[JackSpratts]

Death by DMCA
Fred von Lohmann and Wendy Seltzer

In 1998, U.S. entertainment companies persuaded Congress to make dramatic changes in its copyright code by passing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA gave copyright holders new rights to control the way people use copyrighted material and new protection for technologies designed to restrict access or copying. The movie and record companies argued they needed these new restrictions to fight increased piracy threats in the digital era.

In the eight years since the DMCA's passage, however, piracy has not decreased, and hurdles to lawful uses of media have risen. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), the international arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), estimated worldwide losses because of piracy to be US $2.2 billion in 1997 and $3.5 billion annually in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Meanwhile, entire consumer electronics categories have been wiped from retail shelves. If three or four years ago you didn't buy a digital video recorder that automatically skips commercials, you're out of luck; that feature is not in such products today. Television executives brought litigation that bankrupted the company offering DVRs with these user-friendly features, because skipping commercials potentially undermines their ability to sell commercial time.

You're likewise out of luck if you're looking to buy software that lets you copy a DVD onto your laptop's hard drive; it's no longer for sale, at least not in the United States. Even if you want to put the movie you bought onto a pocket-size video and game console, such as Sony's PlayStation Portable, which allows users to watch video stored on flash memory or a miniature hard drive, you can't legally do so, because you'd have to “rip,” or decode, it to make the transfer—and the studios claim that this action violates the DMCA. When you rip a CD, be it to an audiotape or an MP3 file, you're not breaking any laws. But to rip a DVD you need to somehow get around the encryption technology built into a standard disc, and since such circumvention is forbidden by the DMCA, if you rip a DVD, you are breaking a law. Under the DMCA, legality doesn't depend on how the copy will be used but rather on the means by which the digital content is copied.

Now, in an even more vexing situation, U.S. entertainment companies are successfully spreading the copyright code changes established by the DMCA around the world. Laws similar to the DMCA now exist in Japan, Australia, and much of Europe. At least nine additional countries, including Chile, Guatemala, and Singapore have also been pressured to enact DMCA-like laws as part of a devil's bargain with U.S. trade negotiators, who say the copyright change is necessary to secure free trade pacts with the United States that would govern all sorts of commerce. And in Europe, the body charged with defining the European digital television standards is mixing in content-protection obligations, responding yet again to pressure from major U.S. movie studios.

Emboldened by their successes, U.S. entertainment companies are pushing for another wave of even more restrictive legislation. “Broadcast flag” legislation could require that all consumer electronics devices recognize protected television broadcasts and potentially refuse to copy them; a so-called “radio flag” bill would prevent or restrict the manufacture of hard disk recorders for digital radio; and an “analog hole” closure would restrict the connections new digital devices can make with analog devices.

As the entertainment industry expands copyright law, the rising tide threatens to completely wash away many types of innovative gadgets.

Before the passage of the DMCA, entertainment and technology had, for the most part, peacefully coexisted. Laws addressing the use and misuse of copyrighted content targeted “bad actors” rather than complete classes of technology. For example, when songwriters in the 1920s sued radio stations for broadcasting live music performances without paying the songwriters, the lawyers did nothing to the companies that designed and built the broadcast transmitter towers. And in the early 1980s, when videocassette recorders (VCRs) made it possible for consumers to record television broadcasts, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark Betamax case, ruled that the manufacturers of home video-recording devices were not liable for copyright infringement.

By the 1990s, U.S. entertainment companies wanted not just compensation but control. They went abroad to fight for international treaties that went beyond punishing copyright infringement. These new treaties endorsed copyright-protection technologies and prohibited the circumvention of these technological barriers. Then the companies brought the treaties back home to demand an update of the U.S. Copyright Act. And that brought about the DMCA.

The most controversial of the DMCA's additions to copyright made it a crime to circumvent “technological protection measures” deployed on copyrighted works. Under the DMCA, these measures mean any technology used to restrict or prevent copying of or access to a copyrighted work. Thus, the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a password-control system and also prevents working around an encryption scheme that might stop someone from copying a song to an MP3 player. Other DMCA provisions outlaw the distribution of devices that bypass these digital locks.

Copyright is being turned from a limited-term incentive designed to encourage creative artists to a broadly scoped transfer of wealth from the public to the private realm. As the industries that generate copyrighted materials seek control over not only their works but also the devices on which we watch, listen to, and remix them, copyright law is turning into technology regulation.

ReplayTV 4000, an advanced digital video recorder introduced in 2001 by ReplayTV Network Inc., of Cupertino, Calif., was an early victim of the rising legislative tide. Like its competitor TiVo, from TiVo Inc., Alviso, Calif., the ReplayTV 4000 recorded television programs to a hard drive and allowed the viewer to watch the show at a later time—the kind of time shifting the Supreme Court approved as a fair use of the Betamax. The ReplayTV had two additional unique features: it could automatically skip commercials, and it could also relay a recorded program to another ReplayTV unit in the home or elsewhere on the Internet.

These new capabilities did not please Hollywood. Jamie Kellner, then CEO of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., called skipping commercials “theft” and, along with 28 entertainment companies including major movie studios and television networks—such as Disney, Paramount, Time Warner, Fox, Columbia, ABC, NBC, and CBS—sued ReplayTV for contributing to copyright infringement. Though the company might have prevailed in the end based on the Betamax precedent, ReplayTV ultimately ended up in bankruptcy before it could have its day in court. The company that rescued ReplayTV from bankruptcy, D&M Holdings Inc., Tokyo, settled the case in 2005 by pledging not to include the commercial-skipping and the show-forwarding features in its future models.

None of the DVRs on the market today, from TiVo, ReplayTV's successors, or elsewhere, such as from cable companies, offer these features. Although nothing currently stops a technically savvy hobbyist from turning a personal computer with a TV tuner card into a ReplayTV 4000–like video recorder, the legislative tide may soon threaten these tinkerers as well, as we'll explain.

The DVD, introduced in 1996, quickly became one of the most successful consumer products of all time. It revolutionized the market for home movie viewing and enabled new, portable devices to be created; it also gave rise to new distribution schemes like the Netflix subscription service and its many imitators.

But for consumers, the DVD format left room for improvement. Copy-protection schemes implemented in the DVD format at Hollywood's insistence made it difficult to reproduce movies, in whole or in part. So DVD owners who wanted to copy a few movies onto a laptop computer for a long trip—and to leave the drive and discs themselves at home—couldn't. Furthermore, region codes locked discs to specific areas of the world, blocking travelers from picking up new discs or trying foreign selections.

In 1999, a team that included Jon Lech Johansen, a young Norwegian programmer, cracked the DVD copy-protection technology. Johansen explained how to do it on his Web site, and programs soon developed to enable direct copying of a DVD. A group of movie studios complained to legal authorities in Norway, and the Norwegian prosecutor charged Johansen with a crime. The court cleared him after years of legal battles. However, Johansen's Web site addressed technologically savvy users, not the average consumer looking to make a quick copy of one of the Barney movies.

In 2003, 321 Studios, of St. Charles, Mo., launched a software product called DVD X Copy for these more typical DVD owners. The company built in aggressive measures to prevent piracy, including an antipiracy splash screen that appeared when viewing any copy and watermarks that would enable copies to be traced back to those who made them. The management at 321 Studios hoped that these cooperative measures would stave off Hollywood's wrath.

The company was wrong. Before the DMCA, 321 Studios would have been on relatively safe legal ground. From the time of the Betamax case, U.S. courts had made it clear that copying devices were legal so long as they had any substantial lawful use. But the DMCA changed the rules. When the movie studios sued 321 Studios, the Hollywood contingent did not argue that any of their movies had been unlawfully copied. Instead, it said that the product circumvented a “technical protection measure,” which in this case was the Content Scramble System (CSS) on DVDs.

The CSS is the scheme Hollywood uses to encrypt movies on DVDs. Decryption requires a key, which manufacturers of DVD players obtain by signing a license with the DVD Copy Control Association, a consortium of movie studios, including Fox and Warner, and technology providers, such as Intel and Toshiba. This license, in turn, forbids licensed devices from making digital copies of DVD content or from offering playback modes that the studios disapprove of. (DVD recorders can copy only unencrypted digital material, such as home movies.) The licensing rules and DMCA put companies like 321 Studios in a quandary. If they signed the license in order to obtain the CSS decryption keys, the document prohibited them from using those keys in software capable of copying a DVD. If they didn't sign the license and forged ahead anyway, deriving the CSS keys on their own, they risked prosecution or a civil suit under the DMCA for circumventing the CSS. After consideration, 321 Studios opted to go forward without a license. The DMCA quickly washed away DVD X Copy. After the movie studios prevailed in court in 2004, manufacturers pulled DVD X Copy and similar ripping tools off the U.S. market.

Though DVD-copying software has been swept off U.S. retail shelves, plenty of it escaped to higher ground. Freeware DVD-copying applications like DVD Shrink, MacTheRipper, and HandBrake wander the Web. To escape the Hollywood hunters, most live on Web servers located outside the United States.

Unencumbered digital television tuners are a bit higher up on the beach, yet they represent another class of products that may be eliminated by legislation. These peripherals slip into a computer's PCI card slot or hook up to a USB port to enable it to receive digital television broadcasts, turning a PC into a TV or video recorder. The cards, which cost from $100 to $350, came to market in 2004 from a variety of manufacturers, including ATI, Dvico, Elgato, and pcHDTV. With a tuner card, a hobbyist can build his or her own DVR.

The entertainment companies do not like the flexibility of these home-built machines—or, more significant to them, the flexibility of the machines that consumer electronics manufacturers could offer under the current copyright law and its Betamax rule.

Envisioning a world in which copyrighted works are indiscriminately distributed on the Internet, the entertainment industry looked for ways to force limitations into the design of these devices. Hollywood went first to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to demand a “broadcast flag mandate,” that is, a requirement that every device capable of receiving digital television broadcasts incorporate restrictions against redistribution of those programs. Such a law would give Hollywood a say in the design of all the new hardware consumers would need to make DTV work. The mandate would require devices capable of receiving over-the-air DTV signals to detect and respond to a flag, known officially as the Redistribution Control Descriptor, in the broadcast stream. The flag indicates that the owner of the rights to the transmission has imposed restrictions on its copying or redistribution. The mandate required that the technology designed to detect the flag and implement the restrictions be embedded in every tuner that has digital outputs.

Hollywood lobbyists actually convinced the FCC to impose broadcast flag regulations in 2003, but a U.S. Court of Appeals found that the Commission lacked the authority to regulate the internal workings of televisions. Hollywood is now asking Congress to give the FCC that legal authority by passing the Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006, sponsored by Rep. Michael Ferguson (R-N.J.).

If Congress does enact these broadcast flag regulations, existing tuner cards will ignore the flag, but it will be unlawful to manufacture any new cards without the feature. Products that would have to be redesigned in response to the flag mandate would include the wide variety of inexpensive tuner cards available today, as well as TV hard disk digital recorders, DVD recorders, and any other hardware or software that would make it possible to receive or view digital broadcast television. The broadcast flag law would force designers of tomorrow's digital television devices to either implement one of a limited list of approved content-protection technologies to restrict flagged broadcasts or hire lawyers to seek FCC approval for any newly developed content-protection mechanism. Neither option would ensure backward-compatibility with existing high-definition televisions or interoperability with the other digital media equipment consumers might have already purchased. These requirements would inevitably mean higher costs for technology developers and would handicap the introduction of new features. And all this would happen without stopping those who are truly determined to redistribute HDTV programming.

Like the DMCA's provisions, broadcast flag legislation, if established in the United States, is likely to proliferate around the world.

Hollywood is no longer waiting for products to actually be invented, manufactured, and shipped to retailers before trying to bar them from the market. Instead, the entertainment industry has already begun attacking some consumer electronics devices before the manufacturing process begins. That's happening to products that would give consumers the ability to record digital radio in the same way we “TiVo” television shows.

In the United States, 3000 FM broadcasters have committed to augmenting their traditional analog AM and FM broadcasts with digital signals using a technology called In-Band On‑Channel Digital Audio Broadcasting, more commonly called HD Radio, which debuted around 2004. Some 700 of these stations already have HD Radio on the air. Europe has deployed a similar digital radio system. HD Radio promises increased fidelity for AM broadcasts and increased capacity for FM broadcasts: using digital radio, broadcasters could transmit as many as three compressed digital programs in the same width of spectrum that supports only one analog program today, albeit at lower fidelity than with analog FM.

For decades, music fans have been recording analog music from radio broadcasts. The recording industry never liked this home taping, and in the 1970s and early 1980s it repeatedly tried but failed to convince legislators to tax analog tape. In 1991, the music industry took the issue to the courts, suing to block the first digital audio tape recorders, asserting that digital music is different from analog because digital copies are as good as the originals, whereas analog copies are not. Congress brokered a compromise between the music industry and the consumer electronics manufacturers and enacted the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. Among other items, the law resolved the question of taping off the radio, making it clear that analog taping for noncommercial use was perfectly legal but digital taping would be legal only if the recording devices and blanks included a small royalty, for example, 3 cents on a $1.00 recordable audio CD, payable to the music industry. The law also required that covered digital audio recorders include a primitive copy-control system known as the Serial Copy Management System.

With the advent of HD Radio, the recording industry wanted to reopen the issue. The industry, represented by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is trying to renege on the bargain struck in the Audio Home Recording Act, in which it agreed to accept the royalty in exchange for permitting digital radio recording. The RIAA is urging the FCC and Congress to impose design restrictions on any future HD Radio recorders to stave off a successful new mutation: a digital hard disk recorder that allows easy and flexible archiving of radio broadcasts. As similar devices have appeared for satellite radio, the recording industry has also begun pushing for legislation to restrict them, such as S. 2644, the Platform Equity and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music (PERFORM) Act of 2006, introduced by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Cal.).

The restrictions sought by the RIAA would prevent users from storing individual song tracks, searching by title or artist, or creating playlists. What the RIAA wants, according to documents it filed with the FCC, are digital recorders that record only in segments at least 30 minutes long. This action would prevent users from splitting the 30-minute segment into individual songs or skipping to the beginnings of songs. Limitations such as these would make off-the-air recordings less desirable and therefore, the industry hopes, prevent them from cutting into record sales, and they would also deny users key benefits of the new technology.

The industry argues that the regulations should also require that recordings be cryptographically bound to the recording device, thereby making them nontransferable to iPods, MP3 players, or computers. Further, the regulations should also limit the use of metadata—that is, identifying information that may supplement the audio file—and so deny users the convenience of setting up devices to record only favored artists or genres. In essence, these rules would force future digital recorders to ape the analog cassette recorders of decades past. The regulations would ban all “noncompliant” recorders from the marketplace.

The good news for radio fans is that the recording industry's proposal met with a chilly reception both at the FCC and at a Senate hearing this past January. The bad news is that the recording industry continues to push hard for it.

While some gizmos in the eye of the storm are exotic or newly evolved, one is, today, as common as a house cat. This is the type of device that transforms analog signals into digital ones: the analog-to-digital converter.

The MPAA has made plugging the “analog hole” a top legislative priority. The concept is simple: most of today's digital entertainment devices, whether they are DVD or CD players, hard disk recorders like TiVo, or television tuners, have analog as well as digital outputs. The analog outputs include composite video (a single yellow RCA jack), component video (a trio of RCA jacks, usually green, blue, and red), and S-video (a multipin jack). These jacks let consumers easily connect modern digital products to home entertainment devices that predate the digital era. Hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide use these jacks to enjoy DVDs and other digital media without having to run out and replace all their existing consumer electronics.

New and emerging products are increasingly encrypting their digital outputs. The list includes DVD-Audio players and the new Blu‑Ray Disc and HD DVD players, the much-hyped high-definition successors to DVD players, the first examples of which are just reaching the market. In contrast, device designers can't encrypt or scramble analog outputs, at least not if they intend the products to continue to work with older devices. This means that users can freely record and manipulate analog signals, using an old VCR, for example.

Nevertheless, what really bothers Hollywood about standard, unencrypted analog interfaces is that it cannot use licensing to impose restrictions on the makers of analog devices; unlike digital devices, most analog interfaces do not need decryption keys. If such interfaces are eliminated, however, then when analog devices wear out and consumers replace them with digital devices, Hollywood will have tighter control over the evolution and interconnection of consumer entertainment technologies than it did in the analog era.

Hollywood, therefore, is going on the attack against devices that convert analog content to digital. This category covers an incredibly broad array of products, from basic components found on RadioShack shelves to fully formed gadgets ubiquitous in the marketplace. For example, for just a few hundred dollars consumers can buy video capture cards and use them in their personal computers to digitize old home movies. With a video capture card, you can make a copy of a movie for your video iPod, excerpt video for a school project, or take a clip to remix with your own footage.

In an attempt to put an end to all that, Hollywood has drafted the Digital Transition Content Security Act, introduced as H.R. 4569 in December 2005 by Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). This legislation, better known as the Analog Hole Bill, would impose a design mandate on any “analog video input device that converts into digital form an analog video signal.”

The act would require digital recorders, video capture cards, and other devices that can convert analog signals into digital data to detect and respond to two different analog signaling technologies. One of them, the Copy Generation Management System for Analog (CGMS-A) would set a flag in a television transmission that would identify whether or not the show being broadcast has copy restrictions on it. If it does, the flag would identify the generation of the recording and the number of times it could be copied: not at all, once, or some preset number. The television broadcaster would transmit this identification during the video-blanking interval of the analog transmission, that moment in which the electron gun that paints the pixels on a television screen jumps from the bottom to the top. The second signal, called Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL), would be inserted into the video picture itself and, like CGMS-A, would not be visible to the eye. Originally developed to trigger responses by toys to daytime cartoons, VEIL would operate as a backup for CGMS-A and would be present in every content-controlled broadcast. If a device covered by the legislation detected a VEIL signal without accompanying copy-control information, the mismatch would tip off the device that the copy-control flag had been stripped or tampered with.
Hollywood is going on the attack against devices that convert analog content to digital

The Analog Hole Bill is Hollywood's attempt to control an even broader range of devices than the DMCA does. The chips used to convert video from analog to digital are in today's digital cameras, camera phones, and personal media players. A host of future new devices are likely to include this basic technology. The Analog Hole Bill would require that all these products incorporate content-protection technologies certified by federal regulators and include hardware and software to block any end-user modifications. The days of hardware “tweaking” would end. The legislation would also dictate the kinds of video outputs permitted, potentially orphaning generations of older products, including television sets, stereo speakers, and VCRs. Such legislation, combined with other laws already passed and pending, would lead to a world in which federal regulators, not creative engineers, would dictate many product features and design decisions. In place of the new era's digital developments, Hollywood's vision takes us back to the Stone Age.

Hollywood is good at telling stories. The one it has been screening in Washington—that music and movies will perish if the regulators don't kill the dangerous gizmos first—is powerful drama but has about as much basis in reality as Lord of the Rings. Killing off gizmos and subjecting technological development to the whims of federal regulators will ultimately hurt not just consumers but also tomorrow's creative industries—both technology and entertainment.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun06/3673





Hollywood, Retailers Eye Movie Download Kiosks
Sue Zeidler

In a bid to preserve shelf space and fight slowing DVD sales, major retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - news) have held talks with Hollywood's studios to develop kiosks where consumers can copy movies and TV shows onto DVDs and devices, industry executives said.

Installing video-burning kiosks in retail stores would help counter the slowing growth in the $24 billion home DVD market, executives said.

Retailers have used discounted DVDs to lure customers to stores and sell them other goods. But increasingly, Hollywood's studios are starting to offer digital downloads of films, TV shows and videos to cell phones, PCs and laptop computers.

Retailers are concerned that digital downloads might spell an end to the sale of DVDs, and see the download-to-burn kiosks as a way to keep them in the DVD business.

"There have been discussions with all the major retailers who have an interest in kiosks because they would let them grow their product offerings without using a lot of shelf space," said Jim Wuthrich, senior vice president, digital distribution for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group.

"Burning DVDs in stores could happen in 2007," he said, but noted various licensing and technology hurdles still remained. Warner Bros. is the studio owned by Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news).

Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target Corp. (NYSE:TGT - news) and Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE:BBY - news) represented 50 percent of all sell-through retail DVD sales in 2004, according to the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA).

A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart confirmed that the world's largest retailer was looking into kiosks, but said no formal announcements or decisions were expected soon.

Billion Dollar Business

The video industry group's most recent stand-alone survey for Wal-Mart put its DVD sales at $3.2 billion in 2003, more than double those at Target, the No. 2 sell-through retailer.

Target and Best Buy officials were unavailable to comment.

Restaurant chain McDonald's Corp. (NYSE:MCD - news) and movie rental retailer Movie Gallery (Nasdaq:MOVI - news) have experimented with kiosks that are more like vending machines for renting physical DVDs.

McDonald's has put its $1-per-night kiosks, which hold about 500 disks, in hundreds of restaurants in a bid to lure consumers into a one-stop experience to eat first, then rent a movie to take home and watch.

By contrast, digital on-demand video kiosks could enable retailers to offer all 6,600 Warner Bros. movie titles because they would be downloaded immediately via a high-speed Internet connection at the kiosk. Retailers could use shelf space to stock only the most recent releases.

"It's been a big topic of discussion. The technology does exist currently to enable DVD on-demand through a kiosk," said Lawrence Dvorchik, general manager of KioskCom, a leading trade show on interactive self-service kiosks held in Las Vegas.

"I'd imagine that some of the holdup can be tied to the rights issues. That is the way that it was with the music burning kiosks," said Dvorchik.

Officials from other major studios like Walt Disney Co. (NYSEIS - news) and General Electric Co.'s (NYSE:GE - news) Universal Studios also had no immediate comment. But sources said all the studios were looking at the idea.

"From a studio's perspective, the kiosks would allow us to get more content to more people," said Wuthrich.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060602/...edia_kiosks_dc





Storage Demands Flash Memory Industry
May Wong

The senior vice president of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. whipped out a tiny hard drive about the size of a Wheat Thin. The drive's label claimed a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes — more than 100 times greater than today's models that can hold 8,000 photos or 2,000 songs.

It wasn't real. But at the rate storage technology is now moving, it's only a matter of time before Healy's mock 1-terabyte disk drive becomes a reality.

With pioneering products like TiVo Inc.'s digital video recorders and Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod music players, the unsung storage components of hard disk drives and flash memory are taking on more visible roles. These are the keepers of precious personal cargo — from photos and household finances to music collections and favorite TV shows.

"You're letting us into your heart now, not just your home," said Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate Technology LLC, the world's largest maker of hard drives.

The opportunity hasn't been lost on storage purveyors.

Top suppliers — like Seagate, Western Digital Inc. and Hitachi for hard drives, and Samsung Electronics Co. and Toshiba Corp. for both flash memory and hard drives — are consistently pushing the technological envelope to feed device makers with ever beefier and more reliable technology.

Consider Apple's original iPod, which started in 2001 with a 5-gigabyte hard drive. Today, Apple has models ranging from the pencil-thin iPod Nano that holds up to 4 gigabytes using flash memory, to a video-capable iPod holding up to 60 gigabytes on a hard drive.

Flash memory makers have been doubling capacities about every nine months, says Celeste Crystal, an analyst at market researcher IDC. They're squeezing more bits of data onto cells in their silicon chips as well as developing new ways to stack layers of cells in the same amount of space.

The capacities of hard drives, which use spinning magnetized disks, have been doubling nearly each year. After decades of cramming more and more bits of data closer together, physical limitations are kicking in, so now the industry is switching to so-called perpendicular recording. By flipping the bits of information to stand vertically rather than horizontally, hard drive capacities are again on track to keep expanding.

As a result, consumers are closer than they've ever been to seeing a terabyte of storage in the 3.5-inch hard disk drives found in mainstream home computers.

Later this year, consumers will see PCs and backup-storage devices with 750-gigabyte hard drives — a 50 percent increase from the previous industry maximum of 500 gigabytes and many more times greater than the megabyte drives of the 1980s.

Three-quarters of a terabyte will let consumers store roughly 375 hours of standard TV programming, about 75 hours of high-definition video, more than a half million photos, or more than 10,000 music CDs converted into the MP3 digital audio format.

And by the end of 2007, PCs will have 1-terabyte drives while notebook computers will sport 200-gigabyte drives, suppliers said.

The competing storage medium, flash memory, holds data in tinier packages than hard drives, though at smaller capacities. Flash chips, unlike hard drives, have no moving parts, making them particularly rugged and versatile. It's why people can now tote around reams of documents on USB keychains or work out to their favorite tunes on gizmos as light as a stick of Chapstick.

Continued advances will mean portable gadgets will be able to carry 32 gigabytes of data on fingernail-sized flash memory cards within five years, predicts Eli Harari, chief executive of SanDisk Corp., the world's largest supplier of flash memory storage cards.

Both industries are on a tear.

The hard drive industry hit a record $27.9 billion in worldwide sales in 2005, and IDC predicts record shipments will continue annually, ballooning to $41.5 billion in 2010.

Flash industry sales are expected to jump to $18.7 billion in 2010, up from a record $10.6 billion in 2005, IDC forecasts.

"Storage growth is phenomenal," said IDC analyst John Rydning.

Though flash memory and hard drives will compete for business in some overlapping product segments — cell phones, portable media players and ultracompact laptops — analysts say both are poised to dominate their respective markets.

Hard drives, with their monster capacities, are expected to become increasingly vital components in all kinds of consumer gear — not just computers. They're also expanding into game consoles, car navigation systems, digital video recorders and camcorders.

And Watkins eyes the kingpin of consumer electronics: "Every TV will have a hard drive on it, in it, near it," he said, adding that storage demands will only be driven higher as consumers download more video games, TV shows, movies and other media.

Meanwhile, flash memory is expected to expand beyond its current staples of digital cameras, portable music players and keychain drives. Flash memory suppliers are bullish on how the portability and battery-life advantages of their technology will give consumers access to media wherever they want.

Harari eyes the mother lode in the mobile arena: "There are a billion consumers coming on stream for cell phones that will be your TV, personal computer, personal communicator and entertainment device. That's our huge opportunity."

For both industries, thriving sales in consumer electronics have been key in boosting company profits even as they invested in research and development and cut per-gigabyte prices.

Seagate saw its fiscal 2005 earnings rise to $707 million on revenue of $7.5 billion, up from $529 million in income on sales of $6.22 billion the year before. SanDisk earned $386.4 million in 2005, on sales of $2.31 billion, up from $272 million on sales of $1.78 billion a year earlier.

Because the industry has continually reduced prices, Hitachi's Healy promises consumers won't have to break the bank to satisfy their storage needs.

"This is the vision of the future," Healy said, holding the mock 1-inch, 1-terabyte hard drive. It might take 20 years to get there, he said, "but it won't cost you anymore than it would today."

That would roughly mean a retail price of $150, but instead of getting 8 gigabytes of storage, you would get 1,000.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060604/...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1





Back To The Bunker
William M. Arkin

On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.

But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.

After 9/11, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had set up a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington on a rotating basis to ensure the continuity of national security. Since then, a program once focused on presidential succession and civilian control of U.S. nuclear weapons has been expanded to encompass the entire government. From the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration to the National Archives, every department and agency is now required to plan for continuity outside Washington.

Yet according to scores of documents I've obtained and interviews with half a dozen sources, there's no greater confidence today that essential services would be maintained in a disaster. And no one really knows how an evacuation would even be physically possible.

Moreover, since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the definition of what constitutes an "essential" government function has been expanded so ridiculously beyond core national security functions -- do we really need patent and trademark processing in the middle of a nuclear holocaust? -- that the term has become meaningless. The intent of the government effort may be laudable, even necessary, but a hyper-centralized approach based on the Cold War model of evacuations and bunkering makes it practically worthless.

That the continuity program is so poorly conceived, and poorly run, should come as no surprise. That's because the same Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed New Orleans after Katrina, an agency that a Senate investigating committee has pronounced "in shambles and beyond repair," is in charge of this enormous effort to plan for the U.S. government's survival.

Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created.

At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually.

When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later.

Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program.

On 9/11, the program was put to the test -- and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers.

In the aftermath, the federal government was told to reinvigorate its continuity efforts. Bush approved lines of succession for civil agencies. Cabinet departments and agencies were assigned specific emergency responsibilities. FEMA issued new preparedness guidelines and oversaw training. A National Capital Region continuity working group established in 1999, comprising six White House groups, 15 departments and 61 agencies, met to coordinate.

But all the frenetic activity did not produce a government prepared for the worst. A year after 9/11, and almost three years after the deadline set in Clinton's 1998 directive, the Government Accounting Office evaluated 38 agencies and found that not one had addressed all the issues it had been ordered to. A 2004 GAO audit of 34 government continuity-of-operations plans found total confusion on the question of essential functions. One unnamed organization listed 399 such functions. A department included providing "speeches and articles for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary" among its essential duties, while neglecting many of its central programs.

The confusion and absurdity have continued, according to documents I've collected over the past few years. In June 2004, FEMA told federal agencies that essential services in a catastrophe would include not only such obvious ones as electric power generation and disaster relief but also patent and trademark processing, student aid and passport processing. A month earlier, FEMA had told states and local communities that library services should be counted as essential along with fire protection and law enforcement.

None of this can be heartening to Americans who want to believe that in a crisis, their government can distinguish between what is truly essential and what isn't -- and provide it.

Just two years ago, an exercise called Forward Challenge '04 pointed up the danger of making everyone and everything essential: Barely an hour after agencies were due to arrive at their relocation sites, the Office of Management and Budget asked the reconstituted government to identify emergency funding requirements.

As one after-action report for the exercise later put it in a classic case of understatement: "It was not clear . . . whether this would be a realistic request at that stage of an emergency."

This year's exercise, Forward Challenge '06, will be the third major interagency continuity exercise since 9/11. Larger than Forward Challenge '04 and the Pinnacle exercise held last year, it requires 31 departments and agencies (including FEMA) to relocate. Fifty to 60 are expected to take part.

According to government sources, the exercise will test the newly created continuity of government alert conditions -- called COGCONs -- that emulate the DEFCONs of the national security community. Forward Challenge will begin with a series of alerts via BlackBerry and pager to key officials. It will test COGCON 1, the highest level of preparedness, in which each department and agency is required to have at least one person in its chain of command and sufficient staffing at alternate operating facilities to perform essential functions.

Though key White House officials and military leadership would be relocated via the Pentagon's Joint Emergency Evacuation Program (JEEP), the civilians are on their own to make it to their designated evacuation points.

But fear not: Each organization's COOP, or continuity of operations plan, details the best routes to the emergency locations. The plans even spell out what evacuees should take with them (recommended items: a combination lock, a flashlight, two towels and a small box of washing powder).

Can such an exercise, announced well in advance, hope to re-create any of the tensions and fears of a real crisis? How do you simulate the experience of driving through blazing, radiated, panic-stricken streets to emergency bunker sites miles away?

As the Energy Department stated in its review of Forward Challenge '04, "a method needs to be devised to realistically test the ability of . . . federal offices to relocate to their COOP sites using a scenario that simulates . . . the monumental challenges that would be involved in evacuating the city."

With its new plans and procedures, Washington may think it has thought of everything to save itself. Forward Challenge will no doubt be deemed a success, and officials will pronounce the continuity-of-government project sound. There will be lessons to be learned that will justify more millions of dollars and more work in the infinite effort to guarantee order out of chaos.

But the main defect -- a bunker mentality that considers too many people and too many jobs "essential" -- will remain unchallenged.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060201410.html





Hearst's New Home: Xanadu in Manhattan
Richard Siklos

Frank A. Bennack Jr., the former chief executive of the Hearst Corporation, was recently touring the resplendent new headquarters the company has erected at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan.

What would William Randolph Hearst, the company's legendary founder, have thought of this glass and steel monolith? he was asked. "He only wanted to own his own land and all the land that joined it," Mr. Bennack replied. Gazing around the lobby, he added: "He would have loved it."

Chances are that the Chief, as Mr. Hearst was known to his minions, would be as pleased with the seemingly flush condition of the empire he left behind on his death 55 years ago. Indeed, the company paid for the gleaming headquarters with $500 million in cash.

Among the media giants, the privately held Hearst has been a famously buttoned-up organization. It is gaining a higher profile at a time when publicly traded companies like Time Warner and the Tribune Company are under mounting pressure from disappointed investors. Now, Hearst's ability to move in any direction it chooses without having to explain itself to Wall Street is looking more like a strategic advantage.

The company has been able to go stealthily about its business of running media assets that include newspapers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Houston Chronicle; scores of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Esquire; television stations; investments in cable channels; digital start-ups; and much else. It even publishes Floor Covering Weekly and sells ketchup and grass-fed beef under the Hearst brand from ranches it owns in California.

"Since I became C.E.O. of Hearst, people have said: 'Do you like running a private company?' and I've said 'Yes,' " said Victor F. Ganzi, who succeeded Mr. Bennack in 2002. "Now I say, 'No. I love running a private company.' "

Mr. Hearst might also be surprised by the unexpected and ambitious directions Mr. Ganzi has lately taken the business. In March, for instance, Hearst signaled a move away from traditional media by buying a 20 percent interest in the Fitch Group, which operates the Fitch bond rating service, from its French owner, for $592 million.

A month after the Fitch deal — as if to show the company had not given up on its ink-stained roots — it announced a complex deal with the newspaper publisher William Dean Singleton, which would effectively result in Hearst owning a 20 percent to 30 percent stake in Mr. Singleton's company, the MediaNews Group, at a cost of $263 million.

Typical of the inscrutable Hearst style, both of these recent deals make the company appear to be a passive, patient investor in a larger entity. But Mr. Ganzi revealed in an interview that both arrangements carry rights of refusal and other provisions that would allow Hearst to increase its stake in Fitch and MediaNews (excluding a group of California newspapers it owns) and potentially acquire control of both businesses down the road.

"We are comfortable with our minority stake in all these cases and if it never changes we are comfortable with that," Mr. Ganzi said. In the case of MediaNews, Mr. Singleton, 54, and another investor, Richard Scudder, who is 93, each currently own 45 percent of the group of 55 daily newspapers. "Ultimately, I think there will be opportunities," Mr. Ganzi said. Mr. Singleton did not return calls seeking comment.

It is probably no accident that the new 46-story headquarters, with its geometric form, latest technology and green design elements, stands atop the medieval-style cast-stone husk of a six-story Hearst Magazines office built in the 1920's. The profile-raising new tower, like its occupant, is a melding of newfangled and nostalgic — a throwback to the future.

"As a business, it's a bit of an amalgam," said Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner and a friend of Mr. Ganzi. "They're able to think beyond quarter-to-quarter and my sense is they've been very deliberate and thoughtful about building a business that will be around for a long, long time."

Indeed, only one of the company's main business units, Hearst-Argyle Television, is publicly traded — and, as it happens, it has not been much of an investment in recent years. While acknowledging that his company is not immune to the challenges of the Internet or slowing growth at some businesses, such as newspapers, Mr. Ganzi said the company was loath to sell assets.

Private but Tough

And while the company is assiduously private in nearly every sense of the word, it is not shy. Mr. Ganzi, 59, is known as a tough negotiator who recently took a personal role in tackling disputes with strong-minded media figures like Charles W. Ergen chief executive of EchoStar, which briefly took the Hearst-affiliated Lifetime Television channel off its satellite service, and Frank A. Blethen, a Seattle publisher trying to disentangle a partnership with The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a Hearst newspaper.

Mr. Ganzi, a civic-minded accountant and Harvard-trained lawyer, joined the company as its general counsel in 1990. He was brought up in Queens, and his family has owned half of The Palm chain of steakhouses for close to 80 years. Colleagues say Mr. Ganzi is possessed of a photographic memory, and he speaks in precise rapid-fire bursts.

He agreed to a rare interview, given all the curiosity about the company's new tower, yet he declined to meet in person or to pose for a photo. When asked why, he quickly replied into the telephone: "It's quite simple. Don't take this the wrong way: I've enjoyed talking to you but it doesn't make the Hearst Corporation another dollar."

Mr. Ganzi said Hearst executives did not take their private status for granted, and regularly benchmarked their performance against other publicly traded companies. Despite the company's heritage — dating back to 1887, when young William took over The San Francisco Examiner — Mr. Ganzi said that 85 percent of the company's profits came from businesses that were built, started or acquired in the past 30 years.

Through acquisitions, new publications and the nearly obsessive pursuit of brand extensions, the company says it has increased profits in 13 of the last 14 years, and last year raised net income by 10 percent, to about $850 million on revenue of more than $7 billion. (Hearst declined to share more detailed financial information.) By comparison, in 1951, the year Mr. Hearst died, the company had earnings of around $2.6 million, or $20 million in 2005 dollars.

Hearst has been known mostly for its magazines but, while the company generates nearly 60 percent of its revenue from advertising, magazines are expected to represent only 16 percent of its after-tax cash flow this year. Its 12 newspapers and 28 television stations contribute similar cash-flow numbers. According to the company, Hearst generates nearly half of its cash flow from having invested wisely in cable TV channels alongside the Walt Disney Company.

In fact, much of its business is conducted in a maze of partnerships and investments more typical of European family media dynasties than American media conglomerates. For instance, Hearst publishes Smart Money with Dow Jones, runs a magazine distribution business with its publishing rival Condé Nast, and in cable channels holds 50 percent of Lifetime, one-third of A&E and 20 percent of ESPN.

All three of those cable holdings are close partnerships with Disney, which also uses Hearst to distribute its ESPN Magazine. Hearst-Argyle Television, meanwhile, is the largest operator of affiliates for Disney's ABC network.

In a similar vein, NBC Universal owns another third of the cable channel A&E, and Hearst-Argyle is the second-largest operator of NBC affiliates. NBC Universal also recently acquired the Web site iVillage.com, in which Hearst was a 25 percent shareholder.

The ESPN stake, acquired for around $170 million in 1990, has been especially lucrative. Hearst's investment is now worth as much as $3.5 billion, estimates Laura Martin at Soleil Securities. And Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, says: "In many respects we're joined at the hip. We don't really intersect with any other company in the world the way we do with Hearst."

Hearst's marquee magazine business has long bumped up against the fancier Condé Nast Publications and the Time Inc. juggernaut — both of which outstrip Hearst's stable of 20 magazines in terms of ad pages and revenue in the United States. But Hearst has fought for a place in the top rank of publishers under the direction of Cathleen Black, its magazine president for the last decade.

Print and Online

Most notably, Hearst Magazines has pursued an aggressive international expansion of its titles (Cosmopolitan alone has 56 separate editions) and enjoyed breakout success with O, The Oprah Magazine, a partnership with Oprah Winfrey, started in 2000. But a Lifetime magazine fizzled and other recent lifestyle ventures such as Shop Etc., Quick & Simple and Weekend appear, at first blush, more cautious than revolutionary.

But Ms. Black — a champion of print for whom, it seems, the glass is not half-full but overflowing — said the company was constantly looking at ways to introduce and extend brands. "It's got to be something that parts the waters," she said.

Her current focus is online. IVillage, before being sold, was the exclusive Web home for women's publications at Hearst. Now, the company is hustling to create its own digital sales division and pursuing new Web distribution deals like one Ms. Black announced last month with MSN.

Elsewhere, Hearst's approach to the Internet has been typically idiosyncratic. Rather than running Web businesses, it has made some 35 investments in interactive start-ups that have included Netscape and XM Satellite Radio. Some of the company's recent bets — including the companies Sling Media, Brightcove, USDTV and Current Communications — reflect Mr. Ganzi's interest in capitalizing on new forms of distribution for Hearst's video businesses.

Since a vast majority of Hearst's 20,000 employees are outside New York, magazine staff members will fill most of the new tower's floors. Corporate executives and some other divisions will take what is left. The original magazine building, completed in 1928, was part of a plan the Chief hatched in his heyday — when he owned three New York dailies — for a gigantic media plaza. Indeed, its structure was built to support additional floors. Realizing Mr. Hearst's dream of a Midtown skyscraper has been under study for decades.

In his will, Mr. Hearst left an estate in trust valued at roughly $51 million to his wife, five sons and two charities (around $400 million in today's dollars). One provision of the will was that nonfamily members occupy 8 of the 13 slots on the board of trustees. Another was that the trust would dissolve on the death of the last grandchild living on the day Mr. Hearst died. Mr. Ganzi said actuaries estimated that to be some time around 2045 — too far into the future to affect the company's strategic planning.

The Hearst Heirs

Despite their codified independence, several people close to Hearst said Mr. Ganzi and other executives take pains not to be seen as getting in front of the Hearst heirs who are its shareholders. Today, some 60 descendants of Mr. Hearst's sons are among the owners and "remaindermen" (those who will inherit an interest) of the trust. Many of them meet once a year for a picnic in Northern California where, among other activities, bocce is inexplicably a favorite, said George R. Hearst III, a great-grandson of the founder.

George Hearst III is associate publisher of The Albany Times Union, a Hearst paper, and one of several family members who work in the business. His father, George R. Hearst Jr., the oldest surviving heir, is Hearst's chairman. The February issue of the company's Town & Country magazine was uncharacteristically familial: it featured the model Amanda Hearst posing at San Simeon, her great-grandfather's storied castle, in a cover spread.

While there have been tremors of unrest among family members over the years — not uncommon in wealthy dynasties—George Hearst III said in an interview that the family had been uniformly supportive of the new tower.

While it is not exactly Xanadu, Hearst Tower is certainly a major upgrade for many of the company's rank and file. With its soaring entry and French Balzac limestone lobby floor, the building sets a Four Seasons tone for a magazine business that rivals have viewed as more of a Sheraton.

"I've always felt that that is not fair," Ms. Black said. "What I do believe is fair is we've been a very profit-driven company forever. But there's a big difference between being profit-driven and being cheap."

Regardless, the company's image seems certain to change. The complex, designed by Norman Foster, features a 168-seat theater with top-end acoustics, a shimmering crystal waterfall, and Café 57, a staff commissary clearly intended to vie with Condé Nast's renowned cafeteria. (In a nod to the past, the company has also rebuilt the Good Housekeeping dining room from the former building.)

The building has a gymnasium with fancy Italian equipment, which both supplies and launders workout clothes for employees. "I have to say that it's a lot more luxe than I expected," said David Granger, the editor of Esquire, whose staff is among 700 employees who have moved in as of last week.

Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and now head of its international editions, said she was delighted to be moving to a corner office with sweeping views on the 37th floor, leaving the fourth-floor space she occupies in Cosmo's current Midtown Manhattan offices. "I exercise after lunch every day on the floor of my office and I don't want to go clear down to the gym," Ms. Gurley Brown said. "But I think, on the 37th floor, if I stay down on the floor, no one is going to see me."

Hearst's executives say the best part is the culture that will emerge from gathering so many of their employees under one roof for the first time. Thus, for Mr. Ganzi, there is no contradiction in a media company whose bosses eschew public attention erecting a gleaming, translucent landmark.

"I'm less concerned about a statement to the world," he said. "I'm more concerned about a statement to my colleagues. It's a statement about our future as well as, I think, a statement and commitment to our past."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/bu.../05hearst.html





Microsoft Takes On Net Nasties
David Frith

MICROSOFT executives love telling stories against each other. Here's one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend's wedding reception when the bride's father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Allchin says Ballmer, the world's 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.

He lumped the thing back to Microsoft's headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.

Among the problems was a program that automatically disabled any antivirus software.

"This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world," Allchin told the audience.

If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft's best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?

Ballmer and Allchin didn't get to be such wealthy executives by ignoring a business opportunity, so last week, Microsoft launched Windows Live OneCare.

In doing so it seems to have begun a new battle in the PC security war because antivirus software vendors Symantec and McAfee have announced new products to challenge OneCare.

Described as an "all-in-one, automatic and self-updating PC care service designed to help consumers more easily protect and maintain their PCs", OneCare is at present available only in the US, where users will pay an annual fee of $US50 ($66).

DoubleClick thinks Microsoft has a hide to charge customers $66 a year to fix problems in its operating software that shouldn't be there in the first place, but no doubt many will pay up if it means an easy way of dealing with the increasing flood of viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other computing nasties.

There is no news yet of a OneCare release date in Australia or anywhere else outside North America, but you can safely bet it will be here soon.

Microsoft does offer a free online virus scanning and tune-up service that Australians can access online, although its features are not as comprehensive as those of OneCare. Called Windows Live Safety Centre, it is at http://safety.live.com.

Rivals Symantec and McAfee, which face losing big chunks of their multibillion-dollar businesses to Microsoft, aren't taking all this lying down.

Both have promised an Australian release of the rival all-in-one security products they are rushing to market.

Symantec has announced Norton 360, a consumer PC security service that will include online identity theft protection, backup and PC tune-up capabilities, and automatic updates.

It will work with Windows XP and the coming Windows Vista.

The full international release of Norton 360 is expected towards the end of the year, but Symantec is inviting would-be users to sign up for a beta version, expected in the next few months.

You can sign up at www.symantec.com/norton360 betaprereg

McAfee is calling its OneCare killer Falcon and has predicted a release date sometime between June 21 and September 23.

It is expected to contain antivirus, anti-phishing, spyware and root-kit detection features, along with automated backups and network security.

How well Symantec/Norton and McAfee will be able to compete with the Microsoft remains to be seen.

As commentators are pointing out, Microsoft has a huge captive audience to whom it can promote the new service: the many millions who download its regular security updates.

On the other hand, Symantec and McAfee can play on the distrust that many disgruntled users feel for Microsoft and maybe undercut the $66 fee. The war has just begun.

As a footnote, Symantec has just issued an automated back-up and recovery program for consumers.

Norton Save and Restore is said to make it very easy for home PC users to preserve photos, music files, financial information and other digital data.

It sells for $99.95 and until June 20 can be bought only at Dick Smith Electronics stores. From that date it will be more widely available.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19345228^15865^^nbv^,00.html





Who'll Run The Internet Is Main Bout In Telecommunications Fight
Jim Abrams

A major wrestling match in Congress over control of the Internet features some strange tag teams -- rockers and evangelists vs. phone companies and the Bells' usually biggest adversary, cable TV companies.

The most far-reaching telecommunications bill in a decade has as its main purpose making it easier for phone companies to compete against cable companies in offering the equivalent of cable TV, and streamlining the approval process for both. The promise to consumers is lower prices and more choices.

But the biggest controversy is a different issue, so-called net neutrality. The idea is that all Web sites should get the same treatment from cable and phone companies for use of their broadband, high-speed Internet lines.

The rockers and evangelists _ joined by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! _ fear that telephone and cable companies who control the Internet highway will put their own products in the fast lanes and relegate those unwilling to pay premium fees to poorer quality and slower service.

In their corner are the Christian Coalition, National Religious Broadcasters and Gun Owners of America as well as liberal Web-based entities such as MoveOn.Org and recording artists REM, the Indigo Girls and Moby.

"If Congress guts net neutrality, independent music and news sites would be choked off, consumer choice would be limited and the Internet will become a private toll road auctioned off by companies like AT&T," Moby said in a statement at a recent Capitol Hill event.

Both the House and Senate bills, sponsored by the chairmen of their two commerce committees, respectively Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, address net neutrality, but in language that critics say is too weak to prevent discrimination.

Phone and cable companies contend pure net neutrality would erode Internet freedom and drive up costs to consumers because online businesses wouldn't pay a fair share of the billions of dollars being spent to provide high-speed service around the country.

"Simply put, net neutrality legislation endangers both the future of video choice and the accelerated broadband investment that is just beginning to gain traction," Verizon executive vice president Tom Tauke testified at a recent Senate hearing.

The more aggressive proposals of net neutrality, Tauke said, "really come down to one thing: government regulation of the Internet."

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a sponsor of net neutrality legislation, said Congress must provide nondiscrimination safeguards in the wake of Supreme Court and Federal Communications Commission rulings that effectively deregulated broadband services.

"Unfortunately, if Congress does not act, the age of digital democracy will come to an end," she said. "Innovators with great ideas, but without deep pockets, will be relegated to the Internet's 'dirt road.'"

In the House, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and the top Democrat on the panel, John Conyers of Michigan, won committee approval of their net neutrality bill last month. It requires phone and cable broadband suppliers to give nonaffiliated content producers equal opportunity to reach consumers, and to refrain from interfering with user choice of content.

They're hoping to get a vote when the broader telecommunications bill comes to the House floor, possibly as early as this week.

The main thrust of the House bill is to create a national franchising process for subscription TV to replace the current system where video providers must negotiate contracts on a muncipality-by-municipality basis.

Verizon's Tauke said these negotiations with localities can take up to two years, a disincentive for phone companies interested in expanding into video.

Robert Johnson, president of Consumers for Cable Choice, said 96 percent of Americans have no choice in landline cable TV operator, and that the United States is currently 16th in the world in deployment of broadband, just ahead of Costa Rica.

The Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit group, says it has found that cable prices are about 15 percent lower in areas where there is direct competition.

The cable industry, locked in a fierce lobbying and ad war with the phone companies over bringing TV into homes, points out that the Phoenix Center gets financial backing from the Bells. Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center, said they have been publishing on cable competition for 13 years and "nobody from the cable industry has tried to refute our work."
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....egory=Business





Senate Judiciary Committee wants answers about FBI probe of Jack Anderson
Laurie Kellman

In a new jab at the Bush administration over its use of executive power, the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding that the Justice Department explain the agency's investigations of journalists who publish classified information.

Specifically, Republicans and Democrats want to know more about the FBI's effort to obtain a half-century's worth of papers kept by columnist Jack Anderson _ a member of President Nixon's "enemies list" _ who died in December at 83.

Matthew Friedrich, the Justice Department's criminal division chief of staff, is facing a skeptical panel at a hearing Tuesday.

Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has chafed for months over President Bush's secretive domestic wiretapping and phonetapping programs, and maintained that national security may not justify such uses of executive power. He personally told President Bush earlier this year that "the president doesn't have a blank check."

Now, with the administration considering prosecuting journalists who publish classified information and refuse to reveal their sources, Specter wants the full story of the Anderson search.

Scheduled to testify Tuesday were Friedrich, Anderson's son Kevin and Mark Feldstein, a former investigative reporter who is writing a book about Anderson.

Feldstein says two FBI agents showed up at his home March 3 seeking the roughly 200 boxes of Anderson's papers that the family had granted him access for the book. The agents, Feldstein has said, cited national security concerns.

Members of the Judiciary Committee don't buy the explanation.

"I fail to see what possible national security interest is served by the FBI rummaging through Mr. Anderson's files many years after he published articles about these matters," ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in prepared remarks.

The FBI has said that if the papers contain classified information, they belong to the government.

The FBI had long sought Anderson's papers after he published stories exposing the Keating Five, a CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and details of the Iran-Contra affair.

Anderson's son said the FBI contacted his mother shortly after his father's funeral, expressing interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who have been charged with disclosing classified information.

In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive _ which had yet to be catalogued _ any document they came across that was stamped "secret" or "confidential," or was otherwise classified.

The family refused.

The younger Anderson's account is similar to that of Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor and Anderson biographer, who said he was visited by two agents at his Washington-area home in March.

"They flashed their badges and said they needed access to the papers," said Feldstein. Anderson donated his papers to the university, but the family had not yet formally signed them over.

FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, a spokesman in Washington, said in an interview that the bureau wants to search the Anderson archive and remove classified materials before they are made available to the public. "It has been determined that, among the papers, there are a number of U.S. government documents containing classified information," Kolko said, declining to say how the FBI knows.

The documents contain information about sources and methods used by U.S. intelligence agencies, he said.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....egory=Politics





Meat Loaf Claims 'Bat Out of Hell' Rights
Eric Berkowitz

Someone else might have written the "Bat Out of Hell" song, but Meat Loaf claims he should be the only one to use the phrase in connection with music. In a federal lawsuit dated May 26, the rocker, whose real name is Michael Aday, said the expression had been publicly associated with him since the 1977 release of his "Bat Out of Hell" album.

The suit claims defendant Jim Steinman, who wrote the original song of the same name, wrongly claims ownership of the phrase.

The album and its 1993 follow-up, "Bat Out of Hell II," sold 48 million copies worldwide, according to the suit.

The suit seeks damages of more than $50 million.

Steinman and Meat Loaf's manager, defendant David Sonenberg, have been trying to disrupt the October release of the third "Bat Out of Hell" album by telling the singer's distributors that Aday had no right to use the phrase, according to the suit.

"This contention is blackmail and a holdup," said the complaint, which claimed Steinman and Sonenberg have infringed Aday's trademark rights in the phrase, and are interfering with distribution contracts.

Steinman wrote and produced the second album, and would have produced the third, but he and Aday had a falling out, according the suit.

Attempts to reach Steinman and Sonenberg for comment after business hours Monday were unsuccessful.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





On 6/6/6, the Possibilities Are Endless
Emily Vasquez

Today is June 6, 2006, also known, if you drop the zeroes, as 6/6/6. It's a number that is either portentous or meaningless, depending on who's counting. Those who are intrigued by its devilish pattern — including evangelicals, movie studios and a club in TriBeCa — are abuzz.

Given that 666 is referred to as the "number of the beast," or Antichrist, in the Book of Revelation, commercial outlets have taken advantage of the curiosity or fear linked to the date.

"The Omen," a remake of the 1976 horror film that begins with the birth of the Antichrist, opens today nationwide. Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series, is promoting his new book, "The Rapture," with the tagline "06.06.06. Will You Be Ready?"

Whatever today's 666 may bring, one dance club, the Mocca Lounge on Reade Street in Lower Manhattan, promises a party that will "either get the demons out or invoke them." Ori Raz, the owner of the club, said that to him, 666 signifies "no borders, no boundaries, everything is possible."

Rose Welsh, a numerologist who works from her TriBeCa apartment, said the number 6 has much more to do with desire, on a individual level, than with the broader forces of good and evil. Instead, she relates the number 7 to the devil because it is the number of choice, the number of the "fall from right to wrong."

Even those who believe that an apocalypse is on the horizon do not necessarily see today's date as particularly significant.

"Tuesday you're going to be fine," said Terry James, editor of the evangelical Web site raptureready.com.

"We believe that there is a coming period, Catholics call it the apocalypse, in which the Antichrist will rule," Mr. James said. "But we haven't reached it yet."

And as for the birth of the Antichrist, Mr. James, who also recently wrote "The Rapture Dialogues," said he did not think that would happen today, either. Instead, he said, it is more likely that the Antichrist "is already in the world today, just waiting in the wings."

But there is always a chance that 666 could carry weight, and more than 700 online gamblers wagered on just that at BetUS.com, a sports gambling site.

The wager of the day on the site: "Will the World End on 6-6-06?" By 6 p.m. yesterday, 216 of the 700 gamblers had bet an average of just more than $2 that yes, the world would end. The odds stood at 100,000 to 1.

And how will they collect if their bet was right on? Mike Forman, a spokesman for the site, said the company was committed to paying up. "Come rain, sleet, snow or apocalypse, our clients will receive their winnings," he said.

Elizabeth Castelli, an associate professor of religion at Barnard College, said there was a long history of people trying to make such predictions about the end of time based on the Book of Revelation.

"I don't think one can predict anything from these texts at all," Ms. Castelli said. "There are other places in Scripture that say no one will know when the end of time will be."

And Ms. Castelli added that the "end" of the world was, in the end, a religious construct. "All that is predicated on the idea that time is actually moving toward an end," she said. "And that's a pretty big assumption."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/ny.../06number.html





For Law Firm, Serial Plaintiff Had Golden Touch
Julie Creswell and Jonathan D. Glater

When it came to investing, Howard J. Vogel seemed to possess a perverse kind of Midas touch.

In early October 1997, he bought 50 shares of Oxford Health Plans. Three weeks later, the stock nose-dived, and Mr. Vogel lost about $3,000 of his investment. Still, Mr. Vogel reaped $1.1 million.

How was that possible?

Mr. Vogel was a plaintiff in a shareholder lawsuit filed by the New York securities litigation powerhouse Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach against Oxford Health. In 2003, the company, along with other parties that were sued, paid $300 million to settle.

Most of the investors received pennies on the dollar for their losses. But Mr. Vogel, then a real estate mortgage broker in Englewood, N.J., was not just a hapless investor who bought the wrong stock at the wrong time.

Mr. Vogel now says, according to a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, that he and members of his family were actually linchpins in a long-running arrangement that helped Milberg Weiss snare the lucrative lead counsel position in the Oxford Health and many other securities lawsuits, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees.

Mr. Vogel, who has since moved to Florida, is a central figure in the government's case against Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, as the law firm is now called. Last month, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted the firm and two of its name partners on several criminal charges, including racketeering conspiracy and money laundering. The firm is accused of making $11.3 million in illegal secret payments to Mr. Vogel and two others who served as plaintiffs in more than 150 lawsuits.

The firm contends it has done nothing improper and has vowed to fight the charges against it. But Milberg Weiss is struggling to keep its lawyers and clients from walking away. Several lawyers have left the firm and a number of institutional investors, including the New York state employee pension fund, have removed it as counsel in high-profile lawsuits.

The Oxford Health lawsuit was widely watched at the time, and it takes on new significance in light of Mr. Vogel's admissions and prosecutors' charges.

It provides a window into how, even after Congress passed legislation in 1995 aimed at undermining Milberg Weiss's dominance, the firm worked feverishly to find ways to maneuver around the new landscape.

Yesterday, William W. Taylor, a lawyer at Zuckerman Spaeder who represents Milberg Weiss, said in response to questions: "On behalf of the firm, the Oxford case was handled in the highest traditions of Milberg's practice. The result obtained was exemplary and the firm is proud of the result in that case as it is in all of its cases."

The 1995 law, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, or P.S.L.R.A., was intended to make it harder for plaintiffs' lawyers to file lawsuits after merely finding a single investor who held the stock of the company to be sued. Under the law, courts were required to select the investor with the largest loss as lead plaintiff, whose lawyer then coordinated the lawsuit.

The law was meant to rein in lawyers who simply eyeballed companies that were in trouble and ran to the courthouse with a plaintiff in tow at the first hiccup in the share price.

In many ways, the law seems to have had the intended effect. Since the legislation was enacted, institutional investors like big state pension funds have led the charge in numerous shareholder lawsuits, like those involving Enron and WorldCom.

Still, the majority of federal securities lawsuits settled last year — 62 percent — had individuals as lead plaintiffs, according to NERA Economic Consulting in White Plains.

Indeed, in the cases cited by federal prosecutors in the indictment of Milberg Weiss, the law firm's frequent clients were individual investors, including Mr. Vogel; his wife, Eugenia Gladstone Vogel; and his stepson, Emile Gladstone. Mr. Vogel's lawyer would not comment for this article.

Yet while Mr. Vogel and his family were frequently named as plaintiffs, they were not always successful in winning lead-plaintiff status. That would not mean that the case was a total loss for Milberg Weiss, but its share of any settlement would almost certainly be smaller.

That is because the lead counsel in a lawsuit typically has considerable influence over how the fees will be awarded to other law firms after a settlement is reached, according to plaintiffs' lawyers.

"What typically happens in a securities litigation is you have one case filed and then you have three or four copycat" complaints, said John H. Henn, a defense lawyer at Foley Hoag in Boston. "Then they agree among themselves about on who would make the best lead plaintiff."

Or they have knock-down-drag-out courtroom brawls.

The decision over lead plaintiff in the Oxford Health case dragged on for nearly four years, took many bizarre twists along the way and featured a revolving cast of plaintiffs.

In the fall of 1997, malfunctions in Oxford Health's computer system led to unexpected losses and a steep drop in its stock price, which wiped out nearly $3 billion of the company's market value. In the days after the announcement, more than 50 class-action lawsuits were filed against the company, claiming that Oxford officials had known of the computer problems and their effects, but had misled investors by failing to disclose what they knew.

"The advantage to having a client and being on file with a class action is that you could then send out mailings or press releases, trying to find other plaintiffs who had bigger losses," said a plaintiffs' lawyer who did not want to be identified because he works in the field. "Even if you had a small client, it was at least a foot in the door that allowed you to get the process rolling."

Oxford Health was a big, juicy target for plaintiffs' lawyers.

A lawyer who tried to get his clients named lead plaintiffs in the Oxford case, Lee Squitieri, said: "It looked like a good case right out of the box. This was not what we called a 'prediction case' where the wrongdoing consisted of a prediction that turned out to be untrue. This was a better case. It involved concealing material information. That's a good case."

Milberg Weiss's biggest rival for lead plaintiff was the Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association, which claimed it had lost more than $20 million when Oxford Health's stock fell. The mutual fund company PBHG, managed by Pilgrim Baxter & Associates, also wanted to be the lead plaintiff, contending that six of its funds had lost $4.3 million. It later dropped all but one of the funds from its claim, saying that the remaining one lost $65,000.

Undaunted by groups that, arguably, better met the requirements under the new law, Milberg Weiss aggregated a group of 35 individuals who it said had lost a total of $10 million.

Milberg Weiss's initial plaintiff in the case was Mr. Vogel. What was unknown at the time was that Mr. Vogel had acquired shares of the stock on the belief that it was on the verge of a collapse.

In late April, Mr. Vogel pleaded guilty to a single count of perjury — falsely stating in a court filing that he had not received payment other than his share of the settlement proceeds. In exchange for his cooperation, Mr. Vogel was not charged with being part of the conspiracy that Milberg Weiss is accused of. In addition, prosecutors agreed to recommend leniency in sentencing.

According to Mr. Vogel's plea agreement, he contacted "Partner E" — identified by lawyers involved in the case as Robert Sugarman, a former Milberg Weiss lawyer — and "discussed a potential securities fraud class-action lawsuit" against Oxford Health. Mr. Sugarman is said to be cooperating with federal prosecutors. Mr. Sugarman's lawyer declined to comment.

Dating back to 1991, Mr. Vogel had been a lead plaintiff in numerous lawsuits filed by Milberg Weiss for which he illegally received a cut of the law firm's fees — as much as 14 percent, according to court filings.

But in the case of Oxford, Mr. Vogel was told by Mr. Sugarman that his payment would be less than his usual percentage because the lawsuit was so large and "Milberg Weiss would have other payment obligations in the case," the indictment said.

In 1998, the lawyer representing the Colorado pension fund, Jay W. Eisenhofer, challenged whether Mr. Vogel's losses were substantial enough to meet the law's new requirements.

Patricia M. Hynes, a Milberg Weiss lawyer who was not named in the indictment and has not been accused of any wrongdoing, responded in a June 1998 hearing that among the 35 plaintiffs representing the "Vogel group" were three individuals who had lost $2 million to $3.4 million each.

Swayed by Ms. Hynes's argument, the judge overseeing the case, Charles L. Brieant of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, decided to proceed with three co-lead plaintiffs — the Colorado retirement fund, the PBHG mutual funds and the "Vogel Plaintiff Group," which now did not include Mr. Vogel because his losses were too small. Instead, it consisted of Gary Weber, Daniel Hurley and Michael Sabbia. Milberg Weiss was named co-lead counsel, along with Grant & Eisenhofer, which represented the Colorado fund, and Chitwood & Harley, which represented PBHG.

The size of the losses by the individual investors became a focal point after lawyers with Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Oxford Health, began to dig into the trading records of the Milberg Weiss plaintiffs.

Milberg Weiss had already revised Mr. Hurley's losses, dropping them from $3.4 million to less than $1 million after realizing an error had been made in going through his trading records.

But the lawyers for Oxford argued that more than 4,000 transactions in Oxford options that they had each engaged in during the 13 months of the time period of the lawsuit had been omitted.

By their accounting, Mr. Hurley had actually made $700,747 in profits from his combined trading in stock and options, while Mr. Sabbia's loss totaled $315,000. That was a far cry from the $2 million loss that Ms. Hynes told the court in 1998 Mr. Sabbia had suffered.

Ms. Hynes claimed the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers had used "discredited experts, flawed methodologies and erroneous 'alternative' calculations of plaintiffs' losses." By her firm's calculations, even taking the options trading activity into account, Mr. Sabbia still lost more than $1 million and Mr. Hurley more than $500,000. Those were "substantial losses by any measure," she stated in a 2000 memo to the court.

When contacted, Mr. Sabbia and Mr. Hurley said this was the first time they had been plaintiffs in lawsuits and both men said they did not receive any money from Milberg Weiss for their roles in the lawsuit. Mr. Sabbia added that he had no idea there was even any dispute surrounding the size of his loss in Oxford Health. "I lost tons," he said.

Judge Brieant rejected the defense lawyers' objections, ruling that the two Milberg Weiss clients had indeed suffered losses and could continue as lead plaintiffs.

There were problems with another Milberg Weiss plaintiff, Mr. Weber, who withdrew from the case in late 1999, weeks after he was deposed by lawyers for Oxford. A court document in the case that was recently unsealed is a letter to the judge from a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer who said Mr. Weber "chose to lie" about his education, criminal record, history as a defendant in a civil case and his trading in Oxford securities. The National Law Journal reported on the letter in early 2000. A call to Mr. Weber's office was not returned.

Despite these setbacks, Milberg Weiss and the other lead plaintiffs' law firms reached the $300 million settlement in June 2003. Milberg Weiss's share of the legal fees totaled about $40 million, according to the Justice Department's indictment.

A few months later, Mr. Vogel contacted another Milberg Weiss lawyer, Steven G. Schulman, about his payments for Oxford and other cases, the indictment said. Mr. Schulman and another Milberg Weiss partner, David J. Bershad, were also indicted by the federal grand jury in Los Angeles last month and have taken leaves of absences from the firm. Mr. Bershad's lawyer said his client "vigorously" denied the charges. A call to Mr. Schulman's lawyer was not returned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/bu...rtner=homepage





Online Newspaper Ads Gaining Ground on Print
Julie Bosman

IN the matchup between the print and online versions of newspapers, signs of the Internet's ascendancy are growing stronger. As Colby Atwood, a newspaper analyst and a vice president at Borrell Associates, put it, "The tail is beginning to wag the dog."

According to estimates released on Friday by the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper print ad spending in the first three months of 2006 increased only 0.3 percent, to $10.5 billion, over the corresponding period last year. At the same time, spending for online advertising surged 35 percent.

"I think the handwriting is kind of on the wall that there is a large migration to the Web," Mr. Atwood said. "Increasing amounts of revenue and focus should be on the online properties. This is a transition that's taking place over several years here. It's not happening overnight, but it's definitely happening."

The numbers are still small compared with print: the first quarter of 2006 produced $613 million in online advertising, up from $454 million in the year-ago period. But it is the eighth consecutive quarter of growth for online ads, according to the association.

Analysts say the increases show that newspapers are learning how to harness the potential of online advertising as their print circulation has stumbled. Last month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations released figures showing that in the six-month period that ended in March, daily circulation of American newspapers dropped 2.5 percent, to 45.5 million, over the period a year ago.

"I think this industry is in for exceptional long-term growth from online revenue," said Jason E. Klein, the president and chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing partnership of advertisers and newspapers. Much of the current growth is coming in the technology and automotive categories, he said.

Newspapers have been helped by the general growth of online advertising: according to a report issued last week by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, total Internet advertising revenue reached a record $3.9 billion in the first three months of 2006.

But for many newspapers that are still developing an advertising model, online ads are still in their early stages, said Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development for the newspaper association, which is based in Vienna, Va.

For now, classified advertising makes up roughly 60 to 70 percent of online advertising for newspapers, Mr. Bennett said. At the same time, Web sites like Craigslist that offer free classifieds are luring advertisers away from sites that charge to place ads.

One hope for online newspaper classifieds is the control their staffs can exercise over the content, unlike free sites like Craigslist, which are mostly managed and edited by anonymous users.

"I think newspapers will attempt to differentiate their classified products as authentic, reviewed and updated regularly," Mr. Bennett said. "It's a much more authentic database."

In addition to classified ads, other opportunities for growth in online advertising include interactive ads, wallpaper ads and ads with streaming video or audio.

John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst, noted that newspapers could reap gains as the traffic to their Web sites increased. "The more visitors you get, the higher price you can charge," Mr. Morton said. "And as this transformation continues, the volume will continue to increase."

On average, advertising accounts for roughly 75 to 80 percent of a newspaper's total revenue. Mr. Morton estimated that online advertising would make up 6.5 percent of newspapers' total advertising revenue in 2006, up from 5 percent last year. "What a lot of people don't understand about online advertising for newspapers is that it can be highly profitable," he said.

And there have been signs that newspaper owners are devoting more resources to their Web sites. Brian P. Tierney, the leader of a group of investors that bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News last month, said he planned to improve their Web site with added technology and content.

"Right now, the news industry is trying to hold on to the past, and Brian knows that you just can't do it," said Mary Meder, the president of Harmelin Media, a media-buying agency in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. "There's a lot of options out there for advertising, and he has to make his a viable choice."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/bu...ia/06adco.html





Google Takes Aim at Excel
John Markoff

Stepping up its attack on Microsoft's core business, Google plans to make available on Tuesday a test version of a Web-based spreadsheet program that is intended to make it simple to edit and share lists and data online.

The company said that the free program, called Google Spreadsheets, would be able to read and create files in the format used by Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet software that is installed on millions of personal computers.

The spreadsheet service is another step in Google's steady march toward creating its own computing universe that is an alternative to desktop PC software now dominated by Microsoft. It comes just months after Google bought a small Silicon Valley company called Upstartle, creators of a Web-based word-processing program called Writely.

As Google has been moving into Microsoft's traditional desktop turf, Microsoft has been fighting back by adding online components to its software and building up its Web offerings. It is working especially hard to challenge Google's dominance in Web search services and the lucrative advertising they generate.

Google executives said Monday that the spreadsheet program would make it possible for as many as 10 people to simultaneously edit a spreadsheet document online and chat about it using Google's instant messaging program.

The new service will be able to handle several hundred formulas used to manipulate data in Excel, but not more complex functions like macros, said Jonathan Rochelle, the Google Spreadsheets product manager.

"When people want to share and collaborate, we think this product fits in well," Mr. Rochelle said.

The service was developed by Google's research arm, Google Labs. The company stressed the experimental nature of the product and said that the service would initially be offered to only a limited number of users.

The spreadsheet service is intended to appeal to small groups of business users, or to people who now use spreadsheets as de facto database programs to keep simple lists, Mr. Rochelle said. For example, soccer coaches who are juggling team lists and people planning family reunions might use it to put data in a place where it can be easily viewed and edited by others.

Mr. Rochelle said the ability for many people to collaborate was quite different from the standard method of e-mailing files back and forth. "It's a 'wow' moment with most users," he said.

For now, Google Spreadsheets lacks the ability to chart information. But Google is clearly hoping that the service and Writely will give it a head start on Microsoft in the area of so-called Web services.

Google has played down its efforts in this field. Despite widespread talk that Writely could compete with Microsoft Word, Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said at a recent news conference that the company had no intention of using Writely to enter the word-processing marketplace. Rather, he said, Google was hoping to integrate Web-based word processing into many services that it was developing.

Last year, Microsoft responded to the growing availability of online alternatives to traditional desktop programs by announcing Windows Live and Office Live, two Microsoft-oriented Web portals.

Microsoft says that the Office Live Collaboration service permits several users to edit an Excel spreadsheet document simultaneously. But for the service to work, users must have Excel software on their personal computers. Google is hoping that many Web users will find it simpler to share the information by placing it on Google's servers.

Alan Yates, general manager for information worker business strategy at Microsoft, said that the ability to collaborate had been available to Microsoft Office users for some time. Mr. Yates said the company was watching the low end of the market closely, pointing to a number of free and online spreadsheet services now available, including OpenOffice, SimDesk and ThinkFree. But he said Excel's widespread adoption and powerful features made it superior.

"We see most consumers are really looking for more integration with their school or work life," he said. "They want more compatibility and not less."

As is almost always the case, Google executives deflected questions about how it would derive revenue from its new service.

Mr. Rochelle said that for now the company had no plans to connect the service to its AdWords advertising system, which places relevant text advertisements on Web pages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/te...06google.html?





Bootleg Capital

35% of Scots Have Pirate DVDs One In Four Only Care About Price 31% Don't Even Know It's Crime
Derek Alexander

SCOTS are Britain's biggest customers for pirate DVDs.

More than a third of us - 35 per cent - admit to owning bootleg films, a study has found.

A quarter of Scots told researchers they would buy illegal copies of movies if they were cheaper than the originals.

And 31 per cent of those surveyed claimed not to even know that DVD piracy is against the law.

The proportion of people in Scotland who bought pirate DVDs was at least 10 per cent higher than in almost every other part of the UK.

Industry watchdogs are so worried about piracy in Scotland that they are launching a bizarre amnesty to persuade customers here to give up their dodgy DVDs.

A lorry will tour the country, giving the public the chance to hand in illegal discs to be destroyed. Those who take up the offer will be given legitimate DVDs in exchange.

The amnesty will begin tomorrow in Edinburgh's Castle Street before the lorry moves on to other parts of the country.

The scheme is the brainchild of industry body the British Video Association, who represent DVD makers. The association also commissioned the study which revealed Scotland's love affair with the black market.

Director general Lavinia Carey said: "The aim of the amnesty campaign is to make consumers in Scotland aware that DVD piracy is not a victimless crime.

"When you buy an illegal DVD, your money may well be going directly into the pockets of criminals.

"That's why we are asking people to bring their pirate DVDs along to be publicly destroyed. There's no question of anyone getting into trouble."

Watchdogs say almost 78 million fake DVDs were sold across the UK last year - an increase of two per cent on 2004.

Copyright theft is believed to cost the entertainment industry more than £718million in Britain each year.

Police, trading standards officers and the Federation Against Copyright Theft have launched a range of crackdowns aimed at putting black marketeers out of business. And courts have started handing out stiffer fines and jail sentences to bootleggers.

Carey said: "FACT are targeting all types of piracy, and especially the criminal networks involved in manufacturing and distribution. If members of the public have information that might assist us, we'll be pleased to take details in complete confidence."

Industry giants Universal Pictures and Warner Home Video UK are backing the DVD amnesty and Edinburgh City Council are also giving their support.

Councillor Sheila Gilmore said: "The sale of pirate DVDs causes huge losses every year to the industry and is thought to be linked to more serious forms of criminal activity."
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm...name_page.html





Heroin On NHS Call

VETERAN politician Margo MacDonald yesterday called for heroin addicts to be given the drug on the NHS.

The Lothians independent MSP tabled a Holyrood motion calling for a pilot scheme with medically prescribed heroin.

She said it would test the comparative effectiveness of heroin substitute methadone, which is used to treat addicts.

The call follows a trial in Germany which suggested prescribing heroin could cut drug deaths and crime.

MacDonald said: "I want such a scheme to be evaluated."
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm...name_page.html





The Worst Bill You’ve Never Heard Of
Jake

This will be a busy week in the House -- Congress goes into summer recess Friday, but not before considering the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (SIRA). Never heard of SIRA? That’s the way Big Copyright and their lackey’s want it, and it's bad news for you.

Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy. Even copies of songs that are cached in your computer's memory or buffered over a network would need yet another license. Once again, Big Copyright is looking for a way to double-dip into your wallet, extracting payment for the same content at multiple levels.

Today, so-called "incidental" copies don't need to be licensed; they're made in the process of doing *other* things, like listening to your MP3 library or plugging into a Net radio station. If you paid for the MP3 and the radio station is up-to-date with its bookkeeping, nobody should have to pay again, right? Not if SIRA becomes law. Out of the blue, copyright holders would have created an entire new market to charge for -- and sue over. Good for them. Bad for us.

Don't let Big Copyright legalize double dipping. Fight SIRA today.

The House is going into recess for the summer at the end of this week, so you have a unique opportunity to kill this legislation. If we can stall SIRA now it would effectively kill it for the reminder of the year, giving us more time to prepare an offensive.

Please call the Members of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property and voice your opposition to this legislation.

Republicans:

Honorable Lamar S. Smith
2184 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-4236

Honorable Henry J. Hyde
2110 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-4561

Honorable Elton Gallegly
2427 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-0523
(202) 225-5811

Honorable Bob Goodlatte
2240 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5431

Honorable William L. Jenkins
1207 Longworth Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6356

Honorable Spencer Bachus
442 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
202 225-4921

Hon. Robert Inglis
330 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6030

Honorable Ric Keller
419 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2176

Hon. Darrell Issa
211 Cannon House Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20515

Honorable Chris Cannon
2436 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-7751

Honorable Mike Pence
426 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3021

Honorable J. Randy Forbes
307 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6365

Democrats:

Honorable Howard L. Berman
2221 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-4695

Honorable John Conyers, Jr.
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126

Honorable Rick Boucher
2187 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3861

Honorable Zoe Lofgren
102 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3072

Honorable Maxine Waters
2344 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2201

Honorable Martin T. Meehan
2229 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3411

Honorable Robert Wexler
213 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3001

Honorable Anthony Weiner
1122 Longworth House Office Building
Washington DC 20515
(202) 225-6616

Honorable Adam Schiff
326 Cannon House Office Building
Washington D.C. 20515
(202) 225-4176

Honorable Linda T. Sanchez
1007 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6676

http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/06/wor...-heard-of.html





EMI Music becomes the first major music company to make its catalog available to Qtrax: the world's first ad-supported, legitimate P2P service
Press Release

NEW YORK – JUNE 5, 2006 -- EMI Music, the world’s largest independent music company, and e-commerce software developer LTDnetwork Inc. today announced that EMI is the first major music company to make its catalog of recordings available to what will be the world’s first advertising-supported, legal peer-to-peer music distribution service. The service, called Qtrax, was developed by LTDnetwork, and at launch, will provide fans with free, advertising-funded access to high-quality, high-fidelity digital music files, as well as the option to subscribe to a premium version of the service or to purchase music tracks and albums on an a la carte basis.

Qtrax will offer two tiers of service: the first is a free, advertising-supported tier designed to work with and filter copyrighted content from existing peer-to-peer networks. The second tier is a premium subscription service which will require a monthly fee. The two-tiered business model is intended to attract a broad base of consumers to try out the service, and then graduate those consumers to purchase music permanently or subscribe.

In the ad-supported, free tier, users will be able to search the network for specific tracks, and those tracks registered with Qtrax will be made available for download in Qtrax’s proprietary “.mpq” file format. Users will then be able to play the downloaded .mpq file in full-fidelity sound quality for a pre-defined number of times. Each time a consumer plays a track, the Qtrax player will also offer fans click-to-buy purchase options, as well as the opportunity to upgrade to a premium subscription service for a flat monthly fee.

The premium subscription service tier uses Microsoft’s Janus DRM technology, which allows consumers to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music in the Qtrax network. Subscribers will also have the ability to transfer content to Windows Media enabled portable devices for as long as the subscription stays active.

The service will also include consumer-friendly community-building and music discovery tools which enable fans to easily access to a vast selection of music and other content, all while generating revenues for artists and content owners.

“Working with Qtrax is just one way EMI is actively supporting emerging business models, technologies and platforms to deliver music to fans,” said David Munns, Chairman and CEO of EMI Music North America. “Of course, we think that any ad-supported model should be offered in a way that maintains, or even enhances the value of music, and we believe Qtrax does that by offering a good consumer experience and significant up-selling opportunities. Our collaboration with Qtrax will give us great consumer insight and help us gauge the boundaries between sampling and purchasing music. Ultimately, the feedback we get from Qtrax will help EMI be more responsive to consumer demand. The Qtrax service will also ensure that our artists are compensated for their works and that the value of their music and integrity of our content is protected.”

In addition, Qtrax will offer incentive programs that will allow fans to accrue points redeemable for additional plays for tracks acquired through the free service, or for discounts off a la carte purchases or subscription fees.

“Qtrax is an innovative approach to creating a legitimate P2P offering, so we are pleased that EMI has agreed to be the first of the major music companies to participate. In addition to offering a great consumer experience which we believe will get more consumers excited about digital music, Qtrax will ensure that artists are getting paid when their songs are accesses in a P2P environment. In addition, EMI and other music companies will share in Internet advertising revenues, which according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers reached a new record of $3.9 billion for the first quarter of 2006 in the US - a 38 percent increase over Q1 2005,” said Allan Klepfisz, President & CEO of Brilliant Technologies Corporation, parent company of LTDnetwork.

The Qtrax service is expected to enter a test phase later this year and will initially pilot the service in the United States. In preparation for the launch, EMI will immediately begin delivering and registering its content with Qtrax’s filtering system, powered by Audible Magic.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About LTDnetwork Inc.

Based in New York, NY and founded in October 2000, LTDnetwork is a division of Brilliant Technologies Corporation (OTCBB: BLLNE). LTDnetwork has spent the last five years creating unique proprietary software at its Australian subsidiary in Melbourne. LTDnetwork specializes in the development of innovative technologies, software, and services for online retail, advertising, media and marketing companies. LTDnetwork is dedicated to providing online businesses and third party solution providers with innovative technologies, software, and services which target the consumer with the right message at the right time in what have now become the hottest areas for software applications: music downloading, automatic price comparison and highly targeted advertising.

About EMI Music

EMI is the world's largest independent music company, operating directly in 50 countries. Its EMI Music division represents more than 1,000 artists spanning all musical tastes and genres. Its record labels include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, Capitol Nashville, EMI Classics, EMI CMG, EMI Records, EMI Televisa Music, Manhattan, Mute, Parlophone and Virgin. For further information on EMI, please visit: www.emimusic.com.
http://www.emigroup.com/Press/2006/press25.htm





Hacker Said to Resell Internet Phone Service
Ken Belson and Tom Zeller Jr.

Federal authorities arrested a Miami resident today in what they said was a hacking scheme involving the resale of Internet telephone service.

The suspect, working with at least one confederate, was said to have illegally tapped into the lines of legitimate Internet phone companies, saddling them with the expense of extra traffic, while he collected more than $1 million in connection fees.

The case, one of the first involving Internet phone hacking, illustrated how Internet-based communications may be criminally exploited, and raises fresh questions about the security of phone traffic over largely unregulated networks.

Prosecutors said that starting in November 2004, Edwin Andres Pena, 23, a Venezuelan who has permanent residency in the United States and lives in Miami, used two companies he started to offer wholesale phone connections at discounted rates to small Internet phone companies.

Instead of buying access to other networks to connect his clients' calls, Mr. Pena is said to have worked with other hackers to create "what amounted to 'free' routes by surreptitiously hacking into the computer networks" of unwitting Internet phone providers, and then routing his customers' calls over those providers' systems, the federal complaint says.

To evade detection, Mr. Pena is said to have hacked into computers run by an unsuspecting investment company in Rye Brook, N.Y., commandeered its unprotected servers, and re-routed his phone traffic through them. These steps made it appear as if that company was sending calls to more than 15 Internet phone companies.

In one three-week period, for instance, prosecutors say that one of the victimized Internet phone providers, based in Newark, received about 500,000 calls that were made to look as if they came from the company in Rye Brook. The Newark company was left having to pay $300,000 in connection fees for routing the phone traffic to other carriers, without receiving any revenue for the calls, prosecutors said.

The companies in Newark and Rye Brook and others said to have been victimized were not identified by name in the complaint, which was filed with the United States District Court in Newark.

Mr. Pena, the government said, used more than $1 million he received from his customers to go on a spending spree, buying real estate in south Florida, a 40-foot Sea Ray Mercruiser motor boat, and luxury cars including a BMW and a Cadillac Escalade.

To date, most of the concern about the safety of Internet-based communications has focused on the ability of criminals to eavesdrop on calls, to fake caller ID's and to steal long-distance phone service.

In this case, Mr. Pena is said to have mimicked legitimate telecommunications brokers, who typically help connect long distance calls by buying minutes from large carriers and reselling them for a profit to smaller phone companies.

But instead of buying those minutes, he manipulated voice-over-Internet services that break conversations into data packets and route them over the Internet. Each packet carries a prefix that identifies the carrier handling the call, and its origin and destination.

Mr. Pena appended stolen prefixes to his customers' calls, allowing them to piggyback on other phone company networks.

At its core, industry experts say the scheme was not technologically complex, particularly in a budding industry still trying close its many security loopholes.

"The technical side of this a 14-year-old can do," said Tom Kershaw, the vice president for voice-over-Internet services at Verisign, an Internet security company. "There are many vulnerabilities."

Mr. Kershaw said that, for instance, a vast majority of voice packets sent by Internet phone companies are still unencrypted, making it relatively easy for outsiders to re-route them by installing new prefixes. He added that the prefixes used by Internet phones companies to identify their voice calls are also relatively easy to discover.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/te...nd-voice.html?





Disposable Cameras Defy Film's March to Obscurity

Sayaka Masuda's face was a picture of frustration when she realized she would have to buy a disposable camera in Kyoto, Japan's photogenic ancient capital.

``After I got on the bullet train from Tokyo, I realized that I'd forgotten my digital camera,'' said the biology student. ``I was really annoyed at myself.''

Thanks in no small part to the forgetfulness of consumers, disposable cameras still earn a place on kiosk and convenience store shelves 20 years after the first model was sold in this click-happy country.

Across the Pacific, a heartier appetite for disposables -- little more than a film coiled behind a lens and a flash -- has provided some relief for a film market trampled by galloping demand for cheaper and sharper digital cameras.

In the United States, the world's largest photo market, about 202 million disposable cameras were sold last year, according to the U.S.-based Photo Marketing Association.

That is down from the record 218 million gobbled up in 2004 but defies the more than 20 percent annual shrinking of the color film market as consumers go digital.

Thanks to digital cameras, gone are the days of faces out of focus and wasted shots of eyes caught mid-blink. If you don't like a photo, just erase it from the screen and snap another one.

So deep is the rot in global film sales that the world's third-largest maker of camera film, Japan's Konica Minolta, decided this year to pull the plug on making color film, while AgfaPhoto of Germany went bankrupt, sinking the once-famous Agfa brand.

But digital cameras are susceptible to theft, loss and damage and that has been another key to the longevity of disposables -- serving as a stand-in at the beach, say, or amid the cacophony of celebration and inebriation at parties and rock concerts.

Nor are disposables restricted to mere domestic duties: Oscar-winning director Ang Lee wielded one on Academy Awards night this year, and they are a staple of care packages sent to U.S. troops in Iraq.

``There's no real device that's simple, cheap and effective enough to supplant it yet,'' said Christopher Chute, senior analyst at U.S.-based IDC, a technology research firm.

``It's something people are very familiar with. It's an ingrained behavior.''

No Longer Smitten

One of the few countries to see a significant denting of sales is Japan, the world's second-largest photo market, where once-smitten consumers helped to ignite a global infatuation with disposables.

Domestic shipments slipped to 48 million in 2005, according to Japanese imaging group Photo Market, nearly half the number shipped a decade earlier when Sayaka Masuda took her first disposable on an elementary school trip to Tokyo Disneyland.

Single-use cameras are losing ground in a country famously quick to bin old technology in favor of the new, and where the incidence of theft is comparatively low.

The ubiquitous camera phone, just an arm's length away in bags and trouser pockets, is the latest predator on disposable's diminishing turf in Japan, where around 90 percent of mobile phones can take photos.

But camera phones won't really encroach on the territory of single-use cameras until the printable image is sharper, said Ken Sugiyama, a spokesman for Fuji Photo Film, which introduced the first disposables to the world in 1986.

``The influence of the camera phone is very limited toward the single-use camera,'' he said, noting that camera phones have no flash.

``Digital cameras -- that's the killer.''

Still A Niche

Given disposables' unique role as instrument of last resort, and their popularity among people shy of fiddly electronics, a shrunken niche should be maintained in Japan.

Certainly Eastman Kodak and Fuji, the world's top two makers of photo film, aren't shying away from inventing new flavors of disposables amid long-running shake-ups of their businesses due to the death rattle of film.

The latest single-use camera from Fuji features speedier film for taking clearer photos at night, adding to a range that has included models for taking underwater, panoramic and black-and-white photos.

``The move to digital cameras and the market growth of camera phones threaten sales, but there will continue to be a particular need for disposable cameras,'' said Masahiro Nakanomyo, a market analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities.

The boom in U.S. demand for digital cameras and lately camera phones may have taken a cue from Japan, but the gouging of disposables' sales may not be mimicked in the United States any time soon.

U.S. consumers tend to embrace products based on price and are more likely to use disposables, which sell for as little as $5 for 27 shots on both sides of the Pacific, as their only camera, said Chute at IDC.

``There's still a base of consumers who either can't afford digital, only own film cameras, or respond to this kind of spontaneous nature of needing a camera,'' he said.

``You open the box and 'bang' -- you can start taking pictures. And that's probably really saved the photography industry ever since they came out in the mid- to late-80s.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...sposables.html





Music Review | Joan Jett and the Blackhearts



Embracing a Proud Past, Joan Jett Keeps It Simple
Sia Michel

In the 1980's, when she ruled Top 40 radio, Joan Jett was the perfect embodiment of rock's primal qualities. She was young, cocky, sexy, rebellious and knew how to rock a pair of leather pants. She had a signature look (shag haircut and heavy eyeliner), a jailbait past (she joined the Runaways at age 15) and a punk-rock pedigree (she was friends with Sid Vicious and produced the Germs). It's hard to think of a cooler 80's rocker — maybe Axl Rose? But unlike Mr. Rose, with his odd behavior and even odder new face, Ms. Jett has aged with grace. At 47, she seems eerily youthful and unjaded.

Let's see Madonna pull this off: Ms. Jett arrived in a skimpy bikini top and black leather pants worn so low you could see her hipbones. Her tattooed arms were toned and sinewy; her face was girlish, as if she had just stepped out of the "Bad Reputation" video. Her fitness regime probably involves airborne kicks and rooster strutting. "Joan, you are obscenely sexy, and I want to marry you!" a woman in the audience shouted as Ms. Jett swaggered to the Runaways' classic "Cherry Bomb." Later a female fan rushed the stage and tried to kiss her.

Ms. Jett seemed revolutionary in the 80's because she acted as if being a (rare) female guitar virtuoso was no big deal. She proclaimed "I Love Rock N' Roll" with the casual sense of entitlement of a male legend. Over the years Ms. Jett grew more political, and she is now hailed as a groundbreaking feminist hero. The sold-out show at the Brooklyn club Southpaw on Tuesday was packed with adoring women in their 30's and young, hand-holding lesbian couples. When Ms. Jett sang "Do you want to touch me there?," she was rewarded with deafening screams of "Yeah!"

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts are touring to support the new album "Sinner," Ms. Jett's first studio effort since the 90's. She is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her label, Blackheart Records, by reissuing her early work. And Ms. Jett has joined this summer's Vans Warped Tour, where she is likely to upstage artists almost three decades younger.

The simplistic new punk song "Change the World" is tailor-made for that audience, with its plainspoken call to arms. The lyrics to "Androgynous" sounded especially clunky live ("She's happy with the way she looks/she's happy with her gender") but still generated cheers.

At times it sounded as if Ms. Jett had been kidnapped by a bland Midwestern bar band. But as she and her all-male backup obliged the crowd with nearly all of her hits (including her excellent "Crimson and Clover" cover), it didn't really matter. Even her voice is remarkably young, untainted by bitterness or ennui.

Ms. Jett ended the show with Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People," thrusting her pelvis against her low-slung guitar. There is nothing everyday about her: she is the hard-rock Dorian Gray.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/ar...ic/08jett.html





Democrats Question Handling of Data Breach
David Stout

Democrats on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of incompetence amid revelations that the recent loss of computer data from the Department of Veterans Affairs involved far more active-duty military people than was originally thought.

"Such incompetence is as bad or worse than anything I've seen in six administrations," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said. "At some point, the administration has got to stop saying we'll hire or appoint political cronies, but we'll actually appoint somebody who knows how to make the government work."

Mr. Leahy appeared at a news conference with Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Jack Reed of Rhode Island in the aftermath of the latest revelation in the data-breach episode, in which information on as many as 1.1 million military people on active duty, 430,000 members of the National Guard and 645,000 members of the Reserves may have been compromised.

The Department of Veterans Affairs originally said the lost data involved 26.5 million veterans discharged from about 1975 onward. Later it said that a relatively small number of active-duty people might be included in the 26.5 million. And finally, the agency disclosed on Tuesday that the actual number of active-duty people, Guardsmen and reservists involved may be well over two million.

"It is, I think, the pattern of this administration," said Mr. Reed, a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. "Spin the story out in little pieces here and there rather than taking decisive, appropriate and responsible action."

Asked whether he was accusing department officials of acting in bad faith, or simply being mistaken about the extent of the data loss, Mr. Reed said: "Whether it's incompetence or other factors, the result's the same. It's absolutely unacceptable."

Ms. Murray, a member of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said the troubles within the agency threatened to undermine faith in it.

"Can you imagine being a young woman with a couple of children, your spouse is overseas in Iraq, and now you find out that your address has been stolen and your personal safety is at risk?" she said.

A Veterans Department spokesman, Matt Burns, said Wednesday that the agency would continue to release information on the data breach "as additional details are learned."

Mr. Burns said that Jim Nicholson, the secretary of veterans affairs. was conducting "an up-and-down review" to ensure that such a breach did not happen again.

A laptop computer and external hard drive containing the data were stolen on May 3 in a burglary at the suburban Maryland home of a department data analyst. Some department officials learned of the theft almost immediately, but Mr. Nicholson was not notified until May 16.

Because of the time lag, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not learn of the incident until about two weeks after the burglary, which was under investigation by the police in Montgomery County.

The data includes names, birth dates and Social Security numbers. Although there has been no indication that the information has been misused, there have been widespread concerns that it could be used for credit-card fraud and identity theft.

Loren B. Thompson, a military affairs analyst, said there were broader implications. The identities of people who leave the military and go into intelligence or private security work could be compromised by someone correlating the Veterans Affairs data with information in other data banks, Mr. Thompson said.

Such data comparisons could yield "unexpectedly interesting insights," said Mr. Thompson, the chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a conservative public policy research organization based in Arlington, Va.

Mr. Nicholson testified at a recent Senate hearing that for three years the data analyst whose house was burglarized had taken home sensitive material without authorization.

On Thursday, Mr. Nicholson will be back on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Committee on Government Reform. Mr. Nicholson will probably be asked if he and his subordinates are sure they know the full dimensions of the data breach. The announcement on Tuesday that the breach was more serious than department officials had realized followed a comparison of electronic files by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Defense Department.

A government Web site set up to help those who may be affected lists a toll-free number, and by Tuesday night 146,685 people had phoned in, said Mr. Burns, the department spokesman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/wa...8identity.html





Arts and Crafts for the Digital Age
Michel Marriott

At first blush, the PicoCricket Kit resembles a plastic box of arts and crafts supplies, crammed with colored felt, pipe cleaners, cotton and Styrofoam balls.

But this is a craft kit for the digital age. It includes electronic sensors, motors, sound boxes, connecting cables and a palm-size, battery-powered, programmable computer.

By combining the traditional materials with high-tech ones, children as young as 9 can invent interactive jewelry, fanciful creatures that dance, musical sculptures and more, said Mitchel Resnick, an assistant professor of learning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

Mr. Resnick, whose work with children and learning at the Media Lab helped the Lego Group create its highly successful Mindstorms robotic construction kits in 1998, said he wanted to produce something in which the emphasis was not on the building of mechanical objects.

Instead, he said he was more interested in encouraging the creation of something artistic, and delivering a technology and programming language that would let young people take more control of how their creations would behave.

"The hope is to get people started with simple projects and let their imaginations run wild," Mr. Resnick said. "I do think young people are very quick to dive in and experiment." The PicoCricket Kits, he said, "are designed to encourage that sort of experimentation."

One of the PicoCricket guides, for instance, instructs users on how to turn a birthday cake made mostly of felt, cardboard and drinking straws into an ingeniously interactive one, a cake that can be programmed to shut off the lights in its electrical candles when someone blows on them.

With a few adjustments in the cake's programming, its artificial candles will even flicker before they go out. With more programming tweaks, the cake can play birthday tunes or be joined with another homemade contraption that will toss confetti into the air.

The $250 kit is the first effort of the Playful Invention Company, or PICO, a Montreal-based company of which Mr. Resnick is a co-founder; Lego is a financial backer. (The kit will be available next month from www.picocricket.com, where orders are now being accepted.)

Besides all the parts, the kit includes building guides printed on double-sided placemats, but little more in terms of instructions.

Its central tool is PicoBlocks software, a point-and-click, drop-and-drag programming language. It appears like colored puzzle pieces that can be arranged and combined on a computer screen (PC and Mac) with a mouse. Stringing the labeled pieces together into interlocking sequences can create simple or complex commands.

A U.S.B. "beamer," which is plugged into the computer, transmits the commands to the PicoCricket computer through a series of flashing lights. Motors and sensors are plugged into the PicoCricket, which then performs according to the programming stored in its solid-state memory.

The PicoCricket's core technology, Mr. Resnick said, dates from the 1980's, when M.I.T. and Lego were developing the programmable Lego brick, which led to Mindstorms.

"Putting kids in control is what's so important to us," Mr. Resnick said, noting that girls as well as boys are drawn to the kit's creative engineering, according to M.I.T.'s research and workshops globally.

Other developers, too, are producing more open-ended building kits aimed at letting young people create and program their own computerized designs.

The Vex Robotics Design System, developed last year by Innovation First and RadioShack, was created to spur young people to have fun while being inventive. Along the way, many are given hands-on lessons in how mathematics, physics and computer programming can be useful and practical, said Joel Carter, vice president for marketing at Innovation First, a robotics company in Greenville, Tex.

Vex robot kits include instructions, but they encourage young people — generally high school age and older — to tackle problems. "Talk to the average high school students, they are a lot smarter," Mr. Carter said. "They like open-ended problems, and a lot like to take the tools that are available to solve open-ended problems."

The Vex starter kit, which costs $300, includes more than 500 parts, enough to build remote-controlled robots as well as programmable ones, Mr. Carter noted. Programming, he said, is written in easyC, a graphical variant on the C language used by professional programmers.

"It is a cool tool that works with Vex," he said of easyC, which works on Windows-based personal computers. "It makes Vex accessible and demystifies programming. Relatively young kids can program robots to get them to do what they want them to."

The programming is transferred to the robot's microprocessor by way of a serial cable plugged into the computer.

Vex systems, which include more than 20 accessories (including the easyC programming kit, sold separately for $99), have recently been acquired by Innovation First (www.vexlabs.com). This means, Mr. Carter said, that the robotics kits will not be sold exclusively in RadioShack stores, but also through other channels.

He also noted that Carnegie Mellon University had developed a curriculum that uses Vex robotics to teach math and sciences.

David Greenbaum, owner of Robot Village, a robotics store and workshop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said the attraction of young people to robotics was only natural.

"These are such exciting times for kids when they can see robots all around them doing things like exploring the oceans and outer space, and helping the sick and elderly in hospitals," he said. "They want to be a part of that. Learning robotics technology skills gives them a big advantage in unlocking their future possibilities."

Homemade robots have become such a hot topic lately that Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make magazine, said much of the magazine's latest issue was devoted to guiding readers in building their own.

"One thing that really made a big difference is the kits," Mr. Frauenfelder said about the rising popularity in designing, building and programming personal creations. "They have whetted people's appetites. They see them online, other people home-brewing these really cool robots."

Caleb Chung and Bob Christopher, the co-founders of Ugobe, a robotic technology company in Emeryville, Calif., said they were developing an infant robotic dinosaur, Pleo, that they say will behave so believably that it will invite a relationship as much as play. (Mr. Chung was co-inventor of the Furby, the interactive plush toy.)

The Pleo (www.ugobe.com/pleo) is to be ready by the holiday season; its price has not been disclosed. Mr. Christopher said the robotic pet's technology, running on the company's Life Form operating system, would be "all about enabling the creative gene in everybody."

In the meantime, the diversity of robotic kits and the creative possibilities continue to grow, encompassing everything from mechanical insects and beasts to high-tech toy houses and spinning sculpture.

Robotics does not have to be limited anymore, said Mr. Resnick of M.I.T., "to what comes in the box."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/te...08cricket.html





QNA

Rooting Out Rootkits
J.D. Biersdorfer

Q. What exactly are rootkits, and how are they different from other types of spyware?

A. A rootkit is a collection of software programs and tools that someone can hide deep within a computer system and then use to gain access to the computer. The term comes from the Unix system, where the all-powerful administrator account that controls the computer is commonly called the "root" user account.

Rootkits are hard to detect because they can intercept the operating system's internal functions and exchange that data with false information — like purposely preventing the rootkit's own files from being listed by Windows Explorer or the Windows XP Task Manager.

Most regular spyware programs are meant to run in a stealthy manner, but cannot usually cloak themselves as thoroughly as a rootkit can. Because they can fool the operating system, rootkits can also be used to conceal spyware and other malicious programs planted on the computer.

Internet intruders often use rootkits to gain access to computers on a network. In 2005, however, it was discovered that Sony BMG Music Entertainment was using a rootkit to install and hide copy-protection software on some of its compact discs. (Several lawsuits were filed against the company after an outcry over privacy and security concerns, and Sony BMG recalled the CD's and issued software patches for the computers affected by the rootkit.)

While rootkits can be difficult to detect and remove, free software tools for Windows are available to expose them, including RootkitRevealer (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilitie...tRevealer.html). There's also a test version of the F-Secure Blacklight rootkit detection program at www.f-secure.com/blacklight; the trial version will expire on Sept. 1. Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool can detect some rootkits as well; the company releases an updated version on the second Tuesday of every month at http://www.microsoft.com/security/ma...e/default.mspx. There is more information on rootkits at www.antirootkit.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/business/08askk.html





DRM Causing Difficulties For Libraries
Amber Maitland

The British Library's Chief Executive, Lynne Brindley, is warning that DRM systems are creating unintended consequences that affect how digital material can be stored and disseminated by libraries, which have traditionally been protected by special exceptions under IP law.

Speaking at the launch of the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) into Digital Rights Management, the British Library's Chief Executive, Lynne Brindley urged MPs to balance the rights of content creators with the need to maintain access in the public good.

"Digital material generally comes with a contract, and these contracts are nearly always more restrictive than existing copyright law and frequently prevent copying, archiving, and access by the visually impaired", said Brindley.

She gave the example that in a small sample of 30 licences offered to the library, only two publishers were as generous in terms of access as statutory fair dealing. Only two allowed archiving of the material, and not one permitted sopying of the whole work by the visually impaired.

If action isn't taken to clarify policy on DRM, it could have far reaching effects for institutions like the British Library who have traditionally held archival copies of material. For example, as one digital archiving method becomes extinct, DRM could prevent the library from transferring material to another, newer media for preservation.

The national library is recommending that IP law should clarify that fair dealing applies to digital as well as print items.
http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news.php?newsId=3566





Could Net2Phone Sue More Than Skype?
Dave Greenfield

Net2Phone's lawsuit against Skype may ruffle more than just the feathers of the leading VoIP service provider. It could reshape much of the industry.

The suit charges that when Skype developed a peer-to-peer architecture it violated Net2Phone's patent, number 6,108,704. The patent describes an architecture where nodes, called processing units, exchange IP addresses to establish peer-to-peer communications.

In some respect this architecture sounds strikingly similar to Skype's overlay peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. Addresses of online systems are stored in a database on a connection server. A sender queries the connection server to determine whether or not the recipient is online. If so the sender retrieves the IP address from the connection server and establishes a P2P connection with the recipient.

In other respects, though, the Net2Phone design widely diverges from today's architecture. The patent describes a system whereby P2P sessions are established through e-mail. In that instance, senders and receivers swap emails containing their IP addresses with the purposes of establishing a P2P session.

Evaluating any patent infringement case hinges on understanding the specific patent claim that the suit contends was infringed upon, says J. Matthew Buchanan, patent attorney at Dunlap, Codding, and Rogers. In this case, evaluating those claims at this stage is difficult because Net2Phone, a division of IDT, is first asking for full disclosure from Skype before naming specific claim violations.

Until the specific claims are disclosed its difficult to know thye likelyhood of Net2Phone's success against Skype. What may be easier to ascertain, however, is whether Net2Phone could pursue even bigger fish -- the rest of the VoIP industry. Most VoIP protocols use P2P connections of some kind. SIP certainly does. SIP also uses a location server, like a connection server, as defined in patent 6,108,704.

If so could Net2Phone sue any vendor in the SIP community? We'll bring in a panel of experts to try and answer that question later this week.
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/bl...KHSCJUME KJVN





P2P Media Services Raise ISP Hackles

Internet providers fear that broadcasters are delivering content without paying for bandwidth
Dave Friedlos

Internet experts have expressed concerns about the growing use of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to download media services over the web.

Services such as Sky’s broadband video download offering work on the basis that content is stored on customers’ PCs and uploaded to new users using P2P software, rather than delivering it directly from central servers.

Similar services in the US have resulted in ISPs threatening to charge content providers for use of bandwidth.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, warned against the creation of such a ‘two-tier’ internet in a speech at the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh last week.

Malcolm Hutty, head of public policy at the London Internet Exchange, says bandwidth ownership could become as controversial in the UK as in the US.

‘ISPs are concerned that content providers are getting free bandwidth access without paying for it,’ he said.

‘The content providers’ view is that customers pay for the bandwidth and can use it to move content if they like.’

Ovum analyst Jonathan Arber says there are also concerns that users could face additional costs if they have download and upload limits.

‘There has been some criticism because many users do not realise Sky is uploading from their PC for the benefit of other users,’ he said. ‘Not everyone reads the fine print.

Steve Nuttall, Sky’s director of business development, says the company makes users aware of how P2P works during the installation process. He says the Kontiki technology, delivered by Ioko, is also used by other content providers, including the BBC.

‘Sky by Broadband is designed to give users an improved experience and deliver content faster,’ he said. ‘It does not affect general usage as the Kontiki platform operates on a low priority.’
http://www.vnunet.com/actions/trackback/2157294





Got me in a stranglehold baby

Sandvine Launches New Broadband Platform
Press Release

Sandvine connected with investors today as it announced the launch of its PTS 14000 platform that enables broadband providers to deliver per-subscriber IP-based multimedia applications.

The intelligent broadband network solutions group said PTS 14000 is “the industry's most powerful platform enabling per-subscriber DPI-based policy solutions to solve both business and technology challenges in the world's largest broadband networks that are migrating to 10-Gig connectivity.”

It said the platform was a response to continued broadband subscriber growth combined with mass market adoption of applications like P2P file-sharing, VoIP and online gaming.

“The increase in bandwidth consumption due to media-rich applications...places a high premium on a service provider's ability to identify and manage traffic,” said Vince Vittore, Senior Analyst, Broadband Access Technologies, Yankee Group.

“As broadband is increasingly vital to the consumer's daily life, higher capacity and carrier-grade equipment is a requirement for success.”
http://www.sharecast.com/cgi-bin/sha...tory_id=715877





Avalanche P2P May Be In Vista
David A. Utter

Microsoft has been quietly developing its BitTorrent alternative in the UK, and the announcement that Windows Vista-equipped laptops with built-in WiFi will be able to do peer to peer connections could indicate its pending arrival in the marketplace.

A ZDNet report about a technology called "People Near Me" in Vista will enable P2P connections between laptops in close proximity.

Microsoft has already built one program, Windows MeetingSpace, that utilizes the P2P technology to permit the sharing of files between those machines. Last August, beta testers of Vista noticed that a P2P application was in place and running by default.

At that time, Microsoft said the application had been turned on for testing purposes and would be turned off by default in the final version of Vista. The article noted that the MeetingSpace application had been known as Windows Collaboration.

Last July, a few details on Avalanche became known to the public. In that model, Avalanche overcomes BitTorrent's problem of finding the rarest bit of a file by using network coding instead.

Network coding receives more detail in Microsoft's research report on Avalanche:

Instead of distributing the blocks of the file, peers produce linear combinations of the blocks they already hold. Such combinations are distributed together with a tag that describes the parameters in the combination. Any peer can generate new unique combinations from the combinations it already has. When a peer has enough independent combinations, it can decode and build the original file.

Such encoding ensures that any piece uploaded by a given peer can be of use to any other peer. Peers do not need to find specific pieces in the system to complete, any subset encoded piece will suffice.
In that research note, Microsoft specifically noted how Avalanche includes "strong security to ensure content providers are uniquely identifiable, and to prevent unauthorized parties from offering content for download. The project also ensures content downloaded to each client machine is exactly the same as the content shared by the content provider."

While the initial debut of MeetingSpace will be limited to those laptops with close proximity to other MeetingSpace users, plans by Microsoft to forge content deals with Hollywood studios could use this as a stepping stone toward those negotiations. Especially if Avalanche is part of the package.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/to...BeInVista.html





Microsoft Pulls PC-to-PC Sync From Vista
Gregg Keizer

Microsoft confirmed that it will yank yet another feature from Windows Vista, this time PC-to-PC Sync, a P2P-based technology for keeping files up-to-date on multiple machines.

"While PC-to-PC Sync is a great feature that improves productivity and collaboration we don't have it at the quality level our customers demand," a company spokesperson said in an e-mail. "As a result the decision was made to remove it from Windows Vista."

Part of a broader synchronisation update in Vista - the operating system will have a prominent Sync Center for all such chores, including synchronising PCs with servers and mobile - PC-to-PC Sync was based on peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, and would have let Vista users sync the contents of specialised folders, including the by-default Documents, Pictures, and Music, between multiple PCs on wired or wireless networks.

Analysts characterised the feature as an extension of the old Offline Files technology and the Windows XP SyncToy, with part of the P2P FolderShare utility - a 2005 acquisition by Microsoft - thrown in for good measure.

The consumer-oriented PC-to-PC Sync, however, was limited in that it would synchronise files and folders only between machines running Vista, and then apparently only between computers which had the same user account name and password (in other words, between PCs owned and used by the same person).

The departure of PC-to-PC Sync comes just days after Microsoft said it was pulling other features from Office 2007 and letting computer makers install the OS and the company's new XPS electronic document format, all under pressure from Adobe.

As it has in the past, Microsoft cited quality concerns as the reason for the feature's exit.

"From the beginning, we have made it clear that the top priority for Windows Vista is quality," the spokesperson said. "This is part of the normal beta process as we constantly evaluate, improve and fine tune the features of Windows Vista."

The spokesperson also said that PC-to-PC Sync would be the last feature to be dropped from Vista, and that it hoped to provide it in some fashion down the road.

"Work on it continues and is something we plan to deliver to our customers in the future," the spokesperson concluded.
http://www.crn.com.au/story.aspx?CIID=38709&s=p2p





Specter's Uneasy Relationship With White House Is Revealed in a Letter to Cheney
Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg

A senior Republican lawmaker went public on Wednesday about his often tense and complicated relationship with the Bush White House in a remarkable display of the strains within the party.

The lawmaker, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, accused Vice President Dick Cheney of meddling behind his back in the committee's business, bringing into the open a conflict that has simmered for months.

In a letter to Mr. Cheney that the senator released to the news media, Mr. Specter said the vice president had cut him out of discussions with all the other Republicans on his own committee about oversight of the administration's eavesdropping programs, a subject on which Mr. Specter has often been at odds with the White House.

The trigger for Mr. Specter's anger was a deal made by Mr. Cheney with the other Republicans on the committee to block testimony from phone companies that reportedly cooperated in providing call records to the National Security Agency.

Mr. Specter, who had been considering issuing subpoenas to compel telephone company executives to testify, learned of Mr. Cheney's actions only when he went into a closed meeting of the committee's Republicans on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after encountering the vice president at a weekly luncheon of all Senate Republicans.

Mr. Specter's tone in the letter was restrained, but he made no effort to hide his displeasure at having been outmaneuvered and, in his view, undermined, by Mr. Cheney.

"I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the committee without calling me first, or at least calling me at some point," Mr. Specter wrote. "This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions en route from the buffet to my table."

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Lea Anne McBride, said Wednesday night that the vice president "has not had an opportunity to study" the letter.

"We're going to continue to work with members, listening to their legislative ideas," Ms. McBride said, although she added that it was "not necessary to have legislation to carry out the terrorist surveillance program."

She had no comment on the assertion that Mr. Cheney had worked behind the chairman's back.

Mr. Specter's evident frustration underscored the growing unease on Capitol Hill, among some Republicans as well as many Democrats, over the administration's efforts to exert executive power. At the same time, the White House has been trying to repair its relations with Congress.

One Republican with close ties to the administration, who was granted anonymity to discuss the thinking at the White House, said Mr. Specter had been increasingly nettlesome to the administration with his persistent criticism, especially of the surveillance programs.

Noting that the White House was ultimately pleased with Mr. Specter's help in securing the confirmations of Mr. Bush's Supreme Court nominees, this Republican said, "All of that good will he's built up has really been dissipated because he keeps smacking them around."

A senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the president's chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, had reached out to Mr. Specter on Friday to press the administration's case for how to handle the phone companies.

The official described the conversation as "cordial but not productive."

"That's when we started reaching out to other members," the official said. "It was not out of disrespect."

The official went on, "The chairman's position is well known, and he knows our position, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work with other members who may be more open to our position."

Mr. Specter has been the leading Republican voice raising questions about the legal underpinnings of the surveillance programs.

In his letter, Mr. Specter told Mr. Cheney that events were unfolding in a "context where the administration is continuing warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and is preventing the Senate Judiciary Committee from carrying out its constitutional responsibility for Congressional oversight."

Mr. Cheney, by contrast, has led the White House's effort to defend the surveillance programs on legal and national security grounds.

The vice president has also been the primary force behind the administration's efforts to expand executive power in a wide variety of areas, a stance that has at times put him in direct conflict with Mr. Specter.

When Mr. Specter faced a difficult primary challenge in 2004, Mr. Bush sided with Mr. Specter, giving him vital political support.

In an interview, Mr. Specter described his relationship with Mr. Cheney as generally friendly and cordial. But he was clearly put out by the vice president's handling of the issue and his failure to pull Mr. Specter aside as he made several trips to the buffet for tuna salad and hard-boiled egg, salad dressing and fruit.

"He can talk to anybody he wants to," Mr. Specter said. "I think as a matter of basic protocol he ought not to exclude the chairman."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/wa...08specter.html





'Break-Up' tops 'X-Men' at Box Office
David Germain

Supported by real-life romantic splits and hookups, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn's "The Break-Up" pulled an upset over the mutant world of the "X-Men."

"The Break-Up" debuted more strongly than expected with $38.1 million to take over as the No. 1 weekend movie from "X-Men: The Last Stand," which slipped to second place with $34.35 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Aniston's split from Brad Pitt last year and her reported romance that began with Vaughn while filming "The Break-Up" helped keep the movie in the public eye.

"They're always in the press," said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for Universal, which released "The Break-Up." "Every time you turn around, somebody's talking about Jennifer, or Jennifer and Brad, or Jennifer and Vince. It's not why we made the movie, though."

"The Break-Up" pulled in about $10 million more than Rocco had expected.

After putting in a record four-day debut of $122.9 million over Memorial Day weekend, 20th Century Fox's third "X-Men" movie tumbled. The movie's domestic gross dropped a steep 67 percent from its Friday-Sunday haul the first weekend.

Still, "X-Men" raised its total to a whopping $175.7 million in just 10 days, a mark it took "X2: X-Men United" 18 days to reach. Bruce Snyder, head of distribution for Fox, said the film should top out at $240 million to $250 million, beating the $157 million take for the first "X-Men" and the $215 million return for "X2."

The huge decline in the second weekend was typical given how many people saw the movie over the holiday weekend, Snyder said.

"I'm not shocked at that drop," Snyder said.

DreamWorks Animation's cartoon comedy "Over the Hedge" held up well, placing third with $20.6 million for a three-week total of $112.4 million.

Sony's "The Da Vinci Code" was No. 4 with $19.3 million, lifting its three-week domestic gross to $172.7 million. Worldwide, the Tom Hanks film adapted from Dan Brown's best-seller has grossed $581 million and should hit at least $750 million globally, said Rory Bruer, Sony head of distribution.

In its second weekend, the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" went into wider release and broke into the top 10 with $1.33 million, even though it was playing in just 77 theaters.

Released by Paramount Classics, the film averaged an impressive $17,292 a theater, compared to $12,410 in 3,070 cinemas for "The Break-Up."

Chronicling the former vice president's campaign to educate people about the perils of global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth" expands to more theaters over the next two weekends.

"It's breakups and global warming that I think really are interesting people now," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Overall business rose slightly, with the top 12 movies taking in $128.9 million, up 1.6 percent from the same weekend last year.

After an 8 percent drop in movie attendance last year, Hollywood is positioned for a solid summer. Attendance is running about 1 percent ahead of last year's, with what looks like a solid crop of blockbusters still to come, including this Friday's animated comedy "Cars," from Disney and Pixar, and the Warner Bros. adventure "Superman Returns" on June 30.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "The Break-Up," $38.1 million.

2. "X-Men: The Last Stand," $34.35 million.

3. "Over the Hedge," $20.6 million.

4. "The Da Vinci Code," $19.3 million.

5. "Mission: Impossible III," $4.67 million.

6. "Poseidon," $3.4 million.

7. "RV," $3.3 million.

8. "See No Evil," $2 million.

9. "An Inconvenient Truth," $1.33 million.

10. "Just My Luck," $825,000.

---

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and Vivendi Universal; DreamWorks is a unit of DreamWorks SKG Inc.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Classics are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros., New Line and Warner Independent are units of Time Warner Inc.; Lionsgate is owned by Lionsgate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Sexual Deviations on Parade in 'Psychopathia Sexualis'
Jeannette Catsoulis

Anyone popping in to "Psychopathia Sexualis" hoping for a classier "Basic Instinct" or perhaps a sneak peek at Woody Allen's memoirs will be sorely disappointed. Named for the notorious 1886 text by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, a German psychiatrist whose specialty was sexual perversion, the movie reconstructs four of the book's colorful case histories. But applying the scientific method to carnal behavior is one thing; applying it to moviemaking is quite another.

Trapping his kinky material in a cage of Victorian propriety, the writer and director, Bret Wood, mimics the visual style of silent cinema, complete with wooden tableaus and ornate intertitles. As hysterical violins sob in the background, we see an onanistic mama's boy discover the joys of bloodsucking, and a wealthy masochist trampled by a pair of bored-looking prostitutes. There's necrophilia, and there are sheep (thankfully unmolested), but there is not one moment of fun.

Whether in the whorehouse or the sanitarium, "Psychopathia Sexualis" is an exercise in unrelenting dullness. Its troubled characters may clamber into coffins, ogle chickens and play with leeches, but it's all pleasureless. Bodily fluids and whippings alike are delivered and received with no more enthusiasm than that of a bivalve processing its dinner. If Sharon Stone were to greet sexual deviance with such sang-froid, she'd never work again.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/0...es/08psyc.html





Hollywood Agencies to Leave Talent Row
Sharon Waxman

On plenty of days Bryan Lourd or Ed Limato, agent-princes of Hollywood's reigning talent empires, can still be seen striding down Wilshire Boulevard on the way to lunch with movie stars or studio moguls.

But that may all be coming to an end as two of Hollywood's biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency, where Mr. Lourd helps rule the roost, and International Creative Management, where Mr. Limato holds sway, pack up and move barely a mile away, to Century City.

To the uninitiated, that may seem like a paltry distance. But for the agency world, which for a decade and a half has been clustered along a narrow corridor of power and information on Wilshire Boulevard here, it is the end of something, and the beginning of a more diffuse and more corporate existence.

"When you pick up and move from someplace, it's often more than just to find space," said Lou Pitt, an agent turned manager and producer who works on the Wilshire corridor. "When you move, you redefine yourself. It gives you a chance to start fresh."

In the case of C.A.A., the symbolism is pretty clear. By early next year, the agency will abandon the famous I. M. Pei-designed building at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards that was commissioned and is still owned by the C.A.A. co-founder and fallen kingpin, Michael Ovitz, and his former colleagues Ron Meyer, Bill Haber and Robert Goldman.

The agency, now run by Mr. Lourd and six partners, will be moving into a 12-story glass and matte-steel building under construction on the Avenue of the Stars in Century City. C.A.A. representatives declined to comment for this article.

"It's a new world order," Mr. Pitt said. "The old regime is gone, the remnants of it, and now — it'll reflect their taste."

Meanwhile, I.C.M. is moving from its slick headquarters at Wilshire Boulevard and La Peer Drive (which was designed for, but never occupied by, the failed Columbia Savings and Loan Association) into several stories of MGM Tower, a skyscraper perched just off Avenue of the Stars.

In both cases the need for space is a factor. For C.A.A., the new, rented headquarters will give the agency an additional 50,000 square feet, accommodating its move toward corporate clients and its new sports division.

I.C.M. executives said the move would give the agency almost 25,000 additional square feet of office space, add two screening rooms and allow the company to consolidate its finance and accounting office, which will move from New York and Beverly Hills to a single division in Century City. An executive said the lease was not yet signed, but the move was expected to occur by next year.

But the movements are also part of a broader transformation within Hollywood's agencies, as they expand in some areas, consolidate in others and try to cope with tectonic shifts in the entertainment world, which include a decline in the studios' willingness to hire high-priced movie stars.

Another major agency, William Morris, is considering a move, though not from here. That agency, which for decades has been a fixture in its own building on El Camino Drive, off Wilshire, is negotiating to take more space in a building nearby. The owner of the neighboring building filed plans with the city in April that would allow for the razing of its parking garage to make way for the agency.

A spokesman for William Morris declined to confirm a moving plan. "We have no comment right now on what our plans are now," he said. "We just remodeled the interior of our building."

Other agencies say they are not moving. United Talent Agency, for instance, is staying put, as is nearby Endeavor. "We have a plum location," said Chris Day, a spokesman for United Talent, noting that the agency had just signed a new 10-year lease. "We're on Wilshire between Camden and Rodeo, across from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, across from Barney's, across from the Grill. We have the best location in Beverly Hills."

Guy McElwaine, a leading agent in the 1970's who is now president of the production company Morgan Creek, saw the planned moves as a largely practical response to changing conditions. "I don't see it as symbolic of anything other than the growth of the agencies from a personnel point of view," he said.

In decades past, Mr. McElwaine said, "basically most clients had one agent, unless they worked in multiple areas." He added, "Barbra Streisand worked in so many different venues, she needed a manager to orchestrate everything." Now actors have teams of agents, he observed, and hence the need for more living space.

"What's changed is information," he said. "An agency lives on information. Obviously, in this world of speed and information, you need as many people as you can to gather that information."

Before the 1990's, the agencies were scattered around Beverly Hills, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and farther afield. Then in the heyday of Mr. Ovitz in the late 1980's and early 90's, the buildings along Wilshire Boulevard became a kind of talent gulch, where agencies and management and production companies created a power nexis, rubbing elbows while sharpening their knives.

In that decade small armies of agents (almost always in suits and ties, preferably Armani) could be seen marching up and down Wilshire Boulevard, often in the direction of the Peninsula Hotel bar, or the Beverly Wilshire Hotel lobby, ready to pitch a client or poach one.

All of which has made a rather cozy world of cutthroat competition.

Geographically, talent row begins at C.A.A., which moved into the I. M. Pei building in 1989. It continues along Wilshire, past the Endeavor Agency; United Talent; the former quarters of Artists Management Group, now defunct; William Morris at El Camino Drive; the Gersh Agency on Cañon Drive; Brillstein-Grey at Doheny Drive; and then the Firm near Maple Drive, ending with I.C.M.

In the midst of all of those companies, literally at the epicenter of talent gulch, sits the Grill on the Alley, the lunchtime gathering place for heavyweights of the industry, often seated according to their status. More than one agent is known to use the restaurant as an informal gauge of the state of Hollywood's power structure. One prominent agent is known to refer to a "Grillometer."

But with C.A.A. and I.C.M. moving across the way, there is reason for concern at the restaurant, which early this week was bustling with industry traffic. The director and political activist Rob Reiner was perched at one table, and the mogul Ron Perelman was expected at any minute.

"I don't want everyone leaving town," said Michael Goddard, the manager and maître d'hôtel at the Grill, adding, "I'd worry." He grabbed a ringing phone, listened and said, "Yes, Bud's still here." Bud Yorkin, the veteran producer, was called to the line.

Mr. Goddard estimated that 40 percent of his business came from the nearby talent agencies, most of them a short distance on foot. "We get more William Morris, Endeavor, C.A.A. than I.C.M.," he observed. "But we do get I.C.M." Suddenly, he was struck by a thought: "If they do move, we'd love to get a valet," Mr. Goddard said. "Perhaps we can get a shuttle going to Century City."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/movies/08agen.html





What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood
David Leonhardt

BETWEEN "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II," Francis Ford Coppola made a movie called "The Conversation." It stars Gene Hackman as a paranoid wiretapper in Watergate-era San Francisco, and the cast includes Robert Duvall, a young Harrison Ford, the woman who played Shirley in "Laverne & Shirley" and the guy who played Fredo Corleone in "The Godfather."

The movie was nominated for best picture in 1975, and Mr. Coppola has actually called it the finest film he has ever made. After watching it this week, I wouldn't go that far, but it is certainly better than nearly anything at the multiplex right now.

Yet "The Conversation" was on its way to the movie graveyard just a few years ago. Since video stores have room for only a few thousands titles, some didn't carry it, and it was slowly being buried under the ever growing pile of newer films at other stores. It would have been easy a decade ago to imagine a time when few people would ever watch "The Conversation" again.

Then came Netflix. The Internet company with the red envelopes stocks just about all of the 60,000 movies, television shows and how-to videos that are available on DVD (and that aren't pornography). Just as important, for the sake of "The Conversation," Netflix lets users rate movies on a one- to five-star scale and make online recommendations to their friends.

The company's servers also sift through the one billion ratings in its system to tell you which movies that you might like, based on which ones you have already liked.

The result is a vast movie meritocracy that gives a film a second or third life simply because — get this — it's good. Last year, "The Conversation" (average rating: four stars) was the 13th-most-watched movie from the early 1970's on Netflix.

Its return from oblivion is a nice illustration of a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix's inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day?

The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That's right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. "Americans' tastes are really broad," says Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process.

Five million families now have Netflix accounts, and the company has basically reinvented the concept of a quick-turnaround mail-order business. It is, in short, one of the most impressive companies around. So why do so many people think it's doomed?

MR. HASTINGS, a friendly, goateed 45-year-old who fits the image of a California entrepreneur, founded Netflix in 1997 after running up late fees on a video rental. He figured there had to be a business in helping people avoid those fees, so his new company allowed customers to keep a fixed number of movies, usually three at a time, for as long as they wanted. When they sent one back, they got another.

Today, Netflix sends and receives 700 million little packages a year, a logistical operation that has few peers outside of FedEx, U.P.S. or the post office itself. The company's new head of operations, in fact, used to be the postmaster general.

In the San Francisco area, Netflix trucks pick up returned DVD's from post offices by 4 a.m. each weekday morning and bring them to a warehouse in a leafy Sunnyvale office park. There, workers — mainly Asian and Latino immigrants — arrive on the brightly lighted warehouse floor at 5 a.m. to begin tearing open the red envelopes and putting the discs in mechanized sorters. By 10 a.m., the workers are stuffing new envelopes to be sent out again and the discs are back at the post office the same afternoon.

Netflix has 39 of these warehouses around the country, one in each major metropolitan area. Because first-class mail service takes only a day within a 50-mile radius, most customers get a new movie two days after dropping one in a mailbox.

From the beginning, though, the company's doubters have argued that this isn't fast enough. Blockbuster's chief executive used to say Netflix would never be more than a niche business, and even now the stock trades for about $27, down about $12 from its 2004 high. One fifth of its shares are on loan to short sellers betting it will fall further.

You can understand the doubts, too. At a time when cable and phone companies are running fat data pipes into homes, Netflix can seem a lot like the Sears catalog of the early 21st century. Surely, home movies will soon look more like iTunes than Netflix. Downloading, not envelope stuffing, is the future — or so people have been saying for years.

As it happens, the movie studios have already set up their own attempt at iTunes. It's called Movielink. For $1 to $5, you can download a movie to your computer and watch it at any point in the next month. At some point, presumably, you will be able to download it to your television, too.

But here's the rub. Movielink has a library of only 1,500 movies, fewer than a good video store. Likewise, Comcast, the cable company making a push into video-on-demand, offers just 800 movies. This may not surprise you if you have ever scrolled through the pay-per-view options and found nothing to watch.

The problem is that the studios have sold the exclusive digital rights for most movies (which don't apply to physical DVD's) to a television channel, like HBO. The agreements last for years and, since they bring in millions of dollars, the studios aren't about to stop signing them.

So what's saving Netflix — allowing it to thrive when the technology to obliterate it already exists — is yet another attempt by Hollywood to hold onto a fading business model. Remember, this is the industry that filed lawsuits in the 1970's to prevent people from watching movies at home.

Even Mr. Hastings admits that the convenience of downloading will eventually make the exclusive rights deals disappear and give Netflix some real competition.

The company has been hiring engineers to build its own download site, which, with a familiar brand name and all that information about what people like to watch, may be formidable.

But it could be years — 5? 20? — before downloading approaches the size of the DVD business. Sometimes, inertia can outlast technology long enough for somebody to build a very big business. And once a business gets big, it doesn't easily go away.

"At the heart of any good investment, I tell investors, is a contrarian thesis that they and the company believe very deeply," Mr. Hastings said, "and that the rest of the world thinks is crazy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/te...leonhardt.html





Fuck That Shit!

Congress increases indecency fines tenfold
Jim Abrams

Congress gave notice to broadcasters Wednesday that they will pay dearly for crossing the line with offensive material like Janet Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction," passing legislation that would multiply indecency fines 10 times.

The 379-35 House vote on the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act sends the bill to President Bush for his signature. The bill, which already passed the Senate, increases the top indecency fine the Federal Communications Commission can levy from $32,500 to $325,000 per incident.

Bush said he looked forward to signing the legislation into law. "I believe that government has a responsibility to help strengthen families," he said in a statement. "This legislation will make television and radio more family friendly by allowing the FCC to impose stiffer fines on broadcasters who air obscene or indecent programming."

"This is a victory for children and families," said Senate sponsor Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. The higher fines were needed, he said, "in a world saturated with violent and explicit media."

The measure, given impetus by Jackson's momentary exposure during the Super Bowl halftime show, was an election-year priority of conservative groups.

The Parents Television Council, an aggressive critic of indecency on the public airwaves, praised Congress for listening to Americans "fed up with the sexually raunchy and gratuitously violent content that's broadcast over the public airwaves, particularly during hours when millions of children are in the viewing audience."

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., a chief supporter of the legislation in the House, said the tenfold increase in fines to get "the filth and triple-x smut off the public airwaves" was appropriate when a 30-second commercial aired during this year's Super Bowl cost $2.6 million, or $86,000 a second.

The bill does not apply to cable or satellite broadcasts, which are not included in FCC rules on public broadcasts, and does not try to define what is indecent.

The FCC recently denied a petition of reconsideration from CBS Corp.-owned stations facing $550,000 in fines over the Janet Jackson breast-revealing incident at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Under FCC rules and federal law, radio stations and over-the-air television channels may not air obscene material at any time, and may not air indecent material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. when children are more likely to be in the audience.

The FCC says indecent material is that which contains sexual or excretory material that does not rise to the level of obscenity.

The legislation, while facing little resistance in Congress, had detractors warning of problems in defining what is indecent and of the erosion of First Amendment rights.

"What is at stake here is freedom of speech and whether it will be nibbled to death by election-minded politicians and self-righteous pietists," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said in a statement. He recalled how after the Super Bowl incident, numerous ABC affiliates refused to air the acclaimed war movie "Saving Private Ryan" because of its rough language.

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz, School of Communication director at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said that while the heavy fines may have some short-term effects, broadcasters ultimately will go with edgy programs that audiences want. "Broadcasters are in the business of attracting audiences, so they are going to be under pressure to find the edge of that envelope."

The National Association of Broadcasters said it would prefer to see the nation's 13,000 radio stations and 1,700 TV stations police themselves. "The NAB position is that we think responsible self-regulation is preferable to government regulation in areas of program content," spokesman Dennis Wharton said.

Since the 2004 Super Bowl incident, many broadcasters have voluntarily policed their broadcasts through means such as five-second delays on live broadcasts.

The legislation coming out of the Senate does not go as far as a bill sponsored by Upton that the House passed last year. That measure would have increased the maximum fine to $500,000, allowed fines for individual performers and given the FCC the authority to revoke the licenses of broadcasters fined three or more times.

The FCC has also actively responded to the increase in complaints about lewd material over the airwaves, with total fines jumping from $440,000 in 2003 to almost $8 million in 2004.

The agency recently handed down its biggest fine, $3.3 million, against more than 100 CBS affiliates that aired an episode of the series "Without a Trace" that simulated an orgy scene. That fine is now under review.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...e141329D79.DTL





Even Hilary Does Not Believe In Suing Your Customers Anymore
TG

Hilary Rosen, the ex-chairwoman of the RIAA and a much-hated character during the Napster's heyday, expresses her concern over the RIAA's present suing campaigns targeting individual p2p users in her recent blog entry. She does not seem to believe in DRM either, although leaves the elaboration of that theme to a later time.

I see no reason to doubt the honesty of her opinions expressed as a private person. Professional executives like her are like mercenaries - resourceful, determined and efficient in their jobs even if they had moral doubts about what they are doing. As long as they are paid, they will do it anyway, and there are plenty of them on the market for the media cartels to choose from.

The filesharers, on the other hand, are just private people with little or no experience of serious things like civil courts, lobbying and doing PR in the media. When faced with the professional 'killers' of the media cartels they are totally helpless and seldom see any other choices than to surrender on the spot, trying to gather together whatever loots the mercenaries demand from them. This applies today to almost the whole planet, Sweden being perhaps the only area on the globe where the odds are more even, thanks to the rising political movement of the Swedish pirates.

Despite the gloomy situation we have today, the long term prospects of the media cartels to keep up their empire are less rosy. What is happening in Sweden today will be happening in other countries within a few years. People are questioning the media cartel propaganda on a deeper level; they are starting to see things in a wider context. They are starting to see the invisible strings of control and corruption that have caused their own elected legislators to write such cartel-friendly copyright laws. They are starting to realize that the democratic mechanisms are not quite dead yet, despite the apparent depressing hegemony of corporations over the political decision-makers. If the Swedish pirates can succesfully defy their copyright laws and make a run to their parliament to rewrite the bad laws, why could it not happen elsewhere too? Why not, indeed.
http://reflectionsonp2p.blogspot.com...-in-suing.html
















Until next week,

- js.


















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