[JackSpratts]

Ready to Attack Obama, if Some Money Arrives
Michael Luo

A Bible verse taped to a whiteboard in Floyd Brown’s office that he uses to track his efforts to attack Senator Barack Obama reads, “That is why for Christ’s sake I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”

Mr. Brown, 47, a 6-foot-6 bear of a man is perhaps best known for his involvement with the Willie Horton television advertisement that helped sink Michael S. Dukakis’s candidacy in 1988. Mr. Brown has had much in his career to be delighted about as the source of scores of conservative assaults on Democrats that have earned him their lasting enmity.

Mr. Brown is back to his trade of bludgeoning a Democratic candidate for president, producing an innuendo-laden advertisement that is being televised this week in Michigan, albeit sparsely on cable, questioning Mr. Obama’s religious background.

The Obama campaign singled out Mr. Brown on Thursday as emblematic of the threat that independent groups on the right posed to him. On Friday, Mr. Obama, at a news conference in Jacksonville, Fla., again named Mr. Brown while defending his campaign’s rejection of public financing for the general election.

Yet if Mr. Brown’s struggles are any indication — he has so far failed to raise much money — it is not clear that Republicans will be able to repeat their successes in 2004, when independent groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had a significant role in undermining Senator John Kerry’s campaign.

“It’s all about reaching a tipping point,” Mr. Brown said. “Swift Boats achieved the tipping point. I was part of a team that reached the tipping point in 1988. In 1992, we didn’t reach it. We might not this time. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.”

No major independent effort to help Senator John McCain’s campaign has materialized. Although Republican operatives say something will eventually develop, alarm has spread among many, especially after Mr. Obama’s announcement on Thursday on public financing, raising the prospect that he will wield an enormous financial advantage over Mr. McCain in the fall.

Many reasons explain the absence of a serious independent effort at this point, Republican strategists said. Many wealthy donors who might be in a position to finance a 527 group, named for the Tax Code section that covers them, or a similar independent effort that is free to accept unlimited contributions are wary this time because of the legal problems that dogged many such groups after the 2004 election.

Major donors are said to be uncertain of Mr. McCain’s chances as Republicans face a decidedly unfavorable climate in the fall. Lingering, as well, is the possibility that they may anger Mr. McCain, who has a record of campaign finance reform and has in the past been critical of such groups.

Perhaps in recognition of financial realities, the McCain campaign has softened its statements on such groups, repeatedly saying it cannot be expected to “referee” them.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain, said Friday that although Mr. McCain had made clear his objections to such groups, he also recognized that a number of them were poised to work on Mr. Obama’s behalf. Mr. Schmidt said Mr. McCain understood that “people who want to participate in the process because of what’s going on on the other side are going to participate in the process.”

“He’s not going to be a unilateral referee,” Mr. Schmidt added.

Frank J. Donatelli, deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee, predicted that Mr. Obama’s decision not to use public financing would energize Republicans.

“We are going to be ready,” Mr. Donatelli said.

Enter Mr. Brown, who says it is his calling to tread where the campaign is unwilling to tread in finding malicious gossip on a Democratic nominee.

Several Republican strategists interviewed voiced skepticism about Mr. Brown’s chances of operating at anything other than the periphery of the general election this year, citing the amount of money needed, the difficulty of spreading a message that incites the grass roots and stricter regulation of independent groups.

“There’s a lot of people who are trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but there’s very few people who have,” said Chris LaCivita, a Republican strategist who helped organize the Swift Boat effort.

Mr. Brown conceded that his operation was in its infancy, showing $40,000 in the bank between two committees at the end of March for its first-quarter filing with the Federal Election Commission. Nevertheless, he appears to be at least mounting a serious effort that offers a glimpse at the challenges for such groups, as well as their potential.

At the heart of the effort is a Web site, ExposeObama.com, that has featured two Web advertisements, one on Mr. Obama’s record on crime and the other on his religious background.

The second spot highlights a Roman Catholic elementary school roster from Indonesia showing that Mr. Obama registered as a Muslim. The campaign said that the notation was probably made because Mr. Obama’s stepfather was nominally a Muslim but that the candidate had never been a Muslim. He is a committed Christian.

The site has helped Mr. Brown raise $100,000 in a month and a half. On Friday, after Mr. Obama’s announcement, Mr. Brown received 400 contributions, more than the usual weekly figure, totaling more than $15,000.

Mr. Brown is spreading the word about his videos through an e-mail list that he said had 2.5 million names. His goal is to produce at least one Web advertisement every two weeks, spread the word with e-mail and hope they catch on.

Mr. Brown is also using two conservative direct mail businesses to raise money, Response Dynamics and the Richard Norman Company, which ran the mail campaign for the Swift Boat effort, as well as two telemarketing businesses.

Although he said he was mostly in the testing phase with the mailings, Mr. Brown has put out 700,000 pieces and collected more than $600,000 by mail this year, a vast majority in the last two months. That period is after his last campaign finance filing.

Mr. Brown has also created a network of organizations that he can use to attack Mr. Obama, including two political action committees, the National Campaign Fund and the Legacy Committee, that are governed by strict limits on campaign donations, as well as a 527 group, Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America.

Mr. Brown’s financial limits were obvious with his most recent advertisement, questioning Mr. Obama’s religious background. He spent $5,000 to broadcast it. A cable company in the Detroit area approved it. Another kept Mr. Brown in legal limbo.

With most big-money conservative donors remaining cautious, Mr. Brown is focusing more on his political action committees. That could limit his ability to raise large sums. The maximum donation to such entities is $5,000.

Political action committees are much freer to attack candidates than 527s, which are technically limited to advocating on issues and cannot expressly call for a candidate’s election or defeat.

For conservatives hoping to repeat the Swift Boat effort, Federal Election Commission rulings after the 2004 election put such advertisements, which questioned a candidate’s character and fitness for office, off limits to 527s specifically.

Mr. Brown, a gregarious evangelical churchgoer, said that he merely enjoyed the interchange of ideas and that there was nothing personal about his attacks. He said he earned a living as an investment writer and speaker, working in politics part time.

In 1992, CBS News reported that, while trying to substantiate a rumor of a romantic affair involving Bill Clinton, Mr. Brown hounded the family of a young woman who had committed suicide. Mr. Brown insisted to the network that he had a right to be aggressive in his research.

But there are boundaries even Mr. Brown is unwilling to cross. He said many potential large donors had lost interest after he explained to them that certain harder-hitting advertisements that they favored were not possible through a 527.

His estimates of what he might be able to raise by the fall, assuming that he does not reach his imaginary “tipping point,” are in the $8 million range. That would be hardly consequential, especially in the face of the expected advertising onslaught from Mr. Obama.

Mr. Brown is hopeful, however, that major donors will step forward. “The vehicle will be there,” he said. “The talent will be there. Everything’s prepared.”

Kate Zernike contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us...ics/21ads.html





Christian Novel Is Surprise Best Seller
Motoko Rich

Eckhart Tolle may have Oprah Winfrey, but “The Shack” has people like Caleb Nowak.

Mr. Nowak, a maintenance worker near Yakima, Wash., first bought a copy of “The Shack,” a slim paperback novel by an unknown author about a grieving father who meets God in the form of a jolly African-American woman, at a Borders bookstore in March. He was so taken by the story of redemption and God’s love that he promptly bought 10 more copies to give to family and friends.

“Everybody that I know has bought at least 10 copies,” Mr. Nowak said. “There’s definitely something about the book that makes people want to share it.”

Thousands of readers like Mr. Nowak, a regular churchgoer, have helped propel “The Shack,” written by William P. Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk in Gresham, Ore., and privately published by a pair of former pastors near Los Angeles, into a surprise best seller. It is the most compelling recent example of how a word-of-mouth phenomenon can explode into a blockbuster when the momentum hits chain bookstores, and the marketing and distribution power of a major commercial publisher is thrown behind it.

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, “The Shack” had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even Mr. Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

Its publisher, Windblown Media, a company that was formed expressly to publish “The Shack” in May of last year, estimates that the book has sold more than one million copies. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which usually tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has sold about 350,000 copies, although those numbers do not include sales at stores like Wal-Mart or direct sales from the publisher’s Web site, theshackbook.com, which may have accounted for an unusually large percentage of the book’s sales.

Early in the novel the young daughter of the protagonist, Mack, is abducted. Four years later he visits the shack where evidence of the girl’s murder was discovered. He spends a weekend there in a kind of spiritual therapy session with God, who calls herself “Papa”; Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.

Sales have been fueled partly by a whiff of controversy. Some conservative Christian leaders and bloggers have attacked “The Shack” as heresy. The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, devoted most of a radio show to the book, calling it “deeply troubling” and asserting that it undermined orthodox Christianity. Others have said the book’s approach to theology is too breezy to be taken seriously.

Brad Cummings, a former pastor and the president of Windblown, said the company, which first shipped books out of his garage, spent about $300 in marketing. Word of the book ripped through the Christian blogosphere, talk radio and pulpits across the country.

“People would call back, asking for a dozen or a case,” Mr. Cummings said.

Even people initially put off by the book’s characterization of God as a black woman were won over. “I was so stunned by the presentation of Papa that I couldn’t deal with it,” said Bill Ritchie, senior pastor of an 8,000-member nondenominational church in Vancouver, Wash., who recalled putting the book down at first. He eventually finished it and told his congregation that it was “one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in years.” Since early this year, his church has been buying copies to sell to members by the caseload.

In May Hachette Book Group USA, a large mainstream publisher, entered into a partnership with Windblown to continue to publish the book. Hachette is now investing heavily to place advertisements on subways in Atlanta, Chicago and New York, as well as running television spots on the CNN airport network and other local stations.

Mr. Young, who is known as Paul, said he had written “The Shack” as a gift for his six children. The shack was a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain,” Mr. Young said in a telephone interview from the Phoenix airport on his way to a book reading.

He said he had suffered sexual abuse in New Guinea as the child of Canadian missionaries. After an extramarital affair 15 years ago, he said, he spent a decade in therapy, trying to earn back his wife’s and family’s trust.

In 2005 Mr. Young, now 53, started writing the book to show how he had healed by forging a new relationship with God. He chose to make God an African-American woman, he said, because he wanted to alter religious preconceptions. “It was just a way of saying: ‘You know what? I don’t believe that God is Gandalf with an attitude or Zeus who wants to blast you with any imperfection that you exhibit,’ ” Mr. Young said.

He gave 15 copies to his children and a few friends. When the friends wanted to send copies to other friends, Mr. Young wondered if he might have something suited for a wider audience.

He e-mailed the manuscript to another friend, Wayne Jacobsen, a former pastor and the author of Christian-themed books.

Mr. Jacobsen read the novel and immediately thought it deserved a larger following. “It brought God alive in a way that I think few books in literature ever do,” he said.

Mr. Young, Mr. Cummings and Mr. Jacobsen worked for 16 months through four rewrites. Mr. Jacobsen then showed the manuscript to several publishers, but it was rejected everywhere — both by Christian publishers, who found it too controversial, and secular publishers, who thought it was too Christian.

So Mr. Cummings, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Young invested about $15,000 of their own money to print and distribute the book. All three began sending copies to influential Christian friends, and orders started rolling into Windblown’s Web site.

Mr. Young, who with his wife filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and lost their home of 19 years at auction, said that with proceeds from book sales, he has been able to pay several bills.

In November Jane Love, the buyer of religious books at Barnes & Noble, read “The Shack” and took a chance with a small order. As sales soared, Ms. Love increased her orders.

The book has since gone on sale at Borders, Wal-Mart and Costco. Kathryn Popoff, vice president for merchandising of adult trade books at Borders, said the book was appealing to audiences beyond Christian readers.

But some booksellers said they were not sure that non-Christian readers were interested. At Rainy Day Books, a literary independent bookstore near Kansas City, Mo., Vivien Jennings, the owner, said she had sold only nine copies in four months. “The buzz never made it here,” she said. “What it tells me is that it is still pretty much restricted to the Christian audience.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/books/24shack.html





Dan Brown Tourists: Next Stop, Rome?
Elisabetta Povoledo

As Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and the rest of the cast and crew of “Angels and Demons” wrap up filming, the Dan Brown effect is on many minds here.

Mr. Brown’s last book-turned-movie, “The Da Vinci Code,” spawned hordes of tourists, toting well-thumbed novels, traipsing around France, Scotland and elsewhere to unravel its mysteries. Now Romans are wondering if the film of “Angels and Demons,” based on the 2000 predecessor to “The Da Vinci Code,” will do the same for their city.

Some hope so. Patrizia Prestipino, head of Rome’s provincial department of tourism, said, “A film like this could relaunch American tourism,” which has dropped by 6 percent this year from the same period last year (largely because of the weak dollar). The story takes place in some of the most magnificent spots in Rome, including the Pantheon, Piazza Navona and Piazza del Popolo.

“For us it’s like free advertising,” Ms. Prestipino said. “I say the more films they produce in Rome, the better.” Other groups, like the Roman Catholic Church, which sees its authority as being undermined in both Brown best sellers, have been less receptive.

Requests to film on location in Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria, churches that are homes to paintings by Caravaggio, sculptures by Bernini and a chapel designed by Raphael, were refused. They are also where cardinals are murdered and mutilated in two of the more gruesome scenes in “Angels and Demons.”

“We give authorizations to productions that are compatible with religious sentiment,” said the Rev. Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the Rome diocese. “With Dan Brown’s books this problem exists.”

Last week the production moved to the Royal Palace in Caserta, just north of Naples, to shoot Vatican interiors. (The Caserta location has also doubled for intergalactic palaces in two of the “Star Wars” prequels.)

“No one ever gets permission to film inside the Vatican,” Father Fibbi explained. “They didn’t even make an exception for the mini-series on the life of Pope John Paul II.”

Like “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons” stars Mr. Hanks as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of art history and religious symbology. This time he finds himself desperately trying to stop the Illuminati, a secret society hellbent on the destruction of the Vatican. (Antimatter plays a big role in their plot.)

Filming began in Rome on June 4, and has been fiercely protected. (Sony Pictures turned down requests for interviews with the production team in Rome.) The production even worked under a fake title to throw autograph-seekers off the scent.

“They billed the film as ‘Obelisk,’ but there were so many people milling about the set that it was pretty clear that it wasn’t true,” said Federico Guberti, a Roman paparazzo, who was among many staking out Piazza del Popolo when shooting began. Obelisks, as anyone who has read the book knows, play a starring role in the plot.

The release date, May 2009, may be nearly a year away, but some entrepreneurs in Rome are already benefiting from the buzz surrounding the making of the movie.

“The hype has started,” said Simone Gozzi, the director of Dark Rome tours. Mr. Gozzi said his company operated the only official tour linked to “Angels and Demons.” (“We registered the trademark in 2004,” he said.) The tour attracts an average of 600 clients a month, he said, each paying 56 euros (about $87).

Mr. Gozzi has also branched out to include what he called “incentive-building treasure hunts,” based on the book, for corporate clients. The movie, he said, can only boost business: “People already choose to come to Rome because of the book.”

Matt Kartchner, of Sacramento, Calif., said that he had two objectives in coming on holiday to Rome: “To see the Colosseum and take an ‘Angels and Demons’ tour.” On a recent morning he took that tour.

Rome experts say the film could correct some of the book’s errors. (For example, it places Santa Maria della Vittoria in the wrong piazza.) “People are constantly saying, ‘Wait a minute, in “Angels and Demons” Dan Brown says this or that,’ and we give a spiel about veracity and then explain that what risks being damaged is the image of Rome,” said Paul Bennett, the founder of Context Travel, an upscale tour operator that does not do “Angels and Demons” tours.

Alberto Artioli, the state official responsible for Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, has experienced something similar since Mr. Brown turned St. John into Mary Magdalene in “The Da Vinci Code.”

Before “The Da Vinci Code,” Mr. Artioli said, “people would ask us which of the figures is Judas; now people ask which one is the Magdalene. It’s a little discouraging to see that people take the interpretation as truth instead of a game.”

Mistakes and leaps of imagination aside, Ms. Prestipino, Rome’s tourism official, said she would like to do something for the film’s 2009 release. “It would make sense to have a promotional event where the movie was shot,” she said.

But others counter that Rome needs no advertising.

The Rev. Antonio Truda, the parish priest at Santa Maria del Popolo, marvels that anyone would come to his church just because its Chigi Chapel, decorated by Raphael and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is mentioned in a book. The church has masterpieces by Pinturicchio and Caravaggio, and an average of 2,500 people come by each day.

“I hate to be rude, but I really don’t think people come to a church like this because of ‘Angels and Demons,’ ” he said.

Father Truda may want to speak to Colin Glynn-Percy, the director of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust in Midlothian, Scotland.

Before “The Da Vinci Code,” Rosslyn Chapel averaged 38,000 visitors a year; in 2006, the year the movie was released, 176,000 visitors came. Last year the number dropped to 161,000.

“It’s not in the headlines as much,” Mr. Glynn-Percy said of the book (and movie) that put the chapel on the A list of Scottish tourist attractions, alongside Loch Ness. But it’s still up there.

“When people visit Scotland and someone mentions Rosslyn, they’ll think that’s something to do with the ‘Da Vinci Code’ and come,” he said. “So the effects are continuing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/movies/24ange.html





Hollywood Braces for an Actors’ Strike
Edward Wyatt

Labor unrest continues to dominate the landscape in Hollywood, and the possibility of a strike by actors has large movie studios planning to shut down production after Monday and has television studios rushing to complete episodes of series scheduled to return in the fall or January.

Most major movie studios long ago scheduled their big projects to finish shooting by Monday, the expiration date of the contract between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Screen Actors Guild.

Television studios meanwhile plan to continue taping new and returning series as long as possible, banking episodes scheduled for broadcast in the fall or the new year in case an actors’ strike interrupts production, as the strike by television and film writers did last winter.

It remains unclear whether there will be an actors’ strike at all. The first indication is expected around July 8, when members of the smaller of the two major actors’ unions, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, known as Aftra, completes a vote on whether to ratify a new contract with the producers alliance.

Roughly 44,000 of Aftra’s 70,000 members also belong to SAG, which has about 120,000 members. So the Aftra vote is being viewed as a strong indicator of whether SAG members will support a strike. SAG itself has not yet asked its members to authorize a strike in case its negotiations fail.

SAG’s leadership is lobbying Aftra members to reject the contract offer because the larger union says it does not offer enough in minimum wages for major television series roles and does not secure adequate payments for the digital use of actors’ work. SAG is also seeking new rules on product placement and an increase in allowance for gas and travel costs.

The actors’ unions have already provided exemptions to dozens of independent film projects that do not rely on the major studios for financing or distribution, allowing them to continue production in case of a strike.

Coincidentally, an aftereffect of the writers’ strike, which ended in February, is what allowed television producers to begin production earlier than usual this spring on many returning programs, thus putting them in a better position to withstand a possible short walkout by actors.

“I don’t think the writers’ strike was good for anybody,” said Teri Weinberg, an executive vice president at NBC Entertainment who oversees current programming and development. “But it did allow people like Tim Kring and his team to go back and talk about stories and bank scripts and start production earlier,” she added, referring to the creator of the NBC hit “Heroes.”

Many serialized dramas like “Heroes” and Fox’s “Prison Break” did not return to the air after the strike, allowing their writers to start working on the next season’s opening scripts back in February, when they normally would be plotting season finales.

So, on Tuesday, the “Prison Break” cast was on location at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles starting production on next season’s fourth episode; normally at this time actors might not even have seen scripts for the season opener.

Katherine Pope, president of NBC Universal Television Studio, the production arm related to the NBC broadcast network, said that this June was busier than any in the more than 10 years she had worked in television.

“The business is finally moving toward everything being on its own natural production cycle rather than being shoved into a pre-existing structure that makes no sense for a particular show,” Ms. Pope said.

She was referring partly to the annual cycle of developing new programs, filming pilot episodes and deciding whether to add the series to a network’s schedule.

That process was greatly upset this year by the writers’ strike, which gave networks little time to develop, produce and screen pilots before having to announce in May, for advertisers’ benefit, which shows were joining their fall schedules.

Until recently advertisers had been reluctant to commit to buying commercial time in new series without seeing a full-length pilot episode. This spring, however, some networks sold as much as 80 percent or 85 percent of the available time for the 2008-9 television season during the advance selling period, more than the usual 75 percent.

“This season shows that you don’t have to give advertisers full-blown pilots to sell time,” Gary Newman, co-chairman of the 20th Century Fox Television studio, said. “That enables you to get the scripts into a better place before you start shooting.”

It also gave networks more time to cast new series, something that in most years is compressed into a few weeks in the spring, when all networks are competing for the same performers.

The changes have also led to a raft of pilots for shows being produced in the late spring and early summer. ABC Studios, a production unit that, like the ABC broadcast network, is part of the Walt Disney Company, is shooting 11 pilots this summer for shows that might enter the lineup in 2009 or later.

Television production was undoubtedly hurt by the writers’ strike. According to FilmL.A., an organization that tracks permits for location filming in Los Angeles County and nearby areas, the number of days of television production in the first quarter of 2008 fell by 45 percent from a year earlier as the writers’ strike left most programs without new scripts to film.

Feature film production rose by 11 percent in the same period, as producers rushed to finish projects that had already been written.

Now, in what is traditionally the slowest quarter of the year for television production, studios are working at full throttle. At the Fox studio “Bones,” a crime drama broadcast on the Fox network, and “My Name Is Earl,” an NBC comedy, both began filming new episodes last month, much earlier than normal.

In addition “24,” the serial drama that skipped all of last year despite having shot several episodes of its seventh season, is adding a two-hour episode to start next season and is likely to have its schedule of 24 episodes completed before the first one is broadcast in January.

This assumes that the actors do not walk out or — a more remote possibility — that studios do not lock out actors to force them to reach a work agreement.

Both actors’ unions have been trotting out celebrity backers, with Aftra using Sally Field, Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin to promote endorsement of its proposed contract, and SAG planning a similar effort against the Aftra deal with Jack Nicholson, Rosanna Arquette and Holly Hunter.

The studios, meanwhile, are getting ready for the worst. “Obviously as a network we have to be prepared for that,” Ms. Weinberg of NBC said, without being more specific. “We’re incredibly hopeful an agreement will be reached. But we have a contingency plan.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/ar...on/26stri.html





Pixar Gambles on a Robot in Love
Katrina Onstad

HE is rusty, lipless, sub-literate and keeps company with garbage. Worse, he’s a “Hello, Dolly!” fan. This little robot, who goes by the name Wall-E — for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — is also the newest face (not that he has one) of Pixar.

Last year’s offering, “Ratatouille,” about a cartoon rat with Cordon Bleu aspirations, seemed like a hard sell. But Pixar may have outdone itself in the weird-premises department with “Wall-E,” a $180 million post-apocalyptic, near-silent robot love story inspired by Charlie Chaplin.

Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn’t care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not when the movie comes out on Friday. “I never think about the audience,” he said. “If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.”

Mr. Stanton, 42, sat in a Toronto hotel room this month, shaggy-haired and bearded, bouncing in his chair with a tween’s frenzied energy. In this way he seemed to embody the anti-corporate posture that is part of the Pixar mythology. When John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative executive, announced the company’s $7.4 billion acquisition by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he did so in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Employees at the Pixar “campus” in Emeryville, Calif., ride scooters and play foosball. “It’s like a film school with no teachers,” Mr. Stanton said. “Everyone actually wants you to take risks.”

Such is the Pixar brand, or anti-brand: a multibillion dollar company that acts like a nerd hobbyist in a basement. But that balancing act is even tougher to pull off as a subsidiary of Disney, a company whose very name has been turned into a neologism — Disneyfication — for a kind of bland commercial aesthetic.

Perhaps to assure the public that nothing has changed under new ownership, an early trailer for “Wall-E” plays up Pixar’s carefree mystique. The teaser, narrated by Mr. Stanton, describes a 1994 lunch, when the central Pixar players were finishing “Toy Story,” the first feature-length CG animated film. Over lunch they sketched on napkins characters that would end up in “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.”

On one napkin a lonely robot emerged. “We said: ‘What if humanity left and some little robot got left on and kept doing the same thing forever?’ ” said Mr. Stanton, who joined Pixar in 1990 as its second animator and ninth employee. “That was the saddest character I’d ever heard of.”

“Wall-E” took a back seat to another project, a film Mr. Stanton wrote and directed about a fish father looking for his son: “Finding Nemo” (2003). It went on to earn $340 million domestically and $865 million worldwide. The day after the 2004 Academy Awards, in which Mr. Stanton won the Oscar for best animated feature, he went to work on “Wall-E,” forgoing a planned six-month vacation.

“We were always frustrated that people saw CG as a genre as opposed to just a medium that could tell any kind of story,” he said. “We felt like we widened the palette with ‘Toy Story,’ but then people unconsciously put CG back in a different box: ‘Well, it’s got to be irreverent, it’s got to have A-list actors, it’s got to have talking animals.’ ”

So Mr. Stanton took “Wall-E” to a more somber, less sassy place (though there is some sass of course). The film is set in 2700 on an uninhabitable Earth, a dystopia covered in towers of garbage. Mr. Stanton drew on films from science fiction’s golden age: “1968 to ’81,” he said, with a film geek’s specificity. Software imitated the film — mostly Panavision 70 millimeter — that gave movies like “2001” and “Blade Runner” their visual sweep. Casting Sigourney Weaver in one of a handful of speaking parts is a nod to “Alien.”

Wall-E, a generic robo-janitor, contentedly compacts trash into perfect cubes, until he’s shaken up by the appearance of an egg-shaped search robot named Eve. This high-tech, piano-key-smooth egg-bot has dropped from the sky, seeking a sign of life on Earth. Wall-E, who knows about love from a video of “Hello, Dolly!,” falls hard.

“Technically there have been romances in animation,” Mr. Stanton said, but does anyone care about them? Mr. Stanton loves a rhetorical question: “Why can’t you have a love story that just completely sweeps you up? It happens in other movies, why not animation?”

In “Wall-E,” a mega-corporation called Buy n’ Large has transported Earth’s populace to luxury space ships, where the obese human race moves around in robotic loungers, drinking super-size soft drinks, placated by television and robot servants. Environmental disaster; corporate takeover; a global psychological coma: “Wall-E” starts to seem like “An Inconvenient Cartoon.” Yet Mr. Stanton dismisses talk of an allegory.

“I was writing this thing so long ago, how could I have known what’s going on now?” he said. “As it was getting finished, the environment talk started to freak me out. I don’t have much of a political bent, and the last thing I want to do is preach. I just went with things that I felt were logical for a possible future and supported the point of my story, which was the premise that irrational love defeats life’s programming, and that the most robotic beings I’ve met are us.”

And is the ubiquitous, all-powerful Buy n’ Large a sly dig at Disney Pixar’s new corporate bedfellow? With a fervent head shake no, Mr. Stanton turns company man.

“Part of the contract was: ‘You can’t touch us, you can’t change what we do,’ and that’s actually gained them such a level of respect and trust they wouldn’t have gotten if they’d tried to be Draconian.”

David A. Price, author of a company history called “The Pixar Touch,” doesn’t see the dark tone of “Wall-E” as a radical departure. “Pixar films reach whole audiences because they know how to make characters that are appealing to children and then give them adult problems,” he said.

Both Nemo and Wall-E are small, lost and vulnerable. But unlike “Finding Nemo,” with its chatterbox characters, “Wall-E” feels almost like a silent film. The first 25 to 30 minutes introduce Wall-E as a Buster Keaton-meets-E.T. figure, comically rocking and shuffling. Mr. Stanton found the key to the robot’s infant-sweet appearance at a baseball game. While he played with binoculars, Wall-E sprang into his head: binoculars on a box with treads.

“I want you to project a face on it,” he said. “I wanted to evoke the audience’s participation. You need to actually see it as a machine. I kept saying, I’m trying to make ‘R2D2: The Movie.’ ”

To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the “Star Wars” robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script — “Hi, I’m Wall-E” — and Mr. Burtt essentially translated the dialogue into robot, something he calls “audio puppeteering.”

“If you take sounds from the real world, we have a subconscious association with them that gives credibility to an otherwise fantastic concept,” Mr. Burtt said in a telephone interview.

The result is a film where the sound is as significant as the visual. One hears echoes of E.T.’s throat-singing (“E.T” is another Burtt film), and when Wall-E moves, the sound comes from a hand-cranked, World War II Army generator that Mr. Burtt saw in a John Wayne movie, then found on eBay.

“We all thought about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,” Mr. Burtt said, “this energetic, sympathetic character who doesn’t say a whole lot. Most animation is very dialogue heavy. There’s dance, constant talking, punch lines. We used to wonder: How will we prepare the audience?”

Whether or not viewers give in to “Wall-E” is a billion-dollar question. “The box office from Pixar films hasn’t been growing since ‘Finding Nemo,’ ” Mr. Price said, speaking of the domestic box office. “Certainly ‘Cars’ and ‘Ratatouille’ were not as strong as the predecessor films.” (Even “The Incredibles,” the best performer since “Finding Nemo,” trailed it in the United States.) “If that trend were to continue with ‘Wall-E,’ there would be questions raised about the soundness of the deal. Though of course there’s always money to be made in merchandising.” The “Wall-E” robots, sheets and Crocs may turn a profit, but the alpha success still has to be the film about a mute robot.

But Mr. Stanton is measuring the film’s success in different terms.

“I’m not naïve about what’s at stake,” he said. “But I almost feel like it’s an obligation to not further the status quo if you become somebody with influence and exposure. I don’t want to paint the same painting again. I don’t want to make the same sculpture again. Why shouldn’t a big movie studio be able to make those small independent kinds of pictures? Why not change it up?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/movies/22onst.html





Could YouTube Become Hub for Feature Films and TV Shows?
Greg Sandoval

For a long time, I've said that YouTube could become the Web's supreme ruler of short-form and long-form video should it ever offer feature films and TV shows.

The Web's top video-sharing site now appears to be preparing to make such a move. YouTube has begun experimenting with delivering longer videos than the typical 10-minute clips allowed on the site, Fortune magazine reported Wednesday. On YouTube now are several full-length documentaries and TV shows. (See one of those videos, Howard Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman, embedded below.)

The question is whether Google is making the move too late.

Long-form content would mark the latest attempt to help Google cash in on YouTube's massive audience. Two years after acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion, Google still hasn't figured out a way to profit from the site, CEO Eric Schmidt has said several times recently.

Google hasn't yet responded to my inquiries on the Fortune report.

While Schmidt has declined to detail why the company is struggling to squeeze profits from YouTube, some of the site's shortcomings as a money maker are obvious.

YouTube has become a massive video-hosting service, where people post clips of baby's first steps, a sleeping puppy, or the family picnic. Most don't attract mass audiences. Nevertheless, Google still has to pay the bandwidth costs.

Each minute, more than 10 hours of video are posted to YouTube, which "is now the majority of outbound bandwidth" for Google, Schmidt said last week in an interview with The New Yorker. "We had to retool the network."

Bandwidth costs are likely less of a worry than the advertising issues. If YouTube hasn't become a cash cow after three years as the Web's top supplier of short-form, homemade clips, perhaps its time to conclude advertisers just don't like user-generated content--or at least they don't like it enough.

Greg Sterling, an advertising and marketing analyst, said studies have shown that ad agencies remain wary of putting their brands next to user-generated content. "They don't like not knowing what they're getting," he said.

But Sterling doesn't see how offering long-form content can help YouTube. In addition dealing with advertisers who are squeamish about user-generated content, YouTube must also figure out how to advertise to an audience--regardless of the length of the video--that resents advertising on the Web.

Google has yet to discover an vehicle that can get ads in front of viewers well enough to please advertisers but not alienate viewers.

The Hulu factor, and Mark Cuban weighs in

Another challenge is that YouTube's move toward long-form video comes after many of the big content suppliers have already found other Web outlets for their material. For instance, Disney last week began showing full-length movies online, beginning with Finding Nemo.

The best example of these attempts maybe Hulu, the video portal created by NBC Universal and News Corp. The site offers popular TV shows from both founding companies as well as shows owned by other media firms, including Viacom. Critics have praised the site for delivering high-quality video and for enabling users to embed Hulu videos on other sites.

Hulu has other advantages, such as owning the rights to show all the video it offers, Mark Cuban wrote on his blog Tuesday. Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks and the cable channel HDNet, is one of YouTube's biggest critics.

He wrote that Hulu is crushing YouTube in revenue per video and revenue per user primarily because "Hulu has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site," Cuban wrote. "It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy."

YouTube doesn't have the same luxury because it can advertise only "on the small percentage of videos on its site that it has a licensing deal with" Cuban wrote.

In an e-mail on Wednesday, Cuban was also skeptical that providing long-form content could help YouTube.

"By the letter of the law, YouTube is a hosting service," Cuban said in an e-mail. "They aren't allowed to know what the content of the user uploaded videos they host are. It could be a hard core porn or the daredevil stunt-man movie that is 95-minutes long. Hulu knows exactly what they stream...I think long or short form, Hulu is a better platform to make money from."

On YouTube is copyright content that the company can't sell ads against or else risk losing its protection from lawsuits under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects hosting sites and ISPs from being held responsible for illegal acts committed by users.

That brings us to whether YouTube can acquire the rights from networks and studios that have long accused the company of failing to protect copyright.

This is where I think there will be little problem for YouTube. While it has been criticized for dragging its feet on providing filters that protect against piracy, it can provide content creators an audience of 71 million unique users worldwide every month.

If YouTube can deliver movies and TV shows in high quality, entertainment industry executives are going to want to be in front of YouTube's audience.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-99...?tag=nefd.lede





Broadcasters Want HD Digital Power Boost
FMQB

HD Radio stations are authorized by the FCC to broadcast with the power equivalent to 1 percent of a station’s analog power in order to make sure they don't interfere with analog signals. However, a group of 18 broadcasters and four radio equipment manufacturers have filed a joint request with the FCC, asking it to revise the specifications and allow HD Radio broadcasting at 10 percent of analog power. The group says the HD signals don’t go as far and have a hard time penetrating buildings, and the original standards for digital broadcasting were set at a "very conservative level" because little testing had been done at the time.

"As HD Radio technology moves further toward the mainstream, it's crucial that we continue to add new features and enhance the technology's basic capabilities," said Bob Struble, President/CEO of HD Radio developer iBiquity Digital. "Working with the broadcast industry and equipment makers, iBiquity Digital has completed extensive testing on higher-power FM HD Radio broadcasts, and the results are clear. Increasing from 1 percent to 10 percent of analog broadcast power greatly improves digital performance without meaningfully increasing interference."

One test that was conducted by CBS Radio, Clear Channel Radio, Greater Media and iBiquity found that an increase in digital FM power of up to 10 dB would significantly improve FM digital performance with "virtually no risk of adversely affecting analog compatibility."

The test program looked at Class B FM stations in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York as well as Class A stations in New Jersey, and found that the higher power level significantly increased the digital coverage area of the test stations, according to the FCC filing. For building penetration, the test program measured KROQ/Los Angeles at both authorized and elevated power levels at 10 separate locations. With the power increase, the study found building penetration equal to or better than analog performance.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=749780





Blu-ray Subjected To Japanese Copy Levy
Steve McClure

The Japanese government has added Blu-ray Discs and Blu-ray Disc recorders to the list of products subject to private-copying levies.

But copyright groups such as JASRAC and the RIAJ have expressed concern over the future of the copying-levy system, which has recently come under scrutiny due to proposals for a so-called "iPod tax."

Industry observers suggest a showdown is looming between electronics makers and copyright groups over this issue.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/conte...385b9d9c534d7d





Xbox 360 Hack Lets Owners Play Netflix Movies
Greg Sandoval

People aren't waiting for Microsoft to announce a deal with Netflix.

Someone has already figured out how to hack the Xbox 360 video game console and enable it to play Netflix streaming movies.

At Lifehacker.com, Adam Pash writes that all anyone needs is an Xbox 360, a Windows Vista PC, a Netflix account, and a free Windows Media Center plug-in called vmcNetflix.

Here is some of what Pash says an Xbox 360 owner can do following the hack: stream Watch Now movies directly to the Media Center player; download Watch Now movies to a "Watch Later" gallery; search for movies by keyword; browse DVDs; Watch Now movies by genre; and add, remove, and move movies in your queue.

Of course, this is more functionality than the $100 Netflix Box offers. Roku has received favorable reviews for streaming movies from the Web to television sets without long delays and at a reasonable price.

Soon, a hack may be unnecessary. Rumors are that Microsoft will announce this year that it has cut a deal to deliver Netlix's Watch Now service on the Xbox.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9977171-7.html





Hidden Sex Scenes Draw Ho-Hum, Except From Lawyers
Jonathan D. Glater

Lawyers who sued the makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas profess to be shocked, simply shocked, that few people who bought the game were offended by sex scenes buried in its software.

Any buyer upset about hidden sex in the violent game could file a claim under a settlement the lawyers struck with the game’s makers, Rockstar Games and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive. Of the millions of people who bought the San Andreas version after its release in 2004, exactly 2,676 filed claims.

“Am I disappointed? Sure,” said Seth R. Lesser, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. “We can’t guess as to why now, several years later, people care or don’t care. The merits of the case were clear.”

Far bigger than the payout to plaintiffs will be the fees sought by the lawyers who brought the class action. Mr. Lesser and his colleagues at 10 other law firms have asked for more than $1.3 million — compared with less than $30,000 that Take-Two Interactive’s lawyers say it will spend to resolve the claims for $5 to $35 each (and, sometimes, a sanitized copy of the game).

“It doesn’t typically go that way,” said Mary J. Davis, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who has studied this type of litigation. To have legal fees dwarf a settlement payout, she continued, “is sort of backwards.”

The company and the plaintiffs lawyers both point out that the company has also agreed to make an $860,000 charitable contribution.

But the legal fees have drawn an objection, from a gameplayer who just happens to be a lawyer as well. Seeking to scuttle the deal is Theodore H. Frank, who directs the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes about class actions, liability and other topics.

“There are two possibilities,” Mr. Frank said of the settlement. “Possibility one is they have a meritorious lawsuit and they’re selling out the class for attorneys’ fees. The other possibility is that, and frankly I think this is the more likely possibility, they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all.”

The case could still go to trial if the settlement is not approved by a federal judge. A hearing is scheduled before Judge Shirley Wohl Kram of Federal District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday. But judges do not lightly set aside settlement agreements, which after all are intended to avoid costly litigation, Ms. Davis said. In reviewing such agreements, judges are supposed to ensure that the terms are reasonable, she explained, but they are not to substitute their views for those of the parties to the suit.

In documents filed on Friday, Mr. Lesser and other lawyers who brought the case argued that Mr. Frank was barred from attacking the settlement. They wrote that because Mr. Frank had said he was not offended by the scenes, he could not have a stake in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers said that Take-Two would make a charitable donation to the video game industry’s ratings board under the settlement and argued that there was no way to know beforehand that so few people would apply for compensation under the settlement.

Besides, the lawyers argue, if the lawsuit had no merit, should that not make the settlement that much more impressive?

The civil lawsuit was filed after the disclosure of the sex scenes, accessible only to knowledgeable players using third-party software, sparked fulminations in Congress and great excitement online. The suit charged the company with defrauding buyers by failing to disclose the sex scenes.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board reclassified the game in 2005 for “adults only,” a designation that means the game should be played only by people 18 and older. The game’s rating led some big retailers to stop carrying it. The game had initially been rated for “mature” audiences, meaning people 17 and older.

Take-Two Interactive also settled a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission and released a version without the hidden scenes that then carried the mature rating. In court documents, a company executive said that the sex scenes were unfinished and had been edited out of the game before it was completed; they could not be seen during ordinary play but could be accessed using third-party software or hardware.

“The game was sold as something that it wasn’t,” said Mr. Lesser, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, adding that people did not want to be surprised by sexual content in video games, regardless of whether that content is difficult to view. Not surprisingly, he dismissed Mr. Frank’s criticism and said the lawsuit was justified.

“The merits of the case were clear,” Mr. Lesser said. “Otherwise it would’ve been settled a long time ago.”

Jeffrey S. Jacobson, whose firm of Debevoise & Plimpton represents Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive, was careful in his comments about the case. After all, the deal allows the company to end litigation that might otherwise cost many millions of dollars.

“The defendants always contended that this was a lawsuit that lacked merit,” Mr. Jacobson said. “We certainly wish the case had never been brought and we certainly wish we could’ve litigated it on the merits and achieved a victory,” he continued, but resolving the case this way was much less expensive.

If the case goes to trial, some interesting questions may arise about how and whether game buyers were deceived. While adults who bought the game for children said they were upset over the sex scenes that they did not know about (and had not seen), interviews conducted by lawyers showed the adults also did not know basic characteristics of the game.

For example, Brenda Stanhouse, who bought the game for her son, 15 years old at the time, said in a deposition that she did not know that a player in the game could “stomp to death innocent pedestrians.”

She also did not know that the game included prostitutes, that players could kill policemen or that “a player in the game can kill innocent pedestrians and steal money from them.”

“I’m aware that there is killing in the game,” Ms. Stanhouse said in the deposition. “I wasn’t aware of the stealing.”

Ms. Stanhouse was asked whether she would knowingly buy for her son a game that allowed him to kill police officers.

“Well, I think he does have games with violence,” Ms. Stanhouse said, adding that she would “possibly” buy such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

The exchange raises a deeper and perhaps more troubling question about the harm caused by the hidden scenes. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit clearly were more concerned about exposing their children to images of sex, but academic studies suggest that images of violence — abundant in the games — should be of greater concern.

“For some reason sex is seen as more harmful to kids than violence,” said Craig A. Anderson, distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University, who since the mid-1980s has studied the effects of playing video games on children, adolescents and college students.

“The irony is that in terms of the research literature on harmful effects of various forms of media, television, movies, video games, the research is very, very clear,” Professor Anderson said. “There are significant short-term and long-term effects of violent content.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/te.../25settle.html





Grand Theft Morals

Slossberg targets violent video games.
By the New Haven Nose

Gayle Slossberg has a problem: She wants confirmation of the rumored rape scene in Grand Theft Auto IV—but she can't reach that level of the game. The Milford, Connecticut state senator's never played GTA, but she fears it's corrupting the youth and thinks a law requiring better warning labels might be the fix. She told the Nose as much at a Capitol press conference last week.

Rewarding players who carjack and cop-kill is bad enough, but points for rape is beyond the pale. Or would be, if it were true. Nothing's certain (the Nose couldn't reach the alleged rape scene either) but four out of five gamer geeks in the blogosphere appear to agree: There is no rape scene. It's all the stuff of rumors.

Slossberg hints she'll nonetheless introduce legislation next session calling for clearer labeling of depraved video games like Grand Theft Auto. In doing so, she'll join fellow pols Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton who have pushed video game restrictions on the federal level. Still, Slossberg's a bit unsure of how the warning labels might read: "I mean what would it say? 'This game will make you a sociopath'?" Perhaps....
http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=8476





California Pols Ask ISPs to Block Child Porn
Marguerite Reardon

California's governor and attorney general are asking Internet service providers to help stop the dissemination of child pornography.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. issued a press release Friday asking Internet service providers in California to follow the lead of Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint in "removing child pornography from existing servers and blocking channels" that disseminate the illegal material.

"Protecting the safety of our children must be a top priority, not just for government, but also for businesses with the direct power to reduce the ability to conduct illegal activity," they said in a joint letter to the California Internet Service Provider Association.

Earlier this month, Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint announced an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers of existing child pornography and eliminate access to user groups that distribute child pornography.

Schwarzenegger and Brown said in their letter that it's important that ISPs in California take action that is similar to the steps Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint have agreed to in New York. The Internet Service Provider Association is the largest association of Internet service providers in the country, representing more than 100 ISPs. These providers include small ISPs, as well as big ones such as AT&T and AOL.

"It is not enough for only a few Internet service providers to join the fight against online predators," the letter said. "Child pornography is not protected by the First Amendment, and distributing this material is illegal."

While no one disagrees that distributing child pornography is illegal, some civil liberty experts worry that the way in which ISPs will block access to it could limit free speech for people discussing and distributing perfectly legal content.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint have said they have no plans to actually block access to any Web sites. Instead, they plan to purge or erase any child pornography that has been cached in their servers. They also plan to limit or block access to some of their own Usenet or news groups, which can be used to disseminate this material.

For example, Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

My colleague Declan McCullagh points out in a story he wrote following the New York announcement that this tactic will most likely silence thousands of legitimate user groups that use the alt.* hierarchy for Usenet discussions.

It's not surprising that the American Civil Liberties Union is opposed to this action. Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, told CNET News.com in McCullagh's earlier article that service providers shouldn't be blocking wholesale sections of the Internet, including Usenet groups, because it could eliminate legitimate discussions. "That's taking a sledgehammer to an ant," he was quoted as saying.

Indeed, this could turn out to be a big issue as California's politicians try to push for similar action among other Internet service providers. Some large providers such as AOL stopped carrying Usenet, but AT&T still does.

AT&T said that it is already working to fight online child pornography. "AT&T has long-standing and established procedures for the removal of illegal child pornography from our servers, including servers that host newsgroups," said Marty Richter, a representative for AT&T. "Consistent with these procedures and federal and state statutes, when we receive a report of any illegal content being hosted on our servers and we have a good faith basis for concluding that the content is illegal, we will remove it."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9973966-7.html





'Mini Me' Sex Tape Peddled

The man who turned Paris Hilton into a sex tape star is now reportedly hoping to do the same for pint-sized funnyman Verne Troyer.

Footage from a sex video featuring the Austin Powers star and a former girlfriend has appeared online after a third party got hold of the tape, which was shot in the apartment Troyer shared with his ex.

Website TMZ.com, which has obtained an extract from the video, claims sex tape dealer Kevin Blatt, who brokered the deal for Hilton's One Night In Paris romp, is in negotiations to distribute the footage.
http://www.abcactionnews.com/news/lo...8-febc96667fa9





What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer
Matt Richtel

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values.

But the tactic is another example of the value of data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts, interests and desires of their users.

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added.

Mr. Walters last week also served Google with a subpoena seeking more specific search data, including the number of searches for certain sexual topics done by local residents. A Google spokesman said the company was reviewing the subpoena.

Mr. Walters is defending Clinton Raymond McCowen, who is facing charges that he created and distributed obscene material through a Web site based in Florida. The charges include racketeering and prostitution, but Mr. Walters said the prosecution’s case fundamentally relies on proving that the material on the site is obscene.

Such cases are a relative rarity this decade. In the last eight years, the Justice Department has brought roughly 15 obscenity cases that have not involved child pornography, compared with 75 during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, according to Jeffrey J. Douglas, chairman emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. (There have been hundreds involving child pornography.) Prosecutions at the state level have followed a similar arc.

The question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex — definitions that are based on “contemporary community standards.”

Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit magazines and movies available locally. A better barometer, Mr. Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics, because they show what people consume in private. But that information is hard to obtain.

“All you had to go on is what was available for public consumption, and that was a very crude tool,” Mr. Douglas said. “The prospect of having measurement of Internet traffic brings a more objective component than we’ve ever seen before.”

In a federal obscenity case heard this month, Mr. Douglas defended another Florida pornographer. In the trial, Mr. Douglas set up a computer in the courtroom and did Internet searches for sexually explicit terms to show the jury that there were millions of Web pages discussing such material. He then searched for other topics, like the University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, to demonstrate that there were not nearly as many related Web sites.

The jury was evidently not swayed, as his client was convicted on all counts.

The case Mr. Walters is defending takes the tactic to another level. Rather than showing broad availability of sex-related Web sites, he is trying to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place.

The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.

Mr. Walters chose Pensacola because it is the only city in the court’s jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service’s data.

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

The Google service does, however, show the relative strength of many mainstream queries in Pensacola: “Nascar,” “surfing” and “Nintendo” all beat “orgy.”

Chris Hansen, a staff lawyer for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the tactic clever and novel, but said it underscored the power of the Internet to reveal personal preferences — something that raises concerns about the collection of personal information.

“That’s why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data,” he said.

One question is whether the judge in the case will admit the data as evidence; it was given only in a deposition this month. Mr. Walters said he was confident the information would be allowable given that there has been a growing reliance on such data.

Russ Edgar, the Florida state prosecutor, said he was still assessing whether he would try to block the search data’s use in court. He declined to discuss the case’s specifics, but said that the popularity of sex-related Web sites had no bearing on whether Mr. Edgar was in violation of community standards.

“How many times you do something doesn’t necessarily speak to standards and values,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/te...bscene.html?hp





Google Expands Its New York Footprint
Jennifer 8. Lee

Senator Charles E. Schumer spoke on Monday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Google in Chelsea Market in Manhattan. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, and Senator Charles E. Schumer joined hands on a large pair of scissors on Monday to cut the ribbon on Google’s new 50,000-square-foot offices in Chelsea Market, an expansion of their half-million square feet across the street on Eighth Avenue.

“We don’t have high-tech scissors?” Mr. Schumer asked, looking at the ribbon. “How about a laser?”

(Indeed, it seems as if companies could get a little creative, with something more than just ribbons, at openings. Ikea, for example, opts for log-cuttings — as it did with its new Brooklyn store recently).

Mr. Brin, whose formal title is co-founder and president of technology, joked that New York’s offices started out in 2000 from the Upper West Side apartment of Tim Armstrong, now president of North American sales and commerce.

Since then, it has expanded to 1,600 (and growing) employees in New York City, the largest Google outpost outside of its Silicon Valley headquarters. Google’s New York offices are at 111 Eighth Avenue, a stone’s throw away. Incidentally, 111 Eighth is the same building that houses Doubleclick, which made the merger between the two fairly easy, logistically.

Of Google’s staff in New York, more than a third are sales and marketing, more than a third are engineering and the remainder are in support staff (overhead).

About 300 people, essentially sales and marketing, will occupy the new offices on the second and fourth floors of Chelsea Market, a space that spans three buildings. There is an additional 25,000 square feet that has not yet been developed yet.

Whereas the conference rooms in the 111 Eighth Avenue building are named after places in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the conference rooms are named after places in New Jersey (Meadowlands, Hoboken, etc.) scribbled in a graffiti font. There is no cafeteria in Chelsea markets, but there are kitchens with snacks and lots of bottled water. They do bring packaged sandwiches and sushi (courtesy of Jimmy the Sushi Guy) over.

At the ribbon cutting at Chelsea Market, Google exhibited its trademark control-freakedness, with security guards wearing blue “Google Security” shirts policing the area, receptionists asking reporters and photographers to sign nondisclosure agreements, and making requests for no photos of white boards or computer screens.

Mr. Brin, when asked about Google’s foray into phones at the question-and-answer session, responded, “I’ve been playing with some prototypes.” He said it’s fun to program phones, and his latest application was one that was no so popular with the team because “you would throw the phone up in the air and it would measure the amount of time until you caught it.”

The theme of Google’s Chelsea offices is “urban parks” — so there is a lot of exposed brick, dirty windows (with signs saying they are left dirty on purpose), graffiti font, metal and AstroTurf-ish grass. Blackboards, complimenting white boards, allow Googlers to scribble and be creative to their hearts content (but no photos, please.)

Mostly important: During the tour of the offices, City Room asked the Google guide, do the Google Chelsea Market offices also have a Lego playground area?

“No Legos,” he said. “We do have a slide, though.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20.../index.html?hp





Google's Cell Phone Plans Hit Delays, Journal Says

Mobile phones under development by Google Inc and its partners face slipping delivery schedules, with the first phones not likely to arrive until late 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Google had said eight months ago that the first phones to be built under the Android partnership umbrella would come out in the second half of 2008 and commitments from various handset makers and carriers appear to support this initial commitment.

Last November, Google introduced its highly anticipated Android software system for designing mobile phone devices, in a move it promised could help the cell phone industry make the Internet work as smoothly on phones as it does on computers.

The Wall Street Journal story said the first phones were unlikely to appear until the fourth quarter, making any impact on the global mobile phone market from Android-based phones unlikely to be felt until 2009 at the earliest.

Last month, Taiwanese handset maker High Tech Computer Corp said it was on track to launch the first Android cell phone by the end of 2008, ahead of rivals.

Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA expects to deliver an Android-powered phone in the fourth quarter, but Sprint Nextel Corp will not be able to, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Amid a down day of trading for many Internet stocks, shares of Internet leader Google edged up $2.62, or 0.5 percent, to $549.05 in Nasdaq trading on Monday.

"We remain on schedule to deliver the first Android-based handset in the second half of 2008," Google spokesman Barry Schnitt told Reuters.

"We're very excited to see the momentum continuing to build behind the Android platform among carriers, handset manufacturers, developers and consumers." Android counts more than 30 partners from across the mobile phone industry.

China Mobile, the world's largest wireless carrier with nearly 400 million accounts, likely will have its launch delayed until late 2008 or early 2009 due to Chinese translation problems, the Journal reported, citing sources.

Android has not won broad support from big mobile-software developers, and some said it is hard to develop programs while Google makes changes as it finishes its own software, the Journal reported.

Managing the software development while giving partners the opportunity to lobby for new features takes time, the Journal quoted Google's director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, as saying. He also told the Journal: "This is where the pain happens ... We are very, very close."

(Additional reporting by Robert MacMillan in New York; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Braden Reddall)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...e-android.html





Hi-Phone Anyone? Fake Mobiles Threaten China Brands
Zhou Xin

Steve Jobs may not lose sleep over knock-off iPhones, but legitimate Chinese brands such as Ningbo Bird are fretting about fakes in the cut-throat world of low-end handset makers.

China is the world's largest market for handsets, but domestic brands such as Ningbo Bird and Amoi are struggling amid intense price competition from local rivals, including some that specialize in knock-offs, having ceded their once dominant market position to foreign brands.

"A Nokia user would not be my client, but those who use Ningbo Bird handsets are very eager to try my products," said Fu Jiangang, who owns a website that sells pirated and unregistered mobile phones.

Fu is now thinking about upgrading his Hiphone, a blatant ripoff of Apple Inc's popular iPhone which comes at a fraction of the original's price.

From four small assembly plants owned by a partner located in the southern boom-town of Shenzhen, Fu sells hundreds of handsets a month and is targeting farmers, migrant workers and other low-income users to expand his sales network.

"You can't expect a farmer earning 10,000 yuan a year to spend 5,000 yuan on a new phone," said Fu. "But the farmer also wants phones that look fancy, can take pictures and play music."

His products are competing against Ningbo Bird and a host of other domestic manufacturers such as Konka and Lenovo in the bottom third of the market.

Ningbo Bird reported a loss of 34 million yuan ($4.94 million) for the first quarter, citing fierce competition in the local market, one that it once dominated just a few years ago.

Amoi, another domestic handset maker, reported losses of 121 million yuan also in the first quarter.

Nokia now leads the Chinese market, while five foreign makers commanded almost 70 percent of the domestic mobile market, according to research firm Analysis International.

Quality Counts

In Shenzhen alone, according to official data, there are more than 600 mobile phone producers and 3,000 component providers.

Zhu Xiang, who used to run a handset plant in Shenzhen but now acts as an agent bridging overseas buyers with local producers, said the price war is "bloody".

"In 2006, I made 100 yuan from a handset," Zhu said. "In 2007, 50 yuan, and now, less than 20 yuan."

The falling barriers to entry have attracted an army of small manufacturers willing to compete on razor-thin profit margins, including factories that once produced TV remote controls and MP3 players, Fu said.

China's statistics bureau said the average price of communication devices fell almost 20 percent in May compared with a year ago, while headline consumer inflation rose 7.7 percent.

"In the last two years, we have witnessed the rise of once unknown names like K-touch and the fall of premier brands like Ningbo Bird," said Jiang Lifeng, an analyst with Beijing-based CCID consulting.

Jiang said about 170 million handsets were sold in China last year, while an estimated 70 million were pirated or unregistered.

But the rapid rise of competitors is taking its toll.

Ren Qian, a manager with Ferex Electronics, another Shenzhen mobile phone manufacturer, said many firms were already in difficulties due to rising labor and production costs.

"The profit margin is shrinking, the cost is rising, and I see many firms are dying," said Ren.

(Editing by Kirby Chien and Miral Fahmy)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...33380420080623





T-Mobile Offers New Home Phone Service
Laura M. Holson

How is this for a twist: Wireless carrier T-Mobile wants to sell consumers phone service in their homes.

The company announced Wednesday that it will launch a Internet-based phone service called T-Mobile@Home later this month which it hopes will compete with landline and voice-over-Internet offerings from the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Vonage. The service will cost $10 per month, but customers must also have a T-Mobile cellphone plan (which typically start at $29.99 a month) and broadband Internet service (which typically costs $20 to $50 a month, depending on who the provider is).

The move is part of T-Mobile’s effort to extend its brand beyond wireless communications. Unlike AT&T or Verizon, which have roots as old-line phone companies, T-Mobile does not sell traditional phone service.

The offering also builds on the company’s innovative service launched a year ago that allowed its mobile phone customers to make unlimited calls over their home wireless Internet networks.

T-Mobile@Home transmits calls from the phone handset through a $50 T-Mobile router to the Internet, where voice-over-Internet-protocol technology is used to complete the call. Customers are allowed to keep their existing home phone number. At the same time, said Chief Executive Robert Dotson, they can get the same services they get from mobile phones, such as personalized ring tones.

The $10 price tag for unlimited calling is cheaper than what competitors like AT&T and Verizon, charge for wired or VOIP access. Vonage, which also sells telephone calling plans using VOIP technology, offers unlimited calling for $24.99.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ice/index.html





An Unlikely Promoter Drives Nokia’s Push in Hollywood
Laura M. Holson

Tero Ojanpera is an unlikely media entrepreneur. Mr. Ojanpera, a veteran Nokia executive, is not a fan of “American Idol,” although he says he enjoys it from time to time. And when he tried to watch a recent episode of “Hannah Montana,” one of his sons switched the channel.

But four years ago, Mr. Ojanpera and his colleagues in the research center had an epiphany: that entertainment was crucial to the future of Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone maker. Within a year, Mr. Ojanpera, who earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering, was cruising the palm-tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills, meeting with technology-wary studio executives who greeted him as coolly as a producer pitching a sequel to “Ishtar.”

“They were like, ‘Is this for real?’ ” Mr. Ojanpera (pronounced oy-an-pera) recently recalled.

Indeed, it was. While once formidable competitors like Motorola struggle just to deliver their phones on time, Nokia wants to transform itself into a next-generation entertainment company. Last August, Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, created Ovi, an Internet service and online music store. Its intent, analysts say, is to compete directly against Apple.

Nokia is also positioning itself as a promoter of social networking, with photo and video sharing and games for users of its cellphones. That is because Nokia predicts that in the next five years, mobile phone users will create 25 percent of the entertainment watched on so-called smartphones, like the iPhone and BlackBerries. And just as important to the company’s strategy is users who will share that entertainment.

Music will be important, too. Nokia joined with Sony BMG and the Universal Music Group, which have agreed to give consumers a year’s worth of free downloads they can keep indefinitely as long as they buy and use specific Nokia models.

And to overcome Apple’s formidable lead in delivering digital entertainment to handheld devices, Mr. Ojanpera wants to bridge the gap between musicians and filmmakers and their fans, allowing consumers to get exclusive concert video and recordings or collaborate directly with artists like the director Spike Lee, whom Nokia hired recently to oversee a mobile video sharing and social networking project.

This is unfamiliar territory for Nokia, which got its start in the mid-1800s as a paper maker. But as Mr. Ojanpera explained, companies like his have no choice. “Change is painful, but you have to figure this out in order to be successful,” said Mr. Ojanpera, who is based in White Plains. “The question is, are you willing to play by the new rules?”

The task of negotiating with self-important media moguls, though, is likely to be as tricky for Mr. Ojanpera as it was for Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, who met resistance from entertainment companies and wireless carriers unwilling to give up a measure of control.

Mr. Ojanpera is deliberate in conversation, weighing his words carefully, and he lacks the outsized personality of Mr. Jobs. In a recent interview he was reluctant to take much credit — “It is not the Finnish way,” he said — or draw attention to his fast rise up Nokia’s corporate ranks. But those who have worked with him suggest his skill is finding the middle ground in any negotiation. When jostling with the Universal Music Group to offer its catalog on Nokia phones, Mr. Ojanpera agreed to support a plan that would make it easy for musicians to get their concert videos onto mobile phones.

“Neither of us felt we had to get the better of each other,” said Lucian Grainge, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music Group International.

While Mr. Ojanpera may lack Mr. Jobs’s charisma, he more than makes up for it with Nokia’s global might. Nokia sells 14 mobile phones a second — tallying worldwide market share of 39 percent. That reach gives entertainment executives an enticing international platform over which to digitally distribute movies and music. The company got a head start outside the United States, where its N series of multimedia smartphones is popular. The Nokia N96, which is expected to make its debut in the United States this year, is made specifically for video and television, with high-power stereo speakers and a five-megapixel camera.

“When Nokia puts their weight behind something, they don’t need to be the first,” said Pekka Koponen, a former Nokia executive. “They can dominate the market Mr. Jobs creates for them.”

Another possible advantage for Nokia is that music companies welcome a challenger to Apple. They are wary of Apple’s growing power in digital music distribution; Apple is the top music retailer in the United States, outpacing the behemoth Wal-Mart in April.

Mr. Grainge, who negotiated the free download deal with Mr. Ojanpera, said: “To have another big global player in the mobile music business is good news. Everyone within Universal is doing what we can to make it work.”

Mr. Ojanpera was born in 1966, one of three boys, and he grew up in a small mining town in Finland. He got his first job at a Nokia research and development center where he studied radio frequencies. From his earliest days at Nokia he specialized in understanding high-speed mobile networks, the so-called third-generation, or 3G, networks that are quickly becoming the industry standard.

Before being named executive vice president for entertainment and communities in January — a job created specifically for him — Mr. Ojanpera held a number of senior management positions, including chief technology officer, chief strategy officer and head of the Nokia Research Center, where he and his colleagues studied consumer behavior and design.

But he does not perceive his lack of media experience as a hindrance. “This, to me, is about curiosity and the willingness to learn something new,” he said. “You can have really smart people, but things don’t necessarily change. The challenge is who can translate those ideas into practice.”

The future, he says, will look something like this. While consumers now can buy movie tickets, watch videos and listen to music on their phones, the process is disjointed, with no place for one-button shopping. Nokia wants to make it seamless. Want a concert ticket? Press “yes” on your keypad. Want to listen to a favorite song? Press “yes.” Watch a concert video? Buy a DVD? Read a review? Need a hotel room nearby? Post photographs to your Facebook page? Just press “yes.” “It will be that easy,” he said.

To make that happen, Mr. Ojanpera has sought the advice of artists and producers, among others, including the director Ridley Scott and David A. Stewart, half of the 1980s group the Eurythmics.

Mr. Ojanpera met Mr. Stewart more than a year ago at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and since then they have had monthly conversations, tutorials mostly, Mr. Stewart said, on how the music business works.

“We disagree on the speed of things. I’m trying to force it faster and he, quite wisely, understands he’s in a world where things exist in a certain way,” Mr. Stewart said. “Tero’s thinking is that he’s going to change the way things work and it’s going to be better. But it takes time.”

Executives are more receptive now when Mr. Ojanpera comes calling. “There is more interest,” he said. But he too is realistic. It’s not yet like the early days of the DVD explosion, when the heads of movie studios flew on their private planes to Bentonville, Ark., to woo Wal-Mart executives. But one day, maybe it will be.

“Once we start to see them make the trek to our headquarters in White Plains,” he said, “then I know things really have changed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/bu...a/23nokia.html





Bollywood Goes to Hollywood, Seeking Bargains
Heather Timmons

Hollywood loves to show outside investors just how the movie business really works. But some of the people behind Bollywood in India believe they have something to teach Hollywood about making movies.

Reliance Entertainment, part of an Indian conglomerate controlled by the telecommunications and finance mogul Anil Ambani, is in talks to finance Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in a new venture. The company has also recently signed production deals with several Hollywood directors like Jay Roach and Chris Columbus and stars like Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Jim Carrey.

Unlike other foreign investors who have stepped toward Hollywood — and taken some grief for their efforts — Reliance has deep experience in the film business. Mr. Ambani is a relative newcomer to the movie game, but his wife, Tina Munim, is a former Bollywood star.

Reliance Entertainment’s chairman, Amit Khanna, a Bollywood director and producer, and the company president, Rajesh Sawhney, a former newspaper group executive, have laid out ambitious plans that include creating a $10 billion entertainment company that would be one of the world’s largest. They envision nothing short of remaking Hollywood.

After several good years, entertainment companies in India are finding that they have plenty of money but not enough places to spend it.

“Although the Indian film industry is having one of its best runs ever as far as cash inflow is concerned, the fact is that the top-bracket talent is booked up for the next couple of years,” said Hetal Adesara, a founder of Business of Cinema, a Mumbai-based Web company that provides Bollywood news.

Companies like Reliance are looking to Hollywood to expand their portfolios and “create a new genre of crossover cinema” with talent from India and abroad, Ms. Adesara said.

Whether the company can change the inward-focused culture of the American movie business is an open question. Directors that have worked in both Hollywood and Bollywood say that the Indian emphasis on autonomy and innovation could have a strong impact on Hollywood.

“I have complete and total creative freedom to do what I’m doing,” said Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director of “Eklavya,” an Indian entry in the best foreign-language film category at this year’s Academy Awards. Mr. Chopra recently signed a two-movie deal with Reliance Entertainment for close to $100 million. (Mr. Chopra’s wife, Anupama Chopra, writes occasionally about film and Bollywood for the Arts section of The New York Times.)

“Could you think of a studio in the United States that would give me $100 million and give me creative freedom?” he asked. “Even if they wanted to, I don’t think they could. I don’t think the system would permit them to do it.”

For one of the Reliance projects, “Broken Horses,” an English-language film set in New Mexico, Mr. Chopra has written the script and is directing, and may even pick out the poster, he said. “This kind of thing is a director’s heaven,” he said.

But the flip side is that the recipient of this type of hands-off funding is expected to be more aware of risk than one might be with Hollywood studio money. “I’ll be far more responsible than I would with five suits telling me what to do,” he said.

Reliance Entertainment executives have promised to cut through the “bureaucracy” of Hollywood — in some ways a remarkable goal, coming from a country known for the bureaucracy of its government.

The fast-growing entertainment and media industries in India and other developing countries are attracting capital and building audiences in ways their Western counterparts have not. Revenue from India’s movie industry hit $2.2 billion in 2007, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, less than a 10th that of Hollywood. But Bollywood is expected to double in size by 2012, thanks to 13 percent annual growth, versus less than 3 percent in Hollywood.

“There are a lot of lessons emerging markets can teach the rest of the world,” said Rajesh Jain, head of media and entertainment for KPMG in India. Among his suggestions are how to use new platforms and how to lower costs.

Indian entertainment companies have embraced new channels of film distribution, like the Internet, more rapidly than their Western rivals. That’s in part because of the Indian diaspora — some 25 million people of Indian origin who live outside of India, many of whom are eager to see Bollywood films but cannot find them in the local theater.

Rajshri Group, owner of one of India’s oldest production houses, was the first to tap into those millions, with the premiere of its film “Vivah” in November 2006. Rajshri made a download of the film available at the same time it premiered in theaters in India. Thousands downloaded the film, each paying $9.99.

Rajshri now offers an online library of hundreds of Bollywood movies and Hindi songs through its own Web site, and other production companies have followed suit, although downloads bring in a tiny fraction of what big Bollywood films earn at the box office.

Still, at their roots, Hollywood and Bollywood are starkly different industries, starting with the economics. A Bollywood film costs a fraction of one from Hollywood: a small budget in India might be $200,000 to $1 million, and a big budget is $4 million or more. The largest-budget Bollywood films have barely touched the $20 million mark. As much as half of the production cost can go to fees for actors and directors.

So far, getting mainstream Hollywood stars into major roles in Bollywood movies has proved difficult. Sylvester Stallone agreed this month to appear in “Kambakkht Ishq,” a move seen in the Indian film industry as a big breakthrough. But Mr. Stallone will be making a brief appearance in the movie, playing himself, not acting in a major role. Denise Richards is being wooed for a small role in the film as well, according to Indian news reports.

The financing of Bollywood films has historically been a less-than-transparent business, with cash flowing in from organized crime and black markets. In recent years, though, public corporations have been drawn to the industry because of its rapid growth, and banks in India and beyond have been making loans.

“The industry is still in the process of going straight” as far as financing is concerned, Ms. Adesara said. She estimates that 50 to 60 percent of the money being pumped into the industry now is “legitimate,” adding that “it is going to take another couple of years for the industry to get fully transparent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/bu...reamworks.html





The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator
Charlie Sorrel

Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' projects stealth images into the photographs of strangers, while keeping those images invisible to human eyes. Depending on whom you ask, it's either a clever hack or an obnoxious intrusion. Naturally, we had to find out more.

Yesterday, von Bismarck's device made its premature debut on the internet. Today we met him in his hometown, Berlin, to talk about the device, the thinking behind it and the inevitable deluge of e-mails from viral marketers wanting use it to smash their way further into our brains.

But first, about that name: According to von Bismarck, 'Image Fulgurator' comes from the Latin for 'lightning' (fulgur) and means 'Flash Thrower'.

First, let us make clear that von Bismarck has applied for a patent for the Fulgurator. He stressed this point. Of course, anyone with the requisite skills can make one of their own, but Julius wants to keep some degree of control over commercial use.

To see why, consider how it works. The device is a modified camera -- in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface.

The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device's sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer's camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye.

Now, imagine for a moment that an ad agency gets hold of this. You couldn't take a photograph of a tourist attraction ever again without worrying that some marketing crap would be pushed into your camera. As Julius told me, "I see it as a piece of media art. It could be a dangerous attack on media. [But] if people do shit with it, I feel bad."

This is the reason for the patent, and although he doesn't have an army of lawyers behind him, Julius seems to be on top of the legal side of things. He's also moving fast. This Fulgurator is the first prototype, and the most primitive. "It works, but it's not practical," he says. "In a few years time, huge companies will use it for shit," but by then, Julius will be at the next stage. He already has more working models (which I wasn't allowed to see) which are refinements of this one.

At its simplest, the Fulgurator is a very easy hack. A hole has been cut in the back of the camera and a piece of clear, roughened acrylic put in its place. A rear tube allows the flashgun to slide in. Everything else remains intact. The slides themselves are just rolls of processed film (the pictures are snapped from Julius' computer monitor) returned to their canisters and then loaded up as if a normal film. Any image on the reel can be selected by turning the rewind crank. When you hold the Fulgurator up, you can see the subject on the acrylic screen and line it with the image on the slide. You can also focus, to ensure the final projection ends up sharp.

But the magic happens inside the flash sensor on the top. Ordinary slave flashes (which fire whenever they detect another flash going off) aren't reliable enough, so von Bismarck built his own circuitry. The original was based on the Arduino platform but has evolved into a custom-made circuit. The knobs were for tweaking the settings on the prototype, stuff which is all now taken care of by software.

Julius had ripped the guts out of the box for a newer version, so we couldn't see it in action, but we know what it does. Modern digicams flash for all kinds of reasons, such as red-eye reduction and focus assistance. What Julius' circuit does is to ignore all of these false strobes and fire only when the photo itself is taken. This is the secret sauce of the Fulgurator.

Clearly, this is a prankster's dream. But Julius thinks it has a serious side, too, which is why it looks like a gun. "It's important that people know it's not just a funny idea," he told me, "it can also do negative stuff."

It seems that the "negative stuff" consists mainly of pissing people off, like the aforementioned marketing uses. We're looking forward to seeing what the next gen hardware can do, though. Take a look at this picture:

The message is 'Fulgurated' onto a black laptop bag. Turning black to white is powerful stuff, but it's not just slogans that can be fired. Although Julius frames his nerdery in an artistic context (he's studying a German Diploma called "Digital Class" at UDK, Berlin's art school) he clearly has a soft spot for tomfoolery. In the image below, you see an image of a naked body which can be projected onto a clothed person.

The possibilities are endless, but Julius is just getting started. When I suggested that he put his own URL on the images, so victims could later check to see just what had happened to their pictures, he seemed surprised (later I learned that he does plan to include it later, to promote his own work). In fact, the whole thing has happened a little too quickly.

Yesterday's 'leak' onto the internet was intended as a place holder for an entry into Ars Electronica's Cyber Arts exhibition in September. Instead, it catapulted him into internet fame and he has already received high-priced offers for his work. If he manages to keep on top of things, this little hack could make him some big money.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/0...ive-inter.html





Oyster Hackers Roam London for Free
Matthew Sparkes

Researchers have hacked an Oyster card to get a day's free travel on the London Underground.

The Dutch researchers from Radboud University used a laptop and RFID reader to crack the algorithm used by the cards, enabling them to place credit back on it to get free access to the London Underground.

Speaking to PC Pro this morning a Transport for London spokesperson claimed that the vulnerability would not work for long because the credit balance is stored both on the Oyster card and on a central database.

"Security is the key aspect of the Oyster system and Londoners can have confidence in the security of their Oyster card and personal data," claims a

Transport for London spokesperson. We run daily tests for clones of fraudulent cards and any found would be stopped within 24 hours of being discovered. Therefore the most anyone could gain from a rogue card is one days travel."

However, the information held on the cards is only periodically synchronised to a central database, allowing the researchers a 24-hour period to use their card for free travel around the capital.

The software used by the group to achieve this will not be released, but details will be covered by a paper later this year.

The vulnerability could also theoretically affect much more than travel cards. The Oyster card system uses MIFARE chips from NXP Semiconductors, which are also used in keyless entry systems around the world. Half a billion of the RFID chips have been sold so far, along with five million readers.

"We are aware that the Dutch researchers have reverse engineered the algorithm and we are taking this issue very seriously," said a spokesperson from the company, speaking to the Times. "We've informed all of our system integrators and advised them to closely assess their systems. We're talking to the guys at Radboud University and have identified various counter measures."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/207966/o...-for-free.html





Technology Leaders Favor Online ID Card Over Passwords
Laurie J. Flynn

Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users.

The Information Card Foundation is an effort to create a single industrywide approach to managing identity online that promises to reduce drastically the use of passwords and create a system that is less vulnerable to fraud.

“There is such a market requirement to solve this problem,” said Paul Trevithick, chairman of the new group and chief executive of Parity, an identity-protection technology company in Needham, Mass., that is developing what it calls an i-card. The foundation, which also includes Equifax, Novell, Oracle and nine industry analysts and technology leaders, will try to set open standards for the technology industry.

The idea is to bring the concept of an identity card, like a driver’s license, to the online world. Rather than logging on to sites with user IDs and passwords, people will gain access to sites using a secure digital identity that is overseen by a third party. The user controls the information in a secure place and transmits only the data that is necessary to access a Web site.

In addition to simplifying online shopping, such information cards will reduce the number of phishing incidents — that is, the fraudulent use of someone’s identity to gain access to financial records, according to Robert Blakeley, a research director at the Burton Group, a consulting firm that is participating in the effort. “You don’t have to depend on a password, so there’s no phishing opportunity,” he said.

One of the biggest tasks facing the group is getting the millions of Web sites to support the new system, a process analysts estimate will take a few years.

“The technology is available today, but what is not available today is a lot of sites that will accept information cards,” Mr. Blakeley said. “The mission of the group is to assure everybody that the industry is working together and that it is not going to be a competitive battlefield.”

Michael B. Jones, Microsoft’s director of identity partnerships, said the information card system would depend on the support of Web site owners in the same way that early Web browsers like Netscape waited for the support of Web server developers. The technology will first be used on desktop systems but will eventually find its way to mobile phones and other hand-held devices, he said.

Microsoft has been working on the concept of an identity card for some time. The new organization will ensure various approaches adhere to the same standard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/te...gy/24card.html





One in Three IT Staff Snoops on Co-Workers
Georgina Prodhan

ONE in three information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details, personal emails or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey.

US information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 per cent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role.

"All you need is access to the right passwords or privileged accounts and you're privy to everything that's going on within your company," Mark Fullbrook, Cyber-Ark's UK director, said in a statement released along with the survey results on Thursday.

"For most people, administrative passwords are a seemingly innocuous tool used by the IT department to update or amend systems. To those 'in the know' they are the keys to the kingdom," he said.

Cyber-Ark said privileged passwords get changed far less frequently than user passwords, with 30 per cent being changed every quarter and 9 per cent never changed at all, meaning that IT staff who have left an organization could still gain access.

It added that seven out of 10 companies rely on outdated and insecure methods to exchange sensitive data, with 35 per cent choosing email and 35 per cent using couriers, while 4 per cent still relied on the postal system.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...11968220080619





Spying Bosses Sack Translators

Two translators have been fired by their employer in western Sweden after management at the firm secretly spied on the employees' private internet conversations.

Tomas Hedin,who worked for Structured Consulting Sweden AB from his home in Gothenburg, was relieved of his duties following an internet chat session with a woman also employed by the company.

Management at the firm had told employees that a piece of software sent to their work computers contained a program that would update their computers. In reality, however, the company has installed a tool manufactured by SpectorSoft to keep watch over the employees' computer habits.

"They may well have seen everything we've done on the computer: every chat, every website we're visited, Facebook and our bank details. These programs can even be used to activate the web camera and the microphone. It all feels a bit like East Germany," Hedin told newspaper Göteborgs-Posten.

Shortly after one of their chat sessions, Hedin's colleague was told her services were no longer required. She was accused of trying to find ways to cheat her employer following a theoretical discussion she had with Hedin. She had also complained about her bosses.

A few days later, the company's husband and wife management team, Martin and Diana Carlsson, turned up at Hedin's home in Gothenburg.

"They had read more of the chat over the weekend and quoted some very private sections we had written to each other. It wasn't much fun," said Hedin.

The couple did not leave Hedin's home until they had reclaimed the company computer and convinced him to sign a dismissal agreement.

The company did eventually agreed to withdraw its dismissal of Hedin however following negotiations with his trade union. This enabled him to instead resign and continue receiving a salary for the duration of his notice period.

Hedin's colleague has not yet had her dismissal reviewed.

Prosecutors, police and the Data Inspection Board have differing opinions as to the legality of the surveillance of employees.

According to prosecutor Håkan Roswall the company was within its rights to install spyware on its own computers.

"As long as you own the computer you have the right to install spyware that keeps track of everything from bank transactions to web cameras," he told Göteborgs-Posten.

But Mats Björklund, a legal expert from the Data Inspection Board, countered that data protection laws made it illegal for employers to monitor workers without the staff's consent.

"Obviously one is not authorized to secretly send spyware to people," he said.
http://www.thelocal.se/12602/20080623/





What Privacy Policy?
Andy Greenberg

Want to know how well a company protects its customers' data? Don't talk to its security and compliance officers. Instead, try its marketing department.

A study released Monday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute and funded by e-mail marketing firm Strongmail reveals a disturbing disconnect in companies between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.

In response to a survey answered by 500 privacy and 900 marketing executives in industries ranging from health care to financial services, more than a third of marketing execs said they don't place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.

More specifically, 80% of marketers said their organizations share e-mail addresses with third parties, compared with 47% of security and privacy officers. Other examples: 65% of marketers said they would distribute a customer's cellphone number, while 47% of privacy execs believe their companies banned the practice. Forty-five percent of marketers believe their companies shared credit card data, compared with 32% of privacy officers, and 29% of marketers believe their firms distribute social security numbers, compared with 7% of privacy professionals.

That disconnect may be one source of the annoying spam that plagues inboxes. Just 44% of marketers surveyed believe their organizations were in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act, a law that requires marketers to request permission to send email messages, disclose the messages' source and offer an opt-out function. Forty percent of marketing execs who responded weren't sure whether their companies followed the law.

In recent years, passing on sensitive data points like e-mail addresses and credit card codes to marketing partners has also been a frequent source of corporate data breaches--about 40% of all breach incidents were a result of a third party's handling of data, according to another Ponemon study, released in November 2007.

Last week, for instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission handed down a ruling against NEXT Financial Group, fining the company $125,000 for sharing customer data with brokers it hoped to recruit as clients. Last November, e-mail solicitation company Convio was breached by hackers, revealing personal information of donors to nearly 100 charities that used the service. And in 2005, data broker Choicepoint sold more than 145,000 individuals' personal data to Nigerian scammers it believed were legitimate marketers.

In another ongoing case, Ponemon founder Larry Ponemon says he is consulting with a major financial institution currently being investigated by several states' attorneys general in a major data breach attributed to an e-mail marketing partner. The company, Ponemon says, gave data from six million customer accounts to a marketing firm in Southeast Asia, where it was eventually posted to a Central Asian site dealing in black-market credit card numbers.

To be sure, the marketers who responded to Ponemon's study aren't necessarily violating their companies' own internal policies. Because of the study's low response rate--around 5%--no two conflicting responses necessarily come from any one company. But the numbers point to a general gap in perception between the two sets of employees, Larry Ponemon argues.

"The fact is, marketers are much more aggressive users of information than their privacy-focused colleagues believe," says Ponemon. "Privacy and compliance people tend to think they're more important than marketing people think they are."

Ponemon notes that despite their differences, the two groups tend to agree about the privacy value of another kind of information: their own. Ninety-three percent of marketers and 99% of privacy officers surveyed said their own privacy was "an important personal issue."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...23privacy.html





Dodd And Feingold Will Filibuster Telecom Immunity

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) released the following statement today in response to the announcement that the Senate this week will consider the compromise legislation that would reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA):

This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called 'compromise' legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President's warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

"If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response will be to offer an amendment that strips the retroactive immunity provision out of the bill. We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans' civil liberties by opposing retroactive immunity and rejecting this so-called 'compromise' legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) says he will support Dodd and Feingold:

"Unfortunately, the FISA compromise bill establishes a process where the likely outcome is immunity to the telecommunications carriers who participated in the President's warrantless wiretapping program. Sen. Reid remains opposed to retroactive immunity, which undermines efforts to hold the Bush Administration accountable for violating the law. Thus, he will cosponsor the amendment offered by Senators Dodd and Feingold to strip out the immunity provision, and support their efforts to strip immunity on the floor. "

Read more about Feingold's efforts to get Democrats to stand up for civil liberties here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/0..._n_108963.html





We May Have Just Gotten The FISA Debate Extended
dday

(the operative word here is "may". It's entirely possible that the Senate could finish all of the bills they want to push out by Friday.)

Anyone watching C-SPAN? Senator Reid just informed his colleagues that, because of all the other bills in the queue (like the housing bill, and the Iraq supplemental), FISA may not get a vote until after the July 4 holiday recess.

This is honestly the best we can hope for with this bill. Sens. Dodd, Wyden and Feingold are ready to filibuster and gamely trying to get colleagues to do the same (Sen. Dodd's speech tonight was a bravura performance), but realistically there aren't the numbers to stop cloture. However, that could change if the delay continues. And getting this to the recess means being able to get in a lot of Senator's faces on their trips back home. In addition, there's going to be a very short window in August where a ton of must-pass bills have to get through Congress, and throwing FISA in with that mess means that anything can happen.
dday's diary :: ::

Now, after that bleak bit of hopefulness: I'm sad to report that it's only because the Senate REALLY REALLY wants to pump billions into endless war in Iraq that we have a shot to delay the deletion of the Fourth Amendment. Quite a Hobson's choice. This is more an acknowledgment from Sen. Reid that he finds the housing bill and the Iraq supplemental (which includes unemployment benefits extension and the GI Bill) to be more important than FISA, and so he's going to prioritize. I don't think it means anything more than that. Overall, the fix is still in. All we can do is keep trying to delay. Money is flowing to those who flipped on telecom immunity in the House. For the phone companies, it's a small price to pay - while liability wouldn't bankrupt them, it'd be a bigger hit than the pennies they're spending to bribe legislators.

And the truth is that the federal government, on a bipartisan basis, is largely indifferent to their constituent's privacy. Since 9-11 the situation has gotten far worse, but the surveillance state has been building for decades.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* No right to privacy in constitution, though search and seizure protections exist in 4th Amendment; case law on government searches has considered new technology * No comprehensive privacy law, many sectoral laws; though tort of privacy * FTC continues to give inadequate attention to privacy issues, though issued self-regulating privacy guidelines on advertising in 2007 * State-level data breach legislation has proven to be useful in identifying faults in security * REAL-ID and biometric identification programs continue to spread without adequate oversight, research, and funding structures * Extensive data-sharing programs across federal government and with private sector * Spreading use of CCTV * The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Congress approved presidential program of spying on foreign communications over U.S. networks, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, etc.; and now considering immunity for telephone companies, while government claims secrecy, thus barring any legal action * No data retention law as yet, but equally no data protection law * World leading in border surveillance, mandating trans-border data flows * Weak protections of financial and medical privacy; plans spread for ‘rings of steel’ around cities to monitor movements of individuals * Democratic safeguards tend to be strong but new Congress and political dynamics show that immigration and terrorism continue to leave politicians scared and without principle * Lack of action on data breach legislation on the federal level while REAL-ID is still compelled upon states has shown that states can make informed decisions * Recent news regarding FBI biometric database raises particular concerns as this could lead to the largest database of biometrics around the world that is not protected by strong privacy law

So go ahead and make calls to your Senators, and they'll be tracked (by more people than you think), but we have a ruling class that has invaded your privacy more and more over the years. All for your protection, of course. The daddies in Washington want you to know they have an eye on the bad guys for you. Problem is, they think you are the bad guy.

This isn't likely to be stopped until those of us committed to civil liberties can make our political power manifest. Here's a way to work on that:

https://secure.actblue.com/contribut...ode=therometer

From the standpoint on what we can do to stop this right now, the only hope is to delay, delay, delay. Keep the calls coming and we'll see what happens.
http://dday.dailykos.com/storyonly/2...176/554/541517





Senate Delays Vote on Surveillance Bill
Pamela Hess

The Senate on Thursday put off voting on controversial electronic surveillance legislation, in spite of what appeared to be overwhelming support for the bill.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and more than a dozen other senators who oppose telecom immunity threw up procedural delays that threatened to force the Senate into a midnight or weekend session. The prospect of further delays was enough to cause Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to postpone the vote until after the weeklong July 4 vacation.

The bill provides legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government wiretap American phone and computer lines without court permission after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

It also makes it easier for the government to tap the calls and e-mails of terrorists. Its detractors contend that it does not protect Americans' privacy rights while its champions argue that it strikes the right balance between civil liberties and security. The bill passed the House with a strong majority last week.

Feingold and other critics of the legislation say civil lawsuits are the only way the country will learn the extent of the Bush administration's nearly six years of warrantless wiretapping. The surveillance took place without the permission or knowledge of the secret court Congress created 30 years ago to handle such activities.

"I hope that over the July 4th holiday, senators will take a closer look at this deeply flawed legislation and understand how it threatens the civil liberties of the American people," Feingold said in a statement. "It is possible to defend this country from terrorists while also protecting the rights and freedoms that define our nation."

The bill amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act represents a compromise. In exchange for telecom immunity, the inspectors general of the Pentagon, Justice Department and intelligence agencies will investigate the wiretapping program.

The attorney general and national intelligence director on Thursday said President Bush would veto the bill if the immunity provisions were stripped from it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062603317.html





Scientist Is Paid Millions by U.S. in Anthrax Suit
Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau

The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001.

The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall.

Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television.

In a news conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation.

Dr. Hatfill’s lawsuit, filed in 2003, accused F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials involved in the criminal investigation of the anthrax mailings of leaking information about him to the news media in violation of the Privacy Act. In order to prove their case, his lawyers took depositions from key F.B.I. investigators, senior officials and a number of reporters who had covered the investigation.

Mark Grannis, a lawyer for Dr. Hatfill, said his client was pleased with the settlement.

“The good news is that we still live in a country where a guy who’s been horribly abused can go to a judge and say ‘I need your help,’ and maybe it takes a while, but he gets justice,” Mr. Grannis said.

The settlement, Mr. Grannis said, “means that Steven Hatfill is finally an ex-person of interest.”

In a written statement, Mr. Grannis and Dr. Hatfill’s other lawyers said, “We can only hope that the individuals and institutions involved are sufficiently chastened by this episode to deter similar destruction of private citizens in the future — and that we will all read anonymously sourced news reports with a great deal more skepticism.”

The lawyers will take their fee out of the settlement, which will pay out $5.8 million over 20 years. The $4.6 million figure is the cost of the annuity to the government.

The settlement called new attention to the fact that nearly seven years after the toxic letters were mailed, killing five people and sickening at least 17 others, the case has not been solved.

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a statement that the government admitted no liability but decided settlement was “in the best interest of the United States.”

“The government remains resolute in its investigation into the anthrax attacks, which killed five individuals and sickened others after lethal anthrax powder was sent through the United States mail,” Mr. Roehrkasse said.

An F.B.I. spokesman, Jason Pack, said the anthrax investigation “is one of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted by law enforcement” and is currently being pursued by more than 20 agents of the F.B.I. and the Postal Inspection Service.

“Solving this case is a top priority for the F.B.I. and for the family members of the victims who were killed,” Mr. Pack said.

But Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat whose district was the site of a postal box believed to have been used in the attacks, said he would press Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., for more answers about the status of the case.

“As today’s settlement announcement confirms, this case was botched from the very beginning,” Mr. Holt said. “The F.B.I. did a poor job of collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous theory of the case that has led to this very expensive dead end.”

Dr. Hatfill subpoenaed Washington journalists to try to learn which federal officials had spoken to the news media about the case against him in possible violation of federal privacy laws.

Toni Locy, a former legal affairs reporter for USA Today who wrote several articles about the case, was held in contempt of court, facing fines of up to $5,000 a day from Judge Reggie Walton over her refusal to name her sources, and her case is pending before an appeals court. Ms. Locy said Friday that she was relieved by the developments but that it was too soon to celebrate.

“I hope this means that this ordeal is over and that I can get on with my life,” said Ms. Locy, who will begin teaching legal reporting at Washington and Lee University in the fall.

She said Dr. Hatfill’s lawyers said they no longer needed her testimony, though she had not been told whether the contempt order against her had been lifted.

The outcome differed significantly from the settlement of a similar case involving Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear scientist once suspected of espionage. In that case, five news organizations joined the government’s settlement, agreeing to pay a total of $750,000 to prevent their reporters from having to testify about their sources.

Ms. Locy said that a federal mediator had tried to get Gannett, which owns USA Today, to negotiate some type of settlement with Dr. Hatfill’s lawyers, but that it had refused

She called the result an important affirmation of journalists’ ability to use confidential sources in gathering material on important news stories. “I protected my sources, and that’s important,” she said.

Dr. Hatfill also sued The New York Times and the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, saying that columns Mr. Kristof wrote about the case had libeled him by suggesting that he might be the anthrax mailer. That lawsuit was dismissed last year, but Dr. Hatfill has appealed the dismissal.

The former Army scientist also sued Vanity Fair and the author of an article about the case in the magazine, Donald Foster, as well as Reader’s Digest, which published a condensed version. That case was settled last year on confidential terms.

Dr. Hatfill, 54, grew up in Illinois but studied medicine in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, he worked at the National Institutes of Health and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. In applying for those jobs, he claimed to have had a Ph.D. from a South African university that his lawyers later admitted he had not earned.

He did training on bioterrorism for the F.B.I., Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency and trained to be a bioweapons inspector for the United Nations, though he never began the job.

After Dr. Hatfill came under suspicion in the anthrax case in 2002, an F.B.I. surveillance team began following him everywhere, and a small motorcade sometimes trailed his car around Washington.

In May 2003, an F.B.I. surveillance car ran over Dr. Hatfill’s foot in Georgetown as he approached the car to take the driver’s picture. He was given a ticket for “walking to create a hazard” and was fined $5.

David Stout contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/wa...28hatfill.html





U.S. and Europe Near Agreement on Private Data
Charlie Savage

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information.

Negotiators, who have been meeting since February 2007, have largely agreed on draft language for 12 major issues central to a “binding international agreement,” the report said. The pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa.

But the two sides are still at odds on several other matters, including whether European citizens should be able to sue the United States government over its handling of their personal data, the report said.

The report, which lays out the progress of the talks and lists the completed draft language, was jointly written by the negotiators from the United States Homeland Security, Justice and State Departments, and by their European Union counterparts. The talks grew out of two conflicts over information-sharing after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. The United States government demanded access to customer data held by airlines flying out of Europe and by a consortium, known as Swift, which tracks global bank transfers.

American investigators wanted the data so they could look for suspicious activity. But several European countries objected, citing violations of their privacy laws. Each dispute frayed diplomatic relations and required difficult negotiations to resolve.

American and European Union officials are trying to head off future confrontations “by finding common ground on privacy and by agreeing not to impose conflicting obligations on private companies,” said Stewart A. Baker, the assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, who is involved in the talks. “Globalization means that more and more companies are going to get caught between U.S. and European law,” he said.

Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said such a blanket agreement could transform international privacy law by eliminating a problem that has led to negotiations of “staggering” complexity between Europe and the United States.

“The reason it’s a big deal is that it is going to lower the whole transaction cost for the U.S. government to get information from Europe,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Most of the negotiations will already be completed. They will just be able to say, ‘Look, we provide adequate protection, so you’re required to turn it over.’ ”

But the prospect that the agreement might lower barriers to sending personal information to the United States government has alarmed some privacy rights advocates in Europe. While some praised the principles laid out in the draft text, they warned that it was difficult to tell whether the agreement would allow broad exceptions to such limits.

For example, the two sides have agreed that information that reveals race, religion, political opinion, health or “sexual life” may not be used by a government “unless domestic law provides appropriate safeguards.” But the accord does not spell out what would be considered an appropriate safeguard, suggesting that each government may decide for itself whether it is complying with the rule.

“I am very worried that once this will be adopted, it will serve as a pretext to freely share our personal data with anyone, so I want it to be very clear about exactly what it means and how it will work,” said Sophia in ’t Veld, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands who has been an outspoken advocate of privacy rights.

The Bush administration and the European Commission have not publicized their talks, but they referred to their progress in a little-noticed paragraph deep in a joint statement after a summit meeting between President Bush and European leaders in Slovenia this month.

Issued June 10, the statement declared that “the fight against transnational crime and terrorism requires the ability to share personal data for law enforcement,” and called for the creation of a “binding international agreement” to aid such transfers while also ensuring that citizens’ privacy is “fully” protected.

The negotiators are trying to agree on minimum standards to protect privacy rights, such as limiting access to the information to “authorized individuals with an identified purpose” for looking at it. If a government’s policies are “effective” in meeting all standards, any transfer of personal data to that government would be presumed lawful.

For example, European law sets up independent government agencies to police whether personal data is being used lawfully and to help citizens who are concerned about invasions of their privacy. The United States has no such independent agency. But in a concession, the Europeans have agreed that the American government’s internal oversight system may be good enough to provide accountability for how Europeans’ data is used.

About a half-dozen issues remain unresolved, the report said. One sticking point is what rights European citizens will have if the United States government violates data privacy rules or takes an adverse action against them — like denying them entry into the country or placing them on a no-fly list — based on incorrect personal information.

European law generally allows people who think the government has mishandled their personal information to file a lawsuit to seek damages and to have the data corrected or expunged. American citizens and permanent residents can generally do the same under the Privacy Act of 1974, but that statute does not extend to foreigners.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade the Europeans that other options for correcting problems are satisfactory, including asking an agency to correct any misinformation through administrative procedures. For now, the European Union is holding to the position that its citizens “require the ability to bring suit in U.S. courts specifically under the Privacy Act for an agreement to be reached on redress,” the report said.

But the Bush administration does not want to make such a concession, in part because it would require new legislation. The administration is trying to achieve an agreement that would not require Congressional action, Mr. Baker said.

David Sobel, a senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to data-privacy rights, said the administration’s depiction of the process of correcting mishandled data through agency procedures sounds “very rosy,” but the reality is that it is often impossible, even for American citizens, to win such a fight.

Officials said it remains unclear when the agreement can be completed. But there are several pressures encouraging negotiators to sprint to the finish.

Bush administration officials say they would like to resolve the problem before they leave office next January. If the agreement does not require legislative action, Mr. Bush could complete it with a signature.

European officials may have an easier time securing its approval now, before the European Union completes proposed changes. Member nations now ratify such accords, but the changes would hand ratification power to the European Parliament, which has been skeptical of American antiterrorism policies. The report says Europeans intended to wait until 2009 after the planned completion of the reforms to finish it. But the changes are now facing likely delay after Irish voters rejected them in a referendum this month.

In addition, businesses that operate on both sides of the Atlantic are pushing to make sure they are not caught between conflicting legal obligations.

“This will require compromise,” said Peter Fleischer, the global privacy counsel for Google. “It will require people to agree on a framework that balances two conflicting issues: privacy and security. But the need to develop that kind of framework is becoming more important as more data moves onto the Internet and circles across the global architecture.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/wa...rivacy.html?hp





Groups to Warn Panel About Economic Effect of Seizing Laptops
Gautham Nagesh

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s practice of seizing laptop computers and other electronic devices from American travelers returning to the United States without notifying them of what will happen to the data could negatively affect the U.S. economy, according to travel and privacy analysts who are scheduled to testify before a Senate panel on Wednesday.

The hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee comes two months after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CBP officials do not need reasonable suspicion to search laptops, BlackBerrys, cell phones and other personal electronic storage devices at U.S. borders. The seizures can include downloading personal information and data from the devices. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives filed amicus briefs earlier this month asking the court to reverse the decision.

CBP’s practice places undue burdens on travelers and could have a harmful impact on the economy, said Susan Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, who plans to testify at the hearing. “Our argument is that essentially in today’s world you carry your office with you on electronic devices such as a cell phone, laptop or BlackBerry,” Gurley said. “In the old days, if you were physically sitting in your office, you need a warrant to search it. Now basically one does not need a warrant.”

Peter Swire, a professor at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University who served for two years as chief counselor for privacy under President Bill Clinton, also is concerned about the privacy implications of the ruling. “Opening my suitcase at the border is not the same as opening my laptop and making a permanent record of everything in it,” he said.

Swire said he plans to tell the subcommittee how laptop border searches are similar to the failed encryption policies of the 1990s. “The government policy violates good security practices,” he said. “It asks for password and encryption keys, which people are trained to never reveal. It violates privacy, chills free speech and compromises business secrets.”

The travel association has informally studied the potential economic impact on business travelers. Gurley said lawyers carrying confidential client materials on their laptops or small business owners worried about the integrity of their business plans must make alternate arrangements such as purchasing another computer for travel and adjusting the way they transfer information.

“There is anxiety over not knowing what the rules are,” she said. “Companies are implementing costly measures. If the rules were posted, we would know how long it takes to get the information returned.”

The association is calling for CBP to conduct privacy impact assessments to reveal the number of laptops and other devices it has seized and to disclose how long the agency takes to return them to their owners if it finds no criminal activity. The association also is concerned about what happens to data that CBP downloads or copies.

“If the information will be copied, we want to know that there are safeguards in place so they are sure of the integrity of the data,” Gurley said. “That way individuals know they will get their information back and that it is still private, not potentially shared with hundreds, even if it is inadvertent.”

But travelers should not have an expectation of privacy when crossing the border, said Nathan Sales, a professor of law at George Mason University who also is scheduled to testify. He said that all information and possessions carried by individuals across the border such as documents or photo albums are fair game for search without reasonable suspicion and that the law doesn’t provide an expectation of privacy just because information is stored digitally.

“We ought to have a law that is technologically neutral,” Sales said. “The amount of privacy shouldn’t depend on the format, digital or analog.” He noted that the 11 challenges to the legality of the laptop searches were made by convicted child pornographers.

Sales agreed that the Homeland Security Department should consider adopting policies concerning the information of ordinary travelers, calling the suggestion “eminently reasonable.” He said one such policy should be destroying the information because DHS would have a difficult time justifying why it needs to keep it.

Asked last week to respond to the foundation’s and association’s amicus filings, CBP issued a statement saying that its officers “have the responsibility to check items such as laptops and other personal electronic devices to ensure that any item brought into the country complies with applicable law and is not a threat to the American public. Laptop computers and other personal electronic devices may be detained for violations of law including child pornography, intellectual property offenses, ties to terrorism, or other violations of law. CBP officers are dedicated to protecting the civil rights of all travelers. It is not CBP’s intent to subject legitimate business travelers to undue scrutiny, but to ensure the safety of the American public.”

CBP did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20080624_3037.php





Laptop Searches in Airports Draw Fire at Senate Hearing
Austin Bogues

Advocacy groups and some legal experts told Congress on Wednesday that it was unreasonable for federal officials to search the laptops of United States citizens when they re-enter the country from traveling abroad.

Civil rights groups have said certain ethnic groups have been selectively profiled in the searches by Border Patrol agents and customs officials who have the authority to inspect all luggage and cargo brought into the country without obtaining warrants or having probable cause.

Companies whose employees travel overseas have also criticized the inspections, saying that the search of electronic devices could hurt their businesses.

The federal government says the searches are necessary for national security and for legal action against people who bring illegal material into the country.

“If you asked most Americans whether the government has the right to look through their luggage for contraband when they are returning from an overseas trip, they would tell you ‘yes, the government has that right,’ ” Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said Wednesday at the hearing of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

“But,” Mr. Feingold continued, “if you asked them whether the government has a right to open their laptops, read their documents and e-mails, look at their photographs and examine the Web sites they have visited, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing, I think those same Americans would say that the government absolutely has no right to do that.”

In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Customs and Border Protection agency could conduct searches without reasonable suspicion.

In her testimony, Farhana Y. Khera, the president and executive director of Muslim Advocates, said Muslim Americans traveling abroad had often had electronic storage devices seized without apparent cause. She said several had also been questioned about their political views.

Susan K. Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, said the seizing of laptops could hurt people who travel overseas for business.

“In today’s wired, networked and borderless world, one’s office no longer sits within four walls or a cubicle; rather, one’s office consists of a collection of mobile electronic devices such as a laptop, a BlackBerry, PDA, and a cellphone,” Ms. Gurley said in prepared remarks.

She said the searches meant that “you may find yourself effectively locked out of your office indefinitely.”

Ms. Gurley said a concern was the lack of published regulations explaining what happened to data when it was seized and who had access to it.

Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview, “You can’t go into my home and search my computer without a warrant, but simply because I’m carrying my computer with me as I travel, you can search it.”

But Nathan A. Sales, an assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law, said in a statement: “The reason the home has enjoyed uniquely robust privacy protections in the Anglo-American legal tradition is because it is a sanctuary into which the owner can withdraw from the government’s watchful eye. Crossing an international border is in many ways the opposite of this kind of withdrawal.”

Mr. Feingold expressed discontent that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the customs and border agency, did not send a witness to testify. He said a written statement by Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for the agency, provided “little meaningful detail on the agency’s policies.”

Mr. Ahern’s statement said that the agency’s efforts did not infringe upon privacy and that it was important to note that the agency was “responsible for enforcing over 600 laws at the border, including those that relate to narcotics, intellectual property, child pornography and other contraband, and terrorism.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/wa...6airports.html





The Thin Laptop Wars
Brian Caulfield

The paperback edition of War & Peace, a bottle of wine, the world's smallest cat--all of these things weigh a good deal more than the Portégé R500-S5007V introduced by Toshiba last week.

The neatest trick: Unlike Apple's 3-pound MacBook Air, the 2.4-pound Toshiba includes the optical drive that the MacBook Air lacks while cramming in 128 gigabytes worth of storage, thanks to the world's largest capacity flash memory-based hard drive. All this, and it's just one hundredth of an inch thicker than the Apple.

The catch: Toshiba's new machine won't be available until the third quarter of this year, and even then it will carry a price tag that makes Apple customers look downright thrifty: $2,999.

To be sure, a new class of lightweight, cheap laptops is emerging as well. Computers such as the Asus Eee PC 900, the HP Mini-Note 2133 and the Intel Classmate PC sell for well under $500. But they also suffer from cramped keyboards, dinky screens and relatively pokey processors.

If you want it all, and you want it small, then you're going to have to pay a great deal more than $500. While notebook computer prices are falling fast, notebooks that are still able to lighten the load while packing serious computing power command a premium price.

Take the MacBook Air. In this rarefied category of ultra-thin, full-featured laptops its starting price of $1,799 is something of a bargain. But it's hard to find anything that matches the MacBook Air's style. It's thin, tapered edges are sharp enough to cut cake. Moreover, its 13.3-inch widescreen display and full-size keyboard means you won't notice you're using an ultra-light laptop until you fold it up.

If you want to get much thinner, you'll have to be very, very rich. That's where Hewlett-Packard is positioning one of its new laptops. The $2,099 Voodoo Envy 133 is just a skosh thinner than the MacBook Air. For the extra dough, however, the Voodoo Envy 133 packs plenty of extras: a carbon-fiber case, ambient sensors that adjust the display to suit the environment and a customizable finish.

(And in a sign the bragging rights on thin are hotly contested, an Apple PR rep called after this article was published to point out--quite rightly--that while the Voodoo Envy is thinner at its thickest point than the MacBook Air's thickest point, the less expensive MacBook Air remains thinner at its thinnest point than HP's offering.)

Too rich for you? Dell's M1330 offers what might be the best compromise between power, price and size. Apple's minimalist designs are in vogue, but the slick M1330 has curb appeal, too. And if you're willing to lug around just a pound more computer than the MacBook Air, you'll be able to save $800.

Plus you'll get the optical drive the MacBook Air is missing. Not a bad deal, especially considering Apple's starter MacBook will cost you another $100 for a machine that weighs more than a full pound more. It's not going to set any records for thinness or price, but laptops like this one are a big part of the reason the Round Rock, Texas-based Dell is turning in better numbers lately, and the M1330 could be a case study on how to hit a sweet spot in a fast-moving market.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...inlaptops.html





Computers in Use Pass 1 Billion Mark: Gartner

The number of personal computers in use around the world has surpassed 1 billion, with strong growth in emerging markets set to double the number of PCs by early 2014, research firm Gartner said on Monday.

Mature markets accounted for 58 percent of the first billion installed PCs, but would only account for about 30 percent of the next billion, Gartner said.

"Rapid penetration in emerging markets is being driven by the explosive expansion of broadband and wireless connectivity, the continuing fall in PC average selling prices, and the general realization that PCs are an indispensable tool for advancement," George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, said.

Gartner expects more than 180 million computers will be replaced this year, with some sold to second owners through various channels, some broken up and recycled, but many simply dumped directly into landfill.

"We estimate ... some 35 million PCs will be dumped into landfill with little or no regard for their toxic content," said Gartner analyst Meike Escherich.

"It will become an even more pressing issue, especially in emerging markets, as the number of retired PCs grows with the continuing expansion of the PC installed base," she said.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; editing by Sue Thomas)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...24525420080623





Et Tu, Intel? Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista
Steve Lohr

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.

An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company.

Intel’s decision is certain to sting Microsoft because the two companies have worked closely to align hardware and software from the earliest days of the personal computer. Indeed, the corporate duo is known as “Wintel” in the PC industry.

Could Intel change its mind? Quite possibly. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven Ballmer, has few equals as a forceful, persuasive salesman, and he and Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, meet regularly.

Word of Intel’s lukewarm response to Vista appeared Monday in The Inquirer, an irreverent London-based technology Web site.

Intel is hardly alone in its reluctance to embrace Microsoft’s latest operating system, which was available to corporate customers in November 2006 and to consumers in January 2007. Large companies routinely hold off a year or so after a new version of Windows is introduced before adopting it, waiting for initial bugs to be eliminated and for applications to be written. “But by 18 months, you’d expect to see a significant uptake, and we haven’t seen that,” said David Smith, a Gartner analyst. “There’s not much excitement.”

His Gartner colleague, Michael Silver, said that about 30 percent of corporate customers skip any given new version of Windows. But the percentage will be higher for Vista, Mr. Silver predicted. Gartner’s corporate clients that plan to skip Vista, like Intel, do not see value of this upgrade, particularly since it requires new PC hardware at the time when the economy is weak and corporate budgets are tight.

Still, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be suffering too much from the resistance to Vista by some large corporations. Microsoft says there are more than 140 million copies of Vista installed on machines worldwide. Consumers and small businesses simply get the operating system that is on a new machine when they buy a PC, and that is Vista.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft operating system engine chugs on, phasing out the old and proclaiming the new. The company reiterated this week that, despite some customer protests, it would halt shipments of the previous version of Windows, XP, to retail stores and stop most licensing of XP to PC makers next week. Microsoft also announced that the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, is scheduled to go on sale in January 2010.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/et-tu-intel/





Is Microsoft Better Off Without Gates?
Dan Lyons

"Change is the only constant" is a favorite cliché among technology types. But for an industry that loves to talk about change, its leading lights don't do too much of it, at least not when it comes to turning over control of their companies. Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Oracle are all run by the guys who founded them back in the 1970s and 1980s.

But soon those leaders will move on. First to go is Bill Gates, who on June 27 steps aside at Microsoft. Next, I'd wager, will be Steve Jobs, for health reasons. Jobs, 53, underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004 and lately has been looking frightfully gaunt. Apple PR folks claim he's fine. Problem is, Apple PR is known for having a Clintonesque relationship to the truth. If Jobs is still running Apple at year end, I'll be shocked.

Also headed for the exits will be Larry Ellison at Oracle. Ellison claims to be 63 years old but is barely aging (I secretly believe he's several hundred years old, and a vampire) and these days he seems more passionate about sailboat racing than about schlepping database software. My guess is Ellison will acquire software maker Salesforce.com and replace himself with its 43-year-old founder and chief executive Marc Benioff, a former marketing whiz at Oracle.

These looming handoffs will have mixed effects. For Apple, expect a 30% drop in the stock price on the day the news breaks, followed by a period of disarray and confusion. Apple has a strong management team. These guys (and yes, they're all guys) are smart and experienced. But Apple has recklessly avoided setting in place a succession plan. Who will take over? Timothy Cook, the chief operating officer, who ran the company when Jobs was on sick leave in 2004? Jon Ive, the head of design? Both are bright. But Steve Jobs is beyond bright. He's one of a kind. The sad truth is this: Without Jobs, Apple will never be the same.

For Microsoft the loss of Gates won't be nearly as profound. Gates narrowed his involvement at the company eight years ago when he gave the chief executive job to his college buddy and right-hand man Steve Ballmer. The reality of the last few years is that Gates has been mentally checked out, pursuing loftier goals at his foundation.

Under Ballmer, Microsoft is enduring one of the worst times in its history. The stock has been flat. Vista, the latest version of Windows, has been such a disastrous technical flop that Microsofties themselves have coined a new word for it: "Vistaster."

Ballmer's recent failed attempt to acquire Yahoo! ended up making Microsoft look even more clumsy, weak and ridiculous. Twenty years ago Microsoft's young turks loved to mock the clueless old back-slappers who ran IBM. Today upstarts see Microsoft as a sad old bully that makes lousy software.

Considering how bad things have been lately, you might almost argue that Gates' departure could be a boon, a chance for some fresh thinking. Except look who he's left in charge. Ballmer is smart and relentless, but he's no techie. And he's 52 years old. Ray Ozzie, who replaced Gates as chief software architect, is also 52. He began his career at Data General. Remember them? They vanished a decade ago. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, is 59 and also started out at Data General--in 1970. That's the year the Beatles broke up and Jimi Hendrix died. Microsoft's three top guys came of age in an era when the Internet was called the ARPANET and the personal computer had not yet been invented.

Microsoft's PR spinners point out that other key players are younger. But come on. Kevin Johnson, the guy running Microsoft's Internet efforts, is 47 years old, has been with Microsoft since 1992, has a background in sales and used to work at IBM. He also oversees Vista. Ahem. Robert Bach, president of the Xbox and Zune division, is 46 and has been at Microsoft since 1988. Stephen Elop, president of the Office applications group, is 44 and joined Microsoft this year. Kevin Turner, chief operating officer, age 43, spent 20 years at Wal-Mart.

Smart guys. Great guys. But not a pack of wild-eyed visionaries operating at Internet speed. Take a look at that photo of Gates and his crew circa 1976, looking like the Manson Family. Those are the kind of crazies who change the world.

Sure, Microsoft will participate in the Internet revolution, just as IBM played a role in the PC revolution. But IBM ultimately abandoned PCs and now chugs along on its mainframe franchise and services business. Not exciting, but not a bad business, either.

I think Microsoft will play defense from here on out. Its army of MBAs will milk the monstrous franchise around Windows and Office for all it's worth and try to cushion its decline and create a soft landing.

That's what the future looks like for Microsoft: lucrative, profitable and boring. No doubt Bill Gates realizes this. And that, I suspect, is why he's checking out.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/23/gat...l?boxes=custom





David Caminer, a Pioneer in Computers, Dies at 92
Douglas Martin

David Caminer, who as an employee of a legendary chain of British tea shops found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea, died June 19 in London. He was 92.

The death was announced by the Leo Computers Society, whose purpose is to keep alive the memory of LEO, the computer Mr. Caminer helped develop for J. Lyons & Company. It was the world’s first business computer, a distinction certified by Guinness World Records.

Lyons was the first company in the world to computerize its commercial operations, partly because it had so many of them: it had more than 200 teahouses in London and its suburbs, with each Lyons Corner House daily generating thousands of paper receipts and needing scores of fresh baked items.

In addition to running the tea shops, Lyons catered large events like tennis at Wimbledon and garden parties at Windsor Castle; it also operated hotels, laundries, and ice cream, candy and meat pie companies. And, of course, tea plantations.

As a result, the company required exceptionally efficient office support. So it was only natural it would look at the “electronic brains” that scientists in the United States were developing for scientific and military purposes as a way to streamline its own empire. Mr. Caminer’s role was finding ways to retain traditional clerical rigor while speeding up the company’s logistics and finances many times over.

The result was LEO, its name derived from Lyons Electronic Office. The Economist magazine called it “the first dedicated business machine to operate on the ‘stored program principle,’ meaning that it could be quickly reconfigured to perform different tasks by loading a new program.”

“LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer,” Computer Weekly said last year.

LEO performed its first calculation on Nov. 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output. At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of I.B.M. and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.

“Americans can’t believe this,” Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

That a food conglomerate did this seems almost incredible. New Scientist said in 2001: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

David Treisman was born on June 26, 1915, in the East End of London. His father was killed in World War I, and his mother married Felix Caminer. An avid leftist, he decided a university education was irrelevant, obituaries in the London papers said. He joined Lyons as a management trainee in 1936.

During World War II, he lost a leg in combat in Tunisia. He returned to Lyons and soon became manager of the systems analysis office. Lyons sent employees to the United States to study office automation, and American experts said they should go to the University of Cambridge, where Maurice Wilkes was developing an early computer.

Lyons made a deal to help finance Dr. Wilkes’s work in return for his help in building a computer for the company. As work on the hardware progressed, Mr. Caminer drew up a flow chart to show how the different job requirements related. The charts became the basis of the computer code.

Mr. Caminer has been called the first corporate electronic systems analyst, a designation with which Mr. Ceruzzi agreed.

The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employee’s pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes. Its success led Lyons to set up a computer subsidiary that later developed two more generations of LEO, the last with transistors, rather than the noisy vacuum tubes used in the first two models.

LEOs were sold to the Ford Motor Company, tobacco companies, a steel maker, South Africa, Australia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, among other buyers. When the British government chose the last LEO to handle its telephone billing system, Tony Benn, postmaster general, praised Lyons for “standing up to and beating on its own merits” the competition from overseas.

But the Lyons computer operation merged into a succession of companies, which chose to use American technology, not least for its universality. Many have compared LEO’s experience with that of the de Havilland Comet, which was the first commercial passenger jet in production but which lost out to Boeing jets.

Mr. Caminer, who was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 1980 for developing a computer system for the European Common Market, had many explanations for the failure of Lyons to press its advantage. One was that it had no idea how rapidly technology would advance. Another was: “We were too often arrogant about always knowing best.”

Mr. Caminer is survived by his wife, the former Jackie Lewis, a son and two daughters. The remnants of Lyons predeceased him in 1998.

On Jan. 9, 1965, when the first LEO computer was turned off forever, The Daily Mail published an obituary. It recalled how LEO hummed, and once made a noise that sounded like a hornpipe to Prince Philip.

“Let it be remembered that throughout almost 14 years of life he worked a 24-hour shift on one dreary problem after another without complaining and spent, at the most, only a few hours off sick,” the computer’s obituary said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/te...29caminer.html





Dying Is Hard. Comedy Is Harder.

THE honest truth is, for a comedian, even death is just a premise to make jokes about. I know this because I was on the phone with George Carlin nine days ago and we were making some death jokes. We were talking about Tim Russert and Bo Diddley and George said: “I feel safe for a while. There will probably be a break before they come after the next one. I always like to fly on an airline right after they’ve had a crash. It improves your odds.”

I called him to compliment him on his most recent special on HBO. Seventy years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas getting ready for his show. He was a monster.

You could certainly say that George downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways. Every comedian does a little George. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve been standing around with some comedians and someone talks about some idea for a joke and another comedian would say, “Carlin does it.” I’ve heard it my whole career: “Carlin does it,” “Carlin already did it,” “Carlin did it eight years ago.”

And he didn’t just “do” it. He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.

But his brilliance fathered dozens of great comedians. I personally never cared about “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” or “FM & AM.” To me, everything he did just had this gleaming wonderful precision and originality.

I became obsessed with him in the ’60s. As a kid it seemed like the whole world was funny because of George Carlin. His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.

I know George didn’t believe in heaven or hell. Like death, they were just more comedy premises. And it just makes me even sadder to think that when I reach my own end, whatever tumbling cataclysmic vortex of existence I’m spinning through, in that moment I will still have to think, “Carlin already did it.”

- Jerry Seinfeld

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/op...infeld.html?hp

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

June 21st, June 14th, June 7th, May 31st, May 24th, May 17th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black