to dinosaurs and space aliens. And no question, those critters sell tickets. All five of last year's top worldwide grossers were fantasies, and all but one (The Chronicles of Narnia) a sequel or a remake.

In the brave new digital world, form is defining content. Because the toys are so cool, directors make movies to exploit their technical possibilities. That's why James Cameron, after doing Titanic, the all-time top grosser, stopped making feature films to shoot underwater documentaries with his favorite new toy, the 3-D camera. Going back to his old camera, he told ComingSoon.net "just seemed like going back from a car to a bicycle." Battle Angel, his first feature since 1997, will be shown in 3-D. (And yes, with the funny glasses.) Lucas is planning to release all six Star Wars episodes in 3-D as well.

That's one future of movies--IMAX-size extravaganzas you can see only in a movie house. It's a throwback to the Cinerama and CinemaScope the studios used against the first home-viewing medium, TV.

But Shyamalan has an even more radical--or counterrevolutionary--idea. "Let's say you can see any movie you want anytime. You can see it on a phone in the toilet when it opens," he says. "Well, somebody like me is going to go to somebody like Warner Bros. and say, 'I want to make a movie but only for the movie theaters. How much money will you give me to make a movie like that?' And they'll do the math and say, 'We'll give you $20 million.' And someone like me is going to say, 'O.K., I'm in.' Well, one of these someones is going to be successful at it. And people will go see it and fall in love with it and tell everybody, 'Hey, did you see that movie? It's only playing in the movie theaters!' And it's going to be magic."

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles, Cathy Booth Thomas/Austin
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/pr...172229,00.html





Worst. High-Definition. Ever.

MovieBeam Review
Ben Drawbaugh

I recently got a chance to test MovieBeam without paying the activation fee. In the end MovieBeam foot the bill for shipping as well.

I will admit that my expectations were not very high and I am sorry to say that I am very disappointed. I was very excited when the package arrived and I rushed home to connect it to my HDTV and run it through it's paces. The best news is that the box worked fine with my Vonage VOIP phone. The bad news is that the Picture Quality was the worst HD I have ever seen, well maybe not the worst, but it is in contention.

The MovieBeam box is pretty cool, it is a light blue box with inviting text. It opens easily and the first thing you see is a easy setup sheet like a new PC. The box comes with everything you need except a HDMI cable, which is available as a accessory. The first thing after you connect all the wires that the box wants to do is to phone home. So I ran a wire to my Vonage box and after turning off the bandwidth saver on Vonage.com the first step completed successfully. The next step was to adjust the antenna, the antenna is easily assembled and kinda cool looking, I hid it behind a picture frame and the meter indicated an 85 without any adjustments. The last step of setup was a short movie explaining the service and how important it was to not unplug the MovieBeam STB.

Now that the setup is complete I browsed through the interface, the menu's were intuitive, cool looking and relatively fast. Keep in mind that I tolerate a HDTiVo, so everything seems fast compared to it. The movie previews start fast, but you quickly realize that the selection is not that great. There are 100 movies out of the box and only 7 are available in HD, but none of them are new movies. It reminds me of the selection of DIRECTV's HD PPV, except even older.

The biggest surprise is that MovieBeam requires HDMI to watch the HD movies. It doesn't support DVI ( I called and confirmed it wasn't supported) and it doesn't give you the option to down-rez. The HDMI to DVI cable that came with my HDTiVo works fine at 480p, but does not give me access to the HD content. The software is programmed to check for HDMI and if it isn't there you don't see any HD options anywhere. If you have HDMI you can see the "HD Showcase" under "Find Movies". Since I wasn't able to try it with my 2 year old Mitsubishi WS55813 I bothered my next door neighbor that just bought a 50" Sony SXRD(KDF-E50A10) complete with a HDMI port, so I took the MovieBeam STB to his house to check out some HD. My neighbor is no HD connoisseur but his reaction was the same as mine; surprised at how bad it could look. Although he wasn't sure what was wrong with what he saw, I knew right away. The movie was so compressed that all the scenes suffered from compression artifacts, even scenes that were almost completely still. The compression was unbearable and even if it did work on my TV, I would be sending it back. The movie was "Deep Blue Sea", this scene was a simple profile shot before the transition and with nothing moving. The blocks you see in his cheeks were present in all skin tones. This is by far worse than any compression I have witnessed from DIRECTV or due to local affiliates multicasting their OTA feeds. I have seem some fantastic examples of WM9 HD clips on my MCE so there is no doubt in my mind that they simply cranked up the compression far too much.

In the end the review is right on par with the prediction I made when MovieBeam was first announced. The product is so close, yet so far away. If they don't start to bundle this service with other products and offer higher quality (selection and PQ) movies there is no way that they will ever acquire a large user base.
http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/03/15/moviebeam-review/


















Until next week,

- js.


















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