[JackSpratts]

The Shifting Future Of Wireless Voice
David Haskin

The technology is in its early stages, there's no proven business model, and there's strong disagreement about how the trend will play out. But most experts agree that voice over IP (VoIP) will eventually combine with new types of wireless broadband to change how businesses and consumers acquire and use mobile and fixed voice services.

That means you eventually could walk down the street talking over a cellular network, and the call will seamlessly switch to voice over WLAN when you enter your office, which would cut down on the number of cellular minutes you and your company must purchase. Another example: Software in your phone will automatically route your calls over a voice-over-WLAN system when you are inside a warehouse where the cellular signal is weak and switch to the cellular network when you are outside where the WLAN doesn't reach.

Most important, perhaps, is the possibility that this emerging trend -- and the convergence technology behind it -- could create new challengers to cellular and landline operators. That, in turn, could lead to new and more intense competition.

"Cellular operators aren't thrilled about this idea yet," said Derek Kerton, principal of Kerton Group, a telephone market research and consulting firm. "If [subscribers] think they could cut their [cellular] service from, say, 1,000 minutes to 200 minutes, that explains why they're not too excited."

"Everything is starting to blend, and there are no clear lines about who will provide what kind of service," acknowledged Tony Krueck, vice president of product development for Sprint. "It'll take a while to work itself out."

The technologies

At the heart of this issue are some brand-spanking-new technologies and some new twists on older technologies that converge high-speed landline and wireless Internet access with VoIP. These technologies enable VoIP, which is already a reality in many homes and offices, to become mobile.

The furthest along of these emerging wide-area wireless technologies are wide-area Wi-Fi mesh networks, which proponents claim can cover entire metropolitan areas. Cities such as Philadelphia have received the lion's share of attention about their citywide mesh networking plans, but this technology is already in place in a number of smaller cities.

Some believe that citywide Wi-Fi alone will change the mobile voice landscape, opening the way for increased adoption of mobile VoIP. However, others, such as Phil Redman, a research vice president at Gartner, don't believe Wi-Fi mesh is up to the task.

"One big reason municipal [Wi-Fi] services will fail is that there's no control," Redman said. "This is unlicensed spectrum, so if I blast you with my private networks, there's nothing much you can do about it."

Also, he noted that the current Wi-Fi standard doesn't have built-in quality of service to ensure voice quality, an issue that will be resolved when the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n, is ratified later this year or early next.

Interestingly, Wi-Fi's reputed failings aren't discouraging Sprint. Krueck disclosed that his company is working on a consumer-level phone, which internally is called the Combophone, that can handle both voice over Wi-Fi and cellular calls.

"When you enter your home, there will be a special wireless [Wi-Fi] router that would pair with the Combophone," Krueck said. "Once you leave the house again, you'd use the [cellular] network for your calls."

Krueck stressed, however, that Sprint's Combophone won't work over Wi-Fi outside the home -- the planned Sprint router is necessary to make the VoIP part of the system work, and that router will be available only for in-home installation. He said he expects Sprint's Combophone to launch in the first half of next year.

While use of Wi-Fi for VoIP has its detractors, more robust and far-reaching mobile wireless technologies also are emerging. The best known of these technologies is mobile WiMax. Fixed WiMax is already a fully ratified standard, and the mobile version could be approved as soon as the end of this year.

In addition, IPWireless' UMTS TDD and Qualcomm's FLASH-OFDM are already mobile and available. All three of these technologies create wide-area IP-based networks and usually operate in licensed portions of spectrum, which makes them less prone than Wi-Fi to problems such as interference.

Benefits of converged technologies

The result of all this technology is that users can eventually have a single phone that converges cellular, fixed and mobile VoIP. One market segment in which that idea will be particularly attractive is health care, where doctors and nurses in large facilities such as hospitals spend much of their day walking around visiting patients and colleagues and attending meetings. As in the warehouse scenario mentioned earlier, in-building cellular coverage can be spotty and, besides, VoIP is less expensive. As a result, many health care organizations already have given medical personnel voice-over-WLAN phones, and phones that combine cellular and VoIP would have obvious attractions.

In order for the vision of voice convergence to work, however, technology is needed to hand off calls between cellular and IP-based networks. Here, too, new technologies are emerging. The two with the most momentum are Unlicensed Mobile Access and IP Media Subsystem (IMS). In simple terms, the former technology is for use with GSM-based cellular networks such as those deployed by Cingular and T-Mobile in the U.S., while IMS is IP-based and uses SIP technology already commonly in use with fixed VoIP systems.

Technologies like these are essential for the vision of mix-and-match cellular and VoIP calling to work. Cellular operators and cell-phone manufacturers must incorporate technologies such as these into their infrastructures and phones before these transparent handoffs between networks can occur. The phone manufacturers, which ultimately will sell phones no matter what type of network is used, have been testing the technology and pushing carriers to adopt it. Similarly, vendors of infrastructure equipment used by cellular operators, such as base stations, have also been testing the technology. The carriers, however, have been less than eager, since the change would tend to migrate cellular minutes to VoIP. And that potentially would bring in a slew of new competitors.

The missing business models

If the technology behind this potential sea change is up in the air, the business models are even more so. Nobody's quite sure who the major players will be and exactly what services they will provide.

The cellular operators obviously want to stay in the game. Sprint's Combophone, for instance, gives that company the potential to gain revenue for in-home fixed-line voice service from its cellular subscribers. However, many smaller players are also trying to get a piece of the action.

"We're very interested in voice because it's still a killer application," said Jeff Thompson, CEO of TowerStream, an already-profitable ISP providing fixed WiMax-class access to enterprises in six U.S. cities. He said his company is particularly well positioned to take advantage of mobile VoIP.

"When you use WiMax, you have a much lower cost than legacy infrastructure, plus it's all IP-based," Thompson said. However, he added this potentially gnarly question: "Everybody likes mobility, but how do you make money with mobility? We definitely think voice is a killer app and we have to support it. But whether we do it as a partner or ourselves, we haven't decided yet."

At the other end of the spectrum is Gartner's Redman, who is less certain that there will be a lot of new players in the mobile voice game.

"Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on creating robust cellular networks," Redman said. "There's nobody who can compete with that." However, while he doubts that companies like TowerStream can become major players, he acknowledges that new applications for wireless VoIP will emerge.

"It'll fill niches. It will help with in-building capabilities and for specific industry applications," Redman said. "But will it be disruptive to cellular? Companies like TowerStream might like to think so, but you look at a company like Cingular -- they're huge."

Sprint's Krueck falls somewhere in between Thompson's and Redman's points of view. Sprint has one advantage that no other U.S. cellular operator has -- a lot of licensed spectrum in the 2.5-GHz range, which it acquired when it merged with Nextel. The Federal Communications Commission has told Sprint it must use the spectrum or lose it.

Krueck confirmed what many industry analysts have been speculating about: Sprint plans to use that spectrum for wireless broadband and, potentially, for voice over IP. Nextel ran field trials of FLASH-OFDM before the merger, and Sprint currently is testing WiMax and UMTS TDD.

"We'll do trials this year on a couple of different wireless broadband technologies," Krueck said. "Sometime this year we'll actually select a technology, and sometime in 2007 we could start seeing something come into production."

But Sprint hasn't decided what it actually will do with its new technology and, in particular, whether it will use it for voice, Krueck said.

"We're strategizing now about what the business model would look like for giving access to various types of applications over the IP network," Krueck said. "With [VoIP], we could block it, accept it or establish a business model with vendors like [VoIP provider] Vonage where, if you want to mobilize VoIP, we could charge for the relationship. Those discussions haven't happened yet, but that's an option. Any way you look at it, wireless companies that carry that traffic will have to be compensating, or we'll go out of business."

Krueck stressed that Sprint and the other cellular carriers didn't spend billions to build out their networks just to have their revenue taken away by VoIP over other types of wireless networks.

"It doesn't make sense to move our 50 million customers off an existing infrastructure," Krueck said. "Still, over time we might cap that network and grow the other [IP-based] network."

Even a potential competitor like TowerStream is still trying to figure out a sensible business plan, TowerStream's Thompson acknowledged.

"It's tough to predict the future, but I do see a lot of technologies that are maturing that will allow people to deploy [VoIP] -- if they find the right business model," Thompson said. He acknowledged that, like Sprint, his company is still trying to figure out just how to do that.

Despite the differing opinions, Kerton, the market researcher, believes that these new voice technologies will play a role in the future that will benefit enterprise and individual users alike. Depending on the business models that emerge, that role could be significant.

"At the very least, it will fill a significant niche," Kerton said. "If citywide coverage isn't feasible, there still will be a role [for wireless VoIP] in the home or enterprise."

David Haskin is a freelance writer specializing in mobile and wireless issues.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9000647





Pearl Jam's “Life Wasted” Video Released Under A CC License
Eric Steuer

The new music video for Pearl Jam's "Life Wasted" was released today under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license, so that people anywhere can legally copy, distribute, and share the clip. This is the first Pearl Jam video to be released in eight years and, as far as we know, the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. Pearl Jam and J Records are offering the video as a free download at Google Video from today, May 19th, through May 24th. After May 24th, the clip will be made available for sale. For more information, check out PearlJam.com and CC's press release.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5913





Better Sound in Small Packages
Michel Marriott

Not long ago, Pamela Henning, an executive at a New York-based film company, listened to her music over an expensive stereo system loaded with 2,000 of her favorite CD's. But, she said recently, it was a bit too much to handle. She bought a five-CD changer, later replaced with a single-CD player. Eventually, she chucked it all.

"I found the old-world technology so time-consuming," said Ms. Henning, senior vice president for integrated marketing for the Weinstein Company.

She decided to transfer all of her music, from Shirley Bassey to Trane, onto Apple iPods, and then back up the iPods on a hard drive, backed up by a second hard drive.

Finally, her music was portable and quickly accessible. And when she wanted to listen in her Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, she often snapped one of her four iPods into a stereo docking system.

There was just one drawback, she noted: the musical experience was not as rich as the one her old stereo provided.

With the popularity of iPods and other hand-held digital music players — 140 million were sold worldwide last year — many consumers have made a similar compromise, trading music fidelity for portability. The era of big-box home loudspeakers with broad-shouldered stereo amplifiers and their full-bodied sound has been overtaken by microchip-driven miniaturization and home theater systems that tend to be optimized for listening to movies, not music.

"The thing that has changed is the consumers' perspective of what they expect from audio," said Dweezil Zappa, the 36-year-old musician who is performing the music of his late father, Frank Zappa, for new audiences. "I think younger consumers aren't familiar at all with really high-quality audio because for them a CD is the best thing they have ever heard."

But innovation is restless, suggested Mahesh Sundaram, vice president for marketing for Audistry, an Australian-based audio company established early this year as a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories.

He said technologies that helped put consumers' music at their fingertips could also be used to make that music sound much better than what many have grown accustomed to. "Their reference point is going to shift dramatically," he noted.

The goal, many audio experts say, is to improve sound quality both on portable devices and in the living room. The methods are taking different paths. In some instances, digital technologies are being applied to a new crop of audio components, including speakers, headphones and portable music players, to enhance existing audio recordings. Other approaches include attempts to create richer, fuller recordings in studios and in live performances.

Major audio electronics companies like Creative and SRS Labs, along with Audistry, are increasingly turning to psychoacoustic technologies, which manipulate sound waves to convince listeners that they are hearing much more than they actually are.

Others, like the chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, are investing in supporting PC-like platforms to help musicians, recording studio engineers and producers to capture, store and mix music more accurately. Charlie Boswell, director of Advanced Micro's digital media and entertainment group in Austin, Tex., said the goal was recordings that sound vastly better and computer-driven technologies that do not get in the way of the artistic process.

For example, equipment using Advanced Micro's latest dual Opteron processor was used last month in New York to record the Jammys, an awards event honoring live music performances. Mr. Boswell said the program, which included, among others, Peter Frampton, Dweezil Zappa and Richie Havens, would be available in the fall on a special 5.1 surround-sound DVD (using five speakers and a subwoofer).

The DVD, as well as a series of others made with Advanced Micro chips, can be played in any DVD player but is best appreciated on higher-end music and home-theater systems, offering nuances, warmth and dynamics often not found in live recordings, whether on CD or vinyl, Mr. Boswell said.

Frank Filipetti, a Grammy-winning studio engineer and producer, said he was so impressed with the audio possibilities of DVD's that he is pushing for the recording industry to use them exclusively and phase out CD's. DVD's have enough storage capacity for an album's worth of uncompressed music on them; CD's require compression, though not as much as MP3's and other formats read by digital audio players.

"Why shouldn't the listener at home hear what I hear in here?" Mr. Filipetti said during an interview in a Midtown Manhattan studio while playing back a Frank Zappa track he was readying for a new collection.

But companies that work mostly with compressed music say much can still be done to make it sound better. "We are trying to add back a layer of quality, a layer of experience that people don't realize that they are missing," said Chris Bennett, president of Audistry.

One of his company's offerings is a "sound space expander." Its purpose, Mr. Bennett said, is to convince listeners that music played from speakers that have very little physical separation from one another, as in portable stereos and many music docking stations, sound as if they do. By using a series of proprietary algorithms that will run on the system's microprocessors, Audistry technologies create an impression that the sound is being heard from widely separated speakers, Mr. Bennett said.

At the same time, the technology creates what Audistry calls a "wide stereo image," meaning the space between the music's instruments also seems to widen without distorting vocals at the center of the mix.

Some of the first consumer products using Audistry audio enhancements are going on sale in the United States this month. Among them is the SD-SP10, a 2.1 home audio-video system by Sharp Electronics. The system will cost $350, said Sharp said.

Similarly, Creative Technology, the Singapore-based digital audio pioneer, is turning attention to improving sound quality in consumer products, said Steve Erickson, general manager and vice president for Creative audio products. Last year, Creative released its Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity processor, which is armed with 51 million transistors and is 24 times as powerful as the company's previous audio chip, Mr. Erickson said.

A number of versions of the sound card with varying abilities are available for use in PC's, ranging in price from $130 to $400. But this year Creative's audio enhancement technologies are migrating to a broader range of applications and products. For example, aspects of its digital signal processing abilities could be applied to stereo headphones to create a more natural three-dimensional sound than current headphones can, Mr. Erickson said.

SRS Labs, with its headquarters in Santa Ana, Calif., offers what David Frerichs, the company's executive vice president for strategic marketing and corporate development, calls a "whole eco-system of things we do to leverage our experience" with high-quality audio technologies.

One of the company's newest advances is SRS Mobile HD, designed for digital broadcast and downloads. The technology also enables headphones made for mobile phones and portable media devices to play audio in 5.1 surround sound.

SRS said the technology was so new that it had not yet been licensed to any manufacturers. But one of its similar technologies, called SRS WOW HD, is integrated into a number of consumer products, including a range of MP3 players by Samsung and Alienware.

Like many consumers, Ms. Henning, the film company executive, said she was not overly concerned with the details. She only wants to get the best sound she can with the ease of pressing a button.

Mr. Bennett of Audistry said he was confident that the electronics industry could deliver on that. But he cautioned that consumers should listen not just to claims, but to the approaching waves of improved audio.

"Nothing," he said, "speaks louder than someone hearing it themselves."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/te...y/25sound.html





Christie's to Hold 'Star Trek' Garage Sale
Chris Michaud

Trekkies will be setting their phasers to "bid" this fall when Christie's holds the first official studio auction of memorabilia from all five "Star Trek" television series and 10 movie spinoffs.

CBS Paramount Television Studios is cleaning out its vaults for the sale, comprising more than 1,000 lots totaling some 4,000 items, to be held from October 5 to 7 in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the original "Star Trek" series, Christie's announced on Thursday.

Fans and collectors will have a chance to acquire "Star Trek" artifacts ranging from models of the "Starship" USS Enterprise to Capt. James Kirk's uniform or Capt. Jean-Luc Picard's jumpsuit in an auction where Christie's expects to raise more than $3 million.

Other items to hit the block include props, weapons, prosthetics and set dressings unearthed from five Paramount warehouses.

Among the highlights are a miniature of the Starship Enterprise used in visual effects for the film "Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country," expected to sell for $15,000 to $25,000, and a replica of Kirk's chair from the original TV series that was recreated for the 1996 "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" episode "Trials and Tribble-ations," which is estimated at $10,000 to

$15,000.

Fans with more modest budgets can train their sights on a host of Trekkie ephemera like the 10-inch Resikkan nonplaying prop brass flute used by Patrick Stewart as Picard in the episode "The Inner Light" in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which carries a low estimate of just $300.

Cathy Elkies, director of special collections at Christie's, said the value of the objects was difficult to gauge because "we don't factor in that emotional fury generated around this kind of material."

Past estimates for auctions associated with the likes of Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy, who enjoyed dedicated followings, have been far off the mark as actual sale prices soared to five, 10 and even 100 times presale projections. "Star Trek" fans, with their Web sites, conventions and clubs, have proven among the most wildly devoted in all of pop culture.

'Cultural Icon'

"To several generations of people, 'Star Trek' was a cultural icon that represented our dreams, our hopes and our aspirations -- what we can become as a species, what we aspire to," said Mike Okuda, a graphic designer on four of the TV series and seven of the motion pictures as well as co-author of "The Star Trek Encyclopedia." "And to have a tangible piece of that is to have a tangible piece of a dream."

With the original captain's chair from the first "Star Trek" series in the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle and the original Enterprise miniature at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, other items from the 1960s show could be the most sought-after at auction.

Okuda said many of the first "Star Trek" props were reused, destroyed or disappeared. But the auction will feature a mustard-colored mini-dress from the first series as well as costumes worn by guest stars, such as a gown worn by famed attorney Melvin Belli who played an evil alien entity.

"Star Trek" fans will get a peek at the collection when the memorabilia goes on tour this week in Germany.

Conceived by author Gene Roddenberry in the mid-1960s, the original "Star Trek" series debuted in 1966.

The last TV series, "Enterprise," set in the early 22nd century, about 100 years before the adventures of Kirk's five-year mission, ended its run on the UPN network in 2005.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...E-STARTREK.xml





Connecticut: # 1 for MySpace pervs

Police: Newtown Man Lured Underage Bethel Girls On MySpace
Marietta Homayonpour

A Newtown man was charged today with risk of injury to a child after allegedly engaging in sexual conversations with Bethel girls he met on www.MySpace.com.

Eric Bassett, 25, of Birch Hill Road, was also charged with attempted risk of injury to a minor and attempted second degree sexual assault.

He is being held on a $50,000 bond with an arraignment date of Monday.

Bethel police Det. Tom Murphy said the investigation that led to Bassett’s arrest began about two weeks ago, when the parents of two female juveniles contacted police.

Police said that about four months ago the two girls — friends who were both 13 at the time— met Bassett on MySpace and began having conversations of a sexual nature.

"That evolved into instant messaging via AOL and moved on to (the girls) giving out telephone numbers," Murphy said.

Police said Bassett met in person with the two girls on one occasion and met again with one of the girls on at least one other occasion.

All the meetings were in Bethel.

Bassett's father, Fred Bassett, of Newtown, said his son is an active duty member of the U.S. Army and two years ago suffered a brain injury.

"He’s not the same person he was before the brain injury," said Fred Bassett.

Fred Bassett said his son has a neurological problem, is seeing a neurologist and was diagnosed with psychological problems, including depression.

The injury was caused in an auto accident while Eric was on duty at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. where he is still stationed.

In the past, said Fred Bassett, his son did security duty for the Army at the summer Olympics in Utah and after 9/11 did security duty in Connecticut at the Groton submarine base and at Oxford Airport.

Eric Bassett, who is a graduate of Newtown High School, has been in the Army for six years and is a private first class, said his father.

When Bassett was arrested at his Newtown home today, computers and related items were seized under a search and seizure warrant executed by Bethel school resource officer George Bryce.

The Bethel arrest is the latest of a series of MySpace-related arrests in Connecticut.

After two men were charged earlier this year with sexually molesting Connecticut girls they met on MySpace, the social networking site began posting warnings on the site.

One public service announcement said, "1 in 5 kids online is sexually solicited. Online predators know what they're doing. Do you?"

MySpace officials also hired a Microsoft executive to oversee safety, education, privacy and law enforcement affairs.

A division of News Corp., the company that owns the Fox television network, MySpace has more than 60 million members. It is more popular than Google, the Internet search engine.

Users post profiles that can include photos of themselves and such details as where they live and what music they like.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has been especially critical of the Web site.

In late March, Blumenthal sent MySpace a laundry list of proposed safeguards. Blumenthal has proposed raising the site's minimum age from 14 to 16 and providing free software to parents so they can block the Web site if they so choose.

The company made the blocking software available on the site, but Blumenthal argued it is too difficult for parents to find. The attorney general’s office has a parents’ guide to MySpace posted on its Web site, http://www.ct.gov/ag.

Bethel police urged parents to be vigilant.

"Parents should take an interest in where their children are going online," said Murphy, the Bethel detective.
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....category=Local





For Teens, MySpace.com Is Just So Last Year
Jillian Cohan

MySpace's notoriety could be a turnoff for young people who are looking for an online community of their own, said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher for the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Lenhart has studied teens' online behavior since the late 1990s. "Teens will go where their friends go," she said.

When it became all the rage to have a MySpace page, Luly Larios joined the social networking Web site.

She rarely posts on her MySpace page, though. Instead, the high school sophomore logs on to Bebo.com, a site for high school and college students. The interface is simple, the graphics are better, and she finds more of her friends from school there.

"I'm computer illiterate," Larios said. "The easier it is to work the better."
Losing Appeal

MySpace recently eclipsed more traditional Web sites to become one of the Top 10 Internet destinations. The site has also raised concerns about user safety, thanks to several widely publicized incidents of cyberstalking.

However, the biggest social-networking spot may not stay on top for long. Teens like Larios are increasingly finding other social networks that meet their needs -- and that aren't as well known to their parents.

MySpace's notoriety could be a turnoff for young people who are looking for an online community of their own, said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher for the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Lenhart has studied teens' online behavior since the late 1990s.

"Teens will go where their friends go," she said. "They're always looking for new places to gather. If those places become viewed as more regulated, they'll move on."

MySpace may be reaching that point for its young users. Some no longer think it's cool, while others prefer more closed communities like Bebo and Facebook.com, which target their age group.

As this shift continues, plenty of other sites are on the horizon, anticipating movement away from MySpace.

While much of the concern about MySpace has come from parents afraid their children will meet strangers online, some of the site's competitors are succeeding because they link teens with their in-town friends at another school or in a different neighborhood.

That's the draw for 17-year-old Yesenia Aguilar.

Aguilar's Bebo page identifies her as a North High junior and lists about 50 other teenagers as her friends. Most live in the Wichita, Kan. area.

In response to a message, Aguilar wrote that she and her friends use Bebo to catch up with their buddies.

"We go on this site because a lot of our friends are on here," she said. "We just mostly talk to our friends while we're in class."

Choosing Wisely

Wichita high school senior Rachel Wetta also prefers a more limited social network. She has pages at MySpace, Xanga and Facebook, but she settled on Facebook, a site that's open only to those with an e-mail address ending in ".edu."

Xanga doesn't let her send messages to friends, and she only uses MySpace when someone else writes to her.

"I like Facebook because I can find anybody," Wetta said. "I have a circle of Facebook friends, some from Wichita that I've never met. I use it every day to catch up. There are new people being added constantly."

Recent reports of sexual predators using social networking sites to meet young people don't worry her, Wetta said, and she's not concerned about her personal information getting into the hands of school administrators or potential employers.

"I control it," she said. "I can block people. Only the ones I've approved can see what I write."

Because she's happy with her experience on Facebook, Wetta doesn't plan to join other online communities, but that could change.

"If something else came along that caught on like Facebook, I might look at it," she said.

Newer entrants into the social networking game are banking on that and are already building sites they think improve on the current generation. Here are a few to watch:

Buzznet.com

What it is: An Internet community that connects users through shared interest in pop culture using blogs, music, video and photos. Users don't have to register to access content but must register if they want to contribute content. A few high-profile members, called "buzzmakers," highlight new and notable entries on the site.

Why it's different: "We put more emphasis on media content that you can share," said chief executive Anthony Batt. "You can connect with other people that way, instead of focusing on your personal profile." Users might post video from a rock show they attended, or pictures from a vacation, then find others in the Buzznet community who like the band, or stayed at the same bed and breakfast.

How many users: About 200,000 have registered; Buzznet estimates that it gets millions of unique visitors monthly.

Security: Buzznet hasn't had problems facing some of the profile-based sites, Batt said, because the community polices itself. "You're traversing media, not trolling profiles," Batt said. "It's more like looking at pictures in a magazine, where social networks are sort of like a dating site where no phone numbers are exchanged."

Friendsorenemies.com

What it is: A social network mainly for pop-punk music lovers. The site name started as a spoof of MySpace's motto: "A place for friends." Not everyone in your circle can be classified as a friend, site creators Shawn Hilgart and Nicholas Scimeca reasoned, so their site allows users to link to "friends," but also to maintain a list of "enemies."

Why it's different: Unlike MySpace, where individual member profiles are the draw, FriendsOrEnemies focuses on content generated by a few VIP members who keep journals on the site. In their day jobs, Hilgart and Scimeca design Web sites for the music industry. Because of their connections to indie music, they've enlisted celebrities like Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz and Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden. "A lot of the musicians we have left MySpace because it lost its cool factor in about five minutes," Scimeca said.

How many users: About 40,000

Security: The site has an appropriate-use policy and so far has catered only to teens and 20-somethings. "If users are behaving weird, we could delete them from our site," Scimeca said. So far, it's small enough that users police each other. "We're like the parents [on the site]. If the kids need our help, they can ask us."

Tagworld.com

What it is: A social networking site that gives users one gigabyte of storage for photos, music, user profiles and other things. All content on the site can be indexed with user-generated keywords, called tags.

Why it's different: Its interface is very similar to MySpace, but TagWorld aims to become a one-stop shop for all the online services people use, including blogs, photo and video hosting, music selections and e-commerce . One of the biggest draws is that users have the freedom to create a personal Web site without learning HTML, said Paula Gould, TagWorld's PR director. "Our endeavor is to cultivate the way people live their lives online, and that goes way beyond where social networking is now."

How many users: Nearly 1.5 million

Security: The site is designed to limit older users' contact with teenagers. "When I log on, it knows my age," Gould said. "I'm over 21, so it won't let me search for people under 18."

· The FBI offers the following tips as to how to keep kids safe online:
· Ask teenagers what sites they're on.
· Keep Web-enabled computers in a common room.
· Explain to kids why it's important not to disclose personal information online.
· Check kids' profiles to see what they're posting online.
· Encourage kids to follow the safety guidelines provided on the sites.
· Immediately report inappropriate activity to the Web site operators and at www.missingkids.com/cybertip.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/A...ast-Year.xhtml





A Weinstein Will Invest in Exclusivity
Maria Aspan

Most popular Internet communities, like Facebook.com or MySpace .com, measure their success by their ability to attract new members. A notable exception to this rule is aSmallWorld.net, an exclusive online community that is about to get bigger.

The Weinstein Company, the production business started by Bob and Harvey Weinstein after they left Miramax, has invested in aSmallWorld, the company will announce today. The Weinsteins, whose multimedia portfolio includes Miramax Books and a magazine publishing company, Niche Media, head a team of investors including Robert W. Pittman, former chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner. The company declined to put a dollar figure on its investment, describing it only as "significant." The Weinstein Company was attracted to aSmallWorld by the community's social networking and advertising opportunities, Harvey Weinstein said in an interview. This is the company's first investment in an online venture.

ASmallWorld, a private company founded in 2004, has approximately 130,000 members, or about half the number who join MySpace each day. On its log-in page, it describes its members as "like-minded individuals" who share the "same circle of friends, interests and schedule."

Invitations are difficult to come by: only some members have the right to invite friends to join. According to Erik Wachtmeister, the site's founder and the son of a former Swedish ambassador to the United States, a panel considers 12 to 15 variables before permitting certain users to issue invitations.

"You don't want to let just anyone invite," Mr. Wachtmeister said. Asked what those variables were, he replied that it's a "secret sauce."

Mr. Wachtmeister said he had the initial idea for the community in 1998, having lived in 10 cities. While traveling, "you see the same people over and over, gravitating toward each other," he said.

Once admitted, members have access to "trusted and select information," the site says, like nightclub or restaurant recommendations from other members. Those who abuse the system by trying to network with celebrity members can quickly find themselves out of the club.

"We keep track of people's behavior and we actually do kick people out," Mr. Wachtmeister said. Although he declined to identify celebrity members, media reports have named Quentin Tarantino, Ivanka Trump and Naomi Campbell.

The Weinstein Company's investment may affect the community's size, if not its purpose and membership. According to Mr. Weinstein, his company will be expanding aSmallWorld, while maintaining its membership restrictions and its appeal to a "smaller, more select" audience. "I think we'll become very successful with one million people," he said, "but we have to find the right one million."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/te...weinstein.html





Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply
Anna Bahney

ON the first day of his internship last year, Andrew McDonald created a Web site for himself. It never occurred to him that his bosses might not like his naming it after the company and writing in it about what went on in their office.

For Mr. McDonald, the Web log he created, "I'm a Comedy Central Intern," was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humor writing. For Comedy Central, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on Gawker.com, the gossip Web site, attracting thousands of new readers.

"Not even a newborn puppy on a pink cloud is as cute as a secret work blog!" chirped Gawker, giddily providing the link to its audience.

But Comedy Central disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to "I'm an Intern in New York") and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed.

"They said they figured something like this would happen eventually because blogs had become so popular," said Mr. McDonald, now 23, who kept his internship. "It caught them off guard. They didn't really like that."

This is the time of year when thousands of interns and new employees pour into the workplace from college campuses, many bringing with them an innocence and nonchalance about workplace rules and corporate culture.

Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company's Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the Web, posting pictures of their grandmother at graduation next to one of them eating whipped cream off a woman's belly. For them, shifting from a like-minded audience of peers to an intergenerational, hierarchical workplace can be jarring.

Companies are beginning to recognize the schism and, prodded by their legal and public relations departments, are starting to adopt policies that address it.

"It is important that corporations make a choice as to what type of blogging they will allow," said Alfred C. Frawley III, director of the intellectual property practice group at the law firm Preti Flaherty in Portland, Me.

While there are differences in laws among jurisdictions, from a legal perspective, he said, it is generally accepted that companies have the right to impose controls on their employees' use of computers and other equipment used for communication.

As for content — information generated within a company — the law also allows employers to set limits, even on airing the company laundry outside the office, he said. Private employees do not receive the protection of the First Amendment because there is no government action involved, he said.

"If an employee deviates from the policy, it may be grounds for termination," Mr. Frawley said.

Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, now has an explicit policy. In a section on confidentiality, it states that the employee is "discouraged from publicly discussing work-related matters, whether constituting confidential information or not, outside of appropriate work channels, including online in chat rooms or 'blogs.' "

The problem for the employers is that, in a few highly publicized cases, public airing of workplace shenanigans has proved to be lucrative — and young people entering the workplace know it.

"The Devil Wears Prada," Lauren Weisberger's veiled account of her time working as an assistant to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, ushered in the modern "underling-tell-all" genre, abetted by other revenge-of-the-employee tales like "The Nanny Diaries," by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Both became best sellers that will be showing up on movie screens, with "Devil" opening next month.

Busted bloggers like Jessica Cutler (a former Capitol Hill intern whose blog, Washingtonienne, is now a novel), Nadine Haobsh (a former beauty editor whose blog Jolie in NYC earned her a two-book deal) and Jeremy Blachman (a lawyer whose blog Anonymous Lawyer is being released as "Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel" this summer) were all interns, entry-level employees and worker bees who traded up on in-the-trade secrets.

The generation entering the work world has noticed.

"Everybody I've read about that got fired for having a blog is on to such great things," said Kelly Kreth, 36, who was fired from her job as the marketing and public relations director at a real estate firm in Manhattan last fall for blogging about her co-workers.

"I've had my online diary for six years, and it is very important to me," Ms. Kreth said, calling the firing the best thing that happened to her. "It led to me opening my own business and making triple what I was making before."

Corporations have been slower to get the message.

"The vast majority of organizations don't have policies in place," said Jennifer Schramm, a workplace trends and forecasting manager at the Society for Human Resource Management in Washington.

The group found last year that only 8 percent of the 404 human resource professionals it polled had blogging policies, while 85 percent did not. (The other 7 percent did not know.)

Ms. Schramm said that is just as bad for the employee as for the employer. "Right now it is tough for individuals to know what is happening because so few organizations have a clear policy about employee blogging," she said.

Of course, as long as there have been managers and underlings, there have been disgruntled workers gabbing around the water cooler or over drinks at happy hour. E-mail and instant messages are merely a quicker way to say, "You wouldn't believe what a jerk my boss is."

Blogging takes the grumbling to another level, but one that makes sense when considering how much of it is going on out there. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 11 million people have created blogs at one time or another.

A blog and a job don't necessarily have to clash, some bloggers say.

Alexx Shannon's celebrity blog, www.britboyla.com, came up during his interviews for his internship at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles this spring because he lists it on his résumé.

Mr. Shannon, 21, who is British and is spending a year at the University of California, Los Angeles, before finishing his studies at Kings College, London, said he signed an employee confidentiality agreement with both Paramount and Beacon Pictures, where he is now an intern. Beacon made clear that his blog, while about celebrities, would not include information he picked up at work.

"I suppose they did take kind of a risk," said Mr. Shannon, who confessed he sometimes had to sit on some truly juicy bits of celebrity gossip that he encountered at work.

Neither Paramount nor Beacon returned calls for comment.

"I just knew that I didn't want to jeopardize anything for my career," Mr. Shannon said. "My real life is more important to me than my online life." But other young employees don't see it that way.

Ms. Schramm of the human resources group said young people do not see their job as their identity. Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer and legal technology consultant with his own firm in St. Louis, said that attitude makes them more willing to take chances.

"It's like, 'This is who I am,' " he said. " 'Consequences are what they are. I'll go work for someone who doesn't have a problem with it.' "

But that's not as easy in fields with only a handful of jobs, as Jessa Jeffries Werner, a marine zoologist, found out.

This month, Ms. Werner, 25, who blogged under the name Jessaisms about jobs she held at Adventure Aquarium in Camden and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, was fired by the academy. Officials there also asked her to remove posts and pictures related to them from her site and her myspace.com page, and she did.

The confrontation was traumatic, Ms. Werner recounted, not always with perfect spelling or grammar, on another Web site: "I was still sobbing kind of quietly but I didn't want them to think that I was ashamed of what I had written. My parents read my blog. My old college friends keep up with my life through my blog. I took my badge off and looked at the mean HR lady who was smiling smuggly at me. She told me perhaps next time I would be more wise in my lifestyle and decision making choices regaurding work."

In an interview, she said she regretted crossing the line: "I came to the realization that I probably shouldn't have been blogging about work."

But it is the success stories that can embolden a determined blogger. Ms. Kreth was able to create her own public relations business out of the fallout. Because of his blog, Mr. Shannon was asked to be on a television pilot. For Mr. McDonald, the Comedy Central intern, it was the call of literary agents.

Now back in Kenosha, Wis., where he is finishing up his degree in English at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, Mr. McDonald is hard at work on a book — a novel about a guy from Wisconsin who gets a job in New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/fa...tern.html?8dpc





The Rove Da Vinci Code
Frank Rich

IF we're to believe the reviews, "The Da Vinci Code" is the most exciting summer blockbuster since, well, "Poseidon." But the "Da Vinci Code" marketing strategy is a masterpiece: a perfect Hollywood metaphor for the American political culture of our day.

The Machiavellian mission for the hit-deprived Sony studio was to co-opt conservative religious critics who might depress turnout for a $125-million-plus thriller portraying the Roman Catholic Church as a fraud. To this end, as The New Yorker reported, Sony hired a bevy of P.R. consultants, including a faith-based flack whose Christian Rolodex previously helped sell such inspirational testaments to Hollywood spirituality as "Bruce Almighty" and "Christmas With the Kranks."

Among Sony's ingenious strategies was an elaborate Web site, The Da Vinci Dialogue, which gave many of the movie's prominent critics a platform to vent on the studio's dime. Thus was "The Da Vinci Code" repositioned as a "teaching moment" for Christian evangelists — a bit of hype "completely concocted by the Sony Pictures marketing machine," as Barbara Nicolosi, a former nun and current Hollywood screenwriter, explained to The Times. The more "students" who could be roped into this teaching moment, of course, the bigger the gross.

Ms. Nicolosi remains a vociferous opponent of the film. On her blog she chastises Sony's heavenly P.R. helpers for coaxing "legions of well-meaning Christians into subsidizing a movie that makes their own Savior out to be a sham." But you do have to admire the studio's chutzpah, if the word may be used in this context. It rivals Tom Sawyer's bamboozling of his friends into painting that fence. The Sony scheme also echoes much of the past decade's Washington playbook. Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of "faith" are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.

Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into ostensibly "anti-gambling" letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino clients by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal exploitation of "faith" voters by Washington operatives, it's all too typical. This history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed. The right's leaders are already threatening to stay home this election year because all they got for their support of Republicans in the previous election year was a lousy Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Actually, they also got two Supreme Court justices, but their wish list was far longer. Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist who invented Focus on the Family, set the tone with a tantrum on Fox, whining that Republicans were "ignoring those that put them in office" and warning of "some trouble down the road" if they didn't hop-to.

The doctor's diagnosis is not wrong. He has been punk'd — or Da Vinci'd — since 2004. Though President Bush endorsed the federal marriage amendment then, there's a reason he hasn't pushed it since. Not Gonna Happen, however many times it is dragged onto the Senate floor. The number of Americans who "strongly oppose" same-sex marriage keeps dropping — from 42 percent two years ago to 28 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center — and there will never be the votes to "write discrimination into the Constitution," as Mary Cheney puts it.

The real Republican establishment — including Laura Bush, who has repeatedly refused to disown the many gay families at this year's White House Easter Egg Roll — senses the drift of the culture. "Will & Grace" may have retired to reruns last week, but it's been supplanted by a gay "Sopranos" tough guy who out-brokebacks Jack and Ennis.

The religious right's hope for taming that culture is also doomed, however much Congress ceremoniously raises indecency fines in an election year. The major media companies, heavy donors to both parties, first get such bills watered down, then challenge the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement in court.

The mogul most ostentatiously supportive of Republican causes, Rupert Murdoch, may perennially fan the flames of a bogus "war on Christmas" on Fox, but he's waging his own, far more lethal war on the Christian right by starting a companion TV network this fall to match MySpace.com, his hugely popular and hugely libidinous Internet portal. Mr. Murdoch's new gift to America's youth, My Network TV, "will showcase greed, lust, sex," according to The Wall Street Journal. Conservatives fretting about his fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton don't even know what's about to hit them.

But for all these betrayals, Dr. Dobson and Company won't desert the Republicans come Election Day. If Mr. Rove steps up his usual gay-baiting late in the campaign, as is his wont, maybe the turnout of those on the hard-core right will eke out a victory for the party that double-crossed them not just on cultural issues but also on secular conservative principles (like fiscal responsibility and immigration-law enforcement). If so, they'll promptly be Da Vinci'd yet again. A Republican retreat on stem-cell research is already under way. If there's electoral fallout from the South Dakota Legislature's Draconian abortion ban — the Republican governor's job-approval rating fell from 72 percent to 58 percent in a single month after he signed it — the pro-life checklist in Congress will suffer as well.

Whatever happens in November, the good news is that the religious right leaders most stroked by Mr. Rove, many of them past 70, may no longer command such large blocs of voters anyway. As Amy Sullivan writes in the latest New Republic, Mr. Rove has reason to worry about "another group of evangelicals: the nearly 40 percent who identify themselves as politically moderate and who are just as likely to get energized about AIDS in Africa or melting ice caps as partial-birth abortion and lesbian couples in Massachusetts." The bad news is that no sooner does the religious-right base show signs of cracking in a youthquake than the Democrats trot out their own doomed Da Vinci strategy.

This idiocy began the morning after Election Day 2004, when a vaguely worded exit-poll question persuaded credulous party leaders that "moral values" determined their defeat (as opposed to, say, their standard-bearer's campaign). Their immediate response was to seek out faith-based consultants not unlike those recruited by Sony, and practice dropping the word "values" and biblical quotations into their public pronouncements. In the House, they organized, heaven help us, a Democratic Faith Working Group.

As the next election approaches, they're renewing this effort, to farcical effect. The Democrats' chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based bona fides in the 2004 primary season by citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked his party's position on same-sex marriage to the right. (He apologized for his "misstatement" once off the air.)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking "work is a four-letter word" and for having TV's in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. "I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts," she said. (She also subsequently apologized, once her daughter complained, joining the general chorus of ridicule.) However "old-fashioned" Mrs. Clinton's thoughts, don't expect her to turn back Mr. Murdoch's campaign cash in protest against his steamy new TV channel.

The one New York politician even more disingenuous in this racket is Rudolph Giuliani. He outdid John McCain's appearance with Jerry Falwell by campaigning last week for Ralph Reed in the lieutenant governor's race in Georgia. Any religious conservative who mistakes "America's mayor," an adamant supporter of abortion rights and gay rights, for a fellow traveler is in desperate need of an intervention, if not an exorcism.

But that hypothetical, easily duped voter may no longer exist. Like the Bush era, the cynical Rove strategy of exploiting faith-based voters may be nearing its end. For proof, just take a look at the most craven figure in American politics: the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist. To flatter the far right, this Harvard-trained surgeon misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo's vegetative state from the Senate floor, and justified abstinence-only sex education in AIDS prevention by telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he didn't know for certain that tears and sweat couldn't transmit H.I.V. But increasingly it's not only liberals who see through him. One of his latest stunts, a proposed $100 gas-tax rebate, provoked Rush Limbaugh to condemn him for "treating us like we're a bunch of whores."

When senators as different as Mr. Frist and Mrs. Clinton both earn bipartisan ridicule for their pandering, you have to believe that there's a god other than Karl Rove watching over American politics after all.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/21...on/21rich.html





'Da Vinci' Theater Projector Lenses Stolen
AP

A movie theater was forced to close on the opening night of ''The Da Vinci Code'' after 20 projector lenses were stolen, but the manager said he did not think the theft was related to protests of the film.

A sign on the door of the Carmike 10 Theaters Friday night told moviegoers that ''The Da Vinci Code'' would be shown at another Carmike-owned theater in the city. Showings of nine other movies were canceled.

Some Christian groups have decried ''The Da Vinci Code'' -- based on Dan Brown's best selling novel -- as sacrilegious, and Christian leaders in China, Singapore, India, South Korea, Thailand and elsewhere have tried to get the film censored or banned.

Protesters -- some holding signs that said ''Boycott Hollywood'' and ''Pray for Dan Brown'' -- said the theft was not connected to their demonstration.

Manager Richard Melby also said he did not think the protest and theft were related.

''It's their right to do what they're doing, and I don't have a problem with it,'' he said.

Investigators made no immediate connection between the theft and the movie.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...ode-Theft.html





'Da Vinci Code' Has 2nd-Biggest Opening, Hauls in $224M Worldwide
Gary Gentile

Moviegoers gave their blessing to the "The Da Vinci Code" over the weekend, spending an estimated $77 million to see the Tom Hanks religious thriller.

While the film didn't set a domestic box office record, it was the largest weekend opening of the year so far and became the second largest worldwide release after "Star Wars: Episode III." It garnered some $224 million worldwide, according to Sony Pictures.

The film also was the best domestic opening for both Hanks and director Ron Howard.

The movie's performance, combined with the family film "Over the Hedge" debuting in second place with $37.2 million, was a welcome contrast to the last two weekends that saw disappointing results from "Poseidon" and "Mission: Impossible III."

The total box office was down about 2.8 percent from the same weekend last year, according to studio estimates released Sunday. But that's a tough comparison given that last year's numbers included the record-setting debut of "Star Wars: Episode III."

"'Da Vinci' opening this big just tells you that people do want to go to the movies, they just need the right movie to go," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Sony Pictures took a risk in the marketing of "The Da Vinci Code," keeping the adaptation of the Dan Brown best-seller under wraps until a few days before its opening.

The film received mixed reviews and protesters picketed outside a number of theaters, upset over the story's suggestion that Jesus Christ was married and had a child. But the controversy did little to deter moviegoers, who packed theaters in almost every country the film debuted.

"You had a built-in audience from the book and the awareness levels were so high from this film," Dergarabedian said. "You would have to live under a rock not to know this movie was opening."

The movie also set opening-weekend records in Italy and Spain, Sony Pictures said.

"This is a fantastically great surprise for us this morning," said Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures.

It was good news for the studio, which had been struggling of late and had been counting on "The Da Vinci Code" to boost its fortunes.

"This is starting out to be a very good year," studio chief Amy Pascal said.

The animated film "Over the Hedge" had a strong showing with its $37.2 million as part of a counter-programming strategy from distributor Paramount Pictures. While the opening was slightly low for a computer-animated family movie, the studio believes the film will hold its own next weekend as children have the Memorial Day holiday off.

"We thought we could very easily coexist with `The Da Vinci Code' and I think the numbers bear that out," said Dan Harris, executive vice president at Paramount.

The Tom Cruise action film "Mission: Impossible III" crossed the $100 million mark in its third weekend with a total domestic box office take of $103 million.

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

1. "The Da Vinci Code," $77 million.

2. "Over the Hedge," $37.2 million

3. "Mission: Impossible III," $11 million.

4. "Poseidon," $9.2 million.

5. "RV," $5.1 million

6. "See No Evil," $4.4 million

7. "Just My Luck," $3.4 million.

8. "An American Haunting," $1.7 million.

9. "United 93," $1.4 million.

10. "Akeelah and the Bee," $1 million.

---

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





'An Inconvenient Truth': Al Gore's Fight Against Global Warming
Andrew C. Revkin

The frustrations of a man whose long-sought goal remains out of reach are vividly on display in the first few minutes of "An Inconvenient Truth," a new documentary about former Vice President Al Gore's quest to spur action against global warming.

And the scene has nothing to do with the Supreme Court vote that denied Mr. Gore a chance to win the 2000 presidential election.

He is tapping on his laptop, adding yet another tweak to the illustrated climate lecture he has given more than 1,000 times since 1989 in ever more sophisticated ways: first with flip charts, then slides, then a mix of digital imagery, animation and high-tech stagecraft, and now through this film itself, which was screened at Cannes and opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

He laments being unable so far to awaken the public to what he calls a "planetary emergency" despite evidence that heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases are warming the earth, and even after Hurricane Katrina and Europe's deadly 2003 heat wave, which he calls a foretaste of much worse to come.

"I've been trying to tell this story for a long time, and I feel as if I've failed to get the message across," Mr. Gore muses.

The question now is whether the documentary, with the potential to reach millions of people instead of a roomful of listeners at a time, can do the job.

For the moment, opinions on its prospects range from hopeful to scornful, not so much a reflection on the film's quality as the vast distance between combatants in the fight over what to do, or not do, about human-caused warming.

In a recent interview in Manhattan, Mr. Gore said he was convinced that Americans would move on the issue, not just because of his documentary (and companion book), but also because of the vivid nature of recent climate-related disasters.

"The political system, like the environment, is nonlinear," he said. "In 1941 it was impossible for us to build 1,000 airplanes. In 1942 it was easy. As this pattern becomes ever more clear, there will be a rising public demand for action."

"An Inconvenient Truth" came about after Laurie David, a prominent Hollywood environmentalist, saw Mr. Gore give a short version of his presentation two years ago at an event held just before the premiere of the climate disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

Ms. David said she was stunned by the power of Mr. Gore's talk and helped organize presentations in New York and Los Angeles for people involved in the news media, environmental groups, business and entertainment. By the time she had done the Los Angeles event, "I realized we had to make a movie out of it," she said. "What's the guy going to do? There are not physically enough hours in the day to travel to every town and city to show this thing."

She helped recruit a team of filmmakers and investors and, after pressing Mr. Gore, persuaded him to be followed by a film crew.

In the film, directed by Davis Guggenheim, Mr. Gore comes across as a professorial guide who uses science, humor, his own life lessons, depictions of perilous climate-driven events and even cartoons to make his case.

Mr. Gore — who said he had veto power over all elements of the film but did not exercise it — tries just about every possible tactic to make his points.

One moment he is delivering his climate talk before an invited audience on a Los Angeles sound stage, rising in an electric lift to point to a soaring graph illustrating the buildup of heat-trapping gases. And in the next there are golden-hued restagings of wrenching moments in Mr. Gore's life. These include the loss of his sister Nancy to lung cancer, a subject explored as he discusses how industries, from tobacco to oil and coal, have run expensive media and lobbying campaigns to emphasize uncertainties in the science that points to risks of their products.

Mr. Gore tries to connect the dots between human-driven warming and recent shifts in mosquito-borne diseases, drought patterns, rates of extinction, storm strength and the pace of melting of polar ice sheets and sea ice on the Arctic Ocean.

In a lawyerly way, he often chooses his words to avoid making direct causal links that most scientists say are impossible to substantiate, but uses imagery and implication to convey that humans are fiddling with planet-scale forces.

Longtime critics of Mr. Gore and opponents of cuts in greenhouse gases who attended a Washington screening last Wednesday quickly assembled lists of complaints about his portrayal of the science, saying the dangers of warming are grossly overstated.

The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a clear jab at both the film and recent news media coverage focused on worst-case climate risks, unveiled two television commercials last week that amounted to a defense of the main gas linked to warming, each with the tag line: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."

In interviews and e-mail exchanges, many climate specialists who have seen the film quibbled about details but tended to agree with Eric Steig, a University of Washington geochemist who posted his reactions at the Web log realclimate.org after a recent Seattle screening: "The small errors don't detract from Gore's main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change."

Initial media coverage, rather than focusing on the film's message, has examined it mainly through the lens of presidential politics.

Mr. Gore and his staff have repeatedly swept aside questions about 2008, insisting that Mr. Gore is not running for office, but is racing to save the planet.

But many Democrats are watching Mr. Gore closely in the belief that he could emerge as a strong opponent from the left to the woman viewed as the front-runner for her party's nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The film does not do much to dispel this thesis. While it is being billed as an environmental call to arms, it begins, ends, and is peppered throughout with politics.

The film opens with Mr. Gore greeting an audience with his most famous, and anguished, punch line: "I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States."

It includes a few shots at Republicans including a piece of news film from the 1992 presidential campaign showing the first President Bush saying that Mr. Gore was so environmentally extreme that "we'll be up to our necks in owls and out of work for every American."

The film concludes with Mr. Gore stating that the one element missing in the fight against global warming was political will.

In a line that some have interpreted as a hint of electoral ambitions, Mr. Gore adds, "In America, political will is a renewable resource."

Some scientists said they were worried that Mr. Gore's inherently political nature would further polarize the issue and distract from the underlying science. But some environmental specialists played down the political angle, saying that if someone were seeking a political boost, climate change was hardly the issue to address.

"There are lots of things he could do with his life, and this is what he's chosen," said Jonathan Lash, the president of the World Resources Institute, a private research group in Washington. "I admire him as a political leader who's chosen to use his platform to speak about this issue, and to do so in both scientific and moral terms."

Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/movies/22gore.html





BBC Freeview High Definition Service Hacked
Martin Pipe

The BBC’s Freeview HD trial may well be being carried out under strict Ofcom guidelines, which prevent the corporation from showing the test transmissions to anyone outside of its 550 strong test group, but that hasn’t stopped enthusiasts from hacking the feed.

It’s not that difficult. I have received the broadcast well outside of its London catchment area, using a PC installed with a Hauppauge Nova-t DVB-T tuner card and the TSreader software. With this rig I was able to capture the BBC’s HD transport stream to the PC’s hard drive. To play back the material I used a ‘trialware’ Elecard player, which has an H.264 video decoder ‘plug-in’. Unfortunately, the results weren’t that great. Both vision and sound stuttered, even on a PC running a dual-core 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor. But what I did see was an eye opener.
http://avzombie.com/blog/2006/05/16/...ervice-hacked/





Sticky

Free Hotel Porn
Hammerman

Here’s a tip for those of you that stay in Marriot hotels. Marriot has, to my knowledge, installed a pay-per-view (PPV) system nationwide called “On Command”. This system is probably similar to many such systems used in hotels today. As far as I can tell, there is a radio frequency module attached to the TV that signals some master hotel unit to order movies and add charges to your hotel bill.

I spent several months in a Marriot and found a way to tap into free porn movies without paying a penny. It all started in the exercise room. Early one morning, I noticed that my favorite cable news channel had not been programmed into the wall mounted TV. No one was around, so I just accessed the menu function and scrolled up the “raw” channels so that I could add my channel. As I hit channels 40, 41, and 42, I found porn. No scrambling and no requests for billing authorization. Nervously, I just skipped past and added my channel. When back in my room, I found that those three channels were unavailable and the menu function was not available on the room TV.

This got me thinking. The exercise room TV was just a regular TV with no PPV box on the back, unlike my room TV. So, did this mean that I could hook up a regular TV in my room and see these channels? I pulled the dresser away from the wall to get a good look at the back of the TV. All of the cable connections had plastic protectors that made it impossible to disconnect. It looked like a single cable came out of the wall and then connected into the On Command PPV module. Out of this box it went into the back of the TV. I dove into my computer bag, pulled out a screw driver, and removed the wall plate from the hotel wall. Behind this place was a common cable splitter—with no plastic protectors. Bingo!

I now had a way to splice into the cable system before it got to my TV. At that point, all I had to do was hook a regular TV up and see if I could get those channels. Now, the maid would certainly sound the alarm if she found a second TV hooked up. Not an option. Instead, I ran down to the local electronics superstore and bought a device that would let me watch TV on my computer (Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe). Radio Shack provided a short cable, a 1-to-2 splitter, and some connectors. I figured, if it didn’t work, I could just return it all.

Then, I waited until until late at night to try my hack. If I accidently brought the hotel’s cable system down, I wanted to do it in the middle of the night when few viewers were watching and I could plead ignorance. I just added my Radio Shack splitter between their splitter and my TV’s cable. That created one new empty cable jack for my computer’s use. I then connected my new cable and hooked it up to my new Pinnacle box. I opened the software and presto, ABC was playing on my computer. The picture was great. I checked the TV and it was also functioning fine. Both my TV and computer got great pictures and I could watch different channels. Both my TV and Pinnacle box had remotes, so I could lie on the bed and watch two channels at one time.

But, what would I find at channels 40 thru 42? Well, non-stop porn actually. This is what I think is going on. When navigating the PPV menus on the TV, there are two options for the adult channels. First, you can order specific movies for about $10 each. Second, you can pay them $40 or $50 and have 24 hours of porn on your TV. I think what happens is, when you select the all-day option, they just open up channels 40 – 42 and let you see these movies that run in a long loop. Since you are not selecting individual titles, there is no need for their radio controlled system to start/stop any one movie.

Now, I was really paranoid that I was somehow racking up PPV charges. So, the next morning (after hiding my cables behind the dresser), I paid up my bill to date. Had there been a $50 charge for PPV, I’d have paid it and never tried that again. But, there was no charge. So, for the rest of my stay, I had free access to three channels of non-stop porn. My Pinnacle box even allowed me to capture video and use my computer like a VCR.

Now, I don’t know if every hotel system works like this, but if you’re at a Marriot hotel (Courtyard, Rennaisance, Fairfield, etc.) and they have the On Command system, it can be defeated. Good luck.
http://www.totse.com/en/media/cable_...orn169280.html





New Media Player: Nice Features, but It's No ITunes
Rob Pegoraro

Microsoft has spent the last few years getting smacked around by Apple in the digital-music market, and it must be getting tired of this treatment. So it's doing something drastic: It's throwing its own MSN Music store under the bus and launching a new music program that spotlights another company's service.

Microsoft's new Windows Media Player 11, released in test form last week, looks and works little like older versions of the company's music and video organizer -- starting with its front-and-center placement for Urge, a new music store from MTV.

Microsoft and MTV say this integration of software and store offers an ease and simplicity to match iTunes. But if a week's trial of the service is any clue, Urge will have a hard time competing with such also-rans as Rhapsody, Yahoo and Napster, let alone Apple.

Urge's biggest departure from earlier Microsoft-based music stores is also its biggest problem: its integration into Windows Media Player 11. Not only does this new, Windows XP-only software promote Urge to the exclusion of other retailers, you can't shop at this store-- or even just play your Urge downloads -- in any earlier version of Windows Media Player.

But Windows Media Player 11 ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia ) isn't any old beta release; it's essentially a system upgrade, one that can be removed only with XP's System Restore tool. Nobody should install this kind of preview software lightly.

The immediate reward for taking that risk is a cleaner, simpler interface. Instead of the dense, screen-filling track lists of earlier releases, Windows Media Player 11 displays songs on your computer as a collection of thumbnail views of album covers (it fetches these images automatically from online databases). It cleverly represents how many songs you have in a given category -- from one artist, in one genre, released in a particular year and so on-- by stacking these thumbnails on top of each other.

Aside from the way this redesign still places the play/pause/stop buttons at the bottom of the screen, as far as possible from every other control, this interface is a smart, creative way to organize a digital music library.

It's too bad that Windows Media Player didn't locate cover-art images reliably -- most of my library was illustrated with generic blank-CD icons. For every obscure indie artist's cover art that the program found, it missed two or three releases from big-name acts. And this feature doesn't work at all if your music files (like many Internet downloads) haven't been tagged with the right artist and album data; Windows Media Player 11 is supposed to fill in such missing information automatically but often did not.

Fortunately, this new software provides a search box at the top-right corner that, as in iTunes, finds songs as you type a query instead of waiting for you to hit the Enter key. Windows Media Player 11 also catches up to iTunes by simplifying the process of collecting a set of songs to transfer to a player or burn to a CD -- and it passes Apple's software by letting you copy music from a player to your library.

Lastly, this update makes it easier to change many settings -- instead of diving into a program-options window, you can select commands from the menus that drop down from the tabs at the top of the window.

The right-most tab links to the new MTV Urge music service. Urge sells music under the same basic terms as other stores: Songs (99 cents each) and albums (usually $9.99) can be played on five computers at any one time, and you can burn seven audio CDs from any one playlist of these downloads.

Urge also lets you rent songs: $9.95 a month (or $99 a year) lets you download all the tracks you want to a computer, while $14.95 ($149 a year) lets you transfer those downloads to most newer Windows Media-compatible players. These rented songs can't be burned to CD and go silent if you stop paying the fees.

By comparison, Napster and Rhapsody offer the same price plans but also let people play entire songs for free -- an unlimited number at Napster, though you can't cue up multiple songs, and 25 a month at Rhapsody. Yahoo's subscription services cost about a third less than Urge, and both it and Rhapsody give subscribers a discount on song purchases.

Urge's inventory of about 2 million songs appears no better than anybody else's, but with a few strange omissions (for example, D.C. punk rockers Fugazi) that may only reflect its relative youth. Its search function shows matching songs as you type a query, often with awkward stutters as it scans through that sizable catalogue. It also has the irritating, unhelpful habit of padding out search results with songs and albums that aren't for sale.

Downloads don't come with any of the extras, such as lyrics, printable booklets and bonus videos, that are bundled with many new albums on iTunes -- you can't even print a CD cover or a track listing.

The biggest omission at Urge, however, is MTV's own identity. Except for a set of custom playlists and "Informer" blogs covering particular genres, little here says "I'm MTV." Urge's Web radio stations are all computer-driven -- and the one I sampled played many of the same songs on consecutive days. This store doesn't even sell music videos (although some can be streamed for free) or any of MTV's own shows.

Like every other Windows Media-based store, Urge suffers from the Not iPod problem -- its downloads don't work on Apple's elegant music players. Instead, you can choose from a wide assortment of other devices that all seem to fall short of the iPod's high standards. Consider the new iRiver Clix: This handsome rectangle of glossy white plastic stuffs its shuffle-playback option two menus deep and shuts off its screen after a minute instead of just dimming it.

But Urge's downloads also can't be played on Windows Mobile handheld organizers and smartphones. If you try to open one, you're sent to a Web page inviting you to install the desktop versions of Windows Media Player 11 and Urge, an impossibility on a mobile device. The final annoyance comes when you copy purchased songs to another computer. Urge will treat them as rented downloads, incapable of being burned to CD, until you sit through a "Restore My Library" procedure that downloads new copies of the music.

Not only has MTV failed to match iTunes, it has repeated some of the worst mistakes of earlier iTunes challengers.

Apple needs -- and customers deserve -- vigorous competition. But that's not going to happen if the best Apple's rivals can manage is a combination of beta software of dubious reliability and a tie-in to a music TV channel that devotes most of its airtime to things besides music.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...052000118.html





I Do Have a Life; I'm Watching It Now
Warren ST. John

FOR Angela Jackson, a homemaker in Pittsburg, Calif., and an admitted TV obsessive, this is a sacred time of year. It's sweeps season, and after months of devoted viewing, Ms. Jackson is in a finale frenzy, getting the answers to questions that have nagged her all season and hanging on to every last dramatic plot twist.

She learned last Sunday who won "Survivor: Panama-Exile Island" (Aras Baskauskas), and on Monday that Michael and Lincoln got away on "Prison Break." On Wednesday she learned that Danielle Evans is "America's Next Top Model." And don't even get her started on "American Idol," which will crown a winner on Wednesday.

Asked if she might venture out of the house for, say, food or water with friends this week, Ms. Jackson said, "No way."

"I don't miss TV in May," she said. "All the shows are good, and they have all the special guest appearances. I cook early and I make sure everything is done by the time my show's up."

As American television has moved from episodic sitcoms to serialized shows that end, not unlike baseball or the N.F.L. seasons, in a playoffs-style showdown, the miniseason known as sweeps has become an all-consuming national event. There are season finales (till next time, "24") and series finales (farewell, "Will & Grace"), two-part finales and finale postgame recaps.

Many shows, like "Lost" and "24," have thriving online communities, which fans check the morning after, to see what fellow viewers make of it all. The obsession with "American Idol," which has nearly as many voters as a major presidential candidate, has reached kooky "Truman Show" levels. (Got your back, Taylor. Bring it home bro.)

But there's a dark side to the sweeps orgy, one people don't talk much about: Beyond all those finales and tearful farewells lies a gaping existential void, a deep abiding loneliness that no rerun can alleviate.

"It's really, really sad," Ms. Jackson said. "You know, the shows take up a big part of what I do in the evening." She said she tried to cope by reading, renting movies, watching her daughter's cheerleading practice. But it's not the same.

"I really miss my shows," she said.

Susan Squire, a Manhattan writer who is obsessed with "Grey's Anatomy" and "The OC," said she could already feel a post-sweeps hangover coming on, and a sense of doom weighing down on her.

"I'm feeling major depression," she said. "I wait all week. It's such a great moment — but it's going to go away." She likened her sweeps viewing habits to a cocaine binge, and said last week that she had been asking herself a question most addicts asked at one time or another: "Was it worth it — really worth it?"

For Katie Cray, who works in marketing in Manhattan — that is, when she's not watching "Lost," "House" or "24" — the sweeps are about not medicating. She said she lays off her much-needed allergy medicine so she won't get drowsy during her shows. At the end of sweeps, she said, "It's like I lost a bunch of friends."

TiVo was supposed to change all that. Empowered by the ability to record whole series with ease, and then to skip the commercials and the boring parts, hard-core viewers were promised that technology would free them from the shackles of appointment viewing. Viewers would be in control. What on earth happened?

For one thing, the TiVo foul: the act of discussing the outcome of a previously broadcast show without first checking with those present to find out if they saw it live, or if the show still awaits them, unwatched, on their home DVR's.

Elisabeth Diana, 26, of San Francisco said she would have been content to record her shows and watch them at her leisure, "so long as my friends keep their big mouths shut." Sadly, she said, it didn't always work out that way.

Another problem is that simply logging on to one's e-mail or checking a news site can mean running into a spoiler headline, since sites like Yahoo! News cover television happenings with at least as much zeal as real world happenings: "Mischa Barton's 'OC' Character Killed," blared Yahoo! News on a Friday morning, just hours after the broadcast. Sorry TiVo suckers!

Then there are those souls for whom television serves as a kind of glue for their social lives. Blair Beakley, 25, a buyer for a gift store in Manhattan, said TiVo-ing "Desperate Housewives" would be the equivalent of putting her relationship with her mother on hold.

"My mom and I call each other when we're watching 'Desperate Housewives,' " she said. "We live eight states away, so it enables us to communicate. Our relationship is going to suffer after this season is over."

Cathy Garrard, a journalist who lives in Brooklyn and who described herself as "totally, totally, totally" devoted to "Project Runway," said she and a group of friends have an e-mail powwow the morning after each episode of "Lost," so TiVo-ing is out.

"I would never not watch it live," Ms. Garrard said by way of explaining what happened to most of her Wednesday nights this year. "I look forward to it each week. If you went to a grocery store and bought the ingredients for a great meal, why would you wait to make it?"

Some well-adjusted types say they look forward to being unburdened by the end of the TV season. Jessica Lam, 27, a health care worker in Atlanta who considers herself a moderate fan of "American Idol," said she was happy at the prospect of getting her life back. "It's relieving," she said. "I feel somewhat couch potato-like for having to tune in that much."

Ms. Lam said she was pretty certain that Taylor Hicks, the Alabama rocker, would win this week, and that she would be watching.

So will Sara Coffman of Overland Park, Kan., who said she had recruited her husband Scott and even their 2-year-old into an "American Idol" fixation. "Our 2-year-old is a big music fan," she said. "He dances and plays his 'Sesame Street' guitar. He was a big fan of Carrie Underwood last year — he just stared at her. He likes big hair."

"We actually have a life," Mrs. Coffman added, after a moment's reflection. So what does her family plan to do for life after the sweeps?

"We'll probably go back to golfing," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/fa...elevision.html





'Web Ready For Next Big Leap'

Amsterdam - The world wide web is on the cusp of making its next big leap to become an open environment for collaboration, and its inventor said he has not been so optimistic in years.

Still, Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented and then gave away the world wide web, warns that internet crime and anti-competitive behaviour must be fought tooth and nail.

A lot of new technology is becoming available after many years to make the web smarter and easier to use, he said.

"My personal view is that a lot of it is coming together now. That is very gratifying to see... I'm very optimistic at this moment," Berners-Lee said in a telephone interview ahead of the annual world wide web conference, which opens in Edinburgh on Monday.

"The whole industrial environment is more exciting. We had the bubble and the burst, but now you see a low of young companies again. There's renewed enthusiasm among VCs (venture capitalists) to invest in start-ups. I get a feeling of upsurge in activity."

Roughly twice as much money is being invested in European internet start-ups than the figure two years ago, according to venture capitalist community Tornado-Insider.

"Four years ago, the patent problems were getting in the way. A lot of us were worried, because it looked like the whole thing could get bogged down," Berners-Lee said, referring to attempts by private companies to patent software needed on web sites and charge royalties for usage.

Thanks to the help of many, royalty-free licences are now available, said the man who never saw a cent of royalties for his invention, which set off an industry now generating hundreds of billions of euros (dollars) in revenues a year.

Realising a vision

Berners-Lee, while at the European Particle Physics Laboratory CERN in Geneva, designed key parts of the web to let scientists work together when in different parts of the world.

Currently the director of the world wide web Consortium (W3C), which is a US-headquartered forum of companies and organisations to improve the web, he is only now realising his early vision of a two-way web where people can easily work together on the same page and the content on a page can be recognised by computers.

Some early examples of websites that combine data from different sources include Google Maps, whose geographic maps turn up on other sites combined with services, and photo-sharing site Flickr, where members comment on each other's postings and developers can use the pictures to create new applications.

"Several years ago we said: 'What a shame that we can't go to that website and find all that stuff in there.' We had a loose roadmap five years ago. Steadily we've been making progress," said Berners-Lee, adding that most of the work had been done.

"Of course there are people who say: 'Why didn't Tim do that from the start?' But it's more complicated," he said.

Elements are already filtering through, such as Web sites that do not have to be refreshed entirely when only parts are being updated.

A new query language, SPARQL (pronounced "Sparkle"), is designed to make web pages easier for machines to read, allowing all sorts of different data to be put to work on the web.

"SPARQL will make a huge difference," Berners-Lee said.

"You can see so many ways the web is taking off in so many different directions," he said.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technol...936066,00.html





HONG KONG: BitTorrent Plans Legal Chinese Film Service

Hong Kong and mainland companies in talks to distribute Chinese-language films through legal fire-sharing program
Vivienne Chow

Cannes --- Using BitTorrent software to download Chinese-language films could be legal by year's end -- the owner of the world's most popular file-sharing program plans to offer them for legitimate downloading.

Speaking yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival, BitTorrent's co-founder and president, Ashwin Navin, revealed that over the past couple of months, the company had been negotiating with various film companies in Hong Kong and on the mainland about the possibility of launching a service.

BitTorrent uses a technique called "file swarming" to distribute large files. Rather than download a single large file from one central computer, BitTorrent assembles files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the internet.

"We are very interested in Cantonese and Mandarin films and TV shows for distribution in the Chinese-speaking market and also for expats living in non-Chinese- speaking territories," Mr Navin said. "In some cases when there's a small Chinese population the best way to reach them is through the internet. [Otherwise] there's no way of distribution."

Mr Navin said he had spoken to several Hong Kong film companies but would not specify which ones.

"They've been very receptive. Everyone knows what BitTorrent is. If there's a way for them to protect their films and distribute their films legally, making the money they are not making now, I think there's mutual interest for BitTorrent and the Hong Kong film industry.

"We hope the service [of providing Chinese-language content] can be up this year."

This might be realised after a ground-breaking deal last week signed between Warner Bros Home Entertainment Group and BitTorrent to distribute entertainment content using the file-sharing software legally. The service is intended to be launched in the US this summer. Warner Bros intends to use BitTorrent's ability to quickly download large files to rent and sell its films on the same day the movies are released on DVD.

Pricing has not been set but individual TV shows could cost as little as US$1 and movies would be sold for about the price of a DVD.

BitTorrent earlier reached an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America to prevent film piracy and promote innovation in online digital distribution of content. Studios believe reasonably priced, legal alternatives will be preferable to downloading files that could contain viruses or poor quality copies of films.

The Hong Kong movie industry recently obtained a court order to retrieve from internet service providers the identities of 49 users who had illegally uploaded or downloaded local movies with BitTorrent software. The industry plans to take them to court for piracy.

Despite only a fraction of downloaders paying to use legitimate music downloading services, Mr Navin is optimistic about the future of paid movie downloading.

"It won't happen immediately. But we are going to work together. If we don't get it right from day one, soon after we'll have the right service. People will want to use it because it's still the most convenient way to get movies online."

Mr Navin denied that other studios were being cautious about collaborating with BitTorrent and wanted to wait and see the result of the Warner Bros deal.

"We have negotiated with other studios and record labels as well. A number of them want to be innovative and want to try new models of distribution."

He predicted that popularising online distribution of film content could help foster the creation of independent films, which usually find it difficult to get screened at theatres.

"There is quite a bit of content created for PC consumption. But as soon as it becomes a viable, decent-sized market, major studios will create content exclusively for internet. That's the next phase."
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=46357





Vast Data Cache About Veterans Is Stolen
David Stout and Tom Zeller Jr.

Personal electronic information on up to 26.5 million military veterans, including their Social Security numbers and birth dates, was stolen from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who had taken the data home without authorization, the agency said Monday.

The department said that there was no evidence any of the information had been used illegally and that whoever stole it, in a burglary of the employee's home this month, might be unaware of its nature or how to use it. The stolen data do not include any health records or financial information, the agency said.

But it was immediately clear from the sheer numbers involved, as well as the tone of the announcement and the steps taken in the aftermath of the theft, that the breach was deeply embarrassing to the agency.

"As a result of this incident, information identifiable with you was potentially exposed to others," Jim Nicholson, the secretary of veterans affairs, wrote in a letter being sent to the veterans who might be affected.

As measured by the number of people potentially affected, the data loss is exceeded only by a breach last June at CardSystems Solutions, a payment processor, in which the accounts of 40 million credit card holders were compromised in a hacking incident.

But in that breach, any exposure could be addressed by simply canceling those accounts. In the latest incident, three crucial keys to unlocking a person's financial life — name, Social Security number and date of birth — may have been set loose. Those cannot be canceled, and a clever thief can use them to begin trying to open new accounts, secure loans, buy property and otherwise wreak havoc on the victim's credit history.

At a news conference on Monday afternoon, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said there was "no reason to believe at this time that the identities of these veterans have been compromised." Mr. Gonzales, who spoke after the first working meeting of an identity theft task force established by President Bush on May 10, added that he had directed prosecutors "to exercise zero tolerance" if cases of identity theft were traced to loss of the data.

The breach follows more than a year of intense debate over the security of private consumer data. That controversy stemmed from the disclosure in February 2005 that thieves had duped the world's largest commercial data broker, ChoicePoint, into providing them information on more than 150,000 consumers.

Since then, consumer groups estimate, records of various types involving some 55 million consumers — credit card and bank account data, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other information — have been lost, stolen or otherwise made vulnerable. The figure does not include the breach made public on Monday.

In the aftermath of the ChoicePoint debacle, several states have passed tough legislation aimed principally at forcing companies, schools and other handlers of private data to notify consumers when their information has been compromised. Other new laws permit consumers to freeze their credit as a way of foiling would-be thieves, or force new security standards on data handlers.

Several pieces of legislation are also pending in Congress, but so far the interests of the financial services and credit industries, which seek to limit inhibitions on data handling and the penalties for security breaches, have competed with those of consumer advocates. As a result, no consensus has emerged.

In the Veterans Affairs case, Matt Burns, a spokesman for the department, said the data involved veterans who were discharged from 1975 onward, as well as some who were discharged earlier and then filed a claim with the agency.

The case is under investigation by the department's inspector general and the F.B.I. Mr. Burns, noting that the inquiry was continuing, would not say when the theft was discovered.

But a Congressional aide briefed on the matter, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it, said the information was on disks. Secretary Nicholson, speaking at the same news conference as Attorney General Gonzales, said the worker had taken the data home to work on a department project. Mr. Nicholson described the worker, who has not been identified, as a longtime employee of the agency. He lives in suburban Maryland, a law enforcement official said.

There could be no immediate definitive answer to the most important question: whether those with the stolen data would use the information. But Beth Givens, the director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group based in San Diego, said there was good reason to be concerned.

"There is no telling what kind of path the data is going to take," Ms. Givens said. The combination of names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth "means that 26.5 million people could — could — become victims of identity theft," she said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledged as much in advising veterans to be "extra vigilant" and to monitor their bank statements, credit card records and the like. Veterans can go to firstgov.gov and www.va.gov/opa for information, or call a toll-free number: 1 (800) 333-4636.

Criticism of the agency began almost as soon as the data breach was disclosed Monday.

"Someone needs to be fired, the perpetrators need to be caught, and the security system at the V.A. needs to be massively overhauled," said Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee.

Another Democrat, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, said, "If the government is going to tell private companies that they have to secure Americans' personal and financial data, then it has to set a much better example itself."

Mr. Schumer introduced a far-reaching computer security bill in 2005, but it failed to gain enough support.

David Stout reported from Washington for this article, and Tom Zeller Jr. from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/wa...rtner=homepage





In the Quest for Coolness, Science Could Really Use a Vito Corleone
Dennis Overbye

Somewhere out there, more elusive than a snow leopard, more vaunted in its imagined cultural oomph than an Oprah book blurb, is the Science Movie.

You know, the film that finally does for science and scientists what "The Godfather" did for crime and what "The West Wing" did for politics, accurately reproducing the grandeur and grit of science while ushering its practitioners into the ranks of coolness.

I went to the Tribeca Film Festival recently in search of that movie. I didn't find it, but I didn't expect to. Like some foggy quantum possibility still lurking beyond the limits of measurement, that movie doesn't exist — yet. The best you can hope for is a glimpse, like fragments of a not-yet-dreamed dream, of a genre slouching toward birth.

Scientists often say nice things about science-oriented plays, like "Copenhagen," "Arcadia," "QED" and "Proof" — to name a few that have been on Broadway in the last few years. But you get mostly silence when you ask about movies, except for imprecations about directors who get the curtains right while the science and the characters are loony. For my money, "Apollo 13" did a great job of showing the heroics of the everyday smartness of rocket scientists, but then again, that was a true story.

I was going to ignore Tribeca this year. But my wife, Nancy, noticed in an article in this newspaper that a Spanish movie at the festival, "The Mist in the Palm Trees," was being heralded by its makers as "the first quantum movie." How could I resist a movie whose sections are named for quarks?

Directed by Lola Salvador and Carlos Molinero, "Mist" is a presented as fictional documentary about a Spanish photographer and physicist, one Santiago Bergson. In it, the dead Bergson muses on his atomized life and lack of memory as old photographs and grainy home film clips shuffle past, over and over again, arcing from his childhood in Asturia, in northern Spain, to the cataclysmic climax of the Manhattan Project. In one much-repeated grainy clip, a man in a suit leaps headfirst over a row of chairs on the lawn and lands in a somersault.

Bergson, whose voice is done by a woman, complains at one point that he has no memories; they have been replaced by images, "dead photons."

Instead of becoming familiar the way they would in a conventional narrative, however, the people in these images become more mysterious, and their relationships become more confusing as the movie goes on.

When I asked Ms. Salvador and her colleagues what made this a "quantum film," I was braced to hear some new-age mumbo jumbo about art, consciousness and randomness, perhaps the destructive impact of modernism.

Instead, they began to lecture me about the famous and deeply subversive quantum physics exercise known as the double slit experiment, a staple of college labs and pop-sci books. In it, an electron or some other elementary particle is shot at a screen that has a pair of slits. In seeming contravention of common sense, the particle appears to pass through both slits at once and then interferes with itself, splatting into a pattern that looks like overlapping waves on the far wall.

It turned out that one of the screenwriters, Ricardo Enríquez, is a former particle physicist. Over coffee, he and his colleagues explained how he had prevailed on Ms. Salvador to forgo a classical narrative for one that enfolds quantum principles.

Films usually follow a narrative that unfolds in a straight line in accordance with cause and effect, he said, adding, "That's not true in quantum mechanics, and that's not true either in 'The Mist in the Palm Trees.' "

And so in the movie's conceit, Bergson, like the electron traversing two slits at once, does not have one life, he has many lives, which interfere with one another, like the conflicting versions of a fight on a childhood Thanksgiving told by quarreling cousins.

The result is confusion, a braided arc of love, memory and loss, whose details keep slipping through your fingers. That is to say, it really is a quantum film. But it's not about quantum mechanics, and there is no exam.

"It's not a scientific commentary," Mr. Molinero said. "It's just art."

Since being mystified is my normal state, I enjoyed "Mist." But it may not be for everyone.

At the other end of the scale at Tribeca was "Kettle of Fish," a screwball romantic comedy involving a frog biologist and a jazz saxophonist. That movie, directed and written by Claudia Myers and filmed in my very own Upper West Side neighborhood, was replete with polysyllabic jokes about pair bonding and the courting habits of frogs.

You could argue that every romantic comedy is about biology. Despite a sneaky plot that, among other things, has the biologist making the first pass, however, "Kettle" hews a little too closely to the stereotype of the scientist as socially inexperienced, if not inept. The most fetching relationship is between the saxophonist's fish, Daphne, and a frog named Casanova.

"Kettle" was one of several films and screenplays making its debut under the imprimatur of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as part of its program for the public understanding of science.

Every spring some of the foundation's flowers bloom at Tribeca in the form of staged readings of screenplays under development, and it is in these readings and the discussions that follow that one can perhaps most clearly discern the shape of the cultural beast still fighting to be born.

Two of these screenplays have now been signed to production deals. Just before Tribeca opened, the foundation announced that Peter Bogdanovich, best known for "The Last Picture Show," would direct "The Broken Code." Written by David Baxter, "Code" is based on the book by Ann Sayre about the genetics pioneer Rosalind Franklin, whose work led to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

Last week at Cannes it was announced that David Strathairn, of "Good Night, and Good Luck," would star in a production of "Challenger," about the physicist Richard Feynman and his adventures investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Doron Weber, who heads the Sloan program, noted that Nicole Perlman, the author of "Challenger," first received a Sloan grant years ago as a film major at New York University, adding, "I believe we're spotting talent (and exposing it to science) at a very early stage, and that this group of Sloan winners will be running Hollywood and indie films in the coming decades."

"Challenger" and "Project Mustard," a comedy about a British entry into the 1960's race to land men on the moon, were the subjects of a staged reading one morning by professional actors, including Judd Hirsch in the role of Feynman, during the festival.

A brunch and a panel discussion afterward devolved into a referendum on the direction of the nation's space program over the last 20 years and reminded me that the romance of space was an enduring and perhaps easier hook for people who might not be ready to embrace quantum mysteries.

That longing is at heart of "The Starry Messenger," a portrait of an astronomy teacher at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, by the writer Kenneth Lonergan.

Excerpts from the play, which has a date with Broadway next year and then Hollywood, were read by a group including Matthew Broderick at an invitation-only event one night during the festival. The title comes from Galileo's 1610 book "Sidereus Nuncius," in which he first reported his telescopic observations.

Mr. Lonergan, who was born in New York City, grew up going to the old Hayden Planetarium, which was closed in 1997 to make way for the new Rose Center. The play is set in the period leading up to its demolition.In a panel discussion after the reading, Mr. Lonergan made no bones about his dismay over the loss of the old planetarium building and his distaste for its successor. He joked that the movie version of his play would have to be shot at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

This clearly irked Neil deGrasse Tyson, the planetarium's director, who was on hand and said that he too had grown up with the old planetarium. Its night sky was his first night sky, he said, but by the time it was torn down, Dr. Tyson argued, the old planetarium wasn't appealing to young kids anymore.

He and Mr. Lonergan were able to agree, however, on the glories of the old Zeiss 6 projector they had both grown up with, which started every planetarium show with the skyline around Central Park.

Mr. Lonergan said that once upon a time he could not look at the sky without getting lost in the wonder and terror of it all, but that the day to day drudgery of life and teaching could dull those feelings. He reported sadly that he could look at the sky without that fear and trembling now. "Something has been lost," he said.

Something like this seems to have happened to the teacher in his play, who aspired to a career in research but, as a teacher, is only one of the low-level communicators of science, not unlike your faithful correspondent.

He has lost his faith, but I'm not giving up on him. I am a starry messenger too, and I am hoping for Mr. Lonergan's play to ennoble us all. It might be asking too much to make us cool.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/science/23essa.html





State Department Yields on PC's From China
Steve Lohr

Long story short, an influential member of Congress played the China card, and the State Department folded.

It was a drama that reached a conclusion late last week, when the State Department, responding to fears that its security might be breached by a secretly placed device or hidden software, agreed to keep personal computers made by Lenovo of China off its networks that handle classified government messages and documents.

The damage to Lenovo is more to its reputation than to its pocketbook. The State Department will use the 16,000 desktop computers it purchased from Lenovo, just not on the computer networks that carry sensitive government intelligence.

Yet the episode does point to how much relations between the United States and China have become a tangled web of political, trade and security issues. Mutual economic dependence and mutual distrust, it seems, go hand in hand.

To the Lenovo side, the outcome was a matter of anti-China politics overriding economic logic.

Last year, the Chinese company completed the purchase of the personal computer business of I.B.M., after the Bush administration concluded a national security review. Given the nod, Lenovo figured it was free to do business in America just like any other personal computer company.

But the State Department decision suggests that it is not that simple. "Unfortunately, we're in a situation where certain people in Congress and elsewhere want to make a political issue of this," said Jeffrey Carlisle, vice president of government relations for Lenovo. "They are trying to create as uncomfortable an atmosphere as possible for us in doing business with the federal government."

Mr. Carlisle characterizes the worry that the Chinese government might secretly slip spying hardware or software on Lenovo computers shipped to the State Department as "a fantasy." The desktop machines, he said, will be made in Monterrey, Mexico, and Raleigh, N.C., at plants purchased from I.B.M.

"It's the same places, using the same processes as I.B.M. had," Mr. Carlisle said. "Nothing's changed."

Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican, said the change of ownership changes a lot. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month, he wrote that because of the Chinese government's "coordinated espionage program" intended to steal American secrets, the Lenovo computers "should not be used in the classified network."

Mr. Wolf is the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the budget appropriations for the State Department, Commerce Department and Justice Department.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Wolf said the security concerns about the State Department's use of Lenovo computers had been brought to his attention by two members of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan group appointed by Congress. "They deserve the credit for this," Mr. Wolf said.

Larry M. Wortzel, a member of the review commission and former military attaché to the American embassy in Beijing, said he and another commission member, Michael R. Wessel, began looking into the sale in March. What most concerned them, he said, was that 900 of the Lenovo computers were intended for use on the State Department's classified networks.

Lenovo is partly owned by the Chinese government, which holds 27 percent. "This is a company owned and beholden to agencies of the People's Republic of China," Mr. Wortzel said. "Our assumption is that if the Chinese intelligence agencies could take action, they would take action."

After meetings with American government and securities agencies, including classified briefings, Mr. Wortzel and Mr. Wessel concluded that it would be possible for the Chinese government to put clandestine hardware or software on personal computers that might be able to tap into American intelligence.

"This is not off the wall as to whether there are potential security concerns here," Mr. Wessel said.

Both Mr. Wortzel and Mr. Wessel insisted that theirs is not an anti-China stance or even anti-Lenovo.

"I'm sure they are good computers," Mr. Wortzel said. "I would use them in my home. But I would not use one on a classified network at the State Department."

The State Department said last Thursday that it would not use the Lenovo computers on its classified networks. In a letter to Mr. Wolf, Richard J. Griffin, assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, said that the department had "consulted with U.S. government security experts and is recommending that the computers purchased last fall be utilized on unclassified systems only."

The letter added that the State Department was "initiating changes in its procurement processes in light of the changing ownership" of computer equipment suppliers. A spokesman said that "to allay any possible fears and any possible concerns, this is where we came out."

Certainly, there are fears aplenty these days in any matter related to China. Mr. Carlisle of Lenovo insists any security fears about its computers are unfounded.

The company's computers and the software loaded on it are routinely tested inside the company and, on the State Department sale, by third-party American contractors, like CDW.

"If anything were detected, it would be a death warrant for the company," Mr. Carlisle said. "No one would ever buy another Lenovo PC. It would make no sense to do it."

Lenovo, industry analysts say, may well have the stronger argument, but it may still suffer.

"Basically, this is much ado about nothing," said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "Unfortunately, perceptions count. And the damage has already been done."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/wa.../23lenovo.html





The Dead Formats Society
Momus

The Ise Shrine in Japan is the Shinto religion's most sacred site. Much too important to preserve, like some rotting monument, in its original materials, the shrine is instead torn down every 20 years, replaced by a new, identical shrine built alongside it -- not a replica, but a re-creation, say the Shinto priests who model the process on nature. It contains three legendary items dating back 2000 years; a mirror, a string of jewels and a sword.

I wonder if we aren't doing something similar with our own sacred memories. The formats we use to remember things keep changing. Yet we're sustained by a touching faith that, no matter how temporary their containers, somehow our mirror, jewels and sword will keep showing up.

The other day I tried to watch a Flash media piece my friend Florian Perret and I made back in 2002 for the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art's Digital Gallery. It wouldn't play because, according to MoCA's error page, "Suffusia: A Beautiful Life requires the current Flash Player." Flash 8 wasn't good enough for the MoCA website; it wanted Flash 6 or nothing.

Eventually I was able to reach the file by another route. But it made me think about just how quickly formats die these days. I remembered how, back in 2000, blown away by Mumbleboy's Flash work, I speculated that, had this program been around when I was 20, I'd have dedicated my life to making Flash files instead of pop records. After all, we tend to fall in love with media, programs, idioms or formats even before we have anything to say in them.

Seeing the 4-year-old Flash piece appearing to slip out of reach, I thought about how precocious and precarious that first rush of enthusiasm for Flash had been. Sure, Flash 8 can play Flash 6 files, it's backward compatible, even if the MoCA website isn't forward-compatible. But nobody at this point knows whether the Flash medium itself is just a flash-in-the-pan. Who's going to think of something like that as a vocation? Who's going to try to be "the Tolstoy of Flash" when we don't know whether Flash will even be around in 10 years, let alone a hundred?

Ten years ago I taught myself to use Macromedia Director (it was release 4.0 at the time) and made a CD-ROM called This Must Stop! I put as much effort into it as I put into my records, but just 10 years later This Must Stop! has, indeed, stopped. Or, to be precise, it runs so fast on today's computers that it's a meaningless blur. My CD-ROM is accessible only to cranks and connoisseurs, members of the "dead formats society" who've invested in the dead tech required to play it.

Suddenly, my whole life replays before my eyes as a succession of transient formats. My teens were spent in the age of Betamax video, games consoles with no carts, Pong burnt in ROM, audio delivered on vinyl, cassette tape and 8-track. In my 20s those formats were replaced by exciting new ones: VHS, laser disks, CDs, snap-in console carts, games on floppy disk that you slotted into your "multimedia personal computer," pale faxes. And each time the new thing came along, the old thing became a sideshow, a curiosity ... and, eventually, inaccessible, along with all the memories encoded on it.

Of course, if it mattered at all, content was soon re-made to fit the new format. Sometimes this transience was sold to us as permanence. Most of us spent the "postmodern" 1980s re-buying every album we'd ever bought on CD, because CD had "perfect sound forever." This wasn't just great for the music industry, it fitted the fashions of the '80s. Boomers doing well were happy to spend their money on a little silver memorial to their 1960s youth. Rock magazines went into retro mode, celebrating elderly rock stars or the young bands that sounded like them.

The cycles of obsolescence got tighter, faster. My 30s mapped to the '90s, a decade in which I went through two formats of video tape (Video 8 and DV), three formats of audio mastering (half-inch magnetic tape, DAT and CD), and three consumer music formats (CD, MiniDisc, mp3). Each time a new technology came along with its new format, there were decisions to be made (personal as well as corporate decisions) about what content would make the jump to the new format and what content would gather dust in junk stores, a curio for crank collectors clinging obstinately to dead tech.

In 1995, Jacques Derrida, the high priest of postmodernism, published a book called Archive Fever, which joined up the dots between Freud and e-mail, advancing the idea that "archiving represents both attempting to preserve something to be remembered and leaving out something to be forgotten." This fever to archive, said Derrida, was as much a desire to sublimate and suppress the past as to preserve it.

George Orwell may have been wrong about 1984 being an age of socialist totalitarianism, but his image of Winston Smith going through the archives of The Times selectively re-writing them was spot on. The '80s really felt like that; the '90s even more so. Which of my Video 8 tapes would I transfer to DVD, and which would I consign to the furnace Orwell called, with grim irony, the "Memory Hole"?

Wasn't there something unsettling about having to make this decision every couple of years, about discovering that each new "permanent" and "infallible" medium just seemed to die quicker than the temporary, fallible one it replaced? What did those faxes say, and what files were on these old CD-ROMs, before they faded and failed?

In his 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Nicholson Baker says that since the 1950s American libraries have followed a policy of "destroying to preserve," replacing newspapers and brittle books with microfilmed copies. As a result, he says, few complete editions of America's great newspapers exist. The microfilm these archives were transferred to is illegible, colorless and prone to decay.

"Destroying to preserve," of course, sounds a lot like what goes on at the Ise Shrine. Some of our treasures are too important to be made to change form and format over and over. Others are too important not to.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_2





Google Users Promised Artificial Intelligence
Richard Wray

A search engine that knows exactly what you are looking for, that can understand the question you are asking even better than you do, and find exactly the right information for you, instantly - that was the future predicted by Google yesterday.

Speaking at a conference for Google's European partners, entitled Zeitgeist '06, on the outskirts of London last night Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page gave an insight into perhaps the most ambitious project the Californian business is undertaking - artificial intelligence (AI).

"The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly," Mr Page told an audience of the digerati representing firms from Warner Music and AOL to BSkyB and the BBC. "You could ask 'what should I ask Larry?' and it would tell you."

Speaking after what was tabled an end of day 'fireside chat', Mr Page said one thing that he had learned since Google launched eight years ago was that technology can change faster than expected, and that AI could be a reality within a few years.

Certainly in that short period of time, Google has gone from a start-up in Mountain View to one of the most recognised brands in the world. As evidence of its meteoric rise, the Hertfordshire hotel in which the conference took place was also home to the England football team. The post-conference press roundtable was briefly interrupted by assistant manager Steve McLaren who had evidently got the wrong room.

Google's executives were also forced to defend their tactics. While suggesting the business could one day capture a 20% share of the $800bn (£424bn) global advertising market, Mr Schmidt explained that the apparently scatter-gun approach to research that lets engineers spend a fifth of their time working on pet projects, also allows the company to innovate faster than any rival.

While this has created some products (such as shopping service Froogle) that have not been a great success, it also led to the Gmail email service which despite still being only in test form is rapidly catching up with market leaders such as Hotmail.

But Mr Schmidt admitted that the company is spending more energy than perhaps it has in the past on integrating some of these seemingly random ventures back into its core revenue-generating search tool, something that could be seen as a sea change within the business, though Google executives maintain it is not going through a major consolidation phase.

But the lack of a visible pipeline of development from Google - which never gives a clear indication of what it is working on until it is released - infuriates some of its stockholders, who would rather it concentrated on a few lucrative services.

"We are very clear and I want to be clear and on the record," said Mr Schmidt. "We run the company for the benefit of our end-users globally."

Looking at the current court case in Houston where Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, former executives of collapsed energy giant Enron, await the outcome of their trial for fraud, he added: "Speaking as an American company chief executive, when the management team starts focusing on the stock price rather than focusing on its business and customers you get a really bad outcome. We are focused on doing the right thing for the long-term"

Mr Schmidt also attacked suggestions from some major US cable companies that providers of capacity-hungry internet services - such as video and TV - should be charged to run their services over the web. This presents a challenge to what is generally seen as the internet's neutrality, that everyone should be able to get on to it.

"We believe this violates one of the founding principles that built the internet today and it could stifle the next wave of innovation," he said.

In fact Google is currently working on its own video tool. While adamant that the company is not looking to get into the provision of content itself, it is looking to produce a video tool that will allow broadband TV viewers to find the shows they want from the hundreds that are available across the world. It is looking for media partners interested in using such a tool.

Mr Schmidt also had a few consoling words for the traditional media business which sees its profitability being utterly eroded by online rivals. He said usage of traditional media placed online is rising rapidly, but circulations - the revenue generator - are declining. "You don't have a lack of audience problem, you have a business model problem," he said.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...781121,00.html





Congress Bars Military Funeral Protesters
Jim Abrams

Demonstrators would be barred from disrupting military funerals at national cemeteries under legislation approved by Congress and sent to the White House Wednesday

The measure, passed by voice vote in the House hours after the Senate passed an amended version, specifically targets a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country, claiming that the deaths were a sign of God's anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.

The act "will protect the sanctity of all 122 of our national cemeteries as shrines to their gallant dead," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said prior to the Senate vote.

"It's a sad but necessary measure to protect what should be recognized by all reasonable people as a solemn, private and deeply sacred occasion," he said.

Under the Senate bill, approved without objection by the House with no recorded vote, the "Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act" would bar protests within 300 feet of the entrance of a cemetery and within 150 feet of a road into the cemetery from 60 minutes before to 60 minutes after a funeral. Those violating the act would face up to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

The sponsor of the House bill, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said he took up the issue after attending a military funeral in his home state, where mourners were greeted by "chants and taunting and some of the most vile things I have ever heard."

"Families deserve the time to bury their American heroes with dignity and in peace," Rogers said Wednesday before the Hosue vote.

The demonstrators are led by the Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., who has previously organized protests against those who died of AIDS and gay murder victim
In an interview when the House bill passed, Phelps said Congress was "blatantly violating the First Amendment" rights to free speech in passing the bill. He said that if the bill becomes law he will continue to demonstrate but would abide by the restrictions.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas, said the loved ones of those who die have already sacrificed for the nation and "we must allow them the right to mourn without being thrust into a political circus."

In response to the demonstrations, the Patriot Guard Riders, a motorcyle group including many veterans, has begun appearing at military funerals to pay respects to the fallen service member and protect the family from disruptions.

More than a dozen states are considering similar laws to restrict protests at nonfederal cemeteries. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against a new Kentucky law, saying it goes too far in limiting freedom of speech and expression.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Kids Turn "Teen Repellent" Sound Into Teacher-Proof Ringtone
Cory Doctorow

Kids in the UK have co-opted an annoying noise sold to retailers as teenager-repellent and turned it into a ringtone.

Mosquito is a high-pitched sound "audible only to teenagers" sold by Britain's Compound Security. It is sold to shopkeepers to use as a teenager repellent -- the idea is to play it loudly in and around shops and "chase away those annoying teenagers!!!"

The kids have reportedly converted the high-pitched noise and turned it into a ringtone, which, being inaudible to grownups, can then be used to receive texts and calls in class without alerting teachers.

This is either a magnificent hoax or just plain magnificent -- either way, I love this Little Brother Watches Back parable.
Schoolchildren have recorded the sound, which they named Teen Buzz, and spread it from phone to phone via text messages and Bluetooth technology.

Now they can receive calls and texts during lessons without teachers having the faintest idea what is going on.

A secondary school teacher in Cardiff said: 'All the kids were laughing about something, but I didn't know what. They know phones must be turned off during school. They could all hear somebody's phone ringing but I couldn't hear a thing.
Link (Thanks, Seth and WIll!)

Update: JS sez, "Considering that such high tones are virtually unattainable for the cell-phone loudspeakers I find the story highly suspect. Besides, the sound used as a ringtone would be compressed in some way (maybe not in the newer models, but would all kids have them?), further reducing the possibility that such high frequency content is preserved. I did little research and found this link where cell-phone audio capabilities are presented in detail. According to them the cell-phone's piezoelectric speaker caps its frequency response about at 10khz, while the Teen Buzz plays at 18khz to 20khz."

I had similar doubts -- which suggests that these kids have done something even more subversive than creating an adult-proof ringtone: they've convinced adults that there's an inaudible sound that they can all hear.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/24...een_repel.html





Honda Says Brain Waves Control Robot
Yuri Kageyama

In a step toward linking a person's thoughts to machines, Japanese automaker Honda said it has developed a technology that uses brain signals to control a robot's very simple moves.

In the future, the technology that Honda Motor Co. developed with ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories could be used to replace keyboards or cell phones, researchers said Wednesday. It also could have applications in helping people with spinal cord injuries, they said.

In a video demonstration in Tokyo, brain signals detected by a magnetic resonance imaging scanner were relayed to a robotic hand. A person in the MRI machine made a fist, spread his fingers and then made a V-sign. Several seconds later, a robotic hand mimicked the movements.

Further research would be needed to decode more complex movements.

The machine for reading the brain patterns also would have to become smaller and lighter - like a cap that people can wear as they move about, said ATR researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani.

What Honda calls a "brain-machine interface" is an improvement over past approaches, such as those that required surgery to connect wires. Other methods still had to train people in ways to send brain signals or weren't very accurate in reading the signals, Kamitani said.

Honda officials said the latest research was important not only for developing intelligence for the company's walking bubble-headed robot, Asimo, but also for future auto technology.

"There is a lot of potential for application to autos such as safety measures," said Tomohiko Kawanabe, president of Honda Research Institute Japan Co.

Asimo, about 50 inches tall, can talk, walk and dance. It's available only for rental but is important for Honda's image and has appeared at events and TV ads.

At least another five years are probably needed before Asimo starts moving according to its owner's mental orders, according to Honda.

Right now, Asimo's metallic hand can't even make a V-sign.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





It's Dixie Chicks vs. Country Fans, but Who's Dissing Whom?
Kelefa Sanneh

At the Academy of Country Music awards on Tuesday night, the host, Reba McEntire, made an unfunny joke. "If the Dixie Chicks can sing with their foot in their mouths, surely I can host this sucker," she said. The setup was pretty awkward. And when you stopped to think about it, the punch line really wasn't one. But none of that mattered. The line earned one of the night's most enthusiastic ovations.

It has been more than three years since Natalie Maines, the Dixie Chicks' lead singer, told a London audience, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The comment, delivered less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, sparked a feud with Toby Keith and, it seemed, the entire country-music establishment.

Mr. Keith has since moved on, but country fans clearly haven't. As the Dixie Chicks promote their new album, "Taking the Long Way" (Open Wide/Columbia), they are clearly country-music pariahs. Country radio is snubbing the album. And you know you've got an image problem when even Ms. McEntire is piling on.

It's not hard to sympathize with Ms. Maines and her two band mates, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison. They say they have had to contend with violent threats, and former fans call them bimbos and worse. (For female stars being outspoken carries particular risks.) Against this backdrop the three are presenting themselves as free-speech heroes, pilloried for expressing their political beliefs.

But this isn't really a fight about President Bush or freedom of speech. This is a fight about the identity of country music. There's a contract that binds country singers to their fans, and the Dixie Chicks have broken it.

The Dixie Chicks were once considered too country for country radio. They didn't take off until Ms. Maguire and Ms. Robison, who are sisters, replaced their twangy old singer with Ms. Maines, who has always seemed like a pop star. Two brilliant albums — "Wide Open Spaces," from 1998, and "Fly," from 1999 — made them the era's top-selling country act. When their brash (and sometimes mischievous) songs crossed over to pop radio, many country fans felt proud to see a group of their own doing so well.

Country fans are loyal, but they're not low-maintenance. By the time Ms. Maines made her statement in 2003, many were already questioning the trio's commitment: would they leave their old supporters behind?

For mistrustful listeners in search of an answer, Ms. Maines's comments provided one. Forget about President Bush: she had used the words "ashamed" and "Texas" in the same sentence, and she had done it on foreign soil. She meant to insult the president, but some former fans thought they heard her insulting Texans, and therefore Southerners, and therefore nonmetropolitan listeners everywhere.

This interpretation may seem specious. And yet Ms. Maines and her band mates seem to be going out of their way to prove their detractors right. Instead of fighting for their old fans, the Dixie Chicks seem to be dismissing them.

On "60 Minutes" Ms. Maguire told Steve Kroft that their concerts weren't typical country concerts. "When I looked out in the audience, I didn't see rednecks," she said. (Did her lip curl slightly as she pronounced the r-word?) "I saw a more progressive crowd."

And in a Time magazine cover story she said the group would rather have "a smaller following of really cool people who get it," as opposed to "people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith." (It would seem Ms. McEntire got her revenge.) Perhaps there's a difference between this attitude and simple snobbery, but you can't blame country fans if they don't much feel like splitting hairs.

The contract between country stars and their fans involves more than a little make-believe. Globe-trotting millionaires often pander to suburban middle-class listeners by evoking a mythical rural life. You can hear a hint of anti-Maines sentiment in "Boondocks," the recent hit by the Chicks-influenced group Little Big Town: "I feel no shame/I'm proud of where I came from/I was born and raised in the boondocks."

The Nashville establishment is not politically monolithic. The most depressing thing about this whole episode is the way the Dixie Chicks have conflated politics and culture, Bush supporters and "rednecks." The unintended implication is that only sophisticated city folk oppose the war in Iraq, and only "rednecks" support the president.

Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, country music's most popular couple, made headlines — without, it seems, losing fans — when they criticized the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina at a news conference in March. Mr. McGraw blamed "the leader of the free world" for not holding people accountable for rebuilding the region.

And even as Ms. Maines cites the famously pro-Kerry rock star Bruce Springsteen as a role model, the country channel CMT has been broadcasting an hourlong special on the making of Mr. Springsteen's most recent album, which happens to be full of protest songs. These days Mr. Springsteen might be more visible on CMT than the Dixie Chicks are.

The first single from "Taking the Long Way" is "Not Ready to Make Nice," a defiant song that hasn't, of course, found a home on country radio or CMT. (The follow-up is a gentler — but still defiant — love song, "Everybody Knows.") And while the Dixie Chicks would love to position themselves as underdogs, the truth is that they have probably never been more beloved by the mainstream media. It's hard to complain about your musical career when you're plastered on the front of Time.

The Dixie Chicks are still a joy to hear, and they'll have plenty of fans no matter what. The Nashville game is hard work; it brings out the best in some singers and frustrates others. If the Dixie Chicks don't want to play that game, that's certainly their prerogative. But they might at least acknowledge that they've been playing it for years, and reaping its rewards. And they shouldn't be too surprised if some fans jeer — angry, but also disappointed — as they walk off the court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/ar...ic/25sann.html





Listening to Rock and Hearing Sounds of Conservatism
Ben Sisario

It is a primal moment in rock. In the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," Roger Daltrey sings about gladly fighting in the street for a "new revolution," and with a virtual mushroom cloud of guitar behind him, lets out a fearless cry. But what is the political message?

Classic conservatism, says National Review, the venerable conservative magazine, which in its latest issue offers a list of the "top 50 conservative rock songs of all time." Its No. 1 choice is "Won't Get Fooled Again," which ends with the cynical acceptance that nothing really changes in revolution: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss."

"It is in my view a counterrevolutionary song," John J. Miller, the author of the article, said in a phone interview yesterday. "It's the notion that revolutions are often failures, like the French Revolution leading to Napoleon. The song is skeptical about revolutionary idealism in the end, and that's a very conservative idea."

Among the other conservative ideas that Mr. Miller found in the songs — most of them hits, many of them classics — are opposition to taxation ("Taxman" by the Beatles, at No. 2) and a preference for abstinence before marriage ("Wouldn't It Be Nice" by the Beach Boys, at No. 5).

Mr. Miller, 36, a political reporter for the magazine, said the list was meant to take issue with the idea that rock's politics are essentially liberal, and to offer an alternative view.

"Any claim that rock is fundamentally revolutionary is just kind of silly," he said. "It's so mainstream that it puts them" — liberals — "in the position of saying that at no time has there ever been a rock song that expressed a sentiment that conservatives can appreciate. And that's just silly. In fact here are 50 of them."

Asked to comment on the list, Dave Marsh, the longtime rock critic and avowed lefty, saw it as a desperate effort by the right to co-opt popular culture. "What happened was, my side won the culture war, in the sense that rock and related music is the dominant musical form, not only in the U.S. but around the world," he said. "Once you lose that battle, you lose the war, and then a different kind of battle begins: the battle over meaning."

The list comes at a time when liberal protest songs are gaining popularity. Public approval of the Bush administration and the Iraq war is at a low, and the patriotic sentiments expressed in some rock and country songs in the aftermath of 9/11 seem to have vanished.

Mr. Miller's criteria were broad: the songs had to be good and express classically conservative ideas "such as skepticism of government or support for traditional values." Mr. Miller posted an item on the magazine's Web site, www.nationalreview.com, late last year and received hundreds of responses, he said.

The choices, accompanied by quotations from the lyrics and pithy remarks by Mr. Miller, can be surprisingly persuasive. (The entire list, with explanations, is at nytimes.com/arts.) Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" (No. 4) is "a tribute to the region that liberals love to loathe," and "Der Kommissar" by After the Fire (No. 24) is praised for criticizing Communist East Germany. A few seem a stretch, like Sammy Hagar's "I Can't Drive 55" (No. 38), called "a rocker's objection to the nanny state."

Mr. Miller said that in choosing the songs, "I made an effort for a fair amount of diversity" in the ages of the artists represented. But the list is also overwhelmingly white and male. Among the few black or female artists are Living Colour ("Cult of Personality," No. 18) and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders ("My City Was Gone," No. 13), Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries ("The Icicle Melts," No. 41) and Tammy Wynette ("Stand by Your Man," N0. 50).

Sean Wilentz, the Princeton history professor, who has also written liner notes for Bob Dylan, said it was no surprise that such ideas can be traced through rock. "Of course there's 'conservatism' in rock 'n' roll," he wrote in an e-mail message. "There's everything in rock 'n' roll, just as there's everything in America."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/ar...ic/25rock.html


















Until next week,

- js.


















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