[JackSpratts]

For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate
John Markoff

When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?

Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as “a really wacky idea.”

Ms. Jepsen, a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen’s manufacturing cost to $40 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As a bonus, the display is clearly visible in sunlight.

That advance and others have allowed the nonprofit project, One Laptop Per Child, to win over many skeptics over the last two and a half years. Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007.

The laptop does not come with a Microsoft Windows operating system or even a hard drive, and the screen is small. And the cost is now closer to $150 than $100. But the price tag, even compared with low-end $500 laptops now widely available, transforms the economic equation for developing countries.

That has not prevented the effort, conceived by Nicholas Negroponte, a prominent computer researcher, from becoming the focal point of a debate over the value of computers to both learning and economic development.

The detractors include two computer industry giants, Intel and Microsoft, pushing alternative approaches. Intel has developed a $400 laptop aimed at schools as well as an education program that focuses on teachers instead of students. And Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and a leading philanthropist for the third world, has questioned whether the concept is “just taking what we do in the rich world” and assuming that that is something good for the developing world, too.

Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, said he was amused by the attention his little machine was getting. It is not the first time he has been challenged for proclaiming technology’s promise.

“It’s as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going,” he said in an interview here. “You have to remember that what this is about is education.”

Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and educator who is an adviser to the project, has argued that if young people are given computers and allowed to explore, they will “learn how to learn.” That, Mr. Papert argues, is a more valuable skill than traditional teaching strategies that focus on memorization and testing.

The idea is also that children can take on much of the responsibility for maintaining the systems, rather than relying on or creating bureaucracies to do so.

“We believe you have to leverage the kids themselves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learning machines.” As an example, she pointed to the backlight used by the laptop. Although it is designed to last five years, if it fails it can be replaced as simply as batteries are replaced in a flashlight. It is something a child can do, she said.

That philosophy, at the heart of the project’s world view, has stirred criticism for its focus on getting equipment to students rather than issues like teacher training and curriculum.

“I think it’s wonderful that the machines can be put in the hands of children and parents, and it will have an impact on their lives if they have access to electricity,” Larry Cuban, a Stanford University education professor, said in an interview. “However, if part of their rationale is that it will revolutionize education in various countries, I don’t think it will happen, and they are naïve and innocent about the reality of formal schooling.”

The debate is certain to enter a new phase when the machines go into full-scale production by Taiwan-based Quanta Computer, the world’s second-largest laptop maker. (The manufacturer, unlike the project itself, will make a profit.) Overnight, even though it will not be available to consumers, the laptop could become the best-selling portable computer in the world.

The project now has tentative commitments for three million computers and will begin large-scale manufacturing when it reaches five million with separate commitments from at least one country each in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Based on current negotiations, Mr. Negroponte says he expects that goal to be reached by mid-2007.

It got a significant boost on Nov. 15 when the Inter-American Development Bank signed an agreement to supply both loans and grants to buy the machines.

“Several years ago, I thought it was an illusion or a utopian idea,” said Juan José Daboub, managing director of the World Bank and an independent economic-development expert. “But this is now real and encouraging.”

Mr. Negroponte said the manufacturing cost was now below $150 and that it would fall below $100 by the end of 2008.

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.

“The soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops,” said Walter Bender, a computer researcher who served as director of the Media Laboratory after Mr. Negroponte and now heads software development for the laptop project.

Each machine will come with a simple mechanism for recharging itself when a standard power outlet is not available. The designers experimented with a crank, but eventually discarded that idea because it seemed too fragile. Now they have settled on several alternatives, including a foot pedal as well as a hand-pulled device that works like a salad spinner.

Ms. Jepsen’s display, which removes most of the color filters but can operate in either color or monochrome modes, has made it possible to build a computer that consumes just 2 watts of power, compared with the 25 to 45 watts consumed by a conventional laptop. The ultra-low-power operation is possible because of the lack of a hard drive (the laptop uses solid-state memory, which has no moving parts and has fallen sharply in cost) and because the Advanced Micro Devices microprocessor shuts down whenever the computer is not processing information.

The designers have also gambled in designing the laptop’s software, which is based on the freely available Linux operating system, a rival to Microsoft’s Windows. Dispensing with a traditional desktop display, the software substitutes an iconic interface intended to give students a simpler view of their programs and documents and a maplike view of other connected users nearby.

A video-camera lens sits just to the right of the display, for use in videoconferencing and taking digital still photos of reasonable quality. The computer comes with a stripped-down Web browser, a simple word processor and a number of learning programs. For e-mail, the designers intend to use Google’s Web-based Gmail service.

Only one program at a time can be viewed on the laptop because of its small 7.5-inch display.

Mr. Negroponte has been a globetrotting salesman for the project, winning Libya’s participation when he was summoned by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to a meeting in a desert tent on a sweltering August night. But there have also been setbacks. The Indian Education Ministry rejected a proposal to order a million computers, noting that the money could be better spent on primary and secondary education.

Mr. Negroponte said he had been re-energized by the recent arrival of the first 1,000 working prototypes. The prototypes, he said, will give him new ammunition to convince government leaders that his tiny machines can be a positive force for social development. [On a visit to Brazil on Nov. 24, Mr. Negroponte presented one of the prototypes to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.]

He said a program would be created to enable those in the developed world to underwrite a laptop for a child in a designated country and to correspond with the recipient by e-mail as a sort of “glorified pen-pal program.” But however attractive the idea of a $100 or $150 laptop, he said there were no plans to make it generally available to consumers.

“They should buy Dell’s $499 laptop for now,” he said. “Ours is really designed for developing nations — dusty, dirty, no or unreliable power and so on.”

In his two decades as director of the Media Laboratory, Mr. Negroponte often faced criticism because the institution’s impressive demonstrations of technology only occasionally led to commercial applications.

“He has spent his whole career being accused of being all icing and no cake,” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist and one of Mr. Negroponte’s former students. To that kind of scoffing, he said, the laptop’s success would be Mr. Negroponte’s best retort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/te...rtner=homepage





Casual Computer Games Go Upscale
Rachel Konrad

The programmers at PopCap Games Inc. used to think of themselves as the unloved stepchildren of the computer gaming industry.

Their humble word puzzles and math teasers were in a different league from games in which role-playing characters spray bullets, slay dragons and maim rivals in fantastic virtual worlds. Such hardcore games can cost $30 million or more to develop - as much as a Hollywood movie.

But the casual gaming niche, which includes hits like "Bejeweled," "Scrabble" and the low-budget classic "Tetris," is in the midst of a Cinderella-like transformation. Companies like PopCap are sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into casual games and demanding sophisticated graphics, more nuanced plots, even original music instead of bland electronica.

The sequel to one of PopCap's popular word puzzles, "Bookworm Adventures," is expected to be the most expensive title produced for the casual game genre. PopCap, which has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Ireland, spent $700,000 over 2 1/2 years developing the game. It's set to debut online Tuesday at $30 per download.

"A couple years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that it took three guys six months and $100,000 to make a casual game," said PopCap director John Vechey. "They used to be considered a low art form."

Casual games are simple, one-player puzzles that can be played on desktop computers, gaming consoles, cell phones or hand-held computers. It takes less than a minute to understand the rules, structure and plot. The games often revolve around spelling, trivia, arithmetic or geometry.

They're rarely gory or militaristic. If they include characters at all, they're almost never the stereotypical swashbuckling soldiers or stealthy kick boxers of hardcore games.

The protagonist of "Bookworm Adventures" is Lex, a brainy, bow tie-wearing invertebrate who bops evildoers on the noggin whenever the gamer spells a word from a random assortment of letters.

The original game blends features from crossword puzzles and The Jumble, and in the sequel Lex progresses through stages of richly stylized dragons, vampires and other foes. The sequel also has an original musical score.

Casual gamers play to relax - the same reason people play solitaire, dominoes or mahjong. The games can be played for 5 minutes - while the baby is sleeping or between office meetings - or for hours at a stretch in a Zen-like trance.

Big Fish Games Inc. released its most expensive title - "Travelogue 360: Paris" - earlier this month. The Seattle-based company spent $300,000, hired seasoned illustrators and photographers, and bought the rights to images of historic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. Players scour Paris for souvenirs as they're interviewed for an article in a travel magazine.

The casual-gaming segment, which didn't even have a name until the late 1990s, has grown exponentially in the past half-decade with the proliferation of cell phones and mobile devices.

Research group DFC Intelligence estimates that revenues from casual games worldwide will grow to $953 million this year, from $713 million last year. They were $228 million in 2002. Those numbers don't include casual games played on handheld devices.

"It used to be that these were commodity games," said Alexis Madrigal, analyst at San Diego-based DFC. "But now these companies are showing they can get a return on their investment."

Casual gamers differ sharply from the 20-something males who make up the hardcore gaming demographic.

According to an August study by Information Solutions Group, 89 percent of casual gamers are 30 or older, 72 percent are female, and 53 percent are married with kids. Nearly half are college graduates.

Many companies offer 60 minutes of free playtime, then charge anywhere from $5 to $30 for a download. Others charge monthly fees of $5 or less to access an online arcade, and some - particularly those with advertisements, either embedded or as pop-ups - are free.

Once a game becomes a hit, rogue programmers usually write knockoffs and distribute them for free. That's one reason the most successful companies, including Big Fish Games, launch new games as frequently as once a day.

The risk posed by copycat coders makes experts question the spend-more-money development approach. They also say dazzling visuals are less important than a clever plot: Like a novel, you can't spend more money to guarantee a best seller.

Some executives say the fancy graphics and original music may even detract from the games' appeal.

RealNetworks Inc., which launched a new version of its "Scrabble" download this month, tested background music on 15,000 gamers. Testers consistently liked techie tunes better than original music, said Senior Vice President Michael Schutzler.

"At the end of the day, people are playing these games for stress relief - it's less about how beautiful the game is," Schutzler said. "Those gizmo-y little sound effects aren't picked because they're cheap. They're picked because they work."

Paul Thelen, chief executive of Big Fish Games, said big budgets could backfire. If companies spend huge sums of money, they'll want to minimize risk - and they may only fund sequels to "Scrabble," "Zuma," "Bejeweled" and other established hits.

"You can only do so many clones of 'Bejeweled' before people become tired of that," Thelen said. "The game has to offer something fundamentally new to become a breakaway hit."

Katherine Franco, 25, has been gaming since 1989, when Nintendo Co. released "Tetris" on the Game Boy. She said high-budget graphics might distract her from "staying in the groove."

"If it doesn't play well, there's really no point, regardless of how pretty it is," said the South San Francisco massage therapist, who plays games on the bus. "Besides, I still find myself humming the music to 'Tetris.'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-26-21-53-00





A Wii Workout: When Videogames Hurt

Nintendo's new system forces players to move their bodies, causing aches for some couch potatoes; a case of 'Wii elbow'
Jamin Warren

A videogame maker has finally succeeded in getting kids off the couch and moving around. But the new approach is turning out to be more exercise than some players bargained for.

These surprisingly vigorous workouts are being triggered by Nintendo's new Wii videogames. The Wii game console, which went on sale last weekend, competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's new PlayStation 3. One of the Wii's distinguishing features is a motion-sensitive technology that requires players to act out their character's movements, wielding the game's controller like a sword or swinging it like a tennis racket.

The new console has been wildly successful, selling out at stores and winning high marks from critics and game buffs. But as players spend more time with the Wii, some are noticing that hours waving the game's controller around can add up to fairly intense exertion -- resulting in aches and pains common in more familiar forms of exercise. They're reporting aching backs, sore shoulders -- even something some have dubbed "Wii elbow."

"It's harder than playing basketball," says Kaitlin Franke, a 12-year-old from Louisville, Ky. She has been camped out in front of her family's TV, fine-tuning her bowling motion and practicing boxing footwork in two of the Wii's games. Almost immediately, she says, her right arm started to feel numb.

In Rochester, Minn., Jeremy Scherer and his wife spent three hours playing tennis and bowling, two of the games included with the Wii. Mr. Scherer says he managed to improve his scores -- at the cost of shoulders and back that were still aching the next day. "I was using muscles I hadn't used in a while," says Mr. Scherer, a computer programmer who describes himself as "not very active." Mr. Scherer is vowing nightly "Wii workouts" to get in better shape.VIDEO

Another hazard: collisions. All those flailing arms can sometimes inadvertently smack into lamps, furniture and even competing players. IGN.com, a popular site that reviews videogames, said one player testing the Wii lost her grip and sent the controller flying into a wall. Blaine Stuart of Rochester, N.Y., mistakenly whacked his fiancée, Shelly Haefele, while playing tennis and also accidentally hit his dog while bowling.

Nintendo itself warns players about this risk just before some of the games begin. A message flashes up on the screen saying: "Make sure there are no people or objects around you that you might bump into while playing." Some Wii games also have pop-up reminders every 15 minutes advising gamers to take a break.

Perrin Kaplan, a spokeswoman from Nintendo, says the company hasn't received complaints from any gamers about soreness. "It was not meant to be a Jenny Craig supplement," she says. "If people are finding themselves sore, they may need to exercise more." She says that while it might be more fun to play the games more aerobically, it's possible to play without leaving the couch.

The Wii's introduction is part of a critical holiday season for the videogame industry. Two big new players -- the Wii and the PS3 -- are getting their launch this year. Starting last week, shoppers have been lining up, but in many cases, stores are already sold out of both consoles. The Wii and the PS3 are now fetching more than $1,000 on some Web sites like eBay.

WII MEANS OUCH

Some of the Nintendo games that have players flailing their arms.

Wii Sports
Bundle of five games (bowling, boxing, golf, tennis and baseball). Players, among other things, throw jabs with a controller in each hand.

Rayman Raving Rabbids
To fend off an assault of rabbit-like creatures, players must shoot them with plungers and whack them on the head.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The latest in long-running series, protagonist Link is in a foreign land fighting an evil force. Includes fishing sound effects.

Excite Truck
A continuation of the Excitebike series, players tilt their arms to control their truck mid-jump and bump opponents off the racetrack.

Red Steel
Controllers double as a handgun in this shooting game set in modern-day Tokyo.

The Wii, which retails for $250, comes with a remote control-size device that communicates wirelessly with a sensor sitting on the TV. It also comes with a secondary device -- which attaches via a cable to the first device -- that can mimic a variety of objects, from fishing rods to samurai swords. With their purchase, gamers also get Wii Sports, a package of five games, including golf, bowling, tennis, boxing and baseball. More than two dozen games are available for about $50 each. In one of those games, "Rayman Raving Rabbids," players aggressively shake the controller; in the action game "Red Steel," players wield it as a handgun. Nintendo has marketed the Wii to non-gamers who might find activities like bowling or golf easy to pick up and play.

Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn't helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. "I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe -- I had to go take a shower," he says. And the next morning? "I had trouble putting my shirt on," says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

Some past games have involved physical exertion. The popular "Dance Dance Revolution" by Konami has players moving their feet to music across a pad on the floor. And RedOctane's "Guitar Hero" requires players to attempt air-guitar types of moves. Beyond those two individual games, Nintendo in the 1980s sold something called the Power Pad, a plastic mat that recorded players' movements as they ran or jumped. But the Wii is a far more ambitious attempt to integrate body movement into all games.

In the past, pain from videogames has more typically been associated with the small repetitive movements of thumbing a controller's buttons. In the 1980s, some players addicted to the game "Super Mario Brothers" came down with what was later called "Nintendo thumb."

Doctors advice: Stretch out and be sure to take care of any injuries afterwards. "It's just like athletic play," says Lana Kang, an orthopedic hand surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

Ms. Haefele, who along with her fiancé is also a gamer, has been heeding that advice. Last year, she suffered a tendonitis injury and started wearing an elbow brace. Now, she also wears it when she plays the Wii.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...main_tff_t op





The Financial Page

In Praise of Third Place
James Surowiecki

Fifteen years ago, the video-game industry was ruled by one player, Nintendo. The company had machines in a third of American homes, and it was Japan’s most profitable electronics company. The title of a 1993 book summed up the situation: “Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World.” Then the Sony PlayStation arrived, and everything changed. Today, Sony is the dominant force, and its chief rival is not Nintendo but Microsoft, which makes the Xbox. Two weeks ago, the début of Sony’s PlayStation 3 was greeted by crowds of hysterical consumers anxious to get their hands on the new console, billed as the most powerful gaming machine ever. When Nintendo’s new console, the oddly named Wii, appeared, a few days later, there were excellent reviews and expectations of good sales, but no more talk about world conquest. If Sony and Microsoft are the major-party nominees, Nintendo is more like a cool third-party candidate.

You might expect, then, that Nintendo would be struggling to stay afloat. After all, the prevailing wisdom is that companies need to be market leaders, or face disaster. This approach was famously institutionalized by Jack Welch, who, when he took over as C.E.O. of G.E., laid down a rule that he described as a “central idea” of his tenure: the company would quit any business in which it was not No. 1 or No. 2. The lesson that people took away from this was clear—third place is for losers. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” Alec Baldwin’s character says in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” Nintendo, though, has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived. It has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?

Sony and Microsoft are desperate to be the biggest players in a market that, in their vision, will encompass not just video games but “interactive entertainment” generally. That’s why the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are all-in-one machines, which allow users not just to play video games but also to do things like watch high-definition DVDs and stream digital music. Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.

Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games. For instance, the Wii features a motion sensor that allows you to, say, hit a tennis ball onscreen by swinging the controller like a tennis racquet. Nintendo’s handheld device, the DS, became astoundingly popular because of simple but brilliant games like Nintendogs, in which users raise virtual puppies. And because Nintendo sells many more of its own games than Sony and Microsoft do, its profit margins are higher, too. Arguably, Nintendo has thrived not despite its fall from the top but because of it.

Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.

The point is that business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else. Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations. Nintendo knew that it could not compete with Microsoft and Sony in the quest to build the ultimate home-entertainment device. So it decided, with the Wii, to play a different game entirely. Some pundits are now speculating, ironically, that the simplicity of the Wii may make it a huge hit. Nintendo wouldn’t complain if that happened. But, in the meantime, third prize is looking a lot better than steak knives.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/conten...alk_surowiecki





Nintendo Wii Sales Top 600,000 in U.S.
AP

Nintendo Co. said consumers in the Americas snapped up more than 600,000 of its Wii video game systems in eight days, totaling about $190 million in sales, as it competes with Sony Corp.'s new PlayStation 3.

Sales of both long-awaited systems are not expected to meet demand until next year. The Wii launched Nov. 19; the PS3 made its U.S. debut Nov. 17.

Sony Corp. has said it will have about 1 million PS3 systems for North American stores by the end of the year. Nintendo said it will have shipped 4 million units.

"We've shipped retailers several times the amount of hardware the other company was able to deliver for its launch around the same time - and we still sold out," Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said in a statement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-27-21-50-48





Sony Shifts Duties of the Leader of the PlayStation Unit
Ken Belson and Matt Richtel

Sony’s video game unit said yesterday that Ken Kutaragi, the father of the PlayStation game console, would no longer run its day-to-day affairs. The move comes just weeks after Mr. Kutaragi’s latest creation, the PlayStation 3, hit the market following a year of delays and technical problems.

Mr. Kutaragi, who is a celebrity among consumers in Japan and has had a sometimes stormy relationship with his superiors at Sony, will remain chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment. He will also become chairman but will give up control of daily operations. Starting today, that job will belong to Kazuo Hirai, who has been running the game unit’s American division.

Mr. Hirai will have his hands full. Introduced last month, well behind schedule, the PlayStation 3 is now in a pitched battle with a new game console from Nintendo and the Xbox 360, made by Microsoft, which has closed the gap with Sony in the roughly $30 billion global game market.

It is too early to say whether Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo, which began selling the Wii last month, will win the fight for consumers’ imaginations and money. But some industry analysts said the timing of Sony’s management shake-up, so soon after the machine’s release, suggested a company unhappy with the slow start for its marquee product.

“There was a significant increase in the market share for Xbox because of the delay, and the PS3’s higher price will also have an impact,” said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, a $260 million venture capital firm focused on entertainment and technology. “You have to look at it and say Sony didn’t do themselves any favors, and usually they try to place the blame somewhere.”

Sony said the management shuffle would strengthen oversight of its video game operations, which it sees as critical to its recovery. The company has faced a series of problems lately, from expensive laptop battery recalls to sinking profits and a failure to win back the portable music market from Apple’s iPod.

Mr. Kutaragi will be responsible for strategic thinking at the game unit, Sony said, while Mr. Hirai will handle shorter-term issues.

For Sony, the importance of the PlayStation 3 extends beyond its battle against Microsoft. The consoles have come to symbolize a transition in the world of consumer electronics to a digital, Internet-centered world, one in which Microsoft has a strong position, and away from the stand-alone consumer electronics that made Sony into a giant.

Sony is marketing the PlayStation 3 not just as the future of gaming, but also as a digital entertainment system that plays high-definition movies and serves as a hub in the living room, connecting the Internet, stereo and television. And its fate is being seen as a test of the ability of Howard Stringer, Sony’s chairman, to revitalize the company.

Much depends on whether Sony can get enough consoles into consumers’ hands. While the company says it expects to ship one million machines in North America by the end of the year, it may end up shipping only half that amount at best because of component shortages, according to Evan Wilson, an entertainment analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.

Inside Sony, Mr. Kutaragi has had a reputation as an inspired but volatile leader. In the early 1990s, he threatened to leave the company when he had trouble persuading Sony to get into the game console business.

At Japanese companies, where executives are less likely to be publicly blamed for problems than in the West, a promotion combined with removal from day-to-day control over a product or group can sometimes be a way to penalize an executive.

But some analysts said the move would give Mr. Kutaragi more time to focus on Sony’s broader strategy — and possibly prepare to succeed Mr. Stringer.

The management change is “either a Machiavellian scheme to get rid of Kutaragi or they’re grooming him to replace Sir Howard,” said Michael Pachter, a video game industry analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. “I think it’s the latter.”

Whatever Mr. Kutaragi’s role as chief executive, the promotion of Mr. Hirai may signal that Sony needs fresh energy to help it smooth out the manufacturing and distribution of its new console.

“They need as much management talent at Sony headquarters as possible,” Mr. Wilson said.

Mr. Hirai, 45, has been a vocal and enthusiastic cheerleader for the PlayStation 3. He joined the American game unit in 1995 and became its president in 1999.

He has not overseen manufacturing before, but because of his experience distributing the consoles in the United States, he understands what it takes to build the product, said David Karraker, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment of America.

“He has an intricate knowledge of what goes into the products, and how to get them into the various territories,” Mr. Karraker said. He said Mr. Hirai was not available to comment on his new appointment.

Jack Tretton, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American unit, will move into Mr. Hirai’s current role.

The PlayStation 3 thus far has left industry analysts and eager consumers wanting. A big reason for the slow release of the machine was that Sony was still developing the Blu-ray high-definition DVD player that is an important part of it, Mr. Wilson said.
As a result of that and other complex components, the PlayStation 3 is selling for as much as $600, about $200 more than the comparable version of the Xbox 360. At the same time, Microsoft has moved faster into the world of online gaming, getting a head start on a growing trend. This has helped the Xbox 360 overcome some of its technical shortcomings compared with the PlayStation 3, which some consider a more sophisticated machine.

“It’s been a very, very difficult launch,” said Mike Hickey, a video game industry analyst at Janco Partners, who characterized the management changes as “a heavy move,” particularly Mr. Kutaragi’s new job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/te...gy/01sony.html





Arrest Made in Playstation Shooting
AP

A 20-year-old Woodstock, Conn., man was arrested early Tuesday in the shooting of a Webster, Mass., man who was wounded in a robbery while he waited in line to buy a PlayStation 3 game console in Putnam, Conn..

State police arrested William J. Robertson shortly before 4 a.m. Tuesday on several charges including attempted murder and robbery. He was being held on $1 million bond pending arraignment in Danielson Superior Court.

An arrest warrant has been prepared for a second suspect, 17-year-old Andrew Patnaude, whose last known address was in Putnam, state police said.

State police had searched an area in Putnam early Tuesday looking for Patnaude. The search by state police, Putnam police and police dogs turned up nothing.

Michael Penkala, 21, was shot by two gunmen who tried to steal his cash as he waited outside Wal-Mart in Putnam early Nov. 17.

Penkala said he dialed 911 on his cell phone when he saw the gunmen wearing bandanas over their faces, carrying guns.

The thieves ordered everyone in line to throw possessions and cash on the ground or put them into two bags the gunmen held.

Penkala held onto a wallet in his pocket that held more than $2,500 in cash. He refused to give up his money and was shot.

Penkala is still recovering from his injuries.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1023598





Second Suspect Arraigned in PlayStation Shooting
AP

A Putnam, Conn., teen charged with shooting a Massachusetts man waiting to buy a new PlayStation 3 at Wal-Mart was arraigned Wednesday in Danielson Superior Court, authorities said.

Andrew Patnaude, 17, was ordered held on $1.5 million bond on charges of attempted murder, robbery, assault, threatening, larceny and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

His alleged accomplice, 21-year-old William Robertson of Woodstock, Conn., was arraigned Tuesday on the same charges and ordered held on $1 million bond.

The men are accused of attempting to rob a group of people waiting outside the Putnam Wal-Mart to purchase PlayStation 3 consoles Nov. 17, the first day they went on sale.

Patnaude is accused of striking Michael Penkala, 21, of Webster, Mass., in the chest and shoulder with a shotgun blast after Penkala refused to hand over the $2,500 in his wallet.

Robertson is accused of attempting to fire a pistol at Penkala, but authorities say it misfired and no bullet was discharged.

Penkala was hospitalized but is now recovering at home, police said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1023678





Ban on Louisiana Video Game Law Made Permanent
Eric Bangeman

A federal judge has ruled that a controversial law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors in Louisiana is unconstitutional.

Coauthored by video game critic Jack Thompson and passed by the Louisiana State Legislature in June, Louisiana HB1381 criminalized the sale of some video games to those under 18. Shortly thereafter, the Entertainment Software Association filed a lawsuit, which resulted in a temporary injunction against its enforcement.

The Louisiana law took a novel approach to regulating the sale of video games in the hope that it would pass constitutional muster. Rep. Roy Burrell (R) and Jack Thompson had research that purported to show a causative link between playing violent video games and real-world violence entered into the legislative record in an attempt to buttress the legislation's shaky credentials. In addition, the law adapted the Miller obscenity test to the realm of violent video games, prohibiting their sale to minors if they:

1. Appealed to the minor's morbid interest in violence" according to "contemporary community standards,"
2. Depicted violence inappropriate to minors according to "prevailing standards" in the adult community, and
3. Lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

Judge James Brady found the efforts unconvincing. In issuing a temporary injunction against the law, the judge wrote that "the evidence that was submitted to the legislature in connection with the bill that became the statute is sparse and could hardly be called in any sense reliable." Judge Brady also called the studies' connections between video game and real-world violence "tenuous and speculative."

Thompson blamed the Louisiana Attorney General's office for the ruling, telling Ars that its effort to defend the law was "at best incompetent and at worst compromised."

This has not been a good week for video game legislation. Just yesterday, an US Appeals Court upheld a lower court's ruling that a similar Illinois law was unconstitutional.

With video game legislation on a long losing streak, it's time for politicians to stop pandering to their constituents by continuing to introduce and pass legislation restricting the sale of some video games. The courts have spoken clearly and unanimously: video games are protected by the First Amendment and singling them out for regulation violates the Equal Protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061129-8320.html





Maryland Court to Launch Webcasting Plan
AP

Maryland's highest court is launching a project for live Webcasting of its sessions, hoping to be ready in time to broadcast arguments set for Dec. 4 in a high-profile case involving gay marriage.

The first Webcast is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, giving the court a little time to solve problems that might develop before the gay marriage case is argued next week. The state is asking the high court to overturn a circuit court ruling that the Maryland law defining marriage as between one man and one woman is unconstitutional.

"It's all part of this outreach thing," Chief Judge Robert M. Bell of the Court of Appeals told The (Baltimore) Sun. "Other courts have done it. I don't see why we shouldn't do it."

The Court of Appeals and the Court of Special Appeals, the state's second highest court, allow news organizations to record hearings and to take still and television photographs. State law prohibits cameras and recorders in lower courts in criminal cases, and allows them to be used in civil cases only with the approval of both parties.

Bell has been a proponent of opening up Maryland courts to make them more accessible to the public. About half of the appellate state courts in the nation allow coverage of hearings on the Web or on cable channels.

Proponents say allowing cameras and recorders in court rooms helps give citizens a better idea of how the legal system works.

"The Court of Appeals providing greater access to its proceedings is a good thing," Donald F. Norris, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said.

Marylanders who take the time to check out Webcasts will find less than scintillating viewing in what is usually a dry appellate process. The proceedings follow a rigid structure and are usually restricted to two hours or less. There are no witnesses. Opposing lawyers are given a set amount of time to make their arguments with flashing lights telling them when it is time to sit down.

Occasionally, the proceedings liven-up when the seven crimson-robed judges interrupt lawyers to probe perceived weaknesses in their arguments, but generally the cases involve dry discussions about legal precedents.

"I don't think it will ever break the Nielsen ratings," said Carmen M. Shepard, a former assistant attorney general now in private practice who has argued a dozen cases in the Court of Appeals. "But I think it says something positive about our legal system to say that the highest court in our state is inviting the public to see how it works and watch."

Opponents of televised court proceedings argue that some lawyers will want to grandstand for the cameras, but Bell said he does not think that will happen, noting cameras have not affected previous hearings where they were allowed in the courtroom.

Craig Waters, spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court, said an estimated 50 million people watched part or all of the arguments before that court in the 2000 dispute over the presidential outcome in Florida.

Maryland Court of Appeals cases involving issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty might attract an audience, although it's doubtful few people would want to watch arguments about whether a state agency followed its own regulations, said William Reynolds, who teaches Internet law at the University of Maryland.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-27-18-44-48





Old-School Sponsorship From a Digital-Era Company
Stuart Elliott

MATCHMAKER, matchmaker, make me a match. So sang the daughters of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” For a TV comedy series that begins tonight — about a young woman’s dating life, appropriately enough — Madison Avenue is playing matchmaker, bringing together an advertiser and a network for an elaborate sponsorship deal.

The matchmaker is MediaHub from Mullen, the media planning and buying division of Mullen, an agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies. MediaHub is hooking up Match.com, the dating Web site operated by IAC/InterActiveCorp, with the TBS cable network for a season-long sponsorship of the new sitcom, called “My Boys.”

Under the agreement, estimated at $1 million to $2 million, Match.com will be featured in all 13 episodes of “My Boys,” which chronicles the adventures of a twentysomething who covers sports for a Chicago newspaper as she juggles her career and social life. The Web site will be featured prominently in two episodes and play cameo roles in the rest.

Other elements of the deal include identification of “My Boys” as “sponsored by Match.com” in a television, print, radio and online promotional campaign that TBS is creating for the series; the posting of a profile of a character from the series on Match.com; billboard-style ads for Match.com on a special “My Boys” Web site (tbs.com/shows/myboys/); and a discussion of “My Boys” and Match.com during an episode of another TBS show, “Movie and a Makeover.”

The sponsorship is another example of an advertising technique that is being revived, decades after fading from the media landscape. Known as branded entertainment, it recalls the days when announcers intoned at the start of TV and radio shows that they were being “brought to you by” some name-brand consumer product.

Branded entertainment is returning to television because of its ability to interweave product pitches into the story lines of the shows that consumers want to watch. The goal is to counter viewers’ increasing ability to ignore or avoid more interruptive advertising like traditional commercials.

Among other advertisers that are taking part in the revival of branded entertainment are Coca-Cola, General Motors, Philips Electronics North America, Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

In some instances, they are even getting marquee billing in the names of the shows they are sponsoring, a throwback to the era of “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars” and “The United States Steel Hour.” For example, the AMC cable network announced yesterday the creation of an ad package to be called the “Lincoln Friday Night Feature,” sponsored by the Lincoln Mercury division of the Ford Motor Company.

“After two years of successful TV advertising, buying a lot of syndicated shows like ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends,’ this is, for us, stepping it up,” Jim Safka, chief executive at Match.com in Dallas, said of the agreement with TBS.

“It’s a fully integrated campaign that feels less like a sponsorship or advertisement and more like a part of the program,” he added.

In threading Match.com through the episodes of “My Boys,” Mr. Safka said, “it has to feel seamless and natural,” otherwise it could annoy or even alienate viewers.

Doing more than what the deal calls for “would be heavy-handed,” Mr. Safka said, “and it’s not how our brand fits into someone’s everyday life.”

“It’s taking some risk,” he added, “but we’ve had a good preview of the show and we think it’s going to deliver the goods.”

MediaHub made the deal for Match.com during the recent upfront market, where advertisers agree to spend money with networks before the start of the fall season.

John Moore, senior vice president and group media director at MediaHub in Wenham, Mass., said the agreement made sense because Match.com wanted to promote a brand identity as a Web site for “long-term relationships, not casual dating, and ‘My Boys’ is about a group of friends going through the trials and tribulations of trying to figure out long-term relationships.”

“The characters are a reflection of the people on Match.com,” he added. The creative agency for Match.com is Hanft Unlimited in New York.

This is the first time MediaHub has signed a season-long sponsorship for a client, Mr. Moore said, and the deal is not without its challenges.

“The ‘leap into the void,’ ” Mr. Moore said, “is this show has no track record,” unlike TBS shows like “Sex and the City,” which are reruns of series that proved successful on other networks.

“But we think the rewards outweigh the risks,” he added, because “TBS is giving ‘My Boys’ its most coveted time slot, after ‘Sex and the City,’ ” and because of the pedigree of the production team behind “My Boys.”

Among those involved in the production of “My Boys” are Jamie Tarses, the TV executive who is the basis for a character on the NBC series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and Betsy Thomas, who has worked on series like "My So-Called Life," "Then Came You" and "Run of the House."

TBS was “looking for a launch partner, if you will, for ‘My Boys’ that would be a like-minded brand,” said Linda Yaccarino, executive vice president for advertising sales and marketing at Turner Entertainment in New York, which like TBS is part of the Turner Broadcasting System unit of Time Warner.

Branded entertainment projects “are easier when it’s an organic fit,” Ms. Yaccarino said. “Otherwise you’re just going to turn off the viewer, and then all of your work was for naught.

“As long as we respect the creative process, and that takes the lead, that’ll keep the viewers watching.”

The deal is “the biggest co-branded effort that Turner has ever done,” Ms. Yaccarino said, “and I think you’ll definitely see more of this.”

Early reviews of “My Boys” are mixed to positive. In Touch magazine gave it two stars out of four, while a sibling magazine, Life & Style, gave it two and a half (“Worth a first date at least”). Life magazine called it “fresh” and the critic Matt Roush, in TV Guide, praised it as a “winner.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/bu...ia/28adco.html





Eyebrows Are Raised Over Passages in a Best Seller by Ian McEwan
Alan Cowell

LONDON, Nov. 27 — The scene: a London hospital during World War II. The character: a nurse who “dabs gentian violet on ringworm” and is told to wash blood off her face to avoid upsetting the patients. The inspiration? Well, that’s where the dispute starts.

In a literary imbroglio Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s best known and most lauded authors, has been accused in newspaper articles of copying phrases and sentences for his best-selling novel “Atonement” in 2001 from a memoir published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews, a former nurse and an acclaimed writer of romantic novels.

The dispute’s timing is almost as tantalizing, since it coincides with the filming of a movie version of “Atonement,” starring Keira Knightley.

The memoir, “No Time for Romance,” is out of print, and Ms. Andrews died last month, at 86. But Mr. McEwan’s debt to her has already been briefly acknowledged in a note at the conclusion of “Atonement,” which refers to Ms. Andrews’s autobiography, among several other works.

Mr. McEwan said on Monday that he had never sought to disguise the fact that he had used her book for research. Thus the issue was whether the close resemblance between some sentences and phrases should be classified as copying — a charge leveled against Mr. McEwan once before, with his debut novel, “The Cement Garden, ” in 1978 — or as a form of research. And if material had been borrowed, how grave an offense had been committed?

“I return to the position that it was discourteous from one author to another” for Mr. McEwan to have echoed Ms. Andrews’s wording so closely, her agent, Vanessa Holt, said in a telephone interview.

Julia Langdon, a British political journalist who compared the books for an article in The Mail on Sunday and traced broad similarities between them, said: “I’m not accusing McEwan of plagiarism. I was just making the point that he was discourteous not to have drawn her attention to this when she was alive.”

But Jenny Haddon, the chairwoman of Britain’s Romantic Novelists’ Association, who had known Ms. Andrews, said, “I think it’s quite clear that her response was ‘I don’t give a damn.’ ”

Ms. Andrews, who died of cancer in October, was a prolific writer of 35 romantic novels, once described by The Guardian newspaper as “the brand leader of hospital fiction” for her work as a writer of books with medical themes and backdrops. Born in Suez, Egypt, she trained as a nurse, working in St. Thomas’s Hospital in London in World War II — just as Briony Tallis, a central figure of “Atonement,” also works in a wartime hospital.

In a lengthy article published in The Guardian on Monday, Mr. McEwan, 58, acknowledged that in researching “Atonement,” he came across a copy of Ms. Andrews’s autobiography, which helped him find authentic details of nursing and hospital conditions in wartime Britain.

“With painstaking accuracy, so it seemed to me, she rendered in the form of superb reportage an experience of the war that had been almost entirely neglected, and which I too wanted to bring to life through the eyes of my heroine,” Mr. McEwan wrote in The Guardian.

In the article Mr. McEwan continued: “I have openly acknowledged my debt to her in the author’s note at the end of ‘Atonement,’ and ever since on public platforms, where questions on research are almost as frequent as ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ ”
In a telephone interview on Monday, Mr. McEwan again acknowledged using the Andrews book as a source, as he had done, he said, with his father’s wartime memories. “What I did was to use whatever I could of eyewitness accounts and sift and embroider them into the minds of characters,” he said.

He said the uproar about similarities between some phrases and sentences was “quite a surprise for me.”

“I did use real events that Lucilla Andrews described,” he said. “As far as I know, my wording has been distinct from hers. My own mother used to read her books, so it was not as if I was plucking some obscure figure from the library shelves.”

But he strongly disputed the suggestion that he had copied Ms. Andrews’s work.

“I don’t agree with that,” he said. “I have used her account of certain things, certainly training” of nurses. His depiction of wartime, he added, however, had been “very much diffused through the anxieties and character of the young girl, Briony.”

Mr. McEwan said he did not believe Ms. Andrews would “have had a problem” with what he wrote. Indeed, he said, he paid her tribute in a radio broadcast and interviews. “The one thing I now do deeply regret is not being in touch with her,” he said. “She was quite a wonderful woman.”

In the case of “The Cement Garden,” Mr. McEwan’s first novel, critics had noted some plot similarities between it and a 1963 novel by Julian Gloag, “Our Mother’s House.” Mr. McEwan denied ever having read the other book.

Two British newspapers — The Mail on Sunday and The Times of London — have published excerpts that show close similarities between passages in “Atonement” and Ms. Andrews’s memoir. Mr. McEwan, for instance, wrote: “In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut and painted lead lotion on a bruise.” Ms. Andrews’s book has the lines: “Our ‘nursing’ seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violent on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains.”

The authenticity of the textual references has not been disputed by any of those involved, but the nature of the similarities has been explained in different ways.

Erica Wagner, the literary editor of The Times of London, said that Mr. McEwan seemed to have relied on the Andrews book purely for research. “There’s a close similarity in the wording, but it seems to me that he is mostly describing medical procedures,” she said in a telephone interview. There was no suggestion that the language had been taken from another novel, she said, drawing a distinction with nonfiction. Referring to the accusation that he had copied Ms. Andrews’s work, she said, “I don’t think that’s a valid complaint at all.”

The link between the works was initially drawn by Natasha Alden, a research student at Oxford, and the comparisons were made known to Ms. Andrews last year.

At that time, according to Ms. Haddon of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Ms. Andrews wrote in a note about a telephone conversation concerning the similarities, “I don’t give a damn.” The note was among papers left to the association by Ms. Andrews, who was awarded its prize for lifetime achievement last August.

“Although I can say that the nature of the borrowings is a bit startling, the overall impact of McEwan’s novel and Lucilla’s autobiography is very different,” Ms. Haddon said. She called the brouhaha over the similarities “nonsense.”

“Lucilla was a very ladylike person,” Ms. Haddon said in a telephone interview on Monday. “So I don’t think she would have gone to war with another author like that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/books/28aton.html





Crave Talk: Why do all our Gadgets Break?

Those among you suffering from seasonal affective disorder-induced nostalgia may find yourselves dragging old friends back into the dim winter light this month. For me it was an old IBM XT that has lain dormant in the garage for eleven years. A fox had urinated down the side of the chassis and there was a implausibly fat, dead tropical spider wedged in the 5¼-inch drive. But still, the machine started up without a hitch. This belching, staggering monster from times past still worked like a dream. Why is it, then, that my 11-month-old Motorola Razr V3 is all but dead?

Consumer electronics have largely reached a point where their top performance already far outreaches any demand the average user will put on them. Who is likely to tax a Core 2 Duo processor with a Word document? Who will blow the address book memory of a 64MB mobile phone -- even if they're friends with half of London? My V3 did everything I needed a phone to do. It stored contacts, it made calls, it was small enough to fit in a pocket, but not small enough to be inhaled. Nevertheless, it's falling apart because its delicate clamshell design made it too fragile for the real world.

The keypad emits a constant whining noise, like the shrill battle-cry of a wounded pheasant. The screen intermittently flickers on and off, and it occasionally dials random numbers. While the latter is an exciting way of regaining contact with friends you've neglected to call for months, it's not a great testament to the build quality of modern electronics.

Of course, we live in an upgrade culture, in which mobile phones, laptops and iPods are discarded for cosmetic reasons as much as technical. But there is a splinter cell whose members don't want to upgrade their current product, yet is forced to by the increasingly poor build quality of many modern consumer electronics.

Do owners of Rennie Mackintosh chairs seek to upgrade them each year because the legs have all gone wobbly? Do owners of original Marshall valve amplifiers throw them away because the speaker cones have fallen out? Clearly not. Yet millions of us are expected to discard our phones and our computers each year.

Computers and mobile phones that last a lifetime can already be built. Now that processors have reached a level where the average student has a laptop more powerful than a 1990s Pixar render farm, you have to wonder why the majority of us need to upgrade. Obviously, there will always be creative industries pushing the boundaries, and these groups will need more powerful machines. But my Razr was perfect for me, and now it's dead.

Engineers have built obsolescence into mass-produced technology since the 1920s. There are two kinds of planned deterioration in a product: one is technical, the other is stylistic. The fashion industry relies on your eagerness to keep up with changes in style to keep their new products selling, while the technology industry used to rely on the simple fact that computers were never quite fast enough for the average user.

Now computers are fast enough, mobile phones are small enough and digital music players have enough memory. Manufacturers now have a problem. How will they sell new products to consumers who are perfectly satisfied with their current electronics? My IBM XT, 20 years old, proves that we were capable of manufacturing durable technology decades ago -- now that the performance problem is also taken care of, presumably the majority of us (certainly the shops and offices of the world) can stop buying new computers?

The electronics industry has clearly spotted this problem, and has worked out a simple way to make you upgrade even if you're not a slave to fashion: your gadgets will simply break within the year. The evolution of the microchip to a point where the average consumer cannot tax it technically has ushered in The Age of the Flimsy -- delicate, beautiful supermodels that can't go the distance.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39...9285619,00.htm





Need a Valid e-mail Address to Register But Don't Want the Spam? Try This Seam-Based Web App
Paul McNamara

Here's yet another way to dodge the irksome requirement of presenting a valid e-mail address to register for a Web site: 10 Minute Mail, a Seam-based Web application that fills the bill just long enough to get you onto the site … and then disappears. No fuss, no muss, and best of all, no spam.

Reminds me of Anonymizer Nyms, a somewhat controversial product that debuted at our DEMOfall 2006 conference. However, unlike that $20-a-year offering, 10 Minute Mail is free. It's also reminiscent of PrefPass, another Demo debut that aims to ease registration pains.

Here's what 10 Minute Mail developer Devon Hillard has to say about it on his Digital Sanctuary Tech blog.

"My first Web application built using Seam is now live. It is called 10MinuteMail and you can see it at www.10MinuteMail.com."

"It gives you a temporary e-mail address, and lets you receive and reply to e-mail sent to that address. The e-mail address expires in 10 minutes (or more, you can extend it as you need more time). Basically I created it to learn Seam, and to provide an easy way to avoid giving your real e-mail address to Web sites which require an e-mail from you to sign up. Think of it as spam avoidance."

The site has been an instant hit, too, with the help of bloggers -- which Hillard clearly digs.

"Anyhow, I’m proud," he writes. "Check it out, click on a Google ad or two if you would, and let me know what you think!"

Obviously, the utility here is extremely limited and the cloak-and-dagger crowd will have fun conjuring up all manner of nefarious uses for such a transient communications vehicle.

Bottom line, though, is I think I'll wind up using it.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/9381





Commerce OKs VeriSign `.com' Contract
Anick Jesdanun

VeriSign Inc. will run the key directories that keep track of ".com" domain names until at least 2012 as the U.S. Commerce Department approved a lucrative contract extension.

The government's clearance Thursday was the final one needed for VeriSign to extend its hold over the most popular suffix on the Internet, for which it now makes $6 per name each year, or some $350 million for the nearly 59 million names registered.

Shares of Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign jumped $1.82, or 7.5 percent, to close at $26.09 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

VeriSign reached a contract agreement earlier with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that oversees the Internet's domain-name policies. Commerce has veto power over ICANN decisions.

In approving the extension, Commerce said it would require VeriSign to obtain prior government approval for any further changes in the contract's pricing provisions or for any subsequent renewals - important because the government has indicated it was reducing its oversight over ICANN.

Critics had urged Commerce to reject the contract, complaining among other things that VeriSign would no longer be required to invest in the Domain Name System's infrastructure and that the company would get first dibs to renew the contract in the future.
Commerce sought to address that by stating that any renewals would be granted only if "the approval will serve the public interest."

In a statement, VeriSign said it was continuing to invest tens of millions of dollars in the infrastructure, even if the contract no longer specifies any minimums.
The directories in question are necessary for computers to know where to find Web sites and send e-mail with addresses ending in ".com." Millions of people around the world depend on them every day, but rarely know it.

VeriSign also runs the ".net" directories as well as the master computers that list the Internet's more than 250 suffixes.

Under the deal ICANN approved in February, VeriSign is allowed to raise its annual fee for domain names, which resellers may pass along to consumers. It is currently $6, and VeriSign will be allowed to increase it up to 7 percent a year for four of the next six years. The company may also raise fees during the other two years under limited conditions.

VeriSign initially had a contract through 2007, but agreed to an early rebidding in exchange for a more lucrative extension for ".com." With the contract extension approved, both sides are dropping lawsuits filed against each other over, among other things, the introduction by VeriSign of a controversial search service called Site Finder.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-16-23-49





EFF Accepts Barney's Surrender
Press Release

Purple Dinosaur Backs Off and Pays Up; Free Speech Rights Preserved

The corporate owners of the popular children's television character Barney the Purple Dinosaur have agreed to withdraw their baseless legal threats against a website publisher who parodied the character and to compensate him for fees expended in defending himself.

The agreement settles a suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in August on behalf of Dr. Stuart Frankel against Lyons Partnership, owners of the Barney character. Frankel received repeated, meritless cease-and-desist letters from Lyons, claiming his online parody violated copyright and trademark law. EFF's suit asked the court to declare that Frankel's parody was a noninfringing fair use protected by the First Amendment.

"We wish we hadn't had to file a lawsuit to finally get Barney's lawyers to stop harassing a man who was just expressing his opinion about a cultural phenomenon," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Hopefully Lyons Partnership has learned its lesson and will have more respect for fair use in the future."

This settlement is the latest development in EFF's ongoing campaign to protect online free speech from the chilling effects of bogus copyright claims. Earlier this month, EFF filed suit against Michael Crook -- a man who claimed copyright infringement in an effort to censor his online critics.

"Those who misuse copyright should know that they can be sued for doing so," said McSherry. "This settlement should send a message to those who want to use copyright law as a pretext for censorship."

EFF was assisted in this case by Elizabeth Rader, James d'Auguste, and Brian Carney, attorneys with the firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld LLP, which is defending Dr. Frankel's free speech rights on a pro bono basis.
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_11.php#005024





TiVo Sets Ads on Programs to be Deleted

Before deleting that television show you just watched courtesy of TiVo, you'll be given the option to view a commercial, the latest in a series of enhancements the DVR pioneer will launch in an effort to profit from the proliferation of ad-skipping.

TiVo's newest initiative, called Program Placement, was announced Tuesday, just before a judge rejected a request by EchoStar Communications for a new trial in an ongoing patent dispute. The rejection means that TiVo and EchoStar will probably head to a federal appeals court.

Neither piece of positive news for TiVo impressed investors much Tuesday, when TiVo shares traded just 2 cents higher to $6.28.

TiVo said it has lined up several advertisers for Program Placement, which launches in two weeks, including Court TV, the Weather Channel and Burger King, each of which has chosen various TV shows to attach their commercials to in hopes that viewers will choose to watch them.

When TiVo customers hit their delete buttons, they will be given the standard two options of erasing a program or saving it, as well as a pitch from an advertiser to watch its commercial.

"It reaches the consumer who is watching in playback, where most fast-forwarding occurs," said Davina Kent, TiVo's vice-president national advertising sales.

Program Placement allows advertisers to choose types of programming to advertise across. For example, MasterCard is attaching its ads to several Christmas-themed shows.

"The key," Kent said, "is to target by genre, and not just a traditional 30-second ad but longer-form that is entertaining and informational."

She said most ads so far run about two minutes in length, but Kent expects that some future ones will run as long as 12 minutes.

Because TiVo is accepting only one advertiser per show, Kent envisions that bidding wars could drive prices for Program Placement higher over time.

TiVo, she said, is "selling ads on the TiVo users' interface and not touching the content," so there's no need to share ad revenue with the shows' rights holders.

The initiative is available to TiVo stand-alone subs who have Series 2 or Series 3 boxes, which is about 1.4 million of TiVo's 4.4 million total subscribers. DirecTV, which accounts for the bulk of TiVo subs, could add the service later.

TiVo is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings after the closing bell on Wall Street Wednesday, when it is expected to update its subscriber numbers.

Program Placement is TiVo's latest advertising solution, joining others like Product Watch, which lets users tell TiVo a category of advertising they'd like to receive. TiVo, and some bullish analysts, have been touting the company's Google-like ability to deliver advertising that's relevant to viewers and even desired, though so far TiVo management has not divulged how much revenue the company is taking in through its ad platforms.
http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/en...477805600.html





Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned, Paper Systems Should Be Included, Agency Says
Cameron W. Barr

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Voters in Maryland cast ballots on electronic machines that produce no paper record of each vote; in the District and Loudoun County, voters can choose between using such machines and optical-scan systems. Other Northern Virginia jurisdictions, and many counties across the state, use electronic voting systems exclusively.

NIST's recommendations are to be debated next week before the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, charged by Congress to develop standards for voting systems. To become effective, NIST's recommendations must then be adopted by the Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress to promote changes in election systems after the 2000 debacle in Florida.

If the commission agrees with NIST, the practical impact may not be felt until 2009 or 2010, the soonest that new standards would be implemented. The standards that the Election Assistance Commission will adopt are voluntary, but most states require election officials to deploy voting systems that meet national or federal criteria.

State election officials in Maryland and Virginia declined to comment yesterday on the NIST report, which they were reviewing.

Alice P. Miller, executive director of the District's Board of Elections and Ethics, said through a spokesman that she would not comment because she is a member of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.

NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections." The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

Fears about rigging have animated critics for years, but there has been no conclusive evidence that such fraud has occurred. Electronic voting systems have had technical problems -- including unpredictable screen freezes -- leaving voters wondering whether their ballots were properly recorded.

Computer scientists and others have said that the security of electronic voting systems cannot be guaranteed and that election officials should adopt systems that produce a paper record of each vote in case of a recount. The NIST report embraces that critique, introducing the concept of "software independence" in voting systems.

NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to provide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers have introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote -- and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine -- but such paper trails have had their own problems.

Printers have jammed or otherwise failed, causing some election directors to question whether a paper trail is an improvement. Maryland state elections administrator Linda Lamone, in an undated video snippet that her critics have circulated on the Internet, says that voter verification is unnecessary. "I'm not going to put this paper on my machines -- it'll be over my dead body, because I just don't think it works. It really is a false sense of security," she said.

For critics of paperless electronic voting, the report is vindication. "I think I got it right," said Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who has long questioned the security and reliability of some electronic voting systems.

Linda Schade, a founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote, said, "These strong statements from a credible institution such as NIST add yet another voice to the consensus that paper electronic voting as used in states like MD is not secure. We hope that the [Election Assistance Commission] formally adopts these improved standards."

Even critics of paperless electronic voting have grown disenchanted with the practical problems of adding printers to electronic "touch-screen" voting machines.

"Why are we doing this at all? is the question people are asking," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, a group critical of electronic voting systems. "We have a perfectly good system -- the paper-ballot optical-scan system."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...113001637.html





Electronic Vote Distrusted in Venezuela
Fabiola Sanchez

Under pressure from opponents of President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's elections council has adopted safeguards for the country's electronic voting machines to prevent tampering in Sunday's election - conditions so strict that experts say they surpass some standards in the United States.

The opposition boycotted Venezuela's legislative elections a year ago, saying it couldn't trust that the electronic machines would be used fairly. But after thorough checks of hardware and software and some key concessions by electoral officials, presidential challenger Manuel Rosales says he's satisfied - as long as the agreed-upon rules are respected.

"The Venezuelan people and I hope that the electoral council doesn't step outside the rules, that it maintains impartiality," Rosales said Monday. "I'm going to defend the transparency and the results of this process, even if it's with my last breath."

Unlike with most U.S. electronic voting machines, Venezuelans will get paper receipts that verify their choices were properly recorded, and must deposit them into boxes before leaving the polls. After Sunday's vote, election officials monitored by representatives of each candidate will count millions of the paper receipts for comparison to the electronic totals.

Last month, they performed random hardware and software checks of 1 percent of the machines. Officials also will keep them disconnected from the network during the actual voting as an additional safeguard against tampering.

Digital thumbprint devices aimed at preventing the casting of multiple ballots will be used by about 40 percent of the voters in the most populous states and along Venezuela's borders, but in response to fears that thumbprints could be linked to voters' choices, the National Electoral Council says it has tweaked the software so that no record is kept of the sequence in which thumbprints are recorded.

In the United States, only some of the electronic machines used in this month's midterm elections provided voter-verified receipts. In general, the machines are considered proprietary, and vendors have restricted access to the hardware and software for independent review.

Thousands of citizens in dozens of states had problems voting, and some were left with little confidence that their choices were properly recorded.

Chavez's opponents have been suspicious of the machines made by Boca Raton, Florida-based Smartmatic Inc., which is primarily owned by three Venezuelans. Smartmatic bought one of the largest U.S. voting equipment companies, Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., which is now undergoing a Treasury Department review over what Sequoia calls baseless allegations of potential influence by Chavez over U.S. elections.

But even prominent electronic voting critics say Venezuela appears be doing the right things.

Avi Rubin, an electronic voting expert at Johns Hopkins University, has shown in his laboratory how automated voting systems can have glitches and weaknesses, and how someone could insert code to alter the results - for example by switching a certain number of votes for one candidate to his opponent.

However, Rubin said, "a lot of my criticisms of these systems go away when you look at the paper trail that's verified by the voters." If problems emerge, authorities can perform a full manual count.

The random audit of 54 percent of the boxes containing the paper slips is impressive, Rubin said. In the U.S., it's normal for about 2 percent of electronic ballots to be audited, he said.

Rosales' campaign also plans to have about 1 million witnesses at voting centers to ensure compliance, and at least one person from each of the Rosales and Chavez camps will join in the audits.

"We are very well-prepared," said Eliceo Fermin, Rosales' chief of electoral oversight. "We know the errors we committed in the past, we know our weaknesses and we are on alert."

The opposition boycott of last December's elections allowed Chavez allies to capture the entire National Assembly.

Now even the Venezuelan elections watchdog group Sumate acknowledges that the promised safeguards are significant, President Alejandro Plaz said.

It's a stark change from 2004, when Venezuelans first used the touch-screen machines in a recall referendum Chavez won by a wide margin. Observers said Chavez won cleanly and opponents didn't produce hard evidence of fraud, but some questioned the results nevertheless.

Some Venezuelans still have doubts.

"Technology can be manipulated, so I think it's good to recount the votes manually because it's safer," said Javier Gonzalez, a 22-year-old student, pausing to ask for help before using one of the machines in a test run organized by electoral officials.

An AP-Ipsos poll showing Chavez with a wide lead over Rosales also showed less than half of the 2,500 registered voters surveyed were very confident that Venezuelan ballots are counted accurately and votes kept secret.

But electoral officials insist the count will be precise, and that voting secrecy is assured. And Rosales urged voters not to worry, assuring them recently that "No one will know who you voted for."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-16-18-24





EU Clears Sale of AOL German Access Unit
AP

European Union regulators cleared on Tuesday an agreement by Telecom Italia SpA to buy AOL's German access business, saying the combined company still would face formidable competition.

Upon closing, Milan-based Telecom Italia will become the second-biggest provider of broadband Internet in Germany with 3.2 million customers, behind Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Online International. Telecom Italia has agreed to pay $856 million in cash to AOL parent Time Warner Inc. to gain a firm foothold in the German market.

The European Commission said overlaps between broadband and dial-up Internet access services were limited.

"The combined firm would continue to face a number of strong, effective competitors, notably the incumbent Deutsche Telekom," it said.

The deal will bring to more than 9 million the number of Telecom Italia subscribers in Italy, France and Germany. In Germany, the company operates Hansenet, which it acquired in 2003, and offers broadband under the "Alice" brand.

AOL Germany has 1.1 million broadband users and 1.3 million subscribers who use dial-up or ISDN to access the Internet.

AOL has been trying to shed its legacy access businesses to concentrate on growing its free, ad-supported Web sites. In the United States, it is giving away AOL.com e-mail accounts and software to keep people from defecting to rivals with free offerings. In Europe, it is selling its access operations, though holding on to its portals for the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

The changes are expected to cost 5,000 jobs at AOL, or a quarter of its global work force, although some would be hired by Telecom Italia and other buyers.

Under the deal, AOL will provide content and ads for its current users as well as Telecom Italia's existing customers in Germany.

Germany's broadband market is one of the largest in Europe, with more than 12 million subscribers as of the end of June. The number of users is expected to grow by 10 million through 2009 as faster access is introduced in the country of more than 82 million.

Time Warner has already closed on a deal with Neuf Cegetel for the French telecommunications network operator to buy AOL's French access business for about $365 million in cash.

Mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse Group PLC has agreed to buy AOL's U.K. access business for $688 million in cash.

The U.K. sale is slated to close Dec. 29, while the German sale is expected early next year, according to AOL.

Shares in Time Warner dropped 35 cents to close at $20.18 on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-28-16-59-24





AOL to Give Away Free Movies Dec. 2
BetaNews Staff

AOL said Thursday that it would offer 30 movies to users of its AOL Video portal at no cost as a holiday gift. The titles, which would include recent releases like Spiderman 2 and holiday favorites like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation normally sell for $9.99 to $19.99 USD. Users would be limited to one movie download, and would have 24 hours beginning at 6:00am ET on December 2 to download it.

The movies would be delivered in Windows Media format, and require a Windows XP computer running Internet Explorer and Windows Media 10 in order to view them. Once downloaded, the user would be able to view the file offline, as well as on one other PC and two Windows Media-compatible portable devices.
http://www.betanews.com/article/AOL_...c_2/1164926509





Goodbye Razr, Hello Linux-Based Motofone

Motorola is shipping the first model in its Scpl ("scalpel") line of Linux-based phones set to replace the ubiquitous Razr. The Motofone F3, available today in India, is an extremely low-end phone featuring an "electronic paper" display, breakthrough battery life, and usability features for the illiterate.

Motorola announced the Motofone back in July, as the first model in a new Scpl ("scalpel") line of Linux-based phones. At the time, it positioned Scpl as a replacement for the Razr in the U.S. and European markets. Thus, the Razr line, which includes the Razr, Krazr, and RazrMaxx, is expected to be the last series of Motorola phones based on the company's aging, proprietary "P2K" OS.

To date, Motorola does not appear to have registered the Motofone or any other Scpl models with the FCC, a necessary precursor to U.S. distribution. However, BetaNews quotes Motorola officials as saying that the Motofone could sell for as little as $50 when it does eventually reach the U.S. -- "even without carrier subsidies."

Low end phone

The Motofone is targeted squarely at one of the fastest-growing sectors of the mobile phone market -- the low end. It aims to be simple and intuitive to use, even for those who have never used a computer or a phone before, and who may not even know how to read, according to Motorola.

Interestingly, with many mobile phone markets reaching saturation and relying on replacement business, low-end phones today represent "the major driver behind future subscriber and handset market growth," according to ABI. In a recent report, the research firm noted that Nokia and Motorola -- number one and two in the phone market -- have gained marketshare by dealing with mobile phone market segmentation better than smaller vendors.

The Motofone eschews fancy smartphone features such as video and MP3 playback, instead focusing on the basics -- making and receiving telephone calls. It does also include a text messaging client, and of course, the capability to download ringtones.

Due to its simplicity, the Motofone will offer "extended battery life," Motorola says. Some reports from around the Internet put the expected battery life at 400 hours (over two weeks) of standby, and 450 minutes of continuous talk time -- presumably figures for stationary use. Other reports suggest that the Motofone uses a very small, inexpensive battery that yeilds about 8 hours of talk time.

Additionally, MIT Technology Review says Motorola is developing a bicycle-powered dynamo that will be capable of giving the Motofone a full charge in two hours of leisurely riding.

E-paper display

In place of the power-hungry color TFT LCDs found in nearly all mobile phones today, the Motofone sports a monochromatic "electrophoretic" display (EPD) dubbed "ClearVision." Sometimes referred to as "electronic paper displays," EPDs feature sunlight readability comparable to newsprint, yet require no power to hold an image, once set.

According to BetaNews, the Motofone's ClearVision EPD is sourced from E-Ink, which offers a Linux-based EPD development kit (pictured at right). An E-Ink EPD display was previously used in a Linux-based ebook reader from iRex.

Motorola calls the Motofone's interface "innovative," in part thanks to its ability to deliver voice prompts in local languages. The prompts guide the user in navigating menus, placing calls, and sending text messages, the company says.

The Motofone's interface also features graphical icons that "visually demonstrate the menu features," along with battery life and network status. Previously, Motorola officials said the Motofone's interface would resemble the Linux/Java based "Chameleon" interface used in the Rokr E2.

As with Motorola's previous Linux-based interfaces, Chameleon is based on Trolltech's Qtopia Core (formerly "Qt/Embedded") UI framework and middleware.

Additional touted Motofone features include:

• Stylish thin design
• Durable housing for optimal performance despite dust and sun
• High-contrast screen using new ClearVision display
• Large font size for easy readability
• High-volume for call clarity in loud environments
• Automatic notification of current prepaid balance
• Embedded polyphonic ringtones in eight voices

A few additional details about the Motofone are available in a BetaNews story, here.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5567800205.html





The French Say Au Revoir to Microsoft Software
David Garrett

Currently, a number of French ministries and government bureaus run Linux, but only on servers. France's Senate and National Assembly will be the first to use Linux on workstations, although neither one has announced which flavor of Linux it plans to use instead of Microsoft's software next year.

The French parliament has said au revoir to Microsoft. Starting in June of next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, a free open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office software.

For day-to-day documents, French members of parliament and their staff will use OpenOffice.org, currently in version 2.0.4 and designed to compete directly with Microsoft's Office System.

With versions available in languages from Arabic to Welsh, OpenOffice.org includes several modules to compete with Microsoft Office: Writer, a word processor; Calc, a spreadsheet program; Impress, a presentation package; and Draw, a software package for designing graphics. OpenOffice.org also includes Base, a database tool that competes with Microsoft's Access.

Why the change? The French parliament, composed of an upper chamber (le Senat, or Senate) and a lower chamber (l'Assemblee Nationale, or National Assembly), believes it can save money using open-source software, despite the near-term costs of switching from Microsoft systems and retraining all employees.

But that is a matter of some debate.

Open Debate

"The evidence on the cost savings attributable to a switch to Linux has been mixed," according to Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at research group NPD. "There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy the operating system."

Currently, a number of French ministries and government bureaus run Linux, but only on servers. The Senate and National Assembly will be the first to use Linux on workstations, although neither one has announced which flavor of Linux it plans to use. According to Swenson, that could make all the difference.

"If you buy your software from a Linux vendor like Red Hat, you obviously have to pay for licenses, support, and maintenance," he said, adding that finding and recruiting Linux experts to run enterprise I.T. systems can sometimes be harder than finding Microsoft specialists.

"The net net," said Swenson, is that "the average company or organization can probably save some money by switching to Linux, but deploying software from an established Linux vendor certainly isn't free."

Microsoft Worry?

Microsoft software runs the vast majority of U.S. computers, including laptops, desktops, and servers, at all levels of government, but in the U.S. House, members can use the software they like. "Microsoft is probably the most common," said Salley Collins, press secretary for the Committee on House Administration. "But that having been said, it's up to every individual office and committee to choose their own software."

Still, resistance to Microsoft is growing in small but devoted groups of open-source activists. Among the best-known is Peter Quinn, former CTO of Massachusetts, who resigned his position after his vocal support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) drew massive resistance and at times vocal critique.

Another notable is CPTech, The Consumer Project on Technology, an organization founded by consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader to examine the role of intellectual property and knowledge production in the tech world. CPTech's director, James Love, has called for the widespread adoption of ODF.

Should Microsoft worry? The Redmond giant is far from losing its grip on the world's desktops, and when CEO Steve Ballmer debuts the new versions of Office, Windows, and Exchange this week at an event in New York, Microsoft will trigger yet another upgrade cycle that will continue to boost its bottom line, if history is any guide.

But recent moves by Microsoft -- including a wide-ranging and widely debated deal with Novell, makers of SuSE Linux -- show that even Ballmer and Co. is keeping a close eye on open source.
http://www.newsfactor.com/news/The-F...d=13000CYN8S0K





In Depth

Birmingham City Council Claims Open-Source Success
Matthew Broersma

Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.

In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.

The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.

With Birmingham's trial period over and with lessons learnt and understanding gained, the Council now expects to make cost savings over time, and contrary to press reports which claimed Birmingham had scrapped the Linux initiative, it will in fact "significantly increase" its use of open-source software, Evans said. The trial also had other positive results, he claimed, such as demonstrating the ease with which Firefox and OpenOffice.org can be substituted for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

The trial was carried out with the government-backed Open Source Academy (OSA), and planned to install Linux on 330 desktops in the council's libraries service, split between staff PCs and public access terminals, in an effort to build up practical experience that could be drawn on by other public-sector bodies.

It ran from April 2005 to March 2006, but is still ongoing, with the council refining its Linux desktop image and planning further rollouts next year, according to Evans. "The project did not end when the element of original funding ended, because it is part of the Library Service strategy," he told Techworld. "This project is still very much ongoing, and now that a stable image... has been developed, we would expect significant movement forward."

Over-ambitious

He admitted the council's original plans were over-ambitious, with rollouts of Linux-based staff and public PCs originally scheduled during the one-year trial period. In reality, ongoing testing of the desktop configuration means no Linux desktops have yet been installed. Instead, 96 public desktops and 134 staff desktops are running open source applications such as the OpenOffice.org office suite and the Firefox browser.

The council does plan to begin migrating those desktops to its Suse Professional 9.3-based desktop OS, however, a plan that should go into action in the near future, according to Evans. He said that far from scrapping the Linux initiative, as has occurred in some other high-profile cases such as the London borough of Newham, Birmingham is planning to "significantly increase" the number of desktops involved with the project.

Evans' description of the project is a sharp contrast to the findings described in a case study authored by iMpower Consulting at the formal conclusion of the trial in March, which is available from the OSA's website [pdf]. The case study found that the council had failed to make a business case for its Linux desktops, largely because the half-a-million-pound cost of designing and implementing the system cost more than the estimated cost for a Windows XP installation.

The difference is largely down to high "team costs", including setting up the project, technical definition and design, development and testing and training, all of which amounted to roughly £100,000 more than the estimated team costs for a Windows installation. The total cost of the trial was £534,710, compared to an estimated £429,960 for Windows XP.

"The project showed that there are considerable costs incurred in decision-making, because of the huge range of open source options available," said iMpower in the case study. "The extra resources involved in decision making and project management mean that the cost of this first-time open source implementation for BCC was significantly higher than for a comparable proprietary upgrade, despite the minimal licence costs for open source software."

Frustrations

The case study also detailed the many frustrations involved in approaching an unfamiliar desktop technology, including the discovery that key applications wouldn't run on Linux and usability problems with the original Gnome interface. At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE. The new interface was up and running within a week.

But evaluating the project solely on what occurred during the original trial period is absurd, according to Evans. "There is no doubt that start-up costs for this project would be high due to the level of requirement, the level of Linux expertise within BCC and the complex requirements of the library service for the public desktop," he said. "The positives centre on future costs."

Birmingham's requirements involve "much more than purely tweaking a standard desktop image", according to Evans, including the need for particular security features, authenticated processes and the supply of specialised management information for performance monitoring requirements.

For instance, existing Windows 3.1 public terminals used a program called Deepfreeze that rebooted the system at the end of each session, something that had to be re-engineered for Linux. Another problem arose with the handling of removable media, which often wasn't recognised or caused errors on the desktop.

Staff also found that the OS was storing information about the contents of public users' removable media, and for privacy purposes had to develop a script to delete this information, which caused further delays in developing the final image.

Porting problems

Linux simply wasn't able to meet certain requirements, such as the ability to run Galaxy, the library management system. The council couldn't afford to pay Galaxy's developers to port it to Linux, and running it in emulation would have added yet another layer of complexity, so many staff PCs were simply migrated to Windows XP with OpenOffice and Firefox.

All this planning and configuration added to Birmingham's start-up costs, and meanwhile, the fact that Birmingham qualifies for Windows discounts further lowered the comparative cost of a Windows installation.

The council gets a steep discount on Windows licences through a broader Education SELECT licence arrangement, paying £58 for a Windows XP licence compared to roughly £100 for OEMs. "Accounting for corporate instead of Education SELECT licences would have added nearly £50,000 to a Windows upgrade project," iMpower found.

Despite this, however, the council feels that further down the line the investment in open source will pay off - for instance, Linux-based systems can be upgraded incrementally, avoiding large one-off license payments as would be the case with a Windows upgrade. Any number of further desktops can be added to the project without adding extra licence costs.

Vendor lock-in

Graham Taylor of Open Forum Europe (OFE) said one of the key concerns emerging out of the trial is the effect of vendor lock-in, with particular key applications dictating the choice of operating system. "For me this was the major issue emerging," Taylor said. "Our estimate is that up to 90 percent of UK public-sector organisations have this as their current position, and can no longer freely choose next steps in procurement."

OFE and OSA have developed a certification scheme called Certified Open, designed to encourage applications to certify on open source platforms, which will launch in the new year. While attempting to design and implement a Linux desktop system that could be used by staff and the general public with limited technical knowledge turned out to be an onerous and frustrating chore, by contrast, many of the open source applications themselves ran smoothly and went over well with users.

OpenOffice, for one, met little or no resistance with most users, many of whom said they didn't notice they'd been using a different application. (Power users did face some problems.) The public had no trouble using Firefox on public terminals and some said they preferred the open-source desktop to Windows. "It appears that OpenOffice provides a satisfactory equivalent to Microsoft products for those using basic or intermediate functionality," iMpower found.

Future impact

The trial's findings will be used by the OSA to give other public-sector bodies background when they consider using open source. The OSA has backed other, more unambiguously successful open source projects, such as Bristol's implementation of StarOffice, which saved it hundreds of thousands of pounds in one-off licence costs.

The UK has less than average usage of open source compared with other EU countries, according to a report by the University of Maastricht, with 32.1 percent of all UK local government users on open source compared to the 78.7 percent European average.

That lack of experience adds to the difficulty of public sector bodies getting involved with open source, iMpower found. One high-profile open source failure was the London borough of Newham's decision to scrap an open source trial in favour of upgrading to Windows XP in 2004. That came following Microsoft's offer to provide free consultancy to the council and a subsequent deal struck with Newham Council that remains undisclosed but which is widely assumed to offer a huge discount on Windows licences. Newham Council will be appearing alongside Microsoft today at the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.

In October 2003, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) announced they would fund IBM to run nine proof-of-concept open source trials designed to mesure the cost-benefits of open source over proprietary software such as Windows. Participants were to include the OeE, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Powys CC, Newham and Ofwat, with Newham dropping out. None of the trials have led to further rollouts.
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...fm?newsid=7459





Internet Archive Helps Secure Exemption To The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Brewster

Thanks to the hard work of two great law school students of Peter Jaszi of American University, Jieun Kim and Doug Agopsowicz, the Internet Archive and other libraries may continue to preserve software and video game titles without fear of going to jail. This is a happy moment, but on the other hand this exception is so limited it leaves the overall draconian nature of the DMCA in effect. A total of more than $50,000 of pro-bono lawyer time has been spent to just affect this exemption and its continuation. We hope that Congress, and other governments, will pass more balanced copyright laws to allow at least libraries, archives, research and scholarship to flourish without the current dark clouds of litigation.

More formally, Internet Archive has successfully advocated for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). The DMCA prohibits circumvention of technological measures employed by or on behalf of copyright owners to protect their works (“access controls”). Specifically, 17 U.S.C. §1201(a)(1)(A) provides, in part, that “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” In order to ensure that the public will have continued ability to engage in noninfringing uses of copyrighted works, such as fair use, subparagraph (B) limits this prohibition. It provides that the prohibition against circumvention “shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding three-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title” as determined in a rulemaking proceeding.

On November 27, 2006, the Librarian of Congress, on the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, announced six classes of works which will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (the DMCA) through October 27, 2009. One of these six classes includes:

“computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.”

The group primarily responsible for requesting this second exemption is the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Long before the enactment of the DMCA, many works distributed in digital formats on physical media (such as floppy diskettes) were designed so that the original diskette must be inserted into the appropriate drive in the computer in order to enable access to the work (“original only” access controls). When the Internet Archive migrates the content of these works to digital archival systems, often times the “original only” access controls must be circumvented to verify the integrity of the reproduction. Such “original-only” technological measures qualify as access controls even though the primary purpose may be to prevent copying. Thus, by circumventing the “original-only” access controls to verify the integrity of reproductions, the Internet Archive could potentially face liability under the DMCA for its archival work. However, as a result of receiving this exemption, the Internet Archive may continue to circumvent these access control measures for preservation purposes.

This exemption marks the second successful DMCA exemption proposed by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive first received an exemption similar to the just-granted exemption back in 2003, thanks to pro-bono help of Alex Macgillivray, then of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. As a result of receiving this exemption, the Internet Archive can continue its important archival work of computer programs and video games for at least the next three years, free from liability under the DMCA.

To read the full recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, please visit: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/1...mmendation.pdf
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=82097





Awareness Of Mobile Music Options Strong Among Americans

Ipsos: Seventy Percent Of American Mobile Phone Owners Are Aware Of Full Song Mobile Downloading - But Only One-In-Twenty Have Yet Done So

Recent Findings From The Ongoing TEMPO Digital Music Tracking Study Reveal Mobile Music Consumption Poised For Growth
Press Release

Amid continued growth in portable MP3 player ownership and steady sales of PC-based individual song downloads, recently launched mobile music services offered by many of the major wireless carriers have given American music consumers yet another acquisition option to consider. Recent research released by global market research organization Ipsos in the quarterly digital music tracking program TEMPO reveal that while the mobile music category is still in its infancy, Americans are experimenting with this method of music acquisition in increasing numbers.

Recent findings include:

• Four percent of American mobile phone owners aged 12 and older have downloaded full digital music songs over-the-air in the past 30 days, doubling proportions seen in 2005.
• Males are twice as likely as females to have ever downloaded full songs (6% versus 3%). Teens are the most likely to have ever done so (11%), with younger adults 18 to 34 being the next most likely (8% among 18 to 24 year olds and 7% among those 25 to 34).
• Perhaps reflecting untapped opportunity associated with over-the-air music downloading, seventy-one percent of American mobile phone owners are aware of mobile/wireless phones that would allow them to download and play entire songs rather than just ringtones.
• 14% of American Mobile Phone Owners report that they have a mobile phone with full-song download and playback capability.
• When drilling down among mobile phone owners who have also downloaded digital music to their computers, the number of people with mobile music phones rises to one-third, and the number who have ever downloaded full songs more than doubles - to 10%.
• On average, these over-the-Air (OTA) mobile music downloaders have approximately six tracks stored on their mobile phones, which is similar to the number of ringtones stored.
• Among those with mobile phones, 27% have downloaded ringtones and 9% have done so in the past 30 days, returning to levels experienced in early 2005 after declines in recent quarters. Five percent have downloaded ringbacks – 3% in the past 30 days. This is a slight increase over recent quarters.
• When considering overall spending on mobile music, including ringtones, full songs and ringbacks, the average mobile music downloader spent roughly $7.00 in the past month. Younger over-the-Air (OTA) mobile music downloaders are likely to have spent more than older downloaders.

“In recent months we have witnessed the high profile launch of many mobile music services, and these findings suggest that Americans are indeed aware of these new services and have also begun to experiment with them - particularly teens and young adults ,” says Matt Kleinschmit, Vice President for Ipsos Insight and author of the TEMPO study. “This is encouraging as these groups have traditionally shied away from fee-based digital music behaviors, and thus mobile acquisition may represent a key opportunity for bringing these music enthusiasts back into the realm of the legitimate digital music marketplace.”

Digital Video Downloading Also Emerging As Over-The-Air Content Option

The growing popularity of digital video consumption; particularly that of user-supplied video clips and music videos has lead not only to a new PC-based digital market, but to a number of new over-the-air developments as well. In addition to current video download services offered by the major wireless carriers, pending deals could potentially link mobile phone handsets with video recording and playback capabilities directly to the popular YouTube video clip community - allowing users to download video clips and fully-licensed music videos directly to their mobile phones as well as upload content they may have recorded as well. Similar to mobile music, recent TEMPO research shows that mobile phone-based video downloading is still an emerging activity for many Americans as well:

• Three percent of American mobile phone owners have ever downloaded music videos to their mobile phone, and 2% have ever downloaded short video clips.
• Eighteen to 24 year olds are the most likely to have downloaded music videos (9%) and video clips (6%), with approximately twice as many doing so as teens and considerably more than those Americans ages 25 and older. Males are slightly more likely than females to have ever downloaded digital video content to a mobile phone.

‘While mobile video services are still in their infancy, similar to mobile music this category is in many respects also poised for strong growth”, continued Kleinschmit. “In both cases the key components of the consumer experience are impulse consumption and instant gratification. With music, over-the-air downloading is yet another digital innovation that will work to counter-balance losses created by shifts in consumer purchasing due to the ability to acquire music ‘song-by-song’ rather than via a traditional album purchase. With video, the possibilities for on-the-go access to important or entertaining content and emerging user-generated recordings are just emerging and truly intriguing. The promising common element to both is that they provide vast new opportunities for monetizing impulsive consumption across a wide range of multimedia content via an established wireless carrier billing relationship.”
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3286





Aerosmith’s Perry: 'Who Knows, This Might Be It'

Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry seem to be unstoppable.
Wade Tatangelo

Aerosmith appears unstoppable these days. Singer Steven Tyler’s throat surgery, bassist Tom Hamilton’s bout with throat cancer, guitarist Joe Perry whacked in the head by a 2,000 pound camera boom — nothing seems capable of derailing “America’s Greatest Rock Band” from its current “Route of All Evil” tour with Motley Crue.

Aerosmith’s latest near fatal blow occurred Nov. 4 at the MGM Garden Arena in Las Vegas. Three songs into the performance the band dug into its classic “Back in the Saddle” when a camera boom struck Perry in the head and face. He finished the 90-minute show but sustained a concussion and severe bruising to his face.

“I was so (ticked) off — really, really (ticked) off by the time show was over,” confessed Perry when he called from a tour stop in Arizona. “I was a mess by the next day and felt like (expletive).”

Perry said he didn’t remember finishing the show but is glad he did — surely the 15,000 in attendance were pleased, as well. Aerosmith’s “Route of All Evil” tour is earning the legendary rock band its strongest reviews in years, thanks to inspired performances that have favored 1970s rockers like “Toys in the Attic” over more recent ballads such as “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing.” One can only conclude that recent health issues have prompted the musicians to take each show a little more seriously.

“That’s exactly it,” Perry said. “That feeling of wondering when you’re gonna play again is what does it. I gotta think there’s a sense of immediacy that all this stuff brings. When I play these cities I can’t help but think: Who knows, this might be it.”
The 56-year-old guitarist added: “It’s like that old saying, if you wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans. Be humble and play the show, that’s all I can do. If I had my head tilted a few more inches the other way I couldn’t have finished that show — or maybe ever played again. And then look at Tom (Hamilton), who’s never missed a show, and then something happens out of his control. Things like that really make you feel you gotta just live for the day.”

Hamilton is recovering from throat cancer and has been temporarily replaced by David Hull. However, Hamilton did find the strength to join the band in Boston last month to perform “Sweet Emotion.”

“That was pretty incredible,” Perry said. “Talking about it, I also saw him a couple weeks ago ... It was great he came out and played.”

The band had hoped to have completed a new record by now but Tyler’s and Hamilton’s health issues prevented that from happening. Perry said we should expect the album out by next summer.

What might we find on it?

“There will be the rock stuff that has that familiar sound and a couple of ballads,” Perry said.
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2...2889645166.txt





Rock of Ages
Jeff Leeds

AT 52, Martha Stinson is not quite sure where to turn when it comes to new music. The local Tower Records in Nashville, where Mrs. Stinson is an owner of a general contracting company, is going out of business, and she never did figure out how to load music onto the digital-music player she bought a couple of years ago.

But she may soon receive an overture from a source not known for its musical savvy: AARP. She is the kind of consumer that the association is targeting with a sweeping marketing campaign that it hopes will entice millions of new members, as the first kids weaned on rock ’n’ roll turn gray.

And if Mrs. Stinson is any indication, the group faces an uphill battle. She has repeatedly thrown out AARP membership solicitations, after all. “It’s going to be tough,” to market to those like her, she said. “Our generation has always been a little revolutionary. We feel like we’re in middle age. Were out bike riding, running businesses. Our kids are fully grown, and we’re kind of footloose and fancy free.”

Older consumers (along with children) represent one of the few reliable markets in the music business these days, and AARP, the organization for older Americans, is keen to capitalize on that. On Tuesday the group announced that for the first time it will sponsor a national concert tour, by Tony Bennett. And that’s just a start. Other sponsorships will follow, and from those, AARP hopes, many new members. With plans in the works for an alliance with a major retail chain, a Web-based music recommendation service with Pandora and even a music blog, AARP is looking to graduate from advocate of the shuffleboard set to the ranks of cultural concierge.

“I hope that we make this thing so relevant and so cool,” said Tena Clark, a music consultant helping to devise the group’s marketing strategy. “I would hope that one day in the future that my 20-year-old daughter would want to borrow my AARP card to get into a concert just like she tries to borrow her sister’s I.D.”

Consumers like Ms. Stinson may not be the only skeptics however. For musicians, a deal with AARP is a different matter than a deal with a hip coffee house or a fashion retailer. No matter how hard the group may try to change its image — even with the likes of Paul McCartney and Susan Sarandon on the cover of its magazine — some people still associate it with the Saturday-night-bingo set. And many musicians may want to keep their distance, even if it means sacrificing enormous sales.

“The problem is going to be getting the artists to allow, next to their name, those four feared initials,” said Jonny Podell, the longtime talent agent who books appearances for artists including the Allman Brothers Band, Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel. “I’m the agent for half a dozen acts they’re going to want,” Mr. Podell said, and “short of saying, ‘In addition to your normal fee we’re giving you $1 million in cash,’ I don’t think they’d have one taker.” For the artists, he said, “It’s about not admitting they’re old.” For his part Mr. Podell, who is 60, said he has been receiving AARP entreaties for years, and each time “I drop it like a hot potato.”

Jan Reisen, who along with her partner Peter Kooiker runs the Web site aginghipsters.com, said she plans to join AARP at some point to take advantage of financial benefits like discounts on insurance, rental cars and hotels. But as for recommending albums, “If I want to know about cool music, I’ll ask my 22-year-old.”

Whether AARP succeeds in its new venture, it’s on to something significant. Like Madison Avenue it is responding to the marketing challenge posed by the huge but fickle post-war generation, which for the last 60 years has driven cultural trends from hula hoops to the S.U.V. Consumers over 50 used to make marketers’ eyes glaze over. The assumption was that older buyers’ spending habits had solidified and their earning power had peaked. No longer.

Now they control too much disposable income — and live too long — to be ignored. And nowhere is the shift in attitudes more pronounced than in the beleaguered pop music business, which desperately needs their money (who do you think is buying all those $750 Barbra Streisand tickets?) and shares their aversion to illicit music downloads.

The graying of the music market crept up on America. Even during the ascent of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys in the late 1990s, when teen sensations were getting all the attention, consumers 45 and older were the industry’s biggest market, according to survey data compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America. The gap has only widened since then. Last year fans 45 and older accounted for 25.5 percent of sales, while older teenagers (a group more prone to music piracy) represented less than 12 percent. So it’s little wonder that Rod Stewart’s raspy remakes of pop standards emerged as a franchise, or that Bob Dylan in September captured the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for the first time in 30 years.

The trick is that conventional marketing techniques don’t always work with this group (if they work with anyone anymore). Older listeners don’t have much interest in traditional commercial radio, which targets children and young adults, as do TV channels like VH1 and MTV. And they don’t spend much time in traditional record stores.

So labels, publicists and marketers have had to learn new tricks to reach them. Older acts show up not on MTV’s “TRL” (Total Request Live) but on morning shows like “Today,” and hawk their wares in infomercials and TV mail-order ads. Instead of seeking Top 40 radio airplay, they look to National Public Radio and satellite radio. And to entice more casual consumers, artists now regularly guarantee exclusive recordings to mass retailers like Target or high-end chains that cater to grown-ups.

While Starbucks is the most prominent example, other chains are finding their own niche. James Taylor struck platinum with a CD that was initially sold only in Hallmark stores. Nordstrom has introduced music to its offerings, starting with a previously out-of-print Marvin Gaye release and an exclusive CD from the jazz-tinged singer-songwriter Jamie Cullum.

But perhaps the most surprising results have been online, where the over-50 set accounted for almost 24 percent of the industry’s Internet sales, according to NPD Group, a market-research company.

While these consumers didn’t grow up with the Internet, they have grown comfortable with using it, at least to order CDs if not download music in digital form. All of that helps account for why Amazon.com’s recent Top 10 included Mr. Bennett’s hit “Duets: An American Classic” CD, the new collaboration from J. J. Cale and Eric Clapton, and holiday albums from James Taylor and Bette Midler, while over at iTunes, the best sellers were rap hits from the Game, Akon and the pop-punk band Plus-44.

Overall, marketers say, older consumers need to be made comfortable. So House of Blues, the concert promoter, found that it could boost ticket sales for older artists by offering pre-show dinners or wine tastings. Sometimes they added seating in clubs that had required fans to stand.

AARP is heeding such lessons by developing the machinery of modern tastemaking. That means bulking up its Web site with music offerings, licensing the Pandora online radio and recommendation service, and negotiating for shelf space at a major retail chain, which would carry exclusive versions of certain CDs with discounts to AARP members. And of course it will advertise at Mr. Bennett’s concerts and perhaps sign up new members there too.

Thanks in part to Target and Starbucks, his “Duets” album has racked up the biggest sales of his career (almost 650,000 copies in its first seven weeks). Mr. Bennett’s son and manager, Danny Bennett, said the album is succeeding because it appeals not to older buyers specifically, but to a wide swatch of the audience. And that multi-generational appeal, the younger Mr. Bennett said, is what makes his father a perfect ally for AARP. “It’s not a matter of ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’ It’s ‘Let’s stay healthy so we can rock.’ Tony’s the poster child for AARP. He’s 80 years old. He’s young at heart.”

AARP seems intent on a more generation-specific approach, putting its stamp on albums individually chosen for older consumers.

As for the wary artists, in an era when record labels are cutting back on marketing expenses, AARP, with about 37 million members, could be a great, rich friend to have. The message is not lost on the labels. Jay Krugman, senior vice president for marketing at Columbia Records (which released Mr. Bennett’s CD) calls the group “like the golden chalice.”

Elton John performed at the association’s “Life @50+” convention in Anaheim, Calif., last month; officials said they have booked Rod Stewart and Earth, Wind & Fire for next year. James Taylor played two years ago, and the group’s magazine has named him as one of the hottest people over 50. (He was listed under the “babelicious baldies” category.)

His manager, Gary Borman, acknowledges that for artists who still compete for radio airplay and television exposure, “their reputation could be somewhat tainted” by an AARP affiliation. “On the other hand, for many, many of these artists, they’re no longer playing that radio and record game and they just want to serve their fans and keep them coming back.”

“Our generation,” he concluded, “as much as we were once intuitive discoverers of music, we have lost that intuition. And now we need to be spoon fed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/ar...html?ref=music





Market for Hipsters-in-Training
Tammy La Gorce

CASEY BONHAM LETO, age 5 months, wasn’t to blame. Neither were his parents. Right down to his rock ’n’ roll middle name — a tribute to Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham — everything had been done to bestow him with rock-kid credibility at the earliest possible age: On the floor of the puff-cheeked baby’s living room in Jersey City were toy guitars and a set of Metallica nesting dolls. On his powder-blue onesie pajamas, in gothic script, were the words “My crib rocks.”

Yet when his father recently unwrapped a new CD of ’80s British alternative rock reimagined expressly for babies, Casey was indifferent. As “Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of the Cure” played on the stereo, he kicked fitfully in his bouncy seat. He appeared not to recognize the wordless glockenspiel-and-vibraphone rendition of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” Within seconds he spit up.

His parents, though, liked what they heard.

“This is hilarious,” said his mother, Pam Leto, a music publicist who works with bands like My Morning Jacket and Eagles of Death Metal.

“It’s actually really soothing,” said her husband, Dave Leto, the tattooed drummer for the indie rock band Rye Coalition.

It was the kind of reaction — hook the parents, never mind the kid — that Lisa Roth was looking for when she founded Baby Rock, the Los Angeles label behind the kiddie Cure album and lullaby tributes to Metallica, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, Tool and Coldplay released this year.

Almost the reaction, anyway.

“I’d love for the parents to say, ‘Wow, this is really funny,’ and for the baby to fall asleep,” said Ms. Roth, 48. “It would also be great if it was like Rock 101 between parent and baby. A steppingstone.”

To be a parent in 2006 — especially a coastal, well-heeled, contemporary-minded one — is to be blasted by possibilities for nurturing impeccable musical taste in one’s offspring. The commercial successes, like Disney’s “Baby Einstein” series of albums, have been widely noted on the Billboard charts and in Wal-Mart shopping carts. But they overshadow a hipper niche of kid music that is encouraging a curious form of parental connoisseurship, where “High Fidelity” meets high chairs.

That this ballooning genre is meant as much for the parents as the children, and probably more, is readily acknowledged by some of those producing and buying it.

“Parents are looking at music as a gift you give your children, as something you discover with them,” said Kevin Salem, a rock record producer in Woodstock, N.Y. “Sharing it is a way of making sure music stays in good hands.”

With his wife, Kate Hyman, Mr. Salem formed Little Monster Records in part to guarantee that their 4-year-old daughter, Emily, is exposed to what her parents consider to be good music, like the label’s “All Together Now,” a Beatles tribute featuring Steve Conte of the New York Dolls, the Bangles and others that is being sold exclusively through Barnes & Noble. Its placement in time for the holidays is so far paying off: “All Together Now” landed at No. 84 on Barnes & Noble’s list of top sellers the day of its release.

“Sesame Street” can probably be credited with (or blamed for) helping to create the modern idea of kids’ music as a socially loaded part of a parent’s developmental tool kit. Pop science too. “Baby Einstein,” begun in 1997, prompted new parents to engage infants musically in the name of healthy brain building; based largely on word of mouth, sales figures reached the multimillions by 2001, when Disney bought the company. Fueling the trend are mass-media tie-ins like this year’s “Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film ‘Curious George’ ” (Brushfire/Universal), the Jack Johnson project that made its debut at the top of the Billboard album chart.

According to executives with a rash of new indie labels and children’s music blogs like the Lovely Mrs. Davis (lovelydavis.blogspot.com), this kind of music really took off in 2002, when Dan Zanes, formerly of the roots-rock band the Del Fuegos, reimagined what worthwhile children’s music could sound like. His CD “Rocket Ship Beach” (Festival Five), recorded in his Brooklyn basement with friends like Suzanne Vega, sneaked up on parents with likable, sharable songs and a homespun sensibility. Mr. Zanes clearly struck the right chord, and has created a kiddie-entertainment empire that includes videos, concerts and even a partnership with Starbucks for this year’s “Catch That Train!” (Festival Five).

Mr. Zanes has a lot of company these days. Ralph Covert, of the grown-up band Bad Examples and the family-friendly Ralph’s World, has built a cottage industry to rival that of Mr. Zanes. Other artists who have dipped into kiddie rock include the country-punk singer Jason Ringenberg, the all-girl band Luscious Jackson and members of the Mekons, who tried on alter egos in the band Wee Hairy Beasties, whose album “Animal Crackers” (Bloodshot Records) came out in October.

It is doubtful that they will all equal the success of Mr. Zanes, whose grass-roots Internet marketing and local parental support have helped “Catch That Train!” sell 125,000 copies. But their market sense isn’t unfounded.

Christopher Noxon, author of “Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up” (Crown), identifies an emerging demographic of 30-plus, forever-young-minded Lucky Charms eaters aiming to reset the boundaries of adulthood. He says it’s little wonder their children are being turned into rock fans, at least in their parents’ eyes.

“Their parents encourage it,” Mr. Noxon said. “They think it’s funny and that it sets them apart. Plus, if you listen to that music now, like I do way too often, you realize it’s kids’ music: three chords dressed up with all this distortion.”

Such parents can take credit for the success of this summer’s Kidzapalooza, the two-year-old arm of the Chicago-based rock festival Lollapalooza, which lured a crowd of 160,000, up from 2,000 in 2005. The attractions included a “rock ’n’ roll petting zoo,” where children could get behind a professional drum kit while parents rocked out on guitar or bass, and a hip-hop workshop where children still in strollers burned rap CDs with professional disc jockeys. Among the performers were Patti Smith and Perry Farrell, the former frontman of Jane’s Addiction and the founder of Lollapalooza.

“People in their 30s and 40s aren’t really grown up, and they don’t want to grow up,” said David Agnew, a vice president of the Buena Vista Music Group and the force behind this year’s “Devo 2.0,” which repurposed old Devo songs for 4- to 10-year-olds and their parents. (Next year Mr. Agnew and the Disney Sound label plan to introduce the Po-Go’s, a kiddie tribute to the girl band the Go-Go’s.)

“Because parents can now listen to 30 seconds of every recording on earth at iTunes, they get turned on to more music,” he added.

That helps explain why parents — including the 3,000 who monitor the poll of children’s music at the Lovely Mrs. Davis site each week — expect something like an intergenerational custom fit from the music they buy for their offspring. Little Monster’s Ms. Hyman, a flop-haired, youngish 49-year-old, said she recognized a need “to be catered to musically” among fellow parents.

“I wouldn’t feed my daughter McDonald’s every day,” she said. “Why would I want her listening to something of that same standard?”

But taken too far, such catering can raise complicated issues. For one thing, some acts that appeal to both parents and children, like Jack Black’s Tenacious D, do so more slyly and can present a special challenge. “That’s an incredibly good record,” Mr. Noxon said, but it “spews” profanity on nearly every track.

Hip earnestness is another problem. Many new discs lack the irony-free goofiness that made classics out of the “Sesame Street” song “Rubber Duckie” and Raffi’s “Bananaphone.”

The producers of hipster baby discs seem aware that they may be a mere toddler step away from heavy-handedness. “We’re undergoing a change in what it means to be a traditional parent,” said Mr. Salem. “But I read somewhere that the fastest way to turn your kid into a Republican is to dress him up in a Sex Pistols T-shirt. That’s probably true.”

That last aphorism actually belongs to Mr. Noxon, and its message about musical backfires is probably not lost on the generation of parents who insisted in the 1980s, despite the fierce protestations of their children, that hip-hop was a fad.

Hip-hop, of course, has evolved far beyond the expectations of even the most broad-minded parents of the ’80s. And then some. This month Mathew Knowles, father of Beyoncé, released the CD “Kid’s Rap Radio” (Music World Entertainment), featuring 8-year-olds behind the mike rapping deraunchified hits like Busta Rhymes’s “Touch It.” “Because it’s been such an important part of their lives, parents have a need for their kids to experience hip-hop,” said Mr. Knowles, who explained that he was inspired by his 2-year-old grandson, Jewlz.

Field observations confirm that the new breed of coolness-bestowing parent takes its music seriously. At an all-ages “Baby Loves Jazz” concert at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan in September, the air was thick with grown-up longing. Parents swayed, clapped and whistled, while their 2-year-olds fidgeted with the salt shakers on the tables.

“You could just see that parents are dying to get that awe back, the childlike awe you lose when you start forming opinions about what’s cool,” said John Medeski, of Medeski Martin and Wood, who played keyboards alongside the soul singer Sharon Jones at the show, and whose trio recently recorded a Little Monster disc for release in 2007.

“There’s been a void,” Mr. Medeski added, referring to parents. “The music becomes like medicine.”

If so, the market may be headed for an overdose. The sales gap between the kind of CDs many hip-minded parents consider pablum — the consistently chart-topping “Kidz Bop” series especially — and the indie releases they champion has never been wider. Unless the music gets television exposure or is associated with a brand like Disney, selling more than 20,000 copies is rare.

The wave of music that prompted Amy Davis of Bowling Green, Ohio, to create the Lovely Mrs. Davis site last year has become barely navigable. She and her two sons, ages 6 and 19 months, are drowning in it, she said.

“Next year is going to be really telling,” she said. “We’ll see whether this kind of music takes off and people other than hip urban parents or Net-savvy parents discover it, or if the tide turns and people find something else to get interested in.”

Count Tor Hyams, Kidzapalooza’s 37-year-old co-founder and the father of an infant and a 7-year-old, among the true believers.

“People want to live vicariously through their kids, to rediscover music with them,” he said. “They want to be more than a cog in the cultural wheel, and I salute them for it. If I ever stop being a kid with my kids, you can shoot me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/ar...ic/26lago.html





String Theory

The harpist Joanna Newsom’s daring new album.
Sasha Frere-Jones

The cover of Joanna Newsom’s new album, “Ys,” is an oil painting by the California artist Benjamin Vierling. Newsom is depicted with plaited blond hair, wearing a billowing blouse and a garland of flowers. She is seated at a window on a thronelike chair, holding a sickle in her right hand and a tiny gilt-framed painting of a moth in her left. A blackbird perches on the windowsill, a cherry in its beak; beyond lie valleys and hills. A press release issued by Newsom’s record label, Drag City, says that Vierling “did the cover painting old-master style, with layers of egg-tempera and glazes. Strictly 16th-century processes, just like the recording of the album.”

The Renaissance references may be a joke, but a careful, almost precious husbandry of the past is characteristic of Newsom’s work. Newsom, who is twenty-four, is a classically trained harpist, and “Ys”—pronounced “eess”; it’s the name of an island in Breton mythology—is a series of complex, through-composed songs that have more in common with Kurt Weill’s long-form ballads than with contemporary pop music. Yet Newsom tends to perform in rock clubs, not concert halls, and many of her fans—including the novelist Dave Eggers, who praised her “bare and unflinching” music in Spin—are devotees of independent rock. Moreover, the songs on “Ys” feature lush, intricate orchestral arrangements by the pop composer Van Dyke Parks. (Parks, who was a child actor, worked on Rufus Wainwright’s 1998 début record and on “Smile,” the legendary album by the Beach Boys, which was begun in 1967 but not completed until 2004.)

Newsom is sometimes lumped with a group of acoustic musicians called “freak folk” or “free folk.” They include the bands Tower Recordings and Feathers and the warbling singer and songwriter Devendra Banhart, with whom Newsom shares a fearlessness and a deceptively childlike air. In essence, however, folk describes simple songs that are universally accessible and performed on cheap instruments, if any. (Rap easily qualifies as folk music.) Newsom uses antique words that many English speakers won’t recognize, and plays an expensive and heavy instrument that you couldn’t bring on a camping trip, and some of her recent songs are almost as long as American sitcoms (average length: twenty-two minutes, without commercials).

In 2002, Will Oldham, an eccentric singer and songwriter known as Bonnie Prince Billy, heard recordings that Newsom had made herself, and brought her on tour. In 2003, Drag City released Newsom’s first full-length album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender”: twelve songs about “funny things,” each one peppered with words like “grammerie” and “poetaster.” It is odd and wonderful music, as cheerful and melodically sure-footed as it is affected and fey. Newsom plays the harp with the utilitarian clarity of a piano player in a band, vigorously plucking bass notes with her left hand while exploring chords in the upper register with her right. (Mercifully, she avoids the cascading glissandi that in movies signal “childhood memory” or “medication taking hold.”) Her voice is an acquired taste: a wobbly mezzo-soprano that leaps into falsetto and breaks in a woody squeak. At first, she sounded to me like Lucille Ball reciting Edmund Spenser. She brought to mind a college student I knew who wore suspenders to show that she would not countenance this debased modern world.

I was won over by the strong arc of Newsom’s melodies and the bristling energy of her language. Her lyrics sound as though they were meant to be read, not sung; that she sings them so nimbly does not necessarily mean that anyone else could. She has a passionate appreciation for the musicality of words and the glow of a well-ordered line: “And the gathering floozies afford to be choosy and all sneezing darkly in the dimming divide” (from “Peach, Plum, Pear”). The animals that populate her songs—canaries, tadpoles, worms, turkeys, toads, larks, and a variety of shellfish—are pretty funny. “Even mollusks have weddings,” she sings on “Inflammatory Writ.”

Most musicians like to begin an album with a song that is rousing and short. “Emily,” which opens “Ys,” is twelve minutes long and slow, and it changes time signatures at least a dozen times. The lyrics roughly concern Newsom’s sister Emily, an astrophysicist, who sings background vocals. (Their distant cousin Gavin Newsom is the mayor of San Francisco.) Several minutes into the song, Newsom delivers a brief tutorial on celestial terminology: “The meteorite is the source of light, and the meteor’s just what we see; and the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee.” Maybe I’m partial to pedantry, but I find this charming. The words before and after this verse give the song emotional heft. Newsom sings, “I sat by your side, by the water. You taught me the names of the stars overhead,” and, after a line or two about the Pleiades, she continues, “I promised you I’d set them to verse, so I’d always remember.” The lesson about meteors, then, is a shared intimacy, a metaphor for the relationship between sisters—an insight you might miss on the first (or tenth) listen. “Ys” is built from many such subtle moments, and sometimes Parks’s music—which ranges from small, darting passages to dense, movie-soundtrack swells—threatens to overwhelm the songs.

Earlier this month, at a sold-out show at New York’s Webster Hall, Newsom performed all of “Ys,” along with songs from “The Milk-Eyed Mender” and a Scottish folk ballad. A small, trim woman with waist-length brown hair, she wore a white scoop-neck shirt, tight black jeans, and, yes, suspenders. She took the stage with just five musicians—an implausibly small number, given Parks’s elaborate arrangements. But Newsom had reworked Parks’s music, creating simpler parts for bouzouki, banjo, accordion, and drums. The week in review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. This allowed her voice to become more prominent—it has more grain and tone than the recordings suggest. It was clear that the imagery on “Ys” changes quickly and often; the compositions have a narrative momentum that justifies their length.

Without seeing Newsom’s hands and feet, it is difficult to understand how hard she must work to pluck the strings and press the pedals while reciting by heart a small book’s worth of verse. I haven’t seen a performance of such sustained intensity all year. If Newsom recalls another musician, it is the singer and pianist Tori Amos, who shares her technical virtuosity, and who also seems to be immersed in a private world. The audience was silent during each song, waiting for the last note to fade away before erupting into extremely loud and loving applause. The crowd behaved as if it were at a classical concert, but it responded to Newsom as if she were a rock star.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/mus...1204crmu_music





String Theory: New Approaches to Instrument Design
Andrew C. Revkin

“I think best in foam,” Douglas Martin said as he sorted through a heap of pink violin-shaped slabs in the kitchen-cum-workshop of his snug colonial house in southern Maine.

Each piece of foam was a template for an experimental instrument he had built or was preparing to build, but none used the traditional spruce and maple favored through most of the hallowed 500-year history of the violin.

Mr. Martin, 63, whose day job is designing sleek rowing shells that slice through ocean surf, is consumed in spare moments by a similarly unorthodox pursuit: abandoning age-old norms of acoustic instrument design as he chases his conception of the ideal violin sound.

A dining table was strewn with rough-hewn violins built of balsa wood and graphite fibers, some with the standard instrument’s familiar curves and narrow waist, but others boxy and ribbed, as if they had been built inside out.

In art school in the 1960s, a professor once tossed one of Mr. Martin’s sketches on the floor and scuffed it up, urging him to abandon caution, and he clearly absorbed that notion.

When a violinist tried an instrument at a recent workshop and one of its blunt shoulders got in the way of his wrist, Mr. Martin summarily sawed off the corner and sealed the opening with a scrap.

He might be mistaken for an eccentric dabbler, except that he is far from alone. From Australia to Germany to Maui, there is something of an explosion under way in the use of science and new materials to test the limits of instrument making.

And the traditional violin-making and violin-playing world is taking note.

Last year, Mr. Martin passed around one prototype, Balsa 4, at an annual workshop on violin design at Oberlin College by the Violin Society of America, a group of builders. When it was played and run through an array of tests, the instrument’s responsiveness and punch startled the gathering, several participants said.

Joseph Curtin, a director of the workshop and a builder from Ann Arbor, Mich., who received a 2005 MacArthur Foundation “genius award” for his violin designs, wrote about Mr. Martin’s work in the society’s newsletter, saying “the traditional violin became obsolete in early July of 2005.”

In an interview, Mr. Curtin said that was only partly a playful exaggeration. It will be a long time before balsa and graphite become the materials of choice, he said. But he added that Mr. Martin and other experimenters were legitimately challenging longstanding notions of what makes a great acoustic instrument, and whether past masters’ work represents a sonic pinnacle or merely the best that could be achieved with traditional materials.

Some of the new designs are mass-produced, with companies (many founded by former aerospace engineers) turning out hundreds of synthetic weatherproof guitars and instruments in the fiddle family.

Others, like Mr. Martin’s, are one-off prototypes. (He has sold only three.)

In almost every case, a central goal, particularly in the resonating top or soundboard most responsible for an instrument’s voice, is a mix of stiffness and lightness.

This combination increases an instrument’s ability to turn the energy in a vibrated string into waves of appealing sound.

That is where unconventional materials come into play. Layered graphite fibers and carved balsa are very stiff but far less dense than the traditional choice of spruce.

“Wood reached the limits of its potential in the first half of the 18th century,” Martin Schleske, a leading violin maker from Munich, asserted in a recent lecture in Germany. “I have no doubt that if Stradivari were alive today with the same force of innovation, he would have already discovered the fascinating acoustic properties of graphite fibers and would have ushered us into a new golden age of violin making.”

This month, Ingolf Turban, a touring concert violinist, compared Mr. Schleske’s latest violin, which has a top made of a mix of spruce and graphite, with a 1721 Stradivarius by recording passages from Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D Major with each. He told Mr. Schleske he preferred the new one.

“I have never been playing any violin with such a singing E string,” Mr. Turban said in a testimonial. “It is no longer like playing violin but like singing.”

Some instrument makers and researchers are using science to deconstruct the dozens of kinds of vibrations and waves that interplay in a violin or guitar to create their distinctive sounds.

Working with Mr. Curtin and several other violin makers, George Bissinger, a physicist at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., is using medical-imaging gear, laser scanners, arrays of microphones and computers to measure and model how the parts of a violin react once energy is introduced by a bow, fingertip, pick or, in the laboratory, the repeated taps of a tiny hammer.

Depending on many interrelated variables, from the force exerted on the strings by the player to the stiffness, density and shape of an instrument’s parts, a layered field of sound emanates, sometimes containing dozens of distinctive overtones and harmonics.

Some sounds disperse in the air evenly in all directions, while others — especially high notes on a violin — push outward in a particular direction, funneled by the shape of the instrument.

Particularly important, Dr. Bissinger said, is determining which factors translate the side-to-side sawing of a bow on a string into vertical motions of the violin top. “Up and down is what matters,” he said.

Other vibrations travel in the body — at different speeds reflecting the orientation of wood grain — setting up all manner of ripples and bouncing waves and more ripples.

In instruments built entirely of meshed graphite fibers, the vibrations move uniformly, offering both challenges and opportunities to instrument makers.

Another important influence, particularly on low violin notes, is the movement of air in and out of the f-holes, Dr. Bissinger said. If the dimensions are right, the air sloshes forward and back like disturbed water in a bathtub (or air in an organ’s pipes) at rates that increase the instrument’s volume.

The materials in the body matter because they determine how much of the energy imparted to an instrument moves into the surrounding air as sound and how much is dissipated as heat within the matrix of molecules that make up the instrument’s body.

That damping effect is not all bad, guitar and violin makers say, and may be one of the characteristics that give a mellow tone to older instruments in contrast to the almost metallic brightness sometimes heard in new ones.

In September, Dr. Bissinger ran three days of tests on two violins built by Stradivari and one by Guarneri del Gesù — worth a combined $14 million or so — as well as instruments by Mr. Curtin and Sam Zygmuntowicz, a violin maker from Brooklyn.

By comparing the response of the legendary instruments to the new ones, and to data from a batch of bad student violins, Dr. Bissinger said, he is trying to develop an anatomical guide of sorts, revealing which features determine the qualities of which parts of a violin’s sound, from the lowest notes to the highest trills.

“I like the bad ones as much as the good,” he said. “How can you know beautiful if you don’t know ugly?”

Dr. Bissinger said that the experiments with balsa and carbon were clearly helping expand understanding of the boundaries of violin sound, but that they have “a tall hill to climb” to compete in the marketplace with traditional instruments, which have already shown their ability to last 300 years and hold up to the pounding of a Paganini solo.

At the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, another physicist, Joe Wolfe, has assembled a team that is testing whether an instrument’s age or the amount it has been played change its sound.

In interviews, instrument players and dealers expressed a conviction that vintage does matter, and several theories have been proposed for how aging changes the structure of wood in ways that affect sound.

But Dr. Wolfe and Ra Inta, another member of the Australian team, said that rigorous experimental evidence was scant, with a couple of recent studies, for example, offering conflicting findings.

They have a long-term study under way on two identical violins built by a local maker, Harry Vatiliotis, from the same 80-year-old slabs of spruce and maple. One is sitting nearly untouched in a museum and the other is in constant use in the hands of a concert violinist. But it will be many years before enough time has passed to determine if all those vibrations from continual bowing have altered the wood in substantive ways, the researchers said.

Such scientific analysis has produced some trepidation among traditionalists, Mr. Curtin said. “There’s a kind of a nervousness that the mystery will go out of it, the bubble will be pricked and it’ll all just be ordinary. It’ll be technology. There’s almost a cultural sense that the violin is the last repository of mystery. The fact that we don’t understand the violin adds to its allure.”

Mr. Curtin, who is also experimenting with balsa but is laminating a thin veneer of tougher spruce on top, said such fears were unfounded. “To me, understanding always makes things more interesting, not less. That’s been true for biology. I think it’s the same with acoustics.”

The work on new materials is driven variously by simple passion and curiosity, as in Mr. Martin’s case, and commerce, as companies hunt for ways to make better mass-produced instruments. (Student violins are notoriously hard to play, discouraging learners just when they should be inspired.)

Another goal propelling some builders toward synthetic materials is the prospect of creating fine-sounding instruments that can endure abuse and the vagaries of weather that can destroy an old wood model.

John A. Decker Jr., a physicist and aeronautical engineer, created his weatherproof and resonant RainSong line of all-graphite guitars after moving to Maui in 1981 to manage an Air Force observatory. He found that the extreme Hawaiian humidity and heat ravaged his classical instruments.

The top guitars, with nary a fleck of wood in sight, sell for more than $2,000 and have showed up in the hands of performers including two longtime rockers, Steve Miller and Daryl Hall. Dr. Decker said the most responsive possible guitar soundboard would be one with infinite stiffness and zero mass, so that the energy from the slightest tug of a finger on a string would translate most efficiently into moving air instead of diffusing as heat in the structure of the instrument.

Graphite fibers allow the top to be pared to the minimum mass and eliminate the need for supporting braces required in conventional wooden guitars, he said.

He said there were always trade-offs, and aesthetics is surely one. “Graphite is not a very romantic material,” said Dr. Decker, who builds wooden classical guitars in spare hours. “It doesn’t have grain and swirl and flame and all the things that koa and quilted mahogany do. On the other hand, you know what the thing is going to sound like, which from the musician’s point of view is better.”

For Mr. Martin, the experimentation is ultimately driven by his search for a sound: a soaring, enveloping sound he recalls vividly from childhood summer nights around a campfire in Cohasset, Mass., when a friend’s dad pulled out an old Italian violin.

“The sound of that instrument just burned in my brain,” Mr. Martin said.

As of last weekend, he was still in pursuit, having just started on Balsa 15, with no end in sight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/sc...d08&ei=5087%0A





Talk Softly but Carry a Big Woofer
Eric A. Taub

PLUMMETING prices for giant-size flat panel TVs are encouraging more people to dip into their pockets (or their credit line) to create a movie-theater experience at home.

But oddly, when it comes to replicating the pulse-pounding surround sound available in the cinema, out of sight truly seems to be out of mind.

“It is a great irony that people are willing to spend $3,000 on a flat-panel TV, but not very much on audio,” said David Carnoy, executive editor at CNet.com, a Web site that reviews consumer electronics.

While sound may remain an afterthought for home-theater neophytes, a room full of speakers can transform high-concept TV shows and action films from a flat experience into a three-dimensional one.

“Try watching a movie with the sound off,” said Jack Buser, worldwide technology evangelist for Dolby, creators of the Dolby Digital surround sound standard. “Sound is half the experience. It conveys motion and the power of the entertainment.”

Several years ago, complete systems that included speakers, a receiver and usually a DVD player, collectively known as a home theater in a box, were often underpowered entry-level products. But as with HDTVs, audio prices have dropped sharply, while quality has gone up.

Consumers can buy separate components, mixing and matching based on price and performance. But unless you are an audiophile, there is little reason to do so, especially if the sound system is used primarily to play the soundtracks from TV shows and movies.

Decent systems with sufficient power to fill most rooms are now available for a few hundred dollars. For example, this past holiday weekend, Best Buy was advertising Panasonic’s SC-HT740 unit, a home theater in a box that includes a five-disc DVD changer, for $300. At Circuit City, the Onkyo HTS790 system, XM satellite-ready and iPod compatible, was $400.

At the high end, Sony’s new STR-DA5200ES stand-alone receiver ($1,500) incorporates a new video chip to convert all video sources to 1080p, the highest HD resolution — a process known as upconverting. To avoid squinting at tiny graphics on the receiver itself, the unit transforms the TV into a giant control panel for easy adjustments.

The receiver could be paired with Panasonic’s new $3,000 SB-TP1000 surround speaker system. Recognizing that a speaker cannot be placed on top of a thin plasma TV, Panasonic utilizes two side speakers that give the illusion of sound emanating from the center.

Unlike TV images, sounds from loudspeakers are still created the way they have always been. What has changed is the cost of a high-quality system, the technologies used to mimic a natural sound environment, and the ease at setting up a surround system.

2.1 vs. 5.1 vs. 7.1

The standard surround-sound system found on most DVDs and HDTV broadcasts transmits through six speakers and is called Dolby Digital 5.1. The 5 refers to five full-spectrum speakers: one placed at the front, usually on top of the TV, for speech; two placed on either side of the TV; and two others placed to the left and right behind the viewer. The “.1” refers to the limited-range subwoofer, used to create the deep rumbling sound effects of explosives, airplanes and low-frequency music.

When rear speakers cannot be easily placed behind the viewer, a 2.1 system — with a left and a right speaker and a subwoofer — can be used instead, creating “virtual” rear channels that give the illusion that sound is emanating from behind.

While virtual rear speakers are never as good as the real thing, Philips believes that its $600 HTS6600 system, available in March, comes close.

Its Sonowave technology uses “steerable” rather than bounced sound beams to produce what it says is a more realistic virtual sound effect, giving a “very immersive experience,” according to Cesar Martinez, a Philips home entertainment vice president. The system includes a DVD player that will upconvert a standard-definition DVD to look close to HDTV in picture quality.

The more speakers surrounding the viewer, the more realistic the sense of direction of the sound. The new high-definition DVD formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, both incorporate 7.1 channel sound. To experience it, you will need two additional speakers directly behind the listener, and a new audio receiver capable of decoding the 7.1 track. Several are beginning to appear on the market, from companies including Denon, Yamaha and Pioneer. (If your couch is directly against the wall, then forget about 7.1.)

Dolby Digital vs. DTS

While Dolby Digital is the specified audio surround sound standard for DVDs, many movies also offer soundtracks recorded in the DTS format.

Most surround receivers can decode both formats; the advantage of DTS is that sounds are recorded at a higher bit rate, resulting in “a more real, dynamic, clearer sound,” according to Tom Dixon, a DTS director of strategic marketing.

But whether one can hear the difference between the two is an open question. “It is tough to say,” according to Mr. Dixon. The difference is “fairly subjective.”

Both Dolby and DTS are touting their next-generation technologies available on high-definition DVD players. Known as Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD, both use 7.1 channels of sound to play audio that is recorded using “lossless” compression schemes. The result is sound that is “bit by bit identical to the studio master,” Mr. Dixon said.

New Connections

New home-theater-in-a-box systems with surround sound often feature the 1080i upconversion circuitry that improves the picture quality.

To see the difference, the DVD player must be connected to an HDTV with an HDMI plug, which uses a new cable standard that combines audio and video signals into one wire.

One such system, Sony’s DAV-FX500, available on Amazon.com for $350 after rebate, includes a five-disc DVD changer, six speakers and an HDMI-capable audio receiver.

In addition to HDMI, units like Samsung’s $460 HT-TQ85 include a U.S.B. port, allowing an iPod or other music device to connect directly to the sound system for playback. The Samsung receiver is also XM radio-ready, and upconverts DVDs to 1080i quality.

Making a Choice

The more wattage an amplifier can put out, the better the sound quality at normal listening levels, and the higher the volume can be cranked up without distorting the sound. But not every environment demands the maximum.

“Two hundred watts per channel will not help in a New York City apartment,” said Jeff Goldstein, Sony’s vice president for marketing for home audio and video products. Nor will a booming subwoofer help forge good relations with your downstairs neighbors.

On the other hand, a large great room in a suburban house requires a receiver that can pump out sound at a higher level. Mr. Dixon of DTS recommends that for a typical home, consumers buy a system that produces at least 100 watts per channel. In addition, the subwoofer should receive its power separately, from a wall socket. “This takes some stress off the receiver so it can produce the high frequencies,” he said.

In addition, all speakers should be placed at the same height, which is ideally at ear level.

Once the system is home, speaker volumes can be calibrated by playing the receiver’s built-in test tone. Many models now come with calibration microphones; place the mike where you would normally sit, and the receiver will calibrate itself.

Above all, do not buy audio equipment on looks alone.

“You should absolutely take your favorite CD to a store to try out a system,” said Mark Kauffman, a senior product specialist at Klipsch, a speaker manufacturer. Still, a crowded store may not present the best listening environment — which is why, he said, “it is important to understand the store’s return policy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/te.../30basics.html





Analyst: 70-Inch LCDs 'The Right Size' In 2009

Move out that old armoire and clear off the living room wall—it will soon be time to make room for that new 70-inch LCD television.

With 42-inch flat-panel TVs flying off retailers' shelves this holiday season as prices dip below $1,000, brokerage house Sanford C. Bernstein said in a research note on Tuesday that 70-inch TVs could be the "right size" in 2009.

"We decided to investigate the optimal screen size for high definition viewing," wrote analyst Jeff Evenson in the note. "We conclude that 65 inch to 75 inch is the right size for a 10 foot viewing distance."

Evenson said LCD televisions are free of three barriers that limited the size of traditional TV screens—weight, thickness and cost—meaning large-sized LCDs could become more prevalent in homes.

While a 34-inch bulky tube TV could weigh roughly 200 pounds, Evenson said a 57-inch flat-panel LCD TV weighs only 125 pounds, making it more manageable.

An LCD TV is also not inhibited by a thickness that increases dramatically as the TV gets larger—like it does with a tube TV.

"We believe that a TV's depth creates a barrier to purchase in two ways: it decreases the effect distance viewers sit from the screen and thicker screens can not fit through small doorways and tight turns," he said.

If a tube TV was made as large as the larger LCDs, he said its depth without the shipping box would approach the width of some apartment doors—making them impossible to get inside.

Lastly, he said the cost of larger LCDs should continue to decrease, spurring their popularity.

"Affordability of large screens has and should continue to improve," Evenson wrote. "Our analysis indicates that 70 inch - 80 inch screens could cost around $3,000 in 2010."

With Samsung Corp expected to ramp 70 inch production and AU Optronics expected to ramp up 65 inch production in early 2007, he said TV size growth seems unlikely to slow.

This could be good news for Corning Inc., which manufactures glass substrates used in large flat-screen TVs.

"We believe the long-term valuation of Corning depends largely on demand for LCD substrate glass," he wrote. "We expect that LCD TV adoption will exceed consensus and that increasing screen diagonals ... will compound the substrate demand growth rates."

Bernstein has an "outperform" rating on Corning shares and a $28 price target.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2065122,00.asp





Hollywood and the Vatican See Eye to Eye for a Night
Peter Kiefer

They will almost certainly remain strange bedfellows, Hollywood and the Holy See, but the two had a rare encounter on Sunday when the Vatican was the host of the world premiere of the New Line Cinema film “The Nativity Story,” giving an unprecedented stamp of approval to an American studio production. And though Pope Benedict XVI was conspicuously absent from the event, a clutch of high-ranking cardinals joined the more than 7,000 people who attended.

Held in Paul VI Hall next to St. Peter’s Basilica, the premiere started late, in true Hollywood fashion. The film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke (“Thirteen,” “Lords of Dogtown”), and cast members were seated directly across from high-ranking church officials like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, who ranks second only to Pope Benedict in the Vatican hierarchy. “I kept trying to look over there to see if they liked it,” Ms. Hardwicke acknowledged after the premiere.

That, of course, was a foregone conclusion, as the pope himself had approved of the film well in advance.

“It is well done,” Cardinal Bertone said, as Reuters reported. “It reproposes this event which changed history with realism but also with a sense of great respect of the mystery of the Nativity.”

“The Nativity Story” is a dramatic recounting of the courtship between Mary and Joseph and their journey to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. It is one of a wave of religious-themed movies due from Hollywood studios, which awakened to the potential of an audience for these films with the success of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” in 2004.

Sunday’s event marked the first time the Vatican was the host of the world premiere of a full-length feature film, though last year it helped stage the debut of a television movie about the life of Pope John Paul II, at which Pope Benedict XVI was present. The premiere was also in sharp contrast to the tensions between some Roman Catholic groups and Sony Pictures Entertainment over “The Da Vinci Code,” which was based on a popular novel that challenges church doctrine.

Both “The Nativity Story” and “The Passion” are biblical tales; both were partly shot in Matera in the south of Italy and were similarly budgeted at about $30 million. New Line even borrowed some techniques of Mr. Gibson’s, initiating a similar outreach campaign to some church leaders, who were invited to early screenings of the film and to visit the set.

But unlike “The Passion,” which was rated R for its graphic violence, “The Nativity Story” is rated G and is based on a script, by Mike Rich, that holds to a conventional telling of Jesus’ birth.

“It lacks controversy,” said Rolf Mittweg, New Line’s chief operating officer, in an interview here. “I think with ‘The Passion,’ people wanted to see how bloody and gory this movie was. They wanted to see how far one would go to depict that story. This movie isn’t political and doesn’t make a statement in that regard.”

The film will be released on Friday in the United States and in most other countries. Mr. Mittweg said he expected it to play well both domestically and abroad, especially in strongly Catholic countries like Spain and Italy.

“The cynical view is that controversy could help the film, but we never thought the film could be controversial,” said Toby Emmerich, New Line’s production president. “We never thought ‘The Nativity’ could be as controversial a chapter. Not as if controversy would be the worst thing in the world, either.”

Thanks to the British press, Mr. Emmerich almost got just that. A report in The Times of London last week speculated that the pope’s absence was meant to protest the fact that Keisha Castle-Hughes, the 16-year-old actress who plays the role of Mary in the film, was pregnant by her boyfriend. According to publicists working on the film, Ms. Castle-Hughes did not attend the screening because she is shooting her next movie and would not participate in the worldwide marketing campaign for “The Nativity Story.” The pope, according to the Vatican, was never to attend, and has a more pressing concern, they said: his trip to Turkey this week.

It is doubtful that the Vatican will make a habit of holding premieres, but New Line’s reach for the church’s support is in keeping with Hollywood’s intensifying search for new ways to sell its wares outside of conventional advertising vehicles like newspapers and network television.

“Filmmakers and studios are becoming very entrepreneurial about the way they market their properties, and oftentimes they are going beyond the normal channels and allowing them to become part of a broader conversation,” said Michael Feldman, a communications strategist for the Glover Park Group, which worked on the media campaigns for “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“But people go to the movies to be entertained,” he said, “and if the property is marketed in the context of the issue and doesn’t promote the entertainment value by its very nature, that could hurt it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/movies/28vati.html





Makin a list

10 Films the US Government Would Rather You Not See.

These are 10 films that I believe if watched by the majority of US citizens there would be demands of impeachment, a push to pull out of Iraq and a complete shift in thought or at the very least some questioning of the government.

It’s also amazing to me how few people have seen most of these these films even the “popular” ones.

1) Why We Fight
Genre: Documentary / History
Tagline: It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever.
Plot Outline: Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki’s shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436971/

2) The Fog of War
Genre: Documentary / Biography
Plot Outline: A film about the former US Secretary of Defence and the various difficult lessons he learned about the nature and conduct of modern war.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/

3) The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream
Genre: Documentary
Tagline: We’re literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up
Plot Summary: Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space…
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/

4) America: From Freedom to Fascism
Genre: Documentary
Plot Outline: A documentary that explores the connection between income tax collection and the erosion of civil liberties in America.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0772153/
Watch/Download at Google Video

5) Loose Change
Genre: Documentary (more)
Plot Outline: An exploration of the viewpoint that the September 11, 2001 attacks were planned by the United States government.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831315/
Watch/Download at Google Video

6) 1984
Genre: Drama / Romance / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Tagline: George Orwell’s Terrifying Vision Comes To The Screen.
Plot Outline: George Orwell’s novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087803/

7) V for Vendetta
Genre: Action / Drama / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Tagline: Remember, remember the 5th of November.
Plot Outline: A shadowy freedom fighter known only as “V” uses terrorist tactics to fight against his totalitarian society. Upon rescuing a girl from the secret police, he also finds his best chance at having an ally.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/

8) An An Inconvenient Truth
Genre: Documentary (more)
Tagline: A Global Warning (more)
Plot Outline: A documentary on Al Gore’s campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116

9) Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
Genre: Documentary
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815181/

10) The Corporation
Genre: Documentary / History
Plot Outline: Documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.
IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/

Download/Watch at Google Video
Share and Enjoy

http://skeletonproject.com/2006/11/2...ple-not-watch/





Ugly Americans, Young, Attractive and Tormented
Manohla Dargis

If stupidity were a crime, the nitwits in the cheap horror flick “Turistas” would be doing time in Attica. A grubby, lethally dull bid to cash in on the new extreme horror, the film turns on a conceit as frayed as Freddy Krueger’s shtick: a group of hotties stumble into the lair of a madman. Carnage ensues. Here the hapless, clueless and braless are the English-speaking tourists of the film’s title who, having gone abroad to party hearty, end up being batted about by a wacky cat with very sharp claws and a seriously sick sense of social justice.

Although his heart clearly isn’t in the more unsavory aspects of the job, namely slicing and dicing, the director, John Stockwell, does make a faint, early effort to infuse the proceedings with a smidgen of humor. The opening scene of a Brazilian bus careering wildly on a twisty rural road while the sweaty, swarthy bus driver rummages inside his nostrils (and wrestles a shift stick adorned with a pentagram), does manage to squeeze some dubious humor from the image of the freaked-out white tourist. The only problem is that in this case those fears turn out to be entirely justified, since it isn’t long before the bus is sliding down a mountain, taking that initial flicker of amused reflexivity with it.

What follows is the old splatter and scream as the interchangeable pretty girls and hard-body boys are lined up like ducks to be shot down or, in the case of one turista, gutted while still conscious. (The actors playing the ducks are similarly interchangeable; you can find their names in the accompanying credit box.) This operation, which isn’t any more disgusting than the medical surgeries that crop up on television — though it’s considerably less well-lighted — is as laughable as it is repulsive. That’s especially true when the evil doctor, Zamora (Miguel Lunardi, eyeballs popping), places one victim’s internal organs next to her fetching naked breast, a gesture that neatly encapsulates the sexual panic and misogyny that characterize the stupidest examples of extreme horror.

Apologists for vivisectionist entertainment trot out all sorts of rationales to justify the spectacle of human torture instead of just admitting that such spectacles turn them on. In this respect the horror audience, in its enthusiasm for go-go gore, is far more honest than those who hide behind the fig leaf of radical politics. Like “Hostel” (a critique of American arrogance, don’tcha know), which seems the most direct inspiration for “Turistas,” this film involves first-world tourists who are violently punished for traveling into a third-world (or third-world-like) country. “Turistas” plays this political angle more openly than does “Hostel,” since Zamora defends his blood lust by donating “gringo” organs to his country’s poor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Jason and Freddy donate regularly to their local blood banks.

Advancements in special effects have made it easier than ever to make fictional disembowelments and the like look super-realistic. And on a fundamental level, the charnel-house aesthetics of films like “Hostel,” “Cabin Fever” and the remake of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” are not any different from the graphic passages in films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Flags of Our Fathers.” The goals of these war movies are certainly far loftier than those of a run-of-the-mill horror divertissement, but in the end they all traffic — in part or in whole — in convincing images of extreme human suffering. Some films do it for art; others for amusement. For better and at times for worse, though, the cinema of death now appears inescapable.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/0...es/01turi.html





Comedy on the Hot Seat
Allen Salkin

COMEDY,” Steve Martin famously said, “is not pretty.”

That was never more in evidence than on Sunset Boulevard last week, where Paul Rodriguez, a comedian, was loudly debating a homeless pedestrian outside the Laugh Factory about a certain racial epithet.

“Calling it ‘the “n” word,’ that’s childish, Romper Room,” said Mr. Rodriguez, bristling at the radio hosts, politicians and newly chastened comedians who have reduced the noxious epithet to its first letter when discussing it.

“N-this, n-that, I don’t care if you use it or not,” shouted the passer-by, an African-American dressed in a hooded sweatshirt who declined to give his name but said he was 36 years old. “This is about you and me getting the same bank loan as him,” he said, while pointing at a white bystander. “I want justice. I don’t want to be sleeping on the street.”

It was more than a week after the infamous Nov. 17 meltdown by Michael Richards during what was supposed to be a comedy act at the Laugh Factory. Mr. Richards, the former “Seinfeld” co-star, repeatedly shouted the epithet at a black heckler, and his tirade was caught on a video cellphone and quickly disseminated across the Internet.

The impromptu and passionate street debate in front of the club last week seemed suddenly normal in Los Angeles, where most anywhere that comedians have gathered, a kind of town hall discussion has spontaneously broken out. From spotlighted stages to sidewalks, the comedy world is debating Mr. Richards’s rant, even as the episode moves slowly to the periphery of the public’s attention.

Judy Carter, a teacher of stand-up comics, said she was discussing plans for the annual California Comedy Conference in Palm Springs this weekend with another comedian, Alex House, when they asked themselves how they might have responded in Mr. Richards’s position. “We did some soul-searching on it,” Ms. Carter said. “That’s what comics are doing now. Would I do that? Have I done that? If I were pushed into a corner would I say something so horrible?”

The answer was no, Ms. Carter said, and she was planning a workshop at the comedy conference called “Don’t Pull a Michael Richards.”

“You never hit a heckler harder than they hit you,” she said, explaining a basic rule of comedy.

For many comics, the meaning of Mr. Richards’s outburst is about more than bad comedy technique. Jamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, and Paul Mooney, a black comedian who used to write for Richard Pryor, have joined politicians and activists including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, in calling for an end to the use of what they call “the ‘n’ word” by everyone, including blacks.

Mr. Mooney, who has used the word for years in his act, said Mr. Richards shocked him into realizing it had an ugly power that was no longer worth wielding.

“I am a recovering ‘n’-word-aholic,” he said on Nov. 27 during a news conference at the Laugh Factory. Mr. Masada, concerned that his 28-year-old club would be branded as racist for merely being the site of Mr. Richards’s tirade, announced a ban on the word. Henceforth any comic who uses it on stage will be barred for four to six months and possibly fined.

But the Laugh Factory’s ban is not sitting well with all comics, including the groundbreaking comedian Dick Gregory, who was set to perform with Mr. Mooney last night) at the Lincoln Theater in Washington.

“Calling it ‘the “n” word’ is an insult,” said Mr. Gregory, whose 1964 memoir was titled “Nigger.” “It should be just as much an insult to Jews if they started changing concentration camp to ‘the “c” word’ and swastika to ‘the “s” word.’ You just destroyed history.”

He will not be joining Mr. Mooney’s boycott. “I’m going to walk out on stage,” Mr. Gregory, 75, said, “and hand my book to a white woman in the front and say, ‘Here, madam, take this “Nigger” to bed with you.’ ”

Mr. Gregory and many others are asking why stop at just one word, if purifying the comedy discourse is the goal. Why stop at protecting one aggrieved group?

In the lobby of the Laugh Factory after the news conference, Jason Stuart, a gay comedian, buttonholed Najee Ali, a civil rights activist, and said, “Twenty-five percent of every black comic’s act is gay-bashing and none of you have done anything about that.”

Earlier, Mr. Ali had shouldered his way to the microphones to tell the cameras that what Mr. Richards said showed that many white people harbor deep racism. In the lobby, he said he opposes the ban, and he responded to Mr. Stuart. “It wasn’t so much what he said,” Mr. Ali said. “We’ve heard the word used by many comedians. It was the rage, the hatred, the anger.”

Calls to stamp out the epithet were the latest chapter in a contemporary debate over the word since its has become common, as a quasi-endearment, in the very public language of hip-hop. But in attempting to censor a word, activists seemed to be slightly shifting the conversation from whether Mr. Richards is a racist, to whether a given epithet is racist.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,” said that when he heard Mr. Mooney say he wanted to “destroy” the epithet, a few questions sprung to mind. “Does that mean he wants the owners of record stores to throw out his comedy albums or Richard Pryor’s ‘That Nigger’s Crazy’? ” Professor Kennedy said. “What does he want done with my book? Does he want to cover them up?”

In Mr. Richards’s crack-up, on a Friday night, he shouted at a member of the audience, “Shut up! Fifty years ago, we’d have you upside down,” and he went on to unleash a stream of murderous vitriol. In an apology on “The Late Show With David Letterman” the following Monday, Mr. Richards tried to explain himself in part by saying: “I work in a very uncontrolled manner onstage. I do a lot of free association.”

Mr. Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, confirmed that Mr. Richards’s act does indeed involve a lot of free association, adding, “He gets rage from all the things he talks about.”

Mr. Richards, who appeared as Cosmo Kramer on “Seinfeld” for its nine seasons through 1998, had only recently ventured back into standup, Mr. Masada said. He did not want his name on the Laugh Factory marquee and for a time asked to be introduced as “Zosa.” “He didn’t want people coming to see Michael Richards or Kramer because he didn’t think his act had been perfected enough,” Mr. Masada said.

At the club on the night before last Monday’s news conference, a mostly African-American audience attended the long-running weekly show Chocolate Sundaes, mainly featuring black comedians. Mr. Richards was much on people’s minds. Pookey Wigington , the executive producer, told the crowd that he and the host, Chris Spencer, had been getting “hundreds and hundreds of e-mails and phone calls,” and what was most important was “how the Laugh Factory handled the situation.”

“Yeah, what about that?” an audience member shouted.

Another person called out, “Why did they let him come back?”

It was a reference to Mr. Richards’s appearance at the club on Nov. 18, the night after his rant but before the video had spread across the Internet. Mr. Wigington said Mr. Richards had told the club he would apologize from the stage, and when he did not he was asked to leave the club.

It was not a humorous way to open a comedy night, but the Chocolate Sundaes crowd seemed satisfied. Every comedian who took the stage tried to spin at least one joke about Mr. Richards.

“Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton don’t do it for me,” said Dannon Green, naming the two black leaders from whom Mr. Richards had sought counsel. “The brother he should have called was Clinton. If he had called Clinton, I would have said ‘O.K., he’s all right.’ ”

That same night, there was a late show at the Improv nearby called “Whiteboy Comedy.” A larger-than-life poster of Mr. Richards was still hanging on the rear wall along with those featuring other comic luminaries like Chris Rock and Ray Romano. None of the comedians onstage made any reference to Mr. Richards.

Four nights later, the Richards poster was gone. After serving as host of an 8 p.m. show, a benefit for a gay and lesbian center, the comedian Sarah Silverman said that she had not made a joke about Mr. Richards because she had not yet thought of a good one.

The whole incident, she said, reminded her of Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade in Malibu earlier this year. In a good way. “When I heard Mel Gibson had said that stuff, I was happy,” Ms. Silverman said. “Jews love real anti-Semitism because it’s something you can point to to show it’s real. It’s not just gas in the air.”

The best advice Ms. Silverman said she had heard for Mr. Richards was a reader comment on ESPN.com. It was suggested that Mr. Richards could redeem himself by going on a comedy stage and saying just two words with gusto: “The Aristocrats!”

That was the title of a documentary about a famously offensive joke that starts in a talent agent’s office, digresses into raunchy improvisation and ends with the punch line “The Aristocrats.” The idea expressed in the film is that no matter how gross the improvisation, everything is excused by a punch line, even a meaningless one.

But Mr. Richards is not seeking rehabilitation through comedy. On Friday he issued a statement through a spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, saying that he would apologize in person to the man he had attacked from the stage, Kyle Doss, at a meeting in the presence of a retired judge. Mr. Rubenstein said it was likely the two sides would discuss financial compensation.

At a news conference later that day in Los Angeles, Mr. Doss, a 26-year-old student, and two other African-Americans who were with him at the Laugh Factory, appeared at the office of their lawyer, Gloria Allred. Ms. Allred said that characterizing her clients as hecklers, as most news accounts have done, is wrong because they were part of a large group celebrating a surprise birthday party, and what first drew Mr. Kramer’s ire was the noise of them ordering drinks.

For some, the most important lesson, one which may show some progress toward racial tolerance, is that it is the man who first hurled the racial insult who appears more damaged this time, not the target of his epithet. Mr. Gregory said his son told him a joke the other day: “What is worse than a white man calling a black man a nigger?” Mr. Gregory said, quoting his son. “Calling a white man Michael Richards.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/fashion/03comedy.html





Google to Abandon Answer Service
Michael Liedtke

Google Inc. doesn't have all the answers - a fact underscored by the Internet search leader's decision to abandon a 4-year-old service that hired researchers to field questions on everything from school homework to sports trivia.

The retreat, announced in a notice posted on Google's Web site late Tuesday night, represents a rare victory for rival Yahoo Inc.

It also may signal Google's intention to refocus on its core search engine, a moneymaking machine that generates virtually all its profits. Google executives have recently expressed worries about having too many disjointed products scattered across its Web site.

Despite those distractions, Google still holds a large lead over Yahoo in basic Internet search. Google has parlayed that advantage into more rapid profit growth that has lifted its stock price to new heights while Yahoo shares have slumped badly for most of the year.

But Yahoo appears to have outsmarted Google with a free online answer service that has grown rapidly since its introduction less than a year ago.

Unlike Google's offering, Yahoo's service doesn't charge money. Instead, Yahoo appeals to the vanity of smart people to ferret out the answers to esoteric questions like "What has Alexander Graham Bell invented other than the telephone?"

Google's service required its users to pay a researcher anywhere from $2 to $200 to chase down the answers to minutiae like "How many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline?"

The Mountain View-based company collected a 50-cent commission on each question, with the remainder going to one of the roughly 800 researchers who have responded to questions since Google co-founder Larry Page conceived the service in 2002.

Microsoft Corp. and several specialty Web sites like Keen.com, Answers.com and Answerbag.com also compete against Yahoo and Google in this highly specialized niche of Internet search.

Although it started later, Yahoo's answer service quickly eclipsed Google's. By October, the market share of Yahoo Answers was about 24 times greater than Google's service, estimated Hitwise, a research company that tracks Internet traffic patterns.

Yahoo's users are becoming so adept at answering questions that their responses sometimes even appear on the first results page of Google's own search engine. In its first 11 months, Yahoo's service has accumulated about 160 million answers, according to the Sunnyvale-based company.

Google didn't elaborate on the reasons for dropping its service, which will stop accepting questions later this week. The answers to previously asked questions will remain available.

"Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users," software engineers Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher wrote in the closure notice. "We'll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-21-13-02





We Love Our Internet friends, Really.
Jacqui Cheng

Online friends are just as important to people as their offline friends, according to the results of a recent survey. The sixth-annual report from University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for the Digital Future is part of a six-year study that tracks changes in Internet usage and attitudes in the United States. The survey found that, over a decade after the public was introduced to the web, "we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become," according to the Center for the Digital Future's director, Jeffrey I. Cole.

The survey included 2,000 households in the US and defined an online community as "a group that shares thoughts or ideas, or works on common projects, through electronic communication only." Perhaps unsurprisingly (especially to Ars Technica's loyal readers and discussion participants), well over half of those participating in online communities reported doing so at least once a day. 70.4 percent "sometimes or always" interact with other members while logged in.

The report also found that as Internet users increasingly use the web to socialize, they also translate those online social connections to real-life activities. 20.3 percent of those who participate in online communities also participate in offline activities related to the online community at least once a year. Members of The Lounge can certainly attest that, in any given week of the year, it's almost guaranteed that there is an "Arsmeet" happening somewhere around the world. Similarly, 40 percent of the respondents reported being more involved in social activism since they began to participate in online communities, with two thirds of those involved with social causes saying that they are now involved in activities because of the Internet.

What might be a surprise, though, is that all of this online interaction is apparently not detracting from interaction with close friends and family offline. While 37.7 percent of respondents said that the Internet helps them communicate more with family and friends, "almost all" users reported that increased Internet interaction has no effect on the amount of time spent with those people in real life.

Internet users also report that the Internet helps them make new friends, both online and off. Internet users, on average, have just under five contacts online who they consider to be "friends" but have never met in real life, and almost two friends in real life that they originally met online. Those numbers may seem low to those of us who frequent events like Arsmeets on a regular basis, but the report claims that the number of offline friends that originated online has more than doubled since the project began six years ago. Tipping the scales on the high end, I think it's fairly safe to say that well over 80% of all of my real life friends and acquaintances originated from the Internet in some way—that's well over just two people.

Most importantly, the report says that 43 percent of those who participate in online communities feel "as strongly" about their online buddies as those offline. What this shows is that—due to the proliferation of chat rooms, blogs, sites like MySpace, forums, games, virtual worlds, and other communities online—Internet users are reaching out to more people, not less, as technology critics have feared. So, anyone want to go grab a cup of coffee?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061130-8326.html





Missing

CNET Editor James Kim, Family Missing
Leslie Katz

CNET senior editor and Crave blogger James Kim and his family are missing.

The 35-year-old Kim, his 30-year-old wife Kati and daughters Penelope (4 years) and Sabine (7 months) left their home in San Francisco last week on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. They were last seen on Saturday, November 25, in Portland, Ore., according to the San Francisco Police Department, which has opened a missing persons' investigation. They were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with the personalized California license plate "DOESF."

Those with information about the Kim family's whereabouts are asked to contact San Francisco police immediately at 415-558-5508 during normal business hours and at 415-553-1071 after-hours. The Pacific Northwest call center for the case can be reached at 1-800-452-7888.

Update: Investigators said Friday that the National Guard, CHP, Oregon State Police and Coast Guard are currently coordinating a land search. As of 1:30 p.m. PST, helicopters were in the air, according to the SFPD, and the weather was said to be clear.
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9666094-1.html?tag=#4





FBI Taps Cell Phone Mic as Eavesdropping Tool
Declan McCullagh

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.

Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

While the Genovese crime family prosecution appears to be the first time a remote-eavesdropping mechanism has been used in a criminal case, the technique has been discussed in security circles for years.

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. "They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time," he said. "You can do that without having physical access to the phone."

Because modern handsets are miniature computers, downloaded software could modify the usual interface that always displays when a call is in progress. The spyware could then place a call to the FBI and activate the microphone--all without the owner knowing it happened. (The FBI declined to comment on Friday.)

"If a phone has in fact been modified to act as a bug, the only way to counteract that is to either have a bugsweeper follow you around 24-7, which is not practical, or to peel the battery off the phone," Atkinson said. Security-conscious corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from their cell phones, he added.

FBI's physical bugs discovered

The FBI's Joint Organized Crime Task Force, which includes members of the New York police department, had little luck with conventional surveillance of the Genovese family. They did have a confidential source who reported the suspects met at restaurants including Brunello Trattoria in New Rochelle, N.Y., which the FBI then bugged.

But in July 2003, Ardito and his crew discovered bugs in three restaurants, and the FBI quietly removed the rest. Conversations recounted in FBI affidavits show the men were also highly suspicious of being tailed by police and avoided conversations on cell phones whenever possible.

That led the FBI to resort to "roving bugs," first of Ardito's Nextel handset and then of Peluso's. U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones approved them in a series of orders in 2003 and 2004, and said she expected to "be advised of the locations" of the suspects when their conversations were recorded.

Details of how the Nextel bugs worked are sketchy. Court documents, including an affidavit (p1) and (p2) prepared by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kolodner in September 2003, refer to them as a "listening device placed in the cellular telephone." That phrase could refer to software or hardware.

One private investigator interviewed by CNET News.com, Skipp Porteous of Sherlock Investigations in New York, said he believed the FBI planted a physical bug somewhere in the Nextel handset and did not remotely activate the microphone.

"They had to have physical possession of the phone to do it," Porteous said. "There are several ways that they could have gotten physical possession. Then they monitored the bug from fairly near by."

But other experts thought microphone activation is the more likely scenario, mostly because the battery in a tiny bug would not have lasted a year and because court documents say the bug works anywhere "within the United States"--in other words, outside the range of a nearby FBI agent armed with a radio receiver.

In addition, a paranoid Mafioso likely would be suspicious of any ploy to get him to hand over a cell phone so a bug could be planted. And Kolodner's affidavit seeking a court order lists Ardito's phone number, his 15-digit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier, and lists Nextel Communications as the service provider, all of which would be unnecessary if a physical bug were being planted.

A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."

For its part, Nextel said through spokesman Travis Sowders: "We're not aware of this investigation, and we weren't asked to participate."

Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it "works closely with law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way possible."

A Motorola representative said that "your best source in this case would be the FBI itself." Cingular, T-Mobile, and the CTIA trade association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mobsters: The surveillance vanguard

This isn't the first time the federal government has pushed at the limits of electronic surveillance when investigating reputed mobsters.

In one case involving Nicodemo S. Scarfo, the alleged mastermind of a loan shark operation in New Jersey, the FBI found itself thwarted when Scarfo used Pretty Good Privacy software (PGP) to encode confidential business data.

So with a judge's approval, FBI agents repeatedly snuck into Scarfo's business to plant a keystroke logger and monitor its output.

Like Ardito's lawyers, Scarfo's defense attorneys argued that the then-novel technique was not legal and that the information gleaned through it could not be used. Also like Ardito, Scarfo's lawyers lost when a judge ruled in January 2002 that the evidence was admissible.

This week, Judge Kaplan in the southern district of New York concluded that the "roving bugs" were legally permitted to capture hundreds of hours of conversations because the FBI had obtained a court order and alternatives probably wouldn't work.

The FBI's "applications made a sufficient case for electronic surveillance," Kaplan wrote. "They indicated that alternative methods of investigation either had failed or were unlikely to produce results, in part because the subjects deliberately avoided government surveillance."

Bill Stollhans, president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia, said such a technique would be legally reserved for police armed with court orders, not private investigators.

There is "no law that would allow me as a private investigator to use that type of technique," he said. "That is exclusively for law enforcement. It is not allowable or not legal in the private sector. No client of mine can ask me to overhear telephone or strictly oral conversations."

Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations.

When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were being monitored.

Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings.
http://news.com.com/FBI+taps+cell+ph...3-6140191.html





Devices That Tell On You: The Nike+iPod Sport Kit

T. Scott Saponas, Jonathan Lester, Carl Hartung, and Tadayoshi Kohno.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington.

Overview

Key industry players are incorporating wireless radio communications capabilities into many new personal consumer products. For example, the new Nike+iPod Sport Kit from Apple consists of two components -- a sensor and a receiver -- that communicate using a wireless radio protocol. Unfortunately, there can be negative side-effects associated with equipping these gadgets with wireless communications capabilities.

In the case of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, our research shows that the wireless capabilities in this new gadget can negatively impact a consumer's personal privacy and safety. As part of our research, we built a number of surveillance tools that malicious individuals could use to track Nike+iPod Sport Kit owners. Our tools can track Nike+iPod Sport Kit owners while they our working out, as well as when they are just casually walking around town, a parking lot, or a college campus. The tracked individuals don't even need to have their iPods with them.

Our research also shows that there exist simple cryptographic techniques that the Nike+iPod Sport Kit designers could have used to improve the privacy-preserving properties of the Nike+iPod kit.

Our work underscores the need for a broad public discussion about and further research on the privacy-preserving properties of new wireless personal gadgets.

We stress, however, that there is no evidence that Apple or Nike intended for these devices to be used in any malicious manner. Additionally, neither Apple nor Nike endorsed this study.


FAQ

Q: What is the Nike+iPod kit and how does it work?

A: The Nike+iPod kit consists of a sensor which is placed in the sole of your left Nike+ shoe and a receiver which plugs into the bottom of the iPod Nano. The sensor in your shoe detects when you take steps (while walking or jogging) and transmits this information to the receiver.

When you start a workout session with the iPod, software on the iPod collects the data from the sensor and keeps track of the distance you've walked and the pace at which you're walking at. During a workout the iPod can provide audio feedback about the time, distance, pace, or calories burned.

Once a workout is completed users can sync their iPod's with iTunes and upload their data to the Nike+ website which contains software to track your workouts, challenge other users to competitions, and set personal goals for you to accomplish.

Q: How much does the Nike+iPod kit cost, and is it popular?

A: As for Nov 24, 2006, one can buy the Nike+iPod kit from the Apple online store for $29 (USD). Apple has sold over 450,000 Nike+iPod kits, there are currently 12 versions of the Nike+ shoe, and runners have logged almost 3 million miles on the Nike+ website.

Q: Does the Nike+iPod kit reveal private information about a user?

A: Yes. When you walk or run the Nike+iPod sensor in your shoe will transmit messages using a wireless radio. These messages contain a unique identifier that can be detected from 60 feet away. This information is potentially private because it can reveal where you are, even when you'd prefer for a bad person to not know your location.

Q: Why is it a problem if my Nike+iPod kit sensor transmits a unique identifier when I walk or run?

A: The unique identifier can reveal your presence to nearby receivers. Since the unique identifier doesn't change over time, someone could use the sensor's broadcast messages to track which locations you visit, and when you visit them. A bad person could use this information to compromise your personal privacy and safety. We describe specific example scenarios, like stalking, in our paper.

Q: Would it be hard to track someone?

A: No. It is easy to track someone who has a active Nike+iPod kit sensor in their shoe.

We have built several mechanisms for detecting and tracking Nike+iPod shoe sensors.

Windows XP-based surveillance devices:

We developed a mechanism for attaching a Nike+iPod receiver to a Windows XP laptop via a USB port. When someone wearing an active Nike+iPod sensor walks near one of our laptops, the laptop's attached Nike+iPod receiver will detect the sensor's broadcast messages and will relay information about those messages to the laptop. The laptop will then display the sensor's unique identifier on the screen. The laptop will also use WiFi to upload information about the observed sensor to a back-end database. This latter step allows our Windows XP machines to serve as participating nodes in a larger surveillance system.

Gumstix-based surveillance devices:

We also made a cheap and small Nike+iPod surveillance device from commercially available miniature gumstix computers. Our gumstix surveillance devices also use WiFi to upload real-time surveillance data to a back-end database, thereby allowing the gumstixs to serve as participating nodes in a larger surveillance system.

The gumstix-based surveillance device is small enough to hide in the environment, such as in the bushes near a running trail or under someone's desk, and can detect nearby Nike+iPod sensors up to 60 feet away.

It would also be easy for anyone else to build their own gumstix-based surveillance device, and the total cost for a full, WiFi-enabled gumstix surveillance node is under $250 (USD). The node would be cheaper if one prefers not to use the WiFi capabilities.

Second-generation Intel Mote and Microsoft SPOT Watch:

We also built a Nike+iPod surveillance device using a second-generation Intel Mote (iMote2) and the receiver that comes with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. We also wrote companion software for a Microsoft SPOT Watch.

Not only is the iMote2 another small surveillance device, but, because of the SPOT Watch, our system will allow an adversary to obtain real-time surveillance data on his or her wrist watch.

Using and iPod as a surveillance device:

We also show how to convert a third-generation iPod into a surveillance device. Such iPods are often available on eBay for around $100. Our iPod surveillance device runs iPod Linux and our software, and has an attached Nike+iPod receiver.

GoogleMaps web application:

Recall that our Windows XP- and gumstix-based surveillance devices can upload surveillance information to a back-end server in real-time. To demonstrate what an adversary might do with that data, we created a GoogleMaps-based tracking web application. This web application can overlay surveillance data on a map in real-time, and can also display historical tracking data on the map. Our back-end system can also email and SMS text message tracking information to the adversary.

Q: How much would it cost for someone to implement your surveillance devices?

A: It depends on what that someone would like to do. Our gumstix prototype shows that a bad person could build a full-featured, WiFi-enabled Nike+iPod surveillance device for under $250. Adversaries desiring less functionality could reduce the price of each surveillance device. Adversaries could also significantly reduce the price of each surveillance node by custom building nodes in bulk.

Q: Would it be hard for someone to build their own surveillance system?

A: No, it would be neither hard nor expensive. Any hobbyist, including a technically savvy teenager, could build their own surveillance device, assuming that someone posted detailed instructions and the corresponding software on the Internet (we currently do not plan to release our software). This person would also need to perform a minimal amount of soldering (for our gumstix-based surveillance device, this simply means soldering four wires).

Q: How far away can you detect a Nike+iPod kit sensor?

A: 60 feet.

Q: Can you detect my Nike+iPod sensor when I'm not working out?

A: Yes. As long as wearing an active Nike+iPod kit sensor and are walking or jogging.

Q: Can you detect my Nike+iPod sensor even if I do not have my iPod with me.

A: Yes. As long as wearing an active Nike+iPod kit sensor and are walking or jogging.

Q: Can't I just turn off the sensor when I'm not using it?

A: The sensor has an "on-off" button, but the Nike+iPod Sport Kit online documentation says that "[m]ost Nike+iPod runners and walkers can just drop the sensor in their Nike+ shoes and forget about it," and we believe this to be the common case in practice.

Q: Can't I just remove the sensor when I'm not using it?

A: Yes, the sensor can be removed from your shoe when you do not want to workout. Additionally you can place the sensor under your front shoe laces to make removal easier (or use a third party sensor holder to hold the sensor on your shoe laces).

Q: What can I do to improve my privacy if I want to use the Nike+iPod kit?

A: We strongly suggest turning off your Nike+iPod sensor when you are not actively working out. Unfortunately, this suggestion will only help you when you're not working out. If you want to workout with the Nike+iPod kit, then we are unaware of any way to improve your location privacy during your workout.

Q: Could Apple have designed their system in a more privacy-preserving way?

A: Yes, there are simple cryptographic technique that the Nike+iPod designers could have used to improve the privacy-preserving properties of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. But, as with any technical change, there will be some associated tradeoffs, like sensor battery life, manufacturing costs, and use experience. See Section 6 of the technical report below for more information.

Q: Will you be releasing your software?

A: We currently do not plan to release our software.


Technical Report: PDF.

Video: MOV (Quicktime Movie ~200mb).
http://www.cs.washington.edu/researc...s/privacy.html





Top 10: The Best, Worst... and Craziest Uses of RFID

They've put a chip where?
Gemma Simpson and Jo Best

Children:
Japanese authorities decided to start chipping schoolchildren in one primary school in Osaka a couple of years ago. The kids' clothes and bags were fitted with RFID tags with readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the minors' movements.

Legoland also introduced a similar scheme to stop children going astray by issuing RFID bracelets for the tots.

Pub tables:
Thirsty students can escape the busy bar and still get a pint thanks to RFID tables that deliver orders remotely.

The high-tech bar is fitted with touchscreens so students can get a round in, order a taxi or even chat-up someone at the next table. See snaps of the RFID bar here.

Fulham Football Club:
Fulham FC has started issuing RFID-enabled smartcards to fans to cut queues at the turnstiles and increase safety around the stadium.

Around 20,000 of the smartcards have been issued to mainly season ticket holders and club members and contain data on matches each cardholder has paid for. See shots of the technology around the stadium here.

Air passengers:
It was also suggested by boffins at University College London that air passengers should be RFID-tagged as they mingle in the departure lounge to improve airport security.

silicon.com's audience called the idea, amongst other things, Orwellian, intrusive and detrimental to airport security. Click here to see the Best of Reader Comments on the story.

Tanks:
RFID has also made an appearance in the army to try and reduce casualties from 'friendly fire' incidents.

Last year Nato's Operation Urgent Quest exercise tested the potential of a number of combat identity systems under battlefield conditions. See photos of RFID in action here.

Hospital in-patients:
In an effort to trim clinical errors, hospitals in New York and Germany have been tagging their patients. Visitors to the hospitals are given RFID-chipped wristbands to wear which are scanned by medical personnel to bring up their records and make sure the patients are given the correct dosages of drugs.

Blood:
The same clinic which tags its patients is also tagging blood. No vampire-pleasing effort this, rather the Klinikum Saarbruecken is using the tags to make sure the right blood reaches the right patient. Nurses will be able to scan the tags using reader-equipped PDAs or tablet PCs and check that the blood data matches the information held on an RFID-tagged bracelet worn by the patient.

The National Patient Safety Agency in the UK is also considering a similar move.

Suits:
Marks and Spencer has long been associated with being at the forefront of flogging ladies' undies. It's also now at the forefront of item-level tagging, having chipped some of its men's clothes. The retailer has avoided questions of privacy protection by attaching the tag to a label on the suit that can be cut off.

M&S has now extended the trials nationwide.

Passports:
One of the more controversial applications is soon-to-be mandatory use of RFID in passports. The US is leading the way in deployments and the UK isn't far behind.

As well as the obvious privacy fears that surround such rollouts, experts have questioned how secure the passports are with some claiming to have cracked and cloned them already.

Books:
The first item-level rollout in Europe has already taken place in Dutch book store BGN. Each of the books in BGN's Almere store is chipped and a second store, in Maastricht, will soon go the same way, allowing the retailer to track each book from its central warehouse to the shop floor.
http://networks.silicon.com/lans/0,3...9164446,00.htm





Police Decry Web Site on Informants
Matt Apuzzo

Police and prosecutors are worried that a Web site claiming to identify more than 4,000 informants and undercover agents will cripple investigations and hang targets on witnesses.

The Web site, WhosaRat.com, first caught the attention of authorities after a Massachusetts man put it online and named a few dozen people as turncoats in 2004. Since then, it has grown into a clearinghouse for mug shots, court papers and rumors.

Federal prosecutors say the site was set up to encourage violence, and federal judges around the country were recently warned that witnesses in their courtrooms may be profiled online.

"My concern is making sure cooperators are adequately protected from retaliation," said Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, who alerted other judges in Washington's federal courthouse. He said he learned about the site from a federal judge in Maine.

The Web site is the latest unabashedly public effort to identify witnesses or discourage helping police. "Stop Snitching" T-shirts have been sold in cities around the country and popular hip-hop lyrics disparage or threaten people who help police.

In 2004, NBA star Carmelo Anthony appeared in an underground Baltimore DVD that warned people they could be killed for cooperating with police. Anthony has said he was not aware of the DVD's message.

Such threats hinder criminal investigations, said Ronald Teachman, police chief in New Bedford, Mass., where murder cases have been stymied by witness silence and "Stop Snitching" T-shirts were recently for sale.

"Every shooting we have to treat like homicide. The victim's alive but he's not cooperative," Teachman said. "These kids have the idea that the worst offense they can commit is to cooperate with the police."

Sean Bucci, a former Boston-area disc jockey, set up WhosaRat.com after federal prosecutors charged him with selling marijuana in bulk from his house. Bucci is under house arrest awaiting trial and could not be reached, but a WhosaRat spokesman identifying himself as Anthony Capone said the site is a resource for criminal defendants and does not condone violence.

"If people got hurt or killed, it's kind of on them. They knew the dangers of becoming an informant," Capone said. "We'd feel bad, don't get me wrong, but things happen to people. If they decide to become an informant, with or without the Web site, that's a possibility."

The site offers biographical information about people whom users identify as witnesses or undercover agents. Users can post court documents, comments and pictures.

Some of those listed are well known, such as former Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland, who served 10 months in prison before testifying in a public corruption case. But many never made headlines and were identified as having helped investigators in drug cases.

For two years, anyone with an Internet connection could search the site. On Thursday, a day after it was discussed at a courthouse conference in Washington, the site became a subscription-only service. The site has also disabled the ability to post photos of undercover agents, Capone said, because administrators of the Web site do not want officers to be hurt.

Authorities disagree. In documents filed in Bucci's court case last month, federal prosecutors said they have information that Bucci set up the Web site to help intimidate and harm witnesses.

"Such information not only compromises pending or future government investigations, but places informants and undercover agents in potentially grave danger," Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter K. Levitt wrote.

While prosecutors haven't pointed to a case where a witness or officer was harmed because of the Web site, it has been used to shatter an undercover agent's anonymity. After Hawaiian doctor Kachun Yeung was charged with distributing narcotic painkillers this spring, a surveillance picture of an undercover Drug Enforcement Agent was posted on the site.

Federal prosecutors said they traced the posting to the University of Hawaii newspaper's photo department, where the doctor's son was a photo editor. The posting identified the names of three agents and described one as "a known liar and a dirty agent. He is an absolute disgrace to the American justice system."

Prosecutors in Boston have discussed whether WhosaRat is protected as free speech but have not moved to shut it down. In 2004, an Alabama federal judge ruled that a defendant had the right to run a Web site that included witness information in the form of "wanted" posters.

Earlier this month, federal judges from Minnesota and Utah urged their colleagues to be careful about how much information about witnesses is released in public files, noting that they could end up on WhosaRat.

Steve Bunnell, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said the rules of evidence already require authorities to identity witnesses to the people most likely to harm them: the defendants. Most of the documents labeled "top secret" on the site are really public court records or information copied from other Web sites, he said.

His concern is that the site disparages the reputation of people who come forward to help solve crimes.

"We don't make those high-level gang and drug organization cases without somebody on the inside telling us what's going on," Bunnell said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-30-20-28-31





Indicted: Romanian Hacked U.S. Computers
AP

A Romanian national was indicted on charges of hacking into more than 150 U.S. government computers, causing disruptions that cost NASA, the Energy Department and the Navy nearly $1.5 million.

The federal indictment charges Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania with nine counts of computer intrusion and one count of conspiracy. He faces up to 54 years in prison if convicted of all counts, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Faur was being prosecuted by authorities in Romania on separate computer hacking charges, Mrozek said Thursday, and will be brought to Los Angeles upon resolution of that case. It was not known whether Faur had retained a lawyer in the United States.

The U.S. government alleges Faur was the leader of a hacking group called "WhiteHat Team," whose main goal was to break into U.S. government computers because they are some of the securest in the world.

After hacking into and taking control of the computers, Faur programmed them to operate as chat rooms so he could communicate with other WhiteHat members, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Hoffstadt said.

During the break-ins, Faur searched for passwords that WhiteHat members could use to gain unauthorized access to other computers, Hoffstadt said.

The compromised computers were used to collect, store and analyze scientific data - including data from spacecraft in orbit and deep space - and to evaluate new technologies. The machines were located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.; and the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-01-10-07-09





U.S. Reports Unconfirmed Cyber Threat
AP

The government warned on Thursday of a possible Internet attack on U.S. stock market and banking Web sites from a radical Muslim group, but officials said the threat was unconfirmed and seemed to pose no immediate danger.

The notice was issued to the U.S. cybersecurity industry after officials saw a posting on a "Jihadist Web site" calling for an attack on U.S. Internet-based stock market and banking sites in December, said Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke.

There is no information corroborating the threat, Knocke said, adding that the alert was issued "as a routine matter and out of an abundance of caution. There is no immediate threat to our homeland at this time."

Another government official said the threat had appeared on a Web site that called for Muslims to destroy American economic sites. The attacks were to be retaliation for the holding of Muslims at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which houses prisoners accused of ties to terrorist groups.

The attacks were to be conducted in December, "until the infidel new year," the site said, according to a U.S. government translation. It called for attackers to use viruses that can penetrate Internet sites and destroy data stored there.

The alert was issued by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. The team, a partnership between private industry and a number of government agencies, is based at the Homeland Security Department and warns Web sites about virus outbreaks and other Internet attacks.

Spokespeople for the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq declined to comment on the cyber-terror threat.

Stock exchanges and financial institutions strengthened physical security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and joined forces to enhance protection of data and information technology. The collapse of the World Trade Center initially severed communication between Wall Street firms and their data centers.

The Securities Industry Automation Corp., a data technology subsidiary of the NYSE and American Stock Exchange, immediately went to work in trying to shore up Wall Street's vulnerability. The company formed SFTI, known in the industry as "safety," which acts almost as a traffic cop for data streams in case the system is overloaded.

SFTI currently protects data transferred by all the major U.S. stock markets. Each stock market also has its own firewalls, many of which were beefed up after the attacks.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-01-01-53-21





Report: Pentagon Investigates YouTube Video of U.S. Troops

The U.S. Department of Defense is investigating at least two video clips that appear to show American soldiers in an unfavorable light during contacts with Iraqi children, according to a report in the British newspaper, the Metro.

A clip found on YouTube titled "Iraqi Kid Runs For Water" appears to show U.S. soldiers amusing themselves by watching children chase their truck in the hope the soldiers will make good on their offer of a water bottle.

"You want some water? Keep running," shouts a soldier, who laughs at the scampering boys. He asks, presumably whoever is taping the scene "Are you getting this?"

Another video features a soldier complaining about orders forbidding him from using deadly force against rock-throwing youngsters.

The Internet has spread uncensored images of war to the public like never before. Donald Rumsfeld, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defense, has suggested the U.S. military is not well prepared to fight a propaganda war in the Internet age.

Perhaps the most famous example of how images circulated on the Internet has hurt the U.S. mission in Iraq are the photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison. The pictures of naked men being led around on leashes and stacked up on top of each other like cordwood was denounced by even the closest U.S. allies.

To be sure, none of the videos that have cropped up in the past couple of months on video-sharing sites indicate any wrongdoing on the level of Abu Gharaib.

The video of the truck-chasing children shows them racing to keep up with the soldiers until one by one they begin to give up. A single child continues the pursuit and appears to be rewarded when the soldier tosses the bottle out.

The water, however, is snatched away at the last second by another group of children who happen to be standing nearby.

In the YouTube clip of the truck driver, titled "U.S. military pelted by rocks" a truck convoy is traveling in Iraq while children throw rocks at the vehicles.

"Here is the corner where little (expletive) like to throw rocks at us," says a voice on the profanity-laced video. "According to our first sergeant, we're not allowed to engage these little (expletive). So I'm not going to have my weapon out the window. We're just going to videotape these little (expletive) basically destroying our vehicles."
http://news.com.com/2061-10802_3-613..._3-0&subj=news





Police Track Reckless Driver on YouTube
Doug Mellgren

Police took up pursuit in cyberspace after a young Norwegian posted on the Internet video of his wild car driving. Following an electronic trail that he left online, police caught him and slapped him with real-life fine $1,300.

The Norwegian, identified only as a man in his early 20s, posted the video called "Driving in Norway" on Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube. The recording showed the car's speedometer hitting up to 150 miles - 240 kilometers - per hour on a public highway near Oslo.

"We're touching 240," a voice could be heard saying. "We know it will do it. This is a little nice."

The video was removed from the Web site after it made national news in Norway last week.

Police said they could prove only that the man had driven an average of 86 miles per hour and based the fine, which the motorist accepted, on that speed. Norway's speed limit is as high as 62 miles per hour, though lower on most roads.

"It is disturbing that young people test high speeds on highways like that, and then, on top of it, use the Net to boast about the misdeed afterward," said Morten Hassel of the district police's traffic unit.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...11-29-18-19-33


















Until next week,

- js.



















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