[JackSpratts]

"My name is Rickard, and I am a pirate!" – Rickard Falkvinge


"I'm doing it just as a private person. Internet is the world's best music library." – Ivar Wenster


"We want an apology from the police and from the Justice Ministry, and we want our servers back." – Tobias Andersson


"Really what you're talking about is someone saying, 'Look we've put something on your computer and it might go screwy, so we're going to kind of check in every day'." – Lauren Weinstein
























Rampant Fileflation

Do newer formats "cost" more than mp3s?

In general the answer is, yes.

There has been a trend in "file costs" since Napster, and that trend has invariably been up.

Unless and until someone invents a new lossless codec that is much more efficient than the present codecs I don't see that upward trend reversing anytime soon. As a matter of fact with newer disc formats like multichannel high definition digital, file sizes may continue to increase.

The more one downloads the more one needs to upload to maintain good standing at file-sharing sites that require positive ratios. This has been well established for years, and it’s nothing new but since costs are measured in bits and not files, attaching an economic metaphor to a non-monetary trading transaction can be warranted.

Files are getting bigger, and while not everyone can appreciate the quality differences, everyone ultimately pays for it.

To those who observe that file-sharing is all "for free," here’s some news: it may be true that some people are not paying media companies directly in cash for songs, but they do pay media companies directly in cash for bandwidth, and there are storage and other related costs that they might not otherwise incur, so a more accurate description would be that the record company divisions of the media multinationals might not be receiving cash payments directly from file-sharers. Now that may not equal an actual loss, and I doubt it does and several studies indicate I’m right, but it’s a choice the labels have made in any event. The media companies have had ten years to come up with some system of automated payments and have declined every opportunity, but whether or not record company lobbyists do or don’t support mechanical payout systems is an irrelevancy for the trader facing increased file sizes. The fact is swappers do incur costs for sharing, and may actually pay for files with files, but if the files they want are more "expensive" than the files they have, if that price rise is recent and I think that it is, then I have no problem with applying the term inflation to the situation.

My Steve Miller CD "Your Saving Grace" for instance was once ripped at 128 kbs and came in at 32 megs for the lossy MP3 album. How did it sound? At the time, around 1999, it sounded pretty good actually. Seven years have passed and technology hasn’t exactly stood still so in 2006 a new lossless APE rip of that same CD has now swollen the size of the album to 203 megabytes. How does it sound? Pretty damn good actually. It's perfect perhaps, if one can believe the underlying claim that "lossless" is actually lossless, although I must confess I feel the act itself of ripping/encoding may introduce alien artifacts, but nevertheless it's take it or leave it today if that's the only rip around. Your choices certainly, but those are the only two if the owner of an ultra high-bit lossless file doesn't feel like transcoding it to a lower lossy one. Going then from 32 MB albums to albums where just one or two songs is that size is major fileflation no matter how you slice it.

That’s Progress

With my German-made Sennheiser HD 414s can I hear the difference? Sure, at the proper volume the APE is more transparent and detailed and I’m glad I have it. Is it worth it to me in terms of storage and transfer costs? Maybe. To everyone? Maybe not. Still, that's not really the issue. The need and desire for a specific quality is ultimately a very personal matter that won't change until one's circumstances (and hearing) do. The only questions I’m pondering are whether or not "prices" have increased, and as a result will traders find themselves increasingly having to "pay" more for files. The only reasonable answers I can think of are yes they have, and yes they will.

Distant Rumblings

Many of the homes in my area have odd, fenced-in platforms on their roofs. To the uninitiated they look like something a flamboyant gothic architect slapped on for whimsy. In truth they are nothing but. They exist for a more somber purpose: to allow owners to stand on their roofs and look out to sea without falling off. In the dangerous days before radios, search planes and 24 hour a day rescue services once a sailor left port there was little those left home could do but await his return. The ocean regarded schedules with contempt and sailors returned – if at all – at the pleasure of Neptune. These Victorian structures soon acquired the sobering name of "Widow's Walks" after so many grieving wives and mothers were seen waiting on them day after day, sometimes years after loved ones had failed to return. Thankfully most of the time those missing did come back, and joyful screams would issue from the gables, but all too often wrecks or illness captured the seafarer, and occasionally mishaps of a more sinister nature would bring them harm, like a shark's jaw or a pirate's club.

I wonder now if I stand on my roof will I be able to see through the mist to the offshore armada slowly making it's way west. From Stockholm and Copenhagen, from Helsinki to Tallinn comes news of a most extraordinary event: the founding of a new global political party, one dedicated solely to the legal overthrow of antiquated, culture crushing copyright laws, chains forged to enslave minds and serve the rich.

A small boat has landed on our shore, and has inspired one man. Will he be the spearhead of a great American movement, or will the grim inertia of 300 million people grind him down to a compromised ghost of his present self? And what of those left behind, the political widows and widowers, the mothers and fathers who don't understand the urgency, or even the nature of this impending change? Will the Pirate Party capture and uplift them, will they persevere and even thrive, or will they succumb to the onslaught of this upcoming cultural storm?

Crystals can take forever to grow. It requires a larger caloric transfer to change water from a 32-degree liquid to a 32-degree solid than it does to bring it from 34 degrees to 33. But once started the process can be explosively fast. Many people living in New England have gone to sleep near a shimmering lake only to wake up to a silent, frozen one. The desire to see justice done has been building since an imperious Judge named Marilyn Hall Patel shut down Napster in what became the first of a long line of desperate establishment maneuvers. That was five years ago and the low rumblings since may have been mistaken for a people sleeping but were most assuredly not. Drums have been beating and they have been heard even if their sound was masked by the greater yawns of apathy. This may or not be the time for an American Pirate Party, but don't mistake quiescence for inactivity. There is something good and powerful occurring beneath the corrupted gloss of big-money American politics and when it finally breaks through it will do so decisively, and unapologetically, and things my friends will not be the same.

Like resting by a frozen lake, and waking to one alive with waves.


















Enjoy,

Jack.





















June 10th, ’06







Swedes Protest Police Shutdown Of Web Site
Adam Ewing

Hundreds of people waving signs and skull-and-crossbones pirate flags demonstrated in Stockholm on Saturday against a police crackdown on a popular file-sharing Web site with millions of users worldwide.

Dozens of police officers conducted raids in 10 locations Wednesday, seizing servers and other computer equipment in their crackdown on The Pirate Bay site.

But the site was back up Saturday, and spokesman Tobias Andersson said it would be "bigger and better than ever."

"We want an apology from the police and from the Justice Ministry, and we want our servers back," Andersson said.

He said the site is now mirrored on other sites around the world.

"It will be much stronger now. If police shut down a site, these other sites will be there to keep Pirate Bay working."

The Pirate Bay, started in early 2004, has 10 million to 15 million users each day, Andersson said.

He said the people running The Pirate Bay were not responsible for a hacker attack that shut down the Web site of Sweden's national police on Thursday, but added there many Swedish file sharers probably were angry about the crackdown.

Police spokesman Lars Lindahl said Friday it was not clear who attacked the police site, which was running again Saturday.

The music, movie and software industries say pirated works cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales each year.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060604/...MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-





Swedish Culture Chief Comes Out Of The Closet: "I Share Files!"
TankGirl

Ivar Wenster, the culture chief of the Swedish city Karlskrona, might well be one of the first to-be-heroes of the Swedish Pirate movement. Not that he looks outwardly anymore charismatic or heroic than any other city clerk might look. But from the hundreds of thousands of Swedes serving in various state and city offices and establishment jobs, he seems to be the first one to have - excuse my French - the balls to break the atmosphere of fear and hypocracy surrounding the issue of filesharing. He has publicly confessed being a filesharer and thereby automatically risks a two year jail sentence according to the new strict copyright laws of Sweden. A police report has already been filed.

The defiance of the Swedish people to play the copyright game by the rules set by the international media cartels and accepted by their own elected parliament has taken by surprise both the cartels and the Swedish government. The Swedish piracy drama, culminating around the high profile torrent site Pirate Bay and the group of tech-savvy political activists behind it, has quickly become an international headline item. The websites of both the Swedish police and the Swedish government have crashed under online demonstrations. And the international interest on the events is just growing. Because just like the Swedes, the citizens of all modern Internet-enabled nations love to share files with each other and keep doing it on daily basis - despite it being strictly forbidden in their copyright laws.

When cultural chief Ivar Wenster leaves his city office, he becomes a private person with a serious interest in music. Like millions of other music lovers, he has found out that Internet is the best music library there is. Not a particular online shop - with today's prices he could not afford to pay for all the music he consumes - but the Internet as a whole, with all of its diverse and mostly free sources of music. He is furious about the new copyright Swedish copyright law that is criminalizes his hobby. He knows he is not a criminal. He is not ready to give up the best music library in the world. He is not willing to settle for a strictly controlled, expensive shopping mall how the media cartels would like the Internet to be. Being a culture chief he knows the difference between a mall and a library.

From the legislator's point of view the situation has become nightmarish. How to enforce laws that criminalize tens of percents of a population, including more or less the entire younger generation? How to pick the exemplary punishable 'copyright criminals' from among the masses of schoolchildren, students, pensioners and normal, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens? How to keep the masses fearing to do something they already love to do and know how to do? It sounds as hopeless an effort as to deny sex from teenagers with a law.

The last round of European copyright laws, tighter than any of the previous ones, was hammered down the national parliaments in a hasty and undemocratic fashion to say the least. The practical impact of the laws was not explained to the citizens until it was too late to do something about it. In interviews the responsible ministers, many of them with poor knowledge of the Internet and modern technologies, were often confused about what would actually be allowed and not allowed under the new laws. Their confusion is understandable. They did not actually write or thing through these technically complex and obscure laws themselves. The media cartel lobbyists helped them to do that. It was a three-way deal between media cartels, copyright organizations and governments. The glaringly absent party from the negotiation table was the consumer, despite being the primary target of the laws.

No alternative models of royalty collection were presented to the citizens. No alternatives regarding fair use were given to the citizens to discuss and choose freely from. No possibility was given and no time was reserved to have an open, democratic discussion on the principles and the practical details. There was no democracy involved. From the media cartel point it all went down almost too well to be true. And so it did in almost the whole Europe - apart from one little northern country with 9 million citizens called Sweden.

Sweden is a country with a long democratic tradition and a long history of political and military independence. Being an ex-superpower themselves, they have not even feared to defy the superpowers in political issues. They don't like foreign interests dictating them how to live - even how to live on the Internet. While being a modern and international high-tech nation they are at the same time conscious and proud of their national identity and independent history. Justice Minister Thomas Bodström was quick to deny any U.S. influences behind the Pirate Bay raid - he knew how the Swedes would react to it - but the trail was too obvious and the PR damage was quickly done. In the public eye he is already one of the bad guys of the story - a puppet of U.S. media interests. The political pressure is mounting on him and may eventually cost him his job.

Even worse are things with Henrik Pontén, the lawyer head of the media cartel financed antipiracy 'bureau' Antipiratbyrån. Pontén and his bureau are so widely hated in Sweden that Antipiratbyrån had to shut down their website when things started to heat up after the Hollywood-style Pirate Bay raid. He has tried a few times publicly to justify the hardline police action on copyright issues but the efforts have ended up into PR disasters. The Swedish media shows little sympathy to him, and the reader forums of the newspapers filling up with angry posts protesting police action and defending people's right to private filesharing. Many are wondering why he as a media cartel representative is allowed to be visibly present in police operations.

By coming out of his filesharing closet Ivar Wenster brings into mind the famous lonely Chinese protester standing with a plastic bag on the Tiananmen Square and facing the deadly fury of the military tanks in front of him. The media is watching. The Swedish people are watching. Everybody knows that the establishment controls the tanks, and everybody has freshly learned that the media cartels control the establishment. Those with the power in their hands can still drive over Ivar Wenster if they wish, but the political price of such action might turn out to be high in a country where filesharers have already their own party, soaring in popularity, with only three months to go to the Parliamentary election.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22752





Here is my quickish translation of the remarkable speech given by Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of Pirate Party, in the Pirate Bay support demonstration in Stockholm 3.6.2006.
TankGirl


There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Friends, citizens, pirates:

There is nothing new under the Sun.

My name is Rickard Falkvinge, and I am the leader of the Pirate Party.

During the past week we have seen a number of rights violations taking place. We have seen the police misusing their arresting rights. We have seen innocent parties being harmed. We have seen how the media industry operates. We have seen how the politicians up to the highest levels bend backwards to protect the media industry.

This is scandalous to highest degree. This is the reason why we are here today.

The media industry wants us to believe that this is a question about payment models, about a particular professional group getting paid. They want us to believe that this is about their dropping sales figures, about some dry statistics. But that is only an excuse. This is really about something totally else.

To understand today’s situation in the light of the history, we must go back 400 years - to the time when the Church had the monopoly over both culture and knowledge. Whatever the Church said, was the truth. That was pyramid communication. You had one person at the top talking to the many under him in the pyramid. Culture and knowledge had a source, and that source was the Church.

And God have mercy on those who dared to challenge the culture and knowledge monopoly of the Church! They were subjected to the most horrible trials that man could envision at the time. Under no circumstances did the Church allow its citizens to spread information on their own. Whenever it happened, the Church applied its full judicial powers to obstruct, to punish, to harass the guilty ones.

There is nothing new under the Sun.

Today we know that the only right thing to happen for the society to evolve was to let the knowledge go free. We know now that Galileo Galilei was right. Even if he had to puncture a monopoly of knowledge.

We are speaking here about the time when the Church went out in its full force and ruled that it was unnecessary for its citizens to learn to read or to write, because the priest could tell them anyway everything they needed to know. The Church understood what it would mean for them to lose their control.

Then came the printing press.

Suddenly there was not only a source of knowledge to learn from, but a number of them. The citizens – who at this time had started to learn to read – could take their own part of the knowledge without being sanctioned. The Church went mad. The royal houses went mad. The British Royal Court went as far as to make a law that allowed the printing of books only to those print owners who had a special license from the Royal Court. Only they were allowed to multiply knowledge and culture to the citizens.

This law was called "copyright".

Then a couple of centuries passed, and we got the freedom of press. But everywhere the same old model of communication was still being used: one person talking to the many. And this fact was utilized by the State who introduced the system of “responsible publishers”.

The citizens could admittedly pick pieces of knowledge to themselves, but there always had to be somebody who could be made responsible if – what a horrible thought – somebody happened to pick up a piece of wrong knowledge.

And this very thing is undergoing a fundamental change today - because the Internet does not follow the old model anymore. We not only download culture and knowledge. We upload it to others at the same time. We share files. The knowledge and the culture have amazingly lost their central point of control.

And as this is the central point of my speech, let me lay it out in some detail.

Downloading is the old mass media model where there is a central point of control, a point with a ‘responsible publisher’ – somebody who can be brought to court, forced to pay and so on. A central point of control from where everybody can download knowledge and culture, a central point that can grant rights and take them away as needed and as wanted.

Culture and knowledge monopoly. Control.

Filesharing involves simultaneous uploading and downloading by every connected person. There is no central point of control at all; instead we have a situation where the culture and the information flow organically between millions of different people.

Something totally different, something totally new in the history of human communications. There is no more a person that can be made responsible if wrong knowledge happens to spread.

This is the reason why the media corporations talk so much about ‘legal downloading’. Legal. Downloading. It is because they want to make it the only legal way of things for people to pick up items from a central point that is under their control. Downloading, not filesharing.

And this is precisely why we will change those laws.

During the passed week we have seen how far an acting party is prepared to go to prevent the loss of his control. We saw the Constitution itself being violated. We saw what sort of methods of force and attacks on personal integrity the police is prepared to apply, not to fight crime, but in an obvious intention to harass those involved and those who have been close to them.

There is nothing new under the Sun, and the history always repeats itself. This is not about a group of professionals getting paid. This is about control over culture and knowledge. Because whoever controls them, controls the world.

The media industry has tried to make us feel shame, to say that what we are doing is illegal, that we are pirates. They try to roll a stone over us. Take a look around today – see how they have failed. Yes, we are pirates. But whoever believes that it is shameful to be a pirate, has got it wrong. It is something we are proud of.

That is because we have already seen what it means to be without central control. We have already tasted, felt and smelled the freedom of being without a top-down controlled monopoly of culture and knowledge. We have already learned how to read and how to write.

And we do not intend to forget how to read and how to write, even if yesterday’s media interests do not find it acceptable.

MY NAME IS RICKARD, AND I AM A PIRATE!
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22745





News From The North
The TankGirl Diaries




Ahoy! The pirate ship is sailing again!

Pirate Bay is back online running on new servers located in Holland. Despite the forced move into a new hosting service in another country the site seems to have succesfully restored virtually all of its indexing data from the backups, and the functionality of the site is also being quickly restored. The first new video posted to the site was a control camera capture from the police raid that shut down the site three days ago.

Demonstrations in Stockholm and Gothenburg

Support demonstrations for Pirate Bay are taking place today in the two largest cities of Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg (Göteborg). The demonstrators, backed by four official political organizations, demand the returning of the seized servers, a stop to all raid-related police inquiries, destruction of the DNA samples taken and answers to a number of tough questions from the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who was responsible for initiating the Pirate Bay raid.

A 17-year old hacker took down the Swedish police website

Newspaper Aftonbladet has found out that a 17 year old high school student was responsible for the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that took down the website of the Swedish police for over a day. The hacker told Aftonbladet that it took an hour from him to organize the attack. Thousands of compromised 'zombie computers' were used in the attack, and the effect of the attack was further amplified by the curious surfers from around the world who went to browse the website from the links posted into popular sites like Digg.

Aftonbladet: "Generation War"

"The entertainment industry has no chances against the youth", writes journalist Lena Mellin in her Analys (Analysis) column in the large Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. "The shutdown of the pirate site Pirate Bay has led to a generation war. On the other side are the old people and the law. On the other side are the young people and the Internet." Her view is supported by the official participation of several political youth organizations in today's support demonstrations for the Pirate Pay. Many well-known younger politicians of the established Swedish parties have already openly challenged the official copyright policies of their respective parties.

Pirates recover faster than the Swedish police

Newspaper Aftonbladet organized a humorous online poll asking people to guess which of the two websites, Pirate Bay or the Swedish Police, will manage to come back online first. Indicating the huge public interest in the pirate drama, nearly 70,000 people participated in the poll, with 93 % of the people putting their bets on Pirate Bay. And indeed, at the time of this posting, the Pirate Bay website is online while the website of the Swedish police is still down.

Pirate Party keeps growing at record rate

With demonstrations underway in Stockholm and Göteborg, new people keep joining the Swedish Pirate Party literally by the minute. The member count is 4958 at the moment of this posting. The Party will need 225,000 votes in the parliamentary election to be held in September to pass the 4 percent thresold required for parliamentary representation. This is not an unrealistic goal considering there are an estimated 1,3 million active filesharers in Sweden, a country of 9 million inhabitants.

Led by a charismatic 34-year old IT specialist Rickard Falkvinge from Sollentuna, the party has set 10 candidates to its national candidate list, including the leader of the party, plus 12 local candidates. The party has only three issues on its agenda (in English, worth reading!): a radical reform of the copyright law, abolishment of the patent system and the securing of people's right to privacy. In the relatively split Swedish political field even a small number of parliament members might give them a good strategic position to advance these goals.

Peaceful pirate demonstration in Stockholm

Swedish Television reported about 500 people participating in the demonstration. In his speech one of the Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij, asked the Swedish officials to calm down and stop fighting against the Internet. "It is a battle you are never going to win", he said.

According to blog reports the demonstration went peacefully and in the spirit of unity despite the diverse political groups being represented. Also the police was reported behaving friendly and peacefully.

Pirate Party keeps growing

Pirate Party's member count has just gone over 5000. It is now approaching in size the Greens (Miljöpartiet) who have 17 seats in the 349-seat Swedish Parliament. It took 4.6% of votes in the last parliamentary election for the Greens to get their 17 seats.

Pirate Bay to operate from four countries

According to Pirate Party, Pirate Bay will operate in future from four different countries - Holland, Russia, Ukraine plus one unnamed EU country. The sites will mirror each other so that a possible takedown of one site should not even cause any service breaks for the customers. The Pirate Bay staff called out for help on Internet after the police raid, and "when we told people that we are from Pirate Bay, Sweden, needing help with hardware and hosting, offers of help started to flow in immediately. Pirate Bay is now stronger than it has ever been!"

Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:

Swedish government website collapses

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that the website of the Swedish Government has collapsed. The problem seems to be so serious that the Government representative does not expect them to get it up overnight even if they are constantly working on it. The website serves as a portal to all government departments, including the Foreign Ministery and Immigration Officials.

Antipiracy Bureau goes voluntarily offline

Dagens Nyheter also reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization financed by the media cartels will shut down its homepage for the moment "because it is rather lively right now out there in the Internet", in the words of Henrik Pontén, the nationally hated lawyer head of the organization, responsible for the raid against Pirate Bay.

700 people in demonstrations

An estimated 500 people in Stockholm and 200 people in Gothenburg took part in the Pirate Bay support demonstrations organized by the Pirate Party and three political youth organizations. The Swedish Television was present, interviewing participants. Image galleries from the demonstrations here and here.

Pirate Party soon larger than the Green Party

Pirate Party's member count keeps soaring. At the time of this posting there are 5215 members in the party - up from around 2000 before the police raid on Pirate Bay. At this rate it will take only days for the Pirate Party to become larger than the Green Party, already represented in the Swedish parliament.

Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:

400,000 Swedes in Antipiracy Bureau's secret register

There's a new piracy-related scandal brewing in Sweden. Newspaper Aftonbladet reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization, is keeping a secret encrypted register in its Stockholm offices holding detailed records of the download activities of some 400,000 Swedes. Such registers are illegal in Sweden, where personal privacy is highly appreciated by the law and guarded by state officials. Göran Gräslund, the director of Swedish Data Inspection office has promised to take a closer look at the issue. "Antipiratbyrån having the IP addresses of people in encrypted form is unlikely to make any legal difference", he says. "The personal information is still there and can be decoded back to plaintext as wished."

Swedish press siding with people in the "Net War"

Despite the approaching FIFA World Cup football tournament (a big media event in Europe), it is the unfolding piracy drama that has captured the main headlines in the Swedish press. The press is showing little or no sympathy to Antipiratbyrån and to the media cartels financing its operations. The online reader forums of the newspapers are filling up with hundreds of furious posts from the readers protesting the illegal police action against Pirate Bay and demanding the resigning of the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who seems to have been the key official to fold under the pressure from the U.S. government and the American movie cartel MPAA.

Government website comes back online, police website still down

The web portal of the Swedish government came back online this morning, bringing some relief to the various Swedish officials who need it to access their respective data systems. The website of the Swedish Police is still down under a continuing DDoS attack. Earlier yesterday Antipiratbyrån voluntarily went offline, obviously to avoid an inevitable crashing or worse under the attacks coming from the Internet.

Latest developments from Sweden, June 5.

Cultural Chief confesses filesharing publicly, defying the new copyright law

Swedish TV reports that the Cultural Chief of Karlskrona, a city of 61,000 people in southern Sweden, reports himself voluntarily to the police, confessing publicly that he downloads music from the Internet. He says he started filesharing as a protest against the new stricter copyright law in Sweden, to come into effect 1. of July. He emphasizes that he is filesharing only from his home, not from workplace. "I'm doing it just as a private person. Internet is the world's best music library." According to the new law he risks a two year jail sentence.

Swedish Security police to investigate Government website crashdown

Dagens Nyheter reports that the Swedish Security Police will make a criminal inquiry regarding the recent crashdown of Swedish Government's website. The police is already busy investigating the crashdown of its own webpages, back online after a two day's downtime due to DDoS attacks.

Digged! Pirate Captain's speech gets international attention

P2P Consortium, a 'roof' website linking numerous p2p communities together, gets to taste the dreaded Digg Effect as the English version of Rickard Falkvinge's (Swedish Pirate Party leader) inspired speech from the Stockholm demonstration found its way to Digg's front page in less than a day from its posting. Digg comments available here. The speech has also started to spread as copies in Blogosphere. The voice of Pirate Captain will be heard by an international audience of tens of thousands!

Latest developments from Sweden, June 6.:

Swedish police prepares for National Day unrest

Today is the National Day of Sweden, and the Swedish police is preparing for violent clashes between various political youth groups - mainly the neo-nazis and the radical leftist antifascistic movement, both to have their own meetings in the centrum of Stockholm. An additional worry for the police are the Net activists who managed to shut down both the police and the government websites in the aftermath of the Pirate Bay raid a week ago. The situation in downtown Stockholm is bound to be tense tonight, and the police has told in advance that they will be present with a large riot control force.

Green Party echoes Pirate Party's criticism in filesharing issues

The approaching Parliamentary election starts to show in the Swedish political discussion, even if the large government parties have not yet really started their own campaigns. Peter Eriksson, the spokesman of the Green Party (Miljöpartiet), attacks in today's Expressen Justice Minister Thomas Bodström and his views on Pirate Bay. "It is totally absurd to try to stop new technology with police and repressive laws", he tells Expressen, echoing the criticical voices of the popular Pirate Party. He also addresses filesharing issues in his blog in sharp terms, demanding Swedes to accept the new technology and to start thinking about new ways to compensate copyright owners. The credibility of the Greens as a pro-p2p party is questionable though as they have earlier voted for the new stricter copyright laws and also negotiated possible minister arrangements in a post-election government with the anti-p2p Social Democrats. A more likely explanation is that the party is alarmed by the record fast growth of the new Pirate Party. Should the Pirates manage to attract enough younger voters, the Green Party might be left under the 4 % vote thresold required for parliamentary presence.

New study: every second Swedish schoolchild downloads from Internet

Aftonbladet has just released a new study revealing that every second child in the age group 10-16 is downloading copyrighted material from Internet. Children typically have their own computers in their own rooms, with parents having little idea of what their offspring is doing online. The study also shows that less than 10 % of children have bought music online - most prefer to get their online music for free. However, about 40 % had spent money on CDs during the month before the study.

Pirate Party member lists circulating on Internet?

Aftonbladet reports that copies of Pirate Party's member lists are circulating on Internet. The newspaper claims the lists to be genuine but hasn't given the Pirate Party a chance to verify it. With the election approaching, and with Pirate Party's membership tripled within a week (current member count is 5910) misinformation and scare campaigns are a real possibility.

Latest development, 6.6.2006:

Swedish Green Party now officially wants to legalize 'downloading'

...and it did not take long for the Swedish Green Party (Miljöpartiet) to make legalizing of personal 'downloading' an official campaign issue. This goes straight against the political program of their most likely political partner in the next government, the influential Social Democrats, who have been instrumental in bringing the new tougher copyright laws into Sweden. It is worth noting though that the Greens talk about 'downloading' only which suggests that they are not ready to legalize modern p2p software where uploading is an essential part of the network functionality. And as noted earlier, the credibility of the Greens in this issue is not high, but the development itself is remarkable. The mere possibility of Pirates entering the Swedish parliament is changing the established political field in relation to the filesharing issue.

Latest developments, 6.6.2006

Media game getting dirty

At this stage it seems likely that the news of a Pirate Party memberlist 'circulating in Internet', first claimed by journalist Robert Triches in Aftonbladet, was a fabricated smear and scare effort by the journalist himself and his unknown background forces. The journalist never could deliver this 'list' to Pirate Party for verification; there were no signs of hacking on Party's computer, and despite some 100 or so of the finest pirates looking for this list from Internet they could not find a sign of it. Now if these guys cannot find something from the Internet, it probably is not there!

Pirate Party leader: "Greens are cheating filesharers"

Alarmed by Pirate Party's sensational membership growth and facing a very real risk of dropping below the 4 % vote thresold and thereby having to leave the parliament, the Swedish Greens quickly jumped to the p2p bandwagon and included the legalization of 'downloading' into their official campaign items. In reality they are not promising anything beyond the corporate distribution model, says Pirate Party's Rickard Falkvinge. There are no p2p networks with downloaders only. It's all about downloading and uploading, and only if you legalize both, you are really legalizing filesharing, he emphasizes.

95 % of pirates will have a vote in the election

Bernt Granbacke, one of the many volunteering Pirate Party field workers, gives some interesting statistics about party membership in an interview for Norlänska Socialdemokraten. He tells that the party grows nationwide at a rate of 20-100 new members per day, and that 95 % of party members are in a legal voting age. Perhaps surprisingly the members are not predominantly young people but mostly from the age group 30-50 years. When asked about the position of the party in the traditional left-right axis, Granbacke answers with a question: "Where would you like to have us?"

Election specialist: "Filesharing will be one of the main election themes"

A nationally respected statistics professor and election specialist Peter Esaiasson has already gone on record saying that filesharing will be one of the main themes of these parliamentary elections. Greens have already responded to the signals and made their own p2p-friendly facelift, and there may be pressures in other parties to do something similar.

7.6.2006

Court decision: 26-year Swede to pay fines for sharing a movie on DC

Aftonbladet reports that a lower court in Gothenburg has sentenced a 26-year old Swedish man to pay 16,000 Swedish crowns (1735 euros / 2221 USD) as fines for sharing a movie on a Direct Connect hub. He was the third filesharer sentenced under the new Swedish copyright law, and all sentences so far have been fines only. Media industry appealed earlier one of the sentences to a higher court which refused to consider the appeal.

From the practical point of view it is important that the filesharing punishments have been fines only. This means that the crime is considered so small that it does not give the police a permission to force the ISPs to identify the people behind IP numbers in filesharing networks. This is a remarkable security factor for the Swedes, one of the most active filesharing nations in the world. US-style John Doe cases which the media cartels have used actively to extort money from American filesharers are out of question in Sweden.

In a related reader poll in newspaper Expressen 85 % of people consideres it wrong to sentence filesharers while 15 % accepts it.

8.6.2006

Larger parties bend to support filesharing under political pressure

Following the example of the Swedish Greens, the leaders of two larger Swedish parties, Moderate Party (Moderaterna) and Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet), have now also come out and declared a change in their filesharing politics, reports Expressen. Both parties are now willing to review the new strict Swedish copyright laws so that they would allow domestic filesharing, despite the same parties voting for these strict laws just a year ago. "We cannot go chasing after a whole generation of young people", says Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of Moderate Party. "The idea was to address commercial piracy, not to chase private persons", says Lars Ohly, the Swedish Left Party leader. Both party leaders told that they had changed their minds after seeing the recent police actions against filesharers.

By challenging the established parties with their 3-point agenda the Pirate Party has already managed to cause a major shift in the Swedish political climate regarding filesharing. The Moderates are the second largest party in the Swedish parliament with their 55 seats; Left Party has 28 seats; the Greens, who joined the p2p bandwagon earlier, have 17 seats. Together their 100 seats represent a third of the Swedish parliamentary power. And all this has happened in just a couple of days, with three months still to go to the election. Filesharing will be one of the central election themes in Sweden this time.

The main catalyst for the massive political shift has of course been the soaring popularity of Pirate Party. Now the established parties have realized that they risk losing votes to the Pirates not only from among younger voters but from all age groups in a country where filesharing is a national hobby. As for the young generation, results from a large national Youth Poll (mimicking Parliamentary election with the same candidates) were published yesterday. The established parties were going fast downhill while the great winners were Swedish Democrates (Sverigedemokraterna), a radically nationalistic right-wing party, and Pirate Party, which got 4.7 % of the votes - enough to take it to the Parliament in the real election. However, the poll was done before the Pirate Bay raid - an event that sent Pirate Party's popularity skyrocketing. The party has tripled its member count since the raid, now at 6324 members.

8.6.2006

Three out of four first time voters support filesharing

Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan has just released results of a poll charting the opinions of first time voters on the filesharing issue. The results show that three out of four first time voters support filesharing, legal or not, and the support comes similarly from political left and right. "Anybody who is doing business with copyrighted material has reason to be worried", says Nicklas Källebring, an opinion expert from the Temo institute behind the poll.

The participants were asked whether they feel it is ok to download files from Internet even if it is illegal, to which 38 % answered yes without reservations and 39 % answered yes with some reservations.

"It is quite bizarre that we have tried to criminalize something that is a part of everyday life of young people", comments the results Ida Gabrielsson, a spokeswoman for Young Left, a youth organization of the Swedish Left Party. Two out of three of her party supporters gave an unreserved 'yes' to filesharing in the poll. Usually the thresold for people to admit supporting something illegal is very high, even in opinion polls. The filesharing issue seems to be an exception to this rule. "Obviously many voters think that this particular law is extremely stupid", says Temo's representative.

The poll was done in May, before the MPAA-initiated Pirate Bay raid, a landmark event in the Swedish Net War.

Broadband tax? "No thanks", say both pirates and antipirates

Two high-level managers from Swedish Radio came out yesterday with a compromise proposition of a broadband tax to solve the Swedish filesharing controversy. The proposition was quickly rejected both by the pirates and by the antipiracy organization Antipiratbyrån. A reader poll in Aftonbladet confirms that the public does not like the idea either: 80 % of readers oppose proposed tax, with 15 % supporting it.

"The problem with this kind of solution is that filesharing is a very widespread phenomenon. Most people are not downloading well-known bands but smaller, unsigned bands. The tax money would end up to the pockets of the well-known bands though", says Tobias Andersson from Pirate Bureau. "Yet another tax sounds like a classical Swedish solution. I would instead like to see our politicians stand firmly behind the new stricter laws and keep communicating to people that it is illegal to download copyrighted material", says Henrik Pontén, the head of media cartel controlled Antipiracy Bureau.

In the present pre-election opinion climate the politicians do not seem to be ready to pay the price of standing firmly behind the media cartel friendly laws. Three established parties have already officially indicated to be willing to legalize personal filesharing - a major political achievement from Pirate Party, founded only six months ago.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...ad.php?t=22742





On a Russian Site, Cheap Songs With a Backbeat of Illegality
Thomas Crampton

Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, but with a catch. The site may well be illegal.

Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3.com offers a vast catalog of music that includes artists not normally authorized for sale online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction of the cost of services like the iTunes Music Store owned by Apple Computer.

The songs are sold by the megabyte instead of individually, and an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents a song on iTunes. And unlike songs purchased on iTunes and other commercial services, songs downloaded with AllofMP3's software can be copied without restrictions.

It is an offer that may seem too good to be true, but in Russia — a country that is frequently cited by news media and content owners as rife with digital piracy and theft of intellectual property — courts have so far allowed the site to operate, despite efforts by the record labels Warner, Universal and EMI to aid prosecutors there.

So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that United States trade negotiators warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization.

Meanwhile, consumers are flocking to the site, particularly in Britain, where a survey in March ranked AllofMP3 second only to iTunes in popularity among self-described music enthusiasts surveyed by XTN Data.

Use in the United States reached 345,000 unique visitors in April, an increase of 57 percent over January but a tiny fraction of the 19 million that used the iTunes software, according to comScore Networks, a service that monitors the habits of Internet users.

Music industry officials say AllofMP3 is a large-scale commercial piracy site.

"It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is based in Washington.

People associated with AllofMP3, which lists no telephone contacts on its Web site, declined to comment for this article when tracked down by domain-name ownership records kept by VeriSign. Those records show that Ivan Fedorov of Media Services in Moscow is the owner.

AllofMP3.com says on the site that it can legally sell to any user based in Russia and warns foreign users to verify the legality within their countries for themselves. The site also features a wide selection of Russian music, but it is in English, with prices listed in American dollars.

AllofMP3 asserts its legality by citing a license issued by a royalty collecting society, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, known as R.O.M.S. for its Russian initials.

In most countries, the collecting societies that receive royalty payments for the sale or use of artistic works need reciprocal agreements with overseas copyright holders, according to agencies that represent rights holders.

According to Russia's 1993 copyright law, however, collecting societies are permitted to act on behalf of rights holders who have not authorized them to do so. The result is that numerous organizations in Russia receive royalties for the use of foreign artistic works, but never pass on that money to the artists or music companies, according to the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organization for collecting societies.

"These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists," said Eric Baptiste, director general of the confederation, commonly referred to by the acronym Cisac.

Mr. Baptiste said that in 2004, the confederation expelled R.O.M.S., the collecting society associated with AllofMP3, because it had issued licenses to sell foreign music without agreements from the right holders. R.O.M.S. defended its actions as legal.

"Not a single court says we are illegal, and anything Cisac says is only their opinion," said Oleg Nezus, director general of R.O.M.S. "Unless a court says otherwise, our actions are legal."

Struan Robertson, a Britain-based senior associate in the technology practice of the Pinsent Masons law firm, said that argument did not provide legal cover for consumers who bought music from the site.

"If the music industry says the site is unlicensed, then consumers are buying pirated music," Mr. Robertson said. "In practical terms, however, the chances of an individual consumer being sued for it are very slim."

AllofMP3.com is at the top of the office of the United States trade representative's latest list of the world's most notorious piracy markets.

"Improvement of intellectual property enforcement is critical to our support for Russia's World Trade Organization accession, and AllofMP3 is clearly something they need to address," said Victoria A. Espinel, assistant United States trade representative for intellectual property.

Vladimir Dragunov, a Moscow-based legal adviser to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a group that represents major and independent music labels, said the District Court of Moscow rejected a case against AllofMP3 on May 16 on technical grounds, but the decision was being appealed. Sergei Marchenko, a spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor, said his office was continuing to investigate AllofMP3.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/te...y/05music.html





U.K. Music Industry To Sue AllofMP3.com
Jo Best

The U.K. music-industry trade organization, the BPI, is to sue popular Russian download site AllofMP3.com, claiming it is not sharing any of its profits with the artists whose music it sells.

AllofMP3.com sells singles and albums for download in a fashion similar to rival iTunes, but AllofMP3's offerings typically are much less expensive--1 pound (about $1.87) per album versus iTunes' typical price of 7.99 pounds ($14.85).

The site says it complies with Russian laws and does make royalty payments to the country's rights-holders organization. Not so, says the BPI, which maintains that all of the site's claims to legal operation are false and that no artists have received royalties from the site to date.

As a result, the BPI is now intending to take AllofMP3.com through the U.K. courts.

A representative for the BPI said the organization's lawyers won't be going after any U.K. users of the site: "While it remains illegal to use the site, we aren't interested in taking users to task--what we are doing is targeting the site itself."

According to recent research by XTN, AllofMP3.com is the second-most-used download site in the U.K., behind Apple Computer's iTunes.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+music+indus...3-6080988.html





Can Oink be far behind?

MPAA Takes Aim At Another BitTorrent Search Site

isohunt.com feels the heat
Tobias van der Wal

THE MPAA continues to reach out and send armies of lawyers to the owners of any website making use of BitTorrent and or other file-sharing systems.

The latest victim is Canadian-owned search engine website isohunt.com, which has been sued and labelled a pirate by the association.

As we noted in March, here, IsoHunt attempted to create a coalition in preparation to fight the evil empire on the grounds that the website was a mere search engine, and not a willful pirate site, and thus is doing nothing illegal.

Within the IsoHunt forums Gary Fung, the 23 year-old operator of IsoHunt, said, "the MPAA's allegation that our service is for the sole purpose of helping copyright infringement of their movies is plainly wrong."

For its part, the MPAA claimed Fung had, "chosen not to enter into any negotiations with anybody, but rather to steal… for [his] own ends."

The statement was rather curious, as Fung demonstrated by publishing correspondece he had with the MPAA back in January of 2005, on forums here.

Recently Fung was interviewed on the Canada’s CBC, where he warned the world of, "the Internet taking over phone networks and TV and movies and music, (and) all forms of media."

Fung finds the MPAA's attempts to stop the use of BitTorrent and file-sharing protocols futile. There is, he says, "no way to stop the technology."

He suggests distribution systems like BitTorrent could allow Hollywood to "reach a much bigger audience at a much cheaper cost."

Fung declined to make a statement to the INQUIRER for what he said were legal reasons.

In the meantime, isohunt.com remains open for business, and is now enjoying a slew of new users and seeds to download from.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32255





Platterpush

Music Sharing Site Promises To Help Artists

Lala.com to allow CD trading for just $1 plus shipping, pledges to give a fifth of sales to all musicians.

A new Web site that aims to transform music industry economics is set to go live Thursday, giving musicians a major cut of the proceeds while largely freezing out record labels and other intermediaries.

Lala.com, which allows fans to trade music discs for just $1, plus shipping, pledges to give a fifth of its sales to all the musicians, including lesser known session studio players, involved in the making of CDs exchanged on its site.

In a move that is certain to stoke controversy with music promoters, the founder of the Silicon Valley start-up said Lala will circumvent traditional copyright and royalty payment systems to compensate identifiable working musicians.

The site works something like an eBay auction exchange as it encourages consumers who sign up for the service to list all the CDs they may want to exchange as well as ones they would be interested in receiving.

Once an exchange is arranged, the recipient pays $1.49, of which 49 cents pays for shipping the disc, leaving $1 for the company for musicians, administrative costs and its own cut.

Lala said 20 cents of each $1 will go into a charitable fund for the musicians. It is looking to pay the musicians via a charitable organization it has set up called the Z Foundation. It plans on keeping 20-30 cents for itself, with the remainder going on administration.

"We all have this music that sits in our homes - wouldn't it be great if people can exchange those CDs," said founder Bill Nguyen, a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

He's a veteran of start-up companies including Seven, a mobile e-mail rival to Blackberry maker Research in Motion and OneBox, which was sold to Phone.com, which is now known as Openwave.

Lala has been testing the service for several months with nearly 100,000 people and claims to already have another 200,000 people waiting to join the service when it goes live.

The service is bound to raise eyebrows at record companies which have stepped up their anti-piracy drives in the last few years to combat both CD and digital music piracy.

But a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America said that, "To date we have declined comment on Lala.com - and will hold to that here as well."

Nguyen admits his company has had a mixed reaction from the record companies, with some viewing his plan as a threat along the lines of the pioneering peer-to-peer music file sharing service Napster.

"One label thought it would help them to know their customers for the first time," Nguyen said. "But others' view of us is as the devil, more like peer-to-peer services."

Lala argues that it offering a vibrant new way for consumers to discover new music and that if successful, it will encourage robust sales of new music, unlike the culture of pirated CDs and downloading that followed in Napster's wake.

Nguyen claims that Lala's research shows that for every five CDs exchanged on the server a new CD was bought.

Though Lala is a for-profit business, Nguyen envisages a community of fans and musicians running many key elements of the site with a relatively skeletal paid staff that he plans to keep under 30 employees.

For instance, fans and artists will jointly decide whether a musician who applies for compensation will get paid under the system. Nguyen described the site as having a business model inspired by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia built from editorial contributions by its users.

Lala has received up to $9 million in venture capital funding, Nguyen said.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/07/tech...n=money_latest





Sneaky

Microsoft Plans Better Disclosures For Piracy Monitoring Tool
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker.

The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down.

"It's kind of a safety switch," said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program.

Lazar said the company decided to add the safety measure because the piracy check, despite widespread distribution, is still a pilot program. He said the company was worried that it might have an unforeseen emergency that would require the program to terminate quickly.

But he acknowledged that Microsoft should have given users more information about the daily interactions.

"We're looking at ways to communicate that in a more forward manner," he said.

Lazar also said the company plans to tweak the program soon so that it will only check in with Microsoft every two weeks, rather than daily.

The tool, part of the Redmond company's bid to thwart widespread piracy, is being distributed gradually to people who have signed up to receive Windows security updates. The company expects to have offered it to all users worldwide by the end of the year.

Lazar said that so far, about 60 percent of users who were offered the piracy check decided to install it. Once installed, the program checks to make sure the version of Windows a user is running is legitimate, and gathers information such as the computer's manufacturer and the language and locale it is set for.

That information-gathering is disclosed in a licensing agreement. But the agreement does not make clear that the program also is designed to "call home" to Microsoft's servers, to make sure that it should keep running.

At least every 90 days, the tool also checks again to see if the copy of Windows is legitimate. Lazar said that's because the company sometimes discovers that a copy of Windows that it thought was legitimate is actually pirated.

When Microsoft believes a copy of Windows is pirated, the user begins to get a series of reminders that the copy isn't genuine. Such users also are barred from downloading non-critical updates, such as the new version of its Internet Explorer browser. But anyone who has signed up to automatically received security updates, which repair flaws to prevent Internet attacks, will still get those fixes.

Lauren Weinstein, who is co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility and was one of the first people to notice the daily communications to Microsoft, said he understands and sympathizes with Microsoft's desire to control widespread piracy of its flagship product. But he said it's problematic that Microsoft did not disclose all the tools' communications with the company.

Weinstein said he also was surprised that Microsoft decided to release so widely a tool that it says is in a "pilot" mode and might need to suddenly be shut down.

"Really what you're talking about is someone saying, 'Look we've put something on your computer and it might go screwy, so we're going to kind of check in every day,'" he said.

Such a concession raises concerns about the quality of the tool itself, he added.

"They sure should've notified better, and it makes me wonder if it should have been deployed better."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...ng_Piracy.html





Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules
Motoko Rich

When Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, "Only Revolutions," is published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work. Nearly 60 of his contributors have already received galleys of the experimental book, which they're commenting about in a private forum at Mr. Danielewski's Web site, www.onlyrevolutions.com.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.

Mr. Benkler said he saw the project as "simply an experiment of how books might be in the future." That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry's annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of "snippets" of text, calling it a "grisly scenario."

Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen BookScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than 1,700 percent in just two years. What writers think about technological developments in the literary world has a lot to do with where they are re sitting at the moment. As a researcher and scholar, Anne Fadiman, author of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," thinks a digital library of all books would be a "godsend" during research, allowing her to "sniff out all the paragraphs" on a given topic. But, she said: "That's not reading. For reading, you have to read a book in its entirety and I think there's no substitute for the look and feel and smell of a real book — the magic of the paper and thread and glue."

Others have a much less fixed notion of books. Lisa Scottoline, the author of 13 thrillers, the most recent of which, "Dirty Blonde," spent four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this spring, offers the first chapter or two of each book on her Web site; and her publisher, HarperCollins, hands out "samplers" of a few chapters of her titles in bookstores. Any of these formats are fine with her, she says. Whether its "paper, pulp, gold rimmed or digitized, I don't think you can take away from the best stories," she said.

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book."

"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."

For unknown authors struggling to capture the attention of busy readers, however, the Web offers an unprecedented way to catapult out of obscurity. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who started a political blog, "Unclaimed Territory," just eight months ago, was recruited by a foundation financed by Working Assets, a credit card issuer and telecommunications company, to write a book this spring. Mr. Greenwald promoted the result, called "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," on his own blog and his publisher e-mailed digital galleys to seven other influential bloggers, who helped to send it to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com before it was even published. This Sunday it will hit No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback best-seller list. "I think people who are sort of on the outside of the institutions and new voices entering will be a lot more excited about this technology," Mr. Greenwald said. "That's one of the effects that technology always has. It democratizes things and brings in new readers and new authors."

For many authors, the question of how technology will shape book publishing inevitably leads to the question of how writers will be paid. Currently, publishers pay authors an advance against royalties, which are conventionally earned at the rate of 15 percent of the cover price of each copy sold.

But the Internet makes it a lot easier to spread work free. "I've had pieces put up on Web sites legally and otherwise that get hundreds of thousands of hits, and believe me I sit around thinking 'Boy, if I got a dollar every time that somebody posted an op-ed that I wrote, I'd be a very happy writer,' " said Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the forthcoming book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," a memoir about his hunt to discover what happened to relatives who were killed in the Holocaust.

Mr. Mendelsohn said he understood that technological shakeups take time to play out, and that he can't bemoan every lost penny. "But as an author who creates texts that people consume, I want my authorship to be recognized and I want to get compensated," he said.

Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will continue to pay for books if the price is low enough. "Even in music, price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler said. "The service has to be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one where, as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not clear to me why, if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."

He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book production, publishers could afford to give authors a higher cut of the sale price as royalties.

In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct, inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and bookbinders out of business.

That history gives great comfort to writers like Vikram Chandra, whose 1,000-page novel, "Sacred Games," will be published in January. Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds.

"If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."

Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. "Only Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. "As excited as I am by technology, I'm ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he said. "The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you're exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/books/05digi.html





UK Music Fans Can Copy Own Tracks
BBC

UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use.

Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people.

Currently anyone transferring music to portable devices breaks copyright laws.

The music industry has traditionally turned a blind eye, however, in favour of targeting "professional" pirates.

"We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties," said Mr Jamieson, whose organisation represents the UK's record labels.

He told the Commons select committee for culture, media and sport that he wanted to "make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format, we will not pursue them".

Domination 'not healthy'

Mr Jamieson also called for Apple - which makes the popular iPod portable music player - to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers.

Apple applies a digital protection system to its downloads, which means they are not usually compatible with other companies' devices.

He said iTunes' dominant market share in downloads was "not particularly healthy" and said he "would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability".

Consumers in the UK pay 79p per track on iTunes and - generally - £7.90 for a full album, although this can vary according to the number of songs and the status of the artiste in question.

In February, music industry investigators claimed someone in almost every street in every town in the UK was illegally copying music and film.

The Federation Against Copyright Theft and British Phonographic Industry said home counterfeiters now accounted for the majority of their investigations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/5053658.stm





Brin Says Google Compromised Principles
Ted Bridis

Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged Tuesday the dominant Internet company has compromised its principles by accommodating Chinese censorship demands. He said Google is wrestling to make the deal work before deciding whether to reverse course.

Meeting with reporters near Capitol Hill, Brin said Google had agreed to the censorship demands only after Chinese authorities blocked its service in that country. Google's rivals accommodated the same demands - which Brin described as "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with" - without international criticism, he said.

"We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference," Brin said.

Brin also addressed Internet users' expectations of privacy in an era of increased government surveillance, saying Americans misunderstand the limited safeguards of their personal electronic information.

"I think it's interesting that the expectations of people with respect to what happens to their data seems to be different than what is actually happening," he said.

Google has battled the U.S. Justice Department in court seeking to limit the amount of information the government can get about users' Internet searches. It also says it has not participated in any programs with the National Security Agency to collect Internet communications without warrants.

Google's free e-mail service is among the Internet's most popular.

Brin visited Washington to ask U.S. senators to approve a plan that would prevent telephone and cable companies from collecting premium fees from companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for faster delivery of their services. Brin, dressed casually in jeans, sneakers and a black sport jacket, said he wasn't sure whether he changed any lawmakers' minds.

Google's China-approved Web service omits politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches, such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square. Its agreement with China has provoked considerable criticism from human rights groups.

"Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense," Brin said.

The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that Google's main Web site, http://www.google.com , was no longer accessible in most Chinese provinces due to censorship efforts, and that it was completely inaccessible throughout China on May 31.

Brin said Google is trying to improve its censored search service, Google.cn, before deciding whether to reverse course. He said virtually all the company's customers in China use the non-censored service.

"It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there.' That's an alternate path," Brin said. "It's not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





SanDisk Goes After The iPod iPuppets
CS

If you've been on public transport this past week, you'll have noticed what looks like a counter-culture uprising against the iPod. Posters and stickers have appeared showing chimps, donkeys and sheep listening to music on iPods. Underneath the images there are taglines like 'are you an iChimp?' and, 'Don't follow the iPack'. One advert shows a man strung up by iPod headphones, like Pinocchio, beneath him the tagline reads, 'have you become an iPuppet?'

The adverts have a pseudo-street graffiti style. The stencilled graphics and ancient typewriter font give the impression of an underground movement against cultural homogenisation. But visit the idont.com Web site espoused by the ads and you'll uncover a different story. Far from a triumph of AdBusters or a campaign financed by Naomi Klein converts, these posters are actually SanDisk's new marketing campaign.

SanDisk is Apple's archrival. Since May 2006 SanDisk has been the world's second most popular MP3 player manufacturer, behind Apple. Its e200 player looks very much like the nano, but unlike many other iPod clones it sells well.

This anti-iPod advertising campaign represents a spark of genuine retaliation against Apple. It's a relief to see a rival bring out its guns, in what had become a landscape devoid of any major competition for the iPod.

SanDisk is the first company to market its player as an ideological rather than technological alternative to the iPod. To do so is to fight Apple on their own terms. The SanDisk e200 is not being touted as more advanced than the iPod, it doesn't claim to have longer battery life or a larger capacity. Instead the e200 is being marketed simply as what it is not. It's not an iPod.

The SanDisk assault doesn't end there. SanDisk is reported to have quietly approached the open source developers behind Rockbox, a free operating system for MP3 players. The company is said to be interested in porting the Rockbox software to its e200 player. Rockbox was first conceived as an alternative to the flawed software provided with an Archos MP3 player, but it has evolved into a multi-platform alternative interface supported by many different players. The latest version supports everything from an iPod to an iRiver MP3 player.

Not only would a Rockbox port earn SanDisk credibility with grassroot geeks, but the software offers a number of appealing features, including support for nearly every codec going.

It looks like Apple may finally have a fight on its hands. iPod critics are quick to bemoan Apple's reliance on marketing over the player's technical advantages, now SanDisk will be putting this to the test. If Apple really won the west by manipulating the iPod to the point where it became a lifestyle necessity for any self-respecting music lover, can SanDisk unseat it by turning the iPod's ubiquity against it?

In many ways, SanDisk's advertising campaign has the phony ring of Sony's heavily criticised faux-graffiti campaign for the PSP. Sony hired graffiti artists to paint what looked like street art on city walls, but the characters depicted suspiciously clasped PSPs. Critics on some forums said Sony was "shamelessly appropriating a culture". Effectively that is what SanDisk is doing here. The adverts may use the graphic vocabulary of anti-capitalist campaigns, but the object of the exercise is to sell SanDisk MP3 players. Still, competition is exactly what Apple needs right now, and this is an ingenious attack. Now get back to your iPods, chimps!
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic...9273890,00.htm




Survey: iPods More Popular Than Beer
Paul Sakuma

Move over Bud. College life isn't just about drinking beer. In a rare instance, Apple Computer Inc.'s iconic iPod music player surpassed beer drinking as the most "in" thing among undergraduate college students, according to the latest biannual market research study by Ridgewood, N.J.-based Student Monitor.

Nearly three quarters, or 73 percent, of 1,200 students surveyed said iPods were "in" - more than any other item in a list that also included text messaging, bar hopping and downloading music.

In the year-ago study, only 59 percent of students named the iPod as "in," putting the gadget well below alcohol-related activities.

This year, drinking beer and Facebook.com, a social networking Web site, were tied for second most popular, with 71 percent of the students identifying them as "in."

The only other time beer was temporarily dethroned in the 18 years of the survey was in 1997 - by the Internet, said Eric Weil, a managing partner at Student Monitor.

Though beer might soon regain its No. 1 spot, as it quickly did a decade ago, the iPod's popularity is still "a remarkable sign," Weil said. "For those who believe there's an excessive amount of drinking on campus, now there's something else that's common on campuses."

Student Monitor conducted the survey the week of March 6, interviewing full-time undergraduate students at 100 U.S. colleges. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Secrets Claims In NSA Case May Stop Suits
Dionne Searcey

As lawsuits mount against phone companies from plaintiffs who allege their call records were handed over to the National Security Agency illegally, the companies' defense may benefit from a powerful force: the U.S. government.

The plaintiffs, who accuse Bell phone companies of privacy violations and are seeking billions of dollars in damages, would need to delve into the depths of the NSA's surveillance program to make their cases. But the government considers such information top secret, and legal experts expect the Bush administration to assert the "state secrets" privilege in the 20 or more lawsuits filed by privacy advocates in recent weeks. If judges accept the claim, as has been the case in nearly every instance in which it has been asserted since the early 1950s, the suits will dissolve.

The state-secrets privilege stems from the Cold War era, created to allow the U.S. government a means of moving to dismiss lawsuits that would hurt foreign policy or national security. The motion has been successfully invoked in cases involving government contractors and, more recently, in the case of a German citizen claiming he was wrongfully detained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In a California suit filed earlier this year against AT&T Inc., the Bush administration has already weighed in to try to dismiss the case, asserting state secrets in a motion aimed at preventing the airing of any classified information. A federal judge in San Francisco is expected to rule on the motion as soon as June 23.

In that case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco privacy-rights group, accuses AT&T of illegally helping the NSA analyze phone records and Internet communications without court authorization. Most of the suits have been brought on behalf of phone-company customers by activists ranging from the state branches of the American Civil Liberties Union to public-interest lawyers to Chicago author Studs Terkel. Nearly all seek class-action status.

The suits against AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. stem from recent media reports alleging that the companies violated privacy laws by handing over domestic calling records of Americans without court authorization. To litigate the cases, plaintiffs as well as defendants must produce evidence of exactly what happened between the companies and the NSA, lawyers say. AT&T declines to comment on the cases but insists it has violated no laws. Spokesmen for BellSouth and Verizon, which have denied turning over records to the NSA, say the suits are without merit.

Senate Judiciary Committee leaders met yesterday to consider issuing subpoenas to the chief executives of AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon and Qwest Communications International Inc. for a hearing that would examine the NSA issue. No decision was made, a committee aide said, but the senators plan to meet again June 6. Earlier this week Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, citing the government's invocation of the state's secret privilege in the AT&T suit, said the agency wouldn't investigate allegations of privacy violations by the phone companies.

In highly redacted document unsealed yesterday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation suit, a former AT&T technician says an NSA agent visited an AT&T office in 2002 and 2003.

The bulk of the other lawsuits offer virtually no evidence from plaintiffs beyond the allegations raised in newspaper articles. The phone companies have either denied participating in the NSA program or said they did nothing illegal, and they have noted that they can't discuss classified information. So far, no one in the U.S. government has offered any information publicly.

"As it stands right now we have no way to defend against these lawsuits," said one telecom lawyer. "It's equally important to point out that short of a newspaper article the plaintiffs don't have anything to prosecute these cases," he added.

Lawyers familiar with the suits say they anticipate that the government will invoke state secrets in all the cases against the phone companies. In a filing Wednesday in which Verizon asked the courts to consolidate the myriad cases, the company's lawyers said: "The United States is likely to intervene in and seek the dismissal of these cases...in order to assert its state secret privilege." The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington, D.C., will determine whether to consolidate the cases.

In recent years, government officials have ratcheted up the use of state-secrets motions. According to Thomas Blanton, a director the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the use of the privilege climbed from about once every five years from the 1950s through the late 1970s to twice a year from 1977 to 2001. Since 2001, the government has used the privilege in at least 13 cases, or a rate of about three times a year.

Mr. Blanton says that in nearly every case judges have sided with the government. "With state secrets the way it's developed is that's the magic word, the neutron bomb that leaves no plaintiff standing," he says.

If judges dismiss state-secret motions in the cases, both sides would likely rely on classified information to argue their cases, which could result in significant logistical hurdles. Secret documents would need to be flown from Washington, with federal escorts, to judges' chambers in Rhode Island, Louisiana, Montana and numerous other states where suits have been filed.

Lee Tien, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says he is optimistic that the judge in that suit will quash the state-secrets motion. He argues that the government isn't merely a bystander in the case. "They're an intrinsic part of what's going on," Mr. Tien says. "It's a bigger problem from a fairness or due process point of view."

The judge's ruling in June could set the stage for how the other cases play out, and other lawyers and plaintiffs in the suits said they will be closely watching.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Web Users To 'Patrol' US Border

A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.

The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said the cameras would focus on "hot-spots and common routes" used to enter the US.

US lawmakers have been debating a divisive new illegal immigration bill.

The Senate has approved a law that grants millions of illegal immigrants US citizenship and calls for the creation of a guest-worker programme, while beefing up border security.

But in order to come into effect, the plan must be reconciled with tougher anti-immigration measures backed by the House of Representatives, that insist all illegal immigration should be criminalised.

The issue has polarised politics and US society. Right-wing groups have protested against illegal immigrants, while millions of people marched in support of them last month.

Free number

The Texas governor announced his plans for streaming the border surveillance camera footage over the internet at a meeting of police officials on Thursday.

"A stronger border is what Americans want and it's what our security demands and that is what Texas is going to deliver," Mr Perry said.

The cameras will cost $5m (£2.7m) to install and will be trained on sections of the 1,000-mile (1,600km) border known to be favoured by illegal immigrants.

Web users who spot an apparently illegal crossing will be able to alert the authorities by telephoning a number free of charge.

Mr Perry, a Republican, is running for re-election in November.

Deployment dispute

Meanwhile, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has sent National Guard soldiers to his state's border with Mexico, ending a weeks-old dispute with US President George W Bush.

President Bush announced plans on 14 May for thousands of soldiers from the Guard to be sent to bolster security along the Mexican border.

Mr Schwarzenegger had opposed the plan, describing it as a "Band-Aid solution" - or a temporary fix.

He said he did not want to place his state's National Guard soldiers - many of whom would have already served in Iraq - under additional strain.

On Thursday, the governor said he would send the soldiers to the border and the cost of the deployment would be shouldered by the federal government.

Meanwhile, a group of US civilian volunteers that has been patrolling the Mexican border began last week building a fence along a section of the frontier.

The Minutemen group started erecting the fence on privately-owned land in Arizona on Saturday, saying it is "doing the job the federal government will not do".

The Minutemen are allowed to report illegal crossings to border police but have no right to arrest suspects.

Human rights groups have accused the group of xenophobia towards illegal immigrants - but the group denies this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...as/5040372.stm





Gattaca, USA

Vast DNA Bank Pits Policing Vs. Privacy

Data Stored on 3 Million Americans
Rick Weiss

Brimming with the genetic patterns of more than 3 million Americans, the nation's databank of DNA "fingerprints" is growing by more than 80,000 people every month, giving police an unprecedented crime-fighting tool but prompting warnings that the expansion threatens constitutional privacy protections.

With little public debate, state and federal rules for cataloging DNA have broadened in recent years to include not only violent felons, as was originally the case, but also perpetrators of minor crimes and even people who have been arrested but not convicted.

Now some in law enforcement are calling for a national registry of every American's DNA profile, against which police could instantly compare crime-scene specimens. Advocates say the system would dissuade many would-be criminals and help capture the rest.

"This is the single best way to catch bad guys and keep them off the street," said Chris Asplen, a lawyer with the Washington firm Smith Alling Lane and former executive director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. "When it's applied to everybody, it is fair, and frankly you wouldn't even know it was going on."

But opponents say that the growing use of DNA scans is making suspects out of many law-abiding Americans and turning the "innocent until proven guilty" maxim on its head.

"These databases are starting to look more like a surveillance tool than a tool for criminal investigation," said Tania Simoncelli of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.

The debate is part of a larger, post-Sept. 11 tug of war between public safety and personal privacy that has intensified amid recent revelations that the government has been collecting information on personal phone calls. In particular, it is about the limits of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from being swept into criminal investigations unless there is good reason to suspect they have broken the law.

Once someone's DNA code is in the federal database, critics say, that person is effectively treated as a suspect every time a match with a crime-scene specimen is sought -- even though there is no reason to believe that the person committed the crime.

At issue is not only how many people's DNA is on file but also how the material is being used. In recent years, for example, crime fighters have initiated "DNA dragnets" in which hundreds or even thousands of people were asked to submit blood or tissue samples to help prove their innocence.

Also stirring unease is the growing use of "familial searches," in which police find crime-scene DNA that is similar to the DNA of a known criminal and then pursue that criminal's family members, reasoning that only a relative could have such a similar pattern. Critics say that makes suspects out of people just for being related to a convict.

Such concerns are amplified by fears that, in time, authorities will try to obtain information from stored DNA beyond the unique personal identifiers.

"Genetic material is a very powerful identifier, but it also happens to carry a heck of a lot of information about you," said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington concerned about DNA database trends.

Law enforcement officials say they have no interest in reading people's genetic secrets. The U.S. profiling system focuses on just 13 small regions of the DNA molecule -- regions that do not code for any known biological or behavioral traits but vary enough to give everyone who is not an identical twin a unique 52-digit number.

"It's like a Social Security number, but not assigned by the government," said Michael Smith, a University of Wisconsin law professor who favors a national database of every American's genetic ID with certain restrictions.

Still, the blood, semen or cheek-swab specimen that yields that DNA, and which authorities almost always save, contains additional genetic information that is sensitive, including disease susceptibilities that could affect employment and health insurance prospects and, in some cases, surprises about who a child's father is.

"We don't know all the potential uses of DNA, but once the state has your sample and there are not limits on how it can be used, then the potential civil liberty violations are as vast as the uses themselves," said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

She and others want samples destroyed once the identifying profile has been extracted, but the FBI favors preserving them.

Sometimes authorities need access to those samples to make sure an old analysis was done correctly, said Thomas Callaghan, who oversees the FBI database. The agency also wants to be able to use new DNA identification methods on older samples as the science improves.

Without that option, Callaghan said, "you'd be freezing the database to today's technology."

Crime-Fighting Uses

Over the past dozen years, the FBI-managed national database has made more than 30,000 "cold hits," or exact matches to a known person's DNA, showing its crime-fighting potential.

In a recent case, a Canadian woman flew home the day after she was sexually assaulted in Mexico. Canadian authorities performed a semen DNA profile and, after finding no domestic matches, consulted the FBI database. The pattern matched that of a California man on probation, who was promptly found in the Mexican town where the woman had been staying and was charged by local authorities.

Congress authorized the FBI database precisely for cases like that, on the rationale that sexual predators and other violent felons tend to be repeat offenders and are likely to leave DNA behind. In recent years, however, Congress and state legislators have vastly extended the system's reach.

At least 38 states now have laws to collect DNA from people found guilty of misdemeanors, in some cases for such crimes as shoplifting and fortunetelling. At least 28 now collect from juvenile offenders, too, according to information presented last month at a Boston symposium on DNA and civil liberties, organized by the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

The federal government and five states, including Virginia, go further, allowing DNA scans of people arrested. At least four other states plan to do so this year, and California will start in 2009.

Opponents of the growing inclusion of people arrested note that a large proportion of charges (fully half for felony assaults) are eventually dismissed. Blood specimens are not destroyed automatically when charges are dropped, they note, and the procedures for getting them expunged are not simple.

Even more controversial are DNA dragnets, which snare many people for whom there is no evidence of guilt. Given questions about whether such sweeps can be truly voluntary -- "You know that whoever doesn't participate is going to become a 'person of interest,' " said Rose of the ACLU -- some think they violate the Fourth Amendment.

Civil liberties issues aside, the sweeps rarely pay off, according to a September 2004 study by Samuel Walker, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska. Of the 18 U.S. DNA dragnets he documented since 1990, including one in which police tested 2,300 people, only one identified the offender. And that one was limited to 25 men known to have had access to the victim, who was attacked while incapacitated in a nursing home.

Dragnets, Walker concluded, "are highly unproductive" and "possibly unconstitutional."

Familial searches of the blood relatives of known offenders raise similar issues. The method can work: In a recent British case, police retrieved DNA from a brick that was thrown from an overpass and smashed through a windshield, killing the driver. A near-match of that DNA with someone in Britain's criminal database led police to investigate that offender's relatives, one of whom confessed when confronted with the evidence.

Not investigating such leads "would be like getting a partial license plate number on a getaway car and saying, 'Well, you didn't get the whole plate so we're not going to investigate the crime,' " said Frederick Bieber, a Harvard geneticist who studies familial profiling.

But such profiling stands to exacerbate already serious racial inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system, said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University.

"Incarceration rates are eight times higher for blacks than they are for whites," he said, so any technique that focuses on relatives of people in the FBI database will just expand that trend.

A Universal Database?

That's a concern that many in law enforcement raise, too -- as an argument in favor of creating a universal DNA database of all Americans. The system would make everyone a suspect of sorts in every crime, they acknowledge. But every criminal, regardless of race, would be equally likely to get caught.

Opponents cite a litany of potential problems, including the billions it would cost to profile so many people and the lack of lab capacity to handle the specimens.

Backlogs are already severe, they note. The National Institute of Justice estimated in 2003 that more than 350,000 DNA samples from rape and homicide cases were waiting to be processed nationwide. As of the end of last year, more than 250,000 samples were backlogged in California alone.

And delays can matter. In 2004, police in Indiana arrested a man after his DNA matched samples from dozens of rapes -- the last 13 of which were committed during the two years it took for the sample to get through the backlog.

A big increase in tests would also generate more mistakes, said William C. Thompson, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine, whose studies have found DNA lab accuracy to be "very uneven."

In one of many errors documented by Thompson, a years-old crime-scene specimen was found to match the DNA from a juvenile offender, leading police to suspect the teenager until they realized he was a baby at the time of the crime. The teenager's blood, it turned out, had been processed in the lab the same day as an older specimen was being analyzed, and one contaminated the other.

"A universal database will bring us more wrongful arrests and possibly more wrongful convictions," said Simoncelli of the ACLU.

But Asplen of Smith Alling Lane said Congress has been helping states streamline and improve their DNA processing. And he does not think a national database would violate the Constitution.

"We already take blood from every newborn to perform government-mandated tests . . . so the right to take a sample has already been decided," Asplen said. "And we have a precedent for the government to maintain an identifying number of a person."

While the debate goes on, some in Congress are working to expand the database a bit more. In March, the House passed the Children's Safety and Violent Crime Reduction Act.

Under the broad-ranging bill, DNA profiles provided voluntarily, for example, in a dragnet, would for the first time become a permanent part of the national database. People arrested would lose the right to expunge their samples if they were exonerated or charges were dropped. And the government could take DNA from citizens not arrested but simply detained.

The bill must be reconciled with a Senate, which contains none of those provisions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...48.html?sub=AR





Implant this, Scott

Proposal to Implant Tracking Chips in Immigrants
Bill Christensen

Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company's RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. He made the statement on national television on May 16.

Silverman was being interviewed on "Fox & Friends." Responding to the Bush administration's call to know "who is in our country and why they are here," he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, "We have talked to many people in Washington about using it...."

The VeriChip is a very small Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag about the size of a large grain of rice. It can be injected directly into the body; a special coating on the casing helps the VeriChip bond with living tissue and stay in place. A special RFID reader broadcasts a signal, and the antenna in the VeriChip draws power from the signal and sends its data. The VeriChip is a passive RFID tag; since it does not require a battery, it has a virtually unlimited life span.

RFID tags have long been used to identify animals in a variety of settings; livestock, laboratory animals and pets have been "chipped" for decades. Privacy advocates have long expressed concerns about this technology being used in human beings.

In a related story, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe allegedly remarked that microchips could be used to track seasonal workers to visiting U.S. senators Jeff Sessions (Alabama) and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania). "President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they are permitted to enter the US for seasonal work," Specter told Congress on April 25.

Implanting microchips in human beings for the purpose of monitoring is not exactly news for science fiction fans; Alfred Bester wrote about "skull bugs" in his 1974 novel The Computer Connection:
"...you don't know what's going on in the crazy culture outside. It's a bugged and drugged world. Ninety percent of the bods have bugs implanted in their skulls in hospital when they're born. They're monitored constantly."
(Read more about Alfred Bester's skull bugs)

VeriChips are legal for implantation in people in the U.S.; see VeriChip RFID Tag Patient Implant Badges Now FDA Approved. See also a related story on a Proposed National Worker DNA Fingerprint Database. Read more at RFID implants for guest workers, Latin leader keen on ID chips and Chip implants for migrant workers?.

Note: The source for this story was inadvertently omitted; read the press release at spychips.com; also, see the Silverman interview transcript.

(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction.)

· George Orwell's Illnesses Influenced '1984'
· State Would Outlaw Mandatory Microchip Implants
· Chip Implants Proposed To Halt Blackmarket Cadaver Trade
· Two Workers Have Tracking Chips Implanted Into Them
· More Parents Going High-Tech to Track Kids

http://www.livescience.com/scienceof...fid_chips.html





Renting Movies With a Box and a Beam
David Pogue

YOU know the trouble with movies in America these days? There just aren't enough ways to see them. If you miss a movie in the theater, it's gone forever — unless you can find a video-rental store, DVD-by-mail service, cable movie station, pay-per-view service, video-on-demand channel, Internet movie download site, hotel room or airplane.

Thank goodness, then, that a company backed by Disney, Intel and Cisco has stepped in to fill the breach with yet another movie-delivery mechanism. It's a slim, silver, good-looking $200 set-top box called MovieBeam.

You connect the MovieBeam player directly to your TV set. Then, whenever you're in the mood for a movie, you choose from the list of 100 movies on the player's hard drive. Preposterous as this may sound, there's no monthly fee and no minimum; you're billed only for the movies you watch ($4 for a new release, $2 for an old one). You can rewind, pause, fast-forward and replay a movie you've bought — for 24 hours from your first glimpse of the opening credits.

Each week, seven or eight new movies magically show up in the player's list, pushing an equal number of old ones off to movie heaven.

This wireless movie-delivery feature gives MovieBeam its name. The company doesn't require an Internet connection or even a computer. Nor does the service depend on what cable or satellite setup you have, if any. How, then, can it send enormous, multigigabyte movies to MovieBeam owners nationwide?

Answer: Very cleverly. MovieBeam's movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the country. You're actually receiving MovieBeam's movies at this very moment — but they're invisible unless you have the MovieBeam box. (MovieBeam pays PBS for these piggybacking rights.)

That's why part of the MovieBeam setup is placing a small, square, flat antenna high on a shelf or near a window, and trailing its 20-foot gray cord to the box itself. That's also why MovieBeam is available so far only in 29 major cities (and their suburbs), including Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington; you can check availability in your area at moviebeam.com. The company plans a large geographical expansion in 2007.

AND speaking of unattractive décor enhancements: the MovieBeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack. Every other week, the box dials a toll-free number in the middle of the night to tell the mother ship how much you've spent on movies so far, for the benefit of your monthly statement.

The software design owes an obvious debt to the TiVo's famous attention to detail. In fact, the MovieBeam service is so easy to use, it easily passes what home-theater aficionados call the Baby Sitter Test. The compact remote control isn't illuminated, but it doesn't have to be; you control playback functions with one thumb by touch alone.

The movies represent every genre: comedy, action, drama, kids, horror, and so on. They come from every major movie studio except Sony (MovieBeam says a deal is imminent). You can view them alphabetically or by category, including Coming Soon and Leaving Soon. When you highlight a movie title, details appear and its Hollywood trailer plays automatically.

The picture and sound quality are excellent on standard TV sets, although you should be warned that most of them play in wide-screen format. On standard sets, that means that you'll get black letterbox bars above and below the picture.

MovieBeam could also play an important role in the new era of high-definition movies — once it gets its act together. Each month, about four of its movies are offered in high definition (for an additional $1 each), which you can enjoy on any HDTV set that has — stand back for oncoming jargon — either an HDMI jack or a DVI connector with HDCP.

At the moment, though, MovieBeam is muffing its opportunity here. The graphics and menus look spectacular, but the clarity and detail of the movies themselves fall far short of what you think of as high-def. (When Nicole Kidman's skin looks grainy, you know something's off.) The company blames, not altogether convincingly, the HD transfers from the original film, and promises better-looking HD movies in the coming months.

Otherwise, though, you'll have a tough time finding much to criticize about the MovieBeam experience. The real question is whether MovieBeam can find a niche that's not already served by the 435 other movie-delivery channels.

The company points out that it has advantages over virtually every other contender:

BLOCKBUSTER MovieBeam offers the same sorts of movies at the same prices — but you don't have to make two trips to the video store. You never have to pay late fees. And you never find that all the good movies have already been checked out for the weekend by 7 p.m. on Friday night.

NETFLIX DVD-by-mail services carry just about every movie ever released on DVD. You get to watch a lot of movies each month for a fixed monthly fee, and you can keep the movies for as long as you like with no late fees. But you may have to wait for weeks for your turn to check out the most popular movies. And your movie selection on a given night is limited to the three you've ordered ahead of time. With MovieBeam, you never declare yourself in the mood for a mindless Adam Sandler comedy, only to find that all you've got on hand are three World War II documentaries.

HBO After a movie finishes its run in theaters, it generally moves through the system in this sequence: hotels and airlines; home video (like Blockbuster); pay-per-view television; and finally, maybe nine months after the theatrical run, movie channels like HBO and Starz.

Movies from Disney, Touchstone and Miramax appear on MovieBeam in the home-video window; the rest show up in the pay-per-view window, about a month later. The point is that movies appear much sooner on MovieBeam than on cable movie channels.

PAY-PER-VIEW Standard pay-per-view offers a very small selection, doesn't let you choose when to start the movie and doesn't offer any pause/rewind/replay features.

VIDEO-ON-DEMAND PAY-PER-VIEW This newfangled movie-delivery system is probably MovieBeam's biggest competitor. You can start a movie whenever you like, and even pause/rewind/replay it. Here again, though, the selection is very small, and upgrading to the necessary digital cable box can inflate your monthly cable bill by $10 or more.

INTERNET MOVIE-DOWNLOAD SITES Oh, forget it. It takes forever to download a movie, the quality isn't great, and you need a computer that's connected to your TV.

So who, exactly, is a good candidate for MovieBeam?

According to the company's research, movie fans in 30 million American households make at least four round trips to the video store each month. If you're among them, you're an excellent MovieBeam prospect.

You should also consider MovieBeam if you're paying for several cable movie channels but watching only a few movies a month on them. You could cancel the channels, saving about $10 a channel per month. The beauty of MovieBeam is that you pay only when you actually watch a movie. If your life hits a busy patch, you don't keep forking over money for a service you're not using.

Note that these situations make you a candidate for MovieBeam, not necessarily a happy camper. Potential drawbacks include the price for the box itself ($200, though with free shipping and a 30-day guarantee); the wide-screen format of most of its movies; and the lack of DVD extras ("making of" documentaries and other featurettes). MovieBeam offers only one featurette per movie, and for only a handful of movies each month. (On the bright side, it doesn't sentence you to watching an annoying, non-fast-forwardable F.B.I. warning as the movie starts.)

Clearly, MovieBeam's designers have analyzed nearly every aspect of movie delivery in an attempt to find a drawback-free solution: price, delivery speed, picture quality, movie variety, movie availability, movie timeliness and simplicity.

The result may fill only the nichiest niche. But the movie-rental business generates $10 billion a year; MovieBeam will no doubt be happy with even a very small slice of that pie.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/te...y/01pogue.html





11th Circuit to Webmasters: Telling Someone To Go Away Doesn't Make Them
ACS

The Eleventh Circuit in the case of Snow v. DirecTV held that a webmaster may not exclude certain persons from his site merely by telling them their access is unauthorized.

In this case, Michael Snow was the webmaster of Stop Corporate Extortion, a "private support group website for "individuals who have been, are being, or will be sued by any Corporate entity." In order to access Snow's site, a user was required to register a username and password, and to agree to a statement affirming that the user was not associated with DirecTV, inc. He claimed that several agents of DirecTV ignored this warning and accessed his site. According to Snow, such unauthorized access violated the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which forbids accessing an electronic communication "without authorization."

The Eleventh Circuit rejected this claim. According to the court, the SCA does not apply to communications which are "readily accessible to the general public." On Snow's site, any member of the general public could access the site by merely registering with a username and password and clicking on the words "I Agree to these terms." Such an easily surmountable barrier to access is, according to the court, insufficient to make a site not "readily acessible to the general public."

While the court did not explain just what sort of security measures would invoke the SCA, it did hint that a webmaster who "screens the registrants before granting access" would have a stronger claim than one who merely asks his registrants to "self screen[ ]."
http://www.acsblog.org/ip-and-tech-l...make-them.html





Coming Soon: The Wi-Fi MP3 Player
Rafe Needleman

I love my iPod, but I do not love that it's basically a PC accessory. No PC (or Mac) nearby means no content on the iPod, and no updates. There's got to be a better way.

I've previously covered a company, Music Gremlin, that's building a Wi-Fi-enabled music player. And at the D4 conference this morning, a new company, Zing, is rolling out a service that enables other companies (like its partners Sirius and Yahoo) to build their own complete music infrastructures--content to player--that work just fine without a PC connection.

The Zing prototype shown at D4 had both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios built in. The radios are used to download music and to upload data about what you are listening to. If you have one of these players, you can do cool things, like see what your friends are listening to, then play samples of those tracks, or buy songs and albums directly from the player. If you try buy items when you're not in range of a Wi-Fi access point, the product will queue up your requests and batch-process them when you do eventually connect.

Most people will probably start using a Zing-powered player by first loading it with music that they have on their computer. But say you have just one track by Johnny Cash, and when you're playing it you realize you want more. On your player, you can flag the album it came from, and next time you're in Wi-Fi range, the player will download it for you. The player will stream Sirius radio content (via Wi-Fi, not a satellite connection) and will enable you to do the same thing when you're listening to radio tracks.

The Zing reference player has both a built-in speaker and a microphone, which, combined with the Wi-Fi radio, means it has all the hardware a voice-communication platform needs. So as a bonus, the software enables you to talk with your friends, walkie-talkie style, over the Wi-Fi network.

Building networking capabilities into music players is the obvious next step in their evolution. But wireless devices (cell phones) are also getting music players built into them. It's a bit early to say definitively which model will win out, but it's worth noting that for most people, a cell phone is a necessity while a music player is a luxury; I think that indicates which way the market is going to tilt.

The first Zing-powered players should ship this year, carrying the Sirius brand.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6535687.html





Who Divides Antiterror Money? That's a Secret
Diane Cardwell and Al Baker

The panel that guided the distribution of $711 million in antiterrorism money in a process that led to New York City's share being reduced by 40 percent is a shadow player in the war on terror, its work kept secret and its members shielded from view.

A collection of about 100 law enforcement officials and government bureaucrats from all over the country, the so-called peer reviewers who evaluated proposals for the Department of Homeland Security, took vows of silence, signing agreements that they would not reveal the substance of their deliberations.

Speaking of the reduction in New York's share, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg assailed the process yesterday, telling listeners of his weekly call-in radio program that he had complained to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and planned to fight the cut.

"I said, 'Look, you know I'm going to go out there and fight as hard as I can to get this changed,' " Mr. Bloomberg said. "I just think the ways they went about it was wrong."

Even some of the panelists were frustrated by the evaluation process, which involved a complex and rigid system for grading the highly detailed proposals, according to an official who had been briefed on the deliberations by a member of the panel.

Homeland Security officials say that in creating the panel this year, they were seeking to institute a new system of evaluating aid applications that would for the first time engage people from around the country, making the judging impartial.

Panelists got to work in March at the National Fire Academy in Emmetsburg, Md. The panel evaluates applications for domestic security aid, but the actual decisions on how much aid to award, based in part on the panel's findings, are made by Homeland Security officials.

Officials promised to guard the identities of the panel members to keep them from being pressured, although they were free to come forward themselves, said George W. Foresman, the under secretary for preparedness at the Department of Homeland Security. Thus far, he said, only four have agreed to do so.

Mr. Foresman added that the secrecy surrounding the work stemmed from security concerns about not divulging the vulnerabilities of certain localities.

He said the department sought to ensure that there was "no disincentive for a local jurisdiction to be honest and up-front about what their needs are, where their shortcomings are, and what they are trying to fix and improve."

He added, "You do not want your doctor talking about your medical conditions, do you?"

Working in groups of five to seven from geographically diverse, urban and rural regions, the panelists were given almost three weeks to grade the applications. They were to review the proposals and supporting documents and then rate the individual programs and overall applications on a scale of 1 to 5, using criteria like "shows clear purpose" and "describes expected outcomes."

After the panelists completed that work, they met in groups with a consultant from Booz Allen Hamilton who helped the groups reach a consensus score. Once the evaluations were complete, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security signed off on them and determined the amounts of the allotments.

Mr. Bloomberg said he would investigate whether, as Homeland Security officials maintain, there had been problems with the city's application. At the same time, city officials continued to vigorously defend their work and criticize the federal process. They said they suspected the new system of judging applications was intended to ensure a broad geographic dispersal of the money away from New York.

One of the reviewers who agreed to be identified, Lt. Timothy N. Fisk, said that they judged the effectiveness of the proposals and whether the budgets seemed in line with the declared needs. He emphasized that the panelists made no judgments other than whether it was an appropriate amount of money to support the program in question.

"We did evaluate the investments based on the needs and how they presented the projects," said Lieutenant Fisk, who is commander of the Homeland Security section and Tactical Operations for the Orlando, Fla., Police Department. "We did not determine how much money anybody got."

According to Mr. Fisk, the peer review process was only one-third of the formula that ultimately determined how much money each state and urban area was to receive. The balance was the risk portion determined by the Department of Homeland Security.

As they faced mounting political pressure and public relations problems, Homeland Security officials said that an overwhelming majority of panelists had found the results objective and geographically balanced. But some panelists have questioned that balance, arguing that security officials from smaller locales would have a tough time judging the needs of a larger city like New York.

Officials pointed to another reviewer who agreed to be identified, Chris Geldart, the assistant director of the Maryland governor's office of homeland security, as someone with a rich range of life experience. As a United States marine for 12 years, he served several tours in the Middle East and worked on ways to protect government installations from possible attacks by weapons of mass destruction, a spokesman for the Maryland office said. Now Mr. Geldart is involved in the state's leading intelligence initiative, and "lives and breathes grant funding here," said the spokesman, James M. Pettit.

New York's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that in forming the peer review panel, the Department of Homeland Security had abdicated its responsibility to make threat-based financing decisions. Abandoning a system of decision-making based on real intelligence inevitably hurt New York because it shifted the focus to potential risks rather than to actual threats, he said.

City officials also complained that they had received mixed signals from the department in their battle over how to use antiterrorism funds.

The Bloomberg administration has used the money to pay for continuing costs, like overtime for police officers, while the federal government wants the grants to support semipermanent safeguards like improvements in communications systems, better gas masks or increased training. But city officials have argued that spending on overtime and the like clearly reduces the risk of terror attacks. They say that tactics like stationing patrol cars at the feet of the Brooklyn Bridge should be considered a legitimate use of federal counterterrorism dollars.

This year, according to city officials who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution from the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Chertoff indicated to Mr. Bloomberg that he was open to a philosophical shift toward the city's viewpoint. But when the city tried to follow up with departmental staff members, the officials said, no progress was made.

Others in the administration complained that the decision-making process has been opaque, and they criticized the anonymity of the panelists.

"They made it sound like The New England Journal of Medicine," said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, "but we have no idea of who these people are."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/ny...rtner=homepage





News Media Pay in Scientist Suit
Adam Liptak

Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage, yesterday settled an invasion of privacy lawsuit against the government for $1,645,000.

Five news organizations are paying almost half that sum to avoid contempt sanctions against their reporters.

In the suit, Dr. Lee said the government had violated privacy laws by telling reporters about his employment history, finances, travels and polygraph tests. The settlement followed seven months of unusual negotiations among Dr. Lee, the government and lawyers for the news organizations.

The five reporters were not defendants, but had been held in contempt of court for refusing to testify and ordered to pay fines of $500 a day for refusing to disclose the identities of their confidential sources.

The news organizations — ABC News, part of the Walt Disney Company; The Associated Press; The Los Angeles Times, part of the Tribune Company; The New York Times; and The Washington Post — agreed to contribute $750,000 to the settlement.

Specialists in media law said such a payment by news organizations to avoid a contempt sanction was almost certainly unprecedented. Some called it troubling.

In a joint statement, the five organizations said they made the payment reluctantly.

"We did so," they explained, "to protect our confidential sources, to protect our journalists from further sanction and possible imprisonment and to protect our news organizations from potential exposure."

A senior vice president of ABC, Henry S. Hoberman, said the decision to settle was made after a long, hard legal fight.

"The journalists found themselves between a rock and a hard place after years of seeking relief from the courts and finding none," Mr. Hoberman said. "Given the absence of a federal shield law and the consistently adverse rulings from the federal courts in this case, the only way the journalists could keep their bond with their sources and avoid further sanctions, which might include jail time, was to contribute to a settlement between the government and Wen Ho Lee that would end the case."

Federal courts have been increasingly hostile in recent years to assertions by journalists that they are legally entitled to protect their confidential sources. Last year, Judith Miller, who was a reporter for The New York Times, spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. operative.

Dr. Lee, who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, brought his case against the government in 1999, the year federal investigators accused him of giving nuclear secrets to China.

Dr. Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of illegally gathering and retaining national security data, and he received an apology from the judge in the case.

A lawyer for Dr. Lee, Brian A. Sun, said the settlement furthered two goals.

"We wanted to send a message to the government that leaking information protected by law is not justified, even if they think it's politically expedient to do so," Mr. Sun said. "And the fact that the journalists contributed to the settlement recognizes the role they played in the series of unfortunate events that surrounded Dr. Lee's case."

The settlement included an unusual condition, Mr. Sun said.

"The government didn't want any of the money going into his pocket," Mr. Sun said of Dr. Lee.

In the end, Dr. Lee agreed to apply the government's payment to lawyers' fees, litigation costs and taxes. The money from the news organizations was unrestricted.

The fines against the reporters — Robert Drogin of The Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of The A.P., Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, James Risen of The New York Times and Pierre Thomas, formerly of CNN and now of ABC News — were suspended while they appealed.

The judge in the case, Rosemary M. Collyer of Federal District Court in Washington, vacated the contempt sanctions as part of the settlement. The settlement also moots a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

Though Mr. Thomas covered Dr. Lee for CNN, part of Time Warner, it did not participate in the settlement.

"CNN paid over $1 million toward Pierre's defense in this matter," a spokeswoman, Laurie Goldberg, said. "We parted ways because we had a philosophical disagreement over whether it was appropriate to pay money to Wen Ho Lee or anyone else to get out from under a subpoena."

The five other organizations made roughly similar contributions to the settlement, lawyers in the case said.

The government has settled similar privacy suits in the past. In 2003, it paid Linda R. Tripp, a central figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, $595,000 to settle a suit that accused it of leaking employment information about her.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she viewed the settlement in Dr. Lee's case with mixed emotions.

"It's a huge disappointment, and it's certainly not an ideal resolution," Ms. Dalglish said. "But it's probably as good as we could have expected under the circumstances."

The New York Times has long maintained that it will not settle libel suits in the United States for money. Its lawyers said the payment to Dr. Lee did not violate the principles behind that policy.

"It's apples and oranges," George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said. "That principle remains. In libel suits, people aren't sent to jail."

The Times covered the charges against Dr. Lee aggressively. But in September 2000, it published a lengthy note "from the editors" saying that despite "careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking," there were "some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."

The note said The Times should have pushed harder and sooner "to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee" and to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions behind the case.

In their statement yesterday, the news organizations said the settlement was not connected to their coverage of the case against Dr. Lee.

"The journalism in this case — which was not challenged in Lee's lawsuit — reported on a matter of great public interest," the statement said. "And the public could not have been informed about the issues without the information we were able to obtain only from confidential sources."

Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said she found the news organizations' decision to participate in the settlement "profoundly disturbing."

"These are very strange times in which we are living," Professor Kirtley said, "and it does appear that sometimes decisions have to be made that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But to make a payment in settlement in this context strikes me as an admission that the media are acting in concert with the government."

Ms. Dalglish of the Reporters Committee disagreed.

"I view it," she said, "purely as, 'What can we do to get the least damaging result?' "

Mr. Freeman, the lawyer for The Times, also rejected Professor Kirtley's characterization.

"We acted in the best interests of our reporters and our news organizations to protect our sources and protect our journalists," he said. "We were not acting in concert with anyone. The three parties managed to resolve the matter."

News media lawyers said they hoped that the settlement would help prompt a change in federal law. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment offers reporters no protection, at least in the context of grand jury subpoenas.

Though most states have so-called shield laws that protect journalists' confidential sources, those laws are usually irrelevant in cases brought in federal court.

The settlement in Dr. Lee's case, Professor Kirtley said, "certainly underscores the need for meaningful journalists' shield laws, now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/wa...rtner=homepage





Is Vonage Sinking or Coming Up for Air?
Matt Richtel

When the Internet telephone provider Vonage went public last week, it was meant to be a coming-out party for a technology that many see as the future of voice communications. It was also a chance at redemption for Jeffrey A. Citron, a brash and canny entrepreneur trying to overcome a checkered past.

The company had many things to recommend it: about 1.5 million paying customers, a solid brand name and a big share of a growing market. But Vonage's public offering quickly imploded. Its shares were priced at $17 and have fallen as low as $11.64, a 32 percent decline that is one of the sharpest for a new stock in recent years. The stock rose yesterday to close at $11.98.

The company is also contending with disgruntled customers who were encouraged to buy shares at the offering price. Roughly 9,000 of them were allotted around 13 percent of the 31 million shares offered, and some have complained publicly about having to pay $17 for shares that are now worth much less than that.

How did things go so wrong? There is no simple answer, but a handful of missteps by the company and its underwriters — UBS, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank — and investor nervousness about its prospects appear to have set the stock up for a fall, analysts say. Meanwhile, Vonage is left with the job of repairing an image that was meant to be burnished by the offering.

"Instead of rewarding people and driving loyalty, this could actually have backfired," said Richard S. Greenfield, a telecommunications industry analyst with Pali Research. "How much more is Vonage going to have to spend in marketing to rebuild its image and visibility?"

The company, citing a quiet period, has declined to comment on most issues related to the offering, but Brooke Schulz, a company spokeswoman, defended the initial share price yesterday and said there had been plenty of demand for the stock. Representatives of the underwriters would not answer questions about the offering.

The Vonage sale was the most anticipated initial offering of a technology company since Google's, nearly two years ago. Investors are not seeing its rocky reception as broader evidence of a weak market for initial offerings, or as an indictment of its underlying technology, which turns phone calls into chunks of data and sends them over Internet connections.

Vonage, based in Holmdel, N.J., helped to expand the popularity of the technology — known as VoIP, for voice over Internet protocol — which is less expensive to provide than traditional phone service and is virtually unregulated.

While Vonage has the largest share of the market at 31 percent, according to estimates from Sanford C. Bernstein, there is now severe competition, particularly from cable companies that offer television, Internet and phone service in a single bundle. The main question Vonage faced in the weeks before its offering was whether it still held any advantage over competitors with deeper pockets, longstanding customer relationships and bundles of services to offer.

Analysts say questions about the company's prospects sowed the seeds of a rough debut. They suggest that investors — from big pension funds to individuals — thought enough of Vonage to take a chance on the offering, but not enough to consider it a long-term bet. When the stock started trading and looked to be headed south, investors quickly soured and sold their shares, accelerating the decline.

One investor who found himself in that position is David Anderson, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Mr. Anderson is a Vonage customer who was given the opportunity to buy shares in the offering. He wound up being allotted 200 shares and spending around $3,400 for them. From the start he was not planning to keep them, he said, largely because of the company's competitive and financial situation.

"Before I bought it, I decided I'd sell it immediately," Mr. Anderson said. "If it opened up, I'd take a quick profit. If not, I'd cut my losses."

With the stock at $16.15 some 40 minutes after trading began, he put in an order to sell. By the time the trade was executed his sale price was $15.81, so his loss was roughly $240.

Mr. Anderson said he was not upset with Vonage. "I took a very deliberate gamble and understood the risks and lost a little bit of money," he said.

Other customers who invested have not been so understanding. Some have refused to pay for shares they were allotted. Vonage has said it will reimburse the underwriters if the payments do not come through, but it has also said it will pursue customers who fail to pay.

Analysts have laid much of the blame for the stock's decline on the underwriters.

"Investment banks are supposed to do a better job at pricing a stock," said Robert V. Green, a telecommunications industry strategist with Briefing.com, a financial analysis firm. The disconnect between the price and investors' willingness to pay, he said, led to a frantic sell-off.

"There was a mass exodus," he added. "I.P.O. prices go down, but not this far, this fast."

Indeed, Vonage had the second-steepest one-week percentage drop of any new public company since 2003.

Asked whether the offering price was set too high, Ms. Schulz of Vonage said there was demand for six times the shares allotted. She also noted that the price was at the midpoint of the proposed range of $16 to $18.

Vonage's struggles do not appear to indicate any broader problems in the market for initial offerings, said Richard Peterson, senior researcher with Thomson Financial. "The state of the I.P.O. market is rather healthy," Mr. Peterson said, noting that investor response was varying deal by deal.

To date this year, there have been 76 public offerings that have raised around $17 billion, up from 66 offerings raising around $15 billion in the period last year.

Mr. Green of Briefing.com said his theory was that the underwriters received assurances from big institutional investors that they would buy big allotments, but that those institutions never intended to make a long-term commitment to the stock.

Mr. Green said the underlying problem with Vonage was that while it does have a growing base of paying customers, it shares a crucial similarity with the companies of the boom era: it is focusing on growth while racking up losses. In a public filing on May 23, Vonage said that in the near term it was "pursuing growth, rather than profitability" to enhance future value.

"That's Internet bubble-era thinking," Mr. Green said.

But a handful of industry analysts are now saying the market is not giving Vonage a chance. Albert Lin, a telecommunications analyst with American Technology Research, started coverage of Vonage this week with a buy rating, and, citing Vonage's head start on the competition and its strong brand name, gave it a six- to 12-month target price of $20.

Another bull is Daniel Berninger, a telecommunications analyst with Tier 1 Research who has deep ties to Vonage. Mr. Berninger was an executive at the telecommunications start-up Pulver.com, where in 2000, he said, he brought on Mr. Citron to run the subsidiary that would eventually become Vonage.

Mr. Berninger said he did not own shares of Vonage and is not employed by the company. He predicts that the stock will hit $24 in the next two years. A chief reason for his confidence, he said, is Mr. Citron, a tireless entrepreneur who remains as Vonage's chairman.

Mr. Citron still has something to prove, Mr. Berninger said. Mr. Citron left Wall Street in disgrace in 2003, paying a $22.5 million fine and admitting no wrongdoing, after the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated illegal trading activity at Datek Online Holdings, a pioneering day-trading firm where he had been chief executive.

"That process gave the impression his riches were ill-gotten gains," Mr. Berninger said. "This time he wanted to prove, 'I got those monies because I'm a great entrepreneur.' He wanted to prove the second time that these were not ill-gotten gains."

Mr. Berninger said the disappointing offering would give new impetus to Mr. Citron, who he said was usually the smartest person in the room and "the most intense person I've ever met."

Vonage announced yesterday that it had appointed a new executive to oversee customer service. Bryan DiGiorgio, who has been a manager with OnStar since 1992, takes the title of senior vice president for customer care, a position that could help Vonage tackle issues that have led to customer complaints about its service.

In the wake of the offering, Mr. Citron is being forced to deal with a party gone bad that has left Vonage with a hangover.

"An I.P.O. is supposed to be advertising," said Linda Killian, a portfolio manager for the I.P.O. Plus After-Market Fund, a $25 million mutual fund that focuses on newly public companies. "An unsuccessful deal for a consumer company like Vonage is a problem."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/te.../03vonage.html





The Return of Fania, the Record Company That Made Salsa Hot
Jody Rosen

FANIA RECORDS, the legendary New York label that pioneered salsa, has often been called the Latin Motown. In its heyday, from the late 1960's through the 70's, Fania, like Motown, had a superstar-packed roster, a virtual monopoly on salsa's A-list: Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe, Johnny Pacheco, Rubén Blades, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Bobby Valentin, Larry Harlow and other greats. Like Motown, Fania began as a humble cottage industry — its releases were once sold out of the trunk of a car on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx — and became a multimillion-dollar business that carried a bracing musical hybrid to the nation and the world.

But the comparison soon breaks down. Today Motown looms gigantic in American cultural memory, a cornerstone of the 60's nostalgia industry, the subject of innumerable books and documentaries, its hits still ubiquitous on the airwaves decades after they made the charts. Fania, on the other hand, is recalled mostly by collectors and Latinos of a certain age. And where Motown's records have been endlessly reissued and anthologized, Fania's catalog languished for years, its master tapes moldering in a warehouse in Hudson, N.Y. Dozens of its most important recordings are out of print, and others were so shoddily transferred to CD — often directly from the original vinyl — as to be virtually unlistenable.

Now, though, a Fania revival is stirring. Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez just finished shooting "El Cantante," a biopic about the short, tragic life of the singing star Hector Lavoe. More important, the music itself is at last being reissued properly, with informative liner notes (in Spanish and English) and shimmering remastered sound that conjures a bygone era: the funky tumult of Latin New York in the years of Vietnam, Watergate and Jimmy Carter. Emusica, the Miami company that purchased the Fania catalog last year in a deal worth several million dollars, recently released the first 30 of a planned 300 reissues. This bounty holds surprises even for longtime Fania aficionados and offers non-initiates a chance to catch up with some of the greatest music from one of pop's most fertile periods.

"Fania is the catalog of salsa music, an unmatched body of recordings," said David Garcia, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina and an expert on Latin music. Larry Harlow, the keyboardist and bandleader who produced and arranged many of Fania's classic records (his 1979 album "Yo Soy Latino" is among the first reissued Fania CD's), called the label's output "a chronological biography of the whole Latin music scene from the mid-60's through the early 80's." Fania, Mr. Harlow said, "is Latin music." The label was the brainchild of unlikely business partners: the Dominican flutist and bandleader Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American former New York City police officer turned lawyer who fell in love with Latin music during a brief stay in Cuba in the early 60's. In 1964, Mr. Masucci (who died in 1997) and Mr. Pacheco teamed up and began signing hot New York musicians, including Ray Barretto (who died in February at 76), a conga virtuoso and leader of one of the city's best dance bands, as well as younger bandleaders like Bobby Valentin and Mr. Harlow.

By the late 60's the label's roster had swelled with young talent, and Fania would soon annex several smaller Latin labels. The roster included Willie Colón, a gifted trombonist and composer with eclectic musical tastes, and Hector Lavoe, a Puerto Rican singer with a luminous tenor voice. Together these musicians honed a new sound — a blend of bustling Afro-Cuban rhythms, big-band jazz, street-smart R&B and other styles — in a combustive atmosphere of collaboration and friendly rivalry.

"It was a very competitive time," recalled Mr. Colón, who in recent years has become involved in New York City politics, running for public advocate in 2001 and serving as co-chairman of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's re-election campaign last year. "Within the label, there was a lot of competition. We were all trying to innovate and outdo each other."

Those innovations are all over the first batch of Fania reissues. The music is built on a rock-solid Afro-Cuban base, on the clave beat and on the sensuous big-band stylings of Cuban son, with numerous other styles stirred into the mix, from mambo and rumba to Puerto Rican plena and bomba. But on early albums like "El Malo" (1967) by Mr. Colón, and classic 70's releases like "Rey del Bajo" by Mr. Valentin and "El Maestro" by Mr. Pacheco (both 1974), a sophisticated new style emerges, with son's 1-4-5 chord structures giving way to jazz chords and harmonies, complex arrangements and far more aggressive rhythm than is typical of Cuban music.

Cold war geopolitics played a role in the development of that sound. The Cuban embargo cut off virtually all contact between the island and musicians based in the United States, and a distinctively New York style was incubated in the city's dozens of Latin nightclubs. The Fania reissues radiate big-city cosmopolitanism. The label was a melting pot, with a lineup that included black and white Latinos: Puerto Ricans (Mr. Valentin, Ismael Rivera, Pete Rodriguez), Dominicans (Mr. Pacheco), Panamanians (Mr. Blades), Cubans (Celia Cruz), native New Yorkers (Mr. Barretto, Mr. Colón), even gringos like Mr. Harlow, né Lawrence Kahn, whose keyboard skills earned him the nickname El Judio Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew). Their music drew on bebop, soul, rock and other sounds of the polyglot metropolis, and the lyrics were steeped in grit and street reportage.

"We were making city music, talking about, you know, city things — what's happening on the corner, stories about drugs, violence, looking for a job," Mr. Colón said. "The stuff that was coming from Cuba was more rural, you know, 'my grass shack' and all that. We were kind of doing an urban folklore."

Mr. Colón in particular cultivated an image as a New York street tough, toying with gangster iconography and glowering on the covers of records like "El Malo" ("The Bad One"), whose artwork includes photos of his band performing in prisoners' uniforms.

What really shines through on these remastered records is extraordinary musicianship. Albums like "Celia & Johnny" (1974), Mr. Pacheco's collaboration with Ms. Cruz, and Roberto Roena's "Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound 5" (1973) are the essence of classic salsa: tough, gleaming, unstoppable dance music, with brass fanfares braying over crackling syncopation from claves, timbales and congas.

Jazz fans who have not caught up with salsa will be impressed by the virtuosity packed into tight pop song structures: Eddie Palmieri's cluster-chord-thick electric piano solo on the title track of his 1971 "progressive salsa" landmark "Vamonos Pa'l Monte," or Mr. Colón's blazing trombone improvisations on "El Malo." Most of these records are headlined, à la big-band jazz, by bandleader-instrumentalists. By the mid-1980's, with the arrival of a new style, salsa romántico, singers routinely got top billing. (In that period Fania dissolved amid a string of lawsuits involving royalties.)

Fania's heroic sound was a singer's: the high, pure voice of Hector Lavoe, whose mastery of both velvety crooning and fierce, percussive vocal improvisation set the standard for all salseros who followed. On the remastered version of his 1975 solo album "La Voz," one hears the disarmingly boyish warmth of his voice, a yearning quality that fires both love ballads and up-tempo numbers like "Mi Gente" ("My People"), the Johnny Pacheco song that became Mr. Lavoe's anthem. The sweetness of Mr. Lavoe's singing belied his hard living and hard luck — battles with drug abuse, the murder of his son, suicide attempts and an AIDS-related death at 46 — and today, 13 years after his death, he remains salsa's tragic saint. (His cult, one suspects, will only grow when "El Cantante" hits theaters.)

Fania will forever be defined by those hard-driving salsa records from the mid-70's, not least by the albums of its flagship band, the Fania All-Stars, which featured most of the label's biggest names. (Emusica is planning several Fania All-Star releases.) But the new reissues reveal the surprising breadth of Fania's catalog: it wasn't just a salsa label. The recordings include a remarkable album by the eccentric vocalist La Lupe, singing torchy boleros with string orchestra accompaniment; groove-oriented Latin jazz by the Cuban conga legend Mongo Santamaria; "Cuba y Puerto Rico Son," a superb 1966 collaboration between Tito Puente and a young Celia Cruz; and several very funky boogaloo and Latin soul releases from the middle and late 60's. The best of these is Joe Bataan's "Riot" (1968), whose cover photo of weapon-wielding Latin youth captures the growing militancy of the barrio in those turbulent years.

One of the hallmarks of Fania's golden age is politics, the social-consciousness messages musicians brought to songs that had previously stuck to themes of romance and dancing. "It was revolution time," Mr. Harlow remembered. "It was Woodstock time. It was the Black Panthers. It was Vietnam. When Latin music got cut off from Cuba in the 1960's, New York musicians added that new kind of lyrical content. We would sing about love, we would sing about war, we would sing about protest."

The pivotal figure was Rubén Blades, the singer-songwriter whose poetic lyrics carried forceful, often satirical messages about racism, social justice and cultural pride. "Siembra," Mr. Blades's 1978 collaboration with Mr. Colón, was a sweeping concept album with propulsive salsa tunes (and disco parodies) lampooning American materialism and calling for Latino unity, which for years stood as the top-selling Latin album of all time.

Like nearly all Fania albums, "Siembra" was recorded in a Manhattan studio. Your local record store will probably shelve these CD's in the world music section with all the other non-Anglophone stuff, but salsa is homegrown American music, as much a part of the indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop.

At a moment when the country is convulsed by debate over the latest waves of Latin immigration, the Fania rereleases are reminders of the deep roots of Latinos here — the first Puerto Rican tradesmen arrived in New York in the 17th century — and of the profound role they have played in both shaping United States culture and exporting it back to points south.

"Fania really led the way in spreading salsa throughout South America and the Caribbean," Professor Garcia said. Leading second- and third-generation salsa musicians have hailed from such places as Colombia and Venezuela, and it wasn't just Fania's music but also its messages that took root. The huge popularity throughout Latin America of politically trenchant albums like "Siembra," with its feisty calls for pan-Latin pride, is just one dramatic example of the ways that the Latin diaspora has spoken back to the homeland.

Latin music has found a growing audience among gringos in the United States. But is the audience that embraced the Buena Vista Social Club's prerevolutionary Cuban son ready to discover some more Latin music, not nearly as genteel, from a lot closer to home?

The sound should certainly be familiar to most American listeners. Fania's songwriters were inspired by American pop like Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," but the influence ran both ways: the sonic texture of Gaye's album, with its gently percolating congas, is audibly indebted to salsa. Fania's sound seeped into soul and classic rock, into Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield, into Santana and even Led Zeppelin, whose album radio staple "Fool in the Rain" is a salsa pastiche. And no one who has lived in a city with a significant Latino population in the last four decades can have missed the festive music blasting from cars and open apartment windows on sultry summer evenings.

To younger Latinos enamored of today's Fania equivalent, reggaetón, these old albums will doubtless sound old-fashioned. But music this rhythmically tough could never be dowdy. It's late-20th-century music ready to ignite 21st-century dance floors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ar...ic/04rose.html





Internet Phones: Please Wait for the Next Available Opportunity
Randall Stross

THE telephone and the PC are ubiquitous desk mates, separated by a few inches and about a century.

How soon we can use our home phones to exploit the efficiencies of the Internet, where calling costs are too small to be worth metering, is a question of no small import for every telecommunications provider — and for every household with a phone.

The prospect of modernizing the telephone seems close because broadband services have solved the so-called last-mile problem, bringing relatively fast Internet connections from local switching centers and cable offices into customers' homes. But connecting home phones to the Internet — spanning the last foot and a half — remains a problem, unless one subscribes to one of the new Internet phone services offered by cable companies here and there.

Ideally, we will not end up so dependent upon the cable guy. When eBay decided nine months ago to acquire Skype Technologies, the Luxembourg-based wunderkind that offers free Internet calls around the world, it seemed that free or nearly free Internet telephony would soon reach every American den, and no one would have to sign up for a separate phone service with the cable company. The happy day of free calls will not arrive, however, until existing phones are replaced or adapted to plug into the Internet.

Skype is a service that enables long-distance conversations without phones: one Skype user, sitting at a PC with a headset, can talk to any other Skype user sitting at another PC. Soon after announcing the Skype acquisition, eBay's chief executive, Meg Whitman, said she thought that Skype could "turbocharge" eBay and PayPal — and that eBay and PayPal could likewise "turbocharge" Skype. "One plus one plus one should equal four or five," she said.

She and her eBay colleagues were so eager to complete the Skype deal that they offered rich terms for a company with a mere $60 million in revenue last year: eBay paid $2.6 billion in cash and stock with an additional $1.5 billion to follow if performance targets are met. Figured most conservatively, the $2.6 billion price was 43 times revenue, a valuation so far above industry norms that it might as well have been determined by a Magic 8 Ball.

Any PC, equipped with Skype's free software and a headset, or with a microphone and speakers, can place a free phone call to a similarly equipped PC anywhere in the world — and without bankrupting Skype. The arrangement places no burden upon Skype's servers: messages go directly from calling PC to receiving PC, peer to peer.

These PC-to-PC calls avoid charges because they do not tie up the lines of proprietary telephone company networks. Voice sounds are digitized, compressed, popped into data packets and sent on their way into the shared space of the Internet. The quality of these digitized Internet calls can be as good as or better than conventional calls.

Skype's revenue comes principally from its SkypeOut service, for calls that originate on a PC and connect to a conventional phone number. The sound quality is not as good as it is with its PC-to-PC calls, but Skype's international calls are cheap — as cheap as those offered by no-name, prepaid calling cards — undercutting the rates of traditional telephone companies.

Verizon, for example, has a plan with monthly fees that entitle customers to call China for as little as 15 cents a minute — or $5.23 a minute for the basic rate if you aren't on a plan. At Skype, the call-anytime, no-monthly-fee flat rate is about 2 cents a minute.

News of Skype traveled swiftly, without need of advertising, after the company was founded in 2002. When eBay offered to buy it in September 2005, Skype said that it had 54 million members in 225 countries, and that it was adding 150,000 registrants a day. These numbers must have caused heart palpitations in eBay's executive suite. Skype's hypergrowth would help bolster eBay's slowing growth in its core auction business.

Skype users must use a PC to initiate a call, and eBay users are no less reliant on their PC's, so blending the two services by having eBay sellers offer a "Skype Me" button on their listings seemed a natural fit. With a click, someone interested in bidding would be connected directly to the seller, without having to wait for an exchange of e-mail messages. "Buyers will gain an easy way to talk to sellers quickly and get the information they need to buy," the company said when it announced the acquisition.

EBay has not been in a hurry, however, to roll out the Skype Me option to advertisers. EBay sellers in Belgium, the Netherlands and China can use the option, but not those in the United States. Chris Donlay, a spokesman for eBay, said that the delay in introducing it in the United States was a matter of careful testing and prudence. "We try not to throw something out there," he said.

Undoubtedly, eBay has noticed that stubborn last-foot-and-a-half problem. Paying little or nothing to place a long, unhurried call via Skype to a loved one halfway around the world is worth the minor inconvenience of putting on a headset. But using a headset for every call is a habit yet to be acquired by most people.

The handiest way to make a Skype call is by picking up a telephone. Skype, however, can use only Skype-certified phones, designed to be physically connected to a PC.

When will Skype phones become ubiquitous? Those amazing Skype registration numbers — in the first quarter, the number of users worldwide increased by 220,000 a day — are not having much of an impact on the telephone equipment market in the United States, even in Silicon Valley.

EBay made a great fuss last year when it struck a distribution deal with RadioShack to place Skype-certified phones in 3,500 RadioShack retail outlets. The only one that my local store had in stock, however, cost $120, a price that is not set to move a lot of product. I thought that a local electronics superstore chain might have far greater selection, but discovered that I was only half right: the store, Fry's Electronics, had a lot of phones — 237 models — but only one Skype phone in stock, on sale for $80.

Even after overcoming the equipment problems on the buyer's side, eBay faces another hurdle: most of its merchandise sellers, whether big or small, have good reason to resist offering a Skype Me option. Fielding telephone calls from prospective buyers one by one is labor intensive, which is to say expensive. Restricting communication to e-mail messages is far more efficient. EBay makes it easy for a seller to publicly post replies to queries so that the same questions need not be answered over and over.

While eBay dithers with its proprietary Skype Me plans, Google, Amazon, online newspapers and the rest of the Web are quickly embracing the Old New Thing in advertising: click-to-call, shorthand for "click to be called back," a technology that uses Internet telephony for calling customers back and is available to Web site designers from any number of vendors.

With a click on the button in a Web advertisement, like a Google text ad, a box pops up where you type in your phone number. If it works properly, your phone rings in a blink — with the local plumber or florist or bookseller at the other end of the line. Local merchants who have traditionally advertised in the Yellow Pages are showing particular interest in click-to-call. They, unlike most of eBay's merchandise sellers, are set up to field customers' questions anyhow. On the customer's side, there is no need for a headset or any special equipment. Everyone with a phone can use a click-to-call feature immediately.

For advertisers, click-to-call offers twin attractions: the efficient placing of ads linked to particular search terms, and a means of measuring results without worry about automated click fraud perpetrated by competitors. Peter M. Zollman, an analyst at Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm based in Altamonte Springs, Fla., said that in the future, "advertising — and I mean all advertising — will be performance-based."

"Click-to-call," he added, "is one more manifestation."

Mr. Zollman said he was pleasantly surprised recently when he was searching on the Web for last-minute deals on cruises and was offered a click-to-call button. He clicked, was called back instantly and got a price that he deemed a bargain.

STRICTLY speaking, click-to-call did not save appreciable time when dialing — punching an unfamiliar number into a telephone keypad cannot take much longer than tapping one's own phone number into the click-to-call box. But the process connected him instantly to a human being. Presumably, this level of service will be necessary: surely, no merchant would have the audacity to call you back only to put you on hold.

In an unexpected way, Skype, for all its peer-to-peer ingenuity, has yet to catch up with the plain old telephone system. "People want instant gratification," Mr. Zollman said. "Many do not have Skype, but everyone has a phone."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/bu...ey/04digi.html





Invoking Secrets Privilege Becomes a More Popular Legal Tactic by U.S.
Scott Shane

Facing a wave of litigation challenging its eavesdropping at home and its handling of terror suspects abroad, the Bush administration is increasingly turning to a legal tactic that swiftly torpedoes most lawsuits: the state secrets privilege.

In recent weeks alone, officials have used the privilege to win the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a German man who was abducted and held in Afghanistan for five months and to ask the courts to throw out three legal challenges to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.

But civil liberties groups and some scholars say the privilege claim, in which the government says any discussion of a lawsuit's accusations would endanger national security, has short-circuited judicial scrutiny and public debate of some central controversies of the post-9/11 era.

The privilege has been asserted by the Justice Department more frequently under President Bush than under any of his predecessors — in 19 cases, the same number as during the entire eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, the previous record holder, according to a count by William G. Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso.

While the privilege, defined by a 1953 Supreme Court ruling, was once used to shield sensitive documents or witnesses from disclosure, it is now often used to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception, Mr. Weaver and other legal specialists say.

"This is a very powerful weapon for the executive branch," said Mr. Weaver, who has a law degree and is a co-author of one of the few scholarly articles examining the privilege. "Once it's asserted, in almost every instance it stops the case cold."

Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University who is studying the recent use of the privilege, said the administration's legal strategy "raises profound legal and policy questions that will be the subject of intense debate for the foreseeable future."

Some members of Congress also have doubts about the way the privilege has been used. A bill approved by the House Government Reform Committee would limit its use in blocking whistle-blowers' lawsuits.

"If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who proposed the measure and has campaigned against excessive government secrecy.

Yet courts have almost always deferred to the secrecy claims; Mr. Weaver said he believed that the last unsuccessful assertion of the privilege was in 1993. Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "It's a sign of how potent the national security mantra has become."

Under Mr. Bush, the secrets privilege has been used to block a lawsuit by a translator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after accusing colleagues of security breaches; to stop a discrimination lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Sterling, a Farsi-speaking, African-American officer at the Central Intelligence Agency; and to derail a patent claim involving a coupler for fiber-optic cable, evidently to guard technical details of government eavesdropping.

Such cases can make for oddities. Mark S. Zaid, who has represented Ms. Edmonds, Mr. Sterling and other clients in privilege cases, said he had seen his legal briefs classified by the government and had been barred from contacting a client because his phone line was not secure.

"In most state secrets cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers don't know what the alleged secrets are," Mr. Zaid said.

More recently the privilege has been wielded against lawsuits challenging broader policies, including the three lawsuits attacking the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program — one against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and two against the federal government by the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

In a filing in the New York case, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, wrote that allowing the case to proceed would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" because it "would enable adversaries of the United States to avoid detection." Mr. Negroponte said he was providing more detail in classified filings.

Those cases are still pending. Two lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege.

One plaintiff, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained while changing planes in New York and was taken to Syria, where he has said he was held in a tiny cell and beaten with electrical cables. The other, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Kuwaiti origin, was seized in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan, where he has said he was beaten and injected with drugs before being released in Albania.

The United States never made public any evidence linking either man to terrorism, and both cases are widely viewed as mistakes. Mr. Arar's lawsuit was dismissed in February on separate but similar grounds from the secrets privilege, a decision he is appealing. A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Mr. Masri's lawsuit on May 18, accepting the government's secrets claim.

One frustration of the plaintiffs in such cases is that so much information about the ostensible state secrets is already public. Mr. Arar's case has been examined in months of public hearings by a Canadian government commission, and Mr. Masri's story has been confirmed by American and German officials and blamed on a mix-up of similar names. The N.S.A. program has been described and defended in numerous public statements by Mr. Bush and other top officials and in a 42-page Justice Department legal analysis.

In the A.C.L.U. lawsuit charging that the security agency's eavesdropping is illegal, Ann Beeson, the group's associate legal director, acknowledged that some facts might need to remain secret. "But you don't need those facts to hear this case," she said. "All the facts needed to try this case are already public."

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said he could not discuss any specific case. But he said the state secrets privilege "is well-established in federal law and has been asserted many times in our nation's history to protect our nation's secrets."

Other defenders of the administration's increasing use of the privilege say it merely reflects proliferating lawsuits.

In all of the N.S.A. cases, for instance, "it's the same secret they're trying to protect," said H. Bryan Cunningham, a Denver lawyer who served as a legal adviser to the National Security Council under Mr. Bush. Mr. Cunningham said that under well-established precedent, judges must defer to the executive branch in deciding what secrets must be protected.

But critics of the use of the privilege point out that officials sometimes exaggerate the sensitivities at risk. In fact, documents from the 1953 case that defined the modern privilege, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years and suggest that Air Force officials misled the court.

An accident report on a B-29 bomber crash in 1948 was withheld because the Air Force said it included technical details about sensitive intelligence equipment and missions, but it turned out to contain no such information, said Wilson M. Brown III, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represented survivors of those who died in the crash in recent litigation.

"The facts the Supreme Court was relying on in Reynolds were false," Mr. Brown said in an interview. "It shows that if the government is not truthful, plaintiffs will lose and there's very little chance to straighten it out."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/wa...04secrets.html





India Becoming a Crucial Cog in the Machine at I.B.M.
Saritha Rai

The world's biggest computer services company could not have chosen a more appropriate setting to lay out its strategy for staying on top.

On Tuesday, on the expansive grounds of the Bangalore Palace, a colonial-era mansion once inhabited by a maharajah, the chairman and chief executive of I.B.M., Samuel J. Palmisano, will address 10,000 Indian employees. He will share the stage with A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, India's president, and Sunil Mittal, chairman of the country's largest cellular services provider, Bharti Tele-Ventures. An additional 6,500 employees will look in on the town hall-style meeting by satellite from other Indian cities.

On the same day, Mr. Palmisano and other top executives will meet here with investment analysts and local customers to showcase I.B.M.'s global integration capabilities in a briefing customarily held in New York. During the week, the company will lead the 50 analysts on a tour of its Indian operations.

The meetings are more than an exercise in public and investor relations. They are an acknowledgment of India's critical role in I.B.M.'s strategy, providing it with its fastest-growing market and a crucial base for delivering services to much of the world.

"A significant part of any large project that we do worldwide is today being delivered out of here," said Shanker Annaswamy, I.B.M.'s managing director for India, who presides over what is now the company's second-largest worldwide operation. In the last few years, even as the company has laid off thousands of workers in the United States and Europe, the growth in I.B.M.'s work force in India has been remarkable. From 9,000 employees in early 2004, the number has grown to 43,000 (out of 329,000 worldwide), making I.B.M. the country's largest multinational employer.

Some of the growth has been through acquisition. In a deal valued at about $160 million in 2004, I.B.M. bought Daksh eServices of New Delhi, India's third-largest back-office outsourcing firm with 6,000 workers. Since then, that operation alone has grown to 20,000 employees.

"Now that companies such as Infosys Technologies and Cognizant have clearly demonstrated that the services marketplace is not impregnable, the new battle is for talent," said N. Lakshmi Narayanan, president and chief executive of Cognizant Technology Solutions of Teaneck, N.J. Cognizant is one of I.B.M.'s competitors; it is incorporated in the United States but has the bulk of its 28,000 employees in India.

I.B.M. is growing not only in size by adding new hires, but also in revenue. The company's business in India grew 61 percent in the first quarter of this year, 55 percent in 2005 and 45 percent the year before.

That growth has not come just from taking advantage of the country's pool of low-cost talent. In recent months, the technology hub of Bangalore has become the center of I.B.M.'s efforts to combine high-value, cutting-edge services with its low-cost model.

For instance, the I.B.M. India Research Lab, with units in Bangalore and New Delhi and a hundred employees with Ph.D.'s, has created crucial products like a container tracking system for global shipping companies and a warranty management system for automakers in the United States. Out of the second project, I.B.M. researchers have fashioned a predictable modeling system that helps track the failure of components inside a vehicle, a potentially important tool.

In March, the company started a Global Business Solutions Center here, announcing that it would represent the "future of consulting services." I.B.M. said that it expected to invest more than $200 million a year in the new center. The company hopes to provide clients with access to the expertise of its 60,000 consultants worldwide in complex areas like supply chain management and compliance with banking rules.

But competitors are trying to gain on I.B.M. The rival consulting firm, Accenture, based in Hamilton, Bermuda, is ramping up equally rapidly in India, while another outsourcing competitor, Electronic Data Systems, based in Plano, Tex., recently made an offer for a controlling stake in Mphasis, a midsize outsourcing firm in Bangalore.

The race for India's skilled, inexpensive talent may not stop at I.B.M. "Many companies in the technology development and support niche covet and value these workers highly," said Kevin M. Moss, a New York-based special counsel in Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel's outsourcing and technology transactions group.

On the pricing front, rivals like Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai and Infosys Technologies of Bangalore have pioneered and perfected the low-cost model. Infosys Technologies, with 52,700 employees, has $2.15 billion in annual revenues, a figure that is growing 30 percent annually.

But the depth, breadth and geographic spread of I.B.M.'s global operations — which generated $91 billion in sales last year, $47 billion from services — keep it ahead of its competitors for now. For example, I.B.M. manages a system it developed for a large American oil company, which it would not identify, that keeps track of consumption and oversees financial and administrative processes as well as the technical help desk, data network and servers. I.B.M. is also researching tools to track company assets and reduce costs.

"All this is done for one customer seamlessly from three of our centers in Bangalore, Chicago and outside of London," said Amitabh Ray, director of global delivery, I.B.M. Global Services. "These kinds of capabilities and global scale are unmatched."

But smaller rivals are playing catch-up here, too, by talking to customers about their needs and then developing custom-built software. Infosys Technologies, for instance, has a consulting unit with headquarters in Fremont, Calif., near Silicon Valley, where it now has 200 consultants, and an additional 1,800 consultants in India.

Meanwhile, Mr. Annaswamy, I.B.M.'s chief executive in India, acknowledged that growth was difficult because thousands of recruits had to be quickly integrated into the company. Salaries are rising, and employee costs are also moving up, he said.

Even so, the Indian operation is becoming more and more strategic for the company. "Both in terms of size and scale, India has become the focal point," Mr. Ray, of I.B.M. Global Services, said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/technology/05ibm.html





Apple Software Logs Out Of India
R Raghavendra

BANGALORE: The company that redefined the way we listen to music has decided to call it quits in India. Apple, known for its popular iPods, is pulling out its software development and support operations in India.

The company had commenced operations in April and hired about 30 people for its subsidiary, Apple Services India Pvt Ltd.

At a meeting on May 29, Apple announced its decision to lay off all its employees. Apple officials told them that "the company is revaluating its operations and has thought of pulling back its Indian operations".

Apple is giving these employees a severance package of two months salary. It will settle all claims on June 9. When contacted, Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesperson, said, "We have re-evaluated our plans and have decided to put our planned support centre growth in other countries."

Apple continues to operate its sales and marketing arm in Bangalore which employs 25 people. For most employees — a few have returned to their former employers — it was a bolt from the blue.

"It started off with building dreams. We were not given any warning. They just told us the operations would now head back to the US," said a sacked employee.

Considering the low-cost, high-quality talent pool that Bangalore offers, it is unclear why Apple decided to shut shop just over a month after it commenced operations.

Apple had set itself a hiring target of 600 by the year-end. After a gala induction ceremony on April 17, the operations team went to Transworks for training. Some of the managers were about to leave for the US for further training when they were asked to stay put.

"On May 15, Apple officials addressed us and were highly appreciative of the workforce and the task it would execute in India. I wonder why they never said anything even then," said another fired employee.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/a...ow/1611960.cms





The History of Console Piracy and How It Affects You, The Gamer
Vahid Mirjamali

Software Piracy has been around since the floppies were invented; people were copying games and sharing with their friends and family if they too owned a computer. The first mass console piracy came when the Super Nintendo Entertainment Center got a device that let people put ROMs into a cartridge (at that time only 1 game at a time worked). Then the first modchip was invented for the PS1, this was the first major move in piracy because it caused major concern from Sony and Nintendo over console game security. Sony personally sued many companies over selling and having mod chips in possession. Lik-Sang.com was personally one of those victims as it was one of the biggest modchip retailers at the time. They were shut down for around 2 years before being reopened fully legal. Now companies are wasting time and money inventing hundreds of ways to irritate their customers, they now are adding copy prevention software’s into their games.

Due to this the cost of games has not only risen a large amount, but the release date of the new next-gen consoles such as the Wii and the PS3 have been shifted back almost a whole year. These companies want to make sure that their games don’t get pirated so they are on a mission to build the invisible barrier around their games being copied, unfortunately the demands of piracy is so high, that “invisible protection” is broken down within the first year of that consoles release. That leaves us the customers not only sad and broken hearted, but also angry at the fact that the games cost us now 60 dollars versus the original 40 dollars.

I am sure most of you are noticing that piracy is growing daily by leaps and bounds. A few years back, I was the only one who even knew how to pirate ps1 and ps2 games in my school, now half the people I talk to know how to pirate game consoles, and how to play their pirated version of games. People feel that when you pirate it makes you seem cooler, and somewhat of a “hacker” (I am guessing this came from all those hacker movies from the early 90’s). Man, they are wrong, piracy is what thief’s do in order to save their hard earned money for physical items that they can’t steal so easily.

The largest piracy breakout I have ever seen in my life to date is the PSP iso loader issue. It is not only one of the easiest systems to pirate, but it also requires no modchip. That means it cost the user nothing to fully pirate a game, and it doesn’t prevent even the youngest kid from pirating a PSP game. Although I am totally fine with having a backup of a game you own, or putting ISO’s on your PSP if you own the game in order to speed up the games loading time (As some of the PSP games do have long loading times). I have been noticing the extreme decrease in good games coming out for the PSP. At first I believed that this issue stemmed from the fact that the console has high-graphical demands that are hard to meet, but now I have figured out the true reason that good games are hard to find on the PSP.

Game developers evaluate many different things on a game console before deciding to develop a highly time consuming game for it. They evaluate its system potential, its market share, its popularity, and most of all whether there game will truly sell on its console. If any one of the developers even is slightly up to beat with PSP news they will know right off the bat, that their games will be pirated the second it is released, and the second it is released the game will not sell to its potential. Then they see that the Nintendo DS (Nintendo’s portable system) has a low-rate of piracy compared to the PSP, and many more people own it, they will most likely go to the DS to develop games leaving the PSP in the dust. Now that leaves us, PSP owners with a copy of Dynasty warriors to brood over, or homebrew that bores us after a year.

In recent news headlines there is news of yet a new way to pirate games on the PSP unhindered by firmware issues or game compatibility issues. It is by the method of modchip, the soldered in version of the piracy loader. It will allow you from what we have heard to play ISO’s on any firmware, and all games will work on it. I must point out if you are stupid enough to pay $90 to buy a modchip for a system that costs 200 dollars, then go through the near impossible installation process, then for all I care feel free to brick your PSP, and try again. Modchip’s are like about as safe as the early downgrader when it was released, they are usually so buggy they brick ½ PSP’s it takes a good 6-8 months to perfect the modchip’s firmware. Even though I hate modchip’s, I feel for PSPCrazy’s members, so I will tell you this if you are going to truly get a modchip, for you own sake, WAIT! until a bug-free perfected version is released, it will save you the process of getting a new PSP

It is your choice to pirate or not, for the good of the PSP Scene, and the future of video games please put pirating to rest.
http://www.pspcrazy.com/?page=Articl...article&id=201





Hotels.com Customer Info May Be At Risk
Donna Gordon Blankinship

Thousands of Hotels.com customers may be at risk for credit card fraud after a laptop computer containing their personal information was stolen from an auditor, a company spokesman said Saturday.

The password-protected laptop belonging to an Ernst & Young auditor was taken in late February from a locked car, said Paul Kranhold, spokesman for Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com based in Bellevue, Wash.

"As a result of our ongoing communication with law enforcement, we don't have any indication that any credit card numbers have been used for fraudulent activity," Kranhold said. "It appears the laptop was not the target of the break-in."

Both Hotels.com and Ernst & Young mailed letters to Hotels.com customers this past week encouraging them to take appropriate action to protect their personal information.

The transactions recorded on the laptop were mostly from 2004, although some were from 2003 or 2002, the companies said. The computer contained personal information including names, addresses and credit card information of about 243,000 Hotels.com customers. It did not include their Social Security numbers.

Ernst & Young, which has been the outside auditor for Hotels.com for several years, notified the company of the security breach on May 3.

"We deeply regret this incident has occurred and want to apologize to you and Hotels.com for any inconvenience or concern this may cause," said the unsigned memo from Ernst & Young dated May 2006.

Ernst & Young invites those affected by the incident to enroll in a free credit monitoring service arranged by the auditor.

"We sincerely regret that this incident occurred and we are taking it very seriously," said the letter signed by Hotels.com general manager Sean Kell.

The letter from Hotels.com said "Ernst & Young was taking additional steps to protect the confidentiality of its data, including encrypting the sensitive information we provide to them as part of the audit process."
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