[JackSpratts]

Save Internet Freedom--from Regulation
Larry Downes

Rep. Edward Markey is preparing to reintroduce legislation that would prohibit Internet access providers from offering priority service to content providers--known as the Net neutrality principle.

Similar legislation has failed in both the House and Senate in the past, but proponents of Net neutrality haven't given up.

If only they would.

The Internet has thrived in large part because it has managed to sidestep a barrage of efforts to regulate it, including laws to ban indecent material, levy sales tax on e-commerce, require Web sites to provide "zoning" tags, and to criminalize spam, file sharing, and spyware.

Some of these laws have been overturned by the courts; some died before being passed; and the rest--well, the rest are effectively ignored, thanks to the Internet's remarkable ability (so far) to treat regulation as a network failure and reroute around the problem.

Proponents of Net neutrality--some of whom have led the battles against other forms of network regulation--argue that this law is different. Mandating Net neutrality is simple, fair, and preserves the very features of the Internet that make it so valuable. Indeed, the Senate's version of Net neutrality legislation carries the lofty title of Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

The problem with "simple" regulations is that they never are--especially when the industry being regulated, thanks to new technologies, is evolving rapidly.

Who could be against preserving freedom?

But the information superhighway to hell is surely paved with good intentions.

That's the lesson of America's first misadventure in enforcing "neutrality" on a key piece of national infrastructure: the railroads.

Nearly 100 years ago, shippers in cities between the Mississippi and the West Coast, which were largely served by only one road, found that they were being charged higher rates to subsidize competitive tariffs from cities east of the Mississippi, where shippers had several choices.

Like those calling today for Net neutrality, the Intermountain shippers demanded "reasonable and fair" rates of carriage. Congress agreed, but it left the definition and enforcement of these deceptively simple terms to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

So, what was "reasonable"?

The ICC struggled for decades to answer that single question, spending 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars before giving up, unable to agree on how to value the railroad's assets in order to calculate a reasonable rate of return. With the industry consumed by this "simple" effort to make its operations "fair," other forms of transportation emerged and ultimately put the railroads out of their misery.

More recently, the Civil Aviation Board (CAB), which micromanaged U.S. commercial air travel until 1978, worked to ensure "fair" ticket prices for everyone but in practice created a mess of routes, subsidized carriers, and indecipherable rate structures. Since the CAB was dismantled, air travel has not only expanded but, thanks to market forces, is now also cheaper for consumers.

And what about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the law passed in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, and other corporate scandals? SOX requires "transparency" in financial statements, a worthwhile goal, but one that, so far, has cost public companies that weren't committing fraud billions of dollars in compliance. No one seriously believes that money has helped investors make sense of a single balance sheet.

The problem with "simple" regulations is that they never are--especially when the industry being regulated, thanks to new technologies, is evolving rapidly.

"Net neutrality" only sounds obvious. Cable operators already discriminate between your Internet traffic and your TV traffic, in favor of the latter, because the programming needs priority to maintain its integrity. The Federal Communications Commission--left, like the ICC before it, to work out the details under all proposed Net neutrality legislation--would need to carve out an exception for that non-neutral behavior.

There will be many such exceptions, some based on network activities not yet invented. Indeed, in response to the remarkable range of unplanned uses to which the Internet has been put over the last 10 years, some of its original designers are working on technologies to optimize the Web's increasingly complex traffic patterns--efforts that would run afoul of Net neutrality proposals, perhaps unintentionally.

Worse still, imagine how complaints of non-neutral rates of carriage would be investigated. The FCC would have to monitor network traffic and seize and open the packets in question. So why do the same civil-liberties groups that recognize the value of keeping the government out of Internet content want to open a loophole large enough to drive several Mack trucks through?

Then, as now, there is an appropriate role for government. The development of the U.S. railroad system was greatly aided by initial investment in infrastructure, including basic research, land grants, rights-of-way, and efforts to help the industry agree on standards for track gauge (like the Internet, an open standard), operating techniques, and interline cooperation.

State and federal governments have performed similar positive services on behalf of the national communications infrastructure, and they continue to do so in the form of auctions, basic protocols, and "spectrum grants" for new communications services such as digital TV. (These days, state and federal dollars aren't being invested in communications infrastructure. Witness California's recent massive infrastructure bonds, which include transportation, education, and water, but not communications.)

Good infrastructure management establishes the rules for a competitive market, and then stands back to let buyers and sellers bargain toward the most valuable use of assets.

We need that helpful kind of government intervention, not a stake in the heart of a thriving and rapidly evolving infrastructure.

Let's preserve Internet freedom--freedom from regulation, that is.
http://www.news.com/Save-Internet-fr...3-6222385.html





The Team That Put the Net in Orbit
John Markoff

AS a young NASA engineer during the 1980s, Milo Medin liked to irritate his managers by building scientific computer networks using freely available Internet software that outperformed more costly commercial systems.

He was a member of a rebel generation of engineers and scientists that created what would become the commercial Internet during a tumultuous decade. And this group did so by ignoring conventions and adopting a cooperative spirit that turned into the hallmark of the open source software movement.

Some 220 of the original Internet pioneers met here at the end of November to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the NSFnet, the scientific data network that was originally constructed to tie together the nation’s five supercomputer centers and that would ultimately explode into today’s Internet. By the time the academic network was shut down in 1996, it connected 6.6 million host computers and extended to 93 countries.

The story of the network and its impact on the world is a case study in the role of serendipity in technology design and in the power of a deftly managed public-private partnership.

“It has to be one of the most successful handoffs in history,” said John H. Marburger III, the science adviser to the president, who spoke at the conference.

At the heart of the partnership’s success was a technological gamble: the decision by the National Science Foundation to support a relatively unproven set of software protocols known as TCP/IP that had been developed at Stanford with Pentagon support in the 1980s. It was an idea that is obvious in retrospect, but it was radical at the time. TCP/IP served as a vital lingua franca between previously incompatible computer networks.

“For the first time in the history of computing, all of the computing platforms spoke the same language,” said Allan H. Weis, a veteran I.B.M. researcher who played a crucial role in the commercialization effort.

Although discussions of industrial policy and the federal government’s role in shaping innovation have been muted during the Bush administration, a number of scientists and corporate executives who met here said NSFnet remained a powerful example of how a handful of government bureaucrats in concert with an equally small number of scientists made a set of carefully considered federal policy decisions, in this case leading directly to the modern Internet.

The researchers who built the original network believe that the NSFnet experience can be translated to advance the nation’s science and technology policies more broadly.

“There are so many important areas where this country could lead,” Mr. Weis said. “If we learned one thing with the NSFnet experience, I think it was that the government has the ability to help advance science and technology in this country by holding out a carrot, and using the stick as a pointer.”

The lesson learned, he said, is that it is crucial for government and industry to share financial risks. That would make it possible to move forward in areas as diverse as materials technology, biology and energy efficiency.

The specific form would be to create new “grand challenges” in technology, Mr. Weis said.

Though it’s almost impossible now to imagine living in a world without the Web, the transition from the academic and scientific NSFnet to the commercial Internet did not come without conflict. There were bitter arguments among the participants over whether commercialization should take place at all.

And when the National Science Foundation contracted with a partnership of I.B.M., the MCI Corporation and the Merit Network — a group of Michigan universities and a state agency — to manage the network’s backbone, the resulting Non-Profit Advanced Network Services created bitter resentment among early commercial Internet service providers.

“The idea of network as a service was a new thing, and it was difficult to convince everybody a) that it was a good idea and b) that it was legal,” said Steve Wolff, director of network research at the National Science Foundation from 1986 to 1995. According to a wide range of conference participants, NSFnet ultimately succeeded because of both the hacker culture of engineers that built the system and the very nature of the network they were creating; it fostered intellectual collaboration in a way not previously possible.

“The model of a network where no one is in charge is a model that can scale,” said Douglas E. Van Houweling, the chairman of the Merit Network when the NSFnet backbone was constructed.

Giving the network time to develop was vital, he added, because the Internet “was an alien concept to the communication industry when it began growing.”

While there was no risk for MCI, which was then an upstart trying to gain ground on AT&T, that was not true of I.B.M. The company played a crucial role in the development of the Internet, and it did so despite the fact that the new network was a direct competitive threat to its multibillion-dollar communications networking business, based on a competing standard known as Systems Network Architecture, or S.N.A.

“Although we had the blessing of senior management at I.B.M., they had no idea how disruptive this would be,” said John A. Armstrong, I.B.M.’s director of research at the time the NSFnet was built. “I.B.M. was a large and complex organization, and the decision was made by part of I.B.M.”

IN the 2000 election, Al Gore, then the vice president, was derided by opponents who claimed that he had said he “created” the Internet. But many of the scientists, engineers and technology executives who gathered here to celebrate the Web’s birth say he played a crucial role in its development, and they expressed bitterness that his vision had been so discredited.

Mr. Gore had been instrumental in introducing legislation, beginning in 1988, to finance what he originally called a “national data highway.”

“Our corporations are not taking advantage of high-performance computing to enhance their productivity,” Mr. Gore, then a senator, said in an interview at the time. “With greater access to supercomputers, virtually every business in America could achieve tremendous gains.”

Ultimately, in 1991, his bill to create a National Research and Education Network did pass. Funded by the National Science Foundation, it was instrumental in upgrading the speed of the academic and scientific network backbone leading up to the commercialized Internet.

“He is a hero in this field,” said Lawrence H. Landweber, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin who in 1980 made the pioneering decision to use the basic TCP/IP Internet protocol for CSNET, an academic network that preceded NSFnet and laid the foundation for “internetworking.”

For engineers and scientists like Mr. Medin, who went on to be a co-founder of @Home Networks and is now trying to build a national wireless data network, the NSFnet experience provides a lesson about interplay between technology and government policy.

“In that era the government said, ‘Let’s experiment and move everyone forward,’” he said. “If you had waited for a market, it would never have funded an NSFnet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/bu.../09stream.html





IFPI's European Christmas List: Content Filtering and P2P Blocking
Nate Anderson

Imagine a world in which a single industry could control an entire continent's access to particular web sites, force ISPs to install expensive deep packet inspection gear that would search the complete Internet data streams of millions of users, and force Internet applications to conform to its design parameters or risk being blocked. If you're a European consumer, this might sound like a paranoid dystopia, but it's actually a vision of paradise—if paradise were designed by the IFPI.

In a recent memo to European legislators, the worldwide music lobby laid out its vision of a world in which all ISPs adopted three "feasible and reasonable options" to help address copyright infringement on their networks.

It's a familiar troika: content filtering of audio files using fingerprinting technology, protocol blocking of "specific P2P services that are known to be predominately infringing," and blocking access to specific web sites such as AllOfMP3 (as in Denmark) and The Pirate Bay. The plan is neither "burdensome or expensive," says IFPI, and it doesn't cause any problems for "regular service." Sadly (and shockingly!), ISPs in question haven't warmed to the plan voluntarily. As IFPI so delicately puts it, "This cooperation has not been sufficiently forthcoming from ISPs in Europe so far."

The EFF, which posted a copy of the memo (PDF), is worried that the proposal could well gain favorable attention from European lawmakers who are currently considering a bill that calls on "Internet service providers to apply filtering measures to prevent copyright infringements." The group sent a letter of its own (PDF) to the European Parliament, pointing out that making the IFPI's wishlist into law could have some drawbacks.

Much like the music industry list, the EFF's objections are unsurprising. Automated filtering solutions could negatively impact education and research, harm European innovation, and weaken privacy protections by setting up deep packet inspection gear in every European ISP. In addition, the filtering would have little effect on copyright infringement because file-swappers would simply encrypt their communications. And don't forget mashups! What would happen to our mashups?

But many legislators don't care about mashups. Fortunatetly, the EFF has another argument likely to carry some sway in Europe: the shadow of totalitarian spy services. This sort of powerful, intrusive filtering, set loose across most of Europe, also has huge potential for abuse. "Any country that has a centralized system in place to pry into all its citizen's private communications," says the EFF's Danny O'Brien, "and then preemptively sever those which it deems 'unsuitable,' creates both a very disturbing precedent, and a dangerously powerful tool vulnerable to misuse."

With or without new legislation, though, it looks like the EU is about to get new criminal (not just civil) penalties for certain kinds of copyright infringement. The European Parliament passed the controversial IPRED2 legislation back in April, but owing to legal uncertainties surrounding the failed European constitution, it hasn't been clear that the EU has the authority to create new criminal law like this.

According to EFF Europe's "Copyrcime" web campaign against the bill, this issue was settled in late November after a ruling from the European Court of Justice. That ruling said that the EU can enact criminal law but cannot control the penalties that each state imposes. IPRED2 could well be adopted, though the specific penalties it prescribes for copyright violations would be out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-blocking.html





Intel Targets WiMAX with Software Radio Device
Nick Flaherty

Intel has developed a test chip for software defined radio that can handle WiFi, WiMAX and DVB-H digital TV in one chip.

This kind of chip would allow equipment to access the WiFi network in the home, automatically handover to a WiMAX network when you leave the house and also access digital TV on the move, all through one chip.

“There is a shift from people wanting their content any time, anywhere to any device, any network, and the problem is there are too many radios,” said Jeff Hoffman, system architect for the wireless communications lab.

The chip tapes out next week and uses nine processing elements in different combinations to handle the three protocols. The processing elements are linked by a network on chip for the data and a control bus using the open OCP bus protocol with an ARC 605 configurable processor as the system controller. This has been extended with a 32 x 32 fast multiplier to handle the network access, and provides 303DMIPS of performance at 233MHz with just 17mW of peak power.

The test chip measures 24mm2 overall and consumes 79mW in receive mode at 52Mbit/s and 72mW in transmit, and links to three RF chips for the different networks.

“This provides all the digital signal processing and forward error correction for these three protocols and the area is still comparable to three fixed function Asics,” said Hoffman.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...dio+device.htm





FireWire Spec to Boost Data Speeds to 3.2 Gbps
W. David Gardner

A new set of specs for data transfer technology will quadruple top speeds to 3.2 Gbps. Formally known as IEEE 1394, the technology is called FireWire by Apple and i.LINK by Sony..

The new version is called S3200 and builds on the earlier specification approved by the IEEE, according to the trade association that is preparing to unveil the details this week. The technology will be able to use existing FireWire 800 cables and connectors while delivering a major boost in performance.

"It will probably go into storage products first," said 1394 Trade Association spokesman Richard Davies in an e-mail Wednesday. "It should turn up in set-top boxes and maybe Blue-ray devices, too. It's too soon to tell how fast consumer electronics makers might adopt it."

FireWire technology already powers hard drives that can move more data at speeds of 90 Mbps, and the technology's low power consumption frees users from the necessity of using AC power adapters.

The new spec also will let users interconnect various home-networking appliances via coax cable, "linking HDTVs with set-top boxes, TVs, and computers in various rooms around a home or office," Davies said. The new release enables the transmission of FireWire data over distances of more than 100 meters. Home entertainment centers are likely to be an early application.

Another FireWire feature likely to contribute to its use in entertainment applications is its peer-to-peer architecture, which paves the way for its use with or without a computer. Already virtually all high definition cable TV company set-top boxes already utilise FireWire ports as well as many models of HDTV. "FireWire is the only separable interface today that can record HD programs in their full digital quality while also meeting the content protecton requirements of copyright holders," he said.

The 1394 Trade Association said more than one billion FireWire ports have been shipped to date on a wide variety of products ranging from computers, cameras, and TVs to hard drives and musical instruments. The technology has also found its way into more esoteric state-of-the-art aircraft and polar orbiting satellites, which require the rapid transfer of vast amounts of data.

The new FireWire release will likely be compared to USB 3.0, which is still under development. USB and FireWire are alternately viewed as competitive or complementary, depending on the beholder. Many PCs, for instance, feature ports with both technologies. Many developers and users like the idea that FireWire-equipped hard drives can operate at high rotational speeds without an AC adapter, while USB drives may require an additional power source, provided often by a second USB port.

James Snider, executive director of the 1394 Trade Association, said the new specification will begin its ratification process in January. "The S3200 standard will sustain the position of IEEE 1394 as the absolute performance leader in multi-purpose I/O ports for consumer applications in computer and CE devices," Snider said, in a statement.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/66868,...o-32-gbps.aspx





Crossover Dreams: Turning Free Web Work Into Real Book Sales
Motoko Rich

Three years ago “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” a children’s novel illustrated with cartoons, was published online, where anyone could read it free. To this day anyone still can, at Funbrain.com, an educational Web site.

Despite laments about youngsters spending too much time surfing the Web and not enough time reading, it turns out that many of them still want the format of old-fashioned paper stuck between two covers. Since an edited form of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” was published as a traditional book in April by Amulet, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, it has sold 147,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks 50 percent to 70 percent of retail sales. The book, written and drawn by Jeff Kinney, has spent 33 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. This Sunday, it will be No. 1 on the Children’s Chapter Books list.

That a book derived from free online content has sold so well may allay some fears that giving something away means nobody will want to pay for it. It also encourages publishers who increasingly scour the Internet for talent, hoping to capitalize on the audiences that a popular Web site can deliver.

“I think books are still things, thank goodness, that people want to own,” said Michael Jacobs, chief executive of Abrams. “The package of the book and the way it feels is something apart and separate from being able to read it online.”

Other works that have moved successfully from the Internet into print include the series of books based on postsecret.blogspot.com (among them “Post Secret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives” and “My Secret”), a Web-based project created by Frank Warren on which anonymous contributors confess their deepest secrets on postcards; “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” a collection of apparently autobiographical stories, more than half of which first appeared on the blog of the author, Tucker Max (tuckermax.com); and “Julie & Julia,” Julie Powell’s memoir of racing to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which grew out of her Salon.com blog.

But there is no clear alchemy that turns a popular Web site into a best seller, and several books based on blogs or other Internet material have flopped. “I don’t think there is a formula,” Mr. Warren said. “There is a bit of magic there that can’t be replicated.”

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School who has published three of his four books online as well as on paper, said book sales depended on whether the number of people who discover the book online and then buy a hard copy outnumbers “the number of people who would have bought the book and now won’t because it’s free.”

Hyperion recently made a leap of faith when it reportedly paid $6.7 million to acquire the rights to “Last Lecture,” a book to be based on a talk given at Carnegie Mellon University by Randy Pausch, a 47-year-old computer-science professor who has terminal pancreatic cancer. Videos of the lecture — or parts of it — on YouTube and elsewhere on the Web have been viewed more than 6 million times.

Robert Miller, president of Hyperion, said he believed the book would sell even though prospective readers can see the core of its message online. “A book has a chance to have a timeless quality that’s different from a speech given in real time,” Mr. Miller said.

In the case of “Wimpy Kid,” it appears that word of mouth is driving sales as much as readers first finding the novel online. “I am getting boys and their parents coming in saying, ‘My friend told me about this book,’” said Jan Dundon, children’s coordinator at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill. “I’m not hearing kids going, ‘Oh, there’s this cool Web site.’”

Mr. Kinney, a design director at Family Education Network, a unit of Pearson that operates Funbrain, where “Wimpy Kid” first appeared, spent 10 years writing the book and always intended to publish it in print form. But after discussing it with his boss, Jess Brallier, the publisher of the Family Education Network, Mr. Kinney decided to serialize his book on Funbrain.com in part to attract children to the site during the summer. As an unknown author, he figured he might gain more exposure if he published the book — which looks as if it could be a hand-written diary of a mischievous middle-school boy — on a Web site with thousands of daily visitors in his target market.

Mr. Kinney, who once wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist, knew it was a risk. “I was afraid that by publishing it online, it might cheapen the work and make it harder for me to get published,” he said.

The serialized diary, with its perfectly pitched wit and believably self-centered hero, became one of Funbrain’s most popular features. Mr. Brallier estimated that parts of the book’s roughly 1,300 online pages have been viewed 50 million times.

After Mr. Kinney signed a three-book deal with Abrams for a five-figure advance, he worked with his editor, Charles Kochman, to sharpen plot lines and divide the online text into three volumes, the first of which is just 217 pages. (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules,” the second volume, will be published as a book in February.)

The publisher decided to keep the longer version online, even at the risk of cannibalizing sales. Mr. Kochman said that children were likely to have restricted time to use the Web. The two versions, he said, “can comfortably co-exist.”

Taking down free material can be controversial. When Scott Adams, the “Dilbert” comic strip artist, removed the archives from his blog, dilbertblog.typepad.com, after Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Group, published “Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!” in October, some readers balked.

Mr. Adams said he never expected that people who had already read the book’s content online would want to buy the book. But, he said, he hoped that they would recommend it or buy it as a gift. What he misjudged, he said, was “the fact that people want their stuff for free.”

The authors of “Shooting War,” a graphic novel that grew out of a Web comic (shootingwar.com), purposely limited the amount of material they put up online. Anthony Lappé, the writer, and Dan Goldman, the illustrator, always knew they wanted a book deal, and only posted 11 chapters on a Web magazine, smithmag.net.

They reworked that material, changed an important plot point and added 110 more pages for the book, a hard-hitting satirical story about a left-wing video blogger who ends up working for a sensationalist news network while embedded with an Army unit in Baghdad in the year 2011. The book was released last month by Grand Central Publishing; it’s too early to see if it will follow the trajectory of “Wimpy Kid.”

Some readers are already catching on. Mel Odom, a writer and father of five in Moore, Okla., ordered a copy of “Shooting War,” because he “wanted something I could put on my shelf.” Mr. Odom, who also bought his youngest son a copy of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” after he read the entire thing online, added: “There’s nothing like holding the weight and smelling the paper.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/books/13webbook.html





Nobel Winner Blames Cultural Decline on "Blogging and Blugging"
Nate Anderson

Doris Lessing, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered her acceptance speech last week. It's a powerful plea for reading and for education and for joining in the "great tradition" of books, but Lessing wonders why poor students in southern Africa have a stronger desire for books than do the wealthy students of England. Her answer: TV and the Internet.

Lessing is an old woman now (b. 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia) and wasn't able to deliver the speech in person, but that didn't stop her from crafting a fiery speech about the power of books.

She grew up in Persia (now Iran) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and she is largely self-educated. The Nobel committee calls her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

Lessing's Nobel diploma

She's also no fan of blogging. Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

She contrasts this attitude with the hunger for books shown by students she has visited in Zimbabwe and other African countries, but also with the workingmen's clubs and lending libraries that characterized Victorian England. Her attack on TV, computers, and the Internet, though brief, is crucial to the piece: it is her single reason for the perceived decline in the desire to read.

One could respond to this in many ways, but perhaps the most fruitful would be to simply accept Lessing's premise. TV and computers and the Internet have changed the ways that people spend their time, and those changes have not always been critically examined by those parents who now allow their average US child to watch four hours of television a day. There is much that could be condemned here, from obesity to short attention spans to the singing of Barney songs.

And yet, perhaps book lovers will need to accept that the "great tradition" of literary art is moving into a new medium. It's not the first time. Print did the same thing to an oral culture, and recorded pop music has largely replaced poetry for most in the modern world. But television, films, and web sites can all offer powerful stories. And print, far from dying out, is being consumed in massive quantities online. The issue, as it has always been, is pointing readers and viewers to the sort of material worth their time and attention, material that tells true stories about the world or enlarges our sense of what it means to be human or offers real entertainment. What needs to be avoided is the content, online and off, that is little more than pabulum spoonfed to those who want fare just rich enough to keep them from boredom.

Books are also a great offender in this regard, as anyone who has perused the racks of paperback novels at a supermarket can attest. Bashing those who "blog and blug" (that is, read and write) seems to be missing the point; so too does the glorification of paper copies of Anna Karenina. Text is in no danger of dying out (see Amazon's Kindle); in fact, neither is print. Critics have been wondering for years whether too many books are currently being published.

Lessing tells an anecdote about a visit to a posh London school. She goes to the library. She is told, "You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used." If true, it does seem a sad story, but the answer simply cannot be a fetishization of books. We need instead to encourage the consumption (and thoughtful digestion) of artful fiction and nonfiction on whatever page or screen it appears.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-blugging.html





JK Rowling Magic Tales Fetch $3.98 Million
Jeremy Lovell

A hand-written, illustrated book of wizardry by Harry Potter author JK Rowling fetched a record 1.95 million pounds ($3.98 million) at auction in London on Thursday, nearly 40 times its expected price.

"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" had been expected to go for up to 50,000 pounds at the Sotheby's sale.

The buyer was from London dealer Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, the auctioneer said.

"There was applause when it reached one million and more when it finished," a Sotheby's spokesman said. "Bidding lasted about 10 minutes with four or five bidders in the room and the same number on the phones."

The price is the highest ever achieved at auction for a modern literary manuscript, an auction record for a work by JK Rowling, and an auction record for a children's book.

All proceeds from the sale will go to The Children's Voice, a charity Rowling co-founded in 2005 to help vulnerable children across Europe.

"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" are mentioned in the last Potter book as having been left to Harry's friend Hermione by their teacher Albus Dumbledore.

Of the five stories in the book only one, "The Tale of the Three Brothers", is told in the Potter novels, appearing in the final Potter book "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

"'The Tales of Beedle the Bard' is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I loved and lived in for 17 years," Rowling wrote in the sale catalogue.

There are just seven copies of the Tales, bound in brown leather and decorated in silver and moonstones. Six have been given to people closely connected to the Harry Potter books.

The seventh was auctioned on Thursday.

(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; Editing by Tim Pearce)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...10247720071213





Flying Solo
Wayne Curtis

I saw my first iPod vending machine a little over a year ago at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. It looked pretty much like a vending machine from which you buy Skittles and Doritos, except boxier and you stick in your credit card and out comes a $250 iPod. I’ve since seen a few more of these at other airports. I’ve never seen anyone actually buy anything from them, but I often see people gathered around them, the looks on their faces saying, well, here’s more evidence that America has finally gone off the rails.

But they’re wrong. Those vending machines are not a curiosity catering to mad, impulse-buying American consumers. It is a public service, vending a surprisingly effective antidote to the tumult of air travel. Of all the technologies that have smoothed out the flying experience for consumers — Wi-Fi in terminals, large flat screen monitors that tell you your flight’s been canceled in high-def — I believe that the chief advance has been little machines and the vast stores of music and words available to fill them.

A music player is, basically, a very large tablet of Valium. It provides almost instant ease, carving out a private world around you, and allowing you to move through thickening crowds wrapped in your own version of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, and endure flight delays and boarding areas with no seats with unexpected equanimity. I now consider my own iPod as essential a part of air travel these days as a one-quart, Ziploc bag. (Note: music players are most effective for solo travelers. Parents traveling over the holidays with small children should take actual Valium.)

While I wholly agree with my colleague on this blog Pico Iyer that the Golden Age of air travel was actually more of a Pyrite Age, all glittery at a distance but not so rich up close, many brand new annoyances crop up daily to which we must adapt. And simply not knowing what new small horror will be next adds to the stress of flying. For instance, for past several months, many of us have been very concerned about accidentally tapping our feet to the piped in music when patronizing airport bathrooms.

But heading to my gate on a moving walkway with “The Girl From Ipanema” blaring in my ears and all manner of people streaming by, I find everything soothing and vaguely cinematic, like watching a film made by a forgotten French filmmaker.

Generally, though, I prefer words to music. Audio books and podcasts create an even more impenetrable carapace around me. The only thing I have to compare it to is the feeling of dislocation upon emerging from a movie theater in a small and poor foreign country after spending two hours watching a George Clooney movie. Out on the sidewalk, amid donkeys and unfamiliar aromas, you blink, then blink again, but to no avail. It takes several minutes for your mind to race back and find you.

The same thing happens when you pack your head with the spoken word while in an airport. You get seduced away from the gummy food-court tables and squawking announcements about unattended luggage and into a far more appealing parallel universe. Thrillers and mysteries are good, but so are free downloads like “This American Life” and Harry Shearer’s “Le Show.”

The most powerfully sedative free download I’ve discovered is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Times,” a BBC show. Each 42-minute weekly episode involves the host and three academics discussing topics of riveting obscurity. Here are the subjects currently in my queue: “Discovery of Oxygen,” “Antimatter,” “17th-Century Print Culture,” “Prime Numbers,” “Diet of Worms,” “The St. Peterloo Massacre of 1819” and “The Fibonacci Sequence” (Teaser: “An infinite string of numbers named after, but not invented by, the 13th century Italian mathematician Fibonacci.”)

I don’t know why, but these discussions always take me to a galaxy far, far away from the airport — it’s like a vacation nestled within my vacation. The more obscure the topic, the more relaxed I become. For the first time in years, I’m looking forward to holiday travel.
http://jetlagged.blogs.nytimes.com/2...2/flying-solo/





One Step from the Top, Essex Boy Who Reached Apple’s Core

The designer has come a long way — from a technophobe at a British polytechnic to being mooted as the US giant’s next CEO
Chris Ayres

He holds one of the most powerful corporate jobs in America. His admirers (and customers) include Bono, George W. Bush and the Queen. This year the readers of Time magazine put him among the 100 most influential people on Earth.

Could Jonathan Ive, the publicity-shy Essex boy who started his career designing toilets and combs, be close to performing one of the most extraordinary coups in American business history?

Could this 40-year-old gym-toned, shaven-headed, Aston Martin-driving Brit, who lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco, with his wife, who is a historian, and their twin sons, be the next man to run Apple Computer?

Mr Ive, known to colleagues as Jony, is already Apple’s senior vice-president of industrial design, credited widely with the development of every Apple product from the iMac to the iPhone.

Sales of Mr Ive’s iPhone in Europe are already set to reach half a million – way ahead of analysts’ forecasts. Meanwhile, the iMac, which Mr Ive first revealed nine years ago in Paris, explaining that he wanted it to look like a grapefruit, is continuing to convert more and more PC users to its anorexic design and simpler, less buggy operating system.

Mr Ive’s efforts were rewarded by the Queen last year with a CBE. It has since been revealed that Her Majesty’s appreciation went deeper than many thought: the 81-year-old monarch is the owner of a 6Gb Royal iPod, a gift from Prince Andrew.

But how could a boy from Chingford, East London, ever replace Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and CEO. Although Mr Jobs, 52, is considered by some a tyrant (“being Steved” is shorthand for being fired at Apple), he also an icon and more revered than he is reviled.

And yet he is under growing pressure to name his ultimate replacement, as many fear that a company built on one man’s personality needs a clear succession plan. Jess McMullin, a prominent Silicon Valley blogger, has gone as far as to write an open letter to Apple’s board of directors, pointing out that it is their “fiduciary duty to develop a succession plan”, and that Jonathan Ive should be at the top of their list.

Dan Moren, co-editor of MacUser, agrees. He describes Mr Ive as “the man who embodies what Apple is perhaps most famous for – design”.

There are other reasons for all the talk of succession at Apple – or, as the company’s obsessive followers like to say, the need for a “postSteve scenario”. The company has been made vulnerable by a scandal over stock options – essentially, the opportunity to buy stock for aknockdown price in the hope of selling it at a profit later – that emerged in August last year and has refused to go away.

Apple is one of hundreds of companies accused of unfairly rigging its stock options programme to ensure guaranteed windfalls for executives. On Wall Street, high-profile casualties continue to mount: on Thursday the former chief executive of United-Health Group agreed to forfeit almost half a billion dollars in stock options and pay a $7 million fine to settle an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s financial watchdog.

The SEC has indicated that it has no plans to take action against Apple, but it has filed fraud charges against Nancy Heinen, the company’s former general counsel, and settled an investigation into Fred Anderson, the computer company’s former chief financial officer.

Despite Apple’s reassurances to the public, many are convinced that the SEC is still circling – and as the case against Ms Heinen progresses (she denies any wrongdoing) interest in Apple’s internal politics is only likely to heighten.

It is thought that Mr Jobs himself has been asked to give an official statement, or deposition, as part of the case. Apple maintains that Mr Jobs did nothing wrong, and is eager to point out that the company has been praised by the SEC for its “swift, extensive and extraordinary cooperation”. Yet Apple is also facing a revised lawsuit from a powerful San Francisco law firm that claims that Mr Jobs made hundreds of millions of dollars from unfairly “backdated” stock options.

No matter how remote the possibility of Mr Jobs standing down might be, some investors would be happier if Mr Ive was named officially as the Apple CEO’s successor to avoid future doubt.

Mark Molumphy, the lawyer who is filing the revised lawsuit against Apple, conceded to The Times that Mr Ive was more or less untouchable as far as the stock options litigation goes. “The evidence we’ve seen does not implicate him,” he said.

Mr Ive has admitted that he is more of a designer than a computer geek. “I went through college having a real problem with computers,” he said at a rare speech in 2003. “I was convinced that I was technically inept. Right at the end of my time at college, I discovered the Mac. I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use.”

As an art and design student at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) Mr Ive designed a pebble-shaped object to replace credit cards, a pen for people who like to fiddle with pens and a white plastic hearing aid for deaf children. Unsurprisingly, he graduated with first-class honours while also winning two Royal Society of Arts student design awards.

Later he co-founded his own design studio, Tangerine, whose clients included the toilet manufacturer Ideal Standard. Another of his clients was a then-struggling computer company called Apple, which had just fired its co-founder, Mr Jobs.

By 1992 Mr Ive had moved to Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, in Northern California. When Mr Jobs returned from exile in 1997, Mr Ive was almost fired amid the confusion. But it didn’t take Mr Jobs long to realise that the man who could turn the company around was already working for him.

Mr Ive was quickly promoted to design chief and launched his first key product: the translucent iMac G3, modelled defiantly on a gumdrop (or, more likely given his British heritage, a wine gum). As part of his research, Mr Ive went on a field trip to a jelly bean factory. At the iMac’s debut in Paris, Mr Ive railed against the “beige box” culture of PCs.

“The computer industry is creatively bankrupt,” he declared. “We knew that the iMac was fast, we didn’t need to make it ugly.”

It was the beginning of a remarkable turnaround for Apple, and a series of hit products – including the all-white iMac, the iPod and now the iPhone – that have helped the company’s stock to rise by more than 1,000 per cent in ten years.

Mr Ive and Mr Jobs are said to talk at least once a day, and Mr Ive shares his boss’s perfectionism (it is claimed that Mr Jobs demanded that the iMac not have a single visible screw).

Mr Ive’s salary is not disclosed by Apple, but the company’s revival is thought to have made him very, very wealthy – hence the Aston Martin. It has also brought him many celebrity friends, including Bono, David Byrne, the Talking Heads lead singer, and the designer Paul Smith.

Once described by Business Week magazine as “looking like a graduate student who got lost on the way to Starbucks”, Mr Ive’s rise to power at Apple has astonished company insiders. Apple, after all, is a insular organisation – cultish, some say – and Mr Ive is now considered the Man Behind the Curtain.

“I think Steve Jobs has found somebody in Jony who knows how to complete or even exceed his vision, and do it time and time again,” said Chee Pearlman, who hosted the event at which Mr Ive spoke four years ago.

Mr Ive works in complete secrecy – many Apple employees are not allowed inside his studio – with a dozen or so staff, all of whom earn more than $200,000 a year. His team, which includes a German, an Italian and a New Zealander, is said to come up with some of its best ideas while sitting in the studio’s kitchen eating pizza. Like his boss, and like employees of Apple’s retail stores, Mr Ive turns up to work every morning in jeans, trainers, T-shirt and polo neck sweater.

There are sceptics, of course. Some have suggested that Mr Ive lacks the charisma to become “Steve 2.0”, and that he could never deliver Mr Jobs’s Hollywood-style press conferences, replayed endlessly on YouTube.

And yet of all the potential succession candidates, the Briton who once described himself as technically inept is by far the favourite. True to form he is keeping a low profile.

Susan Lundgren, an Apple spokeswoman, told The Times: “Jony feels his time would be better spent doing his job than doing interviews.”
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle3019090.ece





Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad

An A&E billboard 'whispers' a spooky message audible only in your head in push to promote its new 'Paranormal' program
Andrew Hampp

New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings.

Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it's another story.

Ms. Wilson, a New York-based stylist, said she expected the voice inside her head to be some type of creative project but could see how others might perceive it differently, particularly on a late-night stroll home. "I might be a little freaked out, and I wouldn't necessarily think it's coming from that billboard," she said.

Less-intrusive approach?
Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics, said the creepy approach is key to drawing attention to A&E's show. But, he noted, the technology was designed to avoid adding to noise pollution. "If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it," he said. "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."

Holosonics has partnered with a cable network once before, when Court TV implemented the technology to promote its "Mystery Whisperer" in the mystery sections of select bookstores. Mr. Pompei said the company also has tested retail deployments in grocery stores with Procter & Gamble and Kraft for customized audio messaging. So a customer, for example, looking to buy laundry detergent could suddenly hear the sound of gurgling water and thus feel compelled to buy Tide as a result of the sonic experience.

Mr. Pompei contends that the technology will take time for consumers to get used to, much like the lights on digital signage and illuminated billboards did when they were first used. The website Gawker posted an item about the billboard last week with the headline "Schizophrenia is the new ad gimmick," and asked "How soon will it be until in addition to the do-not-call list, we'll have a 'do not beam commercial messages into my head' list?"

"There's going to be a certain population sensitive to it. But once people see what it does and hear for themselves, they'll see it's effective for getting attention," Mr. Pompei said.

More disruptions
A&E's $3 million to $5 million campaign for "Paranormal" includes other more disruptive elements than just the one audio ad in New York. In Los Angeles, a mechanical face creeps out of a billboard as if it's coming toward the viewer, and then recedes. In print, the marketing team persuaded two print players to surrender a full editorial page to their ads, flipping the gossip section in AM New York upside down and turning a page in this week's Parade into a checkerboard of ads for "Paranormal."

It's not the network's first foray into supernatural marketing, having launched a successful viral campaign for "Mind Freak" star Criss Angel earlier this year that allowed users to trick their friends into thinking Mr. Angel was reading their mind via YouTube.

"We all know what you need to do for one of these shows is get people talking about them," said Guy Slattery, A&E's exec VP-marketing. "It shouldn't be pure informational advertising. When we were talking about marketing the show, nearly everyone had a connection with a paranormal experience, and that was a surprise to us. So we really tried to base the whole campaign on people's paranormal experiences."

So was it a ghost or just an annoyed resident who stole the speaker from the SoHo billboard twice in one day last week? Horizon Media, which helped place the billboard, had to find a new device that would prevent theft from its rooftop location. Mr. Pompei only takes it as a compliment that someone would go to the trouble of stealing his technology, but hopes consumer acceptance comes with time. "The sound isn't rattling your skull, it's not penetrating you, it's not doing anything nefarious at all. It's just like having a flashlight vs. a light bulb," he said.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=122491





Canadian ISP Tests Injecting Content into Web Pages
Ryan Paul

Advocates of network neutrality frequently express concerns that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will use sophisticated network filtering technologies that facilitate Deep Packet Inspection to track and modify the content of web pages as they are being served to end users.

The ability to modify Internet content at the network level could potentially be abused by ISPs to insert additional advertising into web pages or perform selective, automated censorship. Although no mainstream ISP in North America engages in such practices, proponents of network neutrality have discovered that Rogers—a Canadian cable Internet provider—is trialing similar technology to inject notices to subscribers in regular web content, leading some to fear that more abusive content manipulation may occur in the future.

Lauren Weinstein, the co-founder of a net neutrality advocacy group called People for Internet Responsibility (PFIR), has published an example of one of the notices that Rogers has begun embedding in web pages. The notice informs users when they are close to reaching their monthly bandwidth cap. According to Weinstein, Rogers is using software created by in-browser marketing firm PerfTech, which can easily be used for more odious endeavors. Rogers uses the software to modify web pages as they are being transmitted, adding JavaScript code that causes the notice to display.

"While Rogers' current planned use for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system (reportedly manufactured by 'In-Browser Marketing' firm 'PerfTech') is for account status messages, it's obvious that commercial ISP content and ads (beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through this mechanism," wrote Weinstein.

The screenshot that Weinstein uses to demonstrate the feature is a Google web page, but the notices will appear on any page that the user visits until they either click a link in the message acknowledging that they have seen it or click a link opting out of seeing future subscriber notices embedded in content.

We asked Rogers for additional information about the subscriber notification system and other potential instances of content manipulation. Rogers confirmed that the notices are being added to pages, but denies plans to engage in more extensive content manipulation. "Rogers has had bandwidth limits on its various tiers of service for several years we are looking at ways to notify customers when he/she hits the 75% mark of that limit," Rogers communications VP Taanta Gupta told Ars. "We do not interfere with the content of the search (it could easily have been a Rogers yahoo search or any web site visit so is certainly not specific to any search engine or web site). This is a trial to make it easier for our customers to keep track of usage. There is no deep package inspection and there is no privacy issue."

Despite the fact that the message is exclusively a notice to subscribers about the service rather than commercial content, some proponents of network neutrality believe that third-party modification of web content—particularly at the ISP-level—fundamentally changes the nature of the Internet in detrimental ways.

"Will Web service providers such as Google and many others, who have spent vast resources in both talent and treasure creating and maintaining their services' appearances and quality, be willing to stand still while any ISP intercepts and modifies their traffic in such a manner?" Weinstein asks, referring to a screenshot of a Rogers subscription information notice plastered onto the top of a Google page. "Google didn't give this ISP any such permission. The ISP simply decided to modify Google on their own."

Although embedding subscription notices in web pages isn't exactly malicious behavior, the use of this practice by Rogers adds credibility to some of the concerns voiced by network neutrality advocates. Rogers already engages in several questionable practices, like impeding the usage of peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

At this stage in the network neutrality debate, when lawmakers and consumers are becoming more aware of the issues at stake, it seems particularly foolish for an ISP to do something that contributes to the credibility of those arguing for stricter regulation. Cable providers appear to be a particularly audacious bunch. Comcast's questionable activities, for instance, are also inviting a regulatory smackdown.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...web-pages.html





AT&T to Buy Cisco Core Routers for Network Upgrade
Ritsuko Ando

Top phone company AT&T Inc will buy core routers from Cisco Systems Inc to upgrade its Internet backbone network, helping to ease fears that slower economic growth will hurt network equipment sales.

The companies did not reveal the price or size of the order for Cisco's CRS-1 core routers, which direct massive amounts of Internet traffic for service providers, but AT&T said on Monday it plans to connect Internet hubs in 25 major U.S. cities with the upgraded network in the coming months.

The announcement comes amid concern about weaker spending by U.S. companies after Cisco reported a fall in orders from banks and automakers last quarter.

Investors have also pointed to competition from smaller rival Juniper Networks Inc, which recently launched a new core router called the T1600 to rival the CRS-1.

Lehman Brothers analyst Inder Singh said news of the order, as well as an announcement that Cisco now has 100 customers for its high-end video conference system called TelePresence, showed the company was benefiting from a strategy of broadening revenue sources.

"Overall, these announcements support our belief that Cisco's diversified strength, led by carrier, commercial, emerging markets and advanced technology, could offset potentially slower spending by U.S. companies," he said.

While Cisco is the world's biggest manufacturer of routers, it has recently been expanding into a wider array of products including software and video. It has also been broadening its geographic reach, investing heavily in China and India.

The CRS-1 sells for $500,000 to more than $1 million, depending on the configuration. Most buyers are large phone and cable service providers such as Comcast Corp, Deutsche Telekom AG and Sprint Nextel Corp.

Cisco shares rose 1.3 percent, or 36 cents, to $27.81 in early-afternoon trade. Juniper shares rose 2.6 percent, or 80 cents, to $31.70.

Growing Traffic

AT&T said the network upgrade was in response to growing Internet traffic as more consumers use the Web to make phone calls and to watch online videos, activities requiring higher connection speeds. The new network will also be used to deliver AT&T's advanced Web and video service, called U-verse.

"As the demand for Internet and IP-based applications continues to explode, IP traffic on the AT&T network has doubled throughout the past two years, and we fully expect this substantial growth to continue in the future," said John Stankey, AT&T's group president of telecoms operations.

AT&T said it chose the CRS-1 after comparing it with similar equipment from other vendors. The upgrade helps to quadruple the speed of the backbone network to 40 gigabits per second.

Analysts' forecasts on Internet traffic growth vary, but Cisco expects Internet protocol (IP), or Web-based, traffic to nearly double every two years through 2011.

Cisco says Web-based video, including webcam traffic and advanced video services like U-verse, is expected to lead the traffic growth, supporting demand for its network equipment.

Kelly Ahuja, vice president and general manager of Cisco's core routing business unit, said one key advantage of the CRS-1 over competing products is its ability to gradually expand without disrupting the network.

"One of the things we talk about with the CRS-1 is the unprecedented scalability. The system is designed to scale in capacity ... you don't need to rip it out for a very long time," he said.

Analysts said the CRS-1 was likely replacing routers by Avici Systems Inc. Avici announced in April that it was discontinuing its core router development.

Lehman's Singh said Avici typically generated between $30 million and $50 million a year in revenue, with a majority coming from AT&T.

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando; editing by Maureen Bavdek)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...39414520071210





AT&T Boosts Dividend, Expanding TV Plans
AP

AT&T Inc. on Tuesday raised its dividend 12.7 percent, announced a share buyback and set a long-term target for its TV service, which is delivered over phone lines, saying it will be available to 30 million customers by 2010.

Shares of the telecommunications company jumped more than 5 percent in morning trading.

The TV announcement by chief executive Randall Stephenson reinforces AT&T's commitment to the service, known as U-verse. Recent news reports said the San Antonio-based company was in talks to acquire satellite TV broadcaster EchoStar Corp., which would have given the company a different route to reach customers.

Stephenson told analysts the new target includes customers in the Southeastern states formerly served by BellSouth Corp., which AT&T acquired late last year.

The U-verse rollout has been delayed several times. A month ago, AT&T trimmed its coverage target for the end of next year to 17 million homes from 18 million. The delay was due to a shift in resources to the former BellSouth.

AT&T expects to spend between $4.5 billion and $5 billion on U-verse through 2008.

The company said it will buy back 400 million shares, which represent about 7 percent of the company's stock, would cost $15.16 billion. AT&T said it expects to complete the repurchase by the end of 2009.

The company said the new repurchase plan supersedes an existing one announced in 2006. AT&T bought $13 billion in shares under that authorization.

AT&T's dividend will rise to 40 cents from 35.5 cents. It will be paid Feb. 1 to shareholders of record on Jan. 10. the telecommunications company said Tuesday.

AT&T shares rose $2.10, or 5.5 percent, to $40 in morning trading Tuesday.
http://www.newsday.com/technology/wi...,7899187.story





Why Wireless Isn't Wide Open

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and other big cellular carriers are dragging their feet on approving services that could compete with their own
Bruce Meyerson

Even as the wireless industry chants a new gospel about opening mobile-phone networks to outside devices and applications, some of the biggest U.S. carriers are quietly blocking new services that would compete with their own.

Would-be mobile-service providers, ranging from startups to major banks to eBay's (EBAY) PayPal have encountered these roadblocks, erected by the likes of AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless. In some cases, cellular carriers have backed down, but only after inflicting costly delays on the new services.

At issue is a type of mobile text message known as a short code, essentially a shortcut that lets cell-phone users access an array of services—say, getting sports scores or voting for a contestant on American Idol—by punching in five or six digits instead of the usual seven plus area code.

Even though it's illegal for phone companies to dictate which phone numbers customers can or can't dial, the carriers do not appear to be breaking any government regulations or industry rules by refusing certain short codes. Wireless-service providers say short-code applicants can still use regular text messaging to offer their services. Still, some experts suggest the actions can be construed as anticompetitive behavior that violates antitrust laws. And if nothing else, the moves undermine the credibility of recent proclamations by Verizon Wireless and AT&T about allowing competing devices and services to run on their rigidly controlled networks.

Global Calls for Less

One company rebuffed by the carriers is Rebtel Networks, a Swedish provider of cheap international calls over the Web. Rebtel wants to use short codes to bring its service to mobile phones. Users would send a text message containing the desired global phone number to Rebtel's short code. They would then receive a text message with a local phone number to dial, paying pennies per minute for the call rather than the much higher sums cellular carriers charge for overseas connections.

In May, Rebtel applied for a short code with the five biggest U.S. wireless providers. Sprint Nextel (S) and AT&T approved the request. But Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Alltel denied the application, Rebtel says. Rebtel co-founder Greg Spector says the company that handled its application was told that Verizon Wireless considered the service "not an allowed international calling plan" and that Alltel refused because Rebtel's service "cannibalizes their international rates." T-Mobile and Alltel didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the Rebtel matter.

Verizon says it has done nothing wrong. "They can still text-message our customers" to offer their service, says spokesman Jeffrey Nelson. "They just don't get to do it in a special way with a short code. We're not blocking anything." Just as a newspaper or TV network is free to reject advertising from a rival media outlet, Nelson says, "we don't need to provide special access to our customers and network to a company that's in direct competition with us."

It's not just small fry that are having trouble launching short-code services. AT&T recently refused to approve short-code applications by four banks that wanted to offer customers a mobile application to check account balances, transfer funds, and perform other transactions, say people familiar with the matter. One of the institutions was Bank of Stockton, a 140-year-old California bank, while two others were among the nation's 20 biggest banks, these sources say, declining to name the larger banks.

Self-Dealing?

The applications, submitted in the third quarter, were rejected in October, these sources say. But under pressure from the banks and financial industry groups, AT&T relented in mid-November and agreed to allow the services, powered by technology from a company named ClairMail. Right around the time it reversed course, AT&T also announced the launch of its own mobile-banking service in partnership with Wachovia (WB) and SunTrust Banks (STI). AT&T declined to discuss specific applications, but stressed that it had approved other banking short codes in the past and has granted the ones in question.

AT&T also impeded a plan by PayPal to bring its online-payment service to mobile phones. PayPal announced the initiative at a wireless-industry trade show in early 2006. While all the other major cell carriers approved PayPal's short code soon after its application, AT&T didn't grant the request until May of this year. "We were in talks with them for a long time, and it just took a little bit longer with them," says Amanda Pires, a PayPal spokeswoman. AT&T didn't respond specifically to questions about PayPal's short code.

The disputes over access to short codes contrast with Verizon's surprise decision in late November to open its network to more phones and services in 2008 (BusinessWeek.com, 11/28/07). That announcement was greeted as the first big crack in a restrictive system that has made it hard for "unauthorized" device and software makers to reach cell-phone users.

Since short codes are relatively new and have rarely aroused controversy, there has been little need for lawmakers and regulators to weigh in on them the way federal and state agencies oversee basic phone service and industry competition. And since the system was created by the wireless industry to further its own business interests, it's unclear whether they have any obligation to provide equal access to all comers.

Legal Precedents May Apply

CTIA, the industry group that administers the U.S. program, discourages short codes that involve sexual content, illegal activity, and prejudice, but it doesn't set any other parameters for what constitutes an acceptable reason to reject an application. "Every pretzel maker in the country would like to have room on supermarket shelves. Every fast-food restaurant would like to be in O'Hare airport," says CTIA spokesman Joseph Farren. "The essence of every business agreement is that it makes sense for both parties. There's no difference here."

The Federal Communications Commission, which has never conducted proceedings or issued rulings concerning short codes, declined to comment for this article. Some industry experts say there's no clear-cut law being violated but suggest that legal precedents set in other areas of telecommunications may be applicable to short codes.

"There's no question that this sounds anticompetitive, but that doesn't mean it's illegal," says Michael Salsbury, a partner at law firm Chadbourne & Parke and former general counsel for MCI, the long-distance carrier purchased by Verizon Communications (VZ). "It's definitely improper, because I think from a consumer perspective [a phone company] should have its service compete on the merits of features and cost. It shouldn't be blocking someone else." But, Salsbury adds, if it's still possible to provide a service via text message rather than a short code, then the carriers may be acting within their rights.

The FCC may need to deal with the issue sooner rather than later. On Dec. 11, Public Knowledge and seven other consumer advocacy groups filed a petition with the FCC, calling carrier interference in text messaging a threat to free speech. The groups also asked the regulator to ban the practice. The petition cites the September refusal by Verizon Wireless to allow a short code for NARAL Pro-Choice America. Verizon Wireless quickly reversed the decision and apologized. Petitioners also refer to the Rebtel matter.

Such disputes may multiply, as short codes represent an expanding business for the carriers. For starters, all requests for short codes, and all responses, are delivered via text message, which typically cost 15¢ apiece or are purchased in monthly buckets. But carriers also share in revenue from premium short-code services where users agree to an extra per-message charge on their phone bills. Customers who have played the short-code version of Deal or No Deal, for example, have paid $1 for each message sent or received in the promotion, generating millions of dollars in revenue for the show and the carriers.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...tm?chan=search





Cellphones Challenge Poll Sampling
Megan Thee

With more American households giving up their old-fashioned land lines and using cellphones for all calls, public opinion researchers are facing a challenge of how to make sure they are getting representative samples when conducting polls.

Since the 1970s, pollsters have relied on sampling techniques that depend on talking with people on their home land line telephones. For the most part, the polls sample the public by randomly dialing telephone numbers in every region from a list of area codes and exchanges known to be residences. The sample is weighted to the results of the latest census.

But cellphones are not geographically based, forcing pollsters to adjust their methods. In addition, a land line often represents a household and a cellphone often represents an individual.

Pollsters say they are also concerned about low response rates among people reached on cellphones. Because wireless carriers charge customers by the minute, people may be less likely to agree to complete lengthy cellphone surveys.

The survey industry is exploring reimbursing respondents for minutes used.

Researchers using computers to dial may encounter legal complications. The Federal Communications Commission requires an interviewer to dial the number when calling a cellphone. No autodialers are allowed.

Survey researches have dealt with sampling and low response rates before. But cellphones bring up a new concern, safety. Calling someone driving or engaged in another activity that requires concentration raises ethics and liability questions.

Bloggers and media critics have been questioning pollsters for months about whether 2008 polls are truly representative without including cellphone-only households.

The issue came up in 2004, but cellphone-only households in 2003 were 3 percent of the total. They now run 16 percent, according to Mediamark Research.

The F.C.C. estimates that more than 60 percent of households have at least one mobile phone.

The demographic groups that tend to be cellphone-only households are also historically less likely to vote, reducing the effects of underrepresentation in pre-election polls.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey, adults with cellphones and no land lines are more likely to be young — half of exclusively wireless users are younger than 30 — male, Hispanic, living in poverty, renting a residence and living in metropolitan regions.

The Pew Research Center conducted four studies last year on the differences between cellphone and land line respondents. The studies said the differences were not significant enough to influence surveys properly weighted to census data. With the increase in cellphone-only households, that may not be the case next year. Researchers, including the New York Times/CBS News poll will test that by incorporating cellphones in samples.

The estimates in the Health Interview Study suggest that cellphone-only households are steadily increasing.

“If the percentage of adults living in cell-only households continues to grow at the rate it has been growing for the past four years, I have projected that it will exceed 25 percent by the end of 2008,” Stephen J. Blumberg, a senior scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics, wrote in an e-mail message.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research has been examining the question and formed a group to study it. The association says it will issue its report early next year.

Paul J. Lavrakas, a survey methodologist and a former professor at Northwestern and Ohio State, has been a driving force behind the research at the association. Mr. Lavrakas said that he could not “imagine how anyone can feel safe in planning their election coverage without including cellphone sampling for the 2008 election.”

He added that much will be learned next year as researchers experiment with calling cellphones and measure the accuracy of their polls.

The New York Times/CBS News Poll has been addressing the question. Kathleen A. Frankovic, director of surveys at CBS News, said that without intending to dial cellphones, its interviewers “already complete as many as 2 percent of our interviews per poll on cellphones, and we are experimenting this fall with dialing cellphone samples.”

The industry generally agrees that a truly representative sample should include cellphone-only households, land-line-only households and mixed households. Many pollsters are working on assembling such samples.

“Until Internet polling gets a decent sampling frame, telephone surveys are necessary, and we can’t exclude cellphones from telephone polling,” said Martin Frankel, a professor of statistics at Baruch College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/us...l?ref=politics





Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry
Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane

For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access.

After the disclosure two years ago that the N.S.A. was eavesdropping on the international communications of terrorism suspects inside the United States without warrants, more than 40 lawsuits were filed against the government and phone carriers. As a result, skittish companies and their lawyers have been demanding stricter safeguards before they provide access to the government and, in some cases, are refusing outright to cooperate, officials said.

“It’s a very frayed and strained relationship right now, and that’s not a good thing for the country in terms of keeping all of us safe,” said an industry official who believes that immunity is critical for the phone carriers. “This episode has caused companies to change their conduct in a variety of ways.”

With a vote in the Senate on the issue expected as early as Monday, the Bush administration has intensified its efforts to win retroactive immunity for companies cooperating with counterterrorism operations.

“The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article Monday urging Congress to pass the immunity provision. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.”

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey echoed that theme in an op-ed article of his own in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, saying private companies would be reluctant to provide their “full-hearted help” if they were not given legal protections.

The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues.

While the N.S.A. operates under restrictions on domestic spying, the companies have broader concerns — customers’ demands for privacy and shareholders’ worries about bad publicity.

In the drug-trafficking operation, the N.S.A. has been helping the Drug Enforcement Administration in collecting the phone records showing patterns of calls between the United States, Latin America and other drug-producing regions. The program dates to the 1990s, according to several government officials, but it appears to have expanded in recent years.

Officials say the government has not listened to the communications, but has instead used phone numbers and e-mail addresses to analyze links between people in the United States and overseas. Senior Justice Department officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations signed off on the operation, which uses broad administrative subpoenas but does not require court approval to demand the records.

At least one major phone carrier — whose identity could not be confirmed — refused to cooperate, citing concerns in 2004 that the subpoenas were overly broad, government and industry officials said. The executives also worried that if the program were exposed, the company would face a public-relations backlash.

The D.E.A. declined to comment on the call-tracing program, except to say that it “exercises its legal authority” to issue administrative subpoenas. The N.S.A. also declined to comment on it.

In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.

While Qwest’s refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.’s request were not. The agency, those knowledgeable about the incident said, wanted to install monitoring equipment on Qwest’s “Class 5” switching facilities, which transmit the most localized calls. Limited international traffic also passes through the switches.

A government official said the N.S.A. intended to single out only foreigners on Qwest’s network, and added that the agency believed Joseph Nacchio, then the chief executive of Qwest, and other company officials misunderstood the agency’s proposal. Bob Toevs, a Qwest spokesman, said the company did not comment on matters of national security.

Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”

Two other AT&T employees who worked on the proposal discounted his claims, saying in interviews that the project had simply sought to improve the N.S.A.’s internal communications systems and was never designed to allow the agency access to outside communications. Michael Coe, a company spokesman, said: “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security.”

But lawyers for the plaintiffs say that if the suit were allowed to proceed, internal AT&T documents would verify the engineer’s account.

“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”

The same lawsuit accuses Verizon of setting up a dedicated fiber optic line from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. In an interview, a former consultant who worked on internal security said he had tried numerous times to install safeguards on the line to prevent hacking on the system, as he was doing for other lines at the operations center, but his ideas were rejected by a senior security official.

The facts behind a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco are also shrouded in government secrecy. The case relies on disclosures by a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, who says he stumbled upon a secret room at an company facility in San Francisco that was reserved for the N.S.A. Company documents he obtained and other former AT&T employees have lent some support to his claim that the facility gave the agency access to a range of domestic and international Internet traffic.

The telecommunications companies that gave the government access are pushing hard for legal protection from Congress. As part of a broader plan to restructure the N.S.A.’s wiretapping authority, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to give immunity to the telecommunications companies, but the Judiciary Committee refused to do so. The White House has threatened to veto any plan that left out immunity, as the House bill does.

“Congress shouldn’t grant amnesty to companies that broke the law by conspiring to illegally spy on Americans” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

But Bobby R. Inman, a retired admiral and former N.S.A. director who has publicly criticized the agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, says he still supports immunity for the companies that cooperated.

“The responsibility ought to be on the government, not on the companies that are trying to help with national security requirements,” Admiral Inman said. If the companies decided to stop cooperating, he added, “it would have a huge impact on both the timeliness and availability of critical intelligence.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/washington/16nsa.html






Activists See Senate Dems Backing Down to Bush, Ready to Give Immunity to Phone Companies
Nick Juliano

As lawmakers hurry to clear their legislative plates before rushing home for Christmas dinner, it appears all-but-certain that Congress will not finish work to update a foreign spy law before the new year.

But votes expected this week and next in the Senate have civil libertarians worried about their prospects to block a proposal that would free telecommunications companies from legal oversight of their facilitation of President Bush's post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping scheme.

As the timeline appears to be shaking out, Democrats seem headed for an 11th-hour showdown with the White House over updates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In a similar showdown this summer, Republicans said a failure to act on FISA would endanger the country. On its way out the door for summer vacation, Congress passed a temporary update to the law that was widely panned for its lack of judicial oversight and constitutional protections.

Although Democrats succeeded in keeping telecom immunity out of the August bill, it seems likely to worm its way into this latest version, at least in the Senate, despite voracious opposition from prominent Democrats there, including all the party's presidential candidates.

"People who had some faith that [congressional Democrats] were going to live up to their campaign promises are a little disappointed," Caroline Fredrickson, the top Washington lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told RAW STORY Friday.

The House and Senate have spent the last few months crafting permanent FISA updates that would close loopholes in the 1978 law that President Bush says limits US intelligence agencies' ability to spy on suspected terrorists. The Senate is expected to begin debate on dueling FISA updates Friday and into next week, although it remains unclear whether the Senate will pass a bill before recessing just before Christmas.

There is some common ground between Bush and the Democratic congress on closing that loophole, which required US spies to get court warrants before listening in on phone calls between intelligence suspects abroad.

But there is substantial opposition among Democrats to a companion proposal put forward by Bush and Republicans in congress to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that facilitated the president's post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program.
Last month, the House passed a FISA update that did not include immunity for telecommunications companies, but the Senate still has not voted on companion legislation, although a bill could come to the floor as soon as this week. The Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees share jurisdiction over the FISA law, but the committees have come down on different sides of the immunity issue.

It is up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to decide which proposal the full chamber will consider. As things stand now, Reid is expected to send to the floor the Intelligence Committee's bill, which includes immunity, with the immunity-free Judiciary bill pending as a substitute amendment.

The way things stand now, observers expect 60 votes would be required to substitute the immunity-free judiciary proposal for the intelligence committee bill, a standard few believe could be reached. Debate on the bill will begin Monday, Reid said from the Senate floor Friday.

"This is one of the most bizarre procedural scenarios that I've ever dealt with," said Fredrickson, who spent nine years as a Senate staffer.

Further muddling matters, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), a dark-horse presidential candidate, announced his intention to place a "hold" on any FISA update containing immunity. Reid is apparently ignoring his request, but Dodd has vowed to filibuster the bill and says he will work to block immunity any way he can.

On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee voted down a proposal from Sen. Arlen Specter that would have allowed the 40 or so lawsuits that have been filed to go forward, but it would have made the government the defendant in those suits, not the telecoms. Specter, the committee's ranking Republican, could re-introduce his amendment when the FISA update comes to the Senate floor.

Opponents of telecom immunity see the lawsuits against the telecoms as the only opportunity to find out whether the warrantless wiretapping was constitutional, as the Bush administration has claimed executive privilege and state secrets doctrines in dodging Congress's attempts to investigate the program. Specter said his proposal was aimed at allowing those suits to go forward without bankrupting the telephone and internet companies defending themselves.

"What rankles me is that we're being asked to approve of something that we don't even know what happened," Specter said during a Judiciary Committee meeting today. His proposal failed on a 5-13 vote.

The Senate has a raft of spending bills and other legislation to address before it goes to recess at the end of next week, so it's still up in the air whether the FISA update will come to the floor before then. Whatever happens, the House and Senate are not expected to meet in conference or send a bill to the president until January.

"Practically speaking, how do you do that?" Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Erica Chabot said in an interview Thursday.

In August, Congress rushed through a temporary FISA update, which many Democrats and civil libertarians found unacceptable, under heavy pressure from the Bush administration. The president, along with members of his administration and GOP lawmakers, issued ominous warnings that a failure to act immediately would leave the country vulnerable.

The House and Senate passed a temporary FISA update, the Protect America Act, less than 24 hours before each adjourned for a month-long recess, and lawmakers later complained that the tight deadline they faced forced them to adopt an unacceptable bill.

Congress has spent more time on the current FISA-update proposals, but they still seem headed for a potential showdown with the White House under a looming deadline. The PAA expires Feb. 1, but Congress does not return to session until week of Jan. 15, giving them about two weeks to finalize a bill for the president.

Further complicating measures is Bush's vow to veto any bill without telecom immunity -- such as the version passed in the House -- and he will give his State of the Union address Jan. 29, two days before the PAA would expire.

Democrats could feasibly pass an immunity-free bill that gives the president what he wants except for telecom immunity and dare him to veto it, thereby allowing the PAA to expire and re-opening the loopholes he says endanger national security.

Whether there is enough support for such a strategy remains to be seen. Plenty of Democratic senators seem to have been convinced of the merits of giving immunity to telecommunications companies, and the Democrats have demonstrated in the past that they are willing to bow the Republican attacks that they are weak in fighting terrorism, Fredrickson said.

"Anything that's the slightest bit of a risk ... they decide not to deal with it," she said. Rather, the mantra among Democrats seems to be "keep the majority at all costs."
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Presid...bill_1213.html





House Passes Ban On Waterboarding

Approves Intelligence Bill Outlawing Harsh CIA Interrogation Techniques

The House of Representatives on Thursday approved an intelligence bill that bans the Central Intelligence Agency from using waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation methods.

The 222-199 vote sent the measure to the Senate, which still must act before it can go to President Bush. The White House has threatened a veto.

The bill, a House-Senate compromise to authorize intelligence operations in 2008, also blocks spending 70 percent of the intelligence budget until the House and Senate intelligence committees are briefed on Israel's Sept. 6 air strike on an alleged nuclear site in Syria.

The 2008 intelligence budget is classified, but it is more than the $43 billion approved for 2007.

Most of the bill itself also is classified, although some portions were made public. One provision requires reporting to the committees on whether intelligence agency employees are complying with protections for detainees from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Another requires a report on the use of private contractors in intelligence work.

It is the first intelligence authorization conference bill Congress has produced in three years.

The White House threatened to veto the measure this week in a lengthy statement, highlighting more than 11 areas of disagreement with the bill.

The administration particularly opposes restricting the CIA to interrogation methods approved by the U.S. military in 2006. That document prohibits forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over detainees' heads or duct tape over their eyes; beating, shocking, or burning detainees; threatening them with military dogs; exposing them to extreme heat or cold; conducting mock executions; depriving them of food, water, or medical care; and waterboarding.

Waterboarding is a particularly harsh form of interrogation that involves strapping down a prisoner, covering his mouth with plastic or cloth and pouring water over his face. The prisoner quickly begins to inhale water, causing the sensation of drowning.
The CIA is known to have waterboarded three prisoners but has not used the technique since 2003, according to a government official familiar with the program who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. CIA Director Michael Hayden prohibited waterboarding in 2006. The U.S. military outlawed it the same year.

The intelligence authorization bill also creates a new internal watchdog to oversee all the intelligence agencies. It requires Senate approval for the first time of two agency heads the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the nation's spy satellites, and the National Security Agency, the outfit that conducted warrantless wiretapping on American phone and computer lines in what the White House calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Separately on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected legislation that would have protected telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits over helping the government eavesdrop on Americans' communications without court orders. The legislation would have made the government the defendant in such lawsuits, rather than telecommunications companies. The 5-13 vote sank the measure pushed by Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican who hoped it could be a compromise in the dispute over whether to immunize the companies from lawsuits.

In competing legislation written in October, the Senate Intelligence Committee granted legal immunity to telecom companies. The House passed a bill that does not protect the companies. The White House has also threatened to veto that bill.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was briefing the Senate in a closed session about the matter on Thursday.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n3616832.shtml





GOP Seeks to Restore Harsh Interrogation
Pamela Hess

Senate Republicans blocked a bill Friday that would restrict the interrogation methods the CIA can use against terrorism suspects.

The legislation, part of a measure authorizing the government's intelligence activities for 2008, had been approved a day earlier by the House and sent to the Senate for what was supposed to be final action. The bill would require the CIA to adhere to the Army's field manual on interrogation, which bans waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation methods.

Senate opponents of that provision, however, discovered a potentially fatal parliamentary flaw: The ban on harsh questioning tactics had not been in the original versions of the intelligence bill passed by the House and Senate. Instead, it was a last-minute addition during negotiations between the two sides to write a compromise bill, a move that could violate Senate rules. The rule is intended to protect legislation from last-minute amendments that neither house of Congress has had time to fully consider.
Although it's not unheard of for new language to be added in House-Senate negotiations, the rules allow such a move to be challenged and the language stripped from the bill.

In a separate development related to CIA interrogations, Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused Friday to give Congress details of the government's investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes of interrogations of terror suspects. He said doing so could raise questions about whether the inquiry is vulnerable to political pressures.

In letters to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Mukasey also said there is no need right now to appoint a special prosecutor to lead the investigation. The preliminary inquiry currently is being handled by the Justice Department and the CIA's inspector general.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., expressed disappointment and said the tapes would be a major topic at his committee's hearing next week to consider the nomination of U.S. District Judge Mark Filip for deputy attorney general.

The Senate was prevented from voting on the intelligence bill because Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., placed a hold on it while the GOP procedural challenge goes forward.

"I think quite frankly applying the Army field manual to the CIA would be ill-advised and would destroy a program that I think is lawful and helps the country," Graham said in an interview.

If the Senate were to approve a stripped-down authorization bill next week, it would then have to go back to the House for another vote.

The field manual amendment was pushed by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and backed by two Senate Republicans, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Feinstein defended the provision and said the Senate should debate it. "The Army Field Manual has been an effective guide for the military," she said. "It was very carefully written and reviewed. It has not come under criticism, unlike the constant criticism in the CIA arena .... It is my belief that America is not well served by torture."

The White House threatened to veto the bill this week over the interrogation restrictions and a list of other issues. The CIA denies that it tortures detainees.

The Army field manual, adopted in 2006, prohibits forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over detainees' heads or duct tape over their eyes; beating, shocking, or burning detainees; threatening them with military dogs; exposing them to extreme heat or cold; conducting mock executions; depriving them of food, water, or medical care; and waterboarding.

Waterboarding is a particularly harsh form of interrogation that involves strapping down a prisoner, covering his mouth with plastic or cloth and pouring water over his face. The prisoner quickly begins to inhale water, causing the sensation of drowning.

The CIA is known to have waterboarded three prisoners but has not used the technique since 2003, according to a government official familiar with the program who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. CIA Director Michael Hayden prohibited waterboarding in 2006.

The White House gave the CIA special latitude to conduct harsh or "enhanced" interrogations in 2002 to break down recalcitrant terror suspects.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...7CtwQD8THFO0O0





Bush Seeks to Limit Military Lawyers' Independence
Charlie Savage

The Bush administration is escalating a conflict over the independence of military lawyers who have repeatedly raised objections to White House policies over prisoners held as enemy combatants.

The administration has proposed a regulation requiring "coordination" with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before the promotion of any member of the Judge Advocate General Corps, the military's 4,000-member uniformed legal force.

A Pentagon spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the reasoning behind the draft regulation. But the the administration has repeatedly tried and failed to impose greater control over the military lawyers.

Former JAG officers say the regulation would end the uniformed lawyers' role as a check on presidential power because politically appointed lawyers could block the promotion of JAGs who they believe would speak up if they think a White House policy is illegal.

Thomas Romig, a retired major general who was the U.S. Army's top JAG from 2001 to 2005, called the proposal an attempt "to control the military JAGs" by sending a message that if they want to be promoted, they should be "team players" who "bow to their political masters on legal advice."

It "would certainly have a chilling effect on the JAGs' advice to commanders," Romig said. "The implication is clear: without approval the officer will not be promoted."

The new JAG rule is part of a set of proposed changes to the military's procedures for promoting all commissioned officers, a copy of which was obtained by a reporter. The Pentagon began internally circulating a draft of the changes for comments by the services in mid-November, and the administration will decide whether to make the changes official this month or early next year.

The JAG rule would give new leverage over the JAGs to the Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. Haynes has been the Pentagon's point man in the disputes with JAGs who disagreed with the administration's assertion that the president has the right to bypass the Geneva Conventions and other legal protections for prisoners.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said that Haynes was traveling and unavailable for an interview, and she did not respond to other written questions.

In the past, Haynes has made several proposals that would bring the JAGs under greater control by political appointees. As part of the uniformed chain of command, the JAGs are not directly controlled by civilian political appointees. But Haynes has long promoted the idea of making each service's politically appointed general counsel the direct boss of the service's top JAG, a change Haynes has said would support the principle of civilian control of the military.

One of Haynes's allies on the Bush administration legal team is John Yoo, who as a Justice Department lawyer wrote a series of legal opinions asserting a presidential power to bypass the Geneva Conventions and ignore laws against torture.

Yoo recently wrote an article sharply critical of the JAGs' unwillingness to endorse the legality of the Bush administration's treatment of detainees and called for some kind of "corrective measures" that would "punish" JAGs who undermine the president's policies.

Yoo's article did not specifically discuss injecting political appointees into the JAG promotions process, and he said in an e-mail that he did not know anything about the new Pentagon proposal. But several retired JAGs said they think the proposed change is an attempt by the Bush administration to turn Yoo's idea into a reality.

Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor who is also general counsel to the National Institute of Military Justice, said the proposal boiled down to giving political appointees the power to veto JAG promotions.

"The message would be clear to every JAG, which is that when you have been told that the general counsel has a view on the law, any time you dare disagree with it, don't expect a promotion," Saltzburg said. "I don't think that would be in the best interest of the country. We've seen how important it can be to have the JAGs give their honest opinions when you look at the debates on interrogation techniques and the like."

Through the past several years, the administration has repeatedly proposed changes that would impose greater control over the JAGs. Each previous proposal has died in the Pentagon or Congress. The new proposal goes further than anything the administration has pushed before because it would affect all military lawyers, not just the top JAG for each service.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/...g.1-189605.php





Of Orwell, Wikipedia and Guantánamo Bay
Patrick J. Lyons

Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s “1984,” worked at a government job he hated, rewriting history to conform to current propaganda imperatives. This week, a group called Wikileaks asserted that the United States military appeared to have a Winston Smith of its own at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, mucking about with the way Wikipedia and news sites portray the base and, curiously, posting odd assertions about Fidel Castro.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks laid out evidence on the group’s web site Wednesday indicating that computers belonging to the base’s Joint Task Force-Guantánamo command were used for the suspicious online activity, including:

“deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed ’self praise’ comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantánamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro’s encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as ‘an admitted transexual’ [sic].”

Mr. Assange’s report caught the attention of, among other news outlets, The Daily News of New York, which wrote about the situation on Thursday.

A denial followed a day later from Lt. Col. Edward Bush, a spokesman for the command’s public affairs office, The News reports today:

“There has been no attempt to alter/change any information that has been posted anywhere,” Lt. Col. Bush said in the statement e-mailed to us. “That would be unethical.”

Bush said in a subsequent phone call that there’s no way to know if any of the 3,000 uniformed military at Gitmo was responsible for the documented changes, but he promised his public affairs staff was not behind it. He also blasted Wikipedia for identifying one sailor in his office by name, who has since received death threats for simply doing his job - posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.

The Wikileaks group’s main purpose is to create an “uncensorable” version of Wikipedia where people around the world could post leaked documents and other things governments didn’t want seen, without fear of the material being suppressed or the source being traced. So Mr. Assange and his colleagues have an obvious interest in exposing government attempts to manipulate popular Internet sites like Wikipedia and Digg for propaganda purposes.

There is nothing new about self-serving alterations to Wikipedia entries, of course. Nearly anyone can edit nearly any Wikipedia page, because the site depends on the larger community of users to eventually spot and correct errors and distortions that may be inserted into an entry — a process that may work well enough with simple, uncontroversial facts but runs into a lot more trouble when political, religious, financial or personal agendas are at stake.

Still, it never looks good to be caught Winston Smith-ing it on the Internet, least of all for the American military, which has gotten one black eye after another over its information programs. And just as Orwell’s character found out, escaping detection is harder than it seems.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200.../index.html?hp





Judge: Man Can't be Forced to Divulge Encryption Passphrase
Declan McCullagh

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury's subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide "any passwords" used with his Alienware laptop. "Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him," the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. "Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop."

Especially if this ruling is appealed, U.S. v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled "Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.")

This debate has been one of analogy and metaphor. Prosecutors tend to view PGP passphrases as akin to someone possessing a key to a safe filled with incriminating documents. That person can, in general, be legally compelled to hand over the key. Other examples include the U.S. Supreme Court saying that defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood samples, or voice recordings.

Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department prosecutor who's now a law professor at George Washington University, shares this view. Kerr acknowledges that it's a tough call, but says, "I tend to think Judge Niedermeier was wrong given the specific facts of this case."

The alternate view elevates individual rights over prosecutorial convenience. It looks to other Supreme Court cases saying Americans can't be forced to give "compelled testimonial communications" and argues the Fifth Amendment must apply to encryption passphrases as well. Courts already have ruled that that such protection extends to the contents of a defendant's minds, so why shouldn't a passphrase be shielded as well?

In this case, Judge Niedermeier took the second approach. He said that encryption keys can be "testimonial," and even the prosecution's alternative of asking the defendant to type in the passphrase when nobody was looking would be insufficient.

Laptop files: Unencrypted, then encrypted
A second reason this case is unusual is that Boucher was initially arrested when customs agents stopped him and searched his laptop when he and his father crossed the border from Canada on December 17, 2006. An officer opened the laptop, accessed the files without a password or passphrase, and allegedly discovered "thousands of images of adult pornography and animation depicting adult and child pornography."

Boucher was read his Miranda rights, waived them, and allegedly told the customs agents that he may have downloaded child pornography. But then--and this is key--the laptop was shut down after Boucher was arrested. It wasn't until December 26 that a Vermont Department of Corrections officer tried to access the laptop--prosecutors obtained a subpoena on December 19--and found that the Z: drive was encrypted with PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy. (PGP sells software, including whole disk encryption and drive-specific encryption. It's a little unclear what exactly happened, but one likely scenario is that Boucher configured PGP to forget his passphrase, effectively re-encrypting the Z: drive, after a few hours or days had elapsed.)

According to Niedermeier's written opinion, prosecutors sent Boucher a grand jury subpoena asking for the passwords because:

Secret Service Agent Matthew Fasvlo, who has experience and training in computer forensics, testified that it is nearly impossible to access these encrypted files without knowing the password. There are no "back doors" or secret entrances to access the files. The only way to get access without the password is to use an automated system which repeatedly guesses passwords. According to the government, the process to unlock drive Z could take years, based on efforts to unlock similarly encrypted files in another case. Despite its best efforts, to date the government has been unable to learn the password to access drive Z.

The opinion added:

If the subpoena is requesting production of the files in drive Z, the foregone conclusion doctrine does not apply. While the government has seen some of the files on drive Z, it has not viewed all or even most of them. While the government may know of the existence and location of the files it has previously viewed, it does not know of the existence of other files on drive Z that may contain incriminating material. By compelling entry of the password the government would be compelling production of all the files on drive Z, both known and unknown.

Boucher is a Canadian citizen who is a lawful permanent resident in the United States and lives with his father in Derry, N.H. Two attorneys listed as representing him could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.

So what happens next? It's possible that prosecutors will be able to establish that Boucher's laptop has child pornography on it without being able to access it: after all, there were at least two federal agents who looked at the laptop when the Z: drive was still unencrypted.

But if this ruling in the case is eventually appealed, it could have a far-reaching impact in a pro-privacy or pro-law-enforcement direction.

Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami, has written that the government "would have a very hard time" trying to obtain a memorized passphrase. A similar argument, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1996, says:

The courts likely will find that compelling someone to reveal the steps necessary to decrypt a PGP-encrypted document violates the Fifth Amendment privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. Because most users protect their private keys by memorizing passwords to them and not writing them down, access to encrypted documents would almost definitely require an individual to disclose the contents of his mind. This bars the state from compelling its production. This would force law enforcement officials to grant some form of immunity to the owners of these documents to gain access to them.

But prosecutors think they can split the idea of immunity into two halves: divulging the passphrase, and then using the passphrase to decrypt the files. A 1996 article by Philip Reitinger of the Department of Justice's computer crime section proposes a clever device for forcing a defendant to divulge a PGP passphrase and then convicting him anyway (remember, the passphrase lets the key be used to decrypt the document):

Finally, even if the foregoing considerations require the government to grant act-of-production immunity to compel production of a key, the scope of the immunity should be quite narrow. The contents of the key are not privileged, and it is the contents that will be used to decrypt a document. Therefore, the government can use the contents of the decrypted document without impediment. Unless the government cannot authenticate the document to be decrypted without using the act of production of the key, granting act-of-production immunity should have little effect.

Translation: Giving a defendant limited immunity in terms of forcing them to turn over the passphrase can lead to a conviction. That's because the fellow technically isn't being convicted based on his passphrase; he's being convicted for what it unlocks. Isn't the law grand?
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html





Citing Destruction of Torture Tapes, ACLU Asks Court to Hold CIA in Contempt
Press release

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a motion asking a federal judge to hold the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in contempt, charging that the agency flouted a court order when it destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in its custody. In response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the ACLU and other organizations in October 2003 and May 2004, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the CIA to produce or identify all records pertaining to the treatment of detainees in its custody. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Despite the court’s ruling, the CIA never produced the tapes or even acknowledged their existence. Last week, in anticipation of media reports concerning the tapes, CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly acknowledged that the CIA had made the tapes in 2002 but destroyed them in 2005.

“The CIA’s secret destruction of these tapes displays a flagrant disregard for the rule of law,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “It must be sanctioned for violating the court’s order and the obligation to preserve records that fell within the scope of our Freedom of Information Act requests.”

The tapes, which showed CIA operatives subjecting suspects to extremely harsh interrogation methods, should have been identified and processed for the ACLU in response to its FOIA request demanding information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody. The tapes were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, appointed by President Bush and Congress, which had formally requested that the CIA hand over transcripts and recordings documenting the interrogation of CIA prisoners.

“These tapes were clearly responsive to the Freedom of Information Act requests that we filed in 2003 and 2004, and accordingly the CIA was under a legal obligation to produce the tapes to us or to provide a legal justification for withholding them,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “By destroying these tapes, the CIA violated the statute as well as an order of the court. In the circumstances, it would be entirely appropriate for the court to hold the agency in contempt.”

The motion filed today relates to a lawsuit that was filed in 2004 to enforce a FOIA request for records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. The ACLU brought the FOIA lawsuit with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace.

The motion filed today asks the court to hold the CIA in contempt; to require the CIA to produce a complete list of all records that fall within the scope of the FOIA requests that have been destroyed (including tapes); and to require the CIA to file with the court a detailed written description of the substance of the destroyed tapes.

“The interrogation techniques employed by our government raise fundamental questions of human rights and decency,” said Arthur Eisenberg, New York Civil Liberties Union Legal Director. “The CIA cannot avoid those questions by simply destroying the evidence.”

The ACLU brief and related legal documents are available online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

Many of these documents are also contained and summarized in Administration of Torture, a recently published book by Jaffer and Singh. More information is available online at: www.aclu.org/administrationoftorture

Attorneys in the FOIA case are Lawrence S. Lustberg and Melanca D. Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons P.C.; Jaffer, Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture...s20071212.html





Rudy: All Business
Michael Weiskopf and Massimo Calabresi

Not long after he stepped down as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani received an intriguing offer. A group of officials from a Florida company called Seisint Inc. asked him to promote a powerful new database technology capable of tracking potential terrorists and other criminals. Their timing was perfect. Giuliani had just opened Giuliani Partners (GP), a consulting shop that planned to specialize in helping companies like Seisint grow. "Nobody knew us; everybody knew him," says Michael Brauser, a major shareholder who negotiated the December 2002 contract between GP and the Boca Raton-based firm. "It was an unbelievable fit."

For Giuliani's new company, it was a remarkably profitable fit too. GP pulled in more than $30 million for just one year's work on Seisint's behalf, company records show. Big paydays have not been unusual for GP, which in just five years has reaped tens of millions of dollars from clients at home and abroad, a business success story closely linked to Giuliani's fame as a hero of 9/11. That same legacy has propelled him to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates.

But now Giuliani the candidate is facing a growing number of questions about the clients, earnings and practices of Giuliani the businessman. Although much of his work has been for blue-chip American corporations, it has been widely reported that GP has also represented more controversial clients, including the maker of the prescription drug OxyContin and the government of Qatar. TIME has also learned that Bracewell & Giuliani, a Houston-based legal and lobbying firm he joined as a name partner in 2005, represents Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company. Thus far, Giuliani has refused to divulge a client list or many details of his work for either GP or Bracewell & Giuliani, and he has maintained his ownership stake in both companies as he continues his run for the White House. Ed Rogers, White House political director under the first President Bush, says the Giuliani campaign has to do better at handling his business situation "to keep it from becoming a real issue and something that may drive votes."

The Seisint deal, details of which TIME pieced together from interviews and corporate documents, seemed like a good match for Giuliani's company. Seisint's founder, Hank Asher, was regarded as a database wizard who used supercomputers to store billions of pieces of information from public records, which, he claimed, were able to spit out the names of some of the 9/11 hijackers before they were publicly identified. The firm's potential seemed endless to GP, and it signed on for what Seisint saw as a heavily discounted fee of $2 million a year, plus a percentage of revenue from company sales to government and corporate buyers.

In the first year, GP earned $6.5 million, Seisint records show, in part for what Brauser and Seisint's in-house lobbyist, Dan Latham, say were commissions for state and federal contracts. Giuliani "came through," says Brauser. "The doors were wide open. It was almost a flood of business opportunities." Latham says GP set up meetings in 2003 at the Department of Homeland Security at which Seisint executives pushed a data-mining program called the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or MATRIX. The program looked like a promising law-enforcement tool that states could use in partnership with Seisint. The Federal Government spent $12 million to run the program, and eventually 13 states signed up to participate in it.

But the Seisint deal wasn't as perfect as it seemed. One problem: the payment of percentages or commissions to "solicit or secure" government contracts is prohibited by federal law and laws of some states. Tom Susman, ethics chairman of the American League of Lobbyists, says the bar on commissions is intended to eliminate incentives for middlemen to bend the rules to land a contract. A GP official who refused to be named insists that the firm never received "commissions" from Seisint--despite what Brauser and Latham remember and despite the fact that payments to GP are labeled "commissions" in both the minutes of a Seisint board meeting and a key financial statement. Instead, says the official, GP earned "special bonuses" based on the achievement of corporate "milestones." Another problem: Seisint CEO Asher had a shady past. After the statute of limitations made his crimes unprosecutable, he admitted to having been a cocaine smuggler in the 1980s. He stepped down from Seisint's board in August 2003. Giuliani told Vanity Fair in 2004 that Asher's "mistakes are way behind him."

Meanwhile, Seisint's premier product--MATRIX--had proved controversial. The databases it searched contained personal histories of millions of Americans, their relatives, past addresses, property records and credit ratings. Civil-liberties groups said MATRIX would create detailed data profiles of innocent Americans. Georgia and Utah, which had signed up for MATRIX, launched investigations into the privacy concerns raised by the program's vast data files.

Seisint wasn't the only GP client to receive government scrutiny. In 2002, Giuliani's firm agreed to represent Purdue Pharma, the maker of the painkiller OxyContin, after the Drug Enforcement Administration began looking into thefts of the highly addictive drug from company plants. Purdue Pharma ended up agreeing to pay a $2 million fine for lax security at some of its plants. Sunny Mindel, spokeswoman for GP, says the firm helped Purdue balance the need to produce a "lifesaving medicine ... with the need to make sure that this vital medicine did not get diverted by criminals for criminal use."

Giuliani's international clients have also attracted controversy. Last summer the firm dropped Citgo, the oil company that is majority-owned by a company nominally controlled by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, after news reports uncovered the relationship. (Maria Comella, a Giuliani campaign spokeswoman, says the candidate "continues to provide general guidance to the management of the firm," and adds, "But he doesn't participate in any client matters or in the day-to-day operation.") The security firm within GP has provided advice and training in counterterrorism to the government of Qatar, an emirate on the Persian Gulf, though Qatar's Interior Minister, Sheik Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, is a controversial figure whom several former U.S. officials have suspected of protecting major al-Qaeda suspects. The head of GP's security arm, Pat D'Amuro, says the firm is helping protect American service members and private citizens in Qatar. Of al-Thani, he says, "We've never met him; we've never dealt with him. Our contract is not with him. He's not involved at all."

In most cases, it's impossible to say how much a specific contract has been worth to GP or Bracewell & Giuliani. That's one reason the Seisint case is interesting. By December 2003, Seisint was positioning itself to go public or be bought out. GP, according to Seisint's financial statements, agreed to waive $2.2 million of accrued commissions from its total bill of $6.5 million. In return, the firm received $5.5 million in cash and a much reduced exercise price on 1.7 million stock options that had been granted in the contract.

But however promising MATRIX's future appeared, it was unable to escape the concerns of privacy watchdogs. In early 2004, a commission appointed by Utah's Governor recommended dropping MATRIX over privacy concerns. One commission member, Elizabeth Dunning, said the program's accumulation of personal data on innocent Americans was "shocking" and "outrageous." Shortly thereafter, however, Seisint was sold to the British-Dutch firm Reed Elsevier. The sale netted GP $24 million, records show, with half of that made possible by the lower stock-option price. "A lot of people made a lot of money on the sale of Seisint," said Latham. "[Giuliani] was one of them." Did law enforcement benefit too? Hard to say. By mid-2004, fewer than half the states that had originally signed up for MATRIX remained in the program, and by the end of the year the rest had quit. Less than two years after Giuliani signed on to market MATRIX, the program was dead.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...694438,00.html





Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction
Warren Ellis

Like Pattern Recognition before it, William Gibson's eighth novel, Spook Country, feels like dictation from the zeitgeist. Its "illegal facilitators," nonexistent magazines, terrorists, pirates, junkies, mad art dealers, and WMD are all woven together into something more unsettling and blackly comic than anything he's done before. Gibson and I started talking in '04, shortly before meeting in person while I was in Vancouver working on a doomed TV pilot based on my comic book series Global Frequency. At the time, he disclosed that near-future events would determine whether Spook Country would be comedy or horror. We've stayed in touch electronically ever since, and when wired asked me to talk to him about the book, set for release in August, we picked up right where we left off.

Wired: So, comedy or horror?

Gibson: I think it turned out to be satirical, which is what comedy best aspires to in tragic times. I can't make a narrative up beforehand, can't write before I start typing, so I literally don't decide what a story is or where it goes.

Wired:I was surprised to see Hubertus Bigend from Pattern show up. It made me wonder if that novel and Spook are consciously building to form your third trilogy.

Gibson: You know, I've never wanted to write a trilogy. I tacked that "He never saw Molly again" on the end of Neuromancer to indicate no sequel was to be expected. The fact that I've done it twice now ... Well, it seems to be one result of my "method." I wasn't suspecting H.B. either, for the longest time, but then it became apparent that Node, the shadowy magazine startup, was way Bigendian.

Wired: One of the details that leaped out at me was the Adidas GSG9, named for the German counterterrorism squad. I felt certain you'd invented the shoe, but then I Googled it.

Gibson: The Adidas GSG9s were the obvious choice for the thinking man's ninja. Nothing I could make up could resonate in the same way. There's code in name-checking the GSG9 history — esoteric meaning. Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I†discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site — readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about "the possibilities of interactive fiction," and they seem to have no clue how we're already so there.
http://www.wired.com/culture/culture...15-08/pl_print





Did Blockbuster, Facebook Break Video Privacy Law with Beacon?

A 1988 law restricts the sharing of someone's video choices
Jaikumar Vijayan

Did Facebook and Beacon partner Blockbuster violate a 1988 video privacy protection law when movie choices that Facebook members made on the latter's Web site were made available to other members of the social network?

According to a professor at the New York Law School, the answer is a definite "yes" -- at least for Blockbuster -- and "quite possibly so" for Facebook.

"The case against Blockbuster is quite straightforward," said James Grimmelmann, associate professor at the New York Law School. "I'm surprised that there haven't been lawsuits already in terms of Blockbuster. The one against Facebook requires a couple more steps. It's one of those interesting issues" that can be viewed in multiple ways legally.

The law in question is the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) of 1988. It basically prohibits movie rental companies such as Blockbuster from disclosing personally identifiable rental records of the people who rent or buy movies from them to others -- unless the customer consents to the practice in writing.

The rarely invoked law was passed after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental records were published in a newspaper. It "stands as one of the strongest protections of consumer privacy against a specific form of data collection," according to a description of the law on the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Web site.

Civil remedies under the law include fines of at least $2,500 for each violation. In the few situations where the law has been invoked, the cases involved the disclosure of customer movie rental records to law enforcement authorities by rental companies. The law has never been tested in an online situation such as the one involving Blockbuster and Facebook, and could raise interesting issues, according to Grimmelmann.

Facebook's Beacon ad service was released in early November as a part of the Facebook Ads platform. It is ostensibly designed to track the activities of Facebook users on more than 44 participating Web sites and to report those activities to the users' Facebook friends, unless specifically told not to do so. The idea is to give participating online companies a way to monitor the activities of Facebook users on their Web sites and to use that information to then deliver targeted messages to Facebook friends.

The problem with that arrangement, at least for Blockbuster, is that such information sharing put it in violation of VPPA before Facebook changed its privacy policies following an outcry over Beacon, Grimmelmann said. The mere fact that Blockbuster passed on movie choice information to Facebook friends without user consent is a violation of VPPA, he said. That information exchange between Blockbuster and Facebook took place in the background without the Facebook user's knowledge, even though the user's consent might have been needed for it to have been shared with other Facebook members, he said.

It is less clear what, if any, culpability Facebook might have, he said. Under tort law, it could be argued that this was a joint enterprise and since Blockbuster is liable, Facebook is, too, Grimmelmann said. Even so, Facebook has a "much better argument" than Blockbuster, he said.

Blockbuster did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Grimmelmann's assertions. A spokesman for Facebook said the company "does not have a comment here."

Grimmelmann wrote about the issue in his blog earlier this week.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Ask.com Puts a Bet on Privacy
Miguel Helft

Will privacy sell?

Ask.com is betting it will. The fourth-largest search engine company will begin a service today called AskEraser, which allows users to make their searches more private.

Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.

Ask, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp based in Oakland, hopes that the privacy protection will differentiate it from more prominent search engines like Google. The service will be conspicuously displayed on Ask.com’s main search page, as well as on the pages of the company’s specialized services for finding videos, images, news and blogs. Unlike typical online privacy controls that can be difficult for average users to find or modify, people will be able to turn AskEraser on or off with a single click.

“It works like a light switch,” said Doug Leeds, senior vice president for product management at Ask.com. Mr. Leeds said the service would be a selling point with consumers who were particularly alert about protecting their privacy.

“I think that it is a step forward,” said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, about AskEraser. “It is the first time that a large company is giving individuals choices that are so transparent.”

But underscoring how difficult it is to completely erase one’s digital footprints, the information typed by users of AskEraser into Ask.com will not disappear completely. Ask.com relies on Google to deliver many of the ads that appear next to its search results. Under an agreement between the two companies, Ask.com will continue to pass query information on to Google. Mr. Leeds acknowledged that AskEraser cannot promise complete anonymity, but said it would greatly increase privacy protections for users who want them, as Google is contractually constrained in what it can do with that information. A Google spokesman said the company uses the information to place relevant ads and to fight certain online scams.

Some privacy experts doubt that concerns about privacy are significant enough to turn a feature like AskEraser into a major selling point for Ask.com. The search engine accounted for 4.7 percent of all searches conducted in the United States in October, according to comScore, which ranks Internet traffic. By comparison, Google accounted for 58.5 percent, Yahoo for 22.9 percent and Microsoft for 9.7 percent.

“My gut tells me that basically it is not going to be a competitive advantage,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, an independent research company “I think people will look at it and see it as a cool thing, and they may use it. But I don’t think it will be a market differentiator.”

Mr. Ponemon said many surveys showed that while about three in four Americans said they were concerned about privacy, their concern was not sufficient to make them change their behavior toward sharing personal information. About 8 percent of Americans were concerned enough about privacy to routinely take steps to protect it, the surveys showed.

“Privacy only becomes important to the average consumer when something blows up,” Mr. Ponemon said.

Of course, something has already blown up. Last year, AOL released the queries conducted by more than 650,000 Americans over three months to foster academic research. While the queries where associated only with a number, rather than a computer’s address, reporters for The New York Times and others were quickly able to identify some of the people who had done the queries. The queries released by AOL included searches for deeply private things like “depression and medical leave” and “fear that spouse contemplating cheating.”

The incident heightened concerns about the risks posed by the systematic collection of growing amounts of data about people’s online activities. In response, search companies have sought to reassure consumers that they are serious about privacy.

While companies say they need to keep records of search strings to improve the quality of search results and fight online scams, they have put limits on the time they retain user data.

Google and Microsoft make search logs largely anonymous or discard them after 18 months. Yahoo does the same after 13 months.

In recent months, privacy has emerged as an increasingly important issue affecting major Internet companies. Several consumer advocacy groups, legislators and competitors, for instance, have expressed concerns about the privacy implications of the proposed $3.1 billion merger between Google and the ad serving company DoubleClick, which is being reviewed by regulators in the United States and Europe.

Last month, the Federal Trade Commission held a forum to discuss concerns over online ads that appear based on a user’s Web visits. And just last week, the popular social networking site Facebook suffered an embarrassing setback when it was forced to rein in an advertising plan that would have informed users of their friends’ buying activities on the Web. After more than 50,000 of its members objected, the company apologized and said it would allow users to turn off the feature.

In some cases, companies have argued that they are required to keep records of search queries for some time to comply with laws in various countries.

“Those arguments are seriously undermined when their competitors erase data immediately,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior lawyer at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Hoofnagle and other privacy advocates said they hoped AskEraser would pressure Google and others to offer a similar feature. A Google spokesman said the company takes privacy seriously but is not currently developing a service to immediately discard search queries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/technology/11ask.html





Google Keeps What Ask.com Erases
Thomas Claburn

AskEraser may remove user search query data from Ask.com's servers, but deleted data may live on, in part at least, on Google's servers. That's because Google delivers the bulk of the ads on Ask.com, based on information provided by Ask..

This week Ask.com launched its new AskEraser program to eliminate a users' IP addresses, user IDs, session ID cookies, and the complete text of search queries if users ask for it. In some cases, however, gone from an Ask.com server does not mean gone for good.

"We pass information to Google, including the IP address and the search query, in order to get search results on the site," explained Doug Leeds, senior VP at Ask.

Google uses that data to fight click fraud and to present contextually relevant ads. It may well use the information for other purposes, such as measuring the responsiveness of its systems. However, Leeds said he could not disclose the specifics of the contractual relationship between Ask and Google.

"The contractual relationship we have with Google constrains Google much more than its privacy policy does," said Leeds. "But I can't say what the specifics are."

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite the apparent indelibility of shared data, at least during the 18-month retention period the industry has settled on, Leeds said that AskEraser addresses search privacy concerns "because it primarily erases it from our servers and our logs."

Indeed, Ask offers more privacy than any of the major search engines at the moment. A lesser known search engine, Ixquick.com, deletes user search data within 48 hours.

The persistence of Ask users' search queries and IP addresses on Google's servers isn't necessarily troubling to most people. The fact that neither Ask nor Google has had a major privacy breach suggests that both companies are storing user data responsibly. But clearly the same cannot be said for the many other companies that have acknowledged data breaches in recent years.

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimates that more than 216 million personal records have been exposed as a result of security breaches in the U.S since the start of 2005. Perhaps the most serious recent breach of note, made public in January, was the theft of as many as 94 million credit and debit card account numbers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of merchandise return records, which included driver's license numbers, from the computer systems of TJX Companies, through a series of cyber break-ins dating back to 2005. The U.K. government's recent loss of discs containing data on some 25 million of its citizens represents a comparable data debacle. In 2006, there were more than 315 publicized breaches affecting almost 20 million people, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. The type of organization involved breaks down as follows: 29% government or military agencies; 28% from educational institutions; 22% from general businesses; 13% from health care organizations; and 8% from financial companies. In 2005, there were 158 publicized breaches affecting more than 64.8 million people, according to the ITRC.

The companies leaking data are not fly-by-night firms staffed by the IT challenged. They've got names like Gap, eBay, IBM, and Pfizer, not to mention assorted universities and government agencies.

Since, according to the Government Accountability Office, most information exposed thus doesn't lead to identity theft, is it worth being worried? It might be. The absence of privacy isn't always inconsequential.

In an adversarial situation, your actions, online and off, may help incriminate you. According to Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, electronic data is becoming more common in divorce cases and often that data is supplied to the attorney by the client unsolicited.

"I tell my clients to go in with the assumption during your divorce that your electronic information may not be all that private," said Ferro. "And maybe I'm a little more paranoid than most, but I've seen cases where people have planted spyware. I've seen cases were people have programmed their computer to forward copies of all e-mails. I've seen cases where people have swiped the laptop and cloned the hard drive. I've seen cases where people have taken their spouse's BlackBerry. It happens fairly frequently."

Job seekers have to consider how the absence of privacy affects their employability. Search engines are frequently used by employers to screen potential applicants. It only takes a few unflattering photos to doom one's resume to the circular file.

"I think it's quite common," said John Challenger, CEO of global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "It's not just Google. It's several different sites looking to find out who they know, like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo, as well as sometimes electronic background checks that companies use to check up on people."

The scrutiny once reserved for high-profile hires has become more accessible and more affordable, said Challenger. For example, recruiters are looking at MySpace and Facebook. "They're using that as part of the screening process," he said.

The issue affects travelers as well. Andrew Feldmar, a psychotherapist from Vancouver in Canada, was denied entry into the U.S. earlier this year for narcotics use because a border guard Googled "Andrew Feldmar" and found that Feldmar had written an article about his experience with LSD forty years earlier.

"I should warn people that the electronic footprint you leave on the Net will be used against you," Feldmar told the New York Times in May. "It cannot be erased."
http://itnews.com.au/News/66867,goog...om-erases.aspx





Google Develops Wikipedia Rival
Jeremy Kirk

Google is developing an online publishing platform where people can write entries on subjects they know, an idea that's close to Wikipedia's user-contributed encyclopedia but with key differences.

The project, which is in an invitation-only beta stage, lets users create clean-looking Web pages with their photo and write entries on, for example, insomnia. Those entries are called "knols" for "unit of knowledge," Google said.

Google wants the knols to develop into a deep repository of knowledge, covering topics such as geography, history and entertainment.

Google's project will have to catch up with Wikipedia, which includes more than 7 million articles in 200 languages. Anonymous users constantly update Wikipedia entries in an ever-growing online encyclopedia that's edited by a network of vetted editors.

But Google asserts that the Web's development so far has neglected the importance of the bylined author.

"We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content," wrote Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, on the official Google blog.

Google said anyone can write about any topic, and repetition of entries on the same subjects is beneficial. Google will provide the Web hosting space, as well as editing tools.

Contributors can choose whether to let Google place ads on the knols. Google said it will give the contributors a "substantial" portion of the revenue generated by those ads. While Wikipedia lacks ads, keyword advertising has underpinned Google's growth.

Entries can't be edited or revised by other people, in contrast to Wikipedia. However, other readers will be able to rank and review others' entries, which will then be interpreted by Google's search engine when displaying results.

The concept of peer-reviewed information is nothing new and is implemented in different ways on various Web sites. Yahoo, for example, has an "Answers" feature where users can ask questions, and the response is ranked on quality. Also, most blogs have forms where readers can comment on the author's entry.

Despite those other formats, Google probably feels that "a service like Knol might be necessary to stay competitive," wrote Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, in a review.
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_00257...10046E582.html





Data Breach Prompts Ohio Pact with McAfee for SafeBoot

Encryption software to be distributed to all state agencies, colleges, schools
Brian Fonseca

Still reeling from a massive data breach caused by a stolen backup tape, the state of Ohio is planning to provide government agencies and schools with access to encryption software in 2008 to help protect sensitive data.

State officials announced late last week that they have agreed to purchase about 60,000 licenses of McAfee Inc.'s SafeBoot encryption software. The state will begin rolling out SafeBoot's policy-based encryption technology to government offices beginning early next year, according to the Ohio Department of Administrative Services (DAS). Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Ohio Office of Information Technology, working with a task force of 37 IT professionals from 30 state agencies, made the decision to purchase SafeBoot, the DAS said.

The encryption software will be available to all city and county governments, universities, colleges and schools in Ohio. The mobile data security tools are designed to protect laptop and desktop computers, memory sticks, and CD, DVD and hard drives from unauthorized access, said Steve Edmonson, the state's CIO, in a statement.

Ohio officials moved to launch a hefty security policy makeover after a backup tape containing Social Security and other personal information of residents was taken from the car of a government intern in June. The intern had been transporting data being used to test a new ERP system the state is developing. The data loss could cost the state as much as $3 million.

Computer forensics experts hired by the state determined the unencrypted stolen backup tape contained information on 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. In September the state docked a state government official about a week of future vacation time for not ensuring that the data would be protected.

McAfee acquired SafeBoot technology in a $350 million purchase of SafeBoot BV last month. The acquired data protection suite is designed to encrypt data stored on hard disks, individual files and folders on computer systems and storage devices.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Megan's Law Listing May Have Led to Slaying

Lake County prosecutors have investigated the possibility that information in the Internet database might have been the motive for the killing of a convicted sex offender.
Maria L. La Ganga

Convicted rapist Michael A. Dodele had been free just 35 days when sheriff's deputies found him dead last month in his aging, tan mobile home, his chest and left side punctured with stab wounds.

Officers quickly arrested Dodele's neighbor, 29-year-old construction worker Ivan Garcia Oliver, who made "incriminating comments, essentially admitting to his attacking Dodele," the Lake County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

Prosecutors said they have investigated the possibility that the slaying of Dodele, 67, stemmed from his having been listed on the state's Megan's Law database of sex offenders. If so, his death may be the first in the state to result from such a listing, experts said.

Oliver pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, burglary and elder abuse when he was arraigned Nov. 30.

In a jailhouse interview Wednesday night, Oliver said he has a son who was molested in the past, and he took action to protect the child.

"Society may see the action I took as unacceptable in the eyes of 'normal' people," Oliver said. "I felt that by not taking evasive action as a father in the right direction, I might as well have taken my child to some swamp filled with alligators and had them tear him to pieces. It's no different."

Although Oliver did not say he killed Dodele, he said that "any father in my position, with moral, home, family values, wouldn't have done any different. At the end of the day, what are we as parents? Protectors, caregivers, nurturers."

In fact, Dodele was not a child molester. But a listing on the Megan's Law website could have left Oliver with the impression that he had abused children because of the way it was written.

Although Dodele's listing has been taken down since his death, a spokesman for the state attorney general said the site described the man's offenses as "rape by force" and "oral copulation with a person under 14 or by force."

"He was convicted of other bad things, but nothing involving a minor," said Richard F. Hinchcliff, chief deputy district attorney for Lake County. But "it would be easy to understand why someone might think so looking at the website."

Dodele's crimes involved sexual assaults on adult women, records show.

A neighbor at the Western Hills Resort & Trailer Park, a tattered collection of mobile homes and bungalows, said that two days before the killing, Oliver "told every house" in the park that he'd found Dodele listed on the website of convicted sexual offenders and was uncomfortable living near him.

"He looked it up on the computer . . . ," the neighbor said. "He said [Dodele] can't be around here."

The park resident requested anonymity because of a fear of reprisal, but reported Oliver's visit and statements to sheriff's deputies after the slaying. "A lot of people told them" about Oliver's claims, the person said.

Officials in Lake County -- a patchwork of wealth and poverty, vineyards and mobile home parks just north of Napa Valley -- would not offer a motive for the killing.

Hinchcliff acknowledged, however, that one possible motive investigated by the district attorney's office was that Oliver knew Dodele was on the Megan's Law list and did not want him as a neighbor.

According to court documents, Dodele committed his first offenses at age 15 and spent the last two decades either in prison or at Atascadero State Hospital receiving treatment.

His last attack was the 1987 knife-point rape of a 37-year-old woman on a Sonoma County beach.

Those were the charges that were listed on the Megan's Law website.

"I think [Oliver and Dodele] are both victims of the Internet," said Charlene Steen, a psychologist who examined Dodele on behalf of the defense in two 2007 trials about whether he should be recommitted to Atascadero.

Both ended in hung juries. Dodele was freed Oct. 16 and was hoping to start over in the crowded little mobile home park, where neighbors described him as open and friendly.

"The family is just sick," Steen said. "They finally got him back. They all thought he had made such great progress, and then this happened. It's pretty bad."

At 10:14 a.m. Nov. 20, an anonymous woman called 911 to report that a man was bleeding from his hands and directed medical personnel to Dodele's space at the mobile home park, according to a written statement from the Sheriff's Department.

When deputies arrived, they found Dodele's body.

The dead man's "immediate neighbors and other residents" sent the deputies to Oliver's home, the statement said, because "he had been seen recently leaving Dodele's residence with what appeared to be blood on his hands and clothing."

There was blood on a car in front of Oliver's house and at the front door of the concrete-block duplex. Inside, deputies reportedly found Oliver with blood on his hands and clothing and "injuries to his hands, consistent with having been in a physical altercation."

Authorities will not divulge exactly what Oliver said when he was arrested.

Steen wrote a letter to a local paper decrying Dodele's death "simply because he was a sex offender whose name and picture were on the registry."

Shortly after the letter was published, Steen said, a woman describing herself as Oliver's wife called to complain.

"She said, 'We have a child who was molested, and my husband is very upset to have a child molester living nearby'," Steen recounted, noting the irony that Dodele's crimes all involved adult women.

Steen said she had not talked to police about the phone call. Oliver said that the woman with whom he lived in the trailer park was his girlfriend, and the two were not married.

Attempts to reach the woman failed. One neighbor said she had moved away after the slaying.

Oliver is being held without bail, a police statement said, because he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in San Diego and was on parole when Dodele was killed.

Speaking from behind a thick glass divider in the visiting area of the Lake County Correctional Facility, Oliver said his son had been molested, but he declined to give the details of his son's assault or to give the child's name.

Although he spoke of "the action I took," he would not describe what happened in the aging mobile home the Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving.

Oliver would not comment on whether Dodele had ever approached his son.

But Oliver said he saw the older man looking at the boy.

"It was more than watching," Oliver said. "You could see his eyes. He was fantasizing, plotting. Later on down the line, who knows how many other children he could have hurt."

Research indicates that, in general, the older rapists get, the lower their risk of re-offending, said L.C. Miccio-Fonseca, chairwoman of the California Coalition on Sex Offenders, a group of treatment providers, probation and parole officers.

In addition, she said, sex offenders who target grown women over the course of many years are unlikely to victimize children.

But when told that Dodele's victims were women and not children, Oliver seemed unfazed. "There is no curing the people that do it," he said.

Oliver's preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 7.

Asked about what he thinks will happen to him, he said, "It's hard to tell at this point. There's no doubt I'm looking at a numerous amount of years. I'm not a lawyer. We haven't gone over the evidence."

But he also said that he "would never change who I am or what I do because of what society thinks is right or not right. I have always been who I am and always will be."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=2&cset=true





Paying for Free Web Information
Noam Cohen

NEWSPAPER publishers and other content producers have a complicated relationship with giant search engines like Google and Yahoo. They simultaneously try to curry favor with these sites, hiring people known as optimizers with magical incantations to make articles show up high on the results pages and drive traffic, all the while grumbling that maybe, perhaps, it isn’t fair for the search engines to make copies of their material — so that it can be searched or appear on aggregation sites like Google News — without compensation.

But few are willing to speak as unambiguously as Samuel Zell, the real estate developer who intends to buy the Tribune Company, did this spring at Stanford University.

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do?” he asked. “We have a situation today where effectively the content is being paid for by the newspapers and stolen by Google, et cetera. That can last for a short time, but it can’t last forever. I think Google and the boys understand that. We’re going to see new deals and new formulas in the media space that reflect the reality of cost benefit.”

He added, according to The Stanford Daily, perhaps by way of apology for his candor: “But remember, I’m a newspaper man since Monday, and not even that. Give me two weeks to become a genius.”

•

Notwithstanding Mr. Zell, who is expected to close his deal this month, an international coalition of publishers recently took what could be described as an aggressively ambiguous step in its relationship with the search engines. Using computer-to-computer code embedded in online material that readers never see, the coalition is proposing that publishers give detailed instructions to search engines about how to catalog and index its content.

Under the code, called Automated Content Access Protocol or ACAP, publishers could, for example, instruct search engines about how long an article should remain in a search engine’s index, or which search engines would be allowed to index it at all, says Larry Kilman, of the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, an early backer.

Putting a time limit on how long articles are kept, or cached, he said, can ensure that only the most recent, and therefore most accurate, information is accessed, while also allowing publishers to know that material it sells as part of an archive won’t be floating around free.

ACAP was created with the backing of large publishing groups, and went live last month after nearly a year of testing. The Associated Press recently signed up as a participant, and The Times of London is employing it now, Mark Bide, the project’s coordinator, wrote in an e-mail message from London.

Srinandan Kasi, the general counsel at The Associated Press, stressed that for his organization ACAP was about “access, not about restriction.”

“Digital expression for anyone in the content economy will stand to benefit for efficiency on a scale that we cannot transact humanly,” he said. “The difference is the content economy is vast, multilingual, time sensitive. How do you create a common vocabulary?”

The crucial step for ACAP, everyone agrees, is to get the big search engines to play along. Despite the use of words like “comply” and “permissions,” ACAP would have no coercive power over the search engines. Yet right now, the search engines are holding back.

A Yahoo spokeswoman, Kathryn Kelly, said in an e-mail: “While Yahoo respects the efforts of ACAP we have not thoroughly evaluated the initiative and are not members or committed to it.” Google didn’t respond to a request for comment, but a spokeswoman was paraphrased by The A.P. as saying Google needed to evaluate the plan.

The problem for the publishers is that the big search engines are largely happy with the access they have right now. The current system relies on robots.txt, a more-than-decade-old convention that Web sites can use to block automated spiders — computer applications that crawl the Internet indexing Web pages.

But robots.txt is an all-or-nothing proposition. And publishers are in need of a hybrid solution to the fundamental challenge that has come as content has migrated online. Enter ACAP.

It proposes a half-way measure to answer the baffling question that has played out in various media outlets, say, when newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal decide whether to charge readers for content online; or when the music industry and the television networks decide whether to join established sites like YouTube or iTunes, or control the content themselves; or when publishers decide whether to participate in programs by Google and Amazon that allow books’ contents to be searched by allowing copies to be made.

Is greater visibility more important than control, or is it the other way around?

Part of the problem, no doubt, is that in a cut-and-paste online world, control is hard to enforce. Even the robots.txt instructions are not binding, but have gained acceptance over time.

The law has largely been silent on how much copying is fair use by search engines; but in any event, how could the law speak with one voice across the globe? (There have been lawsuits filed on the issue, and Google has reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse and other news producers allowing it to use their content on Google News.)

•

So it is a contest between two large industries — the distributor (search engines) or the producer (publishers). If ACAP became too restrictive, presumably the search engines could leave the material alone to wallow in its obscurity.

Yet by not trying to assert some control, publishers would be acknowledging that they have an uninvited business partner.

If ACAP is intended to be a “a cudgel to force search engines to change their business models,” writes Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet law expert at Oxford University, it “won’t be successful.” Rather, he writes, “if it takes off at all, it will likely be only with a few of its more basic features. That may well be enough for the content publishers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/te...gy/10link.html





Onscreen Villain Makes Doctors Wince
Melissa Lafsky

The most horrifying moment in the new movie “Awake” occurs 34 minutes into the film, when the protagonist (Hayden Christensen) feels the scalpel cutting into his chest. As his surgeon (Terrence Howard) deepens the incision, the audience can hear the patient’s screams of agony, while the characters onscreen see only a man lying on an operating table, seemingly unconscious.

Movies and television shows that portray doctors as ego-driven and error-prone are standard fare these days. But “Awake” takes dramatic license a step further, bringing to life a rare phenomenon that physicians are still struggling to understand.

Called anesthesia awareness, it occurs when patients wake up during surgery because they are underanesthetized. In real life, these periods are generally brief. But the patient can indeed feel pain, ranging from minor to unendurable.

“Those are the two ends of the scale, and there’s everything in between,” said Dr. Peter S. Sebel, a professor of anesthesiology at Emory University and a leading researcher on awareness. “We don’t have a good feel for how many episodes are distressing and how many are not.”

Such nuances may be lost on viewers of “Awake,” which opened Nov. 30 — a date for which anesthesiologists spent months bracing themselves.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists sent e-mail messages to its 40,000 members urging them to be prepared for a possible onslaught of negative press and questions from patients who have seen the film. On Nov. 2, the society’s president, Dr. Jeffrey Apfelbaum of the University of Chicago, advised members to “remain calm regarding the movie.”

Particularly troubling to physicians is the film’s marketing line, which states that “Awake” will “do to surgery what ‘Jaws’ did to swimming in the ocean.”

Gary Faber, executive vice president for marketing at the Weinstein Company, which distributed the movie, said the company was aware of the doctors’ concern but would not comment on their criticisms.

Keeping a patient asleep through surgery is a delicate process. Anesthesiologists typically administer a variety of drugs, often including a paralytic that leaves the patient unable to move or speak. They must then monitor vital signs throughout the procedure to ensure that the patient is anesthetized enough, but not too much.

“Too deep anesthesia is bad for the brain and can cause cognitive dysfunction, but too light can result in awareness,” said Dr. James E. Cottrell, chairman of anesthesiology at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and a former president of the anesthesiologists’ society.

The exact percentage of patients who experience awareness is difficult to calculate. In 2004, in a report based on several studies, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations put the total incidence at 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, or 20,000 to 40,000 of the 21 million patients who receive general anesthesia each year. A later study concluded that the figure was much smaller — about 1,400 patients.

But while the number may be small, anesthesiologists concede that the problem is real. “All anesthesiologists realize the number isn’t zero,” said Dr. Donald M. Mathews, program director of the department of anesthesia at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. “To me, that’s the important piece of information.”

Patients who experience the highest levels of awareness suffer horribly, both during and after the procedure. “Patients who have experienced this frequently say that it was worse than death itself and that they were praying to God to let them die,” Dr. Mark J. S. Heath, an assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology at Columbia, wrote in an e-mail message. (In the movie, the ostensibly anesthetized main character learns something that drives the thriller’s plot: someone is trying to kill him.)

Some anesthesiologists say “Awake” could have positive results. Dr. Daniel J. Cole, chairman of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic campus in Arizona, said many of his colleagues felt that “anything that can help raise awareness of intraoperative awareness is a positive thing, since consumers will be better informed.”

Others are less convinced. “It sensationalizes and trivializes a complication from anesthesia,” Dr. Sebel said. “It does the patient a disservice, and the profession a disservice.”

After seeing the movie, Dr. Cole agreed with that assessment, though he stood by his view that more awareness was useful. “What happened in that operating room,” he said, “was so far removed from reality that I hope it doesn’t leave the American public with the idea that this is what really goes on.”

As for whether other anesthesiologists have been going out to see the movie, responses are mixed. “I don’t have any specific desire to see it,” Dr. Apfelbaum said.

Dr. Mathews, of St. Vincent’s, took a different view. “We’re all going to go see this thing,” he said. “We know our patients are going to go see this thing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/health/11awak.html





Toshiba Launching SCiB Batteries in March: 5 Min Charge, 10 Year Lifespan
Thomas Ricker

How does this sound: a battery capable of recharging to 90% in under 5 minutes while remaining useful (i.e., 5,000+ recharges) for 10 years or more? Sounds like the stuff of jetpacks and food replicators right? Nope... March, 2008. It was a long, long time ago when we first brought you news of these so-called "Super Li-ion" batteries. In March of 2005 to be exact. Now they're here, courtesy of Toshiba who just announced their Super Charge ion Batteries, or SCiBs. The wee 2.4V version measures 62 x 95 x 13-mm / 150-grams while the big, bad 24V version measures in at 100 x 300 x 45-mm and 2000-grams. Oh, and they won't short-circuit and explode. The problem? The first production run is for industrial-use (non-CE) class devices like hybrid cars and the like. Oh pretty please Toshiba, with sugar, won't you make a laptop version?
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/11/t...harge-10-year/





Amateur Time Hackers Play With Atomic Clocks at Home
Quinn Norton

Tom Van Baak's spare upstairs bedroom looks like a cross between the control center of a remote polar outpost and the inner sanctum of a Victorian mad scientist. In reality, it's a home-built lab dedicated to the study of time.

One wall is stacked with a small museum's worth of old nautical clocks, thin slabs of quartz, vacuum tubes of unknown purpose and a few metronomes. Another wall is dominated by shelves overflowing with metal boxes sporting dials, knobs, flashing LEDs and constantly shifting digital displays. A sealed metal cylinder resting on a paint-splattered stepladder bears the not-quite-reassuring sticker, "Cesium Device. Not Radioactive."

"If you have one clock ... you are peaceful and have no worries," says Van Baak, fingering a length of cable connecting two of his machines. "If you have two clocks ... you start asking, 'What time is it, really?'"

Van Baak is in a better position to answer that question than most. He's part of a community of about 400 geek hobbyists taking advantage of a glut of surplus precision timekeeping gear to pursue a serious interest in very precise timekeeping. They call themselves Time Nuts, and they spend their spare cycles collecting, repairing, tweaking -- and occasionally using -- super-precise clocks.

With the end of the Cold War, and with telecommunications technology advancing rapidly, surplus stores and eBay have filled up with discarded precision time equipment once beyond the reach of all but governments. Cesium clocks, rubidium clocks and even the occasional hydrogen maser can be had for less than a decent laptop. A recent search on eBay turned up an HP 5061B cesium standard for sale for $2,000, and you can get a telecom surplus rubidium standard for less than $400. Some of this equipment costs upwards of $50,000 new.

Their access to once-forbidden technology lets the time hackers play in a realm of precision that underpins the modern technological world. A select few, like Van Baak, have started exploring the underpinnings of the universe.

A retired Unix kernel programmer, Van Baak began buying time instruments a decade ago, slowly building what today is probably the best-equipped, individually owned time lab in the world, exceeding the capability of many national labs. His gear lets him perform some impressive experiments. Two years ago, he realized he'd acquired the capability to offer his children a demonstration of one of the effects predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity -- a demonstration that Einstein himself couldn't have performed with the equipment of his day.

The theory says time passes slowly for someone near a massive object, as measured relative to someone farther away. On Earth, this effect is so small as to be undetectable to all but the most precise equipment, putting demonstrations beyond the reach of, say, a typical high school science fair. Consequently, "kids grow up thinking relativity is only for really fast speeds or really heavy gravity," says Van Baak.

He wanted his children to see that relativity is proportional. So he loaded the family's blue minivan with portable power supplies, monitoring equipment, and three HP 5071 cesium clocks. Three, because time is always marked relative to other clocks: More clocks mean more accurate time. With his three kids and some camping gear in tow, he drove the winding roads spiraling up Washington's Mt. Rainier and checked the family into a lodge 5,319 feet above sea level.

They hiked the trails, and the kids relaxed with board games and books, while in the imperceptibly lessened gravity, time moved a little bit faster than at home. Van Baak found himself explaining to park rangers more than once why a minivan filled with inscrutable equipment was idling in front of the national park lodge for hours on end. But the effort paid off. When the family returned to the suburbs two days later, the cesium clocks were off by the precise amount relativity predicted. He and his family had lived just a little more life than the neighbors.

"It was the best extra 22 nanoseconds I've ever spent with the kids," Van Baak says.

Existential thrills aside, the Time Nuts dabble in the practical as well. John Ackerman, an attorney with a technology company, offers super-accurate time over the internet to anyone who wants it, courtesy of four of the most accurate NTP (network time protocol) servers in the world.

Located in a pegboard-lined basement in his Dayton, Ohio home, three of Ackerman's servers use external sources: GPS and LORAN-C navigation broadcasts, and the WWVB radio station that broadcasts U.S. standard time from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. His fourth machine, though, is the most impressive: It has its own cesium clock. A rack-mounted PC watches the cesium clock's output and uses it to keep the other clocks in line during the microsecond chasms between broadcast pings.

Ackerman fell into the time rabbit hole while practicing his other hobby, ham radio. Precise frequencies are important when trying to get to the right bit of radio spectrum, and from his pursuit of the perfect frequency it was easy to get drawn into clocks. "It led me into buying all sorts of crap from eBay," he admits.

It's a hobby that feeds on itself: A good clock always needs a better clock to set it. "You always have to have a reference frequency," says Ackerman. "If you get the next new good thing ... you have to measure it against something even better." It's a source of pride to Ackerman that his four machines keep time within 100 nanoseconds of each other.

That fastidiousness is typical in both the amateur and professional timekeeping communities, where people are drawn first to the idea of finding precision in the physical world. Consistently, they tell stories of an early fascination with looking ever closer at something, trying to understand its exact boundaries. Fundamental to the field of precise time is that it will never be perfect. With every new level of accuracy comes a new frame of reference for error. Time has an intractable precision -- you can spend your days always moving closer to the ever-unreachable now.

The time hackers' commitment has earned them the respect of professional horologists, some of whom lurk on the Time Nuts mailing list to offer advice -- or even unofficial tech support. One participant, Rick Karlquist, is a celebrity of sorts in the group. Now an electrical engineer for Agilent Labs, in the 1980s Karlquist helped design two of the precision clocks now showing up in the surplus market.

At Agilent's Sunnyvale, California, campus, Karlquist shows off one of his inventions. It's a "hockey puck" -- a silver discus on a circuit board the size of a PC card slot. Inside is a quartz-crystal-based oscillator that can keep its accuracy through 100-degree Celsius variations in temperature. Originally designed for Qualcomm CDMA towers, this was the clock that could keep you talking from Barrow, Alaska, to Phoenix, Arizona. Now, it's a popular plaything in the hands of the Time Nuts, who appreciate its legendary indestructibility.

Karlquist's other achievement is the HP 5071 cesium clock -- the model Van Baak hauled up the slopes of Mt. Rainier. "The 5071 was indisputably the best commercial clock that's ever been made," Karlquist says. There's consensus on this in the time community. The 5071 is a damn fine clock, and a rare $30,000 find on eBay. At one point, explains Karlquist, it made up 80 percent of the weighting of international atomic time.

On Agilent's campus, though, the 5071 is literally a museum piece -- an exhibit in a small museum of Agilent devices, most of them dating from when Agilent was Hewlett Packard's R&D arm. That's why Karlquist feels a duty to the Time Nuts -- it's how he keeps his creations alive. "Most of the pro community has moved on," he says. "If I didn't support them, it would be impossible to get them to work.... I can't resist coming in and sounding like an expert," he says, laughing.

People like Karlquist built a backbone of time technology that stretches from obscure government labs to our mobile phones and e-mail servers. For curious enthusiasts, the chance to explore and understand that hidden connection is now wide open, and cheap surplus.

"Precision time is the infrastructure on which most modern technology depends," says Van Baak. Unlock the black boxes of the computers, travel, telecommunications and transportation, he says, and you get clocks.
http://www.wired.com/science/discove...2/time_hackers





Make Your Own Ringtones (Even With Copyrighted Songs)
Saul Hansell

Too many startup ideas are rather boring combinations of trendy concepts — say, a social network for hedge fund mangers. But I ran into one today that seems interesting; it’s something like YouTube for ringtones. The site, which officially launches Tuesday, is called Cellware, and it was founded by John Ferber, who started Advertising.com with his brother Scott.

There are a couple of nifty bits to what Mr. Ferber is doing. First, the site offers free ringtones, in a world where most ringtones are either sold for as much as $2.49 in conjunction with major labels, or through various subscription services that pitch themselves through rather garish ads on social networks with their prices in hard-to-read print.

The business model is advertising: banner ads on the Web site you use to pick the ringtones to download, and on the SMS message you need to receive in order to get the ring tones on the phone. In addition to ringtones, the site also offers images for use as wallpaper, downloadable games and video clips, also supported by ads.

There is some oddball professional content, a library of sound effects, and some indie rock. But the main point is for people to upload and create their own ringtones. Indeed, there are some simple Flash tools that let you upload whole MP3 tracks, edit them into clips and even mix several tracks together into a mashup. These can be tagged, rated, searched and shared in a way that any user of YouTube would recognize.

The site also offers anyone who uploads ringtones or other content a share of the advertising revenue they generate.

Uploading and sharing MP3 files? Isn’t there a bit of a copyright issue there?

Mr. Ferber has a rather interesting take on this. Unlike most user-generated sites which post all content and wait for copyright owners to complain, Cellware has someone listen to every ringtone before it is put up on the site for others to hear, so copyrighted songs can be blocked.

On the other hand, the site makes it incredibly easy for people to upload MP3 files of songs and then send 20 second clips of them to their own cellphones to use as ringtones. Mr. Ferber said Cellware does not filter out copyrighted content for this aspect of the service because it deems that this falls within the fair use doctrine — the rights of someone who buys a copyrighted work to use it in certain ways, such as to make backup copies of software. Of course, Cellware does not verify that you have actually paid for the song you are converting.

Using an MP3 file as a ringtone is certainly not new. Some phones make it easy, and there is a lot of software available to help people do this. Still, the music industry would like to preserve its extra revenue from ringtones as much as possible. Apple, for example, charges an extra 99 cents, above the price of a song itself, to use a song as a ringtone for the iPhone.

Not surprisingly, the iPhone is one of the few phones capable of playing MP3s that will not work with Cellware’s service.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/1.../index.html?hp





Will Smith Film 'I Am Legend' Not Hitting China Amid U.S. Movie Ban Report

Will Smith's new sci-fi thriller, "I Am Legend," is hitting movie theaters across Asia later this month — but not in China.

The delay in the film's approval comes amid a report that China has issued a temporary ban on American movies to boost the country's domestic film industry — a move the country's regulator has denied.

"We struggled very, very hard to try to get it to work out, but there are only a certain amount of foreign films that are allowed in," Smith told reporters in Hong Kong on Friday.

Smith said he had met with China Film Group's chairman, Han Sanping, and is working with him to secure a release date for "I Am Legend."

Smith said he has discussed other movie projects with Han and mentioned that he's exploring the idea of a remake of "The Karate Kid," possibly set in Hong Kong or Beijing.

"I am Legend" has already received a green light for release in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

Although Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the territory has maintained a certain amount of autonomy, with its own financial, legal and regulatory systems.

Smith's comments came a day after Hollywood trade publication Variety reported that Chinese authorities have decided to ban American movies for three months to protect the local film industry.

But an executive at the import and export arm of state-run China Film Group on Thursday denied there was a ban, saying the company is still reviewing Hollywood movies for release in the country.

In the past, Chinese regulators have tried to maximize revenue for Chinese studios by banning foreign films from theaters during holidays and school vacations, when audiences are biggest.

"I Am Legend," based on the Richard Matheson novel by the same name, is set in New York where Smith is one of the lone survivors of a deadly global epidemic. It has been adapted for the big screen on two previous occasions — first as "The Last Man on Earth" in 1964 and then as "The Omega Man" in 1971.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,315882,00.html





Second Life's CTO Resigns
AP

Virtual world Second Life's chief technology officer -- a colorful Navy veteran who delights in mocking creationism -- has resigned.

Cory Ondrejka, employee No. 4 at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which owns Second Life, quit Tuesday and will depart at the end of the year.

Ondrejka helped write the computer code that underpins the popular virtual world. Second Life is a 3D Internet destination where users create, buy and sell fantastic islands inhabited by virtual characters, or avatars.

Philip Rosedale, CEO of the eight-year-old company, said Ondrejka resigned to ''pursue new professional challenges'' and said he and Ondrejka had strategic differences.

''The needs of our company are changing, and the role of CTO, or technical lead, has also evolved,'' Rosedale said in a statement. ''Cory and I are in agreement that our paths, at this point in time at least, lie in different directions.''

Ondrejka could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Second Life has been criticized for technical problems -- graphics that load painfully slowly on older computers, and bizarre glitches where avatars appear unintentionally naked. The site has struggled with hackers and hecklers, who have defaced other users' content or interrupted virtual conferences.

Ondrejka spearheaded the company's decision to allow users to retain intellectual property rights to their creations. That's encouraged a thriving e-commerce market where users spend real dollars to buy virtual real estate, clothes, cars and other items.

Ondrejka has appeared in Second Life as the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- a reference to the farcical religion ''Pastafarianism.''

Pastafarianism -- in which the universe's creator resembles spaghetti and meatballs -- is the brain child of a physics graduate student at Oregon State University, who in 2005 wanted to protest the Kansas State Board of Education's decision to require the teaching of intelligent design.

If schools teach intelligent design -- similar to creationism and contrary to evolution -- they should also teach Pastafarianism and other beliefs, insist adherents, including many scientists and technologists.

Before joining Linden Lab in November 2000, Ondrejka was a programmer for video game developer Pacific Coast Power and Light. He did computer work for the Department of Defense and worked at the National Security Agency.

The former Navy officer and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy was the first Annapolis graduate to earn a joint undergraduate degree in computer science and weapons and systems engineering, according to his Linden Lab biography.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...s_cto_resigns/





Penthouse Buys Group of Social-Networking Sites
Andrew Martin

While the influx of free and low-cost video has hurt the sale of pornographic videos, the chief executive of the Penthouse Media Group remains so bullish on the sex-related entertainment industry that he is investing $500 million in a group of social networking sites.

Marc H. Bell, chief executive of Penthouse Media, said the company had acquired Various Inc. and its subsidiaries as part of a plan to expand its reach. Various operates more than 25 networking sites and says it has a member base of more than 260 million consumers, about 1.2 million of them paying subscribers.

The combined revenue of both companies is projected to be $340 million in 2007.

Various’s most popular Web site is adultfriendfinder, which describes itself as a personals community for swingers and sex. But Various owns a variety of other social networks like Italianfriendfinder.com, gradfinder.com and bigchurch.com, which offers to help users “meet people who share the same spiritual beliefs as you.”

“For now, we are holding on to everything,” Mr. Bell said. He said the goal was to provide consumers, particularly 18-to-34-year-old men, with a wide variety of sex-related offerings in magazines, in videos and online.

“The rationale here is, it’s an online world,” Mr. Bell said.

After filing for bankruptcy protection, Penthouse was purchased in 2004 by PET Capital Partners, a group of private investors that includes Mr. Bell. Since then, Mr. Bell and his team have revamped the magazine, turning it from what he describes as an “XXX” publication into a more lifestyle-focused magazine that is “where you go when you graduate from Maxim.” The company also started making sex-related movies aimed at couples.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/te...penthouse.html





Lonely Canadian Shocked to Get $85,000 Phone Bill

A Canadian oil-field worker, stunned to get a C$85,000 ($83,700) cell phone bill, has had the charges reduced to C$3,400, but is still fighting them.

Piotr Staniaszek, a 22-year-old oil and gas well tester in rural northwest Alberta, became a figure of international media attention this week when his father went to the press to complain about the size of his son's bill.

Staniaszek's father, also named Piotr Staniaszek, said his son thought he could use his new phone as a modem for his computer as part of his C$10 unlimited browser plan from Bell Mobility, a division of Bell Canada.

He downloaded movies and other high-resolution files unaware of the charges they would incur.

"He's working in the field sometimes, alone, in the shack. What to do? Drink vodka or go on the Internet?" Staniaszek senior told Reuters on Thursday from Calgary, Alberta.

"Now it's $85,000 and nobody told him," he said.

According to the invoice, his son rang up C$60,000 in charges in November, and they have since climbed to C$85,000.

Staniaszek senior said Bell has agreed to reduce the charges to C$3,400 for "goodwill."

"It's still high...Who can afford it?" he said, adding his son can barely make payments on a new truck he bought for work, and will continue to fight the charges.

A Bell spokesman said the plan is not intended for downloading files to a computer, and that's clear in his contract.

Staniaszek said his son did not want to talk to the press after the interest his story has received and that he is afraid to use his cell phone and incur more long-distance charges.

(Reporting by Claire Sibonney; Editing by Peter Galloway)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...22682220071213





Student Sues Teacher For Anti-Christian Comments

A high school student and his parents have filed a lawsuit against a teacher, accusing him of making offensive comments in class about Christianity.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Santa Ana accuses teacher James Corbett of demonstrating "a sense of hostility toward religion" that caused Christian students at Capistrano Valley High School to "feel ostracized and treated as second-class citizens."

Chad Farnan, 16, claims his constitutional rights were violated and wants Corbett removed from the classroom.

"The teacher is a representative of the state and the Constitution requires government neutrality toward religion," attorney Jennifer Monk said. "We will not seek damages if the teacher is removed."

It wasn't immediately known if Corbett had retained a lawyer. Principal Tom Ressler described Corbett as a solid teacher who has been with the Capistrano Unified School District for more than 15 years.

"It's really premature to say anything about this," he said. "People can make allegations all they want; we have to see the reality and context of what was said."

Among the statements the lawsuit contends Corbett said to students include "when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth"; religion is not "connected with morality"; and suggested that churchgoers are more likely to commit rape and murder.

Chad Farnan said he taped the teacher's lectures with a tape recorder in plain sight on his backpack.

"I'm not sure whether he saw me," Farnan said. "He's against Christianity and bashes it all the time. He's been indoctrinating us and not teaching the class; we don't need to be hearing his political views during school time when we should be learning."

Farnan said he would remain in school but stay out of Corbett's class until the lawsuit is settled.

Capristrano Valley High School is in Mission Viejo, Calif., about 60 miles north of San Diego.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/education...s=dgo&psp=news





Local news

Threat Reported by Connecticut Teacher Turns Out to be Bad Singing
AP

A scary threat to a teacher at a Roxbury school turned out to be nothing more than some bad singing.

State police say a teacher at Booth Free School barricaded herself in a classroom Wednesday when she mistook someone singing a Guns N' Roses song over the public address system for a threat.

Her 911 call brought in Connecticut troopers and police dogs who detained three men until an investigation at the scene cleared up the misunderstanding.

Troopers discovered that the three teens, one of them a custodian at the school, had been playing with the public address system.

Police say one of them sang "Welcome to the Jungle" into the microphone. The song contains the lyrics "You're in the jungle baby; you're gonna die."
http://www.newstimes.com/latestnews/ci_7710258


















Until next week,

- js.



















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