[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star." – Spencer Elden, "Nevermind" baby


"Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact. It’s not necessarily so." – James Randi


"Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals." – Tony Fratto


"It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page." – Pat Schroeder


"My friend and I went to a shopping mall at 3 p.m. on June 29th, the day it came out. We got our iPhones right at 6 and we came home and I've been working on it ever since." – George Hotz

"Do you think some wiley entrepreneur out there is going to take your method and start himself up a company that's gonna make a whole lot of money?" – Kai Ryssdal

"I mean, I'm sure he will. And actually my dad thinks I should be the one doing that. But I have no desire to do that at all." – George Hotz

"Why not?" – Kai Ryssdal

"That's something I kinda don't want. I mean, it's not what I was going for at all. I wish I could just release a little program that everyone could just run on their iPhone. And then there'd be no need for these companies." – George Hotz


"Die white pork." – Anonymous


"The U.S. government is freaking out." – William D. Watkins































Got You in a Stranglehold Baby

Kudos to Robb Topolski for his thorough job in both outing cable giant Comcast’s peer deflection "traffic management" practices and defending his expose against the usual pro-company flame bait from wannabe Ayn Rands who instantly jumped on him back in May, no doubt with well thumbed copies of The Fountainhead in their white knuckled hands.

The unfortunate truth however is that dubious ISP behavior such as this has been occurring for a much longer period than even Topolski’s mid-spring report would suggest. For instance a story on traffic shaper Sandvine is so old it’s no longer hosted at the parent site. I have it here, and it's sobering to note it’s a Week in Review from 2002.

Sandvine techniques will only get bolder and ISP service weaker unless something concrete is done like actually physically increasing broadband capacity. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the foreseeable future users exploring the more progressive social Internet experiences have much to mourn. In addition, posters say Comcast subscribers haven’t even been seeing the full 8MBs down they paid for, regardless of their file-sharing habits if any, with many getting only about 3 it seems.

Meanwhile Tokyo customers can purchase (and use) 50 MBs down and 12.5 MBs up for the U.S. equivalent of some 40 dollars a month, and others indicate they can buy 100 MBs down for a paltry 14 bucks.

Sandvine is Soma for American ISPs. It allows them to float in an extended dream state, pretending less capacity is more, while all around them countries are getting down to earth, rolling up their sleeves and doing the real work required to improve their systems and the productivity of their citizens.

The contrasts couldn’t be sharper.

If US subscribers could actually buy Japanese service, Comcast and AT&T would be out of business, overnight.

But as Atlas may have shrugged, they can’t.

This is competition?













Enjoy,

Jack













August 25th, 2007








Meet Copowi, the World's First ISP to Guarantee Network Neutrality
Nate Anderson

Copowi! Kablooey! An ISP dons superhero tights

How much would you pay for an Internet connection from an ISP that guarantees a neutral network, bills itself as a "social enterprise" instead of a traditional business, and sends free Ubuntu CDs to every new customer?

In the US, the battle over network neutrality has captured the public imagination in a way that it has yet to do in Europe or Australia. Debates over network neutrality occur in the media and in Washington, but new ISP Copowi wants to give customers a way to vote with their dollars as well. When it opened its doors for business two weeks ago, Copowi billed itself as the country's first ISP to guarantee network neutrality, and it now hopes to prove to other ISPs that the issue matters enough to consumers to provide a competitive advantage, even if prices are higher (and they are).

Copowi already offers service in 12 Western states, but "absolutely" wants to go national—even international. Copowi senior partner George Matafonov tells Ars that he sees no reason why the company couldn't eventually expand into Australia, Canada, and the UK.

But for now, with a few hundred subscribers, selling service in Australia looks a long way off. I spoke to Matafonov (an Australian himself) about Copowi's business model, its challenges, and whether it will really remain neutral if a handful of peer-to-peer users start slurping up most of the available bandwidth.
Your gateway to a neutral 'Net

Copowi's main pitch is a fully neutral network, which it defines as one that provides "equal access to all web sites and online services." The idea is that usage will be unrestricted and traffic will not be shaped, throttled, or prioritized. According to Matafonov, the major telecommunications companies want to "privatize the Internet" because greater control leads to greater profits. The eventual outcome could become something more like cable television than like the open Internet we know now, and Copowi strongly supports SavetheInternet.com's campaign to preserve an open 'Net.

But Copowi doesn't own any "last-mile" lines to people's homes, which means that it needs to lease DSL lines from local telcos out west in order to offer service (interesting side note: although companies like Verizon and AT&T scoffed at the idea of offering part of the 700MHz band as a "wholesale-only" license, both firms run thriving wholesale businesses of their own already). This puts Copowi at the mercy of the telcos that it leases lines from and means it has only limited control over its network neutrality guarantee.

Matafonov says that Copowi has had no problem in its negotiations yet, though. The telcos have so far been happy to provide unregulated access if Copowi is willing to pay for the bandwidth.

Because of this, and because telco wholesalers rarely resell lines at competitive prices (they don't want to create their own competition), Copowi's service runs toward the pricey side of the broadband spectrum. Users in Colorado, for example, will have to cough up a staggering $33.95 a month for a 256Kbps DSL connection—expensive by any standard (except perhaps in Kazakhstan).

Copowi's higher-end plans are actually far more competitive when it comes to price. A 1.5Mbps connection is still not cheap at $49.95 per month, but a 7Mbps link isn't a bad deal at $59.95 a month.

Matafonov admits that high wholesale rates are "one of the key questions" that the company faces, but he hopes that a small niche of customers will be willing to pay the premium for a guaranteed neutral connection. He also hopes that prices will drop as subscriber numbers grow and Copowi can negotiate better contracts. For now, though, Copowi targets those who don't make "cost" their primary concern when choosing an ISP.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...neutrality.ars





Comcast Responds To Traffic Shaping Accusations

But chooses their words carefully....
Karl

We (and other outlets we've spoken to) have been trying to get Comcast to comment on reports that the company has started using Sandvine gear to disrupt the seeding of BitTorrent files. Comcast picked Light Reading to issue their first denial of wrongdoing, chosing their words carefully in response to the allegations of preferential traffic treatment:

"We're not blocking access to any application, and we don't throttle any traffic," says Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman. Douglas didn't explicitly deny the use of deep packet inspection or traffic shaping products. "[Comcast] has a responsibility to manage our network to ensure our customers have the best service, and we use available technologies to do so."

Keep in mind that the allegations that surfaced in our forums and were also highlighted in a Torrent Freak report note that Comcast is using the Sandvine gear to limit the ability to seed Torrent files effectively in some markets, not necessarily throttle available bandwidth or restrict application access.

So are we going to be playing a game of semantics as the practices of our Canadian neighbors trickle down to U.S. cable operators? RCN does something similar, but is very forthcoming. Time Warner Cable denies traffic shaping whatsoever despite evidence otherwise.

While U.S. cable ops offer faster speeds than DSL operators, the practice of download caps and traffic shaping could neutralize that marketing advantage. These ISPs are very aware of your thoughts on this issue. The volume of traffic shaping they implement will depend on how much you're willing to tolerate.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...usations-86816





Comcast Wrongfully Denies Interfering with BitTorrent
Ernesto

Last week we reported that Comcast is making it impossible for its customers to seed files on BitTorrent. Not surprisingly, Comcast’s PR department does all it can to deny there allegations, but we - and with us some of the leading BitTorrent developers - know better.

So who’s right here? The hundreds of people that seem to have the same seeding problem, or the Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas, who denies that Comcast is monkeying with BitTorrent bandwidth. Apparently Comcast want people to believe the latter, even though all evidence points in the other direction. Decide for yourself.

Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.

More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged

Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.

Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-wron...th-bittorrent/





How to Test How Many Connections are Being Reset by RST Pack
Robb Topolski

The technique Comcast is using is definitely not the typical way to employ traffic shaping. Comcast, more accurately, is employing "traffic deflection" by killing an unwanted (by them) connection in hopes that a better connection will take its place.

Here is a quick-and-dirty way to determine whether, and how much, you are being affected by the P2P management that I described at the top of this thread.

1. Start your P2P application, wait about 15 minutes for full connectivity to be established.

2. In a Console window (Start, Run, CMD.EXE), type
netstat -s | find "Reset Connections"
and write down the number that you get in response.

3. Exactly one hour later, repeat Step 2. Subtract the first number from this latest number. The result is how many connections were terminated by a "RST" in the past hour.

If you have a VPN, or an access to a non-Comcast line, repeat the above process (as much as you can, try to match the conditions -- same applications, same uploads and downloads).

Now compare the two numbers. If you are being affected, the "Comcast" number will be an order of magnitude higher than the "non-Comcast" number.

The above result should be enough to show the effect, if it is there, as the difference is huge and undeniable. However, you can be more accurate by using the above process, but using this command and this math at the end of each test, instead:

netstat -s

Look for this output:

TCP Statistics for IPv4

Active Opens = 253461
Passive Opens = 131313
Failed Connection Attempts = 188271
Reset Connections = 12271

These numbers always accumulate (they don't go up and down). Record this output, and at the end of the test, subtract the numbers from the beginning of the test to get the number that applies to the duration of your test.

Now add "Active Opens" and "Passive Opens" and subtract "Failed Connection Attempts." The result will be the number of Successfully Established Connections.

Take the "Reset Connections" and divide that by the number of "Successfully Established Connections," and the result is the ratio of connections that were torn down by Resets.

If you don't have a non-Comcast account to use for comparison, you can use this result to compare with other users of your P2P application (to a degree), since it divides by the number of successful connections instead of by time.


If you know how to use a batch file, here is a batch file that simplifies this testing -- call it CheckRST.BAT:

1) SETLOCAL
2)
3) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Active Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL1=%%i
4) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Passive Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL1=%CESTABL1%+%%i
5) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Failed Connection Attempts"`) DO set /A CESTABL1=%CESTABL1%-%%i
6) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Reset Connections"`) DO set /A CRESETS1=%%i
7) SET /A TESTCYCLE=0
8) SET /A TESTMINS=0
9)
10) cls
11) echo results will begin to be reported shortly,
12) echo please wait or use Ctrl-c to quit...
13)
14) :repeatcycle
15) ping -n 9 localhost >nul
16) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Active Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL2=%%i
17) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Passive Opens"`) DO set /A CESTABL2=%CESTABL2%+%%i
18) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Failed Connection Attempts"`) DO set /A CESTABL2=%CESTABL2%-%%i
19) FOR /F "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i IN (`netstat -s ^| find "Reset Connections"`) DO set /A CRESETS2=%%i
20) SET /A TESTCYCLE=%TESTCYCLE%+1
21) SET /A TESTMINS=%TESTCYCLE% / 6
22) SET /A TESTSECS=%TESTCYCLE%%%6*10
23) IF %TESTSECS% EQU 0 SET TESTSECS=00
24) SET /A CESTABL=%CESTABL2%-%CESTABL1%
25) SET /A CRESETS=%CRESETS2%-%CRESETS1%
26) SET /A PCTRST=(%CRESETS% * 100)/%CESTABL%
27) ECHO %TESTMINS%:%TESTSECS% - %CRESETS% out of %CESTABL% connections reset (%PCTRST%%%) [Ctrl-c quit] goto repeatcycle

The above file was written and tested using Windows XP SP2. Use CMD.EXE (which is installed by default in Windows XP), not COMMAND.COM, to run this batch file. http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r189...et-by-RST-pack

It's Been Over 3 Months Since My Original Post

I decided to see if the numbers or behaviors had changed.

The numbers did not change, much. In May, 39% of my BitTorrent connections were killed by the RST flag, but I was still able to seed a torrent at my preferred speed (16 KB/s). Today that number is 46% killed, and still able to seed a torrent at my preset upload limit speed (16 KB/s).

What did change is the behavior toward BitTorrent's standard DHE encrypted connections: Surprisingly, none were dropped! It was only yesterday or the day before that I noted encrypted connections were still being killed by RST, so this is new behavior for me. This could be due to policy parameters such as time-of-day, level of global or individual use, or localized adjustments -- so your milage may vary.

The test method:

1. Start a BitTorrent client performing an upload (seeding) to an established swarm.
2. Wait 5 minutes to allow connections and speeds to stabilize.
3. Record the starting number of connections and resets reported by "netstat -s" or start the batch file (see »How to test how many connections are being reset by RST pack for details).
4. Wait 5 minutes.
5. Record the ending number of connections and resets, and determine the amount that took place during the test (or obtain the numbers from the batch file).

I used the above method on the same small (25-30 peer, 4 seed) swarm, using uTorrent 1.7.2.

No encryption ... 34 out of 73 reset (46%)
Encryption enabled (with fallback) ... 5 out of 20 reset (25%)
Encryption forced (no fallback) ... 0 out of 17 reset ( 0%)
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18919646-





BitComet Pollutes BitTorrent with Junk Data
Ernesto

Due to a new feature recently introduced into Bitcomet’s torrent maker, people who do not use BitComet (the majority) are sometimes forced to download so called “padding files” which is — for them — a waste of time and bandwidth.

So what are these padding files?

For every file in a multi-file torrent, BitComet includes a padding file by default. This overcomes the problem of ending one file and beginning another on the same BitTorrent “piece.” The feature was added to support finding sources from http/ftp/ed2k services on multi-file torrents.

For example, if BitComet users are downloading a set of .mp3 files, it tries to get some of those files from a non-BitTorrent source if possible. This is good both for the (BitComet) user and the swarm. However, the implementation of these padding files create problems for non-Bitcomet clients and the web sites that carry information from the *.torrent files.

Why is this a problem?

Unfortunately, BitComet’s development team sprung these padding files on to the rest of the community. If they had been more communicative, such as pre-publishing a specification, client makers and administrators of Torrent sites could then program their systems to mask them.

It impacts people who use uTorrent, Azureus or any other client than BitComet. The padding feature is enabled by default, so if a BitComet user created a .torrent, non BitComet users have to download these useless padding files. A padding file is created for every file in the .torrent, so if you download a collection of 100 MP3s you’ll be forced to download 100 (useless) padding files. The average added overhead for an MP3 album will be around 3%, not too bad, but annoying because its junk data to most people. However, it is possible in rare circumstances that the amount of junk data caused by these files might exceed 10%.

The padding file feature might come to bite BitComet users. It has been reported that a malicious user could create a torrent with a fake padding file. This means that Bitcomet 0.85+ users will never be able to complete their downloads without switching to another client.

Some BitTorrent users are starting to get annoyed by these (for most people) useless padding files. “Fuzzier,” who has been leading the charge on several forums (including Wikipedia), sums it up:

“I and lots of my friends don’t use BitComet, and many others stick with older versions of BitComet. We see more and more useless padding files in torrents, and it gets really inconvenient — delete them then we cannot pass hash check and cannot seed; and no matter what, we get a bunch of wastes especially our precious upload bandwidth.”

Unless this practice becomes more widely adopted in the BitTorrent community, BitComet might consider disabling this feature by default, and suppling client makers and administrators of BitTorrent sites with the specs so they can decide how to deal with them.
http://torrentfreak.com/bitcomet-pol...ith-junk-data/





Gunplay Blamed for Internet Slowdown
Robert McMillan

ISPs in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire.

TeliaSonera, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot. "Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable," said Anders Olausson, a TeliaSonera spokesman.

The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said.

The company declined to name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 could not be reached immediately for comment.

Cogent Communications warned that some customers may be experiencing disruptions because network lines had been cut somewhere between Montville, Ohio, and Cleveland. "Splice crews are currently doing preparation work on the new fiber cable before splicing begins to resolve the outage," Cogent said in a note to customers.

According to Keynote Systems' Internet Pulse Report, Cogent was experiencing significant latency problems on Monday.

The outage caused headaches for Christopher McCoy, a system administrator for a Web hosting company in Atlanta. "This Telia outage is really causing a pain," he wrote in a blog posting. "Telia is one of my company’s main network providers, and explaining to your average Webmaster the details and specifics of a fiber break isn’t all that easy."From February
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...-internet.html





Japan Working to Replace the Internet

Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. Speaking to reporters in Brazil, where he is visiting, Suga said an organization will be set up as early as this fall with cooperation from businesses, academia and government offices for promoting the technology when the Internet is seen to be faced with increasing constraints in achieving higher throughputs of data as well as ensuring data security.

The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns. The ministry is hoping Japan will take a lead in development of post-Internet technology and setting global standards, a move that ministry officials believe would help make Japanese companies competitive in the global market for hardware and software using such technology.

Suga also said he will set up a task force early next month to oversee the transition from analog to digital broadcasting in July 2011. The task force will request the electronics industry to produce and sell low-price converters to enable analog TVs to receive digital broadcasting programs within two years, the minister said. ''We will consider providing simplified converters to low-income households for free or distributing coupons to assist them to purchase such converters,'' he said.
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/...e_internet.php





Man Arrested for Stealing Broadband

A man who was spotted in the street using his laptop to access an unsecured wireless connection has been arrested.

The 39-year-old man was seen sitting on a wall outside a home in Chiswick, west London, by two community support officers.
Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act

When questioned he admitted using the owner's unsecured wireless internet connection without permission and was arrested on suspicion of stealing a wireless broadband connection.

The man was bailed to October pending further inquiries.

Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act.

The move is the latest example of police cracking down on a crime that did not exist several years ago when wireless internet access was relatively rare.

In April, a man was cautioned by police after neighbours saw him using a laptop in a car parked outside a house in Redditch, Worcestershire.

In 2005, a man was fined £500 for piggybacking on someone else's wireless broadband connection in London.

Detective Constable Mark Roberts, of the Metropolitan Police computer crime unit, said anyone who illegally uses a broadband link faces arrest.

He said: "This arrest should act as a warning to anyone who thinks it is acceptable to illegally use other people's broadband connections.

"To do so potentially breaches the Computer Misuse Act and the Communications Act, so computer users need to be aware that this is unlawful and police will investigate any violation we become aware of."
http://itn.co.uk/news/1112943368020a...568ddbde1.html





Google Ready to Invade Telco Turf, Bid on 700MHz Spectrum
Nate Anderson

For the last few weeks, Google has been pondering its response to the FCC's 700MHz auction rules. Would it bid on the spectrum or wouldn't it? Last night, CEO Eric Schmidt appeared to indicate that the company was leaning toward a bid, a decision that is no doubt giving the incumbent telcos night sweats.

Schmidt delivered a dinner keynote at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen Summit, and he talked about the topic that was on everyone's mind: would Google use its hoard of cash to bid for a juicy block of 700MHz spectrum being vacated by analog television broadcasters in 2009?

Google had promised the FCC a minimum $4.6 billion bid if the agency agreed to impose four "open access" conditions on the available spectrum. After only two of those conditions made their way into the final rules, Google's telecom counsel called the progress "real, if incomplete" and said that Google was waiting on the final FCC rules to make a decision.

Those rules are now out, so anticipation was high among the gathered glitterati of the tech sector. Anticipation was also high among Google competitors like T-Mobile, a company long said to want more spectrum to boost its cellular data offerings. T-Mobile's head of government relations, Thomas Sugrue, stood up after dinner and asked Schmidt directly if Google would make a play for the spectrum.

Here's where things get a bit dicey. Reuters' recounting of his answer goes this way:

Schmidt replied that bidding "probably would be the way to answer that."

GigaOm reports it a bit differently:

Saying the FCC’s rules were "conducive" to the kind of bid Google might make, Schmidt said "probably... is the way to answer."

According to CNet, the crucial line fell trippingly from Schmidt's lips like this:

In response to a question from a T-Mobile representative, he added: "probably is the answer to that."

The fact that each response is worded slightly differently is no big deal, and the gist of Schmidt's words is obvious. But the Reuters report makes it sound as though a bid would be Google's answer to the question; in other words, Schmidt isn't going to say, and other companies will just have to wait until the auction to find out if Google bids or not. The other quotes (and the tone of the rest of the Reuters piece) suggest that Schmidt's answer to the question about whether Google would bid was "Probably." That is, Schmidt said, "Yes, it's likely we will make a play for the spectrum." These are two quite different responses.

What's at stake

In any event, Google hasn't ruled out what could become an expensive bidding war for a prime piece of spectrum and seems to be in favor of throwing its hat into the ring. What Google would do with the spectrum is not entirely clear, though we assume that it would voluntarily stick to the four open access conditions proposed earlier.

In addition to coughing up more than $4.6 billion just for the rights to the spectrum (the reserve price set by the FCC), Google would then need to build out a national network infrastructure in the next few years at a cost that could make the license look like a bargain. Assuming that Google were to do so and were to stick to its four open access principles, the company (or consortium, if it partners with others) would be running a network that only sells wholesale services to others.

This certainly has the potential to create great innovation, since anyone can purchase access to a high-quality wireless network and offer services across it without owning massive infrastructure. What's Google's game here?

Because the 700MHz has such desirable spectrum propagation characteristics, it's also much cheaper and easier to roll out a network with excellent coverage than it is to do so with higher-frequency technology. Making broadband access cheap and affordable means more people come online, and more people are able to make use of Internet services-exactly the sort of thing Google offers.

But just as importantly, it helps Google avoid any problems from non-neutral ISPs. After former SBC chief Ed Whitacre announced that Google shouldn't be able to "use my pipes free," Google saw a potential threat to its existence from the network operators that lay between it and consumers. Running a national wireless network could create enough competition that incumbent telcos simply couldn't implement their previous plans to charge companies like Google and Yahoo for better access to end users.

In effect, this could give Google control of the entire pipe between customers and Google servers, a move that could be very good for business strategy, even if the wireless network is not a major profit center. Companies never like to be at the mercy of other companies, and Google is no exception.

Whitacre's remarks are sometimes credited with igniting the public debate over network neutrality. Ironically for the telcos who can't be thrilled at the possibility of a bidding war with a cash factory like Google, one of their own may be to thank for the current situation.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ctrum-bid.html





With Software and Soldering, a Non-AT&T iPhone
Brad Stone

AT&T is paying millions to be the exclusive United States provider of Apple’s much-hyped and glowingly reviewed gadget, the iPhone.

It took 17-year-old George Hotz two months of work to undermine AT&T’s investment.

Mr. Hotz, a resident of Glen Rock, N.J., published detailed instructions online this week that he says will let iPhone owners abandon AT&T’s service and use their phones on some competing cellular networks.

Mr. Hotz’s method, which requires a soldering gun, a steady hand and a set of obscure software tools, is one of several techniques that have emerged over the last week to break the technological locks confining the iPhone to AT&T’s network.

“This was about opening up the device for everyone,” Mr. Hotz said in an interview over his iPhone, which he was using on the network of T-Mobile, a rival to AT&T.

Carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint seek to keep their customers in two ways. They force them to sign multiyear contracts, which are expensive to break. And the carriers put complex technological locks on phones to ensure that they run only on a given carrier’s wireless network. Without the locks, the phones could be used on rival networks that use the same underlying technology.

People who work on unlocking cellphones say those technical locks unfairly restrict customer choice. They want to give cellphone users the flexibility to take their phones with them overseas without incurring heavy roaming fees, or to transfer the devices to other networks once a user’s service contract has expired.

Mr. Hotz says it took him about 500 hours to unlock two iPhone units. He put one of them up for sale on eBay, and by late yesterday, bids on the phone had reached many thousands of dollars. An unmodified iPhone sells for $499 at an Apple store.

His technique is probably not accessible to most people. But Mr. Hotz described it in detail on his Web site in the hopes that others could simplify the procedure.

Neither Apple nor AT&T would comment on Mr. Hotz’s handiwork or on another unlocking technique revealed yesterday by an anonymous group calling itself iPhoneSimFree.

Members of that group demonstrated their technique to a writer for the Web site Engadget. They said they had developed a way to unlock iPhones with a software update, without any hardware changes to the device.

IPhone owners presumably would be able to run that software and then insert another carrier’s SIM card, the small card inside phones that run on G.S.M. networks. A SIM card stores information about the subscriber.

The writer for Engadget verified that the iPhoneSimFree technique worked. Apparently only one feature, AT&T’s visual voice mail system, which lets users retrieve voice mail in whatever order they choose, stopped working when an iPhone was removed from the AT&T system.

The six-man iPhoneSimFree group says that it has been working on unlocking the iPhone since June and that it plans to start selling its software to parties that want to unlock large numbers of iPhones.

The members have not disclosed what they intend to charge, and they declined to reveal their identities.

“We’re a bit paranoid about privacy because we don’t know how things are going to evolve,” said one group member, who identified himself only as Jim in a brief phone interview.

His caution stems from the murky legal status of unlocking cellphones.

Last fall, the Librarian of Congress issued an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ruling that people can legally unlock their cellphones. But the ruling does not specifically apply to people like Mr. Hotz and the iPhoneSimFree group who distribute the unlocking tools.

Apple and AT&T could conceivably sue such distributors under the copyright act. The companies could also argue that people sharing modifications to iPhones are interfering with a business relationship, between Apple and AT&T and the customers.

Apple might also seek to block the unlocking tools with its regular software updates to the iPhone. Mr. Hotz says he thinks his unlocking process is immune to such changes, because he is making a change to the device’s read-only memory, which cannot be changed with a software patch.

One other approach to unlocking the iPhone has made some waves recently.

Two weeks ago, a company called Bladox, based in the Czech Republic, began selling an $80 device called a Turbo SIM. The thumbnail-size card, attached to another carrier’s SIM card and inserted into an iPhone, tricks the iPhone into thinking it is running on the AT&T network even when it is not.

The company has reportedly been overwhelmed by orders and is not selling the product on its site. But Jesús Díaz, a technology writer in Madrid, said he bought the Turbo SIM last week and was now using his iPhone on Spain’s Vodafone network.

“Everyone here asks me: ‘What is that? Can I see it, can I touch it?’ ” said Mr. Díaz, whose iPhone draws a lot of attention because Apple has not yet announced a deal to sell the device in Europe.

The iPhone unlocking craze may have reverberations beyond Apple and AT&T.

Cellphone carriers in the United States generally subsidize the initial purchase of a phone and then work to keep customers paying the lucrative monthly fees. That is why operators offer incentives for loyalty and require long contracts.

But people now want the same freedom with their cellphones that they have with other devices, like televisions and computers.

Mike McGuire, an analyst at the research firm Gartner, says that even though few consumers will try these sophisticated alterations, the iPhone modifications point to “the rather rapid erosion of the carrier control of handset distribution.”

“This has been going on for a while,” he said, “and this is the latest salvo.”

John Biggs contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/te...iphone.html?hp




'I Partied and I Unlocked the iPhone!'

George Hotz, 17, has posted on his blog the instructions for how to fiddle with an iPhone so it can be used with a wireless carrier other than AT&T. Kai Ryssdal figured that was worth a conversation and called him up.

KAI RYSSDAL: Sometimes cause and effect in the stock market's a pretty easy thing to figure out. Maybe there's an earnings report or something. So when we noticed Apple shares were up more than two percent today we went looking for a reason. And we found it in Glen Rock, New Jersey. That's where George Hotz lives.

Last night on his blog George, who's 17 by the way, posted instructions for how to fiddle with an iPhone so it can be used with a wireless carrier other than AT&T. We figured that was worth a conversation, so we called him up.

GEORGE HOTZ: Hello?

RYSSDAL: Hey, George. Kai Ryssdal. How are you?

HOTZ: Pretty good.

RYSSDAL: How long did it take you to do this?

HOTZ: My friend and I went to a shopping mall at 3 p.m. on June 29th, the day it came out. We got our iPhones right at 6 and we came home and I've been working on it ever since.

RYSSDAL: Now, I read your blog. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't understand the whole thing. Is this a hardware thing where you actually crack open the phone and . . .

HOTZ: Yeah.

RYSSDAL: It is?

HOTZ: You do, actually, have to open the iPhone and solder some stuff to it. And all it is is a piece of wire. So it's tools everyone has. But the issue is you actually can open your iPhone and do it.

RYSSDAL: All right, now here's the big question. Why?

HOTZ: The truth is because our family has T-Mobile. We have a T-Mobile family plan. And if I wanted AT&T, I'd have to pay for it. So, I could either decide to pay for AT&T or just work to unlock the iPhone.

RYSSDAL: So, pure practicality then.

HOTZ: Yeah, basically.

RYSSDAL: As it stands now, you can only buy the iPhone in the United States. You can only use it -- well, until you came out with this thing -- only use it with AT&T. But what this does is it opens up the iPhone to be used overseas. Do you think some wiley entrepreneur out there is going to take your method and start himself up a company that's gonna make a whole lot of money?

HOTZ: I mean, I'm sure he will. And actually my dad thinks I should be the one doing that. But I have no desire to do that at all.

RYSSDAL: Why not?

HOTZ: That's something I kinda don't want. I mean, it's not what I was going for at all. I wish I could just release a little program that everyone could just run on their iPhone. And then there'd be no need for these companies. But, there are going to be companies that do it.

RYSSDAL: And you're all right with that?

HOTZ: It's either that or I don't release the method. And some people -- there's probably been about 50 people so far who have reported success with the method. And I'm happy to hear that.

RYSSDAL: So, what does your mom think of this whole thing?

HOTZ: I mean, she thinks I've been drinking too many Red Bulls.

RYSSDAL: So, a lot of late nights doing this project?

HOTZ: Yeah, like, there were nights I'd go to sleep at 9 in the morning.

RYSSDAL: All right, that's not good.

HOTZ: Well, but, it's all worth it.

RYSSDAL: Yeah, and really what else you gonna do the summer before you go to college, right?

HOTZ: Yeah, exactly. Like it's . . . I partied and I unlocked the iPhone. It was a good summer.

RYSSDAL: Yeah, not bad for a 17-year-old kid from New Jersey, huh?

HOTZ: I'll take it, yeah.

RYSSDAL: Where you going to school?

HOTZ: R.I.T.

RYSSDAL: Excellent. Rochester Institute of Technology, right?

HOTZ: That's the one.

RYSSDAL: All right. Best of luck to you.

HOTZ: Thanks a lot.

RYSSDAL: George Hotz leaves for college tomorrow morning. His "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay's going to be titled, "Changing the Market Dynamics of the iPhone."
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/s...200708244.html

Listen to this very confident and cool techie - Jack.





How to…

Unlock the iPhone

What you need
George Hotz

--First, an iPhone. Of the sshed and jailbroken variety. Also, kill commcenter by moving the LaunchDaemon plist out of the directory.
--Some trusty case opener tools(read: guitar picks) Read one of the many tutorials available online for taking apart your phone.
--A soldering iron. This should've cost you more than $10.
--Fine pitch wire. I used magnet wire salvaged from a little motor.
--An unlock switch. The bigger and more badass, the better. Or if you are cheap, wire cutters :-)
--A red bull. This requires concentration, something I don't have without Red Bull.

More





Uniquephones's iPhone Unlock Release 'Slowed' by AT&T Lawyers

Update

It is now 12N EST – the time when we said we would be offering iphone unlocking software to our customers.

We have the software. It works. And we are ready to go.

Seems AT&T is a bit annoyed at the idea. A middle of the night phone call from a Silicon Valley law firm is slowing down the release of the software to you.

Stay tuned.

Hope you weren't waiting in tense anticipation to get your hands on Uniquephone's iPhone unlock software, because things certainly aren't going as planned. Reportedly, the gurus behind the software unlock were contacted by "a Silicon Valley law firm" who is "slowing down the release of the software." Of course, they still claim to have the app "ready to go," but until this legal hubbub gets cleared up, it seems like their method of freeing your iPhone will remain a well kept secret. We'll keep you posted.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/25/u...tandt-lawyers/





AFTRA Musicians, Labels Face Off Over Contract Issues
FMQB

AFTRA's sound-recordings contract expired on June 30, and talks about a new agreement are going slowly between artists and record labels. In fact, an online protest campaign has been posted against the major labels. The petition, posted on the AFTRA Web site, says "The major record labels want to strip or reduce benefits to recording artists and keep singers from being paid for digital distributions." The petition objects to three record label demands, which it lists as: "No more health benefits for recording artists, or at the very least, a reduction in basic benefits; Group recording artists would continue to be paid as if they are one artist for health and pension credits; and Background singers cut out of monies from digital distributions."

"The negotiations are ongoing," AFTRA spokesman John Hinrichs told the Hollywood Reporter. However, it looks like both sides are not on the same page. AFTRA claims that the proposals include givebacks in basic health benefits and that they exclude background singers from digital distribution compensation.

"In this new age of digital distribution, older recordings are finding new popularity through subscriptions services, downloads, ringtones and ringbacks," reads the petition. "Background singers, whose voices are heard on these recordings, should share in these new sources of revenue, just like everyone else who contributes to the music you sell."

But a source told the Hollywood Reporter that the matter of background singers' benefits is not a question of whether they will share in digital distribution money but how much they will receive and for how long. The source also said the suggestion of a demand for benefit givebacks is inaccurate.

Meanwhile, AFTRA musicians claim that their own demands are modest. "The total cost of our union's proposals to the entire recording industry -- which would spread benefits and protection to thousands of artists seeking fair treatment -- is a small fraction of what a single label currently spends on the promotion of one new recording artist or what a single label might pay in a few executive bonuses," reads the petition. "We understand that piracy and the decline in hard product sales are affecting us all, but we also understand as digital businesses grow, it is only fair that we -- as the artist who make your businesses viable -- have a fair share in the future, and fair health and pension security."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=458472





SoundExchange Reaches Agreement On Web Royalty Cap
FMQB

After a Thursday meeting with DiMA, SoundExchange has announced it has reached an agreement with larger webcasters over the minimum fee cap for Web royalties. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) had required a $500 minimum fee "per station or channel," regardless of the total number of stations. Today's new agreement sets a cap of $50,000 per service on the $500 per station number. The two parties also agreed that beginning in six months, webcasters will provide SoundExchange with a full census of songs performed (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) in order to accurately distribute royalties to independent labels and artists. Furthermore, SoundExchange and DiMA will form a committee to evaluate the issue of "streamripping" (copying a song from a Web stream) and potential technological solutions to it.

Though the deal currently applies to those services involved in today's agreement, SoundExchange says the agreement will be presented to the Copyright Royalty Judges as an industry-wide rule.

John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, said in a statement, "This agreement shows that we can address specific issues of concern to the industry through private negotiations while upholding the integrity of the CRB process and while protecting the interests of SoundExchange members."

He continued, "With the small webcaster agreement we sent out earlier this week, with progress on the non-commercial webcaster front, and with this agreement, SoundExchange has now addressed the key issues of concern with respect to the CRB rate-setting decision while still protecting the value of sound recordings. We now hope to move forward together with our partners, the webcasters, in providing an enhanced listening experience through Internet radio."

DiMA Executive Director Jonathan Potter released a statement saying, "This agreement marks an important first step in the Internet radio royalty negotiation process. We’re encouraged by this development and the knowledge that good-faith negotiations have begun. We look forward to the next step of negotiating the royalty rates that will allow for the growth of the Internet radio industry, a platform for music discovery for consumers."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=462406





Gambling Dispute With a Tiny Country Puts U.S. in a Bind
Gary Rivlin

With long blond hair reaching his shoulders and dozens of cloth bracelets peeking out from under his sleeves, Mark E. Mendel hardly conjures up the image of a typical lawyer.

But then there is nothing run-of-the-mill about the case that Mr. Mendel, a Texan who was born and raised in Southern California, has been waging against his own government before the World Trade Organization, the body in Geneva that sets the ground rules for global trade. It is a clash that at once challenges Washington’s effort to prohibit online gambling while simultaneously testing the ability of the W.T.O. to enforce its own standards.

The dispute stretches back to 2003, when Mr. Mendel first persuaded officials in Antigua and Barbuda, a tiny nation in the Caribbean with a population of around 70,000, to instigate a trade complaint against the United States, claiming its ban against Americans gambling over the Internet violated Antigua and Barbuda’s rights as a member of the W.T.O.

Antigua is best known to Americans for its pristine beaches and tourist attractions like historic English Harbor. But the dozens of online casinos based there are vital to the island’s economy, serving as its second-largest employer.

More than a few people in Washington initially dismissed as absurd the idea that the trade organization could claim jurisdiction over something as basic as a country’s own policies toward gambling. Various states and the federal government, after all, have been deeply engaged for decades in where and when to allow the operation of casinos, Indian gambling halls, racetracks, lotteries and the like.

But a W.T.O. panel ruled against the United States in 2004, and its appellate body upheld that decision one year later. In March, the organization upheld that ruling for a second time and declared Washington out of compliance with its rules.

That has placed the United States in a quandary, said John H. Jackson, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in international trade law.

Complying with the W.T.O. ruling, Professor Jackson said, would require Congress and the Bush administration either to reverse course and permit Americans to place bets online legally with offshore casinos or, equally unlikely, impose an across-the-board ban on all forms of Internet gambling — including the online purchase of lottery tickets, participation in Web-based pro sports fantasy leagues and off-track wagering on horse racing.

But not complying with the decision presents big problems of its own for Washington. That’s because Mr. Mendel, who is claiming $3.4 billion in damages on behalf of Antigua, has asked the trade organization to grant a rare form of compensation if the American government refuses to accept the ruling: permission for Antiguans to violate intellectual property laws by allowing them to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products, among others.

For the W.T.O. itself, the decision is equally fraught with peril. It cannot back down because that would undermine its credibility with the rest of the world. But if it actually carries out the penalties, it risks a political backlash in the United States, the most powerful force for free-flowing global trade and the W.T.O.’s biggest backer.

“Think of this from the W.T.O.’s point of view,” said Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re this fledgling organization dominated by a huge monster in the United States. People there must be scared out of their wits at the prospects of enforcing a ruling that would instantly galvanize public opinion in the United States against the W.T.O.”

In April 2005, the trade body gave the United States one year to comply with its ruling, but that deadline passed with little more than a statement from Washington that it had reviewed its laws and decided it has been in compliance all along. The case is now before an arbitration body charged with assessing damages.

“The stakes here are enormous,” Professor Nesson said.

If anything, the Bush administration raised those stakes in May when it announced it was removing gambling services from existing trade agreements. John K. Veroneau, a deputy trade representative, said that the federal government was only “clarifying our view” that it had never meant to include online gambling in any free trade agreements.

“It is truly untenable to think that we would knowingly bargain away something that has been illegal for decade upon decade in this country,” Mr. Veroneau said, adding that Washington is not defying the W.T.O. but simply pursuing its case through all legal channels.

The W.T.O. allowed that Washington probably had not intended to include online gambling when it agreed to the inclusion of “recreational services” and other similar language in agreements reached during the early 1990s, when the W.T.O. was first established. But the organization says it has no choice but to enforce the plain language of the pacts.

“Geneva is certainly buzzing about this case,” said Lode Van Den Hende, an international trade lawyer with the firm of Herbert Smith in Brussels.

One reason for all the interest is the David-and-Goliath aspect of the case. Another is that the dispute, as the trade organization’s first to deal with the Internet, is likely to serve as a major precedent in establishing rules of commerce in an online age and dealing with such prickly issues as China’s attempts to block online content it finds offensive.

Yet another reason the fraternity of trade lawyers and experts are so closely watching the case, Mr. Van Den Hende said, is “that the U.S. is not behaving as one would expect.”

“One day they’re out there saying how scandalous it is that China doesn’t respect W.T.O. decisions,” he said. “But then the next day there’s a dispute that doesn’t go their way and their attitude is: The decision is completely wrong, these judges don’t know what they’re doing, why should we comply?”

It’s not clear that Mr. Mendel knew just how much of a hornet’s nest he would stir up with this case. But he certainly seems to be enjoying the attention.

In 2002, Mr. Mendel — who does not gamble and knew little about international trade — was little more than a corporate lawyer in El Paso specializing in securities law. His law partner, though, was friends with Jay Cohen, an operator of an offshore sports betting operation in Antigua who had been sentenced to 21 months in prison for taking bets over the Internet from Americans. Mr. Cohen asked his friend to see if there was anything his firm could do.

“I had not done any trade law whatsoever, but for whatever reason this issue really struck my curiosity,” Mr. Mendel said. Beyond the intellectual challenge, the case also offered the prospect of a set of deep-pocketed clients — the online casinos doing business out of Antigua.

So Mr. Mendel, 51, who recently moved his family and his practice to Ireland to be closer to Geneva, jumped in enthusiastically.

Washington responded to Antigua’s complaint by claiming it was within its rights to seek to block online gambling on moral grounds, just as any Muslim country would be within its rights under international trade agreements to ban the import of alcoholic beverages. The W.T.O. rejected this argument as inconsistent with American policy.

The general rule in the world of international trade agreements is that a country must treat foreign goods and services in the same manner as it treats domestic ones. The United States, the trade body found, permits online wagering through sites like Youbet.com, a publicly traded company that allows visitors to place bets at horse racing tracks around the globe.

And, of course, some form of casino gambling is legal in more than 30 states, and even local governments advertise gambling services when states encourage people to buy a lottery ticket.

“This isn’t a case of forcing gambling on a population that has decided they don’t like it,” Mr. Mendel said. “This is the world’s biggest consumer and exporter of gambling services trying to prohibit a small country from developing its economy by offering these same services. And we find that deeply hypocritical.”

Indeed, despite all the obstacles Washington has imposed, including making it a crime for banks and credit card companies to handle Internet gambling payments, millions of Americans still manage to play poker and place sports bets online. Many more would certainly do so if the obstacles were removed.

The United States has exhausted its appeals, so Mr. Mendel and lawyers for the United States are arguing over the extent of damages that Antigua has suffered.

Antigua presents a particularly thorny challenge. To balance the scales, a country that wins a W.T.O. case typically demands trade penalties equal to its losses as compensation. But Antigua is so small that any ordinary trade sanctions would barely register in the United States.

“Compensation is not a check in the mail,” Professor Jackson of Georgetown said. “It’s the right to raise trade barriers against the country in violation.” Whatever trade barriers Antigua imposed, he said, “would feel like a pin prick.”

To get around that limitation, Antigua is seeking the right under international law to violate American intellectual property laws.

Only once has the trade organization done so, with Ecuador, though Ecuador never actually took advantage of that power. It was used instead as a cudgel to force Ecuador’s opponents to back down.

“This is all new territory,” said Simon Lester, who worked in the appeals unit of the W.T.O. before helping to found WorldTradeLaw.net, which provides legal analysis of trade law disputes.

Mr. Lester expects Hollywood, the music industry and software makers like Microsoft to press Washington to work things out with Antigua.

“But the question,” he said, “is whether that would be enough to make Congress do something.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/bu.../23gamble.html





Tom Green Works at Home (You Can Watch)
Joe Rhodes

IT was 8 p.m., time for Tom Green’s live Internet talk show, the one he’s been doing from his living room five nights a week, more or less, for the last year, and as seems to happen more often than not, things were going horribly wrong.

The servers had been wonky all day, most likely the result of a late attempt to install high-definition video players onto his Web site, tomgreen.com. Rex Murphy, Mr. Green’s bright red and usually low-key parrot, was agitated and screeching in a corner. The audio feeds weren’t working, and the Video Toaster system, the heart of Mr. Green’s online operation, was down.

Worst of all, the guest hadn’t turned up. Norm MacDonald, the former “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update anchor and an old buddy of Mr. Green’s from his hometown, Ottawa, was scheduled to appear, but no one had heard from him all day.

“I’m starting to think he’s not coming,” Mr. Green said at 8:15, clearly flustered. “I can guarantee you that this is probably my fault somehow.”

Most likely, yes. Mr. Green alone is responsible not just for being funny, interviewing guests and sparring with callers, but for nearly every aspect of the production of “Tom Green Live,” up to and including last-minute pet upheavals.

He does have a talent booker, two full-time technical assistants and a sponsorship agreement with an online distributor, but he is the one who does the lion’s share of the tinkering, tweaking and nonstop fretting that goes with running a talk show, even one that’s available only online.

There is a switch under his desk that turns on the lights, microphones, remote-control cameras and live stream on broadband Internet. He has managed to acquire that most sought-after of show business commodities — complete creative control. And the headaches that go with it.

“This is not like a television show where you’ve got 150 people, writers, prescripted interviews and everything put together so that everything’s guaranteed to go great,” he said, one eye on the clock. “It’s turned out to be quite a technically complex thing. I never thought I’d know this much about computers. So it’s an ongoing process. You figure out little things along the way, and slowly they start to work a little better.

“I know, if we go on tonight, I’m not going to do a perfect show,” he continued. “But it’ll be a little better than last night. And it’s not like there are 10 million people watching. But we’re trying to make this better for that day, maybe a year in the future, when there will be. And by that time maybe we’ll have figured things out.”

The viewership of the show, which returns with new episodes Aug. 27, might not be in the millions, but it is still a good size. Although only 5,000 to 10,000 people a night watch the live feeds on his online distributor, ManiaTV.com, 40,000 to 60,000 a day watch reruns. And 250,000 to 300,000 more view clips on sites like YouTube. (Viewership figures from Mr. Green’s Web site weren’t available.)

The site, which he calls “The Channel,” is not exactly a departure for Mr. Green, who started out broadcasting an Ottawa public-access show on Rogers Cable in 1994. He has been dabbling with computers since 1996, before his MTV talk show in 1999 gained him a national following.

MTV’s “Tom Green Show,” which featured his intentionally annoying man-on-the-street interviews and all manner of pre-“Jackass” pranks, led to lucrative commercial gigs, a guest-host appearance on “Saturday Night Live” and, in 2001, the film “Freddy Got Fingered,” which he wrote, directed and starred in. It received some scorchingly bad reviews, largely because of scenes involving unnatural acts with assorted animals living and dead.

In between he had a short-lived and tabloid-covered marriage to Drew Barrymore. He also endured a bout with testicular cancer, which he chronicled in an MTV special that Time magazine lauded as one of the best programs of 2001.

By then Mr. Green was living in Los Angeles and was, he acknowledges, somewhat overwhelmed by all the attention. And he was not sure what to do with himself or his career. “I found myself trying to work within the Los Angeles system,” he said. “I had an agent and a manager, which I still do, and going to meetings with networks about game shows and reality shows and projects that weren’t mine. It was fun, but it wasn’t what I’d set out to do.

“I really missed what I’d done on Rogers Cable, which was shooting and editing all my own stuff. A nightly talk show is what I’d always wanted, and I’d kind of gotten sidetracked.”

So he went back to concentrating on his Web site. He decided two years ago that, if it were technically feasible and economically viable, he’d be happiest doing his own show from his living room.

ManiaTV.com, a Denver-based broadband company, helped him do exactly that. ManiaTV made a deal with Mr. Green to build a television studio inside his home, installing more than $100,000 worth of equipment and providing him a broadband distribution network and sponsors. Archived shows are available for viewing or download on iTunes or elsewhere on the Web.

“Like any television network we bring distribution, an audience, production resources and a marketing machine, all the things that Tom did not have,” said Peter Clemente, ManiaTV’s chief marketing officer.

Although ManiaTV provided the initial financing and technical expertise and found the show’s corporate sponsor, Bud Light, Mr. Green insists he has complete autonomy and will end up owning the equipment and the show. Rather than rely on ManiaTV’s technicians, he has hired his own studio assistants and bought additional equipment, including a teleprompter and extra cameras on his own. That’s part of the reason that there are so many technical glitches.

“If I had, like, 10 people working on the show full time, I’d be able to do what I really want to do,” he said. “I don’t ever want it to look too slick, but I’d like it to look better than it does now.”

As it is, Mr. Green spends much of his on-air time complaining about things that go wrong, mics that don’t work, camera shots that are off-center, Skype video uplinks with callers that sputter out.

It is impossible to forget, even when there are network-worthy celebrity guests like Val Kilmer, Pamela Anderson and Andy Dick (whose only appearance after his much-publicized scuffle with Jon Lovitz was on Mr. Green’s show), that the program is essentially homemade. “I try to think of it as organized confusion,” he said. “I have the freedom to do anything I want. We could sit here in silence for an hour if we wanted. And it’s nice to know that no one can cancel me. Unless I cancel myself.”

At 8:20 Mr. Green’s doorbell rang. It was Mr. MacDonald, unaware that he was late. At 8:47, after the Video Toaster was finally fixed, the show went live. To make up for the late start, Mr. Green stayed on for extra time, drinking Bud Lights on camera until the show ended at 10:20.

“It seems like nobody knows what this is going to be,” Mr. MacDonald said later. “But I want to do something like this way more than I want to do anything that’s been offered to me on television. Television just seems like vaudeville to me. Nobody I know ever watches a sitcom, ever. It’s a dead medium.

“So I don’t know where this is going,” he said, “but I love that Tommy’s just trying to figure it out. It’s cool to watch him try.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/ar....html?ref=arts





Pass the Popcorn. But Where’s the Movie?
Randall Stross

AS consumers by the millions install new flat-screen, high-definition TV sets this year, more than half of which will have 50-inch or larger screens, they can proudly say that they are doing their part to modernize the movie-viewing experience at home.

Cable operators have done their part, too, building a video-on-demand infrastructure that can supply viewers with a nearly limitless choice of movie titles, available at any time of day. No trips to the rental store. No vigils at the mailbox for discs from the subscription service. No purchases of additional computer hardware to transport downloaded movie files to somewhere else in the house. Just a couple of clicks of the cable remote control.

All is ready — except an unstinting supply of movies. The studios have balked.

According to Craig Moffett, vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, cable’s video-on-demand is well positioned, technically speaking, to be the preferred way that movies reach the home, but the Cable Guys cannot get access to Hollywood’s products: “They built a Ferrari of a delivery engine, but the content owners didn’t show up.”

The movie studios are preternaturally suspicious of the new and unfamiliar. Their fear has nothing to do with crunching the numbers, but rather with large organizations’ tendency to lose sight of their interests — not to mention their customers’. Thanks to the efficiencies of digital delivery, the studios actually earn three times the margin on each video-on-demand viewed that they earn on a store rental, while charging the same $4.

Comcast now has secured rights to offer only about 300 movie titles on-demand on any given day, excluding premium channels like HBO; about 50 of those are high-definition. It has a long way to go to match the comprehensive coverage of Netflix’s 80,000 titles or Blockbuster Online’s 75,000.

But the on-demand menu does not have to attain comparable size immediately, especially since Netflix’s and Blockbuster’s lists mostly consist of the long tail of backlist titles for which demand is low — and high-definition versions are scant. The overwhelming bulk of viewers’ requests could be met simply by having the newest releases on hand in all formats.

To their credit, the major studios have shown a willingness to re-examine the artificial limits they have placed on video-on-demand. Late last year, six studios began an experiment with Comcast in Denver and Pittsburgh, making their newest releases available for viewing on demand the same day the DVD went on sale. Time Warner Cable is in the third month of a similar, six-month trial in Austin, Tex., and Columbus, Ohio.

The studios contend that the trials are necessary so they can be certain that DVD sales are not hurt by immediate availability of video-on-demand. This is supposed to be a $16 billion question, which is the size of the domestic DVD market, the lifeblood of the industry. The sum dwarfs the $10 billion in total box-office revenue or the $8 billion from movie rentals. Because prospective DVD buyers have always had a less-expensive alternative the day when DVDs go on sale — namely, renting the title — it is hard to see why video-on-demand poses a different cannibalistic threat.

Comcast has not yet released details of its findings. Earlier this month, however, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, Time Warner’s president and chief operating officer, offered some encouraging tidbits. He said that when a movie title was made available on-demand the same day the DVD was released, revenue from video-on-demand rentals increased 50 percent — and retail sales actually went up 5 to 10 percent. To explain the somewhat surprising gains in stores, Mr. Bewkes speculated that sales of a new title were depressed in the past by the almost-instant availability of used DVDs for sale at rental stores like Blockbuster.

The movie studio is paid only once — when the DVD is sold the first time — and not when it is resold used. For the studios, digital delivery of a rental eliminates the problem of a physical product being resold, cutting into the sales of new copies without generating additional royalties. And studios are paid every time an on-demand video is viewed.

The digital delivery system of video-on-demand offers many advantages to consumers, too. The immediate gratification provided by instant fulfillment of a viewing request is no trifle. The Netflix model assumes that the lag between the time a subscriber enters a requested title and when that title finally shows up in the mailbox does not matter all that much — that as long as a consumer has at least one unwatched DVD on hand at any time and the queue of requested titles is kept full of good stuff, the customer shouldn’t care when a particular title reaches the top of the queue and wends its way through the postal system to the home.

Netflix customers apparently do care, however. The company has had to build out its shipping centers from one at its founding in 1998 to 44 today, in an effort to minimize transit delays. Even so, the time that elapses between a Netflix user’s request and the delivery of a title is measured in days. With video-on-demand, it’s seconds.

Netflix also struggles to have enough copies of the hottest titles on hand. The swords-sandals-and-pecs hit “300” was released on the last day of July and immediately became the top rental in the nation. Two weeks after its release, however, subscribers were warned on their on-screen queues that they faced a “very long wait.” (Blockbuster Online could not do better.)

So, too, with the No. 2 rental title, “Hot Fuzz.” In fact, in mid-August, Netflix had on hand, ready for shipping, only 4 of the top 10 titles nationally listed as the most popular DVD rentals the week before. With digital transport, a single master can simultaneously supply as many households that wish to view the DVD; inventory management problems — and “very long wait” notices — disappear.

AMERICANS have never failed to show their appreciation for services that provide speedy gratification; the instant variety is preferred most. Once the cooperation of the studios is secured, video-on-demand will become the most popular means of renting movies.

When Netflix made its debut almost 10 years ago, many movie viewers discovered that sitting at a desk at home and using a Web site to select rental titles was considerably easier than going to a store to choose a rental. Video-on-demand offers the next enhancement: ordering by remote control while stretched across the living room couch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/bu...ey/19digi.html





A Maverick Mogul, Proudly Politically Incorrect
John Strausbaugh

THOR HALVORSSEN is a hard man to pin down. If you ask him whether he’s a human-rights activist, a free-speech advocate, an anti-Communist, an anti-fascist or a movie producer, he could plausibly answer “all of the above.”

“He’s uncategorizable,” Nat Hentoff, the journalist and First Amendment advocate, said. “Thor’s the embodiment of the nonpolitically correct person.”

Mr. Halvorssen, a half-Norwegian Venezuelan, is a conservative operating in fields more often associated with liberals, a scion of wealth and privilege who champions the underdog and the powerless, and a polemicist who loves a lively argument. “I have a lot of fun being a heretic,” Mr. Halvorssen, 31, explained, pacing around a small office in the Empire State Building that was strewn with books, magazines and DVDs.

Since 2005, having already founded two nonprofit organizations focused on free speech and human-rights issues, Mr. Halvorssen has made the movie business part of his portfolio of controversy-stirring efforts. Established with a small amount of his money, his nonprofit Moving Picture Institute has raised about $1.5 million in donations to date to pay for, promote and seek distribution for documentary films.

At a time when the most successful documentaries on political or social issues all seem to be anti-corporate, anti-Bush, pro-environmentalist and left-leaning, the Moving Picture Institute has backed pro-business, anti-Communist and even anti-environmentalist ones. The latest, “Indoctrinate U,” follows the first-time filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney as he turns Michael Moore’s guerrilla interview tactics on their head to address what he sees as political correctness on campus. In one scene, Mr. Maloney strolls into the women’s studies centers on several campuses and, playing innocent, asks directions to the men’s studies center. He is met with genuine bafflement, derisive laughs or icy hostility.

To Mr. Halvorssen his new role as a fledgling movie mogul dovetails perfectly with his other activities. “Pop culture has the power to be transformational culture,” he said. “A film can reach a lot more people than a white paper. You could think of the film as a trailer for the white paper.”

He paused, then said, “Put it this way: What ‘Sideways’ did for pinot noir, I want to do for freedom.”

Boyish and clean-cut, Mr. Halvorssen doesn’t look much like the Viking his name suggests. His grandfather, Oestein Halvorssen, went to Venezuela as the Norwegian king’s consul and built a family dynasty as the Venezuelan representative for corporations including Dunlop and Ericsson.

His father (also Thor) and uncle Olaf “lived in the ultrafast lane” among Venezuela’s most eligible playboys. They flew to Paris for weekends, and while Olaf dated Candice Bergen, Thor lured the girls to his place to meet his pet lion, Petunia.

Mr. Halvorssen’s father eventually settled down, accepting appointments as a cabinet minister and diplomat, and married into one of Venezuela’s first families, descendants of the country’s first two presidents, Cristóbal Mendoza and Simón Bolivar.

“The politics in my house was all over the place,” he said, recalling Nicaraguan refugees from the Sandanista regime holding meetings in his house and a trip with his father when he was 8 to meet Óscar Arias, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president of Costa Rica. “But there were key principles that were very basic.”

His upbringing helped make a self-described “classical liberal” rather than a conservative, big on free markets and individual liberties, and convinced that “government is not your friend most of the time,” he said. “And I abhor fascism, whether it’s socialist or National Socialist.”

He arrived in the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, but as a 19-year-old sophomore in 1993 the theories of his youth got a real-world workout when his father was arrested in Venezuela. As the country’s anti-drug minister, Mr. Halvorssen said, his father had led investigations revealing involvement in international drug trafficking at the highest levels of Venezuela’s government and banking. For his efforts he was imprisoned, charged with masterminding a series of bombings in the Caracas financial district. Mr. Halvorssen helped organize an international campaign for his father’s release. After 74 days all charges were dropped.

A decade later it was Mr. Halvorssen’s mother’s turn. In 2004, during a trip to Caracas, she was shot and seriously wounded when gunmen fired into a rally calling for a national referendum to recall President Hugo Chávez. Eleven other protestors were wounded and one killed.

“So you can see why I take this stuff personally,” Mr. Halvorssen said.

“This stuff” includes the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, of which he was a co-founder in 1998 and a director through 2004. (Mr. Hentoff is a board member.) It focuses media attention and legal aid on instances of overzealous political correctness and free-speech restrictions at American colleges. And the Human Rights Foundation, whose advisory board includes Elie Wiesel, focuses on civil-rights abuses in Latin America.

These concerns animate the Motion Picture Institute’s films. “The Sugar Babies,” a documentary by Amy Serrano that Mr. Halvorssen helped produce, takes on the issue human trafficking of Haitian workers on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. A screening at Florida International University in June erupted into what local press described as “a near riot” between Dominican and Haitian audience members.

Other documentaries championed by the Motion Picture Institute include “Hammer & Tickle,” a lighthearted look at the subversive jokes Soviet citizens told about their leaders.

And Mr. Halvorssen was a co-producer of “Freedom’s Fury,” narrated by Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, which describes the role Hungary’s Olympic water polo team played in that nation’s 1956 uprising against its Soviet occupiers.

No doubt the most contentious film on the Motion Picture Institute roster so far is “Mine Your Own Business,” billed as “the world’s first anti-environmentalist documentary.” Phelim McAleer, an Irish journalist who received a fellowship from the Motion Picture Institute, traveled to Romania, Madagascar and Chile, where international environmental groups oppose planned mining operations. His film — financed by Gabriel Resources, a Canadian mining company — portrays environmentalists as condescending elitists while impoverished locals insist they would welcome the jobs and development the mines would bring.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups denounced the film as corporate propaganda and protested outside a screening at the National Geographic Society in Washington in January.

“It’s typical propaganda from anti-regulation types,” said Kert Davies, Greenpeace’s research director, adding that there has been much more community opposition to the proposed mines than the film suggests.

“Indoctrinate U” aims to stir up as big a ruckus. It’s the first film by Mr. Maloney, the conservative son of liberal New York City parents. A fan of Mr. Moore’s techniques, if not his politics, he met Mr. Moore, the director of “Sicko,” in the only proper way. “I found out where he lived, staked out his street for four days” and ambushed Mr. Moore on the sidewalk, camera running.

“He was surprisingly encouraging and surprisingly nice,” Mr. Maloney added. “He told me to go for it and make my movie.”

But as Mr. Halvorssen and Mr. Maloney have found, getting a documentary made is one thing, getting it released in theaters and on DVD is another. “Distributors are starting to shy away” from documentaries, said Morgan Spurlock, the director of “Super Size Me,” “simply because there haven’t been a lot of documentaries in the last few years that made a lot of money.” (“March of the Penguins” and “An Inconvenient Truth” are among the few exceptions.)

But Mr. Spurlock believes that a movie like “Indoctrinate U” “could be a lightning rod,” he said. “Movies that get attention and spark a dialogue, get people talking on news shows, can be profitable at the box office.”

Lately Mr. Halvorssen has been making many trips to Los Angeles to meet with film distributors, producers and assorted Hollywood wheelers and dealers to convince them that the film has the potential to make money in theaters and through DVD sales. “There is no left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood, no manual that says they will not distribute films of this sort,” he insisted.

Nonetheless Mr. Halvorssen and Mr. Maloney are exploring alternative ways to reach audiences. Mr. Halvorssen arranged for the film to open at the American Film Renaissance Festival, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, on Sept. 28. And working directly with theater owners and managers he has to date brokered limited theatrical runs, beginning in October, in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and seven other cities. (He’s still working on New York.)

Borrowing tactics from their left-leaning brethren like Robert Greenwald, who spurred interest in his films “Wal-Mart” and “Iraq for Sale” by inviting people to hold screenings in their churches or homes, Mr. Halvorssen and Mr. Maloney are also trying to harness the Internet. Visitors to indoctrinate-u.com can request a screening in their hometowns. A Google map displays the results. More than 20,000 requests have been made.

Mr. Halvorssen speaks of a “YouTube revolution” with the Internet, along with on-demand cable and satellite television, freeing independent filmmakers from Hollywood dominance.

Ultimately, he added, he hopes that “exploiting technology, marketing and alternative distribution will transform human rights, making it inspiring and even sexy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19stra.html





11 Injured At Tom Cruise Film Shoot
AP

Eleven extras were injured during the filming of a new movie starring Tom Cruise, police said Monday.

The 11 men, along with a companion who escaped injury, fell off the back of a truck on Sunday night. Police said in a statement that a bolt on a side panel of the truck apparently came loose as the vehicle turned.

Germany's Bild daily reported that Cruise himself was not involved in the weekend filming.

The extras were taken to a hospital, where all but one of them required only outpatient treatment. Filming work was stopped.

The movie, provisionally titled "Valkyrie," stars Cruise as Germany's most famous anti-Hitler plotter, Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

His casting has attracted controversy in Germany because Cruise is one of the best known adherents of Scientology, which the German government considers a commercial enterprise that takes advantage of vulnerable people.

Some critics maintain that one of its members should not be playing what some consider one of the Nazi era's few heroes.

The weekend accident happened during filming of scenes around the Finance Ministry, which was once the Nazis' aviation ministry.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n3183900.shtml





Japanese Experts Demand Change to Make Phones and Laptops Safe
Leo Lewis

The fundamental technology behind the present generation of lithium-ion cells – the batteries that power nearly every laptop computer and mobile phone in the world – is inherently dangerous and must be changed to ensure safety, according to experts.

Masataka Wakihara, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who advises the Japanese Government on battery safety, told The Times that there must be changes to the way in which batteries are made if they are to be robust enough for everyday use.

His warnings were supported by comments from Kuniaki Tatsumi, head of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology’s battery research group, who said that “companies are less cautious about designing batteries with a focus on safety”.

At least two Japanese manufacturers are understood to be considering redesigns of their production lines as a result of Professor Wakihara’s advice, but in general companies are expected to resist calls to overhaul their factories. Although the commercial production of lithium-ion batteries began in 1992, when Sony became the first to enter the market, most battery production lines are young and have required substantial investment already, hence the difficulty in persuading their owners that a small number of battery explosions merits an expensive change.

“Battery companies are still learning because the technology is young, but there is a fundamental flaw with the way lithium-ion batteries are currently designed and if the companies genuinely care about safety, they need to completely change their production methods. A lithium-ion battery is quite a dangerous little box of energy,” Professor Wakihara said.

Last year Japanese companies produced around 60 per cent of the two billion lithium-ion batteries sold worldwide. Machines such as multi-function mobile phones, digital cameras and laptops equipped with processors large enough to cope with Microsoft’s new Vista program place huge demands on the batteries. According to Professor Wakihara, the risks of not adopting an alternative technology are rising constantly because of the demands that modern devices in a “mobile device culture” place on their power source.

“Efforts have been mainly devoted to miniaturisation and boosting power output,” Professor Tatsumi said.

The academics’ concerns emerged after a series of safety problems at the world’s three biggest battery manufacturers – Sony, Sanyo and, most recently, Matsushita (Panasonic), which has recalled 46 million mobile phone batteries made for Nokia after a handful of them burst into flames.

While the temptation has been to blame quality control at the factories where the batteries are made, Professor Wakihara said, the focus is wrong. The Japanese Government’s hasty creation of new battery safety standards fall into the same trap.

The recent recalls at Sony, Sanyo and Matsushita have arisen from problems during the manufacturing process, which led to short-circuits and other overheating issues, but it is possible, Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers say, to produce a lithium-ion battery that poses no fire risk, even if a fault develops. Existing lithium-ion batteries submerge the electrodes in an organic solvent that acts as the electrolyte, and separates them with a film of perforated plastic, which is expensive to produce. An alternative, chemical engineers argue, is to encase the electrodes in a solid polymer electrolyte – a structure that might have to be heated slightly to ensure good function.

Within the past fortnight, Sony has announced a battery plant in Singapore that would use new technology, but it would not say whether this represented the kind of shift that Professor Wakihara is calling for.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle2295743.ece





Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits
Katie Hafner

Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of “orcas” to “killer whales,” insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.

There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld’s “lack of respect toward its orcas” disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have come from corporate networks.

Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company’s electronic voting machines. That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says the site discourages such “conflict of interest” editing. “We don’t make it an absolute rule,” he said, “but it’s definitely a guideline.”

Internet experts, for the most part, have welcomed WikiScanner. “I’m very glad that this has been exposed,” said Susan P. Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “Wikipedia is a reliable first stop for getting information about a huge variety of things, and it shouldn’t be manipulated as a public relations arm of major companies.”

Most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long. Many Wikipedia entries are in a constant state of flux as they are edited and re-edited, and the site’s many regular volunteers and administrators tend to keep an eye out for bias.

In general, changes to a Wikipedia page cannot be traced to an individual, only to the owner of a particular network. In 2004, someone using a computer at ExxonMobil made substantial changes to a description of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, playing down its impact on the area’s wildlife and casting a positive light on compensation payments the company had made to victims of the spill.

Gantt Walton, a spokesman for the company, said that although the revisions appeared to have come from an ExxonMobil computer, the company has more than 80,000 employees around the world, making it “more than a difficult task” to figure out who made the changes.

Mr. Walton said ExxonMobil employees “are not authorized to update Wikipedia with company computers without company endorsement.” The company’s preferred approach, he said, would be to use Wikipedia’s “talk” pages, a forum for discussing Wikipedia entries.

Mr. Wales also said the “talk” pages are where Wikipedia encourages editors with a conflict of interest to suggest revisions.

“If someone sees a simple factual error about their company, we really don’t mind if they go in and edit,” he said. But if a revision is likely to be controversial, he added, “the best thing to do is log in, go to the ‘talk’ page, identify yourself openly, and say, ‘I’m the communications person from such and such company.’ The community responds very well, especially if the person isn’t combative.”

Mike Sitrick, a longtime public relations consultant in Los Angeles, agreed. “I’m a big believer that if you’re going to correct it, correct it with a name,” he said. “Otherwise it hurts your credibility.”

An Anheuser-Busch employee eventually took responsibility for the changes to the SeaWorld page — but only after being challenged about them twice by another user. A person identifying himself as Fred Jacobs, communications director for the company’s theme park unit, said on the entry’s “talk” page that discussion of the ethics of keeping sea creatures captive “belongs in an article devoted to that subject.”

Mr. Jacobs referred questions about the editing to another company office, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The SCO Group, a software maker in Salt Lake City, made changes to product information in its own entry this year. The company has been involved in legal disputes over the rights to some open-source software.

Craig Bushman, the company’s vice president for marketing, said he had told a public relations manager to make the changes. “The whole history of SCO had been written by someone who doesn’t know the history of SCO,” he said.

An hour after the changes were made, he said, they disappeared. The company e-mailed Wikipedia administrators, who replied that the changes had been rejected because of a lack of objectivity.

In the case of the Wal-Mart revisions, David Tovar, a company spokesman, said that while he was not aware of anyone within Wal-Mart who had asked to contribute to Wikipedia, the changes could have been made by any of its workers, who are called associates. “We consider our associates our best ambassadors,” he said, “and sometimes they speak out to set the record straight.”

At Dell, the computer maker, employees are told that they need to identify their employer if they write about the company online. “Whether it’s Wikipedia, Twitter or MySpace, our policy is you have to let someone know you’re from Dell,” said Bob Pearson, a Dell spokesman.

Before that policy was put in place a year ago, changes to parts of Dell’s Wikipedia entry discussing its offshore outsourcing of customer service were made by someone from the Dell corporate network.

Most people using company networks to edit Wikipedia entries dabble in subjects that appear to have little to do with their work, although sometimes they cannot resist a silly dig at the competition.

Last year, someone using a computer at the Washington Post Company changed the name of the owner of a free local paper, The Washington Examiner, from Philip Anschutz to Charles Manson. A person using a computer at CBS updated the page on Wolf Blitzer of CNN to add that his real name was Irving Federman. (It is actually Wolf Blitzer.)

And The New York Times Company is among those whose employees have made, among hundreds of innocuous changes, a handful of questionable edits. A change to the page on President Bush, for instance, repeated the word “jerk” 12 times. And in the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, the word “pianist” was changed to “penis.”

“It’s impossible to determine who did any of these things,” said Craig R. Whitney, the standards editor of The Times. “But you can only shake your head when you see what was done to the George Bush and Condoleezza Rice entries.”

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

Mr. Wales, who called the scanner “a very clever idea,” said he was considering some changes to Wikipedia to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them.

“When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’ ” he said. “That might make them stop and think.”

Noam Cohen contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/te...wikipedia.html





Ad Growth for AOL Called Vital to a Remake
Miguel Helft

Just over a year ago, AOL unveiled a radical plan to remake itself into a business built on advertising from one driven by Internet access subscriptions.

To a great extent, AOL had little choice in the matter. Customers were rapidly deserting its once-lucrative dial-up access service, and retaining them was costly.

The new plan certainly seemed to make sense. With the advertising business growing rapidly across the Web, AOL appeared to be in an ideal place to capitalize on that trend. It remains, after all, one of the most popular online destinations, with more than 90 million people visiting its sites in a month.

But a precipitous slowdown in advertising growth has raised new questions about AOL’s transformation plans. AOL executives say the slowdown is probably temporary, but Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner, which owns 95 percent of AOL, said this month that he no longer expected AOL’s ad growth to match or exceed the overall growth rate of online advertising. The company’s challenges highlight one of the quirks of today’s Internet market. As advertising is moving from offline media to the Internet at a rapid clip, portals, which command some of the biggest audiences online, should be among the top beneficiaries. Instead, the travails of the mass market portals like AOL, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, indicate a decline in power.

Online advertising in the United States is expected to increase 28.5 percent this year, according to eMarketer, a research firm. AOL’s ad revenue increased 16 percent in the last quarter after gaining 40 percent in the previous quarter. Revenue at Yahoo, the No. 1 Internet portal, rose 8 percent in the latest quarter.

Part of the challenge for portals is that people are starting to approach the Internet in a different way. A new generation of Web users has grown increasingly adept at finding what it wants online and is less reliant on portals for guidance. What is more, younger audiences are spending more time on social networking sites and less time on traditional Internet portals.

“Just like Yahoo, AOL is fighting MySpace, Facebook and others for audience and ad dollars, and those are tough competitors,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Social networking sites are not the only culprits. Thousands of smaller Web sites, like blogs, news collectors and niche content sites, are also attracting growing numbers of Internet users and advertisers.

AOL knows all this. It may even have been the first among the major portals to recognize this trend. In 2004, it bought Advertising.com, a network that collects ad space from across the Web and sells it to marketers, giving them a way to reach the Web’s increasingly fragmented audience.

Since then, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have all invested significantly to remake themselves into companies that not only sell advertising on their own sites, but also help sell or broker ads across the Web. And AOL has sought to further the success of Advertising.com by buying a string of online advertising companies.

Advertising.com is now AOL’s fastest growing unit. “The brand that we build around Advertising.com might become more important than the AOL brand itself,” said Randy Falco, AOL’s chief executive.

Mr. Falco and other AOL executives reject any notion that their turnaround plan is in trouble. They say the slowdown in advertising growth in the most recent quarter was tied to specific events, including redesigns of several of the portal’s channels and a change in the way it displays search results.

“In the first six months of the year, we have accomplished more in terms of a turnaround, in terms of fixing products and the platform, than in the past three years,” Mr. Falco said.

Mr. Falco, a longtime NBC Universal executive who took the top job at AOL in December, said the company was systematically revamping its channels and services. It has redesigned many of its pages and embarked on an expansion into 14 countries.

AOL plans to re-engineer its site so users can choose various channels and services they like and include them in their blogs, personalized home pages or favorite social networking sites.

“We are not trying to build yesterday’s portal,” said Ron Grant, AOL’s president. “We are trying to build a network of sites that users can combine or do whatever they are most comfortable with.”

The efforts are beginning to pay off, AOL executives said, noting that page views have increased 4 percent in the second quarter from the first.

Not all changes have been well received. After an earlier executive team devised an innovative way to display AOL search results, which are powered by Google, Mr. Grant and Mr. Falco decided to roll back the changes and mimic Google’s presentation of 10 links on a page. The decision led to defections.

John McKinley, the former president of AOL Digital Services, thought the imitation would serve to dilute the AOL brand. “Over time, the average consumer is going to develop more of a tendency to just go to google.com directly,” he wrote in his blog. Mr. Grant defended the decision, saying the change to the Google-like results stopped a decline in the use of AOL’s search service.

AOL’s revamping has focused not only on consumers but also on its advertisers. Advertising executives say that for the first time in years, AOL’s customized ad packages are competitive with those of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

None of the improvements have been able to prevent the recent slowdown in growth at AOL. Gordon Hodge, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, said that if the slowdown continues, it could spell trouble for AOL’s turnaround plan. “I think the dial-up subscriber losses and profit losses could overwhelm the gains they could make from advertising,” he said.

Louise Story contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/technology/20aol.html





HP Service Lets Cellphone Users Print Most Anywhere
John Markoff

Hoping to alleviate a frustration of mobile computing, Hewlett-Packard has quietly introduced a free service designed to make it possible to print documents on any printer almost anywhere in the world.

Cloudprint, which was developed over a period of several months by a small group of HP Labs researchers, makes it possible to share, store, and print documents using a mobile phone.

The service emerged as the result of a conversation begun at the laboratory this year over how the computer and printing company might benefit from the introduction of the Apple iPhone, said Patrick Scaglia, HP's director for Internet and computing platforms technologies at the research laboratory.

"The world is going to flip," Scaglia said. "We want to ride the wave of the Web."

The underlying idea is to unhook physical documents from a user's computer and printer and make it simple for travelers to take their documents with them and use them with no more than a cellphone and access to a local printer.

The service requires users to first "print" their documents to HP servers connected to the Internet.

The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user's cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user's phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint website. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

The service will include a directory service that will show the location of publicly available printers on Google Maps. The system currently works with any Windows-connected printer. A Macintosh version is also planned.

The strategy is an extension of a broader, and all-important, HP strategy of indirectly creating a business that will foster the sale of Hewlett-Packard ink and supplies. The strategy has been working well. On Thursday, the company said operating profits from its printing division, most of it from ink and supplies, rose 11 percent in its third quarter from a year earlier.

The service is the first of a series of initiatives the company will take to increasingly unhook printing from desktop computers, Scaglia said.
http://www.boston.com/business/perso...most_anywhere/





Content-Aware Image Resizing
Posted by kdawson

"At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, have demonstrated a new method to shrink images. The method is called 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing' (PDF paper here) and it figures out which parts of an image are less significant. This makes it possible to change the aspect ratio of an image without making the content look skewed or stretched out. There is a video demonstration up on YouTube."
http://science.slashdot.org/article..../08/25/1835256





Interview

Thinking Outside the Opera Box
Andrew Orlowski

Some of Opera's long-term bets are beginning to pay off. The Norwegian web pioneer has invested in TV and mobile for years, and now Nintendo's hit Wii console has put Opera into more than eight million living rooms. Mini has made the web usable on millions more phones. And the most recent major release of FireFox has been met with pushback on its performance, usability, and security.

This week we caught up with Opera founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner to discuss this, and some of the thornier challenges facing the company.

So we started with a biggie - was the web leaving Opera behind?

Isn't it just getting harder to keep up with the web, especially on mobile?

Software engineers will always find ways to make a device seem slow. I'm a software engineer - I know I did. With Opera Mini there are some things that may not work, but most things work very quickly. We did visual comparisons of Opera Mini in the labs, using the same websites Steve Jobs used at the launch of the iPhone demonstrating how quickly it runs on GPRS agains the iPhone on Wi-Fi. On GPRS, Mini is faster. We did it for fun.

Opera Mini is not the same as the browser you have on iPhone, or desktop Opera - there are things Opera can do that Mini can't do, but for most general uses Mini does the job.

Andrew Brown, a big fan of Opera, wrote that he chose to move to FireFox (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology.../media.comment) because it was more compatible with new websites, partly citing Flickr compatibility. Do you feel you're falling behind?

We've always been moving in a space where people come up with their own ideas all the time. Now Netscape 4 is out of the market, so compatibility with that isn't so important; IE6 is fading, while IE7 has more compatibility - does that mean problem has gone? As people make more and more applications we see more and more standards. IE in particular has its own stuff, but that's part of the reason us, Apple, and Mozilla work on submitting new standards to the W3C, and getting them adopted. So we're quite optimistic.

It's a chicken and egg situation, which means we need to get more users. And we are. We have by far the most used mobile web browser. Net Applications' survey is showing Mini as the fifth most used browser in the world and in some countries it's beating Safari, and others it's beating Mozilla. The Nintendo Wii is also helping and we're working on new version coming out.

We're also spending time with the services, with Google and Yahoo! discussing compatibility.

To be frank, it's not difficult for them to make this work. There's one guy who fixed bugs in Google and he used a JavaScript thing for Opera which fixed Maps and Mail. We are also actively doing what we can - changing how Opera identifies itself is often enough to fix the problem. We'll do whatever it takes.

Opera market share is increasing, and we're putting more and more effort into hiring new people. This is not an issue that only we face. Recently, I read that 10 per cent of UK sites didn't work in FireFox, while a fair amount of people have told me their sites don't work in IE7. Safari has more problems than Opera.

We believe that with the efforts overall the browsers are becoming more compatible. The problem is going to be less and less there. There is a difference between countries where we have a 10 per cent share. In Russia, Ukraine and in Northern and East European countries we have between five per cent and 10 per cent, and some above 10 per cent share; Japan similar.

On mobile networks the latencies are still big, but surely the screens and the devices will always be smaller than the desktops web designers are targeting?

Heh. When you think of a web designer it's a guy with a big computer, a big screen and direct connection to the service. Some of these guys look differently when they use their own services on location.

But stats are showing up on the Wii. There's traffic coming from something other than the desktop, that is going to be significant. People are already taking Wii into consideration - some fairly big companies are optimising it. Google, Yahoo" and YouTube are optimising for Wii so that you do't have to do a lot of work, for example, sending something that doesn't require you to zoom in on the TV, for example. These are important.

With Mini being popular they're thinking about this and more. I'm certain this is a trend that's going to continue. For example, using hovers doesn't work well on a device where you don't have a cursor, such as the iPhone.

Something for web designers and us to think about too.

Mini has its roots in the caching service you rolled out years ago. But the business model for Mini has changed over time. Can you take us through the evolution of that?

Actually, from the first version of Mini it's been free to end users. We're trying to learn from the desktop experience we had. People were saying, "we love Opera, it's the best browser", but we were held back by the business model.

We tried an ad-supported model for a while and the ad revenues continued to increase - although we never made money off the advertising, to be frank. Then there was a negative focus on ad-supported models, because a lot of the apps out there, such as LimeWire, were spying on the end user. Then we saw how FireFox got a big market share in a short space of time. That business model - we make deals off search side revenues - has allowed us to grow, and grow market share.

So we're able to invest more and money on desktop.

Opera Mobile running on the Motorola Z8

Does Mini make money?

We're not making money off Mini at this time. But we have achieved one billion page views, and so we believe we can have business models with Mini that don't upset users. We make money through operator deals and the Yahoo! deal, for example. We're also offering it on the server side. T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telfonica, all get specialised versions with their own front pages - and they pay us for the hosting.

There's been some controversy about the dependence of FireFox on Google. The company has gained at least $50m a year from Google. Do you feel Google "owns" you?

If you look at our numbers we're not receiving those kinds of numbers - but with Google and Yahoo! and companies like that, Amazon, they raise revenue for us - that allows to have free desktop browser.

I believe we have a good business model and it is good to focus on the best product for the end users - we don't have to charge.

Do you feel FireFox is compromised by that relationship?

I don't know what kind of relationship they have, but I think there's nothing wrong with that business model. We were the ones to start it - we were the first to put a search bar in the browser. People think this is a good thing. This helps Google, given they are the default in this, but people can choose to go with others. It's good we can give it away for free giving away a.. same bar.

Do you detect a disenchantment with the performance and user experience of FireFox 2.0?

We just try to focus on our side. We've always focused on a somewhat richer interface. We've had a lot of negative comments ourselves over the years; for example, when we introduced tabbed browsing a lot of people said it doesn't make sense. We've introduced things like zooming, mouse gestures and the like - and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied, but we would like to focus on features and giving users a good experience. We favour a fairly minimal UI, but not requiring you to install a lot of plug-ins. We know there is an Opera plug-in for FireFox, which is actually 15 different plug-ins in one. Now adding one or two plug-ins is OK, but if you add 15 to 20 then it impacts performance.

How?

It's easier to be efficient if you're coding every piece of the code yourself. I've seen it myself. Someone on a core part strives to make their part really efficient; then someone on the UI side makes something simple but that makes heavy demands. It's easy to think, "something I do doesn't have to be that efficient", but it does. For example, in one of our builds we noticed the progress bar loading was taking up 25 per cent of the CPU.

I'm still amazed Opera has such a tiny footprint

This has been a focus for us - Opera runs on 10 year old hardware. But we noticed external code takes up time and we write our own libraries. There are libraries out there that satisfy a lot more different kinds of programmers - but when you use it your program becomes bigger and slower.

The Web on TV: Nintendo Wii's Opera browser

What are you doing with the built-in Mail? It got an amazing reception when it appeared, but there are lots of complaints about it not being updated. Or there are tiny features that would sway people to make it their default mail program that never get implemented...

I think we need to look at ourselves in the mirror, and say there's something to your point.

We are addressing it. In the next version there's a significant back end improvement and some front end improvements. This is a product we believe is very important. I use it for everything I do. I have 300,000 to 400,000 mails in my system.

The choice of mail applications is poor on Windows. And Outlook is the most targeted for security. At Opera you're banned from using Outlook. We don't mind people trying things, but one of our sales guys got a virus and started spamming customers. That's stupid. We can't have that.

There are some interesting applications on Wii - particularly the Orb hack (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01...b_wii_console/) - where people take advantage of the browser to play their own music and view their own the photos. That's using the browser as plumbing rather than platform...

There is a natural direction with more things being connected - Orb is a very interesting example of that. With services like YouTube, you are now using your TV. This is one of the biggest installations of internet TV in the world now, Wii. People use it to browse around - but also to download small videos from YouTube - it becomes nautral to do that. Natural. It's a great showcase, because we have by far the best browser you can get on TV today.

Is Opera Mobile stagnating? It doesn't have the focus of Mini, it seems.

Stagnating? No.

What's happening is there's a new version in the works based on Opera 9. On Opera Mobile 4.0, we're introducing desktop mode and zooming. The desktop mode is based on a new kernel. The Opera 8 browsers are based on what we call Core 1, while Opera 9 is based on Core 2. There are significant changes under the hood.

We see Mini and Mobile as complimentary products. Mini runs on Java, and there's a Brew version in the works that I'm very enthusiastic about, it's going to be great. We went away from doing just smartphones to BREW, P2K Motorola and many other phones.

Aren't widgets are a security nightmare?

When you start to combine web code with the rest of the system you're opening yourself up to issues - you have to watch what you're doing there. It is difficult, but everyone wants to see power in these devices; you have to make some APIs available to access the underlying system. But we definitely don't want to be doing something like ActiveX.

One has to be realistic, but there isn't a single app that hasn't had a security issue at one time or another; again, I do believe it's the safest way to do things. There are so many things you'd like to do, and it's better to do it web-based than natively. There's going to be more and more service components in there; more and more applications are web-based. Whether you call it a service or not isn't neccessary, but it's combing communication to a server and there's a clear trend to web-based solutions and it started with the web being made, and is being intensified with apps Google is making. ®

Jon von Tetzchner co-developed the original Opera browser while working in the labs of Norwegian telco Telenor. He founded the company in 1995, and took it public in 2004.
Bootnote

Out of curiosity, I asked Jon what was his mobile browser of choice. He said nothing could quite match the usefulness of his favourite phone: the Nokia 9210. Not a member of the Cargo Cult (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08...oke/page2.html) then.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/1...ceo_interview/





Lyrics Sites Out of Tune with Copyrights
Elinor Mills

How does that song go? We've all used the Internet to search for the lyrics to songs whose tune we know but whose words we just can't muster.

Often the Web sites we end up on have misspellings or incomplete and inaccurate lyrics, not to mention annoying pop-up and flashing ads. But there's another problem with the sites--many of them are violating copyright by republishing the lyrics without permission. And they are making money from the Google text ads that appear on the site.

That's money that could be going into the pockets of people like Alexander Perls Rousmaniere, a Los Angeles-based artist who writes and produces dance club tracks, including some pop hits.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, Google--the company that's been sued for $1 billion by Viacom because of its YouTube video unit and has been the target of increasingly testy attacks from all sorts of publishers--finds itself in the center of yet another copyright storm. This time, it's the people who write music--some of them well-known and some of them obscure--complaining that the search giant is helping others step on their copyrights.

"Google is selling advertising on all the big copyright-infringing lyric Web sites," Rousmaniere said. "It may seem like small potatoes, but lyrics are a huge search term on the Internet--these sites (and Google) are probably pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly, all on the back of copyrighted material."

Rousmaniere has complained to Google, repeatedly, with limited success--Google has removed some ads on sites publishing his lyrics but then the ads go back up, he said. Google told him it is his responsibility as copyright holder to police the infringing sites and file additional complaints when the old lyrics or new lyrics of his appear without his permission, he said.

"It would literally be two to three hours a day for the rest of my life" monitoring the Web for copyright violations, Rousmaniere said. Many of the Internet service providers for the sites are located outside the U.S., making it difficult for him to ask them to shut the sites down, he added.

A Google spokesman said he could not comment on any particular copyright holder's complaint.

"We take copyrights very seriously. In accordance with our policy, we disable ads on websites in our content network when we are made aware that they appear next to copyrighted content," the company said in a statement. "Copyright holders who find their copyrighted material appearing next to Google ads can find more information about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down requests on our AdSense Web site. Hundreds of thousands of Web site publishers responsibly abide by our policies and we're committed to preventing those who don't from using our program."

Focusing on sites that monetize
Rousmaniere isn't the only copyright owner concerned about the lyric sites. Lawyers representing National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) have met with Google to discuss the matter, said Jacqueline Charlesworth, senior vice president and general counsel. The NMPA is the leading trade association representing U.S. music publishers, with more than 700 members.

"It's a significant concern. We do send DMCA notices to sites that are commercially oriented, that are trying to profit and aren't paying the people who wrote the songs," Charlesworth said. "We did reach out to Google before we started the program and they said they would cooperate."

The NMPA began sending warning letters to infringing lyric Web sites a few weeks ago and at least one site has taken down the copyrighted lyrics, she said.

"Our next step will be to send DMCA notices to the ISPs who host the site or the search engine that shows sites up in results," she added. "We're hopeful that it will be effective. The goal and the focus here is really the sites that are trying to monetize the lyrics."

Rogue lyrics Web sites have been on the Internet for years--in part because until recently there wasn't a readily available way for consumers to get lyrics from copyright holders.

"We wanted to make sure there was a legitimate alternative available and now that there is, we think it's appropriate to have the lyrics taken down off the other sites," Charlesworth said. "There is a market for these lyrics. There is consumer demand and the lyrics enhance a digital service. It's a very significant potential market."

In April, Yahoo and Gracenote launched an online lyrics service that has received the rights from music publishers, like Universal Music Publishing Group and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, to republish copyrighted lyrics.

At the time the deal was announced, Gracenote Chief Executive Craig Palmer told Reuters that licensed lyrics services could add as much as $100 million a year to the $4 billion the music publishing industry posts in revenues annually.

But a self-described "small fish" like Rousmaniere may not benefit from a service like that, which focuses on large publishing companies. For him, the courts could be an answer, although convincing a judge that Google is liable for copyright infringements of its AdSense publisher partners would be tough, said Denise Howell, an intellectual property lawyer and blogger.

"If it could be demonstrated that the terms (of service for AdSense) are not being enforced (or are not being enforced with sufficient vigor), a plaintiff could try to build a case portraying the terms as mere window dressing, and Google as an entity with a business model that condones or even encourages its users' infringement," Howell said.

However, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court decision in Google's favor in May is an indication of the "uphill battle" someone suing Google would face, she said.

In that case, Perfect 10, an adult-oriented Web site, accused Google of contributory copyright infringement by profiting off revenue-sharing through Google ads on Web sites that display its images without permission. The court disagreed with that point, although it said thumbnails Google's image search displayed of Perfect 10's photos likely infringe on the copyrights.
How thumbnails translate to music lyrics is still anyone's guess.
http://news.com.com/Lyrics+sites+out...3-6203085.html





Hey Eminem, Blame the System, not Apple
Greg Sandoval

Eminem would be better off tangling with street toughs back on the 8 Mile than mixing it up in court against Apple.

That's the opinion of a half dozen copyright lawyers, including some who represent music artists, when asked about the copyright infringement lawsuit filed last month by Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated, the hip-hop star's publishing units.

But Eminem isn't the only star going after Apple. A records check showed that Apple is accused of copyright infringement in two other similar suits: one filed in May by a small label called Dawg Music and another from 2005 by Bridgeport Music, a publishing company with a history of filing such suits. None of the companies involved in the litigation, including Apple, agreed to comment for this story.

Don't expect these lawsuits to go very far. To start, Apple is likely indemnified against such lawsuits, according to copyright attorney Jay Rosenthal. But Rosenthal speculates that the real target of the lawsuits isn't Apple or iTunes. What the musicians and writers really want is to challenge the claim by record labels that they have the right to negotiate Internet sales on their behalf.

"This particular issue is a real sore spot in the industry," said Rosenthal, legal counsel for the Recording Artists' Coalition, a group formed in 1999 by musicians Sheryl Crow and Don Henley. "It's the gorilla in the room, and you're going to start seeing more of these suits as you start to see layoffs and cutbacks."

As compact-disc sales continue to slide, and royalties continue to get squeezed by piracy, more and more performers are growing dissatisfied with the money coming in from digital downloads. Rosenthal predicted that Apple may continue to get drawn into the fray as the music industry tries to prod CEO Steve Jobs to be more flexible with Apple's 99-cent-per-song price.

A growing number of performers, publishers and songwriters want a bigger share of that download revenue and want to see an overhaul of recording and publishing contracts. Among the artists who have expressed anger over their cut of download money are Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers Band. They jointly filed a lawsuit last year that accused Sony BMG Music Entertainment of shortchanging them on digital-music sales.

"Digital music is going to continue to increase as a percentage of the overall market," said Brian Caplan, the attorney representing the bands against Sony. "As time goes on, I believe recording artists will be able to negotiate higher royalty rates on the downloading process."

But Mark Litvack, an intellectual-property attorney who has worked for Sony, Time Warner and Disney, said artists and publishers have to realize that slowing sales does not give them the right to demand more money. He points out that music labels are getting squeezed by piracy and falling CD sales as well.

"The fact that the artist is unhappy with the economic model isn't legally relevant," Litvack said. "They agreed to a deal to allow labels to distribute music at retail locations. There isn't any difference between the Web and the local record store. I think it's clear the labels have the right to sell over the Web."

"Heartbreak Hotel" for industry
Highly paid musicians won't get much sympathy from most of their fans. But not every performer or writer is living in a palace, argues songwriter Rick Carnes.

Just southwest of downtown Nashville, the much-heralded Music Row is a montage of platinum records, sheet music, cigarette smoke, steel guitars and Jack Daniel's. Music Row, where Carnes came to write music in 1978, is where gospel, country and rock music converge, the home of hundreds of publishing houses and record labels that once churned out some of the world's best loved music. This is where Elvis Presley--who died 30 years ago this week--recorded his first chart-topping single, "Heartbreak Hotel."

Rick Carnes

Music Row is now giving way to "nail shops and hair salons," according to Carnes, 57. He blames piracy, shrinking CD sales, the royalty rates that songwriters and publishers have been locked into for years, and the way revenue from downloads is divvied up.

"It's Armageddon," said Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, who has written hits for such stars as Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire and Dean Martin.

"We're getting crushed here. The day that hurt the most was driving down Music Row not long ago and seeing all the 'For Sale' signs. We're losing the canon of American music. I can't tell you how sad I feel when I see talented songwriters selling insurance."

By now, anyone following the music industry can practically recite the statistics. According to a report provided by the Recording Industry Association of America, unit sales and revenue from CD sales declined more than 12 percent in 2006. In 2005, they fell 8 percent.

To help the music industry in general, Carnes wants Apple to loosen its grip on download prices. The 99 cents that iTunes charges per song, according to Carnes, isn't enough to go around. And to the specific problems faced by songwriters, performers and publishers, Carnes wants the music labels to raise their royalties.

Royalty vs. license
To understand what artists are upset about, one has to pick through the complex way they are paid. Artists are compensated on a royalty structure for traditional CD sales. When a CD is sold at a retail store, say at a Wal-Mart Stores outlet, the artist receives about 16 cents. The music publisher gets 9.1 cents.

In Cheap Trick's lawsuit, the band alleges that after labels deduct for things like "breakage," the band earns only 4.5 cents on every 99-cent digital download. So what's breakage? The costs incurred by things like damaged CDs, packaging charges and restocking. Of course, there's no such thing as a damaged CD in downloads, making such a charge highly questionable, the band argues.

Some musicians would like download payments to be structured like fees for music that's licensed to movies, television shows, ringtones or commercials. When that happens, the artists and labels split the proceeds from the license after the publisher takes its 9.1 cents. If that structure were to apply to downloads, the artists and labels would split whatever's left after Apple, and the publishers takes their cuts. The assumption is that this would lead to more money going into the pockets of the musicians.

"I represent artists, and you always have disagreements between artists' lawyers over contracts," Rosenthal said. "But I've yet to run into a single artist attorney who thinks any differently about this. We all agree that when it comes to iTunes' sales, revenue should be split between the artist and label 50-50."

In the meantime, there is some reason for hope, according to Carnes. He notes that Apple, in a partnership with EMI, has agreed to sell unprotected MP3 files for 30 cents more than the standard 99-cent price. He's also seeing a little money from ringtones. Still, he says he no longer writes music for recording artists. He has turned to writing jingles for commercials.

"It's really funny how everyone thinks that only rich labels are getting hurt," Carnes said. "The labels are the last to get hurt. The first are the very poorest: artists and songwriters, and they'll be the first ones out of the business."
http://news.com.com/Hey+Eminem%2C+bl...3-6203210.html





Does Skype's Windows Update Story Fly?
Gregg Keizer

Analysts and rivals today said they were dubious of Skype Ltd.'s explanation that the voice-over-IP service's 48-hour outage was triggered by restarts after Microsoft's monthly security updates were delivered.

"Why this particular Tuesday?" asked Doug Williams, an analyst with JupiterResearch. "That doesn't really fly."

Skype's blackout -- which began Wednesday around midnight, Pacific time, and ended late Friday -- was caused by a software glitch provoked, said Skype, by machines rebooting after they had applied updates to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

"The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," Skype said in a statement posted this morning.

"I'm leery of that explanation on two counts," said Aron Rosenberg, chief technology officer of SightSpeed Inc., a Berkeley, Calif.-based VoIP competitor to Skype. "First, the timing of the patches."

Although Microsoft rolls out its monthly security updates before noon, Pacific time, on Patch Tuesday, those updates are by default downloaded and installed at 3 a.m. local time, often over a period of a day or two. "At the very least, then, systems would have rebooted time zone by time zone, not all at once," saiRosenberg said.

However, there may be a connection to the 3 a.m. default reboot. According to Skype's statistics, the outage began sometime between Wednesday at 10:30 p.m. and 3:05 a.m. Thursday, PDT. Between those two data points, the number of connected users dropped by 50%.

Second, said Rosenberg, is the fact that Microsoft has been releasing its security fixes on the second Tuesday of each month since October 2003. If the problem was triggered by Windows Update, as Skype claimed, why hadn't it happened before?

While he scoffed at Skype's excuse, Rosenberg also noted that the service's infrastructure may make it vulnerable to problems experienced by a minority of systems on the network. Like the Kazaa music file-sharing network, which was created by the same pair who founded Skype -- Swedish engineer Niklas Zennstrom and Danish entrepreneur Janus Friis -- the VoIP service uses "supernodes" to detect online Skype users, establish connections between users, and help route traffic. The supernodes, which are computers that Skype identifies as having surplus Internet bandwidth and processor cycles, serve as the directory servers and traffic cops of the network. If too many go offline in a short time -- whether from restarts or simply by being switched off -- Skype could suffer.

Skype's explanation hinted as much. "Normally Skype's peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal," said spokesman Villu Arak in this morning's statement. "However, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly."

What Skype describes as self-healing, said Rosenberg, is simply the ability of Skype to switch a user from one supernode to another, necessary, say, when the first supernode goes offline. If too many of those supernodes dropped off the network simultaneously, Skype might have had trouble switching users to other supernodes. In other words, there would have been too many nodes -- normal users -- chasing too few supernodes to allow the former to log on. Skype itself described it as "a chain reaction that had a critical impact."

"Skype is unusual in that one of its key components, the supernodes, are always going up and down," Rosenberg said. "Because it relies on the supernodes working, if Skype's [network] software wasn't load balancing across time zones, they could have had a massive loss of supernodes [when systems rebooted]," he added.

Microsoft also pooh-poohed the idea that there was anything out of the ordinary in last Tuesday's updates that might have triggered the Skype crash. "Windows Update is a routine service Microsoft provides to its users to receive software updates, including last Tuesday's security updates, which were not unique," said a company spokeswoman in an e-mail today. "As indicated in Skype's blog, their specific disruption was caused by a bug in their software."

Tallies of Microsoft's recent monthly updates seem to back up the company's claim that last week's were not unique, at least in the number which demanded restarts. Although five of August's nine updates required a reboot, that number wasn't out of line with July's four of six, or even February's five out of 12.

Skype did not reply to a request for comment, and additional information about the impact of Windows Update-generated restarts on its network.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...ntsrc=hm_topic





Estonia Accuses Ex-Official of Genocide
C. J. Chivers

The authorities in Estonia on Wednesday said that they had charged a cousin of a former president with genocide in connection with his role as a Communist bureaucrat involved in the deportation of civilians to Siberia in 1949.

The man, Arnold Meri, fought the Nazis and became a prominent official in the Communist Party during the decades of Soviet occupation in the Baltics. He was charged last week, his lawyer and the authorities said. If convicted, Mr. Meri, 88, could be sentenced to life in prison.

The authorities accused Mr. Meri of organizing the deportation of 251 Estonian civilians, most of them women and children, from the island of Hiiumaa to the Novosibirsk region of Siberia, where 43 of them died.

They were exiled during a grim period of Stalinist reprisals after World War II, when the K.G.B. forcibly moved more than 20,700 Estonians to Russia, official Estonian accounts say.

Mr. Meri, a cousin of Lennart Meri, the president of Estonia from 1992 to 2001, has long complained that his country has labeled him a traitor, saying that the accusations against him were unfair and were a misreading of history.

His lawyer said that Mr. Meri would defend himself on the grounds that, while he participated in the deportations, he was actually trying to protect fellow citizens being sent into exile.

“His explanation is that he was sent by the Communist Party as a check against K.G.B. action,” said the lawyer, Sven Sillar, by telephone. “Mr. Meri’s defense position is that he cannot be regarded as an accomplice of the K.G.B.”

“He could be regarded as an ombudsman,” Mr. Sillar said. “He protected people’s rights.”

As an example, he said, Mr. Meri contends that he made certain that deportees traveled with the full allotment of personal possessions allowed under Soviet rules and that no violence was used against them as they were rounded up and shipped away by train.
The authorities appeared unmoved. “That is a possible concept — that there is an ombudsman when you are committing crimes against humanity,” said Martin Arpo, superintendent of Security Police Board, the police and intelligence service in Estonia responsible for investigating war crimes.

Among those deported from Hiiumaa were 13 people older than 75 and 61 younger than 12, Mr. Arpo said by telephone. Investigators later found and interviewed 78 survivors from the Hiiumaa group, some of whom may testify in court.

No trial date has been set. But the possibility of the public airing of the emotionally potent charge of genocide could inflame anew the poor relations between Estonia and Russia.

The countries have quarreled since the early 1990s about the interpretation of the Soviet period, which the Kremlin has tried to portray as a liberation from Nazism but many Estonians, and Estonian officials, recall as an ordeal of occupation, subjugation, economic stagnation and state-sponsored terrorism.

The wounds have lingered. Estonia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and snubbed a Kremlin invitation to attend a celebration on Red Square in 2006 commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany. Its leaders said that freedom did not arrive in Estonia with Hitler’s defeat.

This spring the Estonian government moved a Soviet war-era memorial in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to a less prominent military graveyard in the city, prompting riots and a diplomatic fury from Russia, which treated the action as a desecration of the Soviet war dead.

Huge cyberattacks, which Estonian officials suggested had been initiated from Russia, soon temporarily disabled many Estonian government and corporate computer networks.

In 1941, Mr. Meri was given the title Hero of the Soviet Union, and in the years after Estonian independence in 1991, he was received in Red Square and at the Kremlin, where he was hailed as a veteran of the war against the Nazis.

Dmitry S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, reacted cautiously to the charge, saying that he hoped that Mr. Meri would not stand trial, “taking into account a lot of factors, including the humanitarian one — the guy is 88 years old.”

He added, “Of course we are very sorry that the Estonian government is still fighting with the past, instead of looking into the future.”

Many countries formerly in the Soviet sphere have tried to force an assessment of the crimes and privations of Communist times. The Russian government has generally resisted.

Early this month a document surfaced from archives in Germany that detailed a directive in 1973 to East German border guards to shoot to kill citizens trying to flee to West Germany.

Many Russians have been critical of these efforts at reassessment, however, and have accused countries once under the Kremlin’s sway, including Estonia, of not pursuing a full account of some of their citizens’ collaborations with the Nazis.

Mr. Arpo, the Security Police Board superintendent, disagreed, saying that Nazi cases are more difficult to pursue in lands formerly occupied by the Soviet Union because the K.G.B. had already disposed of many cases.

“Both regimes were criminal and committed criminal acts and brought suffering to the Estonian people,” he said. “But the local K.G.B. couldn’t find any more evidence against the Nazi collaborators.”

“We haven’t found it either,” he added. “And the K.G.B. was a much larger organization than we are and had powers and methods, shall we say, that are not available to a Western democratic country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/wo...23estonia.html





Your Data's Less Safe Today Than Two Years Ago
Robert L. Scheier

Today's electronic world is a risky place for your personal data -- and it's not getting any safer. More than 158 million data records of U.S. residents have been exposed as a result of security breaches since January 2005, according to The Privacy Rights Clearing House, a nonprofit consumer rights organization.

As fast as banks, merchants and consumers add new layers of security to their storage systems and network, say security analysts, new technologies -- or simply careless users -- create new security holes that aggressive and sophisticated identity thieves eagerly exploit. The result, says Avivah Litan, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc., is that "things will get worse before they get better."

Clever Crooks

Attacks against both consumers and retailers have "really grown in the last couple of years," says Litan, who cites a Gartner survey showing that approximately 15 million Americans were victims of identity-theft related fraud in the 12 months ending in the middle of 2006. According to Gartner, that's a 50% increase since 2003, and the average loss per incident was $3,257, more than twice the level for the same period a year earlier, according to the survey.

The number of companies whose customers were targeted by phishing attacks -- a fake e-mail asking for sensitive information -- grew by 20% in the second quarter of 2007, says Terry Gudaitis, cyberintelligence director at Cyveillance Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based firm that monitors the Internet for malware and other threats. While such attacks used to target customers of only a few large banks, they now impersonate "credit unions, hotel chains, insurance companies -- it's all over the board," says Todd Bransford, vice president of marketing at Cyveillance.

During the same period, Cyveillance also identified more than 2 million URLs that distribute malicious downloads to site visitors without their knowledge, as well as 2.5 million stolen credit card numbers online.

Criminals are also getting smarter. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute, which conducts research on privacy and security issues, calls it "inverted customer relationship management," in which criminals target the wealthiest individuals for their attacks.

Some are even buying marketing lists to piece together profiles of "who's got the Platinum [American Express card] and who's got the account with Merrill Lynch and who doesn't," says Litan.

"Hackers are exploiting Internet auctions, nonregulated money transmittal systems and the ability to impersonate lottery and sweepstakes contests," among other scams, wrote Litan in a February 2007 research report.

Theft and fraud?

Hard figures on identity theft and identity fraud (using stolen data to commit a crime) are difficult to come by. A June 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office said that of 24 large data breaches reported in the media between January 2000 and January 2005, only three "appeared to have resulted in fraud on existing accounts, and one breach appeared to have resulted in the unauthorized creation of new accounts."

However, the study noted it's difficult to determine the exact damage, because while at least 36 states require companies to notify consumers of data breaches, victims often don't know their information has been stolen or how it was stolen. Thieves may wait a year or more before using the data, and may use only some of it so as to not alert the card issuer, which could cancel the entire block of stolen cards.

Mary Monahan, a partner, editor and analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, a research and consulting firm in Pleasanton, Calif., takes a more upbeat view. She says that prevention and awareness by both consumers and businesses helped reduce the number of adult victims of identity fraud in the U.S. from 8.9 million in 2005 to 8.4 million in 2006, and the dollar amount of fraud dropped 12% from $55.7 billion to $49.3 billion.

Those figures, however, include all types of identity fraud, the vast majority of which Javelin says result from traditional causes such as lost or stolen checkbooks or credit cards. Rachel Kim, a research associate at the firm, also points out that less than 1% of victims whose information has been stolen experience fraud. Despite the publicity of data breaches at companies such as The TJX Companies Inc., she says, the percentage of victims who knew how their data was lost who cited a data breach actually fell from 6% to 3% from 2005 to 2006.

Given all the unknowns, it's not surprising that even the experts are sometimes in the dark. A December 2006 survey of more than 200 North American security professionals by Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. showed that more than one-third had experienced a data breach at their company in the past 12 months, and another 10% didn't know if they had lost data.

Weak points

One reason concern about identity theft is increasing is that with the expanding adoption of high-speed Internet service, more consumers are spending more time online, where they might share sensitive data.

And just as hackers target consumers they believe to be wealthy, they also take aim at companies they believe to have loose access controls, says Ponemon. Many companies don't maintain the same strict access control for contractors or part-time employees as they do for full-timers, says Mark McClain, CEO and founder of SailPoint Technologies Inc., an identity risk management vendor. "Folks on long-term contracts live outside the employee control system," he says. "It's very ad hoc: Bob hired Joe to help his group, and only Bob knows what access Joe has, and if Bob leaves, nobody knows what access Joe got."

"The old mind-set was that data breaches were the result of nefarious outside hackers, while the latest industry rhetoric blames insider attacks," Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Jon Oltsik says in his June 2007 report, "The Case for Data Leakage Prevention Solutions." However, the report states, breaches can be caused by either internal or external attacks, as well as logical hacking, physical theft and accidents. To reduce this wide variety of risks, he says, "large organizations need layered and extremely flexible defenses."

Just finding where sensitive data sits within the organization and where it's most vulnerable is a daunting task, says Scott Crawford, a research director at Enterprise Management Associates. Customer credit card information, purchase histories and other information might be stored anywhere, from a user's notebook computer to a Fibre Channel storage array at headquarters. "The data may move wirelessly; it may move through public links on the Internet; it may or may not be encrypted within the business and may be encrypted [only] part of the way," he says.

Retailers also often overlook vulnerabilities in devices such as point-of-sale (POS) systems that store data read from magnetic stripes on credit cards and can be accessed from the Internet, and printers that store data on hard drives as part of the printing process, says Gartner in a December 2006 report. The report predicts that by 2008, more than half of attacks against retailers will be directed at POS systems and that by 2009, less than one-third of POS software will comply with prevailing security standards.

While retailers are always reluctant to spend money on security that could otherwise be spent to drive sales, they might be convinced by the news from TJX that a large data breach disclosed in January will cost the company $118 million, says Litan.

Industry regulations such as the Payment Card Industry data security standard are forcing many companies to strengthen their security processes as well as the security tools they use, says Crawford. Visa U.S.A. Inc. says that about 40% of its 327 Level 1 merchants -- those that process more than 6 million transactions a year -- have demonstrated their compliance with the standard, up from 36% of the 230 Level 1 retailers counted at the end of 2006.

To counter a big spike in the use of counterfeit credit cards, Litan said card issuers, for a cost of about $5 per card, could add strong authentication mechanisms such as a unique password that would be downloaded to the card each time the owner tried to use it. Because the user would need the physical card (and not just the card number, expiration date and security code) to make a purchase, "it wouldn't matter" if companies lost credit card information through data breaches, she says.

Even as companies try to tighten their existing systems, Web 2.0 sites -- such as social networking services where much or all of the content is generated by users -- have become a handy way to distribute malware as well as yet another innocent-sounding business to impersonate in a phishing scheme, says Bransford. "You tend to trust these social networking sites because you belong to them and wind up with malware on your PC."

In the second half of the year, Cyveillance predicts another 10% to 20% growth in the number of traditional phishing attacks, with more than 80% of the attacks aimed at customers of financial services customers.

So what's an IT manager to do to protect sensitive data? "Don't store [information] if you don't need it, encrypt it if you can, and put strong access controls around it -- and then monitor the access," says Litan.

And when you get home, check your own bank statement for any odd-looking transactions.

Tips for avoiding identity theft

For companies:
Just as you did for Sarbanes-Oxley, identify and secure the applications and devices most vulnerable to attack.
Track access rights (and access activity) for contractors as tightly as you do for employees.
Don't store data if you don't need to; encrypt it if you must store it.
Educate and remind all your employees about the need for data security.

Tips for consumers:
Monitor bank statements, credit card bills and credit reports for signs of ID fraud.
Use up-to-date firewalls and antivirus/antispyware software on all computers.
Be wary of performing transactions or spending time on unknown Web sites.
Be alert for changes in the look or wording of emails from banks or other institutions, which might signal a phishing attack.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





159 Million People Affected by Data Breaches in Under Three Years
Nate Anderson

Data breaches at universities, government agencies, and corporations have become so common that only the most egregious even make the news anymore. Just how common are they? The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which tracks major breaches, now says that 159,105,898 records have been leaked since 2005.

The number was noted in a recent Computerworld article by Robert Scheier as part of a larger piece on just how bad identity theft has become, but it's mentioned only in passing. That's too bad, because the PRC list makes for fascinating reading.

You might suspect that after the widespread publicity regarding identity theft and data breach issues over the last few years, every organization which collects personally-identifiable information would treat it like gold. Unfortunately, it's too often still treated like a pile of scrap iron. Breaches are still occurring at an alarming rate, and they come in more flavors than Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

Consider five examples from this summer alone:

• May 3, 2007: A Montgomery College employee accidentally puts the personal information of all graduating seniors on a publicly-available hard drive.
• May 19, 2007: Somewhat ironically, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation suffered a data breach after a hacker compromised a server and got access to Social Security numbers, addresses, and more. 300,000 people were affected.
• June 11, 2007: Pharma giant Pfizer found that an employee had inadvertently exposed data on 17,000 workers after installing a file-swapping program on a company laptop.
• June 11, 2007: Michigan's Grand Valley State University had a flash drive stolen. The drive contained data on 3,000 past and present students. It was taken from the English department, a place not known for stringent data security requirements.
• June 14, 2007: The Los Angeles Hamburger Hamlet suffered a breach after a waitress absconded with credit card numbers and began ringing up the bills.

The breaches happen in so many ways that it can be difficult to clamp down on them on all, and even the agency charged with keeping US citizens safe has suffered major breaches of its own. Given the dismal state of many network security measures and the amount of personally-identifying information collected, is it time for a set of federal regulations on data collection and security? Such bills have been proposed several times in the last few years; some proposed more penalties for identity theft, others have tried to regulate the sale and use of Social Security numbers. So far, no major data breach legislation has been passed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ree-years.html





Monster Attack Steals User Data
BBC

US job website Monster.com has suffered an online attack with the personal data of hundreds of thousands of users stolen, says a security firm.

A computer program was used to access the employers' section of the website using stolen log-in credentials.

Symantec said the log-ins were used to harvest user names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, which were uploaded to a remote web server.

The stolen data could be used to send phishing and spam e-mails.

"This remote server held over 1.6 million entries with personal information belonging to several hundred thousands of candidates, mainly based in the US, who had posted their resumes to the Monster.com website," reported Symantec.

Security breach

The firm has contacted Monster.com to inform them of the security breach.

Symantec said it had seen reports of phishing e-mails sent out to Monster.com users which were "very realistic" and contained "personal information of the victims".

The e-mail encouraged users to download a Monster Job Seeker Tool, which was in fact a program that encrypted files in their computer and left a ransom note demanding money for their decryption.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is not a hack of Monster's security, rather, legitimate customer credentials are being used to log in to the database," said Patrick Manzo, vice president of compliance and fraud prevention at Monster.

He added: "There have been reports of this as an issue of identify theft.

"We are not aware of any cases of identity theft. In fact, the information that is gathered from Monster is no different than that displayed in a phone book."

The program used to access Monster.com user data was a Trojan, which are commonly used to gain access to bank details, usernames and passwords.

More than 8,000 new variants of Trojans are found each month, according to internet security specialists Sophos.

Last year, a British nurse was blackmailed by hackers who had used a Trojan to access her personal e-mails.

They threatened to reveal personal details unless she paid them.

Symantec said users should always limit contact information posted to job websites and to use a disposable e-mail address.

"Never disclose sensitive details such as your social security number, passport or driver's license numbers, bank account information to prospective employers until you have established they are legitimate," said the firm.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6956349.stm





Data Breaches Endanger NY, CA Retirees

Consultant's bungling, printer's errors put retirees at risk
Martin H. Bosworth

The last thing you want to worry about when enjoying your golden years is the possibility of identity theft or fraud, but two data breaches this week have left thousands of pensioners and retirees in that exact position.

A laptop containing data on 280,000 New York City retirees was stolen from a consultant to the city's Financial Information Services Agency (FISA) on August 23. The unidentified consultant reported that the laptop was stolen when he brought it to a Korean restaurant at roughly 8:20 pm, and could not confirm that the data was encrypted.

The consultant was employed by CGI AMS, a Canadian information and technology services company hired by the city to evaluate the city's pension payments system.

City Comptroller William Thompson, who oversees the city's pension payroll, said he was "outraged" by the theft and that CGI AMS should foot the bill for notifying and protecting any affected city retirees.

"Our pensioners should not be victimized by an absence of judgment by this consultant," Thompson said in a statement. "Providing these credit protection measures, no matter what the cost, will give our pensioners the peace of mind they deserve that we are employing all means possible to protect their assets."

FISA also said it was conducting an internal investigation of the incident, and police are currently looking for the suspected thief.

CalPERS' Calamity

A day earlier, officials at the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) announced that they had mistakenly published the Social Security numbers of 445,000 state retirees on brochures announcing an upcoming election. Some of the brochures contained full numbers, others only partial numbers.

The breach occured when the printer accidentally added the numbers to the brochures' address boxes, even though the printing system had alerts designed to detect and prevent publication of Social Security numbers.

CalPERS' spokepersons said the breach is causing them to perform a thorough top-to-bottom review of their security procedures to prevent another occurrence, but has not said it would provide credit protection to any affected individuals.

CalPERS also downplayed the incident, saying that the numbers could not be easily identified, making them harder to use.

Accidental printings of Social Security numbers have become a frequent cause of data breaches in recent months. In January 2007, Wisconsin's Department of Revenue accidentally printed up tax forms with visible Social Security numbers on the front page for 17,000 citizens.

It was later revealed that the printing agency and the Department of Revenue tried to keep the breach quiet, but went public after angry residents contacted the media about the incident.

And in November 2006, a printing contractor hired by Chicago's school system accidentally sent out personal information on 1,740 employees, mistaking them for health care providers. The information included names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, any combination of which could easily be used by thieves to steal someone's identity or gain access to their finances.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0..._retirees.html





Source-Code Theft Suspect Caught at Border
Riva Richmond

Federal law-enforcement officials have arrested a Russian national who allegedly stole a U.S. company's programming source code.

The company, closely held Alibre Inc., says a former employee took the source code in an incident the company reported in 2003. The suspect, Roman Voznyuk, was arrested as he tried to re-enter the U.S. this month.

Mr. Voznyuk is scheduled to appear today before Magistrate Judge William F. Sanderson Jr. in U.S. District Court in Dallas. His attorney, Carlton C. McLarty of the Dallas Federal Public Defender Office, said he will seek a release on bond.

Mr. Voznyuk was arrested Aug. 6 in upstate New York as he entered the U.S. from Canada. He was transferred to Dallas, where he was indicted three years ago for allegedly infringing copyrights held by Alibre, based in nearby Richardson, Texas.

The defendant is accused of stealing source code for Alibre Design, three-dimensional solid-modeling software for creating virtual prototypes of products. Alibre Design competes with products by SolidWorks Corp. and Autodesk Inc.. Mr. Voznyuk allegedly offered it under the name RaceCAD Design Professional for download on the Internet. Mr. McLarty said Mr. Voznyuk likely will plead not guilty at an arraignment sometime in the next few weeks.

Paul Grayson, Alibre's founder, said Mr. Voznyuk was a software developer at Alibre until he was laid off in 2003 amid a business downturn. Unable to find another job in the U.S., he returned to Russia where he began trying to market RaceCAD online, Mr. Grayson said.

Mr. Grayson said he began an email dialogue with Mr. Voznyuk to try to persuade him to stop, an exchange the company cited as evidence that Mr. Voznyuk had stolen the source code from Alibre. Mr. Grayson already had contacted the Justice Department, which was involved in the case but wasn't able to pursue Mr. Voznyuk in Russia. The Justice Department confirmed the arrest and court date but declined to comment further.

Mr. Grayson also took his story to the media and to customers to try to block purchases of the clone software. He says he didn't lose customers to Mr. Voznyuk.

Mr. Voznyuk, who more recently had been working in Toronto, apparently was nabbed while entering the U.S. at Niagara Falls for a weekend stay.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118775109729205007.html





Claims that Anonymous Domain Registration Aid Terrorists Are Overblown
Jacqui Cheng

Domain registrars are providing services that aid terrorism, claims Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. A lengthy article published over the weekend, "Terror goes digital. With Canadian help," delves into the many different facets of the Internet that have been used by Islamic terrorist groups to communicate their messages to each other and to the rest of the world. But the "Canadian help" part of the equation comes by way of domain registrars Register.com and Tucows, which both operate out of Canada. The newspaper's assertions that these companies somehow aid terrorists with their services, however, are somewhat misguided.

The linchpin of The Globe and Mail's argument is that registrars are aiding terrorists by helping to keep them anonymous. As many of our readers know, people who register new domains now often have the option to do so without having their personal information displayed to the public through a WHOIS query. This service usually only costs a few extra dollars per year and has been applauded by privacy advocates as a way to keep a citizen's personal info private—no one needs to know who has registered those domains, they argue. But according to The Globe and Mail, the service has made it easier for terrorists to put their message out online without exposing their location or contact information.

But it's not as if the registrars themselves don't store the information. Both Register.com and Tucows require people who are registering domains to enter all of their personal information, regardless of whether they make use of the public anonymizing services or not. Register.com told us that the company provides private registration services so that its customers can avoid getting unwanted spam, mail, and telephone calls, but that there are a number of terms that users must agree to in order to use them. The company says that it takes reports of illegal activity on its servers seriously.

"Our policy clearly states that any site that does not comply with applicable laws, government rules or requirements, court orders or requests from law enforcement, is subject to immediate termination," Register.com's Wendy Kennedy told Ars. "In the event that Register.com is notified that a user of our Private Domain Registration is violating our policy, we follow a very specific process to respond. This process includes investigating the report and if applicable, disabling the domain and notifying the customer of the reason for this action. Register.com has, and will continue, to work with law enforcement to protect our domains for being used for any such activities."

As the "war on terror" moves onto the Internet, however, domain registrars will continue feeling pressure from both sides over the privacy services offered to their customers. And although Register.com appears to be making a reasonable effort to strike a balance thus far, shutting down web sites that are hosted on this side of the pond only represents small victories against those determined to spread word of their activities around the world.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...overblown.html





Video Surveillance Raises Privacy Concerns in California
Jacqui Cheng

Video surveillance cameras are quickly populating the streets of California cities and pose a threat to citizens' privacy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization says that 37 cities in California already have some level of video surveillance, with 18 that have "significant" surveillance and 10 more considering "expansive" programs, but that they have had next to zero impact on fighting crime. Not only that, but certain laws could make it easier for everyday Joes and Janes to get ahold of video surveillance tapes—a privacy nightmare of its own.
Government may not need warrant to search your e-mail

In a report titled "Under the Watchful Eye" (PDF), the ACLU notes that only 11 of the 37 cities have any privacy policy, and that "even where policies exist, they are inadequate and often not legally enforceable." Case in point: Fresno's policy claims to prohibit the use of the cameras for racial profiling although it simultaneously "allows the use of race as a factor in determining whom to monitor."

There has also been virtually no analysis as to the effectiveness of these cameras. The report says that while several jurisdictions in the survey collected general crime stats, not one had conducted a comprehensive analysis on the benefits (or the lack thereof) of the camera programs. If they had done so, says the ACLU, they might find that surveillance cameras don't appear to have any significant effect on crime when compared to areas without cameras, as the Scottish Central Research Unit found in its own 1999 study. The ACLU also cites a study (PDF) by the British Home Office in 2002 that found that the presence of video cameras did not reduce violent crime (only smaller crimes such as those in parking garages), and another by researchers at the University of Leicester that had similar findings.

Cities have been on a surveillance binge in part due to the DHS making $1.4 billion available for anti-terrorism projects. "This trend, along with rising homicide rates and aggressive marketing by security companies, has led many cities to approve and install surveillance camera systems without guidelines to protect civil liberties and with little or no public debate," said ACLU executive director Maya Harris in a statement. We strongly urge local governments to pause and consider whether this is the best way to make our cities safer."

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom defends the $500,000 his office has spent on 70 cameras throughout the city alongside $200,000 spent on 178 cameras set up by the Housing Authority, saying that they have deterred crime. San Francisco police, however, have also told the San Francisco Chronicle that the cameras have contributed to only a single arrest in the past two years. Spokespeople at Newsom's office said that a report on the cameras' effectiveness is due in October of this year.

Finally, the ACLU warns that due to the California Public Records Act—legislation that the ACLU supports as a means to access government records—video surveillance footage would "almost certainly be accessible to the public." This would clearly introduce a whole new level of privacy concerns: imagine telling your boss that you had a doctor's appointment, only to have him or her later check video surveillance footage to find out that you weren't having your hearing checked but instead interviewing for a new job.

At the top of the list of the ACLU's recommendations is that cities stop deploying surveillance cameras. For cities determined to press ahead, the ACLU encourages them to evaluate other crime reduction measures that might have a greater effect than cameras, and to establish a process for open public debate on any technology deployment. And for those cities that already have cameras in place, the ACLU recommends that they reevaluate the effectiveness of such technology and to hold public hearings. "We all want and deserve safe communities, but video surveillance systems are not the answer," reads the report. "Rather than investing money in invasive systems with marginal effectiveness, local governments must look at programs with proven results that protect Californians'
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...alifornia.html





Courts Block Laws on Video Game Violence
Seth Schiesel

As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children. So far all such efforts have failed.

Citing the Constitution’s protection of free speech, federal judges have rejected attempts to regulate video games in eight cities and states since 2001. The judge in a ninth place, Oklahoma, has temporarily blocked a law pending a final decision. No such laws have been upheld.

The latest state to have its tentative game regulations stymied by a judge’s interpretation of the First Amendment is California. This month a federal judge in San Jose, Ronald M. Whyte, declared unconstitutional a 2005 bill that would have made it a crime to sell or rent certain violent games to minors in that state.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has said he plans to appeal the ruling, but he is merely the latest in a line of politicians whose attempts to regulate video games have been frustrated by federal courts. “It’s more than a trend,” said Ronald Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington. “It seems the cases are moving uniformly down the same track, and that is that such laws are unconstitutional. Such uniformity in declaring a category of laws unconstitutional is very rare.”

New York will probably be the next state to try its chances in court. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has declared regulating children’s access to video games a priority. The State Assembly passed a game-regulation bill in June, and the Senate could take up the measure when the Legislature reconvenes as soon as next month.

The New York bill has been phrased in an attempt to pass constitutional muster, but it will almost surely be challenged by the same game-industry legal team that has successfully opposed game regulations around the country.

“Video games are a new medium, and while people are used to scary stuff in the movies, they aren’t as used to having scary stuff in interactive media, so there is political value in passing these laws even if they are ultimately rejected by the courts,” said Paul M. Smith, a partner in the Jenner & Block law firm, which represents the game industry. “I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people who passed these laws knew they were unconstitutional, and they did it anyway.”

Put simply, the United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution as allowing states broad leeway in regulating minors’ access to sexually explicit material. That is why it is illegal around the country to sell pornography to children. Courts have not, however, said that states have a similar right to regulate media based on violence. Most of the city and state video game laws that have been struck down in recent years have tried to ban the sale or rental of certain violent games to minors. In many of those cases, states and cities have tried to translate the legal rules for pornography into a new system for regulating violent media.

“One of our major arguments was that when it comes to minors, violence should be treated similarly to sexually explicit material,” said Zackery P. Morazzini, the California deputy attorney general who argued the recent case for the state. “We allow states to protect children from sexually explicit material, so to us it is a logical extension to take that lesser obscenity standard and apply that in the context of violent media.”

The United States Supreme Court has not taken up the matter, but judges appear to have taken a dim view of that approach.

The opinion in the first major video game case was written in 2001 by Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In blocking an Indianapolis ordinance that would have regulated public game arcades, he wrote that exposure to imaginary violence — whether in “The Odyssey,” “War and Peace” or Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 — can play an important role in the development of a child’s moral, social and political outlook.

“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

Judge Posner is not known as a First Amendment liberal. He wrote an opinion in 2003 that has been credited (or blamed) with beginning the erosion in the reporter’s privilege that many news organizations have cited in refusing to turn over reporters’ notes to government agencies.

The federal judiciary is hardly monolithic, but as courts around the country have considered video game regulations in places including St. Louis County, Mo.; Washington; Illinois; Michigan; Minnesota; Louisiana; and now California, they have generally followed Judge Posner’s basic arguments.

Many politicians, however, see regulating games not as a First Amendment matter but as a public health and safety issue.

“We prohibit children from smoking,” said Adam Keigwin, a spokesman for State Senator Leland Yee, Democrat of San Francisco, who helped draft the California law. “We regulate driver’s licenses. We prohibit alcohol. We prohibit lots of things from children, and we think it’s logical that kids should not be able to purchase these games on their own.”

Considering the track records of other states that have tried to defend their game restrictions, New York, with Governor Spitzer’s prodding, is taking a novel approach. Under the bill passed in June by the Assembly, it would become a felony in New York to sell or rent to a child any game that includes both pornographic images and egregious violence. Games that are violent but nonsexual would not be regulated.

“If the governor were to be honest, he would have to say that this provision does not change anything in terms of the current state of the law and does nothing to address video game violence,” said State Sen. Andrew J. Lanza, Republican of Staten Island, one of the bill’s sponsors and a proponent of a separate measure to make ratings on video games mandatory. “They want to be able to say they did something about video game violence, and I think it’s a little disinengenuous to say you did something that you didn’t do.”

Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Governor Spitzer, said he was confident that New York’s proposed bill could hold up in court.

“Protecting children from violent and indecent video games is one of the governor’s priorities,” she said. “He proposed legislation this session to do just that, which differs from other legislation enacted or proposed in other states. This legislation would give a new tool to district attorneys to use that expressly applies to video games.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/ar...on/21vide.html





The Web Way to Magazine Ad Sales
Maria Aspan

THE September issue of Vogue arrives on newsstands today, clocking in at a record 727 advertising pages. That “extra-extra large!” size, as the cover proudly proclaims, is more than 100 pages fatter than last year and seems to provide evidence of a healthy appetite for print advertising in the fashion industry.

Most of those pages were sold with the added value of an Internet feature that Vogue is introducing today: a broadband channel that aims to serve as both an entertainment destination and a shopping Web site.

The feature, ShopVogue.TV, offers links to purchase the products featured in the magazine’s print ads, while simultaneously showing videos of runway shows, fashion ad campaigns and serial shows created by Vogue. The channel will also have a user-generated component, with visitors encouraged to upload photos of their own fashion looks in an area designated Fashion U Share.

For Vogue, which is owned by the Condé Nast Publications unit of Advance Publications, the channel is a major push into the world of fashion-related video entertainment; the channel will start with more than 240 minutes of original online video content. Vogue has particularly high hopes for the multi-episode series it will feature on the channel, like “60 Seconds to Chic” (a quick-makeover show), “Behind the Lens” (a documentary-style series) and “Trend Watch,” which started on syndicated television in 2003.

“America seems to be very interested in entertainment about fashion,” said Thomas A. Florio, publishing director of Vogue, in a recent interview at Condé Nast’s Manhattan headquarters. He cited the success of television shows like “Ugly Betty” and the film “The Devil Wears Prada” (both of which take place in magazines that bear more than a passing resemblance to Vogue) as well as of reality shows like “Project Runway" and “America’s Next Top Model.” According to Mr. Florio, the programs on ShopVogue.TV will give “more of a nonfiction perspective” on the fashion industry.

And while Bravo’s popular “Project Runway” may seem like the champion of the behind-the-scenes fashion genre, Vogue is hoping that its high-definition Internet videos will offer some competition. Episodes of “Behind the Lens,” for example, will document recent fashion shoots for advertising campaigns; one segment focuses on a shoot with Gisele Bündchen for Vogue Eyewear, and another shows an exclusive interview with Trey Laird of Laird + Partners, who recently shot a campaign for Gwen Stefani’s new fragrance, L by L.A.M.B.

These episodes try to convey an insider feel “without any of the negativity of the reality shows, and the B-level people in the industry,” Mr. Florio said. “The real world is the glamour, the product. It’s not forced, it’s not a Kmart sticker over the runway.”

Mr. Florio says he hopes that the shows on the channel become as popular as television clips on YouTube. “We shot it to be viral, we expect it to go beyond our site,” he said of series like “60 Seconds to Chic.”

Beyond entertainment, the broadband channel is meant to move product for the magazine’s advertisers. According to Mr. Florio, more than 85 percent of Vogue readers said the ads in Vogue’s September issues define the overall tone of the magazine. “It’s our Super Bowl,” he said.

ShopVogue.TV once existed in static Web form at ShopVogue.com, allowing visitors to see online versions of the print ads that were in the current issue, three times a year. At the new site, visitors will be able to shop by brand, trend, department or even price (an option that Vogue expects to become especially popular after November, when the channel will be refreshed for the holiday shopping season.) And videos from recent runway shows will also appear online, allowing visitors to see — and purchase — fashions from the current season.

Each advertiser that purchased a national ad page in the September issue qualified for inclusion on the Web site. Advertisers that bought multipage spreads were permitted to post additional content, like behind-the-scenes video from their campaign’s photo shoots. Visitors can get an inside look at the making of a glamorous fashion ad, and, if the spirit moves them, buy the product being advertised as well.

Fashion magazines may be latecomers to the online-retail sphere. This month, Hearst Magazines said it would acquire the established shopping-bookmark site Kaboodle; Hearst and Vogue’s entries both arrive years after the success of designer shopping sites like net-a-porter.com.

But Vogue is emphasizing the channel’s entertainment value over its pure advertising impact. “We really wanted to make it feel like a program, not an advertorial,” Mr. Florio said of the new shows. “We don’t want to be in a business that’s about selling goods online. We’re in a branding business.”

ShopVogue.TV is not technically a retail site; the “shop” function allows visitors to click through to the Web sites of the advertisers or their online merchant partners. Vogue does not take a cut of any of the sales made through its site. (Condé Nast, which is privately held, does not disclose its finances and declined to say how much was spent on this campaign.)

Vogue expects to draw about half a million visitors to the channel in the first few months, or first “season.” The channel will be advertised on fashion Web sites, on the sides of 270 Manhattan buses, and, of course, in the print pages of September Vogue.
The interactive agency Schematic helped design the channel, although all of the original programming was created and produced by Vogue. Vogue Studio, the magazine’s internal creative agency, worked with many advertisers on both print ads and online video content.

According to Dennis Keogh, the senior vice president for United States marketing at Coty Prestige, which handled the L fragrance for Gwen Stefani, Vogue’s assistance was vital. In addition to a fold-out insert in the magazine, the “Behind the Lens” interview with Mr. Laird was produced specifically for ShopVogue.TV. Visitors can watch either that episode or b-roll from the campaign’s photo session with Ms. Stefani, and simultaneously click through to Nordstrom’s Web site to buy the fragrance.

“We’re working very aggressively on digital media these days as well, and this is such a wonderful communication platform,” Mr. Keogh said.

He said he had no concerns about the entertainment portion of the ShopVogue.TV channel overshadowing its purpose as an advertising destination. “Even if they don’t get that far, it’s building awareness and interest in the brand,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/bu...ia/21adco.html





Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation
Sandra Blakeslee

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include including vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.

In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance.

Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person’s body.

When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.

In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.

A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Insitutute in Helsinki.

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London,” he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”

To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.

They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.

People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.

The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

Such mismatches are likely to occur naturally when multi-sensory regions of the brain are deprived of oxygen after injury or shock. Or they may be induced during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports or intense meditation practices that alter blood flow to specific brain regions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/sc...d-body.html?hp





Sleights of Mind
George Johnson

The reason he had picked me from the audience, Apollo Robbins insisted, was that I’d seemed so engaged, nodding my head and making eye contact as he and the other magicians explained the tricks of the trade. I believed him when he told me afterward, over dinner at the Venetian, that he hadn’t noticed the name tag identifying me as a science writer. But then everyone believes Apollo — as he expertly removes your wallet and car keys and unbuckles your watch.

It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. The organization’s last gathering had been in the staid environs of Oxford, but Las Vegas — the city of illusions, where the Statue of Liberty stares past Camelot at the Sphinx — turned out to be the perfect locale. After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention.

“This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.”

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of his hand, swung around my attention like a gooseneck lamp, so that it always pointed in the wrong direction. When he appeared to be reaching for my left pocket he was swiping something from the right. At the end of the act the audience applauded as he handed me my pen, some crumpled receipts and dollar bills, and my digital audio recorder, which had been running all the while. I hadn’t noticed that my watch was gone until he unstrapped it from his own wrist.
“He’s uncanny,” Teller said to me afterward as he rushed off for his nightly show with Penn at the Rio.

A recurring theme in experimental psychology is the narrowness of perception: how very little of the sensory clamor makes its way into awareness. Earlier in the day, before the magic show, a neuroscientist had demonstrated a phenomenon called inattentional blindness with a video made at the Visual Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois.

In the video, six men and women — half with white shirts and half with black — are tossing around a couple of basketballs. Viewers are asked to count how many times members of, say, the white team, manage to complete a pass, keeping the ball from the opposition. I dutifully followed the instructions and was surprised when some 15 seconds into the game, laughter began to ripple through the audience. Only when I watched a second time did I see the person in the gorilla suit walking on from stage left. (The video is online at viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html.)

Secretive as they are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to discussing the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn’t there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps — making assumptions, as The Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts.

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

“In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,” he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. “If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.”

Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.

As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

• • •

In his opening address, Michael Gazzaniga, the president of the consciousness association, had described another form of prestidigitation — a virtual reality experiment in which he had put on a pair of electronic goggles that projected the illusion of a deep hole opening in what he knew to be a solid concrete floor. Jolted by the adrenaline rush, his heart beat faster and his muscles tensed, a reminder that even without goggles the brain cobbles together a world from whatever it can.

“In a sense our reality is virtual,” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “Think about flying in an airplane. You’re up there in an aluminum tube, 30,000 feet up, going 600 miles an hour, and you think everything is all right.”

Dr. Gazzaniga is famous for his work with split-brain patients, whose left and right hemispheres have been disconnected as a last-ditch treatment for severe epilepsy. These are the experiments that have led to the notion, oversimplified in popular culture, that the left brain is predominantly analytical while the right brain is intuitive and laid-back.

The left brain, as Dr. Gazzaniga put it, is the confabulator, constantly concocting stories. But mine was momentarily dumbstruck when, after his talk, I passed through a doorway inside the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and entered an air-conditioned simulation of the Grand Canal. My eyes were drawn upward to the stunning illusion of a trompe l’oeil sky and what I decided must be ravens flying high overhead. Looking closer, my brain discarded that theory, and I saw that the black curved wings were the edges of discs — giant thumbtacks holding up the sky. Later I was told they were automatic sprinklers, in case the clouds catch fire.

“It’s ‘The Truman Show,’ ” said Robert Van Gulick, a philosopher at Syracuse University, as I joined him at a table overlooking a version of the Piazza San Marco. A sea breeze was wafting through the window, the clouds were glowing in the late afternoon sun (and they were still glowing, around 10:30 p.m., when I headed back toward my hotel). How could we be sure that the world outside the Venetian — outside Las Vegas itself — wasn’t also a simulation? Or that I wasn’t just a brain in a vat in some mad scientist’s laboratory.

Dr. Van Gulick had come to the conference to talk about qualia, the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.

Like physicists, philosophers play with such conundrums by engaging in thought experiments. In a recent paper, Michael P. Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut, entertained the idea of a “phenomenal pickpocket,” an imaginary creature, like Apollo the thief, who distracts your attention while he removes your qualia, turning you into what’s known in the trade as a philosophical zombie. You could catch a ball, hum a tune, stop at a red light — act exactly like a person but without any sense of what it is like to be alive. If zombies are logically possible, some philosophers insist, then conscious beings must be endowed with an ineffable essence that cannot be reduced to biological circuitry.

Dr. Lynch’s fantasy was a ploy to undermine the zombie argument. But if zombies do exist, it is probably in Las Vegas. One evening as I walked across the floor of the Imperial Palace casino — a cacophony of clanging bells and electronic arpeggios — it was easy to imagine that the hominids parked in front of the one-armed bandits were simply extensions of the machines.

“Intermittent conditioning,” suggested Irene Pepperberg, an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University who studies animal intelligence. If you want to train a laboratory rat to pull a crank to get a food pellet, the reflex will be scratched in deeper if the creature is rewarded with some regularity but not all the time.

Dr. Pepperberg has thrown a wild card into studies of consciousness with her controversial experiments with African gray parrots. With a brain “the size of a walnut,” as she puts it, the birds display what appears to be the cognitive potential of a young child. Her best-known parrot, Alex, can stare at a tray of objects and pick the one that has four corners and is blue. He has also coined his own word for almond — “cork nut.”

With appearances on PBS and a cameo role in a Margaret Atwood novel, “Oryx and Crake,” Alex has entered the popular imagination, while Dr. Pepperberg struggles to find a secure academic position. Critics can’t resist comparing Alex to “Clever Hans,” the famous horse whose arithmetical abilities were exposed as learned responses to his trainer’s subtle cues. Dr. Pepperberg says she controls for that possibility in her experiments and believes her parrots are thinking and expressing themselves with words.

• • •

One evening out on the Strip, I spotted Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher, hurrying along the sidewalk across from the Mirage, which has its own tropical rain forest and volcano. The marquees were flashing and the air-conditioners roaring — Las Vegas stomping its carbon footprint with jackboots in the Nevada sand. I asked him if he was enjoying the qualia. “You really know how to hurt a guy,” he replied.

For years Dr. Dennett has argued that qualia, in the airy way they have been defined in philosophy, are illusory. In his book “Consciousness Explained,” he posed a thought experiment involving a wine-tasting machine. Pour a sample into the funnel and an array of electronic sensors would analyze the chemical content, refer to a database and finally type out its conclusion: “a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina.”

If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia?

Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — “ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather” — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.”

As he sipped his drink he tried out another metaphor, involving a gold panning technique he had learned about in New Zealand. Lead and gold are similar in density. If you salt the slurry with buck shot and swirl the pan around, the dark pellets will track the elusive flecks of gold.

With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I.

“Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce ‘magic,’ ” Dr. Dennett has written, “and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer.”

At the end of the magic show where I was fleeced by Apollo, The Amazing Randi called on Dr. Dennett and another volunteer to help with the final act. As Mr. Randi sat on a chair, the two men tightly bound his arms to his thighs with a rope.

“Daniel, would you take off your jacket for me for just a moment?” the conjuror asked. “Now drape it around the front of my hands.”

“A little higher,” Mr. Randi said.

Without missing a beat, he grabbed the collar and pulled it up toward his chin. The audience cheered. Either he had slipped the ropes in a matter of seconds or his hands had been free all along.

“Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact,” Mr. Randi said. “It’s not necessarily so.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/science/21magic.html





Foundation on Which RIAA Builds Cases in Danger of Being Undermined
Eric Bangeman

At the base of every one of the over 25,000 lawsuits filed by the RIAA against suspected file-sharing is a single argument: making a song available over a P2P network like KaZaA infringes on the copyrights of the record labels. That assertion will be tested by Warner v. Cassin next month, as her attorney, Ray Beckerman, will argue the matter in a federal court in White Plains, NY.

Although the RIAA's claim that making a song available over a P2P network infringes on a record label's copyrights may seem sound at first glance, the issue is as not cut and dried as the music industry would lead us to believe. First, the RIAA has not established that any infringement has actually taken place. The RIAA's claims of copyright infringement come after its investigator, MediaSentry, discovers music in a P2P user's shared folder. MediaSentry then takes screenshots, notes the IP address, and the litigation process is set into motion. That's the sole basis for the RIAA's complaints.

A number of defendants have pointed out the weakness of the RIAA's argument. First, the RIAA's complaints do not allege any actual acts of infringement, which the Copyright Act says must take place in order for a case for infringement to be made. The only downloading that the RIAA can actually prove occurred was done by its authorized agent, MediaSentry. Since the RIAA cannot demonstrate that someone other than MediaSentry downloaded the file—or that the defendant ever illegally downloaded any of the tracks in the shared folder—it therefore cannot show that infringement actually took place. Looking at it from another angle, there are no allegations that the defendants actually engaged in a specific act of distribution at any point in time—which is why the RIAA's boilerplate complaints refer to "ongoing" and "continuous" infringement.

Or, as Beckerman notes in his motion, "the complaint fails to set forth... any instance or example of 'downloading' a recording; any instance or example of 'distributing' a recording; any instance or example of 'making [a recording] available';... or what law would support a claim for 'making [a recording] available.'"

Beckerman also argues that if making available is found to be the same as distributing, it could have broader implications than just sharing files over a P2P network. "Under such an elastic interpretation and ill-defined standards, almost all participants in the Internet would become vulnerable to accusations that they 'make available' a variety of content, including copyrighted materials, to users," he argues in the reply. Think about hyperlinks, which make available other content on the Internet. Providing a hyperlink could be construed as distribution under the RIAA's definition, argues Beckerman.

There have been seven cases in which the making available argument has been tested. In six of those cases, the judges did not actually rule on the issue of whether making a file available is the same as distribution. Instead, the judges said that the cases could go ahead based on the allegations of continuing infringement. The judge in Elektra v. Perez also considered the argument after the RIAA decided to dismiss the case and the defendant argued that the case should be dismissed with prejudice. The judge presiding over the seventh case, Elektra v. Barker, has yet to issue a decision but has promised to rule on the making available argument.

The rulings in Warner v. Cassin and Elektra v. Barker could change the legal landscape for both the RIAA and defendants if the judges hold that making a file available on KaZaA or any other P2P network does not constitute copyright infringement. In fact, it would all but certainly kill the RIAA's current litigation model. The labels would have to show actual evidence that someone downloaded a file from a targeted P2P user instead of just offering a few screenshots and a report from MediaSentry along with a boilerplate complaint.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ndermined.html





A billion trillion zillion…and that’s the truth!

Latest Music Piracy Study Overstates Effect of P2P
Eric Bangeman

A new study (large PDF) from the Institute for Policy Innovation takes a different approach to quantifying the cost of music piracy. Instead of just focusing on what the lost sales cost the record labels, the new study measures the impact of piracy on the US economy. The total price tag? A cool $12.5 billion in lost output, if you trust the study's numbers.

Along with the multibillion-dollar loss, piracy also is hindering job growth, according to the IPI. The US economy will lose 71,060 jobs due to piracy, with almost 38 percent of those (26,860) in the recording industry. That amounts to $2.7 billion in lost earnings. Piracy also hits Uncle Sam—as well as state and local governments—right in the pocketbook, with at least $422 million in lost tax revenues.

Problematic assumptions

The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads == lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase. "Unfortunately, there is no precise measure of the degree to which consumers of pirated CDs would continue to purchase those CDs at legitimate prices," according to the study. "While the degree to which these legitimate purchases would occur differs by market, it appears nevertheless that such purchases would comprise a very significant fraction of the total number of pirated CDs now purchased... In this study, the weighted average substitution rate used for the physical piracy of recorded music is 65.7 percent. It is then assumed that only 20% (1 in 5) of these downloaded songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist."

That's a bit better than the one-to-one argument, but not by much. It essentially assumes that one of every five downloaded songs would have been purchased, were it not for file-sharing. Although a 20 percent figure may not look like much, it is still a percentage not justified by our own knowledge of file-sharing trends. The study needs to make a firm argument for why this percentage is so high. It's a flaw similar to that in a 2006 study commissioned by the MPAA.

Note that the assumption cuts both ways. Not only does it assume many would-be sales, but it also ignores sales that do stem from file sharing. P2P users buy a lot of music, after all. Three out of four P2P users said that they bought music after downloading it online, with 21 percent of the respondents to the survey commissioned by the Canadian Record Industry Association saying that they have bought previously downloaded music on more than 10 occasions. So here again, we have data not being taken into account, data which would necessarily lower the study's estimates.

Another study even goes so far as to argue that the effect of file-sharing on legal music sales is "not statistically distinguishable from zero." Published this past February in the Journal of Political Economy, the study tracked the effects of 1.75 million song downloads on 680 albums. The researchers concluded that the availability—and even increased downloads—of music on P2P networks did not correlate to a negative effect on music sales. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero," the study's authors reported.

If there was no such thing as piracy...

The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good. 58 percent of those responding to a study commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine and the Associated Press said that music is declining in quality. And although the DRM situation is looking up these days, it can still be a confusing morass with unanticipated side effects for consumers, as the recently announced closure of the Google Video Store demonstrates.

Consumer apathy aside, there are other factors at work in the music industry. One of the biggest is the transition from sales of physical media to digital media. CD sales have dropped sharply since the beginning of the decade, and projections indicate that there's no end in sight to the decline. Sure, downloads have picked up since 2004, but not at a rate that will come close to overcoming the slide in CD sales. The individual song download angle is largely ignored by the IPI's study as well, which is fixated on sales of physical media.

The IPI has a history of pushing what it calls a pro-market agenda with its research, including one study asking if open source has reached its limits and another similar to that under discussion here that attempts to quantify the economic impact of movie piracy. Given its track record (which includes this gem from the aforementioned open-source study: "Open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K") and ideological bent, the results of this study are rather unsurprising.

When the discussion over dollar figures and economic impact comes to an end, most people will agree that file-sharing is a real issue for the recording industry and that there is a financial cost that goes along with it. It's also true that piracy has something of a ripple effect, reaching beyond the artists and record labels. But studies that overstate the economic effect of piracy do little to further the discussion over issues of copyright, file-sharing, and DRM and obscure the fact that the music industry still has some serious work to do on its business model.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ct-of-p2p.html





RIAA Faces Possible Class Action Over Suing the Innocent
Nate Anderson

The scene at RIAA headquarters this week must have been fascinating. The group yesterday announced that it has finished sending out a new batch of 503 "pre-litigation letters" to 58 different universities around the US, generously offering to let students settle copyright infringement claims "at a discounted rate" before those claims go to trial. The letters blanketed the country, going everywhere from the University of Hawaii to Swarthmore, from Boston College to Tulane, from Emory to Chico State. And then the RIAA learned that its aggressive litigation tactics have placed it on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.

Single mom Tanya Andersen, a defendant in a previous lawsuit brought by the RIAA, was one of the first to have her case dismissed with prejudice (it cannot be refiled at a later date). Throughout the court battle, she maintained her total innocence, a claim given even more plausibility by the fact that she was charged with downloading numerous gangsta rap tracks.

After the case was dismissed, Andersen then sued the RIAA for malicious prosecution, and her attorney filed court documents in an Oregon federal court on Wednesday that seek to elevate the case to class action status.

The development, first reported by p2pnet, hopes to make a class out of those "who were sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement." In other words, a class of the innocent. In the complaint, Andersen alleges that the RIAA "has engaged in a coordinated enterprise to pursue a scheme of threatening and intimidating litigation in an attempt to maintain its music distribution monopoly."

Andersen is also going after the RIAA's investigative arm, SafeNet, formerly known as MediaSentry. This group allegedly "conducts illegal, flawed and negligent investigations for the RIAA and its controlled member companies" and has also featured in past complaints.

Some of Andersen's claims against the RIAA have been tried by other defendants who chose to fight back, but this is the first time that a judge has been asked to consolidate such lawsuits into a class action.

Proving many of these charges will be difficult. Andersen alleges that the RIAA has violated the RICO racketeering act, but we have previously discussed why this will be hard to prove. The charge of malicious prosecution could be a bit easier, though Andersen (and other defendants, if the class is certified) will have to show a pattern of willful behavior by the RIAA, something that could be very difficult without having an insider from the organization "flip."

Should the case eventually be certified as a class action, it would bring a whole new kind of negative attention to the RIAA's legal campaign. The fact that the class specifically includes only those who have not committed copyright infringement will certainly go a long way toward making this look like David v. Goliath redux. Whether deserved or not, these sort of cases are giving the RIAA a reputation for suing innocent people, a perception that a class action suit would only heighten.

Expect a vigorous defense from the association.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...tion-suit.html





Anime Distributor Has No Legal Right to Threaten BitTorrent Users
enigmax

A company that tracked thousands of users sharing anime via BitTorrent has lost its legal battle to force an ISP to reveal its customer’s details. The company would’ve used the information to demand $3,500 in compensation from each person they tracked - a plan which now lies in ruins.

Last week we reported on the Singapore-based anime distributor Odex Pt. Ltd and their campaign to track, find and threaten thousands of BitTorrent users which they claim infringe their copyrights. The demand - ‘Pay us $3,500 - or else’.

After previously forcing the ISP ‘Singnet’ to give up personal details (names, addresses) of its customers, they moved on to the ISP ‘StarHub’ who put up a fight but was also forced to hand over details. The next move was to force another ISP - Pacific Internet (PacNet) - to give up the details of a thousand of its customers so it could demand money from them also.

PacNet said that although it respects the rights of intellectual property owners, equally it believes in “protecting the privacy of all our subscribers” and refused to hand the information over. Odex went to the courts to force PacNet to comply.

Unfortunately for Odex, the court decided that Odex had ‘no right of civil action’ against those it accuses of infringing its copyrights. Apparently, Odex is merely a sub-licensee of its anime titles and is not even the copyright holder so it cannot take any action at all. It had also threatened criminal action against BitTorrent users - the judge quashed this threat too.

Furthermore, according to the report from ChannelNewsAsia, the judge wasn’t happy with the way Odex went after the BitTorrent users. He criticized the investigative methods used to collect their IP addresses and the manner in which it gathered other so-called ‘evidence’.

Odex is to appeal but in the meantime, they now know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a ‘pay-up or else’ demand. The judge has ordered them to pay more than $7,000 in legal costs.
http://torrentfreak.com/anime-distri...torrent-users/





BitTorrent Admin Monitored by US Government, Forced to Dump Linux
enigmax

Sk0t, an ex-administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker is to have his internet connection forcibly monitored by the US Government. If that wasn’t bad enough, the monitoring software is Windows based - which means he is being forced to ditch Linux - or face being barred from the internet.

Scott McCausland (sk0t), the ex-administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker isn’t having much luck lately. Back in September 2006, he pleaded guilty to two charges - ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ and ‘criminal copyright infringement’. Both charges relate to him uploading ‘Star Wars: Episode III’ onto the internet hours before the theatrical release, earning him 5 months in jail and 5 months home confinement.

Sk0t has now been released from jail but this doesn’t mean that everything is back to normal.

Back on 17 July, sk0t had to see his Probation Officer for the first time and two days later he had to have a special ankle bracelet attached. This monitoring device is there to enforce the terms of his release: Monday to Friday 08:30 to 21:00 he is free to do as he pleases. Weekends are more restrictive - freedom is allocated between 08:30 to 17:00. The one good thing about this device is that it will be removed before Christmas (Dec 19th).

According to a post on his blog, following another meeting with his Probation Officer, it seems sk0t is having more trouble:

So, I am getting shafted by the Justice Department again…”

sk0t was informed by his Probation Officer that he has to have special software installed on his PC so that the government can monitor his online activities. However, what is a more bitter pill to swallow for him is that the monitoring software is Windows only and as sk0t is an Ubuntu user, the Justice Department is forcing him to switch operating systems.

I had a meeting with my probation officer today, and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me, that is part of my sentence. However, their software doesnt support GNU/Linux (Which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.

Sk0t is left with a tough choice. Give in to the evils of the monitoring software, format his hard drive and install Windows - or be barred from using a PC completely.

Sk0t told TorrentFreak: “I think that this whole situation is just one more way that they can impose their will onto me. I have contacted my attorney, and we are going to fight this. It isn’t the fact that I have to be monitored that bothers me, it is the fact that I have restructure my life (different OS, different software on that OS) and that they would require (force) me to purchase software while I a currently unemployed and relatively unemployable with the 2 felonies that they gave me. It is just a ridiculous situation. Why should I conform to them when I am consenting to the software… they should have software that conforms to me.”

Unfortunately, thanks to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, some BitTorrent users are considered criminals these days, which means these unusual measures can be forced upon them. In a society where ‘the punishment should fit the crime’, you can’t help but think that somewhere along the line there’s been a big miscalculation when regular citizens are turned into criminals for sharing files.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-a...to-dump-linux/





Booze Banned After 2 Die, 83 Arrested At N.J. Concert
Drinking In Parking Lot Banned

Authorities are taking a tougher approach after a crackdown failed to stop underage drinking at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel.

Effective Friday, alcohol is banned in the parking lot of the central New Jersey entertainment venue. The ban comes a day after two people died and more than 80 people were arrested Thursday night at an Ozzfest concert.

Police are investigating the deaths of two men, identified as Raymond Guarino, 26, of Forked River and Patrick Norris, 24, of Coram, N.Y.

After possibly taking drugs and alcohol, both passed out in separate incidents at the concert, went into cardiac arrest and later died. State Police said the men were believed to have ingested cocaine, marijuana and alcohol prior to their deaths, and troopers who searched Guarino's vehicle found small amounts of both drugs.

Eighty-three people were arrested during the concert; 59 were charged with underage drinking. Other charges included distribution of drugs, lewd behavior and providing alcohol to a minor.

Authorities said the Ozzfest incidents were the latest in a long string of problems this season that led them to ban alcohol in the center's parking lot.

"This is a dramatic step to have to take, but one that is necessary given the potential consequences of such risky behavior," Gov. Jon S. Corzine said Friday.

The first show to be affected will be a concert featuring Velvet Revolver, Alice in Chains and Kill Hannah, scheduled for Friday night. Signs on the Garden State Parkway will notify concertgoers of the alcohol ban.

Joe Orlando, a spokesman for the Turnpike Authority, which owns the arts center, said the ban is effective no matter a person's age, so even those who can drink legally cannot bring alcohol onto the site; in the past, people over the legal drinking age have been allowed to bring alcohol to the center's parking lot and tailgate before and during concerts.

Depending on their age, violators face fines, expulsion from the premises and arrest.

Alcohol will still be sold inside the center, which is located near the shore.

Kevin Coyne, of Sewell, N.J., who attended Ozzfest, said Friday that the all-day concert didn't seem particularly out of control to him, although he left around 5:30 p.m. and didn't spend much time in the parking lot.

"To me it was just a normal concert. I didn't see anything that was out of the ordinary," said Coyne, who said the alcohol ban wouldn't keep him from going to shows in the future.

Coyne said many concertgoers seem to spend more time in the parking lot drinking than inside the venue watching the acts.

"People get there bright and early and get their party started," Coyne.

Another concertgoer said the alcohol ban might keep him from going to shows in the future.

"My only chance to get drunk is in the parking lot, and they took that away from us," said Avi Miller, of Elizabeth, N.J. who said the beer prices inside the concert venue are too high.

"They do go around the parking lot asking people for IDs. I don't understand why that's not enough," said Miller, who was at the Ozzfest show.

Miller had been planning to attend Friday night's Velvet Revolver show, but instead plans to go to Camden's Tweeter Center on the Waterfront on Monday, where the band was playing and alcohol is still allowed in the parking lot.

Orlando said state police have arrested more than 200 people at shows at the center in the past 10 days.

"We've tried to deal with it by enforcing the law, and people have thumbed their nose at it," he said. "So we're taking the only action we can."

Some of the arrests Thursday also involved unruly behavior in the mosh pit. Concertgoers were charged with assault if they were flailing arms or legs in a way that would hurt others.

Ozzfest is a tour of heavy-metal bands started by rocker Ozzy Osbourne. Over the years it has showcased a number of up-and-coming bands, including Linkin Park and Incubus.

Authorities launched a crackdown on drinking after the season's first show in May because 13 young patrons had to be taken to hospitals with alcohol-related illnesses. The youngest was 11 years old.

More than 90 patrons were arrested at the O.A.R concert on Saturday and 54 people were arrested at the Incubus show last Friday.
http://www.wnbc.com/news/13914641/de...ss=ny&psp=news





Rolling Stones to Quit Touring After 45 Years

THE Rolling Stones will reportedly quit touring for good after playing London's O2 Arena this Sunday after 45 years in the music business.

The veteran rockers are believed to have declared that their current A Bigger Bang Tour will be their last because frontman Sir Mick Jagger, 64, and guitarist Keith Richards, 63, will be too old to do another.

A source said: "We've been told this will be the last tour. Embarking on a Stones world tour takes years to plan. Mick and Keith would be in their late 60s by the time they would be ready to rock once more."

Mick, Keith, drummer Charlie Watts, 66, and guitarist Ronnie Wood, 60, end their massive two-year tour this week with three dates at the new O2 Arena, with their final performance on Sunday.

The band was formed in 1962 and has been touring regularly ever since.

The group have sold more than 200 million albums worldwide over the last five decades and played thousands of sold-out shows.

The Stones have been receiving rave reviews for the latest leg of their tour - and wowed 60,000 at Ireland's Slane Castle on Saturday.

The band started in London in 1962 with original leader Brian Jones, but he was usurped by the songwriting partnership of singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards.

Jones died in 1969, shortly after being fired from the band and was replaced by 20-year-old Mick Taylor.

The band has released 55 albums and have had 37 top-10 singles. They have sold over 300 million albums worldwide. Their latest album, A Bigger Bang, was released in 2005 and their world tour is still continuing.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...006003,00.html





The Future of Music
Suhas Sreedhar

You're listening to your favorite Pink Floyd CD on your home stereo when you accidentally hit the “change CD” button on the control panel. All goes quiet for a bit as your CD player urgently shifts to play whatever is in the next tray. With dread, you desperately reach for the volume knob, but it's too late—your speakers blast the latest Green Day album. Reacting like you were just pricked by a pin, your hand jolts to the volume knob and turns it down. You breathe a sigh of relief. But that's not the end of it. Ten minutes later you feel that something isn't right. Even though you love this album, you can't listen to it anymore. You shut it off, tired, puzzled, and confused. This always seems to happen when you switch from a classic album to a modern one. What you've just experienced is something called overcompression of the dynamic range. Welcome to the loudness war.

The loudness war, what many audiophiles refer to as an assault on music (and ears), has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has garnered more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology. The “war” refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums. But the loudness war could be doing more than simply pumping up the volume and angering aficionados—it could be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come.

Overcompression

Music, like speech, is dynamic. There are quiet and loud moments that serve to accentuate each other and convey meaning by their relative levels of loudness. For instance, if someone is talking and suddenly shouts, the loudness of the shout, in addition to the content, conveys a message—be it a sense of urgency, surprise, or anger.

When the dynamic range of a song is heavily reduced for the sake of achieving loudness, the sound becomes analogous to someone constantly shouting everything he or she says. Not only is all impact lost, but the constant level of the sound is fatiguing to the ear. So why is achieving greater and greater loudness so important that the natural ebb and flow of music has been so readily sacrificed?

The answer goes back to the beginnings of recorded music.

The Vinyl Era

Loudness has always been a desirable quality for mainstream popular music. The louder a song is overall, the more it stands out from ambient noise and the more it grabs your attention. Studies in the field of psychoacoustics, which investigates how humans perceive sound, show that people judge how loud a sound is based on its average loudness, not its peak loudness. So even though there might be two songs whose loudest parts reach the same loudness level in decibels (dB), the one with the higher average level is generally perceived as louder.

As far back as the early 1960s, record companies began engaging in a loudness battle when they observed that louder songs in jukeboxes tended to garner more attention than quieter ones. To maintain their competitive edge, record companies wanted to keep raising the loudness of their songs. But the physical properties of vinyl records limited engineers' ability to perpetually increase loudness.

A vinyl record consists of a lacquer into which small V-shaped grooves—vibrational transcriptions of analog sound—are cut. Creating a record in the studio involves a process called mastering, where songs are sonically adjusted and placed into an appropriate order to fit the given medium's requirements. Mastering for vinyl was always a balance between loudness and playing time. The louder you wanted a song to be, the wider the groove needed to be in order to accommodate the larger amplitude of the transcription. Since there's only a limited amount of usable surface area per vinyl disc, gaining loudness meant sacrificing playing time, especially on a long playing (LP) record where upwards of six songs were often fit on each side of the disc.

In order to save the cost of manufacturing an excessive number of vinyl discs per album, playing time usually won out over loudness. Live music typically has a dynamic range of 120 dB, peaking at about the same loudness of a jet engine (though some concerts have gone even louder). Vinyl records tend to have about 70 dB of dynamic range. This meant that in order to fit a song onto a record, it either needed to have its overall amplitude reduced or it needed to be compressed—have its peaks brought down to a lower level—to fit within the given range. How much of each was done varied from record to record and defined the art of mastering. However, the tools of analog signal processing limited the amount of compression that was possible.

Analog compressors of this era were basically voltage control amplifiers that varied the level of an output signal based on a control voltage, similar to the devices that regulate signals in AM radio. Such compressors were typically used on individual instrument tracks (vocals, guitar, etc.) to add clarity to a sound or to change the sound of an instrument for effect. However, in some cases, such as with the hit singles put out by Motown Records (for example, “Want Ads” by Honey Cone), compressors were used to boost the loudness of songs to higher-than-average levels. Mastering engineers accomplished this by reducing the dynamic range of a song so that the entire song could be amplified to a greater extent before it pushed the physical limits of the medium. This became known as “hot” mastering and was typically done on singles where each side of the record only contained one song. Generally, however, the average level of songs and albums stayed relatively the same throughout the period.

“CD” Behavior

“The invention of digital audio and the compact disc became a new fuel for a previously existing loudness race,” says Bob Katz, a renowned mastering engineer and one of the first outspoken critics of dynamic-range overcompression. “The reason is that the analog media did not permit what we would call ‘normalization' to the peak level.”

When the compact disc (CD) was introduced in the early 1980s, there was much for audiophiles to be happy about. Digital audio removed many of the physical restrictions vinyl had imposed, such as concerns about surface noise (caused by dust, scratches, the lacquer itself, and so on) and limited dynamic range. The CD was capable of supporting a dynamic range of about 96 dB. For most of the 1980s, when CDs were still high-end products and mastering engineers largely did not have access to digital signal-processing technologies, albums released on CD tended to make use of this better dynamic range.

Unlike vinyl, which had varying loudness limits due to its physical characteristics, the CD had a definitive peak loudness limit due to its specified digitizing standard, a form of pulse code modulation (PCM). PCM had previously been used in telephony as a method of digitizing an analog signal. When an analog signal is sampled for digitization, each level of the signal is quantized (stored as a number in binary). How frequently samples of the signal are taken is specified by the sampling rate, and the total number of unique quantization levels capable of being stored is determined by the number of bits. When Sony and Philips specified the standard for CD audio, they determined that the sampling rate would be 44.1 kHz with 16 bits per sample. Using the rule of thumb, the approximation of 6.02 dB of dynamic range per bit gave CD audio roughly 96 dB of dynamic range. The highest loudness level (16 bits of all 1's) was designated as 0 decibels full scale (dBFS). Lower levels were assigned negative numbers.

In the 1980s, CDs were mastered so that songs generally peaked at about -6 dBFS with their root mean square (RMS)—or average levels—hovering around -20 dBFS to -18 dBFS. As multidisc CD changers began to gain prominence in households toward the end of the decade, the same jukebox-type loudness competition started all over again as record companies wanted their CDs to stick out more than their competitors'. By the end of the 1980s, songs on CDs were amplified to the point where their peaks started pushing the loudness limit of 0 dBFS. At this point, the only way to raise the average levels of songs without having their loudest parts clipped—the digital equivalent of distortion, where information is lost because it exceeds the bit capacity—was to compress the peaks.

While analog compressors had been limited in the extent to which they could reduce peak levels, digital compressors were much more powerful. As mastering engineers began to get hold of digital signal-processing tools, they were able to “hot” master songs even more. The process was similar to what had been done on some vinyl singles—peak levels were brought down by a certain amount, and then the entire waveform was amplified until the (now reduced) peaks once again reached 0 dBFS. The result? The average level of the entire song increased.

The 1990s saw average amplitude levels go from around -15 dBFS to as much as -6 dBFS in extreme cases. Most songs in this decade, however, remained at around -12 dBFS. The 2000s saw the loudness war reach its height, with most current songs having an average level of -9 dBFS or higher. From the mid 1980s to now, the average loudness of CDs increased by a factor of 10, and the peaks of songs are now one-tenth of what they used to be. The loudness war is also not just confined to the big four record companies (Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony BMG, and Universal Music Group). Overcompression is now widespread and performed by independent labels and international record companies.

The CD Is Dead

The biggest change from 15 years ago to today is how people consume music. With more than 100 million iPods sold worldwide as of early this year, more and more people are listening to music on the go rather than at their home stereos. Physical media like CDs are on their way out. And yet overcompression continues to plague the music world.

Even though the CD might be in its death throes, most digital music available online was mastered for CDs. Popular formats like MP3, AAC, and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) merely use data-compression techniques (not to be confused with dynamic-range compression) to reduce the amount of data a song encoded in PCM takes up. As long as the specter of CDs continues to haunt the online world, downloaded songs will still be subject to overcompression.

But the problem doesn't just lie on the production end. If people are listening to songs in a noisy environment—such as in their cars, on trains, in airport waiting rooms, at work, or in a dormitory—the music needs to be louder to compensate. Dynamic-range compression does just that and more. Not only does it raise the average loudness of the song, but by doing so it eliminates all the quiet moments of a song as well. So listeners are now able to hear the entire song above the noise without getting frustrated by any inaudible low parts.

This might be one of the biggest reasons why most people are completely unaware of the loss of dynamics in modern music. They are listening to songs in less-than-ideal environments on a constant basis. But many listeners have subconsciously felt the effects of overcompressed songs in the form of auditory fatigue, where it actually becomes tiring to continue listening to the music.

“You want music that breathes. If the music has stopped breathing, and it's a continuous wall of sound, that will be fatiguing,” says Katz. “If you listen to it loudly as well, it will potentially damage your ears before the older music did because the older music had room to breathe.”

Some audiophiles find relief by going back to the past. A few musicians still continue to release their albums on vinyl records (in addition to CDs and online formats). Because vinyl cannot support the loudness that CDs can, these modern vinyl releases are much quieter than their CD counterparts. But they are often less compressed as well, and, in some instances, remastered in a way that is as dynamic as albums released in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the most prominent examples of this is the recent Red Hot Chili Peppers album Stadium Arcadium, which was remastered for vinyl by mastering engineer Steve Hoffman with the intent of providing full dynamic sound. Hoffman is one of the few mastering engineers who have actually refused to take certain jobs because he's been asked to overcompress music. “[It happens] all the time,” says Hoffman. “At least once a week.”

But turning to vinyl for uncompressed music might not always provide salvation. In order to save the cost of remastering, record companies might simply take the compressed master of a song, reduce the overall loudness, and place it on vinyl. Katz warns, “You could take the Red Hot Chili Peppers recording and put it onto vinyl just as it came from CD, and it would sound just as fatiguing. [The only difference is] you'd just have to turn the volume control up because you couldn't get the peak level the same.”

Tearing Down the Wall

Audiophiles looking to the future for relief from overcompression see a cloudy picture. DVD-Audio and Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) are two high-fidelity formats that were thought to be solutions to the loudness war. Both formats offer not only a greater dynamic range than CD but also higher sampling rates. This allows for frequencies higher than what most humans are capable of hearing to be encoded onto the medium, addressing a common complaint by people who prefer analog over digital because they claim they can hear these frequencies.

DVD-Audio uses PCM encoding that can support 24-bit, 192 kHz stereo sound (contrasted with the CD's 16 bit, 44.1 kHz) yielding 144 dB of dynamic range, 14 dB over the human threshold of pain. SACD, like the CD, was developed by Sony and Philips and uses a form of pulse-density modulation (PDM) encoding branded as Direct Stream Digital. Basically, instead of having 16-bit samples at a frequency of 44.1 kHz, it takes 1-bit samples at 64 times that rate (2.82 MHz). It has a dynamic range of about 120 dB. Additionally, both SACD and DVD-Audio are capable of high-fidelity five-channel surround sound.

Since their introduction in 2000, however, neither format has taken hold. An overwhelming majority of releases have been of the classical music genre, which has generally not been subject to overcompression to begin with. So even if audiophiles wanted to spend upward of $300 for a DVD-Audio or SACD player, chances are they won't be able to buy their favorite popular albums in either medium.

Since music has gone online, the possibility of having high-fidelity digital files remains, and formats such as FLAC are capable of supporting 24-bit audio. Slim Devices, a company acquired last year by Logitech, has created two products—the Squeezebox and the Transporter—that wirelessly stream digital files from a computer or the Internet to high-end stereo receivers. Both are capable of handling 24-bit audio, but the problem, says Sean Adams, former CEO of Slim Devices, is lack of content.

“If we're going to go to higher levels of sound quality, the real problem is actually getting the content out. Right now, unfortunately, the industry has kind of gone backward from CD quality. When MP3 came out, [it was called] CD quality when it really wasn't,” says Adams. “We've made some improvements since then with better [compression techniques], but it's really a function of people demanding better sound quality. That has to happen first before the [recording] industry's going to start producing it.”
Overcompression, however, seems to be one of the biggest obstacles to overcome. With music being compressed to have smaller and smaller dynamic ranges, the need for the next high-fidelity audio format vanishes. If record companies aren't making use of the full dynamic capability of CDs, then why bother moving to another format with even more potentially unused capability? And with the average consumer being either completely unaware of, or only subconsciously irritated by, the current state of overcompressed music, there is little incentive for sound quality to progress. Consequently, all the potential benefits of higher-quality audio—lifelike dynamic range, greater frequency response, and multichannel surround sound—remain unseen, even though the technology exists today. Audiophiles are forced to return to vinyl and analog recordings that should have been obsolete 20 years ago.

But there might still be hope for getting out of the loudness war. RMS (average) normalization algorithms, such as Replay Gain, have been implemented in many digital audio players and work to bring all songs in a digital library to the same average level. With Replay Gain enabled, songs originating from many CDs are processed and played back at a consistent average level of loudness. This helps listeners because they no longer have to adjust their volume each time they go from one album to another. And while such normalization cannot undo the compression of music (it amplifies or reduces the song in its entirety), it counteracts any efforts that were put in to make one song louder than another, essentially nullifying the loudness war altogether.

Many hope that widespread implementation of technologies like Replay Gain will make record companies see that further and further compression in the name of competitive loudness is a feckless task, and slowly but surely popular music will begin to return to a dynamic, less-compressed state. In fact, many digital audio players have caught on; Winamp uses Replay Gain, and iTunes has its own normalization option called Sound Check, which also works on iPods.

Whether the loudness war can end and give rise to the next generation of high-fidelity audio depends heavily on the attitudes of consumers. Unlike the CD and DVD video, there is no overwhelming industrial push toward the next level of sound quality. How songs and albums will sound will depend entirely on whether or not the listener actually cares about the intricacies of the music.

For a multimedia version of this article click here.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429





Nevermind Baby: 'I Feel Like I'm the World's Biggest Porn Star'
NeutralMilk

Spencer Elden, who was photograhed in 1991 for the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind (and is now 17), told MTV: "Yeah, it's kind of creepy that that many people have seen me naked. I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star." Yeah, for pederasts.

Elden goes to Eagle Rock High School in Eagle Rock, California and is, by all accounts, a pretty normal dude. "It's kind of cool, knowing that I've been on an album cover, but I feel pretty normal about it because growing up, I've always known I was the Nirvana baby. It never really struck me as like, 'Oh, shit — that's me on the cover.' It's always just been whatever for me. At the time, my parents didn't know who Nirvana was. No one really knew who they were. And then all of a sudden, it took off, and I just happened to be on the album cover." Did I say "normal"? I meant "self-righteous." Did you seriously just refer to yourself as "the Nirvana baby"?

I'll let him out-douche himself: "I have to use stupid pickup lines like, 'You want to see my penis ... again.'"

Emo.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/25018