[JackSpratts]

Marilyn Monroe's Millions at Stake
Philip Sherwell

Her sultry pout and peroxide blonde hair helped make Marilyn Monroe one of the most famous faces in showbusiness. Now her instantly recognisable looks are at the centre of a bitter legal row over the control of dead celebrities' images, one that is pitting some of the biggest names in entertainment and sport against each other.

Yoko Ono, Al Pacino and the estates of the tennis champion Arthur Ashe and the baseball legend Babe Ruth are among those backing new legislation that would give the heirs of dead celebrities full control over commercial use of their names and images.

Opponents, who include the children of Ray Charles and Marlon Brando as well as the photographers who captured iconic images of Monroe, contend that new laws proposed in California and New York would restrict public access throughout the world to the pictures and work of hundreds of actors and artists.

The intensity of the confrontation reflects the highly lucrative business of marketing the famous names that keep filling the coffers even in death. According to the latest dead rich list compiled by Forbes magazine, the top 13 dead celebrities raked in $247 million (£125 million) for their estates last year from deals for their works, or rights to use their names and images for marketing and memorabilia.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor-turned-politician, now has a pivotal role in the process. As the governor of California, he must decide whether to sign a bill passed last month by the state legislature that expands the control of heirs over how deceased celebrities are marketed. The immediate controversy is over who has the right to control images such as the world famous pose of Monroe, with dress billowing over a subway grate, in a photo shoot taken by Sam Shaw for the film The Seven Year Itch.

The star's sole heir, Anna Strasberg, the Venezuelan-born widow of Monroe's acting coach Lee Strasberg, to whom she left her estate, is pitted against the children of four photographers who worked closely with the international sex symbol. It has turned into an ugly and unpleasant fight.

The enduring allure of Monroe, who died of a sleeping pill overdose aged 36 in 1962, earned $8 million for her estate for 2005-06 from perfumes, handbags and advertising campaigns for the likes of Dom Perignon and General Motors.

Those were all authorised by the Marilyn Monroe Limited Liability Company, established by Mrs Strasberg. But in 2005, she sued the picture archives that had been independently selling photographs for merchandising.

Although there was no dispute that the archives owned the copyrights, and indeed in some cases Monroe had also signed release forms, Mrs Strasberg argued that she should control marketing rights — and of course licensing fees.

The court hearings on the East and West coasts went against her in May, prompting Mrs Strasberg to launch her legislative push in June. The proposals stalled in New York but were fast-tracked in California, where lawmakers are historically more supportive of the entertainment industry.

Her battle has angered the descendants of the photographers who helped make Marilyn Monroe famous. "Sam Shaw owned the copyright to the photos and the billowing skirt concept was his. Now we are facing an attempt to enact retroactive legislation," said his grandson David Marcus.

Joshua Greene, whose photographer father Milton was a former business partner of Monroe and shot some 5,000 pictures of her, is equally indignant. "My father and Marilyn were partners, she happily signed away the rights to the photos, she lived in our house and she babysat for me, but now Marilyn Monroe LLC wants the right to control those images," he said.

The Monroe estate counters that it is pursuing its duty to protect the star's reputation from exploitation on inappropriate items such as condoms and knickers — items that have been found bearing her image.

Currently, a British T-shirt manufacturer who wants to feature a Milton Greene picture of Monroe must seek permission and pay a fee to the photographer's archive. If the new legislation is passed, he would also need authority from Mrs Strasberg and pay her charges too.

Anna Strasberg enlisted big-name allies for the legislative push. Yoko Ono gave support on behalf of her murdered husband John Lennon, the former Beatle, while Al Pacino said: "I feel one's likeness and image should be protected in some way and not abused or denigrated for the sake of profit."

Mrs Strasberg's son David said his family was determined to protect Monroe's legacy and had rejected proposals such as Marilyn cigarettes and condoms.

"The only people who are opposed to this legislation are those who want to make a quick buck out of Marilyn," he said. "You can still use photos of Marilyn in artworks and newspapers and books. But we are determined to prevent her exploitation."

However, the children of Ray Charles joined a campaign urging Mr Schwarzenegger not to sign the legislation, including a petition which suggests that Anna Strasberg only wants to change the law to make "millions of dollars from those wishing to use the name or likeness of Marilyn Monroe".

And Surjit Soni, a lawyer for two California-based picture archives, contended the law would cause "pandemonium" in the courts and reduce the availability worldwide of Monroe memorabilia.

"If this legislation is passed, the public throughout the world would be at the mercy of Anna Strasberg's taste and sensibilities," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...wmonroe107.xml





New Blu-Ray Features Freeze Older Players; Updates Coming
Scott M. Fulton, III

With the next wave of interactive features having been added to 20th Century-Fox's latest Blu-Ray Disc releases, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow, there was always a certain level of anticipation that some existing Blu-ray consoles would have trouble, especially the first-generation editions. Surprisingly, it's the second generation which is seeing some early problems, with reports from owners of Samsung's BD-P1200 that they can't play either of these titles.

"You know, this really sucks...how much did we pay for the freaking things?" asked one AVS Forum member on Tuesday. "It's bad enough you have to choose sides to play certain movies, but now some don't even work."

Reports from other AVS Forum users show many BD-P1200s don't play the F4 sequel at all, while earlier first-generation BD-P1000 models valiantly make the attempt - taking forever to load and sputtering generally through the first half-hour of playback, before freezing. Owners of LG's original dual-format BH-100 console also report no playback, but its interactivity support was always known to be lacking anyway, especially for HD DVD.

While some Sony PlayStation 3 owners have also reported problems, expert owners point the latest system firmware already available should correct them.

In a statement yesterday to Video Business, Fox' senior VP of communications, Steve Feldstein, acknowledged the issue but said the solution rests with the hardware manufacturers. Feldstein urged that console owners lobby those companies, implying some kind of mass movement.

In anticipation of such movement, apparently, both affected manufacturers are acting. Spokespersons for both LG and Samsung told Hi-Def Digest they would have firmware fixes within the next few weeks, while some Samsung owners report being told by its customer support personnel a fix may be available next week, though at least one other Samsung owner was told the company had no absolute timetable.

Users of Cyberlink's PowerDVD player for Windows have also reported problems with these titles, and have been advised to upgrade their software. However as of today, many of those users remain perplexed.

What exactly is the problem, and could it become widespread? The initial lack of reports from any other Blu-ray brand appear hopeful, though there may yet be implementation problems which manufacturers may need to take into account.

While some expert owners at first suspected Blu-ray's BDMV authoring mode, which has advanced features such as overlaid menus and alternate audio tracks, suspicion now centers on Fox's implementation of Blu-ray's BD-J interactivity layer and its BD+ copy protection - specifically, on how both may be used together.

Although both categories have always been part of the Blu-ray specification, they have actually been evolving while the first generation of high-def discs were already being sold, and the first-generation consoles being distributed.

Supposedly, if a later generation disc with BD+ protection was to be inserted in a console with earlier-generation support or no support, or that needed to have a firmware upgrade to support it, the older firmware would recognize that fact and warn the owner in plain English on screen. That's not what's happening in any of the cases reported to user forums.

While that would appear to cast the spotlight on BD-J as the likely culprit, some PowerDVD users who have updated their software as advised and who still have problems are suspecting their BD-ROM drives. Meanwhile, many users of the very first Blu-ray players made available early last year report no problems whatsoever with these or any other titles.

As one member of the Hi-Def Forum put it, "I have no idea how these AACS/BD+ thingies work...Why should I? As a customer, I just want a working product!"
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...ing/1191609316





Is The Net Good For Writers?
RU Sirius

"Writing as a special talent became obsolete in the 19th century. The bottleneck was publishing."

That bold statement came from Clay Shirky when I interviewed him for the NeoFiles webzine back in 2002. I never got around to asking him if that was an aesthetic judgment or a statement about economics and social relations.

But here's a contrasting viewpoint. Novelist William Burroughs met playwright Samuel Beckett, and after some small talk, Beckett looked directly at Burroughs and said, propitiously, "You're a writer." Burroughs instantly understood that Beckett was welcoming him into a very tiny and exclusive club — that there are only a few writers alive at any one time in human history. Beckett was saying that Burroughs was one of them. Everybody writes. Not everybody is a writer. Or at least, that's what some of us think...

Now the web — and its democratizing impact — has spread for over a decade. Over a billion people can deliver their text to a very broad public. It's a fantastic thing which gives a global voice to dissidents in various regions, makes people less lonely by connecting other people with similar interests and problems, ad infinitum.

But what does it mean for writers and writing? What does it mean for those who specialize in writing well?

I've asked ten professional writers, including Mr. Shirky, to assess the net's impact on writers. Here are their answers to the question...

Q: Is the internet good for writers and writing?


Mark Amerika

The short answer is yes, but as I suggest in my new book, META/DATA, we probably need to expand the concept of writing to take into account new forms of online communication as well as emerging styles of digital rhetoric. This means that the educational approach to writing is also becoming more complex, because it's not just one (alphabetically oriented) literacy that informs successful written communication but a few others as well, most notably visual design literacy and computer/networking literacy.

As always, RU, you were ahead of the game — think how easy it is to text your name!

It helps to know how to write across all media platforms. Not only that, but to become various role-playing personas whose writerly performance plays out in various multi-media languages across these same platforms. The most successful writer-personas now and into the future — at least those interested in "making a living" as you put it — will be those who can take on varying flux personas via the act of writing. (And who isn't into making a living... What's the opposite? Conducting a death ritual for the consumer zombies lost in the greenwash imaginary?)

Think of this gem from Italo Calvino.
Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the imagination — in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.

The key is to keep writing, imaginatively. As Ron Sukenick once said: "Use your imagination or else someone else will use it for you." What better way to use it than via writing, and the internet is the space where writing is teleported to your distributed audience in waiting, no?

Mark Amerika has been the Publisher of Alt-X since it first went online in 1993. He is the producer of the Net-Art Trilogy, Grammatron. His books include META/DATA: A Digital Poetics and In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop (coedited with Lance Olsen). He teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


Erik Davis

In the face of this complex, hydra-headed query I'll simply offer the evidence and narrow perspective of one writer in a moderately grumpy mood: me.

I began my career as a freelance writer in 1989, and by the mid-90s was a modestly successful and up-and-coming character who wrote about a wide number of topics for a variety of print publications, both esoteric (Gnosis, Fringeware Review) and slick (Details, Spin). I got paid pretty good for a youngster—generally much better than I get paid now, when my career sometimes looks more and more like a hobby, but also less driven by external measures of what a “successful” writing career looks like.

I cannot blame my shrinking income entirely on the internet. My own career choices have been largely to write about what I want to write about, and my interests are not exactly mainstream. The early to mid-1990s was a very special time in American culture, a strange and giddy Renaissance where esoteric topics freely mixed and matched in a highly sampledelic culture. So I was able to write about outsider matters in a reasonably mainstream context.

My first book, Techgnosis, which was about mystic and countercultural currents within media and technological culture, fetched a pretty nice advance. But once the internet bubble really started to swell, leading to the pop and then 9/11, that era passed into a more conservative, celebrity-driven, and niche-oriented culture, a development that relates to the rise of the internet but cannot be laid at its feet.

Many of the changes in the book industry and print publications are more obviously related to the rise of the internet. One of the worst developments for me has been the increasing brevity of print pieces, something I do blame largely on the fast-moving, novelty-driven blip culture of the internet and the blogosphere. When I started writing for music magazines, I wrote 2000-plus-word articles about (then) relatively obscure bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Now I write 125-word reviews for Blender. I don't even try to play the game of penning celebrity-driven profiles in mainstream music mags anymore, where feature lengths have shrunk all around and the topics seem more driven by the publicists.

Shrinking space has definitely worked against my job satisfaction. I'm basically an essayist, though I often disguise myself as a critic or a journalist. Either way, it means that I am a long writer guy. I like to develop topics, approach them from different, often contradictory angles, and most of all, I like to polish the shit out of them so that the flow and the prose shine and bedazzle. On and offline, I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated — as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical — rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection. I do enjoy writing 125-word record reviews though!

I also like to read and try to produce really good prose — prose that infuses nonfiction, whether criticism or journalism or essay, with an almost poetic and emotional sensibility that ideally reflects in style and form the content that one is expressing. But nonfiction discourse online is almost entirely driven by Content — which includes not only news and information, but also opinion, that dread and terrible habit that is kinda like canned thought. People have reactions, and yet feel a need to justify them, and so reach for a can of opinion, pop the lid, and spread it all over the bulletin board or the blog.

I'm really sick of opinions and of most of what passes for online debate. Even the more artful rhetorical elements of argument and debate are rarely seen amidst the food fights, the generic argumentative “moves,” the poor syntax, and the often lame attempts to bring a “fresh take” to a topic. This is not an encouraging environment from which to speak from the heart or the soul or whatever it is that makes living, breathing prose an actual source of sustenance and spiritual strength.

But it's all about adaptation, right? Though I'm still committed to books, I now write more online than off. I've been enjoying myself, although my definition of “making a living” has continued to sink ever farther from anything halfway reasonable. I've enjoyed writing for online pay publications like Slate and Salon, but the rates are depressing. As for my own writing at my Techgnosis.com, I'm still struggling to develop traffic in an environment that rewards precisely the kind of writing I don't really do. Some people really love the stuff I write there, but I take a lot of time on my posts and generally don't offer the sort of sharp opinions and super-fresh news and unseen links that tend to draw eyeballs.

At the same time, it's been enormously satisfying to find my own way into this vast and open form, and to elude the generic grooves of the blog form and really shape it into a medium for the kind of writing I want to do. (Don't get me wrong—some of my favorite writing and thinking anywhere appears online; BLDGBLOG is just the first that springs to mind.) It's been delicious to explore possibilities in nonfiction writing that all but the most obscure and arty print publications would reject, and to do so in a medium that is bursting with possible readers. I'm not into “private” writing; I write for and with readers in mind, and I think its great how the web allows linkages and alliances with like minds and crews (like 10 Zen Monkeys, or Reality Sandwich, or Boing Boing). And I know that readers who resonate with my stuff now stumble across it along myriad paths.

At the same time, I find it tough to keep at bay the online inclinations that in many ways I find corrosive to the type of writing I do — the desire to increase traffic, to post relentlessly, to write shorter and snappier, to obsessively check stats, to plug into the often tedious and ill-thought “debates” that will increase traffic but that too often fall far short of actually thinking about anything. I've met amazing like minds online, and participated in some stellar debates, but frankly that was years ago. Today things seem to be growing rather claustrophobic and increasingly cybernetic.

For example, I chose to not have a comments section on Techgnosis.com, because I didn't want to deal with spam. Plus I find most comments sections boring and/or tendentious and/or tough to read for one still invested in proper grammar. I figure that folks who wanted to respond can just send me emails, which they do, and which I have long made it a rule to answer. I'm pleased with my choice, though I also feel the absence of the sort of quick feedback loops of attention that satisfy the desire to make an impact on readers, and that, in an attention economy, have increasingly become the coin of the realm. But that coin—which is certainly not the same thing as actually being read—is a little thin.

Especially without some of the old coin in your pocket to back it up.
Erik Davis is author of The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape and Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information.

He writes for Wired, Bookforum, Village Voice and many other publications. He posts frequently at his website at techgnosis.com


Mark Dery

Who, exactly, is making a living shoveling prose online? Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds? Jason Kottke? Josh Marshall? To the best of my knowledge, only a vanishingly tiny number of bloggers are able to eke out an existence through their blogging, much less turn a healthy profit.

For now, visions of getting rich through self-publishing look a lot like envelope-stuffing for the cognitive elite — or at least for insomniacs with enough time and bandwidth to run their legs to stumps in their electronic hamster wheels, posting and answering comments 24/7. As a venerable hack toiling in the fields of academe, I love the idea of being King of All Media without even wearing pants, which is why I hope that some new-media wonk like Jason Calacanis or Jeff Jarvis finds the Holy Grail of self-winding journalism — i.e., figuring out how to make online writing self-supporting.

Meanwhile, the sour smell of fear is in the air. Reporting — especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press — is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams. I mean, even John Perry Barlow, bearded evangelist of the coming netopia, seems to have taken shelter in the academy. Yes, we live in the golden age of achingly hip little 'zines like Cabinet and The Believer and Meatpaper, and I rejoice in that fact, but most of them pay hen corn, if they pay at all.

As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn't begin with Dawson's Landing. A professor friend of mine, well-known for his/her incisive cultural criticism, just landed a column for PopMatters.com. Now, a column is yeoman's work and it doesn't pay squat. But s/he was happy to get the gig because she wanted to burnish her brand, presumably, and besides, as she noted, "Who does, these days?" (Pay, that is.) The Village Voice's Voice Literary Supplement used to offer the Smartest Kids in the World a forum for long, shaggy screeds; now, newspapers across the country are shuttering their book review sections and the Voice is about the length (and depth) of your average Jack Chick tract and shedding pages by the minute.

So those are the grim, pecuniary effects of the net on writers and writing. As for its literary fallout, print editors are being stampeded, goggle-eyed, toward a form of writing that presumes what used to be called, cornily enough, a "screenage" paradigm: short bursts of prose — the shorter the better, to accommodate as much eye candy as possible. Rupert Murdoch just took over The Wall Street Journal, and is already remaking that august journal for blip culture: article lengths are shrinking. Shrewdly, magazines like The New Yorker understand that print fetishists want their print printy — McLuhan would have said Gutenbergian — so they're erring on the side of length, and Dave Eggers and the Cabinet people are emphasizing what print does best: exquisite paper stocks, images so luxuriously reproduced you could lower yourself into them, like a hot bath.

Also, information overload and time famine encourage a sort of flat, depthless style, indebted to online blurblets, that's spreading like kudzu across the landscape of American prose. (The English, by contrast, preserve a smarter, more literary voice online, rich in character; not for nothing are Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens two of the web's best stylists.) I can't read people like Malcolm Gladwell, whose bajillion-selling success is no surprise when you consider that he aspires to a sort of in-flight magazine weightlessness, just the sort of thing for anxious middle managers who want it all explained for them in the space of a New York-to-Chicago flight. The English language dies screaming on the pages of Gladwell's books, and between the covers of every other bestseller whose subtitle begins, "How..."

Another fit of spleen: This ghastly notion, popularized by Masters of Their Own Domain like Jeff Jarvis, that every piece of writing is a "conversation." It's a no-brainer that writing is a communicative act, and always has been. And I'll eagerly grant the point that composing in a dialogic medium like the net is like typing onstage, in Madison Square Garden, with Metallica laying down a speed metal beat behind you. You're writing on the fly, which is halfway between prose and speech. But the Jarvises of the world forget that not all writing published online is written online. I dearly loathe Jarvis's implication that all writing, online or off, should sound like water-cooler conversation; that content is all that matters; that foppish literati should stop sylphing around and submit to the tyranny of the pyramid lead; and that any mind that can't squeeze its thoughts into bullet points should just die. This is the beige, soul-crushing logic of the PowerPoint mind. What will happen, I wonder, when we have to write for the postage-stamp screen of the iPod? The age of IM prose is waiting in the wings...

Parting thoughts: The net has also open-sourced the cultural criticism business, a signal development that on one hand destratifies cultural hierarchies and makes space for astonishing voices like the people behind bOING bOING and BLDGBLOG and Ballardian. Skimming reader comments on Amazon, I never cease to be amazed by the arcane expertise lurking in the crowd; somebody, somewhere, knows everything about something, no matter how mind-twistingly obscure. But this sea change — and it's an extraordinary one — is counterbalanced by the unhappy fact that off-the-shelf blogware and the comment thread make everyone a critic or, more accurately, make everyone think they're a critic, to a minus effect. We're drowning in yak, and it's getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter's Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.

Also, the Digital Age puts the middlebrow masses on the bleeding edge. Again, a good thing, and a symmetry break with postwar history, when the bobos were the "antennae of the race," as Pound put it, light years ahead of the leadfooted bourgeoisie when it came to emergent trends. Now even obscure subcultures and microtrends tucked into the nooks and crannies of our culture are just a Google search away. Back in the day, a subcultural spelunker could make a living writing about the cultural fringes because it took a kind of pop ethnographer or anthropologist to sleuth them out and make sense of them; it still takes critical wisdom to make sense of them, but sleuthing them out takes only a few clicks.

Do I sound bitter? Not at all. But we live in times of chaos and complexity, and the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain. Reading and writing are solitary activities. The web enables us to write in public and, maybe one day, strike off the shackles of cubicle hell and get rich living by our wits. Sometimes I think we're just about to turn that cultural corner. Then I step onto the New York subway, where most of the car is talking nonstop on cellphones. Time was when people would have occupied their idle hours between the covers of a book. No more. We've turned the psyche inside out, exteriorizing our egos, extruding our selves into public space and filling our inner vacuums with white noise.

Mark Dery is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. His 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement.

He teaches media criticism and literary journalism in the Department of Journalism at NYU and blogs at markdery.com


Jay Kinney

It's a mixed blessing.

If the hardest part of writing is just making yourself sit there and write, and what used to be a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper has been transformed into a magical portal to a zillion fascinating destinations, then the internet can be a giant and addictive distraction.

On the other hand, it's a quick and simple way to do research without ever leaving your chair, and that can be a real time-saver.

So, on those counts at least — color me ambivalent.

Jay Kinney is the author of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Richard Smoley), and The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West. He was the editor of CoEvolution Quarterly and Gnosis magazine.


Paul Krassner

For me as a writer, the internet has become indispensable; if only in terms of researching it saves so much time and energy. Google et al are miraculous.

Word processing has changed the nature of editing, and without the dread of typing a whole page again; I can change things as I go along, surrendering to delusions of perfection.

I have become as much in awe of Technology as I am of Nature. And although I blog for free, occasional paid assignments have fallen into my lap as a result.

Better than lapdancing.

Paul Krassner was Publisher/Editor of the legendary satire magazine, The Realist.

He started the classic satirical publication The Realist, founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and has written billions and billions of books including his most recent: One Hand Jerking: Reports from an Investigative Satirist. Krassner posts regularly at paulkrassner.com


Adam Parfrey

The internet has made research much easier, which is both good and bad. It's good not to be forced to go libraries to fact check and throw together bibliographic references. But it's bad not to be forced to do this, since it diminishes the possibility of accidental discovery. Physically browsing on library stacks and at used bookstores can lead to extraordinary discoveries. One can also discover extraordinary things online, too, but the physical process of doing so is somehow more personally gratifying.

The internet has both broadened and limited audiences for books at the same time. People outside urban centers can now find offbeat books that personally intrigue them. But the interest in physical books overall seems diminished by the satiation of curiosity by a simple search on the internet, and the distraction of limitless data smog.

The internet has influenced my decision as a publisher to move away from text-only books to ones with a more multimedia quality, with photos, illustrations and sometimes CDs or DVDs.

I like the internet and computers for their ability to make writers of nearly everyone. I don't like the internet and computers for their ability to make sloppy and thoughtless writers of nearly everyone.

Overall, it's an exciting world. I'm glad to be alive at this time.

Adam Parfrey is Publisher with Feral House and Process Media, and author of the classic Apocalypse Culture, among many other books.


Douglas Rushkoff

I'd say that it's great for writing as a cultural behavior, but maybe not for people who made their livings creating text. There's a whole lot more text out there, and only so much time to read all this stuff. People spend a lot of their time reading text on screens, and don't necessarily want to come home and read text on a page after that. Reading a hundred emails is really enough daily reading for anyone.

The book industry isn't what it used to be, but I don't blame that on the internet. It's really the fault of media conglomeration. Authors are no longer respected in the same way, books are treated more like magazines with firm expiration dates, and writers who simply write really well don't get deals as quickly as disgraced celebrities or get-rich-quick gurus.

This makes it harder for writers to make a living writing. To write professionally means being able to craft sentences and paragraphs and articles and books that communicate as literature. Those who care about such things should rise to the top.

But I think many writers — even good ones — will have to accept the fact that books can be loss-leaders or break-even propositions in a highly mediated world where showing up in person generates the most income.

Douglas Rushkoff is a noted media critic who has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries that looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture — The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders.

Recent books include Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business and Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism. He is currently writing a monthly comic book, Testament for Vertigo. He blogs frequently at Rushkoff.com/blog.php


Clay Shirky

Dear Mr. Sirius, I read with some interest your request to comment on whether Herr Gutenberg's new movable type is good for books and for scribes. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the newly capable printing press, and though the invention is just 40 years old, I think we can already see some of the outlines of the coming changes.

First, your question "is it good for books and for scribes?" seems to assume that what is good for one must be good for the other. Granted, this has been true for the last several centuries, but the printing press has a curious property — it reduces the very scarcity of writing that made scribal effort worthwhile, so I would answer that it is great for books and terrible for scribes. Thanks to the printing press, we are going to see more writing, and more kinds of writing, which is wonderful for the reading public, and even creates new incentives for literacy. Because of these improvements, however, the people who made their living from the previous scarcity of books will be sorely discomfited.

In the same way that water is more vital than diamonds but diamonds are more expensive than water, the new abundance caused by the printing press will destroy many of the old professions tied to writing, even as it puts in place new opportunities as yet only dimly with us. Aldus Manutius, in Venice, seems to be creating a market for new kinds of writing that the scribes never dreamt of, and which were impossible given the high cost of paying someone to copy a book by hand.

There is one thing the printing press does not change, of course, which is the scarcity of publishing. Taking a fantastical turn, one could imagine a world in which everyone had not only the ability to read and write but to publish as well. In such a world, of course, we would see the same sort of transformation we are seeing now with the printing press, which is to say an explosion in novel forms of writing. Such a change would also create enormous economic hardship for anyone whose living was tied to earlier scarcities. Such a world, as remarkable as it might be, must remain merely imaginative, as the cost of publishing will always be out of reach of even literate citizens.

Yours,

Clay Shirky, Esq.

Clay Shirky consults on the rise of decentralized technologies for Nokia, the Library of Congress, and the BBC. He's an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches a course in "Social Weather," examining ways of understanding group dynamics in online spaces.

His writing has appeared in Business 2.0, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.


John Shirley

The internet has some advantages for writers, which I gladly exploit; it offers some access to new audiences, it offers new venues... But it has even more disadvantages.

A recent study suggested that young people read approximately half as much as young people did before the advent of the internet and videogames. While there are enormous bookstores, teeming with books, chain stores and online book dealing now dominate the book trade and it may be that there are fewer booksellers overall. A lot of fine books are published but, on the whole, publishers push for the predictable profit far more than they used to, which means they prefer predictable books. Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.

And in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.

I know people earnestly involved in producing dramas for iPod download and transmission to iPhones. Obviously, productions of that sort are oriented to small images in easy-to-absorb bites. Episodes are often only a few minutes long. Or even shorter. Broadband drama, produced to be seen on the internet, is also attention-deficit-oriented. I've written for episodic television and have known the frustration of writers told to cut their "one hour" episodes down to 42 minutes, so that more commercials can be crammed in. Losing ten minutes of drama takes a toll on the writing of a one hour show — just imagine the toll taken by being restricted to three-minute episodes. Story development becomes staccato, pointlessly violent (because that translates well to the form), childishly melodramatic, simple minded to the extreme.

All this may be an extension of the basic communication format forged by the internet: email, chatrooms, instant messages, board postings, blogs. Email is usually telegraphic in form, compact, and without the literary feel that letters once had; communication in chatrooms is reduced to soundbites that will fit into the little message window and people are impatient in chatrooms, unwilling to wait as a long sentence is formulated; instant messages are even more compressed, superficial, and not even in real English; board postings may be lengthier but if they are, no one reads them.

Same goes for blogs. They'd better be short thoughts or — for the most part — few will trouble to read them. The internet is always tugging at you to move on, surf on, check this and that, talk to three people at once. How do you maintain long thoughts, how do you stretch out intellectually, in those conditions? Sometimes at places like The Well, perhaps, people are more thoughtful. But in general, online readers are prone to be attention challenged.

Reading at one's computer is, also, not as comfortable as reading a book in an armchair — so besides the distractions, it's simply a drag to spend a lot of time reading a single document online. But people spend a great deal of time and energy online, time and energy which is then not available for that armchair book. Occasionally someone breaks the rules and puts long stories online, as Rudy Rucker has done, admirably well, posting new stories by various writers at flurb.net. But for the most part, the internet is inimical to stretching out, literarily.

The genie is out of the bottle, and we cannot go back. But it would be well if people did not misrepresent the literary value of writing for the internet.

John Shirley was the original cyberpunk SF writer, but he also writes in other genres including horror. He wrote the original script for The Crow and has written for television including Deep Space Nine, Max Headroom, and Poltergeist: The Legacy.

His books include the Eclipse Trilogy, Wetbones, The Other End and his latest — a short story collection Living Shadows: Stories: New & Preowned. He writes lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult. Shirley's own online indulgence is his site Signs of Witness.


Michael Simmons

Concerning the internet, yes, many thoughts. None of them good.

The advent of personal computers has been ruinous. Empowering, my ass. Suddenly everyone's a writer. As someone who's been a professional writer my entire life, I now sit for hours every day and answer e-mails. I don't mind if the subject has substance, like this, but the onslaught of e-media, e-spam, e-requests for money, stupid e-jokes, e-advertisements, etc., is painful. I'm chained to a machine. Editors say they simply can't respond to all the e-mails they receive. Telephonic communication was quicker and easier.

Used to be I sat at an alphabet keyboard (called typewriters in my day) when I had an assignment or inspiration. Now it's all I do. Go to a library? Why? You can get what you need on the internet. Which means I've been suffering from Acute Cabin Fever since 1999 (when I tragically signed up for internet access). Sure, I could get off my ass and go to a library, but the internet is like heroin. Why take a walk in the park when you can boot up and find beauty behind your eyelids or truth from the MacBook? (Interesting that the term 'boot-up' is junkie-speak.)

I only got a word processor in 1990. I used a typewriter until then. My writing was no different before I could instantly re-write. I had to think about what I was going to write before applying fingertip to key. Now I'm terribly careless. I make mistakes that I never made pre-processing. Certainly literature hasn't improved (nor has art, music, film or anything else). Instead of reading Charles Olson or Rimbaud or Melville or Voltaire or Terry Southern, now people spend all day playing with their computers and endless varieties of applications.

I hear my friends — all smart — kvelling about some new piece of software. You'd think they'd cured cancer. We're a planet of marks getting our bank accounts skimmed by Bill Gates and Steven Jobs. Gates and Jobs (and yer pal Woz) ought to be disemboweled — yes, on the internet — and their carcasses left to rot on www.disemboweledcyberthieves.com.

Furthermore, I get nauseous thinking of the days, weeks, months I've spent on the phone with tech support. All these robber baron geeks are loaded, yet they can't even perfect the goddamn things.

The world of LOL and iirc and this hideous perpetual junior high language has not encouraged quality-lit. Have you looked at my former employer the L.A. Weekly lately? It's created by illiterates promoting bad and overpriced music, art, film, etc. There's a glut of so-called writers and if they're 22 and have big tits, many editors will give them work before I get any. It's no coincidence that my payments and assignments for freelancing have diminished in the last 8 years.

I was a happy nappy-takin' pappy 'fore the advent of these glorified television sets. Now my eyes hurt at the end of every day from the glow of the monitor. RU, I'm not happy that you — a brilliant man who has kept Yippie spirit alive — promote these contraptions. I didn't even have a phone answering machine until 1988 when I was 33. Everything was better before this glut of machinery entered my life. It's quadrupled my monthly bills and swamps me with useless information.

No, it hasn't fired my imagination but, yes, I can't get no satisfaction.

Michael Simmons edited the National Lampoon in the ‘80s. He has written for LA Weekly, LA Times, Rolling Stone, High Times, and The Progressive. Currently, he blogs for Huffington Post and he and Tyler Hubby are shooting a documentary on the Yippies


Edward Champion

The Internet is good for writers for several reasons: What was once a rather clunky process of querying by fax, phone, and snail-mail has been replaced by the mad, near-instantaneous medium of e-mail, where the indolent are more easily sequestered from the industrious. The process is, as it always was, one of long hours, haphazard diets, and rather bizarre forms of self-promotion. But clips are easily linkable. Work can be more readily distributed. And if a writer maintains a blog, there is now a more regular indicator of a writer's thought process.

The stakes have risen. Everyone who wishes to survive in this game must operate at some peak and preternatural efficiency. Since the internet is a ragtag, lightning-fast glockenspiel where thoughts, both divine and clumsy, are banged out swifter with mad mallets more than any medium that has preceded it, an editor can get a very good sense of what a writer is good for and how he makes mistakes. While it is true that this great speed has come at the expense of long-form pieces and even months-long reporting, I believe the very limitations of this current system are capable of creating ambition rather than stifling it.

If the internet was committing some kind of cultural genocide for any piece of writing that was over twenty pages, why then has the number of books published increased over the past fifteen years? Some of the old-school types, like John Updike, have decried the ancillary and annotated aspects of the Internet, insisting that there is nothing more to talk about than the book. But if a book is a unit transmitting information from one person to another, then why ignore those on the receiving end? For are they not part of this process? Writing has been talked about ever since Johann Gutenberg's great innovation caused many classical works to be disseminated into the public consciousness, and thus spawned the Renaissance.

What we are now experiencing may have an altogether different scale, but it is not different in effect. The profusion of written thoughts and emotions is certainly overwhelming, but the true writer is likely to be a skillful and highly selective reader, and thus has many jewels to select from, to be inspired by, to be wowed by, and to otherwise cause the truly ambitious to carry forth with passion and a whip-smart disposition.
Edward Champion's work has appeared in The LA Times, Chicago Sun-Times, and Newsday, as well as more disreputable publications.

His Bat Segundo podcast — which you can find at his website at edrants.com — has featured interviews with the likes of T.C. Boyle, Brett Easton Elllis, Octavio Butler, John Updike, Richard Dawkins, Amy Sedaris, David Lynch, Martin Amis, and William Gibson.
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/10/...d-for-writers/





AP Sues US News Aggregator for Copyright Infringement and Trademark Abuse
Thomas Wilburn

The Associated Press stated today that it has filed suit against Moreover Technologies, a news aggregation service owned by Verisign. AP says that the suit comes in the wake of a cease-and-desist letter sent to the service on September 11 and insists that Moreover is infringing on the news giant's "proprietary news reports," as well as "falsely associating themselves with AP."

For a fee, Moreover provides individuals and businesses with a wide variety of news coverage, scraped from online sources, editorially ranked, and placed in a database, which can then be filtered and distributed in a variety of ways. For example, the BBC uses Moreover's services for its Newstracker service, which adds related links to other news sites to any BBC article. As of the time of this writing, Moreover still listed AP as a major news coverage source on its product web site. Ironically, according to CNN Money, AP discovered the infringement while it was negotiating to have Moreover provide content management for its own members.

At first glance, this may appear similar to legal troubles experienced by Google on multiple occasions, as well as by other aggregation services. The services in question have usually lost those battles, and been forced to settle with news providers. Google has long maintained that its news excerpts and images are legal and fall under US "fair use" provisions, but has also reportedly worked out a contract with the AP for its content.

There are a few differences between past suits and the AP's complaint, however. For one thing, both parties are based in the US, which means that the case will fall under the jurisdiction of US courts. For another, while Moreover displays AP headlines and excerpts for free on a page with ads (similar to Google News, except for the ads), the stories are reproduced in their entirety on Moreover's fee-based service, and full reproduction for commercial gain falls outside of the boundaries of fair use.

It's tempting to see this lawsuit as just another content provider that doesn't understand the Internet, or an attempt to stifle the open exchange of information. But it's telling that the plaintiffs in these cases are wire services, which make their income by selling reporting to other outlets, such as newspapers and broadcast media, instead of to the public. Indeed, AP stories are the backbone of many major news sources. But as mere content providers, AP and other wire services don't see any benefit from ad revenue and incoming link traffic to their clients. If they don't jealously guard their content, the organizations reason, many clients will simply acquire it secondhand from ultrafast aggregation services, instead of directly from the newswire. If that happens, the licensing revenue stream could dry up, taking AP with it.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...g-failure.html





Don't Post This Cease-and-Desist Letter, Or Else
Greg Beck

DirectBuy is a company that claims to offer a deal on furniture and home supplies by letting consumers buy directly from the manufacturer. Apparently, the company doesn't want you to hear from customers who don't think the deal is such a good one. The company's law firm, Dozier Internet Law (which specializes, among other things, in using copyright law to "get websites pulled down without notice") sent a strongly worded demand letter to the owner of InfomercialScams.com, claiming that consumer complaints on the website are defamatory because they refer to the company's direct-buy plan as a "scam" and a "nightmare."

Of course, words like "scam" and "nightmare" are subjective statements of opinion. If consumers think a product is a scam, who can prove them wrong? Because the statements identified by DirectBuy are pure opinion, they are protected by the First Amendment and can't give rise to liability for defamation. Even if the complaints were not opinion, however, the Communications Decency Act would protect the website from liability for its users' posts. The demand letter is therefore completely without merit.

Nevertheless, DirectBuy's lawyer, Donald Morris, relies on an extraordinarily broad reading of the Ninth Circuit's decision in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com to claim that InfomercialRatings.com is liable for "encourag[ing] and solicit[ing] defamatory statements." Even worse, Morris threatens to file suit in Canada, because DirectBuy does business there in addition to the United States. And, to top it off, he claims that his threat letter is copyrighted, and that to post it online would give rise to copyright liability.

Companies trying to quash complaints by consumers on the Internet often send bullying letters like this, demanding that criticism be taken offline. These threats are often effective against small website operators who can't afford the cost of a legal battle, especially one filed in a distant forum or another country. Before the Web, there was little disincentive to sending such a letter. Now, however, companies realize that their demand letters may end up online, resulting in further embarrassment for them (a phenomenon for which Mike Masnick coined the term "Streisand Effect"). Copyright claims like the one in this letter are becoming a common method to counter that problem by scaring recipients into keeping quiet. It has so far been a successful strategy -- DirectBuy's lawyer claims that none of his similar demand letters, until now, have ever been posted online.

Public Citizen decided to post the letter on its website because it is only possible to understand our letter in response by seeing the letter we are responding to, and because we think Morris's letter is a good example of the many meritless threats that companies hurl at their online critics in an effort to silence dissent. We also don't think the copyright laws prevent us from posting the letter. First, the letter is not registered with the copyright office, and until it is, DirectBuy's law firm can't sue to enforce it. Second, posting the letter is a clear example of fair use. Companies should not be able to make threats and then hide from criticism behind the Copyright Act.

Paul Levy wrote Public Citizen's response, titled "How not to write a cease and desist letter."
http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/20...ublish-th.html





Court Clears Way for Mobile-Phone-Unlocking Lawsuit Against T-Mobile
David Kravets

Wireless-carrier T-Mobile USA lost a California Supreme Court bid Wednesday to kill a lawsuit challenging the company's early-termination fees and its practice of locking down phones to work only on T-Mobile's network.

Without comment, the high court's seven justices declined to review two lower-court decisions that allowed the lawsuit. The case could ultimately revamp the relationship between mobile-phone carriers and their customers.

Neither T-Mobile nor lawyers for aggrieved phone customers immediately returned messages to comment.

The Supreme Court's refusal to hear the challenge clears the way for a class-action lawsuit seeking a court injunction barring T-Mobile from collecting a termination-of-service fee of about $200. The company usually charges the fee when a contract is terminated early, no matter how close or far away from the contract's expiration date.

The plaintiffs also seek an order requiring T-Mobile to disclose the existence and effect of the software locks it places on the phones it sells, and to offer to unlock the handsets so consumers can switch to a different carrier without buying a new phone.

The practice of locking cell phones to a particular carrier is widespread. This week a California man sued Apple under the state's antitrust laws for locking the popular iPhone to AT&T's network.

If the T-Mobile lawsuit is successful, the outcome could require cell phone carriers, at least in California, to unlock cell phones upon a customer's request.

T-Mobile originally asked the lower courts to throw out the lawsuit, arguing its terms-of-service agreement requires aggrieved customers to submit to binding arbitration before a neutral mediator. T-Mobile said the service agreement also bars them from filing class-action lawsuits. But the plaintiffs argued it is in the public interest to use the courts, not mediators, because public-policy issues are at stake.

A state trial judge and a state appeals court rejected T-Mobile's position. The carrier appealed to California's highest court, which on Wednesday let those decisions stand.

In its August appeal to the Supreme Court, T-Mobile said its customers should honor the agreements they signed:"When the plaintiffs signed up for service with T-Mobile, they signed a written customer-service agreement that contained an arbitration clause."

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Ronald Sabraw had ruled at the trial-court level that the case could go ahead, and a San Francisco-based appellate court affirmed that decision in June.

The appeals court also held that the prohibition on class-action lawsuits in T-Mobile's service agreement was unconscionable, and therefore "rendered the arbitration provision unenforceable."

The case is Gatton v. T-Mobile, S154947.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/10/tmobile





iPhone and iPod Touch v1.1.1 Full Jailbreak Tested, Confirmed!
Ryan Block

We were invited by iPhone / iPod touch file system hacker Niacin (who you might also know for his PSP and MSN TV Linux cluster hacks, etc.) and Dre to test out their new v1.1.1 file system hack. We know the whole v1.1.1 hacking thing has been massively confusing even to folks like us, so here's a quick n' dirty timeline to bring you up to date.

Apple releases iPhone, which was obviously cracked six ways from Sunday.
Through firmwares 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 Apple does not block these hacks in any way.
Firmware v1.1.1 is released for iPhone and iPod touch, which completely locks out file system access (and thus 3rd party software).
Awkward silence from Apple fans and the dev community as everyone ponders how to crack the new file system protections.
Hackers dinopio, edgan discover the symlink hack, which takes v1.0.2 iPhones up to v1.1.1 with read / write file system access. In other words, the hack only works on v1.0.2 iPhones (not the iPod touch) when being upgraded to v1.1.1, and still doesn't grant the ability to execute loaded programs.
The next version of dinopio & co.'s symlink hack (which hasn't yet been released to the public) grants the coveted execute privilege (so you can run those 3rd party apps), and enables another hack (by pumpkin) to make the new SpringBoard (the application launcher) recognize the freshly recompiled iPhone apps.
Hacker Niacin (aka toc2rta) and Dre claim they've managed to combine the symlink hack with a TIFF vulnerability found in the v1.1.1 firmware's mobile Safari, which grants access to the file system. This is the hack we're testing here.
Note: Due to the nature of this hack, it's to be considered ephemeral. Apple needs only to patch the TIFF vulnerability and file system access on v1.1.1 is out, with the touch and iPhone back to their previously not-too-hackable state.
And the result thus far? We've tested the solution, and we can confirm file system read+write access via the TIFF exploit on an iPod touch, meaning loading a simple image file on your v1.1.1 device gives full root file system access!

Caveats:
The release has not at this time been released to the public. Niacin claims that will happen in the near future, possibly later this morning.
Thus far the hack isn't entirely without issues. We're still trying to determine exactly what's what, but we've lost read and write access unexpectedly. This may or may not be a problem with our machine or device, though, and not necessarily the hack.
We did not test this method on an iPhone, but technically there should be no difference in the effect. Side note: your v1.1.1 iPhone would, at this time, need to be activated to load the TIFF. (How else are you gonna load it?) This is supposedly being worked on.
Quick terminal log using iPHUC on the iPod touch confirming write ability to root FS after the break.

==Terminal==
iphuc 0.6.1 with tab completion.
>> By The iPhoneDev Team: nightwatch geohot ixtli warren nall mjc operator
CFRunLoop: Waiting for iPhone.
notification: iPhone attached.
AMDeviceStartService 'com.apple.afc': 0
(iPHUC) /: ls
.
..
Applications
Library
System
bin
cores
dev
etc
mach
private
sbin
tmp
usr
var
(iPHUC) /: putfile ./fstab /etc/fstab [That's the money line! No errors.]
(iPHUC) /: exit
==/Terminal==

Can confirm by way of getfile that the uploaded version sticks.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/10/i...ted-confirmed/





L'iPhone Debloqué: Seulement en Français?

Welcome to Europe, land of the unlocked phone, Apple. According to several stories in the French press, Apple's deal with Orange to sell iPhones in France has run up against a little legal problem: Orange is required to sell iPhones both with and without contract. Paraphrasing the French paper Les Echos, this is a big problem for Apple, because their business model is based on getting kickbacks from monthly subscriptions. No subscriptions, no monthly vig going to La Casa Cupertinostra.

Things get even thornier for Apple depending on how you interpret France's mobile phone law. There's a bit at the end of Chapter 2.3 of the law that supposedly says that carriers must unlock phones for free after six months of use. That means in about six months, France could flood the world with unlocked iPhones.

If you've wondered why there are no iPhones in Belgium, Italy or Spain, this is why: Apple hasn't released phones in any countries with strong unlocking laws. (If you've wondered why there are no iPhones in Canada, there's no good reason.)

I was talking to my fellow analyst Joel Santo Domingo about this, and he came up with a great theory of what Apple is going to do. They're going to let users unlock phones in accordance with French law - but the phones sold in France will only have French language resources on board. Each firmware update, meanwhile, will wipe any non-French languages added.

This will send people in Quebec into a thrill of gloating hilarity, but it will safely keep the unlocked phones out of les mains of Apple's core English-and-Spanish-speaking clientele. And the French government will love it - if people want to buy unlocked iPhones, they'll have to learn French.

Heck, I see the same thing happening in Belgium and the Netherlands with Flemish-only and Dutch-only phones. Spain is probably still shafted, though - Spanish-only iPhones would be too tempting to both all of Latin America and to Spanish-speakers here in the US.
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/10/lipho...ulement_en.php





Don’t Invent, Evolve
The inventor’s trial-and-error approach can be automated by software that mimics natural selection

“I HAVE not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” So said Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor, speaking of his laborious attempts to perfect the incandescent light bulb. Although 10,000 trial-and-error attempts might sound a little over the top, an emerging technique for developing inventions knocks even Edison’s exhaustive approach into a cocked hat. Evolutionary design, as it is known, allows a computer to run through tens of millions of variations on an invention until it hits on the best solution to a problem.

As its name suggests, evolutionary design borrows its ideas from biology. It takes a basic blueprint and mutates it in a bid to improve it without human input. As in biology, most mutations are worse than the original. But a few are better, and these are used to create the next generation. Evolutionary design uses a computer program called an evolutionary algorithm, which takes the initial parameters of the design (things such as lengths, areas, volumes, currents and voltages) and treats each like one gene in an organism. Collectively, these genes comprise the product’s genome. By randomly mutating these genes and then breeding them with other, similarly mutated genomes, new offspring designs are created. These are subjected to simulated use by a second program. If a particular offspring is shown not to be up to the task, it is discarded. If it is promising, it is selectively bred with other fit offspring to see if the results, when subject to further mutation, can do even better.

The idea of evolutionary algorithms is not new. Until recently, however, their use has been confined to projects such as refining the aerodynamic profiles of car bodies, aircraft fuselages and wings. That is because only large firms have been able to afford the supercomputers needed to mutate and crossbreed large virtual genomes—and then simulate the behaviour of their offspring—for perhaps 20m generations before the perfect design emerges.

What has changed, in this as in so much else, is the availability and cheapness of computing power. According to John Koza of Stanford University, who is one of the pioneers of the field, evolutionary designs that would have taken many months to run on PCs are now feasible in days.

The result is that the range of applications to which the principles of evolutionary design are being applied is growing fast. Among those revealed at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference held in London this summer were long-life USB memory sticks, superfast racing-yacht keels, ultra-high-bandwidth optical fibres, high performance Wi-Fi antennae (evolved to avoid patent fees), cochlear implants that can optimise themselves to individual patients and a cancer-biopsy analyser that was evolved to match a human pathologist’s tumour-spotting skills.

How can evolution help improve a USB stick? It turns out that the storage transistors in these flash-memory devices are prone to being gummed up with electrostatic charge that they cannot dissipate. That prevents them being erased, limiting the stick’s useful life. A team at the University of Limerick in Ireland therefore evolved new signal-timing patterns that minimise the build-up of the disabling charge. The result: USB sticks that last up to 30 times longer than their predecessors. At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos let an evolutionary algorithm come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre’s bandwidth.

Meanwhile, Pierrick Legrand of the University of Bordeaux has used the method to optimise individual devices to the user. The devices in question are cochlear implants, which help those hard of hearing to hear better. One of the hardest tasks facing those who fit these devices is working out the precise choreography of the voltages and timings that need to be applied to the 20 or so electrodes embedded in the auditory nerve, in order to make them work properly. The signals required vary from patient to patient and some people go many years before an audiologist gets it right. Dr Legrand, however, has developed an evolution-based system that works on the fly. It co-evolves several channels at a time, allowing a patient to tell his doctor how each pattern of electrode stimulation is faring. Dr Legrand says that one patient, who had experienced a decade of trouble with his implant, had it fixed in a couple of days by the evolutionary method.

Perhaps the most cunning use of an evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr Koza himself. His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to Cisco Systems. The team fed the algorithm as much data as they could from the Cisco patent and told the software to design around it. It succeeded in doing so. The result is a design that does not infringe Cisco’s patent—and is more efficient to boot. A century and a half after Darwin suggested natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, engineers have proved him right once again.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/...ory_id=9896323





Physics of Hard Drives Wins Nobel
Matt Moore and Karl Ritter

Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for a discovery that lets computers, iPods and other digital devices store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg independently discovered a physical effect in 1988 has led to sensitive tools for reading the information stored on hard disks. That sensitivity lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.

''The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,'' Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. ''You would not have an iPod without this effect.''

The two scientists discovered a phenomenon called giant magnetoresistance. In this effect, very weak changes in magnetism generate larger changes in electrical resistance. This is how information stored magnetically on a hard disk can be converted to electrical signals that the computer reads.

Smaller disks mean fainter magnetic signals, so the ability to detect them is key to shrinking hard disks.

The first disk-reading device based on the effect was launched in 1997 ''and this soon became the standard technology,'' the Nobel committee said.

Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, said the prize honored ''a terrific combination of great physics and huge practical application.

''I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.''

Fert, 69, is the scientific director of the Mixed Unit for Physics at CNRS/Thales in Orsay, France, while Gruenberg, 68, is a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in western Germany.

In a telephone conference with the award committee, Fert said he was very happy to win, and to share the $1.5 million prize with Gruenberg.

''This is a surprise for me but I knew that it was possible,'' he said. ''I knew I was among the many candidates.''

A former rugby player and now avid sailboarder, Fert told France's Inter Radio that he planned to share some of the spoils of his winnings with colleagues.

''As usual when I get prizes, I share a little with my associates and then I will see,'' he said. ''I don't know. I think I need new sails for my windsurfers.''

Last year, Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for their work examining the infancy of the universe, studies that have aided the understanding of galaxies and stars and increasing support for the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe.

On Monday, two American scientists, Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

Prizes for chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.

The peace award is announced in Oslo, while the other prizes are announced in Stockholm. The prizes, each of which carries a cash prize of $1.5 million, were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

The Nobel prizes are always presented to the winners on the Dec. 10 anniversary of the death of its creator.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j...RPEcQD8S5MO6G0





Hard Times for Hard Drives: US May Ban Popular Imports
Jacqui Cheng

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has announced that it plans to begin an investigation into several companies that either make or use certain hard drives. In a statement issued yesterday, the ITC said that the hard drives in question are alleged to infringe on patents owned by California residents Steven and Mary Reiber. The two filed a complaint with the ITC in September, saying that the importation of the hard drives violates section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

There are currently five companies being investigated by the ITC, including Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. All five companies either manufacture drives that use "dissipative ceramic bonding tips," or sell products that use such hard drives. These parts are used to bond electrical wires within the hard drive—while the ITC doesn't specify exactly which patents the technology allegedly infringes on, two patents that are owned by the Reibers, titled "Dissipative ceramic bonding tool tip," appear to fit the description.

Section 337 of the Tariff Act bars the importation of products into the US that infringe on patents owned by others in the US. This is the same stipulation that bit Qualcomm in the butt last June, when the ITC barred the importation of its EVDO chips, circuit board modules, and handsets that infringed on the patents owned by its competitor, Broadcom. At that time, the ITC said that handsets that were already being imported prior to the ruling could continue to be imported, but that no new chips or handsets could be brought into the country.

The Qualcomm ban sparked outrage among the mobile industry, with all of the major carriers—AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint—speaking out against the ITC's decision. Trade group CTIA also criticized the ITC over the decision, saying that it "unnecessarily decreases competition" and would "cause enormous undue harm to tens of millions of American wireless consumers." The same would almost definitely happen if such a ban was placed on products made by some of the most popular hard drive makers in the world.

Even if the ITC ends up ruling against them, Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, HP, and Dell might still get lucky if the US Court of Appeals remains on their side, as it did with Qualcomm when the court stayed the ban in September. No target date has been set for completing the investigation, but the ITC has 45 days to settle on one.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...r-imports.html





Alienware Supercharges Desktop with 64GB Solid-State Drives
Brian Fonseca

Alienware Tuesday introduced a 64GB solid-state storage option for its Alienware Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop computers.

Marc Diana, product marketing manager at Miami-based Alienware said the company plans to add solid-state functionality to its other desktop offerings by mid-2008.

Diana would not say whether Alienware's parent firm, Dell Inc., also plans to use the solid-state storage options in its personal computers. Dell officials could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this year, Dell announced a 32GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers. The PC vendor has been relatively silent on the solid-state front ever since.

Unlike traditional hard drives, solid-state drives contain no moving parts that can be damaged or worn over time. While the reliability, improved power consumption and speed of solid-state drives leapfrogs hard drive technology, the flash-based technology's steep price point continues to hamper adoption, analysts say.

"Using solid-state drives completely as a primary solution right now is a significant price premium to traditional hard drives," said Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.

Still, IDC foresees growing interest in the emerging storage technology. A report released by the IT research firm in July predicted that sales of solid-state drives will skyrocket from $373 million in 2006 to $5.4 billion in 2011.

Despite admitting solid-state technology is "very expensive" and isn't yet "mature enough" for the mainstream market, Diana downplayed swirling interest in hybrid flash memory/disk drives, such as the new Seagate Technology LLC offering announced on Monday.

"Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state," said Diana. "Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Essay: The Myth of Infinite Bandwidth
Allan Leinwand

Back in the late 1990s I was often asked what I thought would happen if Internet bandwidth was infinite — what would that change about the Internet itself? Level 3’s (LVLT) recent decision to slash prices on its content distribution network and rumors of new multi-terabit cables across the Pacific have me wondering if we are actually getting closer to having infinite bandwidth.

But when replying to the infinite bandwidth question I was prone to posing a return question — what does infinite bandwidth actually mean? As an example, I would often say that infinite bandwidth meant that I could personally consume terabits of bandwidth at any location on the planet at any time without loss or jitter. And, since bandwidth would be infinite, it would be the ultimate commodity and free.

I have often found that people who talk about infinite bandwidth lack a basic understanding of what bandwidth is — many think that if you have infinite bandwidth you can have instantaneous access to every computer around the globe. People often forget that the speed of light is very fast (around 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum) but nevertheless a constant. As an example, if you have infinite bandwidth between two points it’s like having a freeway with infinite lanes but your car can only go a finite speed. There is no congestion or traffic jam, but it still takes time to travel from source to destination.

On the Internet, a bit of data does travel quickly over fiber optics, but there are many different mediums and pieces of equipment between any given source and destination to slow things down. For example, from here in San Francisco it takes a bit of data around 320 milliseconds to travel to Bangalore and back, and about half that for a bit to make a round trip between here and London. Of course, on today’s finite Internet, these travel times vary with the time of day, the exact path taken and a thousand other networking variables, but I believe that these latency times are in the ballpark for most networks. Infinite bandwidth would not have this variability but would still be hampered by the pesky issue of speed of light between any two points on the planet.

Other than the speed of light issue, when people talk about infinite bandwidth they contend that accomplishing this on the backbone of the Internet (across network providers and between exchange points) is definitely feasible, but true end-to-end infinite bandwidth is hard to imagine given the constraints of the last mile in many locations. While I agree that the last mile is clearly a current constraint to infinite bandwidth, I have some hope that some high-speed variant of Ethernet or a wireless technology will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future — just look at what’s happening in Tokyo and Seoul.

So, in my mind infinite bandwidth is possible. Some thoughts about what we could do with it include: unlimited High Definition two-way video streaming (not like little YouTube screens, but to video walls), immersive and lifelike collaboration environments (think Second Life on steroids), limitless file transfer and backup (no more burning data to DVDs), real-time photo sharing (grandmothers will love this), and complete data mobility for both personal and work information (regardless of what type of data you have, you can access it from anywhere).

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” So we need to know that bandwidth will be infinite and we need ways to necessitate this technology soon. How do you think infinite bandwidth would change your behavior on the Internet, either personally or for your company?
http://newteevee.com/2007/10/10/essa...ite-bandwidth/





Dutch Consumers’ Union Asks for Free Copies of XP for Vista Victims
Ruben Francia

In a recent meeting between the Dutch Consumers’ Union (Consumentenbond) and Microsoft Netherlands, the consumer organization asked for free copies of Windows XP for members who were having problems with Vista. Microsoft, of course, refused.

The refusal has led Consumentenbond to call on consumers to explicitly ask for Windows XP when purchasing a new computer and for shops to provide free Windows XP packages to those dissatisfied with Vista.

The meeting was initiated by the union after it did a five weeks investigation, where it received some 5,000 consumer complaints about Windows Vista. Most of the complaints revolved around application and peripheral hardware compatibility issues.

“The product has many teething problems, it is just not ready,” a spokesperson for the consumer organization told Expatica. “Printers and other hardware reportedly failed in combination with Vista, computers crash regularly and the peripherals are very slow.”

Earlier, Microsoft offered a “downgrade” option to consumers that get machines with Windows Vista but want to switch to XP. But the offering applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, so it doesn’t do much for most consumers.

It seems that by giving selective and limited downgrade options to XP, Microsoft is not giving equal treatment to its consumers. Maybe, it’s time for Microsoft to start being more sympathetic.
http://vista.blorge.com/2007/10/12/d...vista-victims/





Stalling Cars Via OnStar: A Hacker's Dream Come True?
Lauren Weinstein

Greetings. Ready to turn over the keys of your vehicle to the cops, or that clever hacker in the next lane? How about that creepy guy following you on a lonely country road?

GM apparently plans to perhaps make this all possible. It's been announced that they'll be equipping nearly two million of their 2009 model vehicles (that have OnStar installed), with the capability to be remotely shut down to idle via OnStar commands at the request of law enforcement.

The claim is that owners will have to give permission first for this capability to be enabled. Bull. I don't care what OnStar's privacy policy says, if the technical capability for this function is present, OnStar will have no practical choice but to comply when faced with a law enforcement demand or court order, whether or not owner "permission" was ever granted.

This new capability will also create an irresistible challenge to the hacker community -- and perhaps criminal organizations -- to try find ways into the OnStar system for triggering this fun -- one way or another. It's impossible to hack OnStar? Would you bet your life on that?

Unfortunately, this is yet another laudable idea that's being "driven" into the marketplace before all of the negative ramifications have been thought through or fully understood. And how long will it be before such systems are mandated, one might wonder?

OnStar has long been the subject of various privacy concerns. This new capability appears to be the most serious privacy-related issue for OnStar to date.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000313.html





10 miles to the penny

China "e" Bikes Silently Drive Lead Demand



Lucy Hornby

As the red light changes, Han Zhang turns the handlebar of his battery-driven bike, pushes off with his foot, and whirrs silently along a Beijing boulevard.

His yellow bike looks like something between a bicycle and a scooter, but to the lead industry, he's driving a car.

Every year, millions of Chinese are hitting the streets on "e" bikes - battery-powered contraptions that are increasingly popular as soaring fuel prices make traditional motorbikes and scooters expensive to drive.

The bikes are getting bigger, faster and more glamorous - and the growing size of their batteries is soaking up increasing amounts of lead.

"Everyone looks at the "e" bike as a replacement for a motorbike. But for the lead industry it's an astonishing change. In terms of lead demand, one "e" bike is one car," said Mark Stevenson, technical manager for lead at Nyrstar in Australia.

"If someone says there is growth of a million bikes a year, the lead industry thinks 'who cares'. But if you say a growth of a million cars per year, that changes the whole picture."

Yet a 48-volt bike battery uses just under 10 kilograms of lead, similar to that used by a medium-sized car like a Toyota Camry. They last for about a year, compared with over three years for a typical car battery.

"There's a huge amount of lead being carried around on bikes in China," said Huw Roberts of CHR Metals Ltd. He estimates the bikes produced through the end of last year have absorbed about 400,000 tons of lead.

That new source of demand could help drive up lead prices, which hit a record high of $3,835 a ton on October 9.

Lead has been the star performer on the London Metal Exchange and is up by 130 percent this year.

Silent Force

China produced 19 million battery driven bikes in 2006, and that figure could rise by 30 percent this year, said Zhang Changhai, lead analyst with metals consultancy Antaike in Beijing.

"The explosive growth is already over, and we expect new standards being developed for the larger bikes to slow growth in 2008," Zhang said.

The standards for newer, 48-volt bikes could be along the lines of those for the more common 36-volt bikes, limiting speed and size and setting guidelines for which companies can produce them to weed out cut throat competition.

Estimates for how many companies produce "e" bikes vary from 100 to 300 firms, but all agree that their low design and start-up costs have driven margins to the bare minimum, eroding profits for more established firms like Shanghai Forever Co.

Meanwhile, 72-volt bikes that are as big and powerful as motorcycles are alarming city governments. They have been banned in the southern boom cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai.

"When you have these things whizzing along in the bike lanes at 60 kilometers an hour it's getting a little dangerous," Roberts said.

"They are known as the 'silent killer' because you can't hear them coming."

Other cities are trying to limit the bikes' speed and size, and may soon require licenses to use them.

Other innovations include bikes that use lithium-ion batteries which generally last longer and give more power for their weight.

With prices above 3,000 yuan ($400), they have found an export niche. But in the domestic market, they are unlikely to replace bikes using lead-acid batteries which cost between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan.

At a bicycle shop in central Beijing, salesman Zhang Guangyi pointed to his best selling model, a long black bike with flames painted along its body. It only costs about 1 yuan to charge the bike enough for 240 kilometers of use, he noted.

"Who drives motorbikes anymore? Fuel is too expensive and these have no emissions so they are better for the environment – it’s popular to think about that these days."

($1=7.516 Yuan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inDep...10974620071010





Film Drop-Off Sites Fade Against Digital Cameras
Katie Hafner

Fresh from a family vacation in California, Rick Wallerstein went to the Stop & Shop supermarket in Berkeley Heights, N.J., last month to drop off a roll of film, as he has done for about two decades.

But a sign on the familiar drop-box next to the juice aisle informed him that because of the advent of digital photography, film would no longer be accepted at the store. “The sign said something like, ‘Thanks for your past patronage and good luck,’” Mr. Wallerstein said.

When he returned to the store 10 days later, both the box and the sign were gone. “It’s like it never even existed,” he said. “As if it had all been a dream.”

Mr. Wallerstein had stumbled upon a trend that materialized not gradually, as many trends do, but instantly — like, well, an image on a digital camera.

“With the prevalence of digital cameras, to continue to do film processing where demand has continued to decline just wasn’t feasible,” said Robert Keane, a spokesman for Stop & Shop, which discontinued film processing services at all 300 of its stores throughout the Northeast on Sept. 15.

Stop & Shop, operated by Royal Ahold, is hardly the first and it will definitely not be the last to abandon film processing.

“Over the past few years it’s gotten increasingly difficult to find next-day service for film,” said Gary Pageau, publisher of PMA Magazine, a photo industry trade publication.

Some 35,000 locations in the United States still develop film, mostly drugstores, supermarkets and discount retail stores, as well as photo specialty stores. “But you’re not going to get the same level of service, where you’d drop off a roll of film at 2 p.m. and have it back the next day,” he said.

Mr. Pageau said he was not surprised to hear that Stop & Shop had stopped offering its film processing service. “They probably weren’t even doing enough business to warrant the five square feet of space the drop-off box was occupying,” he said.

The rate of decline is apparent from film sales — since only people who buy film need to have it developed. Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999. “It’s pretty alarming,” said Bing Liem, senior vice president of sales for the imaging division of Fujifilm USA.

Sales of single-use cameras are declining, too, but more slowly than film, said Mr. Pageau. “You’ll still get people using one-time-use cameras in places like amusement parks where people don’t want to damage their digital camera,” he said. Mr. Pageau said that about 6 percent of households in the United States used single-use cameras exclusively.

Still, Mr. Pageau said, film developing is becoming a niche service, thanks to digital cameras. “It’s all about the replacement cycles of the technology,” he said. “Most reloadable films are 35 millimeter, and there hasn’t been a significant new 35-millimeter camera introduced in two or more years.”

“The photo finishing ecosystem has fragmented,” said Mr. Liem. It used to be a matter of dropping off a roll and choosing between one-hour and overnight processing, matte and glossy, 4x6 and 5x7. “Now you can bring your media card in and go to a kiosk and have it printed in a second. Or you can have it printed at a one-hour photo lab. Or you can upload the image to a wholesale facility on the Internet and have it delivered to a retail store.”

Mr. Liem said he, too, was not surprised to hear of Stop & Shop’s decision to stop processing film. “We knew retailers were most likely going to do that, because they can no longer do just two things. They have to do 10 things now.”

And although retail stores with large film processing departments, like Wal-Mart and Walgreens, still do the traditional film processing, the new emphasis on digital processing is pronounced.

Walgreens said its digital photofinishing sales increased 58 percent in 2006, although the company would not disclose actual sales figures. “Digital is absolutely the fastest growing part of our photo finishing department,” said Carol Hively, a Walgreens spokeswoman. In addition to film developing, Walgreens has self-service kiosks for printing from digital camera memory cards in all of its nearly 6,000 stores.

The Eastman Kodak Company’s film business has plummeted, and the company has spent the last few years making a transition to digital technology.

There is no dearth of images. In the heyday of film, said Mr. Liem, some 25 billion images were not just captured but printed as well. By 2009, as the use of digital cameras continues to grow, some 135 billion images will be captured, but far fewer printed. Instead, those images tend to stay on people’s computers in electronic shoeboxes. The challenge, say companies like Kodak and Fujifilm, is getting people to print those images out.

Kodak is aiming at third world economies where home computers are less common, to extend the life of film. It is selling low-cost film cameras throughout Asia, said Christopher Veronda, a spokesman for Kodak. “We’re seeding places with large populations and limited incomes, trying to take picture taking to those markets,” he said. In India last month, Kodak had a record sales month.

In the United States, when digital camera owners do print out their digital images, they are increasingly doing so in stores rather than on home printers, according to the Photo Marketing Association. Instead of silver halide photo processing equipment, stores are now installing kiosks made by companies like Kodak, Fujifilm and Hewlett-Packard. Among them, those companies have sold more than 100,000 photo kiosks.

As Fujifilm has seen a decline in sales of its analog-based minilabs, it has seen a corresponding rise in sales of kiosks. Some of those kiosks are free-standing, and others are connected to an in-store minilab.

As for Mr. Wallerstein and his roll of film, he let it languish at home for a couple of weeks, and finally took it to Wal-Mart. He had to go there anyway.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/bu...09film.html?hp





Startup Looks to Sell All Things Digital
Tomio Geron

A startup coming out of stealth mode is hoping to upend the market for digital products in the same way eBay did for all types of physical products.

Expected to launch in the next week or so, San Francisco-based Zipidee will let companies sell videos, music tracks, ebooks, mobile ringtones, software, games, and podcasts through its online marketplace.

The idea is to allow small to medium sized companies—and individuals—to set up "stores" much like they can already do on eBay, but merchandise on Zipidee will be limited to digital goods.

But unlike eBay's auction system for physical goods, digital download prices on Zipidee will be fixed by the seller, much in the way that Apple's iTunes store set prices for digital music tracks.

Zipidee's sellers will be able to control the price of their goods and the method by which they will be distributed. Zipidee, founded this February, is backed by Individuals' Venture Fund, which invested in Salesforce.com and Netlogic, as well as Novus Ventures, and Khalda Development.

Zipidee's marketplace is initially focused on selling "prosumer" content—especially instructional or educational videos—that are professionally produced and often sold offline as DVDs. Zipidee has signed up gurus such as Marcia Wieder of Dream University and Christine Comaford-Lynch of Mighty Ventures, who bring legions of devoted fans.

But the challenge for Zipidee will be to attract a large enough audience, when few online content companies have been successful charging customers for content, said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. People have often come to expect digital content and goods to be free, unlike the physical products for sale on eBay.

"The theory of (Zipidee's model) is right in the sense of the so-called long tail and all the niche segments would seem to support a subscription model," Mr. Sterling said. "In practice it's hard to get large numbers of subscribers. There are people out there who will pay. The question is how big is the market."

Zipidee will have to offer a high quality product and unique content that isn't available elsewhere, he added.

Zipidee is also targeting offline DVD and educational content distributors, offering to digitize their content. Finally, the company is in talks with some large media companies about finding ways to monetize their content. Zipidee said it is purposely avoiding most entertainment content because heavyweights such as Apple and Amazon already dominate that market.

Sellers can decide whether they want to use Zipidee's proprietary DRM protection, and whether they want to allow users to rent content for 30 days, purchase individual units or an entire collection at one time. Buyers can also opt to download content or receive it as a stream.

The service allows more information for sellers about how their products are selling—for example real time information—than iTunes does with its monthly reports.

These various services will allow small to medium sized sellers to easily get their products to market in a self-serve format, says Zipidee CEO Henry Wong, rather than spending money to distribute it through DVDs or other channels.

Zipidee is seeking to offer an alternative to both existing pay models for content and free ad-supported models. On the pay side, content creators—not to mention media companies—are often unhappy with iTunes, which takes a large cut of revenues. And free video sites such as Revver and Veoh generate substantial ad revenues only if their videos are massive global hits.

"The online ad model is great for entertainment but that requires massive viewing," Mr. Wong said. "For the content we're going after, the smaller niche audience, the price point is much higher."

Zipidee will charge a $1 listing fee and collect roughly 20 percent of the purchase price. Zipidee also has a number of consumer-friendly features like an eBay-style ratings system.

Mr. Wong has a background in digital marketplaces, having invested in AdECN, the online advertising marketplace that was recently acquired by Microsoft.

As Mr. Wong knows from his work with AdECN, he needs to pull in a large amount of inventory from sellers to ramp up his site into an active functioning marketplace. If he can do that then, as with his Microsoft exit, his marketplace could take off.
http://www.redherring.com/Home/22928





Virtual World’s Like Second Life Brewing Lawsuits and Disputes

With virtual world’s forming into the next big thing on the horizon, the real world is starting to play catch up. Traffic stats are increasing and the money pouring into virtual worlds is starting to translate into real world money that cannot be ignored. Just recently a report was released by Screencast.com, a business research and intelligence gathering company, that listed subscription sales for online virtual worlds rising to $526,000,000 in the US market in 2006 alone.

With all this money pouring into the virtual worlds and attention being given to these markets, entrepreneurs and business minds come alive. Just as if it were in the 1800’s and dreamers were running into the California gold rush, people are now running to virtual worlds for entertainment and business.

With business savvy and genius creations comes the bad side of the virtual world progression of litigation, scams and regulations. Lawsuits and discussions are rising in the area of virtual worlds and if real world laws and government regulations apply to these new worlds.

Probably just due to the fact of the mention of sex, the lawsuit coming out of the virtual world Second Life is setting boundaries. Second Life is one of the leading virtual worlds in self ownership. Second Life allows users to own land, collect rent, invent and sell and products and basically participate in a replica of real life, hence the name, Second Life.

The opportunity at Second Life has inspired entrepreneurs like Kevin Alderman to create virtual products for the virtual world. Alderman has created many products but one of his most successful products involved in a lawsuit is called SexGen Platinum. The SexGen program allows virtual world participants in Second Life to add a little bit of sexual flair to their Avatars (or characters they use in the game).

Business was going great for Alderman and his company Eros. However, just like in the real world there are thieves and copycats and people that try to sell products as their own. An online persona naming himself, “Volkov Catteneo” started copying the program Alderman wrote for Second Life and selling to others at discounted prices. This issue is not about pennies here, the full program goes for a retail price of $45 US dollars. When Alderman contacted the person illegally selling his program the guy just mocked him and said, “What are you going to do? Sue me?” With that attitude, Alderman filed a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida.

This specific lawsuit is very important to the virtual world industry as it will set standards in defining how much freedom people do have in virtual worlds and whether they have to obey every real world law. It isn’t often when avatars from the games start throwing around lawsuits but other litigation in the virtual world industry is not new.

Lawsuits are happening frequently that target the companies actually running the virtual worlds. In regards to Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life they run into lawsuits when they punish users for making bad deals or making the virtual world less fun for others. One recent case that was brought against Second Life was from a man named Marc Bragg, an attorney that used Second Life. The story is well covered in this Wired Magazine story here. Basically Marc Bragg was able to aquire cheap virtual land through underhanded methods and Second Life shut down his account. Since virtual land and products have a real world value, Mr. Bragg’s decided he would sue for the real world value of these products.

Some people question whether these virtual items really have any value at all. The real answer is they do in fact have a value when converted to real world dollars. For instance, in Second Life you can exchange your Linden dollars for U.S. dollars. The exchange rate has ranged anywhere from 200 - 350 Lindens to each U.S. dollar. This exchange rate almost rivals some of the world’s currencies in exchange value. Since people spend the virtual dollars on everything from real estate to avatar enhancements, they are spending money on items that do have a real value. The money making prospects has sent people into full time careers making money off of these virtual worlds.

What now remains to be seen is what standards and laws get passed on over to the virtual world from the real world. As lawsuits get settled people will learn the limits their avatars have and can quit making silly statements like, “What are you going to do, sue me?” Until these disputes are taken to the courts most people fight over who is right and wrong through companies that facilitate the transactions. PayPal has had a growing number of disputes due to virtual world disagreements. Until the values reach epic proportions most financial virtual world disputes will probably be settled by companies like PayPal and Second Life internally.
http://businessshrink.biz/psychology...-and-disputes/





Stretching the Search for Signs of Life



Dennis Overbye

Call it a small step for E.T., a leap for radio astronomy.

Astronomers in Hat Creek, Calif., are planning today to switch on the first elements of a giant new array of radio telescopes that they say will greatly extend the investigation of natural and unnatural phenomena in the universe.

When the Allen Telescope Array, as it is known, is complete, it will consist of 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. Using the separate antennas as if they were one giant dish, radio astronomers will be able to map vast swaths of the sky cheaply and efficiently.

The array will help search for new phenomena like black holes eating each other and so-called dark galaxies without stars, as well as extend the search for extraterrestrial radio signals a thousandfold, to include a million nearby stars over the next two decades.

Today, 42 of the antennas, mass-produced from molds and employing inexpensive telecommunications technology, will go into operation. “It’s like cutting the ribbon on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Seti Institute, in Mountain View, Calif., who pointed out that this was the first radio telescope ever designed specifically for the extraterrestrial quest.

The telescope, named for Paul G. Allen, who provided $25 million in seed money, is a joint project of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Seti Institute. “If they do find something, they’re going to call me up first and say we have a signal,” Mr. Allen said in an interview, adding, “So far the phone hasn’t rung.”

Describing himself as “a child of the 50s, the golden age of space exploration and science fiction,” Mr. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, said he first got interested in supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence after a conversation 12 years ago with Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer and exuberant proponent of cosmic wonder.

When the idea later arose to build a telescope array on the cheap, using off-the-shelf satellite dish technology and advanced digital signal processing, Mr. Allen was intrigued. “If you know anything about me,” he said, “you know I’m a real enthusiast for new unconventional approaches to things.”

Telescopes, including radio telescopes, have traditionally been custom-built one-of-a-kind items. The antennas for the Allen array are stamped from a mold. Mr. Allen’s family foundation put up the money to get the first part of the array built, with other contributions from Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and the chief executive of Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash., among others.

Leo Blitz, director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory, estimated that it would take three years and $41 million more, depending on the price of aluminum, to complete the array. The full array, astronomers say, will be useful not just for science, but also as practice for a truly giant telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array, which would have a combined receiving area of a square kilometer and which astronomers hope to build in Australia or South Africa in 10 or 20 years.

Dr. Blitz said the main advantage of the Allen array for regular radio astronomy was the ability to obtain images of large swaths of the sky, several times the size of the full moon, in a single pointing. At low frequencies, he said, the full array could map the entire sky in a day and night and do it again the next night.

“This has not been possible before,” he said.

In its partial form, Dr. Blitz said, the array is already almost as fast, and much cheaper to run, than larger telescopes.

The speed should make it possible to catch transient events, like radio bursts from colliding black holes, that might last only a few hours, while the mapping ability should enable astronomers to search for lumps of gas without stars, the so-called dark galaxies predicted by the prevailing models of cosmology.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has lived on the kindness of strangers since Congress canceled a NASA-sponsored search using existing radio telescopes in 1993, only a year after it had begun. The Seti Institute, which was to have conducted a search of nearby stars under contract to NASA, raised money from Silicon Valley and revived the search as Project Phoenix, using existing radio telescopes.

Project Phoenix was finished three years ago, having checked some 750 stars for signals, Dr. Shostak said. While that might sound like a lot, he said, “it doesn’t impress anybody who knows how many stars there are in the galaxy.”

There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy have ranged from one (or none, if you are particularly discouraged about human affairs) into the millions.

Dr. Shostak calculated that the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope, a 1,000-foot-diameter dish in Puerto Rico that is the world’s largest (although it is in danger of being shut down to save money). That translates to about a million stars, which he said was getting into a promising number. Dr. Shostak described the expanded search as looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon.

Anyone out there and broadcasting, for whatever wacky alien reason, would also have to be broadcasting right at Earth. But advanced civilizations, Dr. Shostak said, would be able to tell there was life on Earth because of the oxygen in our atmosphere.

“We’ve been broadcasting that for 2.5 billion years,” he said.

The first thing Dr. Shostak and his colleagues plan to do with the newly operational 42-antenna array is to survey a strip across the center of the galaxy. There will be several billion stars in the field of view, but they will be very far away, 10,000 to 50,000 light years, so any signal would have to be huge to be detected. But who is to say that among galactic civilizations there are not a rare few with tremendous capabilities?

“I’ve never begrudged aliens any power in their transmitter,” Dr. Shostak said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/science/11seti.html





Slashdot's CmdrTaco Looks Back at 10 Years of 'News for Nerds'
Miyoko Ohtake

The Sputnik launch isn't the only big anniversary this month; Slashdot is celebrating, too.

The influential "news for nerds" site famous for swamping unsuspecting websites with boatloads of traffic turns 10 in October, and parties are popping up all around the country.

It all started in 1997, in a time before there was Gmail. Slashdot founder and editor Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, wanted a non-college-affiliated e-mail address, so he simply registered his own domain name. And while he was at it, he decided to add a little humor and make the url as unpronounceable as possible: "H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash, slashdot, dot, org."

What Malda didn't expect was that Slashdot would become one of the most popular geek news sites on the web, overloading so many websites' servers that the phrase "Slashdot effect" would be coined.

Wired News spoke with Malda by phone Wednesday as he got ready for the Slashdot 10th anniversary celebrations at his home base in Michigan. (Want to join the fun? Find a Slashdot party in your neck of the woods.)

Wired News: Did you ever think Slashdot would make it to 10 years?

Rob Malda: No. When I registered the domain name it was supposed to be a joke, and I wanted an e-mail address that wasn't my college's e-mail. The website was built out of my blog -- though they didn't call them blogs back then -- because I wanted to have a web server I could Perl and hack around on. There was no premeditation, and it was three or four months before I realized Slashdot meant anything.

WN: So when did you know that Slashdot was turning into something?

Malda: There was a log file that would slowly scroll across your screen. It used to be that I'd look at the log every few days and see we had X number of hits. But one night we were just hanging out in our living room and watching the log scroll by and it was just hit, hit, hit. And they were coming from MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and Microsoft and Red Hat and big companies and big institutions of higher learning. Before that, my only real comprehension of the size of Slashdot was that I was getting a lot of e-mail, hundreds of e-mails, but that never mentally translated into, "OMG! People in Germany are reading this thing!"

WN: So you had hundreds of articles in your inbox and people all over the world following Slashdot. Why did you decide to keep Slashdot a user-submitted, editor-evaluated site instead of crowdsourcing the job of posting articles?

Malda: When you're building a system like this you're balancing the wisdom of the crowds versus the tyranny of the mob. Sometimes a crowd is really smart, but some things don't work so well by committee. Crowds work when you have a tightly knit group of people with similar interests, but when you have a loosely knit community you get "Man Gets Hit in Crotch With Football" and Everybody Loves Raymond, where it's just good enough to not suck. At the end of the day I want to be able to say, "These are good stories."

WN: And the users can tell you whether they think the stories are good in the comments. When you started this, what made you think comments were going to be as important as they've become?

Malda: I never thought of not having comments. I started with BBSes in the 1980s and was using Usenet. I don't understand why you would build a site without comments. That's what the internet is for: people communicating. I think we got lucky that the people reading Slashdot were techies who also grew up with BBSes and Usenet and they also wouldn't have imagined not having user comments.

WN: What do you think has helped Slashdot reach its 10th anniversary?

Malda: Over the years the site has developed something of a personality. There are certain subject matters that we're going to discuss and there are certain subjects we're not going to discuss. We're going to cover what's happening with Linux, who's building new technology and what companies are taking your right away to play with that technology. There aren't a lot of websites that are focuses. Everybody tries to be everything and no one does one thing that they're really good at.

WN: So it's all about having your niche?

Malda: That'd be the much more concise way to say it.

WN: Looking back at the last decade, what are your top Slashdot moments?

Malda: I have to mention that I proposed to my wife on Slashdot. That was pretty cool. And then there have been a number of stories where we went out of our normal bubble and stuck our noses in something else. Those somethings were (the) Columbine (school shootings) and Sept. 11.

Sept. 11 was interesting because a lot of the mainstream websites that were online were getting so overburdened with traffic that they were getting shut down. My team worked really, really, really hard to keep the site up and there was a lot of traffic on the site that day. We'll never know the numbers, because we had to turn off the clock to save processor cycles. But we managed to stay up and that was a real shining day because of what we had to get done. It was a pretty shitty day, but I was very proud of everybody at Slashdot that day.

And then there was Columbine. Columbine was weird because the mainstream media really took on a specific view of what happened and the Slashdot audience took a very different view of that event. The discussions on Slashdot were very heartfelt and meaningful. Instead of reading the mainstream media stories about videogames causing kids to be evil, you were reading stories about what happens to kids being beaten up for four years. When the bully jocks kick a helpless kid, it's not surprising that every now and then someone's going to snap.

So there's a happy and two less-happy moments in Slashdot history.

WN: And what's next for Slashdot?

Malda: People always ask me that, and if in 10 years from now Slashdot is the same as it was 10 years ago, I'll think we're doing something right. If we continue to maintain the level of article selection and user discussion then I'm a happy camper.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/t...slashdot10year





Acquisitive Craigslist Post Reddens Faces All Around
Andrew Adam Newman

Last month on Craigslist.com, someone who described herself as a “spectacularly beautiful” 25-year-old placed a personal ad seeking a husband who made at least $500,000 a year, because “$250,000 won’t get me to Central Park West.”

As her post hit the blogs, it received a scathing response from a man who said he fit her description and told her that her proposition was a bad business deal. “In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset,” he wrote, because “your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity.”

Last week, this exchange spilled over into the e-mail world, where the it turned into a popular item to send to friends as a joke. The difference between this and other outrageous share-mail messages, however, was that instead of remaining anonymous, its ostensible author signed his name and the company where he worked, which happened to be the investment banking division of JPMorgan Chase.

This detail, which may have provoked nearly as much mirth as the contents of the exchange, made the correspondence either more or less credible. Would someone with a big job at a prestigious company really have linked his name to a message that read in part: “You’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!”

The man who is widely credited with writing the response did not respond to a voice message, but the media relations department at JPMorgan Chase confirmed that he worked there and said that he was not the author. Rather, a company spokesman said, he had forwarded the e-mail message to friends, and the signature setting on his e-mail accompanied the response when it wound up on blogs.

By this account, the employee was just an accidental sexist, the latest object lesson in the dangers of e-mail getting into the wrong hands — the Wall Street equivalent of a Pittsburgh Steelers coach who passed along an e-mail message with a sex video to the National Football League commissioner, among others.

“Your workplace computer does not exist as a tool for forwarding jokey things,” said Will Schwalbe, an author of “Send: The Essential Guide to E-Mail for Office and Home.”

As for the legitimacy of the original posting by the husband seeker, a spokeswoman for Craigslist wrote in an e-mail message that “it does look as if the post was made sincerely.” A message sent to the Craigslist mailbox seeking comment yielded no response.

Craigslist declined to say how many people responded to the personal ad (which asked, among other things, for names of bars, restaurants and gyms where rich single men hung out). And so far, the identity of the responder remains a mystery too.

“I wish we wrote it because I think it’s great,” said John Carney, editor of DealBreaker, a Wall Street gossip site that posted the exchange on Wednesday.

Mr. Carney said that he had received the zinger in an e-mail message from someone other than the author, and his source did not know who wrote it. (The response never appeared on Craigslist itself.)

On Thursday, Howard Lindzon posted it to his blog. After a commenter asked who wrote it, Mr. Lindzon responded “me,” but then said in a telephone interview that he had been kidding. The traffic the posting drew was serious, though. Mr. Lindzon usually gets about 3,000 daily visitors, but popularity-rating sites digg.com and reddit.com linked to the item, drawing more than 100,000 visitors and crashing his server.

Brett Michael Dykes, a blogger notorious for fake listings on Craigslist, said he had received about 40 e-mail messages accusing him of posting the husband-seeking personal ad. But he said he had not written it and was stumped about its provenance.

“I’ve probably read it five or six times, and I go back and forth,” Mr. Dykes said. “Sadly I think it may be real. I have met in New York City that type of girl.”

By now, Mr. Dykes said, a blogger would have taken credit for the listing if it were a hoax, but “who would want to step from the shadows and say, ‘I’m the gold digger’?”

And Mr. Carney said he was not holding his breath that the Wall Street type would step forward. “In the age of ultrasensitivity to sexual harassment, people might think that this guy’s response about women being depreciating assets is not exactly how they want their firm to be perceived by the public,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/bu...olddigger.html





Do Prostitutes Use the Social Web Better Than Corporate America?
Kevin

The social web has rapidly evolved into a powerful marketing tool whose reach has forced business to adjust their core philosophies and strategies in order to more effectively reach their target consumers. The social web, though relatively young, was already considered a popular media by 2004, though mainstream media and Corporate America have only recently taken notice. When a Bausch and Lomb Executive was recently asked about his attendance at a conference on blogging, his reply indicated that his company lacked a presence in new media. Businesses and governments are beginning to understand the power of the social web and have begun to embrace it, including British Foreign Secretary David Milibland who launched a blog to help people understand the diplomatic policy of England. One business though has beaten all these titans to the bunch; the world’s oldest profession has been quick to embrace these new and exciting technologies. People in this profession have been quick to grasp the strength of creating a community on the social web.

We have been able to witness the growth of this trend, which mirrors the growth of the technology and shares traits with any other sub-group on the web. Web 2.0 concepts such as the creation of social networking websites are being used by people within this industry as well as other technologies such as bulletin boards, Craigslist.com, and instant messenger have benefited both provider and seeker. These combined technologies have helped create and foster a community. This has had multiple effects on illegal activity: it has moved a lot of people off of the streets, emboldened them to work for themselves, created a screening process for both client and provider, and has created a path for law enforcement to track it.

In examining the growth of prostitution online, it mirrors the type of growth and activity of a typical subgroup. We can take fans of the Super Bowl Champions, the Indianapolis Colts for example. They have their own social networking site designed by the team http://www.mycolts.net/. On that site users can create their own profile and participate on message boards created to specifically discuss the Colts. Beyond the message board, featured users can share their thoughts via chatrooms, messaging services, and blogs. They are also able to follow the news about the team as well as being able to read blogs created by members of the team and coaching staff. By using social networking the Colts have found a way to unite their fan base and create a community. With these connections, you see a history emerge of the interaction between the users. The users refer to other conversations or make references to information about other users, which is a display of familiarity. This is something that you see in a community; not only is there interaction, but you have people with established relationships referencing those relationships within their interactions with each other.

When you examine prostitution online you can see the exact same type of sites, albeit with different subject area and interests. Users still have the creation of relationships and an ongoing discussion between clients, just as the fans in the previous example. On top of their ongoing professional conversations, providers also participate and interact with their client base in a more casual context, beyond their immediate professional concerns. This one on one interaction was a surprising component of this sub-group. Unlike the Colts, where there is a wall between fans and players, in this context there was no formal distinction or distance. This isn’t the case as providers are part of the conversations on these sites in a way that demonstrates that they are members of the community, not just the providers of a service. Unlike the Colts site where the blogs are a one sided interaction (fans can comment on the posts but there isn’t going to be an ongoing dialogue created like on most blogs), on these message boards there is an involvement with the desired subject. These communities are built just like any other web communities, in a collaboration of multiple sites or sites with multiple features that cover multiple types of technology such as in house messaging, profiles, message boards, photography, and other hallmarks of social networking sites.

For example escorts.com- a site which is a way for users to find providers in their area- has a lot of the same aspects you would find onmost social networking websites, but with a niche community like on mycolts.net. Users can set up their own profile with their date of birth, gender, sexual orientation, race, height, weight, smoking preference, drinking preference, and other typical background profile information that social networking websites ask for. Users can also modify their profile by adding pictures (with a full photo gallery feature), configuring a headline or greeting, and designing their profile layout in a manner reminiscent of most social networking sites. The communication features of this site also mirror large social networking sites in that you can instant message, send long form messages, chat, and interact on message boards.

Besides the traditional social networking features of this site, there are things that are specific to this niche such as reviews of providers and clients. Also there is a paid membership feature that allows you extended access that includes reviews with intimate details. This, in addition to referral links to other adult services, is how the site is monetized.

There are multiple benefits of deploying this technology for this industry. From a political perspective it reduces the street aspect of the industry. This has a kind of a “out of site out of mind” type reaction within the political and law enforcement world. (Although in reality it is currently thriving online.) Safety wise this provides multiple levels of protection for all involved: a rating system allows clients to know what to expect with a provider and providers can be tainted if they have a history of participating in unethical practices within this community. Activities such as not expressing their rates properly, upselling their services, or even a reputation of stealing from their clients can follow them in this virtual world. For providers they are able to get recommendations from other providers about specific clients, which helps protect them against law enforcement stings as well as protecting themselves against potentially dangerous clients. While there is obviously still a risk on many levels for both clients and providers ranging from STDs, robbery, or even worse, this screening process created by these sites has considerably lowered risks on a lot of fronts. When compared head to head against street prostitution the risks are considerably lower.

Beyond the social networking type of website, there are a few other sites that people use that are current web 2.0 technologies. Craigslist.com has been in the news recently for their erotic services section on their website. It has drawn the ire of law enforcement personal as well as religious advocates. The erotic services section is filled with multiple ads for adult services that include phone sex operators, web cam girls, massage parlors, and escorts. An interesting angle to the use of cragslist.com is that Craigslist is actually looked down upon by many of the people that are involved in these community websites. It is widely proclaimed by message boards such as aspd.net that Craigslist is a haven for scam artists.

People that are active on message boards centered around prostitution have created a hierarchy of the adult industry. This community has created a social ladder, just like you would see in any other community. “There is a perceived hierarchy in the industry,” Jennifer said. “Topless dancers think they’re better than nude dancers. Nude dancers think they’re better than the prostitutes. The people on Craigslist tend to be women on the lower end of the spectrum.”

Forums such as aspd.net offer up a source for providers as well as clients. There are established users that have created a handbook of how to get involved in- as they refer to it- “the hobby”. The forum is also a place that ties multiple websites together, where people can post reviews from multiple different providers websites, as well as interacting with other users via private message and instant messenger, all while keeping their true identity hidden. Here they evaluate the information that is posted on these sites, as well as tell each other about potential scam warnings and law enforcement lookout. Another topic that the users actually approach is the idea of safe sex and protecting oneself from potential STDS.

In examining multiple dating and sex forums the topic of STDs are never brought up. On this website there were multiple threads dedicated to this topic including multiple links to websites with extremely valuable information regarding safe sex. When compared to other forums that have frank talk about sex, like different dating forums, the topic of STDs and save sex is barely every broached. Here they have formed a community that looks out for each other, from a law enforcement all the way to health perspective. While the activities they are doing are illegal in most areas of the United States and arguably immoral, the amount of participation and care displayed for their fellow “hobbyist” was remarkable.

Detailed information flows pretty freely on these sites. All of this information is available for people that want to take part in the “hobby”. There is a free transfer of information ranging from who to acquire services from and how to get them, to how to protect yourself, avoid scams, and participate within this community. Most providers are perceived to be very open and honest, and while most clients hide themselves behind online identities they were still open with details about a very intimate part of their life creating a sort of comfort level amongst the users.

This openness and transparency of all this comes with a problem from a pragmatic sense, in that law enforcement now has access to information about the business that these people are in. According to a recent article in the New York Times, law enforcement agencies are supported by the digital footprints that sites like Craigslist provide.

Despite police complaints that Craigslist facilitates prostitution, some experts say the Web site also aids enforcement. ‘Craigslist is a very open site, and it leaves digital footprints,’ said Leslie A. Harris, president of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. ‘It makes it easier for the police.’ While the idea of enforcement is nice, the actual implementation of enforcement policies has been rare. Over the last year there have been large arrests, but they are only highlighted by three cities versus the hundreds of cities that have specific sites on Craigslist. “Cook County, Ill., rounded up 43 women working on the streets — and 60 who advertised on Craigslist. In Seattle, a covert police ad on Craigslist in November resulted in the arrests of 71 men, including a bank officer, a construction worker and a surgeon.” These arrests aside, most law enforcement agencies explain that they simply don’t have the manpower to respond to this or they don’t consider it a priority. The impact of technology is apparent here. While it leaves the risk of a digital footprint, it is still more cumbersome and challenging to track providers and clients down than it is to arrest someone on the street or raid a massage parlor.

When looking at prostitution and the people that are involved in it online, you can compare it directly with other communities. The use of various web 2.0 tools and techniques have helped multiple communities grow and have fostered an atmosphere of upfront information sharing. With information being shared so openly due to this use of technology it has caused this illegal activity to expand in the digital age. It has also helped reform a business that by all accounts has had been unsafe for the people involved and the society around it. While the online component of this activity doesn’t cure a lot of the social ills associated with prostitution such as drug use, the exploitation of women, and other problems, it has created a safer environment for those that are involved by creating a screening process, an information sharing network, and a system where people can interact with those around them all by creating and growing a virtual community around it. It is sad to say that corporate America is lagging behind the online sex trade for fully using web 2.0 applications to their fullest.
http://www.buzznetworker.com/do-pros...orate-america/





Interpol Launches Global Hunt for Internet Paedophile
AFP

Interpol on Monday launched an unprecedented worldwide hunt for a man who it said had posted pictures on the Internet of himself raping young boys in Vietnam or Cambodia.

The International Criminal Police Organisation, based in Lyon, France, issued a global request for assistance on its website along with a picture of the wanted suspect recovered from one of his own images.

"For years, images of this man sexually abusing children have been circulating on the Internet," Interpol chief Ronald Noble said in a statement.

"We have tried all other means to identify and to bring him to justice, but we are now convinced that without the public's help this sexual predator could continue to rape and sexually abuse young children whose ages appear to range from six to early teens."

This was "the first time the organisation has made such an appeal," Interpol stressed.

A special crimes unit in Germany managed to produce the picture of the man from one of his photos that had been altered on the web. The original had been digitally 'swirled' to disguise his face.

The recovered picture shows a white man in his 30s or early 40s, shaven, with receding dark hair.

His identity and nationality remain unknown despite efforts by 186 Interpol offices and specialist units.

According to the police organisation, some 200 photos have been circulating of the man assaulting 12 different young boys. They appeared to have been taken in Vietnam and Cambodia, two countries that have gained reputations as destinations for sex tourism.

Noble said "we have very good reason to believe that he travels the world in order to sexually abuse and exploit vulnerable children."

Kristin Kvigne, the assistant director of Interpol's Trafficking in Human Beings Unit, said: "We are certainly not encouraging members of the public to take any direct action themselves, particularly since any positive identification would need to be confirmed by law enforcement authorities."

But she urged anyone who recognised the man to contact police or Interpol representatives in their country.

The appeal and photographs of the man were on www.interpol.int
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...e0oiKMSl-ZtEzg





Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos
Carol Vogel

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.

The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like “This is art?” before showing the vandals at work.

No guards were on duty in the gallery, said Viveca Ohlsson, the show’s curator, although security videos captured much of the incident.

“There was one woman who works at the gallery who tried to stop them until she saw the axes and crowbars,” Ms. Ohlsson said. “These men are dangerous.”

By the time the masked men had finished, half the show — seven 50-by-60-inch photographs, worth some $200,000 over all — had been destroyed. The men left behind leaflets reading, “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” The fliers listed no name or organization.

“I was shocked and horrified,” Mr. Serrano said in a telephone interview yesterday from New York. “I never expected something like this, especially in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like something out of Harry Potter.”

Mr. Serrano said he had flown to Sweden for the opening and was met with great enthusiasm by gallery visitors. “The reaction was so positive,” he said. “I could never imagine anything like this happening.”

Officials at the local police station said yesterday that the vandals had not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.

Ms. Ohlsson said the attack was clearly well planned. “We think that they had been at the gallery a few days before,” she said. “They knew where to go.”

The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals went to the black room, where Ms. Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit racier.

This is not the first time Mr. Serrano’s work has been attacked, physically or in words. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire from conservative politicians and religious groups for helping to finance a $15,000 grant to Mr. Serrano related to past work that included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. A print of that work was attacked and destroyed in 1997 when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in Melbourne, Australia.

It is not the first time the Kulturen Gallery has seen violence, either. About 10 years ago vandals raced into the gallery and put paint on images by a Swedish photographer.

“The History of Sex” remains on view, but with bolstered security, Ms. Ohlsson said, explaining that the group had threatened on the Internet to attack the show again.

Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano’s New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea exhibited his “History of Sex” photographs in 1997, said she was horrified by the attack in Sweden. “Art inflames people,” she said.

Ms. Cooper said that her gallery was working to replace the destroyed photographs as soon as possible so they could go back on view in Lund. (Mr. Serrano produced each in editions of three.)

After “The History of Sex” closes in Lund in December, it is to travel to the Alingsas Art Museum in Alingsas, Sweden.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/ar...gn/09serr.html





Toned-Down Version of 'Manhunt 2,' Approved in U.S., is Still Banned in U.K.
AP

British regulators on Monday banned a toned-down version of the violent video game "Manhunt 2," saying the changes didn't go far enough to alter the game's "bleakness and callousness of tone."

The game's maker called the decision "a setback for video games."

In June, Take Two Interactive Inc. suspended plans to distribute the game - because it was rejected by the Entertainment Software Rating Board in the United States and by regulators in Europe - but finally agreed, two months later, to release the revised version.

The game, made by Take-Two's studio Rockstar Games, allows players to assume the role of an escapee from a mental institution who can go on a killing rampage.

In the U.S., the less-violent version eventually was accepted by the rating board, an industry group, and received a Mature rating, meaning it is appropriate for consumers age 17 or older. It will ship on Halloween for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo Wii game systems.

But the British Board of Film Classification said it was unsatisfied with the changes, which included blurring out some of the game's execution-style kills.

"The impact of the revisions on the bleakness and callousness of tone, or the essential nature of the game play, is clearly insufficient," BBFC director David Cooke said in a statement.

Cooke said it was up to Take-Two and Rockstar Games to resubmit a further edited version. Rockstar Games said it would appeal.

"The changes necessary in order to publish the game in Britain are unacceptable to us and represent a setback for video games," Rockstar Games said in a statement. "The BBFC allows adults the freedom to decide for themselves when it comes to horror in movies and we think adults should be similarly allowed to decide for themselves when it comes to horror in video games, such as Manhunt 2."

Rockstar Games did not explain in detail what it was about the BBFC's current demands that were unacceptable compared to the earlier alterations made for the U.S. market.

Take-Two shares rose a penny to $18.06 in midday trading.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_7119316





Report: Imus To Return December 1
FMQB

Last week, it was reported that Don Imus was close to finalizing a deal with Citadel to return to the radio. Now sources tell the Washington Post that Imus' comeback has a start date of December 1. The Post reports that a new contract between Imus and Citadel Broadcasting will likely be finalized by the end of the week. Sources also told the paper that, as predicted, Imus would be taking over mornings at WABC/New York, with his show back in syndication once again.

There are also suggestions that Imus would bring his show back to TV as well, and he has floated the idea that the show could be a fit on the new Fox Business Network, though no official negotiations have begun.

While nothing has been said on the record yet, Citadel CEO Farid Suleman did tell the New York Times over the weekend that "[Imus] did something wrong. He didn’t break the law. He’s more than paid the price for what he did. I think he should be evaluated by what he does going forward." Suleman did not, however, confirm or deny that Citadel was in negotiations with Imus.

Advertising Age has asked some top advertisers if they would return to running spots during Imus' show, if he comes back. While General Motors had suspended its advertising on his show when the controversy began in the spring, a spokeswoman for GM told Ad Age the company wouldn't buy ad time until it knew what his new program would be about. Natalie Swed Stone, OMD's head of radio buying, added that she "couldn't see why" advertisers wouldn't want to return to running ads with Imus once again.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=490075





Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family
Patricia Cohen

David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.

But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.

“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”

His sister Amy Schulz Johnson felt the same. “The whole thing is completely wrong,” she said from her home in Utah. “I think he wanted to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family.”

“We were all really excited thinking we were going to get to say things about our Dad,” she said, complaining that the children play a very small role in the book.

Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some members of the family were, but that “to their children fathers are always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that paterfamilias.” After interviewing hundreds of people, going through every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive research, Mr. Michaelis said, “this was the man I found.”

“Did I get the story right?” he asked. “Absolutely. No question.”

Mr. Michaelis referred to numerous interviews throughout Charles Schulz’s life in which he talked about his own “melancholy” and anxieties. “I have this awful feeling of impending doom,” he said on “60 Minutes” in 1999. “I wake up to a funeral-like atmosphere.” Many portraits of Schulz pick up the same theme. Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s 1989 biography, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,” similarly describes him as depressed and plagued by panic attacks, despite a large family and mammoth financial and critical success. Nor does it seem that Mr. Michaelis made a secret of his perspective. He wrote an appreciation of Schulz in Time magazine in December 2000 after his death at 77 in which he clearly laid out the thesis he expands on in his 655-page book, sometimes word for word.

Mr. Michaelis’s biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” which HarperCollins is releasing next week, is one of the most anticipated books of the fall publishing season. Schulz’s cartoon panels are interspersed with the text, and Mr. Michaelis uses them as revelations of the artist’s emotions.

“He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’”

“A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said.

Biographers often find themselves at odds with the friends and families of their subjects. Clearly a loved one is not necessarily objective, a family may want to protect a reputation or may be unaware of hidden events or aspects of someone’s character. Janet Malcolm, in a well-known provocative essay, offered another analysis, describing the relationship between a journalist and a subject as innately deceptive and the journalist as “kind of a confidence man.” Elements of all these explanations have been invoked.

Jean Schulz, Charles’ second wife, said she read about three-quarters of Mr. Michaelis’s third draft. She didn’t disagree that her husband, whom friends called Sparky, was “melancholy,” but she said that was only part of the story: “It’s not a full portrait. Sparky was so much more. Most of the time he loved to laugh.

“Part of what puzzles people about Sparky was that he talked about the actual physical sensation that he had from being anxious, the ‘sense of dread’ when he got up in the morning. But he had a Buddhist acceptance of life and its ups and downs. He functioned perfectly well.

“David couldn’t put everything in,” she said, but added, “I think Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the football: “Happiness is not funny.”

What particularly disturbed her, she said, were Mr. Michaelis’s judgments. “Every artist has to take a point of view,” she said, “but if David is going to say that Sparky is a consistently mean man, then you need to back it up.”

“The attribution is very vague,” she said, mentioning anonymous quotations.

Mr. Michaelis’s source notes for each chapter are organized by subject, so it can be difficult to attach a particular quote to a particular source.

Jean Schulz said that she had found factual errors, many of them trivial, like whether a Redwood tree was dug up, but that “it just makes me wonder about other things in the book.” Mr. Michaelis “obviously took notes,” she said, but some things were clearly “mistranscribed or misinterpreted.”

Monte Schulz cited a number of small inaccuracies, including a mention of a housekeeper serving dinner after she no longer worked for the family; an incorrect reference to his father hearing him lecture at a writer’s workshop; and what Monte said was a ridiculously low estimate for building an ice-skating rink, which made it seem as if there were a more than a 1,000 percent cost overrun.

He said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being portrayed as an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said, “I am not talking to anybody about anything.” Meredith Hodges, who grew up as one of Schulz’s five children, only discovered as an adult that he was not her biological father. She describes him in the book as “cold,” “distant” and “afraid to love,” and she wrote in an e-mail message, “No comment.”

Mr. Michaelis in his biography describes Schulz as extremely generous, devoted to his children, modest and funny, and Joyce as energetic, capable and vibrant, but those traits do not get nearly as much space. Amy Schulz Johnson, who described Schulz as “the most amazing Christ-like father,” complained that Mr. Michaelis played up the negative and left out the positive. “We all got deceived,” she said.

Still, Jean Schulz is sympathetic to the notion of a writer’s or artist’s creative vision, pointing to her own husband. “David is writing this for himself,” she said. “He’s got to be satisfied.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/books/08schu.html





Connecticut Man Sues, Saying Demon Murder Claim was a Hoax
John Christoffersen

Carl Glatzel Jr. says he's a happily married building contractor. The last thing he wanted was a book reviving a claim that he and his brother were under the spell of demons that led to a killing decades ago by a family acquaintance.

Glatzel is suing famed psychic Lorraine Warren and author Gerald Brittle, who last year reprinted his book "The Devil in Connecticut." The lawsuit, filed in Danbury Superior Court, was announced Monday and seeks unspecified damages.

"He thought this whole thing was behind him," said Gregory Nolan, Glatzel's attorney. "He doesn't want everyone to think of him as the guy who was possessed by Satan."

The book focuses on Arne Cheyenne Johnson, a Glatzel family acquaintance who was convicted of manslaughter in the fatal stabbing of his landlord, Alan Bono, 40, in 1981. Johnson claimed he killed Bono under the devil's spell after challenging the devil to leave 12-year-old David Glatzel.

A judge refused to allow Johnson's defense of innocent by demonic possession. But the case attracted widespread attention and led to a 1983 NBC television movie, "The Demon Murder Case," that starred Andy Griffith, Cloris Leachman and Kevin Bacon.

Lorraine Warren and her late husband, Ed, worked on the case as demonologists. The couple was challenged in the 1970s over the "Amityville Horror" case, in which Ed Warren said a supposedly haunted house in New York proved the existence of demons.

Carl Glatzel Jr., a 42-year-old Brookfield resident, says the demon claim was a hoax designed to bring the Warrens money and fame. He says his brother David suffered a mental illness as a boy that led to hallucinations and delusions, but has since recovered and now has his own construction business.

"They saw a gold mine," Glatzel said. "We're not going to be ridiculed again."

Glatzel said he and his brother were shunned by friends and classmates and had troubled getting work later because of the notoriety of the case. He said his brother did not want to comment.

"It was living hell when we were kids," Glatzel said Tuesday. "It was just a nightmare. I'm not going to go through that again. Neither is my brother."

Warren, an 80-year-old Monroe resident, called the lawsuit "ridiculous," saying it came 25 years after the book was first published. She said six Catholic priests attended the exorcisms and she and her husband witnessed some of the behavior.

"You can't even believe the things we witnessed in that home and to that boy who was 11 at the time," Warren said. "He came under hideous attacks."

David Glatzel levitated, Warren claimed.

"He'd go right up off the bed," Warren said. "He had marks all over his body. He could tell things that were going to happen in the future such as the murder."

Warren declined to name the priests, except one who has since died. She said David's parents shared in the book's profits.

Brittle said he stands by the book, saying it was based on statements from David's family, including his parents, that he recorded.

"The child was being beaten by unseen hands," Brittle said. "The child was being levitated."

Carl Glatzel said his parents received $2,000 from the book publisher. His father, Carl Glatzel Sr., denied telling the author that his son was possessed.

Johnson, who was released from prison in 1986, married Glatzel's sister, Deborah. They still contend the account of demons was true and say Carl Glatzel is suing to make money.

Carl Glatzel said he wants to set the record straight. The Warrens manipulated dysfunctional families, he said.

"We couldn't do half the stuff we wanted to do in life," Glatzel said. "They made me sound like a freak from outer space."
http://www.newstimes.com/region/ci_7128094





Co-Founder of Skype Defends Its Value
Victoria Shannon

In his first public remarks since quitting last week as chief executive of the Internet phone company Skype, Niklas Zennstrom said Tuesday that he had no regrets about his handling of the company but conceded that he might have tried to squeeze money out of it too quickly.

EBay, the online auction company that paid $2.6 billion for Skype in 2005, said last week that it would take a $1.43 billion charge for the service.

EBay has retained Mr. Zennstrom as Skype’s nonexecutive chairman. Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, will fill in as chief executive until a permanent successor is hired.

The write-down was widely seen as a concession that eBay had overpaid for Skype, but Mr. Zennstrom, a Swede who was a co-founder of the company in 2003, defended its value.

In the second quarter, revenue grew 100 percent from a year earlier, to $90 million, and the company recorded a profit in the first quarter, he said.

About 220 million people, most of them outside the United States, are registered with Skype, which uses the Internet to carry phone conversations between personal computers.

“It’s not like it’s been overtaken by Microsoft or Google or Yahoo,” Mr. Zennstrom said at a technology conference here. “Over the longer term, I think it’s going to turn out to be a good business.”

Revenue and earnings projections made by Skype executives before the sale to eBay turned out to be “a bit front-loaded,” he said.

“Sometimes I feel like we tried to monetize too rapidly,” Mr. Zennstrom said.

While he and his co-founder, Janus Friis, could have made more money if they had stayed on and hit undisclosed financial goals over the next two years, Mr. Zennstrom said it was his choice to leave now.

“I made a decision to phase myself out,” he added. “For me, that was always the intention. That was a very natural process. The question is, when do you do that? In this case, it was when the company is in a good position in the market and you feel confidence in your team.”

Mr. Zennstrom is focusing on his newest business, Joost, a broadband Internet television service. Joost opened its Web site to the public this week after an invitation-only trial period, although the software is still being tested.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/te...y/10skype.html





Happy 1st Anniversary YouTube and Google; Now Move Over a Bit
Mark Hendrickson

Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience - which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position - we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/10...ve-over-a-bit/





Internet Company to Let Consumers Profit From Posted Videos
Victoria Shannon

Blinkx, an Internet video search company based in London, will allow consumers to make money from the videos they show on their own blogs, social network sites or home pages if they agree to embed advertising in the videos.

By combining two Internet trends — social networking and online video — with a moneymaking opportunity, Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube, the market-leading video-sharing service owned by Google, said the founder and chief executive of Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake.

Google said yesterday that it would allow Web sites in its advertising network to use some YouTube content and share advertising revenue. In a similar vein, Revver.com, which shares 50 percent of its ad revenue with people who post videos on its site, includes its ads before and after the videos.

Blinkx, however, has until now concentrated on its role as a video search engine. The company, which was spun off from the British software firm Autonomy in May, uses speech-to-text transcription and visual recognition technology to sift through Internet videos.

On Monday, Blinkx started offering search capabilities in French, German and Spanish. It is indexing content from 200 European sources and sites with more than one million hours of non-English video content, including Eurosport, Euronews, TF1, Elmundo, Le Monde and Spiegel TV.

Under Blinkx’s new program, to be formally introduced in London today, Internet video fans can post film clips to their sites and then submit them to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.

Each time the video is watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places — either in a small transparent window at the bottom of the video screen or in a box outside the top of the frame.

Every time an ad is clicked, the host Web site for the video will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies, based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies for each click.

“This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards,” Mr. Chandratillake said.

He said the choice of ad display was up to the host, adding that the ads were no more distracting than the banner ads now common on Internet pages.

Many Web sites — especially social networks like MySpace and Facebook — allow users to borrow and embed video on their personalized pages. Others, usually professional media companies like the BBC, do not.

Mr. Chandratillake cautioned that any income derived by bloggers and others agreeing to take the ads would not be much. “Maybe enough to pay your Internet bill at best,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/bu...a/10video.html





Sticking it to l'Homme: Canadian Co-op Forms Own ISP

Nate Anderson
Not your father's ISP

Some ISPs simply discourage end users from offering WiFi connections to neighbors; most explicitly rule it out in their terms of service. But a small Canadian ISP called Wireless Nomad actually requires it.

Nomad does things a little differently. The company is subscriber-owned, volunteer-run, and open-source friendly. It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public. Bell Canada this is not.

"People like to share," says Nomad co-founder Damien Fox when we talk about the company's history. And if WiMAX radios run cheap enough, the members of Wireless Nomad could eventually blanket much of Toronto with high-speed ‘Net access. The operation has been tough to keep running, and Fox admits that "if we knew then what we knew now... we probably wouldn't have done it because it was too crazy."

But Fox and cofounder Steve Wilton have kept Wireless Nomad up for two years already, and they hope to see the subscriber-owned model take off in more communities in Canada and the US. Here's how they did it (and keep on doing it) at a lower price than Bell Canada's own DSL offerings.

What has mandatory line-sharing done for you lately?

We recently profiled Copowi, a startup ISP in the US that claims to guarantee network neutrality to subscribers. While Copowi has visions of offering service across the US, Wireless Nomad's ambitions have been more modest. The company has been operating since 2005 in Toronto, where Damien and some friends started the service in a Toronto condo.

It's fitting that a former EFF summer intern would help launch a service without bandwidth caps or traffic shaping, but it's all made possible by government regulation. Canada has mandatory access requirements for telephone lines that require a line owner to lease out access at wholesale rates for competitors who want to resell service. In the US, such requirements initially led to competition in the DSL space, but the line-sharing rules were eventually scrapped. In 2005, a California ISP called Brand X lost an important court case in which it argued that cable companies ought to share their lines, and later that year the FCC reclassified DSL in order to exempt it too from the line-sharing requirements altogether.

Once that happened, telecoms were free to resell services if they liked, but it was no longer required, and rates could be prohibitively expensive for any ISP that hoped to compete on cost (an issue that Copowi currently faces). In Canada, despite opposition from line owners, mandatory access provisions persist and make it simpler for resellers to enter the market. According to Fox, Toronto alone has more than 100 DSL resellers, making Wireless Nomad only one among many small ISPs.

And it is small, with only 100 or so subscribers, but it can still offer DSL at a competitive price. More importantly, it can offer DSL on its own terms.

Toronto downtown coverage map

Here's how it works: every new subscriber gets a DSL connection that Wireless Nomad purchases through a wholesaler (which in turn purchases service from Bell Canada and others). All subscribers are asked to stick a wireless router on the DSL line, but these routers have been tricked out with OpenWRT, and subscribers use Chillispot to control access. The idea is to make free Internet hotspots available to WiFi users all over the city, but not to do so in such a way that a subscriber's home Internet connection is degraded.

Anyone wanting to access the wireless link needs to set up a free account and can then surf the ‘Net at a throttled speed of 64Kbps (obviously, this does not apply to wireless accounts created by the subscriber, who has access to the full speed of the connection). Sure, this is pretty slow, but when total strangers offer you free connections over their own home connection, it's hard to complain too much.

In the last two years, more than 5,000 accounts have been created, a good indication that the free service really is being used.

Small ISP, big problems

For the subscribers, it's a chance to control their own connections in a way that's not possible with most major ISPs. Fox says that the goal of Wireless Nomad is not to offer the cheapest possible service, but to create a reasonably priced system that does what people want it to do. Unfortunately for the company, most people don't have a problem with the major providers, and they like the security of big brand names. Since opening its doors in 2005, Wireless Nomad has signed up only 100 customers, but it has managed to stay afloat for two years, and the founders have learned some hard lessons along the way.

Back when Wireless Nomad began, the founders thought it sounded like a great idea. So great that it would bring in hundreds of subscribers, maybe 1,000, and would provide enough income to fund a couple of full-time jobs. They started spending money, thousands of dollars on setup fees and equipment. They signed on with a wholesaler who resold Bell Canada DSL lines and charged (on top of the fixed fees) $2 per gigabyte of data transferred. Now, all they needed was customers.

After signing on their first subscribers, everything seemed hunky-dory. The connections were live, everyone had broadband, and the WiFi was working. Viva la revolución!

Then came the first bills. Damien and Wilton found themselves immediately in debt to the wholesaler. The DSL subscribers had an unexpected thirst for data; the Wireless Nomad administrators had not set up their pricing scheme with these kind of numbers on mind. An American Express card kept the venture afloat, but the backers were now on the hook for some serious cash.

Clearly, radical changes were required if Wireless Nomad wanted to ramble on. The company immediately switched wholesalers. They found a company that offered 10GB of data per line for a fixed fee (and this was spread across all the lines Wireless Nomad purchased, so that those who used less made it possible for those who used more). This worked better, and the situation stabilized. Costs were containable, and in fact, Wireless Nomad was offering service for less than Bell Canada.

But usage continues to creep up. As YouTube, in particular, exploded in popularity, the company neared its bandwidth caps. Fox was able to work out a new arrangement with the wholesaler under which Wireless Nomad would use a different backhaul link from the wholesaler to the actual line owner, and it could then purchase truly unlimited data access for a fixed price. (Currently, subscribers average about 15GB of data transfer per line, per month.)

The situation was now sustainable, but Wireless Nomad wasn't making any sort of money to speak of. The setup and administration work were done by volunteers, and Fox and the others had to hang on to day jobs.

A lesson in wholesale economics

For anyone considering a similar undertaking in their own community, here's how the numbers break down. According to Fox, Bell Canada charges end users about CAN$45 a month for DSL. It offers that same link at wholesale rates for around CAN$22, but it can be especially difficult for a small startup to work directly with a company like Bell. That's why Wireless Nomad buys from another wholesaler which aggregates all of its orders and deals directly with Bell to get the lines switched on and off. The wholesaler charges CAN$26 for a line, and Wireless Nomad pays another CAN$1 each month per line to have the company handle some tech support issues.

Many of Wireless Nomad's subscribers want to pay with credit card, which means a cost of CAN$1.50 each month to pay the card processor. That makes a grand total of CAN$28.50 in fixed costs.

Wireless Nomad currently charges customers CAN$37 a month for a DSL line, making a profit of CAN$8.50 per line. Well, not quite a profit, since the company also has to cover the cost of bad accounts, the cost of hardware, and its past debts (note: credit card debt can turn out to be really, really expensive). The upshot: no one makes any money.

In fact, things are so tight that Wireless Nomad uses a "Linux café" in Toronto (complete with inflatable penguin) as a mail and equipment drop to save money.

Not owning one's own lines can also be a constant source of frustration, since the company is dependent on line owners to activate new accounts. This requires the submission of the exact information from a phone bill, and then a wait of five days for the line to activate. It "should not take this long," says Fox, but what can he do?

Future plans

Despite its small size, Wireless Nomad has tried some innovative ideas. The free WiFi running on open-source firmware is certainly one of the most obvious, but the company has also experimented with running a mesh network that could theoretically allow even those at a great distance from the DSL-linked hotspot to get access without a DSL connection of their own. The idea is that a wireless router a few houses down from the main DSL link could relay the signal to another router even further down the block, and so on. If this worked properly, it could reduce the needed number of DSL circuits and could lower prices for all the co-op owners.

Unfortunately, this was one of those not-quite-ready-for-primetime ideas, and it failed to live up to expectations. The idea was shelved soon after it was tried, but in retrospect, Fox wonders if the problem was simply the fragility of WiFi signals. They don't propagate well and are notoriously susceptible to interference. This made the mesh perpetually unstable and gave poor performance. But what if each WiFi radio could cover miles instead of meters?

That's the promise of WiMAX, and Fox clings to the dream of hitching WiMAX radios up to the end of his subscribers' DSL lines to blanket Toronto with signals. Obviously, throwing open a DSL link to hundreds of simultaneous users invites total meltdown, but Fox suggests keeping the distance down and charging users a few bucks a months for access. Since the company has purchased truly unlimited access, there's no danger of being booted for slurping up too much bandwidth in a month, and even a few subscribers could offer service over a good portion of the city.

But WiMAX is a ways off. For now, Fox recommends that those interested in starting their own co-op ISP realize a few practical things.

First, it's tough. People like brand names, even for ISPs, and they don't trust small providers to stay in business or to solve their tech support problems. That means that attracting users will be difficult. Keep expectations low and expansion plans realistic.

Second, prepare for the costs. Understand exactly what service level you're buying from a wholesaler, and do worry about setup fees, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Third, recognize that this stuff is complicated. Fox points out that WiFi is easy compared to the complexity of getting a DSL connection to that spot. The heavy lifting (and trench-digging, and DSLAM-owning, and line maintenance) might be invisible to end users and even to some ISPs, but broadband is a real technical challenge. There will be problems; find good technical people to help.

With all the challenges, why bother? Fox bothers because he's helping to give a few people real control over their ‘Net connection at a reasonable price, and he's providing a small but useful public service. He knew just how useful it could be when he looked out of his window one day and saw Bell Canada employees in the park across the street surfing on their laptops.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...ms-own-ISP.ars





PCs to Be Seen, Not Heard
Peter Wayner

JOSH SHENKLE knew that he couldn’t hook up any old PC to the 106-inch Panasonic projection television in his home theater. Most computers come with buzzing fans, whirring disk drives and whining capacitors that compete with the sound system.

“After a while, the noise gets to you during quiet scenes,” he said. “It overwhelms you and takes you away from the movie.”

Computer users who want silent offices and living rooms are starting to ask for quiet computers. Manufacturers are taking notice. Some new computers like the Apple iMac or the Alienware Area-51 7500 are marketed for their silence. A number of other manufacturers are responding by starting to work on quieting their machines.

An aftermarket of parts that people can use to tweak their machines with quieter fans and silent drives is emerging. Some small companies like Zalman are charging more than $5,000 for ultraquiet machines aimed at sound recording studios and home theaters.
Mr. Shenkle, a technical analyst in Minneapolis, ended up building his own PC inside the Antec Sonata 2 (www.antec.com), a computer case engineered to be extraordinarily quiet.

“What’s nice about the Antec 2 is that it has a temperature-sensing power supply with attachments specifically for the fan,” he said. “When the temperature does rise, it will speed up the fans.”

Heat is a product of computation, and every decision a computer makes about a spreadsheet, the color of a Web site’s background or the trajectory of a race car in a game produces a tiny bit of heat. When modern chips make billions of decisions in a second, the heat adds up.

“Most of the noise is related to cooling,” says Mike Chin, the editor of silentpcreview.com. “What you want to do is have the most effective cooling flow with the slowest fans.”

Mr. Chin started his Web site more than five years ago when he became annoyed with the loud machines on the market. Today, he makes his living writing on the topic, reviewing products and designing machines for manufacturers like Cool Tech PC (www.endpcnoise.com).

Mr. Chin says that the simplest way to cut noise is to use larger variable-speed fans that run no faster than necessary to keep the computer cool. If the components inside the case are arranged to make it easier for the air to flow smoothly without negotiating tight corners, the work is that much easier.

He also recommends using quieter disk drives and mounting them with special rubber gaskets that keep any vibrations from radiating through the case. These two steps may make the biggest difference.

But Mr. Chin said it was impossible to completely eliminate the noise that comes from the circuitry itself. “In lots of cases, the noise in a power supply or a motherboard is covered up by fans. You make things quiet enough, the buried noises are plainly audible.”

Mr. Chin’s Web site reviews different components by measuring the sound with a decibel meter and trying to characterize the nature of the sound. Both manufacturers and people who want quiet computers read it regularly to compare the sound emitted by various components.

A number of manufacturers are using these tricks when selling complete systems. “Our typical customer is spending upwards of $2,000 to $5,000 on a PC,” said Jon Schoenborn of Cool Tech PC. “They’re not looking for cheap stuff. They want top-end parts. They’re looking for an immaculate computer.”

His company tests parts carefully for noise, checks with experts like Mr. Chin, chooses the quietest parts and then experiments with putting them together in the best way. “Assembly here is not a low-skill job,” Mr. Schoenborn said. “Our assembly people are highly trained. You can’t mass-produce these things.”

Other companies are experimenting with more exotic solutions that use heat pipes and large blocks of highly conductive metals, known as heat sinks, to carry the heat from the components to the walls of the case. Glenn Lirhus, the owner and main designer for A-Tech Fabrication (www.atechfabrication.com) in Burbank, Calif., said that some of his computers came with a big block of aluminum for mounting the disk drive, a solution he thinks is better than using shock-absorbing mounts because the block conducts the heat away from the drive without air flow.

“The main problem with the rubber washers is you get no heat transfer from the drive, so you need some air flow,” Mr. Lirhus said.

Indeed, Mr. Lirhus’s machines are a good example of the school of design that believes that large blocks of metal can cool without fans. His company’s cases come with large fins running vertically along the sides. The air heats up around the case, producing a natural breeze to cool the devices without a fan.

Heat pipes are also becoming more and more common. These sealed tubes contain a liquid that will boil near the hot spots and then condense near the cool end, effectively moving the heat.

The Zalman 300 system from the Korean company Zalman (www.zalmanusa.com) uses a network of heat pipes that connect the central processing unit and the graphics card with the case itself, which is lined with big aluminum fins. The case alone is available for $600 from www.quietpcusa.com.

Still, others question that approach, pointing out that moving air is much lighter and more effective than aluminum fins. One fan moving 10 cubic feet of air a minute “can mean the difference of 20 degrees for something like a hard drive,” Mr. Chin said. “Take away that fan, you’ll increase that temperature by 15 degrees.”

Mr. Chin said that on the noise front, the typical ambient noise level in an office was 40 decibels, and that it was not hard to get a computer to be quieter than that. But he said the noise level in his home office was usually about 20 decibels. Getting below that level is “a much tougher challenge, but it can be done with fan-cooled,” he said.

The sound from typical computers is about 35 to 45 decibels, roughly the noise of a refrigerator humming, and it is not unusual to find noisier models breaking 50 decibels or maybe even 60, the level of an office conversation.

The designers are not content to just optimize the level of sound. There are aesthetics to consider, too, so the thin metal of the heat sink is being displayed in much the same way that sports cars come with open wheels that flaunt the size of their brake calipers and the cross-drilled rotors.

Some customers are paying attention. When Carlos Rodriguez, a community manager for a Web start-up, built out the PC for his home theater, he turned to a Zalman CNPS9500, a $49 cooler for the C.P.U. that comes with hundreds of thin copper fins and weighs almost a quarter of a pound.

“It’s got huge heat-sink fins,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It’s got a 92-millimeter fan. I just can’t hear it at all. It’s big, but it’s also kind of beautiful.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/te...sics.html?8dpc





Judge Rules Gore Climate Film Requires Guidance Notes
AFP

A judge on Wednesday ruled that Al Gore's award winning climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" should only be shown in schools with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.

High Court judge Michael Burton's decision follows legal action brought by a father of two last month claiming the former US vice-president's film contained "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush".

Stewart Dimmock wanted to block the government's pledge to send more than 3,500 secondary schools in England and Wales a DVD of the documentary to demonstrate the need to fight global warming.

Judge Burton said the Oscar-winning film should be accompanied by government guidance notes and to distribute it without them would breach education laws prohibiting the promotion of unbalanced political viewpoints.

But the victory was only partial, as Dimmock failed to get the film totally banned from schools.

The lorry driver said after the case that he was "elated", but disappointed he had not secured an outright ban.

"If it was not for the case brought by myself, our young people would still be being indoctrinated with this political spin," he told reporters.

Dimmock is a member of the New Party, a fringe political organisation which describes itself as "a party of economic liberalism, political reform and internationalism."

Its supporters include industrialists and small- and medium-sized businesses. The party accepts climate change is a major issue but says the argument that it is man-made is not unequivocal.

Instead, it argues for developing new technologies, building new nuclear power stations and providing "positive incentives" for developing countries to support cleaner technologies.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1





Big Screen Embraces Hot Muse: Rock Stars
David Carr

In the second half of “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” a documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers by the director Peter Bogdanovich, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam sits in on a duet of “The Waiting.” Standing before a tumultuous crowd roaring its approval, Mr. Petty turns to Mr. Vedder and suggests that he enjoy the moment. “Look at that, Eddie — rock and roll heaven.”

Moviegoers might be saying the same thing for months to come. There seems to be enough projects in theaters and in development built on the intersection between celluloid and what used to be called vinyl to fill a jukebox.

“Runnin’ Down a Dream” is one of three musically themed movies scheduled for the closing weekend of the New York Film Festival, along with “The Other Side of the Mirror,” a Bob Dylan documentary, and “Fados,” a look at the Portuguese musical tradition.

The music of the Beatles is currently reimagined in Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe.” Today “Control,” a dramatic feature about the Manchester sad-core band Joy Division, will have its theatrical release, to be followed next month by Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There,” featuring six performers all taking turns as avatars of Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese, whose Rolling Stones documentary will come out next year, just signed on for a documentary about George Harrison.

And after a summer that saw musicals and biopics like “Hairspray,” “El Cantante” and “La Vie en Rose,” a modest movie called “Once,” starring the Frames front man Glen Hansard, continues to play in theaters, powered by ardent word of mouth.

Mr. Bogdanovich, who was invited to make a film about the 30-year career of a master of the three-minute pop song and responded with a nearly four-hour documentary, said that music in general and that of Mr. Petty is often a gateway to bigger themes.

“Tom Petty is a particularly American story,” he said. “And I think that pop music has always been a very good indicator of where we are in the narrative of contemporary history.”

The Petty documentary will probably not have a big theatrical run — Best Buy will sell the DVD exclusively — but the film’s backer, Warner Brothers Records, hopes that all sorts of Petty fans will snap up a documentary about a man with 50 million in all-time sales. (It’s also releasing a concert DVD of a 30th-anniversary show in Gainesville, Fla., Mr. Petty’s hometown.)

The movie looks back in cultural history to a time before “rock stars were invented on game shows,” as Mr. Petty wryly observes. It also serves as a vivid reminder that Mr. Petty remains one of the coolest guys out of the South since William Faulkner, a straight-ahead rocker who got the likes of Mr. Dylan, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Mr. Harrison to play with him.

In the midst of movie clutter, familiar musical figures offer one way to catch audience attention. The music biopic stretches back decades to movies like “Night and Day” (about Cole Porter) and “The Gene Krupa Story,” and the link between musical and visual forms was cemented by MTV back when the network actually used to show music videos. Following a path taken by singers like Frank Sinatra, there is a host of musical stars today who have found traction as film actors, including Jennifer Hudson, Ice-T, Ludacris and Queen Latifah.

The music and film industries might be forming a more steadfast alliance partly to ward off disruptive technologies that allow people to partake without paying, but those same technologies are part of what makes music-oriented projects more likely to be undertaken and potentially more lucrative. Even beyond taking advantage of vastly improved theatrical sound systems, both in theaters and in the home, such films have become a rich source of DVDs, downloads and accompanying compilation and inspired-by albums, like Jay-Z’s take on Ridley Scott’s forthcoming “American Gangster.” (Sometimes a musical companion can outlive and surpass the film itself, as arguably happened with “Garden State,” a record that is still passed around as mood music for an alternative universe.)

“In a digital age, there is a crossover in delivery systems — iTunes and the Web, DVDs — that allows for both musical and film experience,” said Richard Peña, program director of the New York Film Festival. “The technological changes have had an effect on the films themselves as well. You have more and more complex soundtracks, to the point where soundtracks become almost as important as the image tracks from the filmmakers. In the truest sense, you get a kind of audio-visual spectacle.”

Beyond providing narrative assists and serving as a platform for huge crowd-pleasers like “Dreamgirls,” pop music is built on a vast series of rabid, self-defined tribes, who will scoop up any and all products about a given artist or group. That may explain why Joy Division, a group that put out just two records and was never a huge arena band, merits not just a feature, but also a documentary, simply called “Joy Division.”

Demographics may also be playing a role. Many baby boomers whose seminal experiences were accompanied by a certain band or song are now in their prime moviemaking years. But hybrid celebrity culture is in there as well.

“The actors today are absolutely musically obsessed,” said the director James Toback, who is currently in the studio with RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, laying down tracks for his coming documentary on Mike Tyson. “When pop culture became the culture, stars of the two forms interacted and blended, inspiring desire for all sorts of crossover projects.”

Of course music won’t redeem every project. “Ray” and “Walk the Line” notwithstanding, bald attempts to capitalize on embedded awareness can head into the tank faster than you can say “From Justin to Kelly.”

And then there’s “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” the faux biopic starring John C. Reilly, coming in December from the comedy workshop of Judd Apatow. One of the surest signs that a trend is under way is that it has become worthy of parody, and “Walk Hard” riffs through many of the genre’s tendencies. After playing a few songs from the movie and showing a clip from the film last week in Los Angeles, Mr. Apatow said later by phone that he and Jake Kasdan, the film’s director, watched many of the classics and decided that the stories were all pretty much the same.

“A small-town person grows up amidst a tragedy in his family, becomes a star, cheats on his first wife, goes into rehab, falls in love, cheats on his second wife, then sobers up again, experiences a final triumph and passes away peacefully or dies horribly,” he said.

“We all know these stories from VH1’s ‘Behind the Music,’ and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/movies/10pett.html





Haunting Songs of Heartbreak, Done by a Man With Experience
A. O. Scott

In 1973, when we first encounter him, Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) is a lanky schoolboy in Macclesfield, a red-brick English town outside of Manchester, with intense but not unusual interests. Apart from cigarettes and his best friend’s girlfriend (whom he will shortly marry), these are mainly musical and literary. In his debut film, “Control,” about the last seven years of Mr. Curtis’s life, Anton Corbijn notes some of the figures in the young man’s personal canon — the expected proto-punk culture heroes (David Bowie, Lou Reed, J. G. Ballard), yes, but also William Wordsworth, whose “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” Mr. Curtis quotes from memory.

Of course, from its very first frame, “Control” is shadowed by intimations of its main character’s imminent mortality. Mr. Curtis, the lead singer in Joy Division, the great post-punk Manchester quartet, committed suicide in 1980, just before the band was to embark on its first American tour. He was 23, and in the years since his death he has become a canonical figure in his own right. Even as Joy Division’s austere, brooding songs — “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Isolation,” “She’s Lost Control” — have continued to influence musicians from all corners of the musical cosmos, they have lost very little of their glum, haunting power.

The challenge facing Matt Greenhalgh, the screenwriter, and Mr. Corbijn, a celebrity photographer who took pictures of the real Joy Division a few months before Mr. Curtis died, is how to tell this story of great promise and early death without turning it into yet another exercise in pop martyrology. How, in other words, to take account of Mr. Curtis’s artistic life and its premature end without treating them as simple cause and effect. The worst and most common failing in movies of this kind — biographies of artists, musicians in particular — is that they turn creativity into a symptom and fate into pathology. One of the great virtues of “Control” is that it does not fall into this trap. Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, it is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division’s best songs.

You hear a lot of these on the soundtrack, flawlessly performed by Mr. Riley and the other members of the cast (Joe Anderson on bass, James Anthony Pearson on guitar and Harry Treadaway as the wisecracking drummer) who turned themselves into an uncannily persuasive tribute band. (Just how good they are may not become fully apparent until you hear the real Joy Division’s version of “Atmosphere” over the end credits.)

Joy Division’s two albums were artifacts of their time that became permanent fixtures in the pop universe, available to any listener with a good reason to want a few minutes of voluptuous bad feeling. In tracing them back to their origins, Mr. Corbijn resists the temptation to pile on the evocative period details or to wallow in nostalgia for the early days of the Manchester scene. Shot in a pale, Nouvelle Vague black-and-white palette, “Control” manages to be both stylized and straightforward, avoiding overstatement even as it generates considerable intensity.

Mr. Riley, hollow-eyed and gentle-looking, is crucial to the film’s effectiveness. Since Mr. Curtis is known more by his deep, plangent voice than by his face or his physical presence, Mr. Riley does not labor under the burden of mimicry, like the recent portrayers of more famous singers like Ray Charles or Johnny Cash. His performance is quiet, charismatic and a little opaque, in keeping with the movie’s careful, detached approach to its subject.

Samantha Morton, playing Mr. Curtis’s wife, Deborah (on whose 1995 memoir, “Touching From a Distance,” the film is based), provides a necessary measure of hurt and warmth, reminding the audience that Ian Curtis’s great subject as a writer was heartbreak.

But Mr. Corbijn and Mr. Greenhalgh, to their credit, do not presume to probe the depths of Mr. Curtis’s psychology, or to find the hidden emotional sources of his songs. Instead their film shows, plainly and sufficiently, how those songs were made. They were written down in a notebook, practiced with the rest of the band and then performed in front of ever larger and more ecstatic audiences.

But the group’s progress — it wins the favor of the Manchester music guru Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) and acquires an aggressive manager in the person of Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) — is accompanied by increasing complication and strain in Mr. Curtis’s personal life. While still a teenager, he marries Deborah and becomes a father just as Joy Division is recording its first album. He begins to suffer from epileptic seizures and to worry that the medicine he takes to treat the condition will affect his moods and his mind. He also falls for a Belgian journalist named Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara), and love tears him apart, again.

“Control” tells a sad story that is also a chronicle of success, and it declines to find an easy moral either in Joy Division’s rapid rise or in its lead singer’s early death. These are things that happened, both on the intimate stage of individual life and in the larger arena of popular culture. Mr. Corbijn, no doubt aware of what this movie will mean to devotees of post-punk melancholy, sticks to the human dimensions of the narrative rather than turning out yet another show business fable. You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

“Control” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes obscenities and drug use.


CONTROL

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Anton Corbijn; written by Matt Greenhalgh, based on the book “Touching From a Distance” by Deborah Curtis; director of photography, Martin Ruhe; edited by Andrew Hulme; production designer, Chris Roope; produced by Mr. Corbijn, Orian Williams and Todd Eckert; released by the Weinstein Company. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 121 minutes.

WITH: Sam Riley (Ian Curtis), Samantha Morton (Deborah Curtis), Alexandra Maria Lara (Annik Honoré), Joe Anderson (Hooky), James Anthony Pearson (Bernard Sumner), Harry Treadaway (Steve Morris), Craig Parkinson (Tony Wilson) and Toby Kebbell (Rob Gretton).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/movies/10cont.html





Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends
Ian Rogers

Yesterday was a crazy day.

In the morning I found myself car-less and skateboarding to Santa Monica High School in a suitcoat and wool Vans with my computer in a leather satchel over my shoulder (a byproduct of sharing my car with my seventeen year-old daughter — or more accurately her sharing the car with me). In the afternoon I sat on a panel at Digital Media Forum West with the Usual Suspects (TM), and for dinner I had the pleasure of hearing David Pakman’s “drum story” (which was amazing, btw) and sushi at Ike on Hollyweird Blvd.

But in the middle I gave a brief, twenty minute presentation to some friends in the music industry about why it’s time we pay closer attention to consumer needs when it comes to digital music. I thought I’d share my presentation in case others were interested.

Enjoy,
Ian


Hello. My name is Ian Rogers. I’ve been building digital media applications since 1992, dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and have been purchased by both AOL and Yahoo! in the ten years since then, with a stint running the new media department for a record label in the middle. Currently I work at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music.

First, a question: How many of you have tried Amazon’s MP3 download service?

Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers. We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”

Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.

Nullsoft subsequently built and prematurely released a program called Gnutella which became the basis for true P2P of the coming years. When Tom Pepper told Time Magazine that Gnutella was for “sharing recipes” he really said it all: This is so much bigger than just sharing music. This is physics. It’s trivial for one person to transfer bits from one person to another. Trivial. Unstoppable. PUT YOUR ENERGY ELSEWHERE, we thought out loud.

I caught a lot of heat from my music industry friends for Nullsoft’s Gnutella leak. In a long and impassioned email in 1999 I wrote to everyone I knew in a band, at a label, or music journalism (whatup, Jay!) and urged them to sell their content to their users in the format they were asking for: MP3. Make it easy, I wrote, and convenience will beat free.

Well, we (you included) did lots of other things instead. While running “New Media” at Grand Royal I released the first day/date digital/physical release with At The Drive-In’s “Relationship of Command”. Thanks to EMI requirements (hi Ted! hi Melissa!) it was DRM’d WMA and we sold about 12 copies in the first month, probably all to journalists. Years later I helped Yahoo! build Yahoo! Music Unlimited, a Windows Media Janus DRM-based subscription service. Record labels for their part participated in no end of control experiments: SDMI, Liquid Audio, Pressplay, Coral, etc, and they continue to this day.

But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.

Yahoo! Music demonstrates this scale discrepancy perfectly. Yahoo! is the world’s #1 Internet destination. Hundreds of millions of people visit Yahoo! each month. Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors. Between 10 and 20 million people watch music videos on Yahoo! Music every month. Between 5 and 10 million people listen to radio on Yahoo! Music every month. But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions (sorry, we don’t release subscriber numbers, but the aggregate number proves the point), even after years of marketing by all three companies. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.

But this isn’t news, nor is it particular to the digital age. History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses.

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

By way of illustration (and via exaggeration), in a manner of speaking iTunes is a spreadsheet that plays music. It’s context-free. You just paid $10 for that album — who plays drums? I dunno, WHY DON’T YOU GO TO THE WEB TO FIND OUT, BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE THE CONTEXT IS.

But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.

So we have media consumption experiences with no context (desktop media players) and an incredible, endless, emergent contextual experience where media consumption is a pain in the ass, illegal, or non-existent (the Web). FIX IT. Your fans are pouring their music-loving hearts into blogs, Wikipedia, etc and what tools have you given them to work with? Not much, unfortunately.

This is what I’m vowing to devote my energy, and Yahoo!’s energy to.

Lets envision the end state and drive there as quickly as possible. Lets not waste another eight years on what is obvious today. Lets build the tools of a healthy media Web and reward music-lovers for being a part of it.

In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same.

Thanks for listening.



EPILOGUE:

I wrote this on Thursday but didn’t have time to pull the images together and post. Last night (Friday) I took my mom to the Getty to see Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Mom and I saw Jimmie about fifteen years ago in Bloomington, Indiana. Lots changed for both mom and me in those fifteen years in-between, but Jimmie has only gotten better. His voice is hauntingly beautiful and he nailed every song, even a couple which he said he hadn’t done in a while but would “try”. Mom was cute, she’s in love with Jimmie and was so excited when he walked out on stage she leaned forward in her second-row seat a little and said, “Oh my God!” like she couldn’t believe he was really standing there in front of her. She would turn to me throughout the show to call out a Townes Van Zandt song from the opening riff or ask if it was ok if she sang along with “Dallas”. Anyone who wonders where I get my music nerd-ness from need look no further.

By his own admission, Jimmie’s never met a digression he didn’t like. He tells stories on stage which are things you might expect him to say in the mirror. “What I’ve learned is that when I’m on stage I find out what it is I’m thinking,” he half-joked. But in his very first monologue as he was talking about playing the Getty Museum he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about content and context lately. As it turns out, there is only context.” Given that I had just made my mom read a draft of the above post before we left, it was a little eerie.

Afterward Jimmie was in the lobby signing autographs. I didn’t want an autograph but I did want to know why the hell he’s been thinking so much about content vs. context. I waited until the autographing was mostly over, introduced mom and myself, and asked. “Don’t get him started,” said his manager. But start he did, and he told us it was the Buddhist concept he’d been considering, and that the notion that anything was without context wasn’t really plausible. I told him I’d been thinking a lot about content vs. context, too, but from a different perspective (in a different context, I suppose you could say).

But they’re related. Music is never without context. Digital music context isn’t nearly as good as it could be. Context is where the opportunity is and therefore where the innovation will be. The next five years is gonna be fun. I think we’re finally going to see some innovation in digital media.

Ian

http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=127





Sting Tops List of Worst Lyricists

Maybe Sting should start writing more instrumentals. The school teacher-turned-rock star topped Blender's list of the worst lyricists, thanks to lines that betray "mountainous pomposity (and) cloying spirituality," the music magazine said.

The survey, contained in the November issue that hits newsstands next week, placed Rush drummer Neil Peart at No. 2, Creed frontman Scott Stapp at No. 3, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher at No. 4, and soft-rocker Dan Fogelberg at No. 5.

Blender assailed Sting for such alleged sins as name-dropping Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov in the Police tune "Don't Stand So Close to Me," quoting a Volvo bumper sticker ("If You Love Someone Set Them Free"), and co-opting the works of Chaucer, St. Augustine and Shakespeare.

A spokeswoman for the English rocker, who is currently in Belgium on the Police's reunion world tour, did not respond to a request for comment.

Blender described Canadian rocker Peart's lyrics as "richly awful tapestries of fantasy and science," and said Gallagher "seemed incapable of following a metaphor through a single line, let alone a whole verse."

Further down the ranks, Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant (No. 23) was derided for his Tolkienesque musings on Gollum and Mordor in "Ramble On."

Carly Simon (No. 31) was mocked for rhyming "yacht," "apricot" and "gavotte" in "You're So Vain."

Paul McCartney made No. 38, thanks in part to "Ebony and Ivory," his socially conscious duet with Stevie Wonder.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...45096420071009





Jordan Jails Royal Critic Over e-Mails

A critic of Jordan's royal family was sentenced to two years in jail on Tuesday for sending e-mails abroad that the court ruled to be carrying "false news" and harmful to the dignity of the state.

The verdict against Ahmad Oweidi al-Abbadi, after a two-month trial, comes at a time that human rights groups are voicing concern about what they call an official clampdown on the media.

Judicial sources said Abbadi, a right-wing former deputy, was found guilty on three charges of undermining state dignity, publishing "false news" on e-mails sent to foreign figures and illegally distributing leaflets.

Abbadi had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Before his arrest, Abbadi had stepped up criticism of Jordan's royal family and accused top officials of corruption on a Web site he ran. Supporters said he had sent an e-mail to U.S. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid decrying what he called a steep rise in official corruption.

Authorities announced this month that Web sites would be subject to a tough press law that is widely seen as censorship. The law bans articles seen as being in contempt of religion, damaging to national unity or offensive to public morals.

Jordan has tough laws against slandering King Abdullah or Jordan's royal family.

International human rights groups have denounced Abbadi's arrest as politically motivated and called for his release.

Abbadi is from a prominent tribe that wields big influence in Jordan's security services and government.

The 62-year old former police colonel and author of dozens of books on Jordan's tribal roots has long held strong views against the presence of Palestinians who settled in the kingdom after successive Arab-Israeli wars.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...95910320071009





Argentine Priest Receives Life Sentence in ‘Dirty War’ Killings
Alexei Barrionuevo

An Argentine tribunal sentenced a Roman Catholic priest to life in prison on Tuesday for conspiring with the military in murders and kidnapping during the country’s “dirty war” against leftist opponents, in a case that has become for many a powerful symbol of the church’s complicity with the former regime.

The Rev. Christian von Wernich, who worked as a police chaplain during the military dictatorship, was found guilty of involvement in seven murders, 31 cases of torture and 42 kidnappings. He is the first Catholic priest prosecuted in connection with human rights violations in Argentina, where at least 12,000 people were killed during the military regime from 1976 to 1983.

Seconds after the sentence was read, hundreds of protesters cheered and fireworks were shot off outside the courthouse in La Plata, about 50 miles from Buenos Aires. Father von Wernich, who wore a bulletproof vest in court, clasped his hands and frowned.
Nearly a quarter of a century after the junta was toppled in 1983 and democracy was restored, the trial of Father von Wernich has forced Argentina to confront the church’s dark past during the dirty war. It illustrated how closely some Argentine priests, who had strongly aligned themselves with the power of the military, worked with the regime’s leaders.

Over several months of often chilling testimony during the trial, witnesses spoke about how Father von Wernich was present at torture sessions in clandestine detention centers. They said he extracted confessions to help the military root out perceived enemies, while at the same time offering comforting words and hope to family members searching for loved ones who had been kidnapped by the government.

His lawyer, Juan Martín Cerolini, maintained that Father von Wernich had been made a “Catholic scapegoat” for those who wanted to prosecute the church. Father von Wernich fled Argentina for Chile but was found in 2003 in the seaside town of El Quisco by a group of journalists and human rights advocates. He was working as a priest under the name Christian González.

Argentina’s past stands in stark contrast to the role the church played during the dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, where priests and bishops publicly condemned the governments and worked to save those being persecuted from torture and death.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/wo...argentina.html





Going dark

Burma Shuts Down Last Communication Links
Ian MacKinnon

Burma's regime is targeting the last remaining communications links that brought images of the bloody crackdown on the recent pro-democracy protests to the outside world.

Exiled dissident groups in neighbouring Thailand say up to 10 satellite telephones and countless computers earlier smuggled into Burma have been seized, the last lines of contact after the government shut down the internet and blocked mobile and fixed-line telephones.

Officials from Burma's foreign affairs ministry and home department security officers also visited a UN office in the Traders Hotel in downtown Rangoon late last week and demanded to see the organisation's permits for its satellite phones.

Article continues

The officials also inspected the Japan International Co-operation Agency at the Sakura Tower and offices at the Sedona Hotel, which has a vantage point overlooking the Shwedagon Pagoda, one of the flashpoints for the demonstrations.

"I think they came to the Traders Hotel and Sakura Tower in an effort to identify the systems that allowed information about the demonstrations to get out," said a UN official.

The junta's determination to snuff out the last trickles of information signals its paranoia over the damage images of the military's suppression of the demonstrations had inflicted. The pictures, coupled with accounts from bloggers, fuelled the international community's anger over the beatings and arrests of monks, and the killing of at least 13 that heightened demands for tougher sanctions.

Among the most shocking were images of a monk floating face down in a pool and others of the Japanese video journalist, Kenji Nagai, being shot at close range, giving the lie to the regime's claim that he died accidentally from a stray bullet.

Yesterday Burmese exiles, family members and fellow journalists in Tokyo paid their last respects at the funeral of the 50-year-old, who died from massive blood loss after a bullet pierced his liver.

The ceremony came as the 15-member UN Security Council met in New York to debate a resolution condemning Burma's "violent repression of peaceful demonstrations" while calling for a halt to the regime's heavy-handed measures.

Burma's military leaders last night named deputy labour minister Aung Kyi as the "manager for relations" to build bridges with opposition groups. His chief concern will be the junta's dealings with the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in line with a suggestion by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari to Burma's leader, General Than Shwe.

Despite the apparently conciliatory gestures, the arrests of those suspected of taking part in the 100,000 pro-democracy marches were reportedly still continuing in Rangoon. Among those taken were the owners of computers suspected of being used to transmit images and testimony to the outside world.

Yesterday the British and US embassies in Rangoon, reachable by phone until late last week, were impossible to get through to from outside the country. British ambassador Mark Canning and US charge d'affaires Shari Villarosa were outspoken critics of the regime's actions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/burma/stor...186651,00.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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