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Old 07-09-06, 01:56 PM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 9th, '06


































"Machida said the sun could send enough energy to Earth in as little as an hour to provide for all the world's energy needs for one year." – Georgina Prodhan


"It may be perfectly secure, but my daughter is a minor and I understand that supposedly the kids have the option to not have their prints scanned, but that's not being articulated to my daughter." – Hal Storey


"The need to have media companies at all is disappearing. You can create and distribute music on your own, all the delivery systems are free, the networking is free—where do you need a media company? DRM is a way to close all these alternate systems down. All we’re trying to do is slow the adoption of DRM long enough to give these new models a chance." – Peter Brown


"The individual artist has been at the back of the line in terms of support in American funding over the last decade, so any new system designed to get support directly into the hand of working artists is important." – Philip Bither


"I still don’t think if I was making 'Pink Flamingos' today I would ever get a grant, no matter how liberal the organization." – John Waters


"These actions not only violated the privacy rights of our employee, but also the rights of all reporters to protect their confidential sources." – Sarah Cain





















It’s Free!

So what’s it going to be? 99 cents at iTunes and a bunch of DRM or free from SpiralFrog and a bunch more DRM?

The tempest rages.

Let’s admit it, for most kids 99 cents can be hard to come by. A barrier must be high indeed to turn them off to free, at least until they’re old enough to covet the status that comes with owning an iPod or the future's trendy equivalent, and they gain the financial ability to indulge themselves. As our next generation of consumers gets used to grabbing tracks from RIAA-approved sources for nothing (there’s a shock), they may find it unreasonable to switch to paid models even when they have the money. For today’s grownups it’s a little murkier, but to insist as some have recently that adults won't put up with it simply because it has advertising is delusional, because they already are putting up with it, in droves, and it’s been happening forever. In the 1700's people went to live shows that were routinely interrupted by live ads. The lobbies had ads painted on them and so did the backdrops behind the performers and it continues today. Just last month a show on Broadway had a live commercial performed by the cast right on stage. Advertising subsidizes news and entertainment and it’s a very old symbiosis. Homer probably broke for spots.

So the ad industry is tailor-made for free downloads. It’s what it does. At bus stops and subways. On supermarket floors. On cereal boxes and in bathrooms. Ad models can handle music downloads with ease.

As to whether SpiralFrog in particular will thrive and whether P2P mavens will put up with it are other matters entirely. I probably won’t, but I don't watch much TV or listen to commercial radio either. Going by the numbers I’m in a (decidedly large) minority, but big media manages to stumble along without me all the same. If advertising can subsidize newspapers, theatrical shows, television, magazines, romance novels, websites, concerts, talk and music radio and an untold number of other products and services it can surely subsidize downloads.

In many ways this is the deal the record industry has waited 100 years for: the third party underwriter coming to the rescue. Like their pals in the TV and DVD business they can recoup production costs before the consumer shells out for product, and that alone makes it too hard to ignore.

It's the future but it's here right now. Leaving aside debates of purity and propriety and the huge editorial influence advertisers will have on content, the only thing we can expect from free ad-supported music - for better or worse - is that there will be a lot more of it in the years ahead.

















Enjoy,

Jack



















September 9th, '06






SpiralFrog in Deal With EMI Music

SpiralFrog, a new online music service, said on Wednesday it had signed an agreement with EMI Music Publishing to authorize SpiralFrog's use of EMI's music catalog for legal downloading in the United States via SpiralFrog's advertising-supported service.

SpiralFrog said the agreement with EMI Music Publishing follows its deal with Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi, announced last week, which allows SpiralFrog to offer free downloads of Universal's songs.

"It is a very exciting concept which fuses advertising with music downloads and other services to recapture consumer demand which has been hijacked by online piracy," said Roger Faxon, Co-CEO of EMI Music Publishing.

"Anytime we can create a new revenue stream for our songwriters and combat online piracy, you will see EMI Music Publishing leading the charge."

The rights of EMI Music and Universal combined include artists such as Sting, Nelly Furtado, Jay Z and Kanye West.

The SpiralFrog service, to be launched in December, experiments with a new business model that is funded entirely by advertising, as opposed to the pay-per-song model of Apple Computer Inc.'s market-leading iTunes music store.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...S_techn ology





Four in Race for BMG Songs
Joshua Chaffin

At least four groups have submitted bids for Bertelsmann's BMG Music publishing division in an auction that could near $2bn, say people involved in the sale.

The bidders include two music companies, Universal Music and Warner Music Group.

The other contenders to make offers by the Thursday deadline were Viacom, which has partnered with Apollo, the private equity firm, and Charles Koppelman, an entertainment entrepreneur who has teamed with GTCR, the Chicago buyout firm. It was not clear on Friday whether EMI, which is the world's largest music publisher, had gone ahead with a bid.

The company had been working with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. People involved in the auction said Sony Music, another early suitor, had dropped out.

Bertelsmann, which originally sent financial information to 15 interested parties, is expected to sort through the offers next week and whittle the list down to two or three finalists, according to people familiar with the matter. A final sale could be reached by the end of the month.

The BMG catalogue has gone on sale at a time when the music publishing business's steady revenues have become increasingly attractive to investors in an otherwise volatile industry.

In addition to price, the auction could also be determined by regulatory considerations – particularly in the wake of the European court's recent ruling against the Sony-BMG merger.

As a result, Bertelsmann is insisting that trade buyers shoulder the regulatory risk.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14629248/





Vivendi to Buy BMG, Settle Napster Claims
Reuters

Vivendi's Universal Music, the world's largest seller of recorded music, is vaulting to the top spot in music publishing, too, after agreeing to buy BMG Music Publishing for 1.63 billion euros ($2.1 billion).

German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, BMG Music Publishing's parent company, also said on Wednesday it would pay Vivendi $60 million to settle litigation related to financing it once provided to file-sharing service Napster.

Vivendi, the French media and telecommunications group, topped offers from six other bidders for BMG Music Publishing, which owns the rights to thousands of songs, including ones by Coldplay, Christina Aguilera and Barry Manilow.

It had been seen as a frontrunner in the auction since it was tipped off that Bertelsmann would sell BMG earlier this year. Other bidders included Warner Music Group and a team that included media conglomerate Viacom and private equity firm Apollo, sources familiar with the situation said.

Publishers have been increasingly coveted by investors because they are partly shielded by many of the piracy issues that have rattled the music industry. In addition to generating revenue when CDs or downloads are sold, music publishers make money by licensing songs to be performed live and for use in films and television shows.

"The acquisition of BMG Music Publishing is a unique opportunity to grow our music publishing business and enhance the value of Universal Music Group at a time when the music market is improving, supported by technological innovations and digital sales," Vivendi Chief Executive Jean-Bernard Levy said.

Vivendi's shares were down 0.2 percent to 27.10 euros in early trading on Wednesday. The company was advised by Merrill Lynch on the deal.

Bertelsmann, which is selling its music publishing arm to help fund the 4.5 billion euro buyback of a minority stake in the company, said the agreement would increase its net income by about 1 billion euros.

BMG, the world's third-largest music publishing company, had 2005 revenue of 371 million euros, accounting for about 2 percent of Bertelsmann's total.

The deal price represents about a 9.6 multiple on BMG's net publishers share (NPS) of 170 million euros. NPS, which measures the amount of royalties retained by a publisher, is the sector's most closely watched cashflow figure.

The multiple is lower than has been paid for other music publishers, although previous deals have been for much smaller companies such as Acuff-Rose and DreamWorks. Also, under copyright laws more songs are reverting back to songwriters or their heirs, reducing the future earnings of many catalogs.

The BMG deal has been approved by the boards of both companies and is likely to be reviewed by competition authorities in both the United States and Europe.

Strange aura
Bertelsmann, which was advised by Citigroup and J.P. Morgan, said it expected to be paid by the end of the year. It had said in July that it would not bear any antitrust risk from the sale, but declined to comment on the subject on Wednesday.

A European court this summer annulled 2004 EU approval of the merger that created Sony BMG, a recorded music joint venture between Sony Music and Bertelsmann's BMG, creating uncertainty about how much consolidation will be allowed in the industry.

"In the ordinary course of things there shouldn't be any competition concerns, but because it's music, the Commission has to look carefully at these cases," said another person familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified.

"There is a strange aura about this one," the source added. "This will be tricky."

A fresh review of the Sony BMG case by European competition authorities is also likely to run concurrently with the scrutiny of the BMG Music Publishing deal.

The EU said it would look carefully at the BMG Music Publishing deal if it was notified.

Meanwhile, the Napster settlement ends one piece of three-year-old litigation against Bertelsmann, which is being sued by various music companies for allegedly contributing to copyright infringements by granting loans to Napster, thus enabling it to survive longer than it otherwise would have.

After it launched in 1999 and became the first widely used peer-to-peer service, Napster almost single-handedly forced the music industry to revamp its business model when millions of consumers started swapping songs instead of paying for them.

It was eventually shut down by the courts, but was later reborn as a legal music service as the industry began to embrace the file-sharing technology behind Napster and others.

Bertelsmann said it was not admitting any liability as part of the settlement.

"We believe the resolution is a fair one to both parties," Bertelsmann Chief Financial Officer Thomas Rabe said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...try+NewsNews-2





DRM Roll

How corporations are about to drastically change the way you consume media, and how one local group is going to make them pay for it
Paul McMorrow

There’s a Catholic gift shop on Federal Street in Downtown Crossing. They’ve got devotional statues, prayer cards, rosaries, crucifixes, gazillions of Bibles—everything the suit-and-briefcase crowd might need to save their souls and score a quick miracle or two.

A couple floors above this storefront, inside the modest headquarters of the Free Software Foundation, a group of techies is trying to pull off a miracle of their own: mobilizing the American consumer around a campaign, steeped in tech minutiae, to thwart the country’s influential media and electronics lobby.

We’re at a critical juncture in human history, you see. Barbarians at the gates. Liberty and wallets hanging in the balance. The Free Software Foundation has nine months, maybe a year, to land a haymaker on the media/electronics cartel, or we’re all going to be screwed. The cartel wields an unfathomable amount of political and economic influence, and it doesn’t help that the average consumer can’t parse the ins and outs of the dreaded acronym, DRM, that’s at the center of this fight.

The FSF’s executive director, Peter Brown, is unfazed by the long odds. Sitting in the foundation’s offices, fiddling with his laptop and rocking a GNU/Linux T-shirt, Brown lays out a commonsense argument for toppling the cartel’s imposition of DRM that’s equal parts Thomas Paine and Bill Clinton: It’s the freedom, stupid.

Founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman, a former artificial intelligence researcher at MIT, the bulk of the FSF’s work has centered on distributing Stallman’s free software GNU operating system, publishing the General Public License that governs free and open source software, acting as a clearinghouse for free software projects, and lobbying government and business groups to adopt open-source standards. But recently, they’ve been butting heads with a new, particularly nasty foe: DRM (Digital Rights Management, in corporate parlance; Digital Restrictions Management, according to the FSF).

Essentially, DRM is code that dictates how devices and media function. It exists ostensibly to combat piracy, but increasingly it’s being used as a tool to let the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America slither into consumers’ computers and living rooms. In its various incarnations, DRM can prevent CD and DVD copying; restrict the number of times iTunes songs can be burned or copied; block viewers from fast-forwarding through DVDs and DVR’ed TV commercials; and impair cross-brand operability, like when it prevents Napster songs from loading onto your iPod. And remember the Sony rootkit that spied on your computer, exposed your personal data to hackers and then fried your CD drive when you tried to uninstall it? That was DRM, too.

“DRM sets up a proprietary hellhole that’s very hard to escape from,” Brown says. “Freedom number one for free-software users is the freedom to change and modify their software, and still have it work. It’s the same as modding your car—you want to customize it, and still have it work. If you hack DRM software, it’ll no longer work; DRM is never compatible with the goals of free software.

“Even beyond free-software users, we can see [corporations] building the fences higher and higher; we want to stop DRM as a consumer issue. It affects anyone who watches movies or listens to music on their computer.”

As technology progresses, Brown fears that DRM will become increasingly intrusive. And as things stand, citizens have very few tools for combating whatever booby traps media and electronics companies bundle into their products.

When it passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, Congress banned devices and code that circumvent DRM—essentially giving consumers no recourse or escape from overly restrictive DRM measures, even when that DRM blocks uses, like making personal backup copies of media, that are legal under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The DMCA established a system in which consumers have only two choices: Either surrender all rights and discretion to distant corporations and their lobbyists, or reject devices and media containing DRM altogether.

The FSF’s Defective By Design campaign is attempting to steer people toward the latter. Last September, a Disney exec named Peter Lee got unusually honest with a reporter from The Economist, and that candor has haunted Lee’s industry ever since. “If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed,” Lee said. For the anti-DRM set, Lee’s statement perfectly encapsulates the arrogance behind the restrictive technology.

“DRM changes a person’s relationship to media from one of ownership, where you can give media to a friend, or resell it when you’re tired of it, to one where you’re acquiring a series of revocable permissions to use the media, but you don’t own it,” says Gregory Heller, the campaign director for Defective By Design. “And with DRM, our computers could be reporting data back to companies without our knowledge.

“The technology makes the issue sound complex, but it’s easy to understand when you say you’ve got a device that only works the way corporations want it to work. People would be up in arms if, when you bought a car, the dealer said, ‘You can’t open up the hood, you can’t put different tires on, you can only use the gas we sell you, and that gas costs more.’ People would say, ‘I’m not going to buy that car!’”

“It’s about liberty,” Brown adds, emphatically.

Increasingly, Brown says, media companies are writing restrictive DRM directly into hardware. Under a bill being pushed right now by Alaska Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens, digital radio, television and media will include so-called broadcast flags that will tell recording devices that they’re not permitted to record programs. Manufacturers may be able to remotely switch off Blu-ray DVD players, and other digital devices will be able to monitor media and alert the authorities when impermissible activity occurs.

Why all the fascism? “The need to have media companies at all is disappearing,” argues Brown. “You can create and distribute music on your own, all the delivery systems are free, the networking is free—where do you need a media company? DRM is a way to close all these alternate systems down. All we’re trying to do is slow the adoption of DRM long enough to give these new models a chance.”

“All this stuff is being introduced in the hardware that’s coming this holiday season,” Brown warns. “The corporations are saying that all these technologies won’t be operable at first, but what they’re doing is getting us to take down our old devices, getting these DRM devices into our homes and then switching on the DRM over time.”

Because the DMCA prohibits consumers from fighting DRM with technology, Brown’s group must mobilize the American consumer into a massive boycott of DRM-enabled products. And because the first wave of truly evil DRM-enabled electronics will hit the shelves in time for Christmas, D-day for the FSF is right now.

The FSF’s campaign is designed to quickly raise awareness of a complex, shadowy issue that Heller, the campaign director, calls “a multi-headed, moving monster.” Defective By Design has been very successful at both keeping its message easily digestible and attracting attention to itself.

“Different aspects of it affect different peoples’ lives,” explains Heller. “We’re trying to link it all together so people don’t say, ‘I don’t like this type of DRM, but this type is OK.’ We say, ‘All DRM is DRM, and DRM is bad. You can’t abridge freedom.’”

You also can’t walk into an Apple store without passing a picket line of protesters in yellow hazmat suits, hearing them shout about how Apple uses DRM and DRM is evil, and pocketing some Defective By Design literature; FSF hazmat crews have been picketing Apple all summer. They recently staged a day-long call-in to the MPAA and a brilliantly stupid press stunt in which they called on Bono to oppose DRM.

“We don’t really care what he says—it’ll be news either way,” Brown says. “When we launched the drive, the story got picked up everywhere. We had DRM being described to people everywhere. When we deliver the petition, that’ll be another big story. And when you make a story, you make people aware.”

The visibility protests and press stunts will only get bigger. On October 3, the FSF is calling for a massive “Day Without DRM.” And as the holiday shopping season nears, prepare to see lots of anti-DRM stickers slapped all over this season’s hottest DRM-enabled gifts.

Brown argues that, with the way the FSF has structured its anti-DRM campaign, “We don’t need the man on the street to know. All we need is enough so that when these DRM products launch, they flop. We’re building an environment where the customer hates DRM. Companies won’t want to keep pushing DRM because they’ll have concerns about their business.”

“People who join the campaign are the campaign,” Brown explains. “They pledge direct action. Their actions are very clearly focused. Our 8,000 members have the power to influence their entire network of friends and family, and that’s more awareness than ad money can buy. A little eruption has occurred, and we’re now seeing the first wave of a tidal wave. When people are aware of DRM, DRM will lose—it’s just about making those connections.”
http://weeklydig.com/news_opinions/articles/drm_roll/





Quickest Patch Ever
Bruce Schneier

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM.

Security patches used to be rare. Software vendors were happy to pretend that vulnerabilities in their products were illusory -- and then quietly fix the problem in the next software release.

That changed with the full disclosure movement. Independent security researchers started going public with the holes they found, making vulnerabilities impossible for vendors to ignore. Then worms became more common; patching -- and patching quickly -- became the norm.

But even now, no software vendor likes to issue patches. Every patch is a public admission that the company made a mistake. Moreover, the process diverts engineering resources from new development. Patches annoy users by making them update their software, and piss them off even more if the update doesn't work properly.

For the vendor, there's an economic balancing act: how much more will your users be annoyed by unpatched software than they will be by the patch, and is that reduction in annoyance worth the cost of patching?

Since 2003, Microsoft's strategy to balance these costs and benefits has been to batch patches: instead of issuing them one at a time, it's been issuing them all together on the second Tuesday of each month. This decreases Microsoft's development costs and increases the reliability of its patches.

The user pays for this strategy by remaining open to known vulnerabilities for up to a month. On the other hand, users benefit from a predictable schedule: Microsoft can test all the patches that are going out at the same time, which means that patches are more reliable and users are able to install them faster with more confidence.

In the absence of regulation, software liability, or some other mechanism to make unpatched software costly for the vendor, "Patch Tuesday" is the best users are likely to get.

Why? Because it makes near-term financial sense to Microsoft. The company is not a public charity, and if the internet suffers, or if computers are compromised en masse, the economic impact on Microsoft is still minimal.

Microsoft is in the business of making money, and keeping users secure by patching its software is only incidental to that goal.

There's no better example of this of this principle in action than Microsoft's behavior around the vulnerability in its digital rights management software PlaysForSure.

Last week, a hacker developed an application called FairUse4WM that strips the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files.

Now, this isn't a "vulnerability" in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: "Oh no. I can now play the music I bought for my PC on my Mac. I must install a patch so I can't do that anymore."

But to Microsoft, this vulnerability is a big deal. It affects the company's relationship with major record labels. It affects the company's product offerings. It affects the company's bottom line. Fixing this "vulnerability" is in the company's best interest; never mind the customer.

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on Microsoft's DRM.

This clearly demonstrates that economics is a much more powerful motivator than security.

It should surprise no one that the system didn't stay patched for long. FairUse4WM 1.2 gets around Microsoft's patch, and also circumvents the copy protection in Windows Media DRM 9 and 11beta2 files.

That was Saturday. Any guess on how long it will take Microsoft to patch Media Player once again? And then how long before the FairUse4WM people update their own software?

Certainly much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording industry to realize they're playing a losing game, and that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.

If Microsoft abandoned this Sisyphean effort and put the same development effort into building a fast and reliable patching system, the entire internet would benefit. But simple economics says it probably never will.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,71738-0.html





FairUse4WM Peeps Stay One Step Ahead of Microsoft
Paul Miller

Mere days after Microsoft started pushing a new IBX version for "protecting" PlaysForSure files from its users, the FairUse4WM guys have thrown down a new version that deals with that and other little DRM-circumvention obstacles. The new release -- version 1.2 -- knocks out DRMv1 files you've ripped yourself with protection, breaks down individualized WM9 files and has a workaround for WM11beta2. Of course, we're guessing it won't be long until Microsoft has another quick update to break FairUse4WM again, but it seems like a more drastic update might be in order to shut down this hack for good. We're sure you're well familiar with our stance on this whole issue, and hope that version 1.2 treats you right.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/02/f...d-of-microsoft





Ben Affleck Used Video iPod to Prepare for Latest Role

On last night's episode of The Tonight Show, actor Ben Affleck revealed that he used his video iPod to help him prepare for his role in the upcoming movie Hollywoodland. Portraying the late George Reeves who starred as the original Superman, Affleck put every episode of the original series to his video iPod to he could watch them repeatedly in order to get a feel for Reeves' mannerisms.

Since the original Superman series is unavaiable through the iTunes Music Store, is can likely be assumed that Affleck acquired DVDs of the series and used his computer to "rip" them into iPod-compatible format. This is in stark contrast with the movie studios' collective claim that the simple act of ripping a legally purchased DVD into a computer is a violation of the law.

While it's possible that the studio gave Affleck permission to rip the DVDs into his computer, the fact that a famous actor is apparently ripping DVDs into his iPod (in order to help him make a movie, no less) would appear to strengthen the argument made by those users who believe that ripping a purchased DVD into a computer falls under fair and normal use and is therefore legal.
http://www.iprong.com/article.php?id=1913




Panasonic Notebook Batteries Recalled

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. said Tuesday it has begun recalling 6,000 lithium-ion batteries used in Panasonic-brand notebook computers in Japan on concerns they might overheat.

The recall of the batteries for Let's Note CF-W4G notebook PCs only affects Japan, said company spokesman Akira Kadota.

Kadota said the batteries were not made by Sony Corp., whose faulty batteries were involved in far larger recalls by Dell Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. last month, but he declined to say who made the batteries, citing an agreement with the manufacturer.

Matsushita has started replacing batteries from the initial shipments of its Let's Note CF-W4G notebook PCs produced in April and May 2005 following two reported cases of trouble earlier this year, he said.

Kadota said that the problem stems from the battery cover, which could become loose. The batteries could produce heat and change shape if the battery cover is damaged due to the poor strength of the latch, he said.

The size of this recall is much smaller than last month's battery recalls by Dell and Apple, which cited concerns that the batteries could overheat and catch fire. Dell asked customers to return 4.1 million faulty laptop batteries, while Apple recalled 1.8 million batteries worldwide.

In both those cases, the problematic lithium-ion batteries were made by Sony Energy Devices Corp., a Japan-based subsidiary of Sony Corp.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-05-01-14-34





RIAA Doesn't Like Independent Experts
Eric Bangeman

For the past few years, the Recording Industry Association of America has battled file sharing by threatening those it suspects of illegally downloading music with lawsuits. Many potential defendants opt for expensive settlements with the RIAA, others decide to fight it out in court.

In the case of Sony BMG et al. v. Kim Arellanes, the RIAA is using another tactic: strenuously arguing (PDF) against the defendant's request that a neutral, third-party perform a forensic search of the defendant's hard drive to find evidence that she engaged in activities frowned upon by the music industry. Claiming a right to rely on an expert of their own choosing, Sony BMG says that Arellanes "should be ordered to produce her computer hard drive for inspection subject to Plaintiff's proposed protective order."

As one might expect, Arellanes isn't too keen (PDF) on the idea of sending her hard drive to an RIAA star chamber for examination. Citing the RIAA's numerous missteps in its ill-conceived crusade against music fans, she requests that the court require a "neutral computer forensics expert and a protocol protective of non-relevant and privileged information" be used to conduct the examination.

Recently, RIAA target Delina Tschirhart found herself in a mess of hot water when she disobeyed a judge's orders and used a secure file deletion utility to wipe potentially incriminating files off her hard drive. In this case, the RIAA obtained a mirrored copy of her hard drive, on which its forensics expert found the incriminating evidence. The result was a default judgment in the RIAA's favor.

That case aside, the RIAA's history doesn't inspire much confidence in its ability to objectively examine what could be a piece of crucial evidence. Remember, this is an organization that has tried to skirt due process by trying to force ISPs to hand over subscriber information (e.g., names associated with IP addresses). A late 2003 ruling put an end to the practice, requiring the RIAA to look to the courts to compel ISPs to turn over the information. The organization has also sued the deceased along with those who don't even own computers.

Neither plaintiffs or defendants are objective parties in a legal dispute. That's all the more reason to have third parties involved in examining the evidence. When one of the parties has a history of bullying witnesses into perjury and is seemingly incapable of admitting they were wrong and clearing the names of those they wrongfully accused, it becomes even more crucial.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060903-7657.html





Too Much Sharing About File Sharing
Doug Lederman

When members of Congress think they may have a problem on their hands — or, more cynically, when they want to appear to be taking an issue seriously — they often turn to the Government Accountability Office. Congress’s investigative arm will then examine the situation broadly and report back to the senators or representatives who requested the study and, eventually, to the public. Legislative action sometimes follows, sometimes not, but in the meantime, they are (or at least appear to be) doing something.

That’s essentially what happened with a recent GAO study about illegal file sharing on campuses, but with a twist. A House of Representatives subcommittee has requested a survey of colleges’ policies and practices on networks that allow students and others to illegally share copyrighted video and audio files. But unlike most studies by the GAO, Congressional aides have insisted that the agency in this instance report not just on the file sharing landscape in the aggregate, but on how individual colleges responded to the survey.

Declining to promise confidentiality to the respondents, college officials predict, is likely to limit the number of participants and render the survey ineffective.

Like many a GAO survey, this one came to pass after higher education leaders fought off an attempt to impose legislative requirements. During last spring’s debate over the renewal of the Higher Education Act, Democrats in the House proposed an amendment that would have required colleges to take steps to crack down on illegal file sharing, which college leaders opposed as unnecessary federal regulation. (Many college officials insist that they are already doing plenty to deal with this issue, especially since the problem, some of them argue, is less severe among college students than among other segments of the population.)

The amendment failed, but the lawmakers who proposed it (led by Rep. Howard P. Berman of California, who is the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property) continued to pursue a GAO study of file sharing in higher education. College officials said they supported the idea of a study, which would help gauge the extent of the problem.

But as the investigative agency sent out the survey (a blank copy is available for viewing here) in recent days to more than 100 colleges, some college officials realized that the questionnaire and the accompanying cover note did not say, as such surveys almost always do, that the replies would be kept confidential.

When Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, checked with officials at the GAO, he was told that that aides to the Judiciary subcommittee had insisted that the GAO collect and report back to the panel on the responses of individual institutions. (It isn’t clear whether the information about individual institutions would be made public, or if the eventual public report, like most GAO studies, would present information only in the aggregate.)

Paul Anderson, assistant director of the GAO, said Monday that agency policy prohibited him from discussing details about the nature of any of its active surveys, beyond basic information about who had requested the study and its scope. A spokesman for the Judiciary Committee said he would check into the matter but did not provide any details.

Mark A. Luker, vice president of Educause, higher education’s main technology association, said it was “unfortunate” that lawmakers and their staffs had adopted this approach. “Peer to peer file sharing is a legitimate issue, and colleges and universities are working to address it,” Luker said.

“A survey like this could be a valuable means of finding out the state of the environment,” Luker said. But the decision not to make the replies confidential “can hurt the survey by limiting the responses and participation,” he added, not because colleges necessarily have anything to hide, but because survey participants tend to be more responsive when their privacy is protected.

Luker said that Educause is alerting its members to the fact that their responses to the GAO survey will not be kept confidential, since the survey materials themselves don’t make that clear.
http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/25/gao





Education Ministers' Proposal in Need of a Rewrite
Michael Geist

As thousands of children across the province return to school tomorrow, nearly everyone will be asking "what did you do this summer?” If the question were posed to Education Minister Sandra Pupatello, her candid reply might be that she was working with her fellow Provincial Ministers of Education on reforms that will have damaging consequences on Internet use in Canada.

The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), which bills itself as the national voice for education in Canada, brings together the Ministers of Education from across Canada (with the exception of Quebec) to work on issues of mutual concern. At the moment, one such issue is the use of the Internet in the classroom, with CMEC lobbying for a special exception that would allow the education community to freely use any works that are publicly available on the Internet.

At first glance, such a proposal would appear to be a winner. Canada was the first country in the world to bring Internet connectivity to every school from coast to coast to coast and the logical next step is to leverage that connectivity to improve the educational experience.

Moreover, it is far better than a counter-proposal from Access Copyright that seeks to develop a new licensing system for the use of Internet-based content. According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, the copyright collective has asked the Ministry of Canadian Heritage for funding to become the Canadian collective for a new international standard that can be used to register any "textual work” from books to blogs. Armed with a collection of "registered" online text, Access Copyright will be positioned to create a new license for the use of Internet content.

In the run-up to the last federal election, the Conservatives appeared to side with CMEC on this issue. Over the past few months, there has been widespread speculation that the government plans to proceed with reforms that would largely grant the educators their cherished exception.

While the Ministers appear convinced that this benefits the education community, there are potentially several negative long-term effects. First, there is a strong argument that the exception is simply not needed for most educational uses. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that fair dealing - including the use of copyrighted works for research and private study purposes - is an integral part of the Copyright Act to be interpreted in a broad and liberal manner. The law therefore already permits many educational uses of Internet materials without compensation.

Second, the implication of the exception is that using publicly-available Internet materials is not permitted unless one has prior authorization or qualifies for the exception. This suggests that millions of Canadians outside the education system who use Internet-based materials are somehow violating the law. This is simply wrong - an enormous amount of online content is intended for public use or qualifies as fair dealing - and to imply otherwise sends the wrong message.

Third, the exception may violate international law. Several legal scholars have reviewed the CMEC proposal and concluded that it is not compliant with Canada’s existing obligations under the Berne Convention, the world's foremost international copyright treaty.

Fourth, rather than improving access, the exception will actually encourage people to take content offline or to erect barriers that limit access. Many website owners who may be entirely comfortable with non-commercial or limited educational use of their materials, may object to a new law that grants the education community unfettered (and uncompensated) usage rights. Accordingly, many sites may opt out of the exception by making their work unavailable to everyone.

Fifth, the educational exception comes at huge political cost. As a counterpoint to the exception, the government is likely to introduce tough new rules that support technological protection measures. These digital locks will cause particular harm to the education community, who may find that the price of virtually unlimited access to publicly-available Internet-based content is the loss of fair access to all other digitized content.

Not surprisingly, the issue is certain to leave everyone unhappy. It has caused a division within the education and library communities, with several groups, including the Canadian Federation of Students and the Canadian Library Association, de-emphasizing the issue. Moreover, creator groups are angry that their work may go uncompensated and the provinces may ultimately blame the Conservatives for brokering a bad deal.

The issue could be diffused, however, by striking a compromise. The Copyright Act's fair dealing provision is currently limited to research, private study, criticism, review, and news reporting. An expanded provision that treated those categories as illustrative rather than exhaustive would grant education much of the remaining classroom access it needs, while giving creators the fair compensation they crave.

The grade that Minister Pupatello, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, and Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda receive on this issue will depend on their recognition that everyone is entitled to fair use of content on the Internet.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1409/159/





Microsoft, Nokia Have Work Cut Out to Rival iPod
Georgina Prodhan and Lucas van Grinsven

Almost any iPod owner will tell the same story: they wouldn't swap the iconic device for any alternative. But the battle is wide open for the hearts -- and pockets -- of the vast majority who still have no MP3 player.

The iPod commands an unusual loyalty among its fans. "I wouldn't swap it for anything," says Nina Becker, a 27-year-old student, jogging down a street with the iPod's familiar white wires trailing from her ear plugs.

"The design is super," says Claudio Topani, an Italian musician browsing for gadgets at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, which ends on Wednesday.

But many people balk at the iPod's high prices -- top models sell for up to $600 -- or would prefer the convenience of a portable music player integrated into a mobile phone.

And although the iPod still commands more than 75 percent of the U.S. digital music player market and more than 50 percent of the global market, according to research firm NPD, sales have begun to slide as the threat from rivals becomes more real.

The phenomenal success of the iPod has not only inspired an army of imitators, most notably SanDisk's Sansa, but has now goaded the mighty Microsoft into action.

Microsoft plans to launch its answer to the iPod, the "Zune", later this year -- five years after Apple's first iPod went on sale -- in an apparent capitulation.

Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, had maintained for years that mobile phones with integrated MP3 players would render separate portable music players redundant.

The Zune, made by Japanese electronics group Toshiba Corp., will have a 30-gigabyte hard-disk drive, wireless connectivity and a three-inch (eight-centimeter) liquid crystal display screen.

Microsoft's entertainment and devices chief said on Tuesday that the company would heavily market the Zune's wireless possibilities, which enable shared music experiences, to try to dislodge the iPod -- which so far has no wireless capability.

The software giant says there is plenty of room for growth in the digital music player market. U.S.-based Jupiter Research estimates that MP3 penetration was 25 percent of U.S. households and 18 percent of European households in 2005.

"Certainly everyone's awaiting the challenge from Microsoft and the announcement of Zune has created quite a lot of buzz," says Nate Elliott, a London-based analyst for Jupiter who specialises in the digital home.

He said that Microsoft was in a better position than any of Apple's other rivals to build an "ecosystem" -- including online music store -- although he cautioned that in his opinion Microsoft's PlayForSure software was not quite up to scratch.

Mobile Phone Challenge

Another threat to the iPod comes from mobile phone makers who are furiously integrating MP3 players into their handsets.

Close to 100 million phones sold this year will have a built-in music player and that number will grow to almost 800 million units by 2010 according to Strategy Analytics analyst Peter King.

That compares with 8.11 million iPods sold in the April-June quarter, up 32 percent from a year earlier but down from 8.5 million in the January-March quarter.

Many visitors to IFA said they would prefer to have many functions combined in one gadget -- concurring with Bill Gates's argument that mobile phones would eventually win the battle for "share of pocket".

IT engineer Armin, who declined to give his last name, said: "I would rather take the mobile because I carry that already and do not want to carry around a second device."

And Kurt Boz, a salesman at a store of mobile operator E-Plus in Frankfurt, said handsets with integrated MP3 players as well as cameras -- such as Sony Ericsson's K800 -- were flying off the shelves.

"Customers are very keen on the features," he said.

But Jurgen Smit, sales manager at electronics retailer Polectro, said he was confident iPod could keep its share of the market because ever more consumer electronics groups are making docks and ports to connect directly to the device.

Luxury car makers like BMW have also started fitting their models with standard iPod sockets.

"As long as you see that happening, iPod is not going to lose market share," Smit said.

Jupiter's Elliott says that, quite simply, no one has yet produced a device that can rival the iPod in terms of ease of use, good design and easy connectivity to online music stores such as iTunes.

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating -- and so far no one else's pudding is very good," he says.

(Additional reporting by Marie-Louise Moller)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...FAIR-MUSIC.xml





Bob Dylan Earns First No. 1 Album Since 1976
Katie Hasty

For the first time in 30 years, Bob Dylan topped the U.S. album charts Wednesday with "Modern Times," his third consecutive top-10 studio set.

The Columbia Records release sold 192,000 copies in the week ended September 3, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

Not only is it the legendary songwriter's first album to reach the throne since "Desire" in 1976, it's also his highest debuting album and his best sales week since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking data in 1991.

Dylan's previous album, 2001's "Love & Theft" opened at No. 5 with 133,760 copies. Before that, he peaked at No. 10 with 1997's "Time Out of Mind," which opened with 101,600 units. Aside from "Desire" and "Modern Times," only two other Dylan albums assumed the plateau on the chart: 1974's "Planet Waves" and 1975's "Blood on the Tracks."

After crowning The Billboard 200 last week, MTV girl-band Danity Kane slipped to No. 2 with 117,000 copies, a sales hit of 50 percent.

Young Dro's major label debut, "Best Thang Smokin'," bowed at No. 3 with 104,000 copies. With help from his smash hit "Shoulder Lean" (featuring T.I.), the Grand Hustle/Atlantic release also overtook OutKast's soundtrack to "Idlewild" (LaFace) at No. 1 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.

Christina Aguilera's former chart-topper "Back to Basics" (RCA) fell one to No. 4 on the Billboard 200, with 101,000 copies. Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" (Epic) entered the chart at No. 5, selling only a couple hundred albums fewer than "Back to Basics" with 101,000. Her last album, 2003's "In This Skin," originally peaked at No. 10 but hit No. 2 after a 2004 re-release.

The Disney soundtrack to "The Cheetah Girls 2" fell one to9 No. 6 with 80,000, while "Idlewild" tumbled five to No. 7 with 78,000.

Rapper Method Man scored his fifth consecutive top 10 debut, as "4:21 ... The Day After" (Def Jam) landed at No. 8 with 62,000 units. Another Def Jam effort followed at No. 9 in the form of the Roots' "Game Theory," which moved 61,000.

In its 48th week on the chart, Canadian rock band Nickelback's "All the Right Reasons" (Roadrunner) moved up two to No. 10.

Other big debuts this week include Too Short's Jive release "Blow the Whistle" (No. 14, 40,000), Ray Lamontagne's sophomore RCA set, "Till the Sun Turns Black" (No. 28, 28,000), Crossfade's sophomore Columbia effort, "Falling Away" (No. 30, 28,000) and Hatebreed's first Roadrunner album, "Supremacy" (No. 31, 27,000).

The Toby Keith-led "Broken Bridges" soundtrack, released on his Show Dog label, opened at No. 36, followed by the Atlantic debut of reggaeton star Tego Calderon, "The Underdog/El Subestimado," at No. 43. Singer/songwriter Pete Yorn bowed at a disappointing No. 50 with the Columbia album "Nightcrawler"; its predecessor, 2003's "Day I Forgot," debuted at No. 18.

Indie veteran M. Ward made his Billboard 200 debut with the Merge album "Post-War" at No. 146.

At 9.39 million units, overall CD sales were down 1.5 percent from last week's count and down 10 percent compared to the same week a year ago. Sales for 2006 were down 6 percent compared to 2005 at 354 million units.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...C-SALES-DC.XML





Sweden's Watergate
Via Slashdot

Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party's internal network has been illegally accessed several hundred times over a period of several months. Party treasurer Tommy Ohlstroem describes the incident as "wide-scale and systematic." Computer security company Sentor's investigation has revealed intrusions originating from computers belonging to Sweden's Liberal Party, and with the upcoming election in only two weeks many commentators are already describing this as Sweden's Watergate (Swedish only). An employee of the Young Liberals has admitted to unauthorized access, but a series of mysterious coincidences in the form of exceptionally well timed public announcements by the Liberal Party suggests the involvement of more than one person.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/09/04/1....shtml?tid=172





Poll: Online Viewers Shun Lengthy Videos
Anick Jesdanun

Only one in five online video viewers has watched or downloaded a full-length movie or television show, according to a new AP-AOL Video poll.

Overall, more than half of Internet users have watched or downloaded video. News clips were the most popular, seen by 72 percent of online video viewers, followed by short movie and TV clips, music videos, sports highlights and user-generated amateur videos.

The poll's findings come as major Hollywood studios and television networks are increasingly making their old and current programs available online - free with commercials, or for $1.99 an episode through services like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and Google Inc.'s video store. AOL announced deals with four studios last month to offer programs through its new video portal.

"Rome wasn't built in a day," said Benjamin Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, which is selling programs and giving away ad-supported shows through AOL. "A lot of progress has been made in terms of the quality of video and audio on the Web. It's not the same as broadcast or DVD, but it's improving."

Kevin Conroy, executive vice president for AOL, said its users have been watching longer and longer clips as more programs become available - starting with music videos, moving to television and now adding movies. Viewership should improve, he said, as more portable gadgets and other devices support Internet video.

For now, full-length programs are good for frequent travelers who like to watch movies on laptops and for television fans who might have missed an episode of a serial drama like "Lost," said Rob Enderle, an industry analyst with the Enderle Group. Few PCs these days are hooked up to television sets, he said, making longer programs less of a draw.

Enderle and other analysts consider online video key to AOL's ability to increase traffic to ad-supported sites and offset declines in revenues expected as the company drops subscription fees for millions of high-speed customers. Last month, AOL launched a video portal it envisions as a television guide for video clips from around the Internet, including those at rival sites.

The Associated Press also has its sights on video. In March, the news cooperative launched a service with Microsoft Corp. allowing AP member Web sites to offer free video news clips and share in ad revenue. The AP Online Video Network uses Microsoft's MSN Video technology.

The major networks have free and premium subscription offerings on their sites, while ABC and NBC are also selling news clips through iTunes.

The new survey found that relatively few - 7 percent of video users - have paid to watch any video online. Nearly three-quarters of online video users prefer free videos with ads.

You won't find Vanita Butler sitting in front of her computer watching a full-length movie or television show, even though she's an avid viewer of video on the Internet.

The 43-year-old saleswoman from Newark, Ohio, said she sees the Internet as more of a tool - for catching a news story or highlights from a NASCAR race. When she has time for entertainment, she and her husband prefer the television set.

"It's a little bit more of an intimate environment," Butler said of watching television. "We can sit and do it together."

Cheryl Landers, 50, a retail manager in Dedham, Mass., said she finds amateur clips funny and entertaining, but with two foster kids, she can never spare more than five minutes at a time, let alone a whole hour to watch an entire television episode. She said she usually has the TV on as background noise.

"I'm pretty much against paying for stuff on the Internet," said P.J. Park, 25, of Mount Rainier, Md.

Men and younger people were more likely to have watched online video, although one in five Internet users 65 and older and nearly half of all online women have. Joyce Wade, 66, of Dover, Del., said she likes the fact that she can watch news clips from the British Broadcasting Corp. and avoid watching "the same thing over and over again" on TV.

Troy Richards, a businessman from Scottsdale, Ariz., likes the control the Internet offers.

"I don't like to watch the news because it's depressing, so I just go on the computer and pick the stories I want to see," Richards said.

He also likes to watch Arizona Diamondbacks games online when he is at his summer home in San Diego.

"The quality is not nearly as good, but it gets the job done," he said.

Among other findings:

- Users of online video are drawn to its convenience and accessibility, but the bulk of them say their television viewing habits remain unchanged.

- One-third of video viewers - higher among high-speed Internet users - say they watch more video on the Internet now than a year ago.

- Urbanites and suburbanites - who have high-speed connections at home in greater numbers than rural residents - are more likely to have watched video online.

- Forty-six percent of video watchers with high-speed service view video at least once a week, compared with 22 percent of dial-up users. Dial-up users also were more likely to complain about download times.

The AP-AOL Video poll of 3,003 adults, including 1,347 online video watchers, was taken by telephone July 27-Aug. 9. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points for all adults and of 3 percentage points for online video watchers.

---

Associated Press Writer Will Lester, AP Manager of News Surveys Trevor Tompson and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius in Washington contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-05-09-49-02





Percentage Who Have Downloaded TV Shows Doubles, Yet Downloading TV Remains Early Adopter Activity
An Estimated 10 million Americans Have Downloaded A TV Show From The Internet

Recent Findings From The MOTION Digital Video Study Reveal Non-Traditional Video Consumption Poised For Growth

Press Release

Amid growing interest in user-generated video clips and increased experimentation with online movie distribution by the motion picture industry, a new study by global market research firm Ipsos indicates that an estimated 10 million Americans aged 12 and over have downloaded television shows from the Internet; seven million in the past 30 days.

New findings for MOTION—the company’s biannual study of digital video behaviors—reveal that younger Americans are driving growth in many digital video activities, including TV show downloading. Ten percent of young adults aged 18 to 34 (14% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 7% of 25- to 34-year-olds) have downloaded television programs from the Internet and seven percent have done so in the past month—nearly double the rate of television downloading overall.

This marks a significant increase in video downloads over the summer of 2005, when only two percent of Americans overall and five percent of 18- to 34-year-olds had ever downloaded video. Despite these gains, however, downloading larger video files such as full-length TV shows and movies remain firmly entrenched as an early adopter behavior online; it is less commonplace among the mainstream consumer traditional video channels currently serve.

Recent MOTION research also revealed some interesting diagnostic digital video behavior trends:

• Eighteen percent of Americans aged 12 and older have watched music videos streamed online (~41 million) and as many as 32 million have downloaded video games to their PCs (14%).
• Despite growing experimentation on behalf of the motion picture industry in distributing movies online, downloading full-length motion pictures is still a niche activity (just 3% of Americans have ever done this).
• Males continue to lead females in most digital video technology ownership and related behaviors, including downloading television.
• Overall, 27% of portable MP3 players have the ability to play video, a number that has been steadily increasing over the past year; 5% of MP3 player owners have paid to download television programs from the Internet versus only 1% of those who do not own MP3 players.
• Other activities are becoming more popular as well: one in ten Americans aged 12 and older has downloaded music videos (10%) and a similar proportion has downloaded movie trailers (9%).

“These findings underscore what many of us have guessed to be the case; namely, that the distribution of digital entertainment content—not just digital music—is a growing channel of entertainment consumption with exciting possibilities,” said Todd Board, Senior Vice President of the Ipsos Insight Technology & Communications practice and author of the study. “As we have witnessed with music, no single consumption method will necessarily dominate, while traditional media will continue to prosper for the foreseeable future. However, digital entertainment usage will continue to evolve based on shifting consumer choices and an increasing number of options.”

“Today, many consumers utilize the digital channel to access more ‘disposable’ video: content that is brief in nature and takes up little bandwidth, so it’s very easily consumed,” added Board. “This emerging genre of video is being driven by its growing availability on sites such as YouTube and MySpace, but also perpetuated by the ‘two-foot’ user interface of the PC, which is less than ideal for the larger, more involved genres such as the full-length movies dominant on the ‘ten-foot’ interface in consumers’ living rooms.”

Concluded Board, “Savvy product developers and marketers will need to cultivate a forward-looking view of the segments likely to emerge around unmet and under-met needs for video consumption. For digital music, the primary catalyst was the music enthusiast seeking individual song downloads that offered portability and ownership. For digital video, there are inherently more potential catalysts, including music videos, movie trailers, and increasingly, TV shows with intense audience involvement. Because of this variety in the drivers of digital video appeal, it’s critical to understand where digital entertainment aficionados have similar usage expectations for video as they currently have for music, and where they don’t.”

Methodology
Data on music downloading behaviors was gathered from MOTION, a new biannual shared-cost program by Ipsos Insight tracking trends and shifts in traditional video entertainment viewing attitudes and behaviors among Americans aged 12 and older.

Data for general population statistics included with this release were collected between June 23 and July 4, 2006, via a nationally representative U.S. sample of 1,143 respondents aged 12 and over. With a total sample size of 1,143, one can say with 95% certainty that the results are accurate to within +/- 2.90%.
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3177#





ShareReactor says Welcome back!
Webblurb

On behalf of the entire crew including the people working in the forum, we would like to welcome you back to ShareReactor.

As you browse the page you will notice that not much has changed. The categories are mostly the same, and a very large part of the old releases is still here. There are a few new revolutionary features though.

• First feature to mention is our sourcechecking system. Every file in our database is continuesly being checked for sources, in a way that does not overload the network. It is then being shown next to the filname as (F)ull/(P)artial sources. Notice that the number might not be 100% correct, but it will give a general idea about the amount of sources. NOTE: At the moment, files over 4GB are not being checked, and will always show as 0/0

• If a release is marked obsolete it means that there is a newer or better version available on ShareReactor. An example of this would be WinRAR 6.0 would be obsolete since WinRAR 8.0 is released on ShareReactor too. When a release is marked obsolete, a link will be clearly visible to the release that made it obsolete. NOTE: An obsolete release might be incomplete, although it does not have to be. Under all circumstances it is most of the time preferred to get the newer release.

• If a release is marked incomplete it means that one or more files in the release is unavailable on the network. Instead of deleting all the incomplete releases we decided to let them stay for historical reasons, and for the fact that altho episode 3 of your favourite TV show is not availible. the remaining 23 episodes might be.

At the moment the page may lack a little bit of functionallity, but all the important things are done, and you will be able to browse the page without any trouble. In case you are unable to find a link to our forums use this: ShareReactor forums

If you want to say "Hi, I'm back" or something, you can do it HERE

Enjoy your stay, and be sure to check back often! The administrators of the page have lots of neat things in the gobbiebag just waiting to be put online.
http://www.sharereactor.com/





New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artists’ Grants
Stephanie Strom

A new charity, United States Artists, will announce today an ambitious plan to provide support to working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence.

Fifty artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and at various career stages will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4.

“The individual artist has been at the back of the line in terms of support in American funding over the last decade, so any new system designed to get support directly into the hand of working artists is important,” said Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Panels of artists, critics, scholars and others in the arts are reviewing the applications of 300 artists who were nominated by 150 anonymous arts leaders around the country.

United States Artists declined to reveal any of the applicants’ names but said they range from an American Indian weaver who earns her living demonstrating her craft on the cruise ships that ply the Alaska coast to a Chinese-American photographer working in Minneapolis to a mariachi bandleader from Los Angeles.

“No one is a household name,” said Katharine DeShaw, the group’s executive director. “We want these awards to demonstrate the diversity of American art and the artists who create it.”

Four foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential and the Alaska-based Rasmuson— have put up a total of $20 million to create the organization and seed its initial operations, but the goal is for it to become a conduit between artists and individual donors.

“I believe there are individuals who would like to give to artists directly but worry they lack a system to help identify talent,” said Susan V. Berresford, president and chief executive of the Ford Foundation, which put $15 million into the project. “This creates a mechanism through which people can do that.”

This new charity plans to use gifts from individuals to build a permanent endowment to support and expand the grant program, but that, Ms. Berresford and others said, will be its biggest challenge.

United States Artists has attracted support from prominent national arts patrons like Agnes Gund and Eli and Edythe Broad.The hope is that these and other donors will eventually contribute $1 million each to endow a fellowship, much the same way that donors underwrite faculty chairs at universities, Ms. DeShaw said. “This could do for artists what the MacArthur Awards do for those recipients,” Mr. Broad said in a telephone interview, referring to the coveted “genius” grants that the MacArthur Foundation makes annually. Those grants total $500,000, paid out in $100,000 installments over five years.

This new charity was spurred in part by a 2003 Urban Institute study, “Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for U.S. Artists,” that documented the plight of artists since the mid-1990’s, when the federal government abolished many of the grants that the National Endowment to the Arts had made to individual artists amid controversies over works involving nudity, sexuality and other provocative themes.

State and local financing of the arts had also declined, as had foundation support, trends that have started to reverse only in the last year or so.

In any case, most public money goes to arts institutions, not to artists directly. “The chance for an artist to get money through an individual grant is something extremely rare,” said Barbara Kruger, an artist working in New York, Los Angeles and, increasingly, abroad.

There is no precise measure of how many grant programs directly support artists. The New York Foundation for the Arts, which itself makes such grants, maintains a database of about 2,900 such programs. The Urban Institute study found that more than $91 million was available to artists, but that two-thirds of cash grants that could be quantified were of less than $5,000. Only 21 percent of grants were of $10,000 or more.

Ms. Gund said the grants from the new charity come at a critical time, when basic costs of living like health costs and rent are rising and public support continues to ebb. “It’s a myth that most artists make money,” she said. “Most of them don’t even get a chance to show, and even if they do, they don’t make enough with sales to meet their needs and still have to work teaching or waiting tables or at another kind of job.”

For Roxane Butterfly, a tap-dancer, the $33,000 she got from the Guggenheim Foundation this year allowed her to continue her work after an injury sidelined her. “It literally saved my artistic career,” she said in a telephone interview from her native France. “If you don’t dance, you just don’t eat.”

John Waters, the iconoclastic filmmaker, is one of the United States Artists nominators. “I nominated people who have been doing work for a long period with great critical success but are still struggling financially,” he said in an interview from Provincetown, Mass. “They’re very representative of most of the artists in this country.”

Mr. Waters said he had never applied for a grant. His films were made with loans from his father and friends or, later, through investment partnerships. “I still don’t think if I was making ‘Pink Flamingos’ today I would ever get a grant,” he said, “no matter how liberal the organization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/ar...d56&ei=5087%0A





Samsung Displays New Wireless Technology
Burt Herman

Samsung Electronics Co. showed off its vision for the future of mobile technology Thursday, sending data wirelessly at blazing speeds to a moving minibus.

The connection was robust enough to support live images - including a high-definition movie - beamed from a conference the South Korean company is hosting here on fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless.

In a key step toward making the technology truly mobile, the device aboard the minibus switched seamlessly between two base stations - meaning the signal won't be lost when users are on-the-go.

The current prototype allows data transfers of 100 megabits per second, about 30 times typical broadband Internet speeds. It works even when the receiver is moving as fast as 75 mph.

But the promise is still far off: Currently, Samsung's data receiver is the size of a compact refrigerator. It won't be until 2008 that the device can be shrunk to fit in a mobile phone, said Lee Ki-tae, head of the company's telecommunications division.

And even then, frequencies need to be allocated and standards set, meaning the devices aren't expected to be in consumers' hands until after 2010.

The promises of yet another new wireless technology are familiar.

Mobile phone companies are still feeling the burn from their much-hyped third-generation technology. That cost billions in license fees and is now being implemented worldwide, but so far has yet to make much profit.

Now again, engineers boast of providing the world with even higher-speed wireless connections that make information accessible anywhere at anytime, enabling phone calls, quick movie and music downloads, and fast Web-surfing.

Wireless companies realize consumers need a truly compelling reason to embrace the gadgets that seek to blend different functions.

"Convergence has to bring real value to customers, otherwise customers won't buy it," said Alberto Ciarniello, a vice president at Italy's Telecom Italia.

Several conference participants mentioned the hunt for a "killer application" - a feature that people can't live without that draws users to a new technology.

But experts this time are arguing that simply getting online wirelessly at speeds far faster than now possible with most wired broadband connections will be enough to get people to open their wallets.

"The killer application is mobile Internet," said Siavash Alamouti, chief technology officer for the mobile wireless division of Intel Corp.

Meanwhile, another wireless technology called WiMax that is now emerging aims to set up wireless networks that may not be quite as fast as the promised fourth-generation, but still much speedier than today's average broadband connection.

South Korea has become the first country to offer limited WiMax service and plans to blanket the capital, Seoul, with the technology by early 2007, said Hong Won-pyo, an executive vice president at Korea Telecom.

U.S.-based Sprint Nextel Corp. has said it aims to launch WiMax networks in some American markets by late 2007, partnering with Samsung, Motorola Inc. and Intel.

Already, mobile phone companies are seeing the rapidly growing hunger of customers to do much more than just talk on their phones.

Cingular Wireless has 57.3 million subscribers in the United States, of which some 27 million - or nearly half - actively use data services, said Kristin Rinne, the company's chief technology officer.

"We are just at the beginning of a significant explosion," she said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-31-12-37-48





In a TiVo World, Television Turns Marketing Efforts to New Media
Stuart Elliott

MUCH of the ferment that is remaking Madison Avenue is centered on the changes in television, still the largest and arguably most powerful advertising medium. Two deals that are scheduled to be announced today are indicative of the ways TV is headed in new directions to meet the new needs of marketers.

One deal involves CBS, part of the CBS Corporation, and TiVo, the leader in digital video recorder technology. The agreement is intended to make it easier for TiVo subscribers to sample the four new series on the CBS schedule this fall: “The Class,” “Jericho,” “Shark” and “Smith.”

For instance, for a week beginning Monday, TiVo will offer its 4.4 million subscribers a preview of the premiere episode of “The Class,” a sitcom that broadcasts Sept. 18 on CBS.

The agreement is the first time that TiVo, which is trying to change its image as being unfriendly to advertisers, and a broadcast network have teamed up for a sneak peak of a new series. Previous preview deals struck by the broadcasters have been off television, offering computer users a chance to watch streaming video on Web sites like msn.com and yahoo.com.

The other agreement involves ITN Networks, a media sales company in New York with estimated annual billings of $300 million. ITN assembles customized national TV networks for advertisers from the commercial time it buys from local broadcast stations. ITN clients include Burger King, Capital One, Clorox, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Sara Lee and Sears.

A group of media heavyweights — Sony Pictures Television, Veronis Suhler Stevenson and the Zelnick Media Corporation — is buying a majority stake in ITN, spending an estimated $200 million initially as part of plans to eventually invest up to $250 million. The group also intends to expand ITN beyond broadcast TV into other realms like cable and satellite TV, the Internet and video games.

For all the focus on new media, “people will not stop watching television anytime soon,” said Strauss Zelnick, chief executive at Zelnick Media in New York, who will take the new post of chairman at ITN.

The problem with television is that “for years, it’s been a one-size-fits-all medium, when advertisers want to reach targeted audiences more effectively,” Mr. Zelnick said. “We’re trying to look around the corner and benefit from where the media market is going in the future.”

• The agreement between CBS and TiVo was developed with Interpublic Media, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. TiVo signed a multimillion-dollar advertising agreement with Interpublic last May, which was followed last week by a similar deal with the Omnicom Media Group division of the Omnicom Group.

“We now have comprehensive agreements with two of the top three advertising holding companies,” said Tom Rogers, chief executive at TiVo in Alviso, Calif. (The third is the WPP Group.)

“A year or more ago, TiVo was a real pariah in advertising circles,” Mr. Rogers said, because of fears it would enable viewers to more efficiently avoid commercials by zipping through or zapping them as they watched shows on their DVR’s.

Now, advertisers and agencies understand that spot-dodging “is a fact of modern television viewing behavior,” he added, “and how TiVo can be a force to make advertising more effective.” For example, a service called TiVo Product Watch gives viewers the option to download on demand commercials that are meant to be more creative and informative than conventional spots.

As part of the deal between TiVo and CBS, TiVo subscribers will be able, with one click of their remote controls, to record the premieres of all four CBS series newcomers when they are broadcast on Sept. 18 (“The Class”), Sept. 19 (“Smith”), Sept. 20 (“Jericho”) and Sept. 21 (“Shark”). It will be the first time that TiVo has grouped network shows to be recorded as a bundle.

The TiVo agreement is among various efforts by CBS to let consumers sample its prime-time series for the 2006-7 season. There will also be previews of “The Class” and “Shark” on 40,000 American Airlines flights this month and streaming video of “Jericho” on yahoo.com.

George F. Schweitzer, president at the CBS Marketing Group division of CBS, calls it part of an “outer-Net strategy” to attract viewers in a cluttered market. Other offbeat examples include advertising on eggs, postage stamps, water coolers, elevator doors and cruise ships.

“We’re in all the mainstream media, too,” Mr. Schweitzer said, “but we like being in the edgier places where our competitors are not.”

ITN, founded in 1983, is not an actual network like CBS, although it is included in the national Nielsen people meter ratings. Rather, ITN forms ad hoc networks on behalf of its clients based on viewer characteristics like age and sex. For instance, if Clorox wants to reach women ages 25 to 54 to sell them a new bleach, ITN buys commercial time on local TV stations in programs that appeal to those viewers.

The deal with the investment group “provides us with an opportunity to take the concept to a higher level,” said Todd Watson, president and chief operating officer at ITN, “and target viewers based on lifestyles and behaviors.”

One such effort is already under way, he said, which ITN calls the Mom’s Time Network, intended to help three marketers of packaged goods better aim their pitches at working women with children.

•The current managers of ITN will continue in their posts. In addition to Mr. Watson, they include Timothy J. Connors Jr., chief executive. Mr. Connors and Michael Kammerer have been the owners of ITN; they will retain a minority stake.

Zelnick Media also owns interests in Columbia Music Entertainment; National Lampoon; OTX, an online market research company; SkyMall, the in-flight catalog company; Time Life, the seller of recorded music; and UGO Networks, for online game players. ITN is its “second deal in the advertising space,” Mr. Zelnick said, after Naylor Publications, a trade publisher.

Executives from Veronis Suhler Stevenson and Sony Pictures Television will also join the ITN board, along with Mr. Zelnick. They include Kevin S. Waldman, managing director at Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank specializing in the media and information industries, and Steve Mosko, president at Sony Pictures Television.

Sony Pictures Television produces shows like “Days of Our Lives,” “Jeopardy,” “Rescue Me” and “Wheel of Fortune.” It is part of the Sony Pictures Entertainment division of the Sony Corporation of America, owned by the Sony Corporation of Japan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/bu...ia/05adco.html





Sci Fi Creates ‘Webisodes’ to Lure Viewers to TV
Jonathan D. Glater

Beginning tonight the television series “Battlestar Galactica” will travel from outer space into cyberspace. The Sci Fi Channel, which broadcasts the series, has created online mini-episodes, the first of which is scheduled to be posted at midnight.

The 10 Web segments, each just a few minutes long and viewable on devices ranging from iPods to laptops to desktops to full-size television sets, feature characters from the television show. And they have the same dark feel of broadcast episodes of “Galactica,” a post-apocalyptic survival tale of humans on the run after their home planets have been destroyed.

The mini-episodes will go online, one at a time, on Tuesday and Thursday nights until “Galactica’s” season premiere on Oct. 6. They focus on two soldiers in a new city built by humans fleeing Cylons, a race of machines that has wiped out human civilization elsewhere.

The two face difficult choices about how — or whether — to fight back against a new Cylon invasion, the climactic moment of last season. Their decisions will help explain their actions in future on-air episodes.

These Web segments are a bit of a gamble. Sci Fi executives are betting that people who are only glancingly familiar with the series — whose story line may be too complicated to follow for those who don’t know what happened in the first two seasons — will be able to follow the story told online.

The channel is hedging its bets by releasing a one-hour recap, called “The Story So Far,” summarizing the show to date. It will appear in September on several NBC Universal television channels (Sci Fi, USA, Sleuth, Bravo, Universal HD) and will be available free on the SciFi.com Web site, on iTunes, on YouTube.com, on Yahoo.com, on United Air Lines flights and at Universal theme parks.

Writing the story told in the Web segments posed a challenge because the episodes had to be short, lead up to the season premiere, be accessible to new viewers and look good on tiny screens. At the same time the shows had to be nonessential to the new season, so television viewers could follow the on-air series without having watched the Web content.

“It was challenging on several levels,” said Erik Storey, vice president of programming at Sci Fi. “Each of the Webisode chapters had to be close-ended, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and each of those chapters is going to be three minutes, four minutes. And there had to be a little cliffhanger ending for each one.”

To keep the Web segments viewable on tiny screens, “Battlestar” has used lots of close-ups of actors’ faces — plenty of emotion — and few sweeping vistas, Mr. Storey said.

“They’re very emotional, relatable conflicts that these guys are going through,” Mr. Storey said. “Because of that, we could really get in close with the camera.”

The “Galactica” segments are part of a broader effort by NBC Universal, which owns Sci Fi, to make new, original video and audio material — content — available on the Internet. David Eick, an executive producer, has a video-blog, or vlog, that shows steps in the making of the show, and another executive producer, Ronald D. Moore, keeps a blog and prepares a weekly podcast designed to be listened to while watching the show.

Sci Fi also has also posted podcasts of writers’ meetings to hash out the plots of episodes of the television series and made it possible to watch entire episodes online. Mr. Howe, executive vice president and general manager of Sci Fi, said the network plans to augment online offerings for other shows in the future too.

The channel bills the Web segments move as a promotion to drum up interest in the third season of the series. “This is a way to get people talking about the show a month before it airs,” said Craig E. Engler, general manager of SciFi.com. The Web segments, whose cost Sci Fi would not disclose, will be free, unsponsored and carry no advertisements.

The Web segments raise questions about how a show’s writers are compensated: Are Web segments the same as episodes, so “Galactica’s” writers and actors should be compensated at union rates? Or are they something else, for which networks can pay less?

“All of these new programming formats and media are causing a great deal of uncertainty and angst about whether fair compensation is going to be negotiated and paid,” said Christopher Murray, a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, which in the past has worked for General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.

NBC Universal filed a complaint against the Writers Guild of America last month, charging that the union violated labor law by telling members not to cooperate in the production of Web segments. In a statement NBC Universal said it “has a contract in place with its TV series producers to create promotional, made-for-Internet content, which include ‘Webisodes.’ We’re asking our producers to fulfill their obligations in creating these materials and we’re taking appropriate legal action to discourage the WGA’s interference.”

Mona Mangan, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East, said that the problem is the online segments do not fit so neatly into an existing category. “They’re trying to stretch the concept of promotion,” she said. “It doesn’t fit.”

It is not obvious how to measure the success of the online segments. Sci Fi executives said they would monitor how often the Webisodes are the subject of online discussions and of course would see how many people tune in to the season premiere.

“Never having done it, you’re never really sure what you’re going to get out of it,” Mr. Engler said. “Obviously if 50 million people watch them in the course of a week, that’s a great success.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/ar...on/05gala.html





CBS Unit Launches Web Sports Channels
Anick Jesdanun

Football and other sporting events from dozens of colleges and universities will be available live over the Internet through a service launching Friday.

Notre Dame games will be free, while Navy, Stanford and other schools will charge $4.95 to $9.95 a month each for an "All-Access" broadband channel that includes live audio and video feeds of some games, news conferences, highlights, play-by-play animation and other features.

CBS Corp.'s CSTV Networks Inc., which is running the service, will also sell access to CSTV XXL, the entire package of more than 100 schools for $14.95 a month or $99.95 a year.

"Fans of large schools no longer have to wait for that single game on broadcast or cable," said Brian Bedol, chief executive of CSTV. "For millions of fans of smaller schools, they will have access to live sports for the first time no matter where they live."

CSTV joins companies like SportsCast Network LLC and Penn Atlantic LLC in helping colleges and universities bring games to the Internet. Many schools and some entire conferences are already showing football and other sports on their Web sites, and the CSTV offering expands the number of participants and games available online.

Schools initially participating range from the Air Force to Xavier, and from the University of Washington to the University of Miami. Most are Division I schools.

CSTV will have channels for all schools in the Mountain West and Conference USA. It will also have separate conference channels for those two, along with Big East, Big West, Pacific 10, Southland and West Coast.

CSTV and the schools will generally share revenues from subscriptions, advertising, merchandise and other sales.

The schools often produce the material already for broadcast, video scoreboards and other purposes, so getting footage online likely won't require a heavy investment by either the schools or CSTV.

Because of existing television contracts, however, live video of football and basketball games will initially be limited.

Notre Dame, for instance, promises audio only for every football and basketball game, but video will generally be limited to less-prominent sports, such as hockey, baseball and volleyball, Bedol said. Video highlights of football and basketball will be available.

Bedol said every school will have some live video, but only half will show some football games and up to two-thirds will carry basketball games. Audio is expected for most of the schools, primarily for football and basketball.

He also said more schools should be able to carry video as they re-negotiate deals with television rights holders. In some cases, he said, video could be restricted to viewers outside a broadcaster's coverage area, and a school might share online revenues with the rights holder.

The launch of the CSTV broadband channels, which require recent Windows 2000 or XP computers and Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 6 browser, come as video technology improves and availability of high-speed Internet access widens.

Currently, only a handful of games each week are chosen for national broadcast, primarily featuring Top 25 Division I-A teams, and contests shown regionally may not be available to fans and alumni who have moved far from their alma mater.

The online offerings from CSTV, which already shows some games on its cable television channel, expands access to the contests.

"It is not designed as a substitute for television," Bedol said. "This is really for the fans that either (don't) have access to a game on TV, or the sports or teams they follow don't get on TV."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-31-20-02-56





EA Video Games To Carry Ads That Change
Matt Slagle

The upcoming video game "Need for Speed Carbon" will have more than just gleaming sports cars and streets to race on: Drivers also will be speeding past real-time advertisements for upcoming films, automobiles and other products.

Like many other games, previous versions of "Need for Speed" had static ads and product placements that cannot be changed once the game was packaged and sold on store shelves.

But with "Need for Speed Carbon," available in late October, players with PCs connected to the Internet or using Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox Live service will see ads that change over time.

In two deals announced Thursday, Electronic Arts Inc. said it will start bringing dynamic ads to its video games for the Xbox 360 and PC platforms this fall.
Redwood City, Calif.-based EA, the world's largest video game publisher, said it was partnering with Microsoft's Massive Inc. to deliver the ads to up to four games, including "Need for Speed Carbon." Separately, EA inked a deal with IGA Worldwide Inc. in New York to deliver ads in the upcoming sci-fi shooter "Battlefield 2142."

Financial terms were not disclosed.

For gamers, it means once-static billboards or posters in the game worlds might instead promote an upcoming film one day and a brand of soft drink the next.

The moves come as video games are increasingly seen as an important way for advertisers and marketers to reach the elusive 18- to 34-year-old demographic, a group in which many have switched off television in favor of games, Massive Chief Executive Mitch Davis said.

Chip Lange, EA's vice president of online commerce, said it was important that the ads don't disrupt a player's experience.

"In a racing game, advertising is not only nice to have, but it's an essential component to create the fiction of being there," he said. "This agreement with Massive allows us to vary what relevant ads are served to the game player."

The ads can even be tailored to target specific regions, such as the United States or Europe, company officials said.

Jeff Brown, an EA spokesman, said the company would use the system in additional games besides "Need for Speed," but he didn't say which ones. "Need for Speed" is one of EA's top franchises, along with the Madden football games.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-31-12-24-41





Online Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe
Seth Schiesel

SEOUL, South Korea — At 10:43 p.m. one recent Saturday, in a smoky basement gaming parlor under a bank in this sprawling city’s expensive Daechi neighborhood, Yoon Chang Joon, a 25-year-old orc hunter known online as Prodigy, led his troops into battle. “Move, move!” he barked into a microphone around his neck as a strike team of some 40 people seated at computer terminals tapped at keyboards and stormed the refuge of the evil plague lord Heigan, fingers flying.

As Mr. Yoon’s orders echoed from speakers around the room, Heigan reeled under an onslaught of spells and swords. In six minutes he lay dead. The online gaming guild called the Chosen had taken another step in World of Warcraft, the online fantasy game whose virtual, three-dimensional environment has become a global entertainment phenomenon among the cybersavvy and one of the most successful video games ever made.

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

And while games stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” have often struggled abroad, especially in Asia, World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980’s.

The game has more players in China, where it has engaged in co-promotions with major brands like Coca-Cola, than in the United States. (There are more than three million players in China, and slightly fewer than two million in the United States. And as with most video games, a clear majority of players worldwide are male.)

There is a rabid legion of fans here in South Korea, which has the world’s most fervent gaming culture, and more than a million people play in Europe. Most World of Warcraft players pay around $14 a month for access.

“World of Warcraft is an incredibly polished entertainment experience that appeals to more sorts of different players than any game I’ve seen,” said Rich Wickham, who heads Microsoft’s Windows games unit. “It’s fun for both casual players and for the hard-core players for whom the game is more just than a game: it’s a lifestyle. Just as important, Blizzard has made a game that has a broader global appeal than what we’ve seen before.”

Perhaps more than pop music or Hollywood blockbusters, even the top video games traditionally have been limited in their appeal to the specific regional culture that produced them. For example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe. Meanwhile many Japanese games, with their distinctively cutesy anime visual style, often fall flat in North America.

One of the main reasons Western software companies of all kinds have had difficulty in Asia is that piracy is still rampant across the region. Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly.

Since the game’s introduction in November 2004 the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players, helping them with both technical advice and billing concerns.

“Ultimately, what I’d like is for the user to feel like they are having a very polished entertainment experience,” said Mike Morhaime, 38, Blizzard’s president (and a gamer since he first encountered Pong in 1976). “We’d like players to associate our name with quality, so if they see a box on the shelf and it says Blizzard Entertainment, they don’t need to know anything more than that.”

The basic genre that World of Warcraft belongs to is called the massively-multiplayer online game, or M.M.O. The “massive” refers to the fact that in an M.M.O., thousands of players simultaneously occupy one vast virtual 3-D world. (In a more traditional online game like Quake or Counter-Strike, there are generally fewer than a dozen people in each arena.)

Blizzard runs hundreds of copies of the Worlds of Warcraft universe, known as servers, and there might be a few thousand players on any server at any given time. There are servers customized for six written languages: English, both simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, German and French. Spanish is in development.

To begin, a player creates an avatar, or character, customizing its physical appearance as well as race and profession, each of which has different skills and abilities. An elf druid might specialize in healing, for example, while an orc rogue could be an expert in stealth and backstabbing. The player is then set loose in a huge colorful fantasy world with cities, plains, oceans, mountains, forests, rivers, jungles, deserts and of course dungeons.

The players can explore on their own or team up with others to conquer more imposing challenges. As a character completes quests and defeats monsters, it gains new abilities and collects more powerful magical equipment that in turn allow it to progress to the next set of challenges. Players can fight other players if they choose, but much of the focus is on teaming up with other users in guilds like the Chosen to battle automated foes.

There were massively-multiplayer games before World of Warcraft, just as there were MP3 players before Apple’s iPod. Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category.

“I think the real key to WOW’s success has been the sheer variety and amount of things to do, and how easy it is to get into them,” said Kim Daejoong, 29, a doctor of traditional herbal medicine in Iksan, Korea, who had traveled to Seoul for one of the Chosen’s regular in-person sessions.

“Hard-core gamers will play anything, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Kim said. “But in order to be a mainstream game for the general public, it has to be easily accessible, and there have to be lots of things for you to do, even alone. What WOW has done better than other games is be able to appeal to both audiences — hard-core players and more casual players — all within one game and bring them together. That’s why you’ve seen people all over the world get into the game.”

Hours after the Chosen finished their raid in Seoul, a United States guild called Violent stormed Blackwing Lair, home of the black dragon Nefarian and his minions.

One of the players was Jason Pinsky, 33, the chief technology officer for an apparel company in Manhattan. Mr. Pinsky is not unusual among serious players in that he has logged more than 125 days (3,000 hours) on his main character, a hunter.

“I play this game six nights a week from 8 p.m. to midnight,” he said in a telephone interview. “When I say that to people, sometimes they look at me a little funny. But then I point out that most people watch TV at least that much, and television is a totally mindless experience.

“Instead of watching ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as a three-hour experience, I am now participating in the epic adventure.”

It is rare for guilds in North America and Europe to get together in real life, partly because of geographic distance and partly because of the social stigma often associated with gaming in the West.

In Asia, however, online players like those in the Chosen often want to meet in the flesh to put a real face on the digital characters they have been having fun with. Even in the United States, more and more players are coming to see online games as a way to preserve and build human connections, even if it is mostly through a keyboard or microphone.

“Think about it: I’m a 33-year-old guy with a 9-to-5 job, a wife and a baby on the way,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I can’t be going out all the time. So what opportunities do I have to not only meet people and make new friends but actually spend time with them on a nightly basis? In WOW I’ve made, like, 50 new friends, some of whom I’ve hung out with in person, and they are of all ages and from all over the place. You don’t get that sitting on the couch watching TV every night like most people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/te...aee&ei=5087%0A





The Game Is on to Woo the Elusive Female Player
Doreen Carvajal

In one publicity photo, the Frag Dolls loll among soft pink pillows, gripping video game consoles with demure smiles and bright eyes riveted to a computer screen.

This is no slumber party. The stylish, fresh-faced girls are one of the latest weapons in the gaming industry’s effort to smash the stereotypical image of the gamer as a geeky teenage boy in a dark basement, battling aliens.

The French computer game giant Ubisoft is backing three teams of girl game players — one each in Britain, France and the United States, and each named Frag Dolls — on the competitive circuit, while the girls help Ubisoft promote computer play. Other companies are also intensifying efforts to tap the feminine side of computers in a $29 billion industry that is trying to cope with declining sales as consumers await the arrival of a new generation of consoles.

“The industry is starting to move, but it really needed a kick,” said Gabrielle Kent, a game developer and organizer of a recent conference on women in games in Britain. “It’s been a really slow process because the industry is so male-dominated.”

But things are starting to change in the gaming industry, where developers and engineers are typically guys with a penchant for creating action heroes and buxom female sidekicks. Today’s producers are starting to lay down their weapons and talk about the importance of video play infused with depth and emotion.

At the Edinburgh Entertainment Interactive Festival last month, one keynote address was about the need to recruit more women in the business.

“It’s a massively underserved and overlooked segment of the market,” said David P. Gardner, chief operating officer of Electronic Arts, the leading video game company.

“We don’t want to be just for the stereotypical spotty male teenager,” he said. The company’s philosophy was “not to make games for girls, but to make products that are more socially inclusive.”

The Entertainment Software Association has also tried to reach across the gender divide with tougher enforcement of exhibitor rules for the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last May. The association threatened $5,000 fines for the appearance in exhibition booths of bikini-clad women, representing female characters in games. Some women in the gaming industry heralded the change, arguing that the models discouraged girls from participating.

In Germany, where game sales rose less than 1 percent in the last six months, to 469 million euros, or $602 million, organizers of a game convention in Leipzig struck alliances with a magazines for teenage girls and a popular television show, “The Dome,” to produce a rock concert featuring female German pop stars and Lordi, the ghoulish heavy-metal winner of the Eurovision song contest.

“In Germany, we’re very traditional and it’s probably why the girls get the dolls and the boys get the Game Boys,” said Olaf Wolters, managing director of BIU, the German interactive game association. “That is why we have to work on the parents, so they bring in the girls.”

Convention organizers teamed up with the University of Leipzig to develop a family section with areas devoted to video games about singing stars, horses or “My Animal Hospital.”

Game developers are loath to create what they call “pink games” for girls and women. But they are aware that female players tend to scorn games of wanton destruction, preferring simulation games, which allow them to create worlds where the gameplay is more important than winning, or counting cadavers.

The best-selling example of that is a video game franchise called the Sims, published by Electronic Arts, which in the last six years has sold 70 million copies of its various titles, more than 60 percent of them to women or girls.

There is no goal or objective to the game other than controlling a hermetic suburb inhabited by Barbie-doll-like Sims who eat, work and decorate. They also carry on secret love affairs; victims of spectacular breakups are often consoled with shopping sprees.

Will Wright, the game’s designer, refers to this world as a “digital dollhouse.” He is now presiding over the development of a game called Spore, expected to be released next year, that will allow players to control the evolution of creatures, from the tidal pool to intergalactic civilization.

The Sims also reflects the evolution of the industry’s efforts to reach a mass audience that is looking for something more than an adrenaline boost. “I’ve moved away from the shooting games myself,” said Rod Humble, 40, executive producer of the Sims franchise. “There are certain games where you come away feeling kind of angry or at least excited. I’m not sure I want to be thrilled anymore.”

With a new generation of game consoles expected to arrive by Christmas from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, developers are already betting that they will attract a mass audience. Ubisoft, sponsor of the Frag Doll teams, is also working on games for the new consoles, using animation that will allow characters to better express their feelings through words and movements.

Mathilde Abgrall, 24, a player and coach on the Frag Doll team in France, still likes to destroy opponents in games like Counter-Strike or Rayman, but yearns for more of a tale.

“Girls want a good story, a good scenario,” she said. “They want to be able to identify themselves to the character they are playing. Somebody much more like them. Someone with more personality, more character and maybe a little more fat and less, uh, physical.”

Next year, Ubisoft will publish a game called Alive that features characters who rely on their instincts and each other to endure after an earthquake. It reflects the company’s focus on an “action plus” style, according to Yves Guillemot, chief executive of Ubisoft.

“It’s more oriented toward drama, more life in characters, more depth,” he said, adding, “It’s still about surviving, but you can’t resolve things by shooting only.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/te...MVnfGik0NvClTQ





I.B.M. to Build Supercomputer Powered by Video Game Chips
John Markoff

The Department of Energy said Wednesday that it had awarded I.B.M. a contract to build a supercomputer capable of 1,000 trillion calculations a second, using an array of 16,000 Cell processor chips that I.B.M. designed for the coming PlayStation 3 video game machine.

The initial phase of the contract will be for $35 million. There will be two more construction phases through the completion and installation of the system in 2008. The total cost is expected to be $110 million.

The choice of the Cell chip, which was initially designed with Sony and Toshiba for video game and animation applications, is indicative of how much the computer industry has been transformed in the last decade. It is now being driven largely by technologies originally intended for home and consumer applications.

The machine, called Roadrunner, will be installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and it is intended to safeguard and sustain the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. The contract is one of several initiatives in response to Japan’s plans to build computers intended to break the so-called petaflop supercomputer barrier of 1,000 trillion calculations a second.

The Los Alamos system is one of five efforts in the United States to reach petaflop status by 2010.

The Roadrunner will use the Sony Cell Broadband Engine as a specialized processor, with a corresponding array of Advanced Micro Devices Opteron microprocessors. This kind of hybrid design is increasingly being used as designers scramble to reach ever-greater computing speeds.

“It’s like adding a turbo to a car engine,” said Steven J. Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is a consultant at Los Alamos. “Hybrid computing will become a standard way of enhancing the performance of off-the-shelf processors.”

But several computer scientists said that hybrid designs had not yet been proven for general-purpose supercomputing uses. “There are a number of risks involved,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee. “It will be a challenge and it’s still unknown how we get to that performance.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/te...ref=technology





New Name and Strategy for Chip Division at Philips
Steve Lohr

The semiconductor unit of Philips Electronics is adopting a new name, NXP, as it becomes a stand-alone company and pursues a strategy that relies heavily on supplying chips to the fast-growing consumer market for advanced electronics products.

NXP, being adopted today, stands for Next Experience, the company said. The new name is meant to suggest that the company will focus largely on chips to improve the performance of the next generation devices used by consumers, including digital televisions, multimedia cellphones, electronic passports and digital cash and identification systems.

Last month, Philips Electronics agreed to sell 80 percent of its semiconductor division to a group of private equity firms — Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, Silver Lake Partners and AlpInvest Partners — for 3.4 billion euros ($4.35 billion). Two weeks ago, two other private equity firms, Bain Capital and Apax, joined the buyers’ group.

As part of the deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, the investors will take on 4 billion euros ($5.12 billion) of the new company’s debt. The company will be based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

The new name and the strategy, analysts say, bear the clear imprint of the chief executive of the new company, Frans van Houten. He spent eight years as a senior executive in the consumer electronics division of Philips before assuming control of the semiconductor business in 2004.

Mr. van Houten’s experience in consumer electronics, analysts say, shaped his view that the best future for Philips’s semiconductor unit would be to make chips for what he refers to as “connected consumer devices”: products for entertainment, communication and commerce that typically can handle images and sound, and can share information with other devices.

The market for consumer device chips is growing faster than that of chips for the personal computer industry, which is maturing.

“Consumer technology was where the growth is, and van Houten has pushed the Philips semiconductor business in that direction,” said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a consulting firm. “And he was able to communicate the long-term opportunity in this connected consumer market to the investors.”

Mr. van Houten, 46, was often mentioned as the most likely successor to Gerard Kleisterlee, 59, the chief executive of Philips Electronics.

“Van Houten was crucial to the deal getting done — a C.E.O.-style guy with a broad background, someone the investors are comfortable with,” said Rob Enderle, an independent technology analyst in San Jose, Calif.

The Philips semiconductor business, analysts say, has been somewhat hamstrung inside the larger company. It was often trying to sell its chips to companies that compete with the consumer electronics business of the parent company, like Sony, Toshiba and Matsushita, which markets Panasonic products. These companies are understandably reluctant to forge close partnerships with a supplier that is an arm of a corporate rival.

As a separate company, NXP will no longer have to overcome that hurdle. Removing that barrier could lift sales by 25 percent or so over the next few years, estimates Richard Doherty, director of Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

With sales last year of 4.62 billion euros ($5.9 billion), the Philips semiconductor business was among the world’s top 10 chip makers. In the last two years, under Mr. van Houten, the business grew by 19 percent and moved from a loss to profitability, with a pretax profit of 307 million euros ($393 million) last year.

The semiconductor business requires sizable capital investments and in the past it has swung in unpredictable cycles. Mr. van Houten said he was intent on making the business less volatile, delivering steady growth and pretax profit margins in the range of 5 to 15 percent.

But the parent company decided it wanted to get out of the semiconductor business to focus on what it regards as its two core strengths: health care products, like medical imaging machines and defibrillators, and what it calls the lifestyle market, with offerings that range from electric shavers to flat-screen televisions.

Mr. Kleisterlee has said Philips plans to drop “Electronics” from its corporate name.

In using XP as corporate shorthand for “experience,” NXP is following the lead of another technology company, Microsoft. The version of its operating system introduced in 2001 is called Windows XP.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/te...gy/01chip.html





Plan at Intel May Include Many Layoffs
Laurie J. Flynn

Executives from Intel, the largest chip maker, are expected to reveal on Tuesday the results of a sweeping evaluation of the company’s internal operations that could include layoffs of thousands of employees.

The moves would be the culmination of what Paul S. Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, promised in April would be a broad review of operations to reduce costs and increase efficiency, after Intel’s announcement of disappointing financial results.

Mr. Otellini told Intel employees in an e-mail message sent Thursday that he would announce the results of the study to workers via a company Webcast on Tuesday, according to an Intel employee who requested anonymity.

Referring to Intel’s promise that it would announce results of the study by the end of September, Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel, said: “We said that we intend to disclose the results of the structure and efficiency study during the quarter and we’re on track to do that.” Mr. Mulloy declined to provide details or comment on the possibility of layoffs.

In April, Mr. Otellini told a meeting of financial analysts that the company would restructure to focus on reducing manufacturing costs and identifying weak business units. “You will see a leaner, more agile and more efficient Intel,” Mr. Otellini told analysts at the time. Wall Street analysts have been eager to see Intel reduce costs, and most have expected Intel to announce layoffs this fall.

Nathan Brookwood, a technology consultant, said he expected Intel to reduce its work force drastically, perhaps by eliminating redundant projects.

In July, Intel announced plans to sell parts of its communications business and to lay off 1,000 managers. Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has about 100,000 employees.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/te...01layoffs.html





FCC Wants to Reconsider Indecency Ruling on `NYPD Blue' and 3 Other Programs

Will reconsider rulings
Larry Neumeister

The Federal Communications Commission rushed to judgment in concluding that "NYPD Blue" and three other television programs violated rules governing the broadcast of indecent and profane material, an FCC lawyer said Tuesday.

The lawyer, Eric D. Miller, asked an appeals court to delay hearing a challenge to the FCC's findings for two months so its board can hear the opinions of the owners of the programs and reconsider its rulings, which carried no fines.

In court papers, the FCC said it skipped its usual process of soliciting responses from the broadcasters because it believed the orders responded to requests from broadcasters for guidance on what violates the FCC's new indecency and profanity rules.

The FCC said it acted faster than usual and did not propose fines for any of the programs, concluding only that the programs "apparently" violated the statutory and regulatory prohibitions on indecency and profanity.

Lawyers for several broadcasting companies told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals they ultimately want to challenge the rules, which they say have spoiled their First Amendment rights, exposing them to hefty fines for accidental broadcasts of isolated and fleeting expletives.

ABC Television Network, NBC Universal Inc., CBS Broadcasting Inc., Fox and their network affiliate associations challenged a March 15 FCC order resolving indecency complaints based on television programs that aired between February 2002 and 2004.

The broadcasters said the enforcement of federal indecency rules is inconsistently applied since the FCC in 2004 decided that virtually any use of certain expletives would be considered profane and indecent. Millions of dollars in fines have been levied based on those rules.

The appeals challenged the FCC's finding that profane language was used on the CBS program "The Early Show" in 2004, incidents involving Cher and Nicole Richie on the "Billboard Music Awards" shows broadcast by Fox in 2002 and 2003 and various episodes of the ABC show "NYPD Blue" that aired in 2003.

The FCC said it did not issue fines in those cases because the incidents occurred before the 2004 ruling.

While none of the cases involved NBC, the network filed a petition to intervene on behalf of the other networks and stations.

In an interview, attorney Carter G. Phillips, speaking on behalf of Fox Television Stations Inc., said the aim of the broadcasting companies was to have the appeals court declare that the March 15 orders regarding the four programs were unconstitutional.
He said the broadcasters want the FCC to return to the enforcement system that did not penalize accidental expletives.

In court papers, Phillips wrote that Fox's principal concern is that a word that triggers an FCC fine, such as one uttered during a baseball game by an unhappy player or manager, might be inadvertently broadcast.

"The prospect of such massive fines obviously forces Fox to steer far clear of even constitutionally protected speech," he wrote.

The appeals court reserved decision on whether to let the FCC take the case back.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1011694





Wi-Fire Extends Wireless Range to 1,000 Feet
Cyrus Farivar

A new Pennsylvania-based startup, hField Technologies, has just gotten FCC approval for their new supercharged WiFi antenna, the Wi-Fire. The USB antenna boosts reception of faint WiFi signals, extending the range of existing networks up to 1,000 feet. hField's founders, recent Lehigh University graduates, had originally built the product for a student entrepeneurial challenge, and won first place, including the prize of $2,500. Earlier this summer, hField also recieved $25,000 of funding from a state-funded development organization, and the rest, as they say, is history (waiting to happen). The Wi-Fire is now on sale through hField directly for $150, though unfortunately without Mac support for now, it seems -- although if you have a Windows computer, it's guaranteed to put as big of a smile on your face as this girl's, though not nearly as big as these dudes'.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/01/w...to-1-000-feet/





Jail for Hate on Web Site

A judge handed a Two Hills man an 16-month sentence Friday for promoting hatred on his website in what is being called a groundbreaking Internet hate-crime case.

Reni Sentana-Ries was convicted last December by a jury on one count of promoting hatred through his site called Federation of Free Planets, which denies the Holocaust and says Jews created diseases such as AIDS and Ebola.

Court of Queen's Bench Justice Philip Clarke gave the 63-year-old jail time instead of a conditional sentence and prohibited him from using the Internet for 36 months. He also ordered the “appalling” website shut down. It still operates out of the United States.

The maximum sentence was two years.

“There is a complete absence of any mitigating circumstances except for the first time offence and an absence of remorse,” Clarke said.

“He sincerely believes the hate he has posted on his website.”

Crown prosecutor Steven Bilodeau said the case sets "a benchmark" for similar Internet hate cases.

Read Saturday’s Edmonton Journal for more details.
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjourna...f817b5a265&k=0





State Supreme Court To Hear Internet Libel Case

The California Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in San Francisco Tuesday on whether someone who posts a defamatory comment by another person on the Internet can be sued for libel.

Two civil liberties groups say the court’s eventual ruling, due in three months, could have far-reaching implications for free speech on the Internet.

While the case before the court concerns individuals—a Canadian doctor seeking to sue a women’s health activist for posting a third person’s comment about him—the court’s ruling could also determine whether Internet service providers can be held liable when they knowingly allow defamatory remarks to be posted.

Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said last week “it would be a disaster” if the state high court allows such lawsuits.

“The Internet would not be the rich and diverse place it is now,” Opsahl said.

The foundation joined with the American Civil Liberties Union in a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to find that the federal Communications Decency Act protects individuals and Internet service providers from such lawsuits.

The two groups wrote in the brief, “Online forums are the modern soapboxes of our age, where the public can debate and comment on the issues of the day, allowing discourse on the widest range of topics and opinions.”

But Oakland attorney Christopher Grell, representing Canadian physician Terry Polevoy, argued in an opposing brief that prohibiting libel lawsuits would violate his client’s right to try to protect his good name.

Grell wrote that activist Ilena Rosenthal’s interpretation of the law “would leave virtually every Internet user or service provider free to post, republish or have published on their Web site whatever anyone wants to post or republish, no matter how libelous and no matter how much notice or proof of the libel is provided.”

In the case before the court, Polevoy sued Rosenthal in Alameda County Superior Court in 2001 for posting comments about Polevoy by another person, Timothy Bolen, on the Web sites of two alternative medicine newsgroups.

At the time, Rosenthal was a breast implant awareness activist in San Diego.

The message alleged that Polevoy, who opposed alternative medicine, had stalked a female radio announcer. The doctor claimed the stalking allegation was false and defamed him.

Rosenthal contends she is protected from the lawsuit by the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields Internet service providers and users from being sued for posting statements by third parties.

But Polevoy claims Rosenthal is not covered by the law because she is a “distributor” who publicized the statements rather than a user.

Superior Court Judge James Richman dismissed the case, but in 2003, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeal in San Francisco reinstated the lawsuit.

The appeals court said the federal law doesn’t protect people who intentionally post a defamatory comment while knowing or having reason to know the statement is false.

Although the court did not rule directly on Internet service providers, the reasoning of the ruling suggested that service providers could be held liable as well.

Rosenthal then appealed to the state high court, which announced in 2004 that it would hear the case.

The hourlong arguments will be heard at 2 p.m. Tuesday in the panel’s courtroom at the state building in San Francisco. The seven-member court will then have 90 days to issue a ruling.
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_247154828.html





G’day, Cow! Farmers Say Animals Have Accents

Group of British herdsmen say they hear moos with different drawls

Cows have regional accents, a group of British farmers claims, and phonetics experts say the idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Lloyd Green, from southwest England, was one of a group of farmers who first noticed the phenomenon.

“I spend a lot of time with my Friesians, and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl,” he said, referring to the breed of dairy cow he owns.

“I’ve spoken to the other farmers in the West Country group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds.

“I think it works the same as with dogs — the closer a farmer’s bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent.”

Birds, too?
Dom Lane, spokesman for a group called the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers to which Green belongs, said it contacted John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at University College London, who said that a similar phenomenon had been found in birds.

“You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country. This could also be true of cows,” Wells said on the group’s Web site (www.farmhousecheesemakers.com).

According to Lane, accents among cows probably develop in a similar way as among humans, and resulted from spending time with farmers with differing accents.

“Apparently the biggest influence on accents is peer groups — on children in the playground, for example,” he said. “Herds are quite tight-knit communities and don’t tend to leave the area.”

He added that more scientific research was needed to prove what was just an anecdotal theory at this stage.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14503285/





Texan Foils U.K. Burglary Via Beatles Webcam

Man watching over Internet spots crime in progress, alerts local police

An American helped foil a burglary in northern England while watching a Beatles-related Webcam, police said Friday.

The man from Dallas was using a live camera link to look at Mathew Street, an area of Liverpool synonymous with the Beatles and home to the Cavern Club, where the band regularly played.

He saw intruders apparently breaking into a sports store and alerted local police.

"We did get a call from someone in Dallas who was watching on a Webcam that looks into the tourist areas, of which Mathew Street is one because of all the Beatles stuff," a Merseyside Police spokeswoman said.

"He called directly through to police here." Officers were sent to the scene, and three suspects were arrested.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14512473/





Local News

Toilet Bombs Keep ‘Prince Of Darknet’ In Jail

Judge denies bail for alleged Net pirate after portable toilet blast charges
John Christoffersen

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - A Weston man once called one of the Internet's most notorious pirates of music and movies is too dangerous to be released from prison following charges that he blew up several portable toilets, a federal judge ruled.

U.S. Magistrate Holly Fitzsimmons ordered Bruce Forest to undergo a medical evaluation and rejected efforts by his family to release him on bond.

Forest was charged in May with seven counts of using explosives to destroy property and seven counts of discharging a firearm in connection with the explosions from last October through March.

No one was injured.

"We're at a loss to explain why he was doing this, other than the excitement of blowing things up," Weston Police Chief Anthony Land said in March when Forest was arrested on state charges.

Most of the explosions occurred at night in isolated areas, but the last blast in Norwalk occurred during the day in a heavily populated area, authorities said. The explosives involved a mixture of chemicals, Land said.

Forest's family offered to secure a bond with two houses they valued at up to $5 million and proposed home confinement with electronic monitoring. But Fitzsimmons on Wednesday ordered him detained, saying that an arsenal of weapons was found at his home and the charges involved "an escalating pattern of destruction."

The judge also cited evidence that Forest was using drugs or medications illegally obtained over the Internet and told a neighbor he was working for the government and was responsible for repelling any terrorist attack on the neighborhood. Forest scared his wife, who described him as moody, depressed, paranoid and hostile toward her and their children, though not violent, Fitzsimmons said.

"Given the uncertainty concerning the defendant's physical and emotional health, the court cannot have any reasonable assurance that the proposed conditions will deter him from flight or protect the community," Fitzsimmons wrote.

She also ordered Forest to be examined within 30 days with recommendations for any treatment.

Forest was being treated for anxiety, depression and migraine headaches stemming from a fall that caused head trauma, according to a court-appointed social worker.

Forest was a notorious Internet pirate in the late 1990s, said J.D. Lasica, a San Francisco writer who dubbed Forest "Prince of the Darknet" in his 2005 book "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation."
http://www.wiltonvillager.com/wilton...1093181573.php





Liam Revelled In The Pirate's Life
Patrick Gower

His mates on the North Shore didn't call him "Crazy Liam" for nothing.

Take the time Liam Ashley stole a car from his father's work and went on a joyride, pulling a series of burnouts on a grass verge before its windows were smashed out.

But his fun with the car wasn't over yet - with some friends watching on, he drove it off a boat ramp and dumped it in the sea.

"His parents probably wouldn't want me telling you about that, but that was Liam," Daniel, one of his pallbearers, said yesterday.

"He would do anything for fun, and even though it could be totally crazy, he never meant anything bad by it. It is not like he would hurt anyone."

Liam's pursuit of fun ended in the back of a Chubb prison van nine days ago, when the 17-year-old was murdered, allegedly by an adult prisoner he was sharing a cage with in the vehicle.

His parents, exasperated by his latest antics that included the stealing of yet another car from his mother, had wanted him to experience first-hand the penalties for breaking the law if an adult. It was a last resort after a years of dealing with his Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD).

Daniel, Liam and their mates led what they called the "Pirate Life", a slogan since emblazoned on the back of "Crazy Liam" T-shirts.

"Liam loved that saying," said Daniel, also 17, who did not want his last name used. "It was because we lived life like pirates, cruising around, doing what we wanted. Drinking rum and having fun."

They would hang out at the Birkenhead skate bowl, drinking, smoking cigarettes and weed. There was trouble with police, but "nothing major," said Daniel, "just disorderly behaviour and drinking in public".

Daniel was on bail when he spoke at Liam's funeral on Wednesday, on a minor theft charge for which he was given diversion when he appeared in court the following day.

However, he is adamant the boys were just "doing normal teenage stuff". Liam was a mischief man among mischief-makers.

"My parents didn't want me hanging around him, but they didn't understand. He was a victim of ADHD, his friends were everything to him.

"There are guys our age doing things a million times worse than Liam ever did. All the bad things he did, it was against his parents. And everything he ever did, he got snapped for."

The last time Daniel saw Liam it was in the Honda CRV jeep he had stolen from his mother that he was to be arrested for. He knew it was stolen; they always were.

Liam ended up in the North Shore District Court on 10 charges, seven of which he pleaded guilty to on the day of his death, all stemming from offending against his parents.

The next he heard of Liam was a phone call from his mother, Lorraine Ashley. "His mum rang up and said there was bad news. I thought, 'What has he done now?' Then she said he was dead."

Daniel, who first met Liam when they were about 6, is sure his mate would have been terrified in the Chubb van, despite his penchant for risk-taking. A 25-year-old man, who has name suppression, has been charged with Liam's murder.

Daniel said if there was a man Liam idolised it was his father Ian, who runs Milano International, a car importing company, where his son had recently been working. Daniel said Liam thought everything his father did was the best, "the best car, the best bike [a Harley Davidson], the best this, the best that".

And what were Liam's hopes for the future? He once said he wanted "to steal a Harley-Davidson," said Daniel.

"Liam didn't live in the future. He didn't live in the past. He lived in the now."

Father tells of son's struggles

By age 3 Liam Ashley was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) and by age 5 he was prescribed Ritalin.

His father Ian revealed yesterday the family's struggle with Liam's ADHD, saying they had never heard of the disorder when Liam was diagnosed in 1992 and went in search of all the literature they could find. He described his wife Lorraine as "a true angel from heaven" for being Liam's full-time caregiver, and managing three other children's needs.

Liam lasted a short time at his first school before he was asked to leave.

He made progress with some specialised support at other schools but this was "taken away" and Liam went across Auckland to Waimokoia Special School in Half Moon Bay, a last-stop primary for the country's most difficult kids. Liam's return to mainstream education was a failure.

He was sent to board at Christchurch's Halswell Residential College for boys with intellectual and social difficulties, Although Liam flourished, Mr Ashley said he longed to be with his family and they reluctantly brought him back to the North Shore just before his 15th birthday. He lasted only a year and went to work cleaning cars at Mr Ashley's business.

Mr Ashley said Liam had begun to experiment with cars, alcohol, drugs and girls. It was not long before he started to take money or family possessions to trade and sell.

Mr Ashley said that despite the family trying all avenues of teenage support, the offending escalated and they decided to "entrust" Liam to the justice system to show him where he would end up once he turned 18.

"The rest has been well documented."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/sto...2C83027AF1010F





30 Teenagers, 7 Short Movies, 1 Dream of Peace
Matthew Hays

GALIANO ISLAND, British Columbia

THE organizers of this summer’s Peace It Together Camp here never expected it would be easy to bring together 10 Israeli, 10 Palestinian and 10 Canadian teenagers to make several short films in a spirit of dialogue and collaboration. But they also never expected to do so in a time of war.

The conflict erupted in Lebanon just two weeks before the youths arrived on this gulf island on Canada’s west coast. “There were some sleepless nights,” acknowledged Adri Hamael, co-executive director of this 18-day event, arranged by the Creative Peace Network. “Suddenly the Middle East looked like it was on fire. If bombs are dropping on people’s heads, they tend not to be in a very generous mood. When violence escalates, people become more polarized and skeptical about programs like this one. But I had faith that we would make it happen. Canceling really wasn’t an option.”

Gathering young Israelis and Palestinians in a safe environment as a means of breaking down barriers is not a new idea. Several charitable organizations undertake such efforts annually in North America, and one such meeting was captured in the Oscar-nominated 2001 feature-length documentary “Promises.”

But the Creative Peace Network, which had organized a previous peace camp in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2004, decided to use filmmaking as a way to promote cross-cultural understanding and cooperation after being approached by the Gulf Island Film and Television School. In early August the 30 adolescents arrived from Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and Canada to get to know one another while creating a series of short films. “Our point has always been to use dialogue and creativity as a means of breaking down barriers and changing lives,” Mr. Hamael said.

The students, all between 15 and 17, were chosen by regional coordinators. Thanks to private donations, their travel and living expenses were subsidized. A small tuition of $400 was required of each participant.

On arrival the students were broken down into seven groups to work in either animated, documentary or dramatic filmmaking. Each group was assigned an adult mentor to help with brainstorming sessions, screenwriting and technical matters. Each morning the teenagers met to exchange views about their lives and the Middle East conflict; in the afternoons they worked on their films. The idea was that the discussions would be enhanced by the collaborative effort of moviemaking.

Ala’a Abu Dawoud, a 17-year-old Palestinian from the northern Israeli town of Majd Al-Kurum, said the camp was an extremely difficult place to be at times. “Sometimes I feel like crying,” she said during an interview here. “Sometimes I feel I’ve done the wrong thing by coming here. Sometimes it’s hard to rethink the things we’ve been told and the things we see on the news every day. But I realized over time that I was having fun with the Jewish people who were here. And now we’ve become friends.”

For Ms. Dawoud and the others, the filmmaking process helped to bring them together. “I thought it would be so complicated,” she said. “But because we’re doing something I really love, and because we’re showing the conflict in a different way through our eyes, the act of making the film has been really fascinating.”

Not surprisingly, exchanges could occasionally prove acrimonious. “Some people might see this as a feel-good project, but it can be very intense,” Mr. Hamael said. “The youth who are here are a product of violence. They are born either under occupation or under the threat of violence. They come with emotional baggage.”

While the topics of the seven films were varied, they shared themes of promoting peace and conflct resolution. In the five-minute documentary “Sweet Like Chocolate,” several teenagers describe what they think peace would feel, sound and taste like. In the seven-minute drama “No Place for Dreamers,” a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman find it impossible to continue their budding romance because of a roadblock that a checkpoint places between them. In the film’s conclusion the despondent woman looks through a fence as Israeli soldiers tell the Palestinian man that he cannot pass through to the other side.

Part of the inspiration for “On the Line,” a combination of documentary and drama, came after one of the Israeli youths, Nir Ayalon, revealed to the other teenagers that he would serve in the Israeli military next year. “There were some faces made when I told them,” Mr. Ayalon, 17, acknowledged. “But I will not be serving in a combat capacity, so there’s no way I’m going to be shooting at anyone.”

The film depicts Mr. Ayalon’s friendship with one of the Palestinian teenagers at the camp, but concludes ambiguously with a fantasy sequence in which the two meet up again, in 2008, when Mr. Ayalon has become an Israeli soldier manning a checkpoint.

Alternately sweet and bitter, the films by the teenagers at times seem naïve, until one considers that the Israel and Palestinian youths face very real threats of violence, and that their scenarios are all rooted in that reality.

The camp’s organizers have said they hoped to screen the anthology of seven films on the film festival circuit. “I feel we have made an impact,” Mr. Hamael said. “Even if that is a limited impact, it is something nonetheless. Governments spend billions of dollars every year on the possibility of war. We are trying to spend something on the possibility of peace.”

David Ozier, a Vancouver filmmaker who worked as a mentor, said those who attended appeared to be affected by the experience. “Both the Palestinian and Israeli teenagers learned to work together and formed some very strong friendships,” Mr. Ozier said. “True to stereotype, the Canadian kids were often the ones who were filling a diplomatic role when there was conflict.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/movies/03hays.html





Online Auctions Raise Value of Celebrities’ Charity Gifts
Stephanie Strom

It seems that committing $37 billion to charity was not enough for Warren E. Buffett.

Mr. Buffett, the famously frugal billionaire, has donated his 2001 Lincoln Town Car for an eBay auction starting Sept. 12 to raise money for Girls Inc., a youth organization his family has long championed. He is even throwing in his vanity license plate: THRIFTY.

“I don’t want to sound like a used-car salesman, but this car is a real cream puff,” Mr. Buffett said in a telephone interview from his office in Omaha. “You just have to get behind the wheel of this vehicle.”

Charities have long sold items owned by celebrities, but eBay and the Internet have pumped new life into this fund-raising technique, increasing returns exponentially.

Last year, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle autographed by guests on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” raised $760,095 for the American Red Cross to help it serve victims of the Asian tsunami, setting a record on eBay. In 2002, Tiger Woods auctioned off a round of golf with himself for four people and raised $425,000 for his foundation, which supports programs that serve underprivileged children.

The United Way of America used its own Web site to auction off the gift bag George Clooney received this year for his services as a presenter at the Academy Awards. The gift bag raised $45,100, which was $27,100 more than the value of the items in it.

“The Internet increases your reach, drawing people from around the country and even internationally,” said Sheila Consaul, a United Way spokeswoman.

(Nonetheless, Ms. Consaul said the United Way would think twice before accepting another gift bag because only 27 of the 68 items in it could be transferred to someone other than Mr. Clooney, who sits on the United Way’s board. “It was a little more challenging to pull off than it sounded,” she said.)

Since 2000, more than $81 million has been raised for charity on eBay from regular vendors committing a part of their sales to nonprofit groups and by charities selling items directly. On any given day, more than 8,000 such sales are going on.

Conventional sellers are charged standard fees that, under a policy effective Oct. 1, will be returned to them in direct proportion to the percentage of the final sales value they have pledged to donate. For example, if conventional sellers send 30 percent of their revenues to charity, eBay will return 30 percent of their fee. Nonprofits selling items on eBay via the Giving Works program pay no basic fees.

“Interest from nonprofits has been amazing,” said Kristin Cunningham, senior manager of Giving Works. “Among people who are always having to ask for a check, anything that puts a new spin on fund-raising can be exciting.”

Mr. Buffett has experience with that phenomenon. In 2000, he began donating a lunch with himself to the Glide Foundation, a charity providing help to the poor that is affiliated with the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco and was supported by Mr. Buffett’s late wife, Susan Thompson Buffett.

For the first three years, the lunch was auctioned off at Glide’s annual benefit, raising an average of about $27,000 each time, Mr. Buffett recalled. “Then they put it on eBay four years ago,” he said, “and the first year there, it went for $250,100, and I like those kinds of returns.”

This year, the lunch raised $620,100 for Glide, which has a budget of about $12 million. “That’s substantial for us,” said the Rev. Cecil Williams, the chief executive of Glide’s national and international ministries.

Mr. Buffett, who recently donated the bulk of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other charities, said it had been his daughter’s idea to offer the Lincoln to Girls Inc. He said he had bought a Cadillac as a show of support for Rick Wagoner, the chief executive of General Motors, “and she asked me what I wanted to do with this car.”

“I told her she could do what she wanted with it,” he added, “and this is what she came up with.”

The Buffett family has a long history with Girls Inc. of Omaha, the local affiliate, said Roberta Wilhelm, the organization’s executive director. In 1975, Mrs. Buffett helped it find its first home, in a church basement in Omaha, and the Buffetts’ daughter, Susie, sits on the boards of the local and national organizations.

“It’s terrific,” Mr. Buffett said of the charity. “The girls, they come there after school and get help with homework, hot meals, access to computers, getting support and experiences they would not have otherwise. It evens the playing field a bit.”

Girls Inc. of Omaha was one of four youth organizations in the city to benefit from an annual golf tournament Mr. Buffett sponsored. And in 1999, he planted a stock tip inside his wallet and gave it to the charity to sell at auction.

The wallet sold for $210,000, but it raised much more for the charity. “The buyer said he would share the tip in it with others who gave money to us,” Ms. Wilhelm said, “and that generated a lot of other gifts.” She added that the tip paid off for the buyer, John Morgan.

Mr. Morgan, an Omaha native who lives in Minnesota, became a big supporter of Girls Inc. and once served on its national board.

“We got a lot of mileage out of that wallet,” Ms. Wilhelm said.

Mr. Buffett said he had never used the wallet much. “Kind of like my car,” he said. “I only put about 14,000 miles on it in four years, going to the office, which is about a mile from my house, and to the airport, which is about three miles away.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/us/03buffett.html





Banksy Targets Paris Hilton

'Guerrilla artist' replaces heiress's CDs in shops with doctored versions
Claire Truscott and Martin Hodgson

He has smuggled fake artwork into Tate Britain, and sprayed a vision of paradise on the Palestinian side of Israel's "security wall".

Now, the "guerrilla graffiti" artist Banksy has taken aim at the cult of empty celebrity and its current poster child, Paris Hilton.

The secretive artist has smuggled 500 doctored copies of Paris Hilton's debut album into music stores throughout the UK, where they have sold without the shops' knowledge.

In place of Ms Hilton's bubble-gum pop songs, the CDs feature Banksy's own rudimentary compositions. On the cover of the doctored CD, Ms Hilton's dress has been digitally repositioned to reveal her bare breasts; on an inside photo, her head has been replaced with that of her dog.

On the back cover, the original song titles have been replaced with a list of questions: "Why am I famous?", "What have I done?" and "What am I for?"

Inside the accompanying booklet, a picture of the heiress emerging from a luxury car has been retouched to include a group of homeless people.

In another shot, Ms Hilton's head has been superimposed on a shop window mannequin beneath a banner reading: "Thou Shalt Not Worship False Icons."

Instead of Ms Hilton's own compositions, the replacement CD features 40 minutes of a basic rhythm track over which Banksy has dubbed Ms Hilton's catchphrase "That's hot!" and other extracts from her reality TV programme The Simple Life.

The record credits have been re-edited to include thanks to the artist for his "wonderful work".

The bogus CD is not the first time he has branched out beyond the stencil graffiti that made his name. In 2003, Banksy glued one of his paintings on to a wall in Tate Britain, where it went unnoticed by staff for hours. The following year he smuggled a display case with a stuffed rat wearing sunglasses and a backpack into the Natural History Museum. At New York's Museum of Modern Art, he placed an Andy Warhol-style print depicting a tin of Tesco Value soup. Last year, he sprayed paintings on the Israeli security wall around the West Bank.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/thi...cle1325440.ece





MySpace Music Store Is New Challenge for Big Labels
Robert Levine

So far none of the companies that sell music online have emerged as serious competitors to the iTunes Music Store of Apple Computer. But not one of them has an audience like MySpace, which millions of teenage and twentysomething music fans visit every day.

For the music industry, which worries about Apple’s dominance of the online market, a MySpace music store could present difficulties of a different sort.

MySpace, the online community site owned by the News Corporation, said on Friday that it would sell music through a partnership with Snocap, a technology company started by the creator of Napster, Shawn Fanning. When the online store opens this fall, it will allow bands and labels of any size to sell songs online for whatever price they want.

For the independent-label bands and unsigned artists who have found MySpace to be an effective and inexpensive way to spread the word about their recordings and concerts, a store on the site will be an important outlet.

With more than three million pages devoted to a variety of performers, from unknown garage bands to Bob Dylan, MySpace is already an important online venue for musicians.

“Instead of going to iTunes and searching for music, which happens once in a while,” said Tom Anderson, president and co-founder of MySpace, “you can see the band and buy their music.”

But for the four major labels, which must approve each retailer that sells digital versions of their music, the new store could represent a challenge.

The MySpace store would let labels set their own prices for songs, which they have complained that iTunes does not let them do. And all of the major labels have put their catalogs into Snocap’s database, which uses an audio fingerprinting technology to prevent people from selling songs they do not own.

The MySpace store will sell music in the MP3 format, however, which allows them to be played on the Apple iPod but does not offer any copy protection. So far, the labels have been unwilling to sell music online in any format that does not allow them to restrict how many copies can be made.

At least one of the major labels, EMI, is in talks with MySpace, according to one person with knowledge of the negotiations who declined to be identified, citing the confidentiality of the discussions.

Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, said: “We’re hopeful that once we start getting adoption from smaller bands and labels, the major labels will want to participate. We’ll be talking to them continually, as will Snocap.”

Others are more skeptical.

“The majors aren’t going to distribute music unprotected on MP3,” said David Card, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research. Without their participation, he suggested, the appeal of such a store could be limited. Snocap has the ability to sell songs in other formats, but Apple has never let other companies sell iTunes files, and right now other restricted formats have little traction with consumers.

There is one other large online music store that sells songs in the MP3 format, eMusic. It offers a wide range of material from independent labels, but nothing from the four majors. As of July, it had almost 13 percent of the market for online music.

Snocap’s system can be used by anyone, which would let small labels and unsigned bands sell their music just as major labels do. Currently, iTunes sells music from most sizable independent labels, but many smaller ones go first through a digital distributor.

“It’s not that easy, if you’re an artist on the street, to get your music on iTunes,” Mr. DeWolfe said. “With Snocap you can upload your music, sign the contract and do everything online.”

For each track it sells, MySpace will charge a band or label a fixed fee of around 45 cents, which it will share with Snocap, according to Snocap’s chief executive, Rusty Rueff.

The iTunes store keeps about 35 cents from each purchase, according to Mr. Card, because Apple is willing to accept low profits from selling music to generate demand for the profitable iPod. MySpace, which currently brings in most of its revenue through advertising, views music sales as another source of profit. Its music store will accept PayPal, rather than credit cards, because the transaction fees are lower.

Potential customers will be able to buy music directly from the pages that bands have set up. “That’s consistent with MySpace’s mission to build a direct relationship with the audience,” said Luke Wood, a talent development executive at Interscope Records, which has a distribution deal with MySpace Records, a music label started by the site. MySpace will also let users link to a band’s storefront from their personal pages to recommend their favorite acts, which could drive consumers to buy music they might not otherwise.

With sites like MySpace becoming an important venue for music promotion, the labels may need to weigh risk of online piracy against the potential reach of a MySpace store.

“I think that kind of distributed retail could be really significant as a model,” said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, an online media measurement firm. “More and more, we’re exposed to media by other people. If I learn about music from you, I should be buying it from you. I shouldn’t have to scribble it down in a note for when I go to Tower Records.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/te...04myspace.html





Major Labels Embrace Mobile Technology

The music industry, searching for ever-expanding ways to promote acts and generate new revenue streams, is getting increasingly creative in its use of mobile technology.

With ringtones now a well-established product, record labels are turning to mobile games and video.

Warner Music Group recently introduced its first mobile videogame on T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. The car-racing game features the likeness, voice and music of hip-hop sensation T.I. The company says it is developing additional mobile games from multiple artists spanning all genres. Similarly, Hudson Entertainment, a mobile-content aggregator, has produced mobile games that feature the likeness and music of such acts as hip-hop group D12 and (most recently) the late Bob Marley.

Meanwhile, Capitol Records is supporting the debut album by Dave Navarro's new band the Panic Channel with a first-of-its-kind mobile-TV promotion in conjunction with Sprint and GoTV. For the next three months, GoTV will air free behind-the-scenes footage, exclusive interviews and performances of the band. They will be refreshed every two weeks.

Partner Retail Entertainment & Design, which produces the content, says it is preparing a similar mobile-TV push behind the debut solo album from Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas.

``It's becoming popular and sort of a cachet to have a mobile presence, and that extends outside of ringtones,'' Hudson Entertainment COO Mike Samachisa says.

Of course, there's more to it than just being cool. Mobile TV and games have the potential to become big business in the near future. According to research group Infonetics, the global market for mobile-video services is set to reach $5.6 billion by 2009, from $46.2 million this year -- an increase of nearly 12,000%. An Informa forecast pegs the more mature global mobile-gaming industry at $7.2 billion by 2010, up from the $2.4 billion expected this year.

Big Names Needed

To reach these numbers, the mobile industry is relying heavily on recognized entertainment brands to capture attention and encourage more traffic to these fledgling formats. One of the reasons ringtones are so successful is that people have a pretty good idea what they are buying from the beginning because of their familiarity with the original song. The same cannot be said of mobile games or video.

``The only thing you have to go on is a name, a very short description and the price,'' Samachisa says. Content featuring recognizable names gets more sales. ``It's like why you put an artist in a movie. It's because you're trying to connect his music audience to a new platform.''

Record labels are taking advantage of this and beginning to publish and distribute this content directly to wireless carriers themselves, similar to what they do with ringtones now.

Warner Music and Sony BMG have developed their own mobile-game publishing divisions, rather than licensing the rights to existing game developers. Universal Music Group partners with sister company Vivendi Universal Games for the same. Sony BMG has even started publishing nonmusic-related mobile games, such as one called ``The Shroud'' -- a sort of real-life treasure hunt that utilizes GPS technology but no direct music element.

Additionally, labels are amassing a flood of video content that they expect to make available via mobile phones in the near future, incorporating mobile as the third screen to their existing TV and Internet video strategy. Not just music videos, but live performances, interviews and other footage created specifically for mobile phones are in development.

The ultimate goal is to release mobile content in conjunction with an artist's new release, preferably beforehand to generate excitement, but this remains a difficult goal.

``That's obviously the ideal,'' says George White, Warner Music's senior VP of strategy and product development. ``Getting a game completed, tested and ready to launch is even more of a challenge than getting a new hip-hop record recorded, mastered and ready to launch. But that's clearly where we want to be headed.''

Particularly frustrating is the fact that this content must be optimized for multiple mobile phones, many of which require different content in different formats.

Development issues aside, there's also the challenge of drawing attention to this bevy of new content. Mobile TV and games combined do not generate a fraction of the traffic that ringtones do. The key, White says, is to direct fans who buy a ringtone to other mobile content by the same artist.

``We're really excited about cross-marketing between these categories, driving traffic from a ringtone promotion to a game,'' he says. ``That's one of the things we feel we can bring to the category and is a theme that we've been working with carriers to do.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...ch-mobile.html





Sharp Expects Solar Power Costs To Halve By 2010
Georgina Prodhan

Japan's Sharp Corp., the world's biggest maker of solar cells, expects the cost of generating solar power to halve by 2010 and to be comparable with that of nuclear power by 2030, Sharp's president said.

"By the year 2010 we'll be able to halve generation costs," Katsuhiko Machida said on Thursday.

"By 2020 we expect a further reduction - half of 2010 - and by 2030 we expect half the 2020 level.

"By 2030 the cost will be comparable to electricity produced by a nuclear power plant," said Machida, speaking on the fringes of the IFA trade fair in Berlin, the world's biggest consumer electronics fair.

Asked how the costs were likely to compare with those for producing electricity from fossil fuels such as coal, Machida replied: "Fossil fuel resources will be totally out by then."

Solar electricity currently costs about US$0.50 ($0.78) per kilowatt hour to produce, more than eight times as much as that produced from fossil fuel.

The market is growing at a rate of more than 30 per cent per year but solar power still produces just a small fraction of one per cent of the world's energy.

The solar industry in general expects the cost of producing solar power to fall by about 5 per cent per year, on average.

Machida said he expected that a shortage of solar-grade silicon, the raw material from which solar panels that harness the sun's energy are made, would ease by 2008 as silicon makers step up production to catch up with soaring demand.

"In the first half of 2007, supply capacity will be increased, so once we go into 2008, supply will be catching up," he said.

Sharp has also been moving towards producing more so-called thin-film solar panels, which use less silicon but are less efficient than traditional solar panels.

Machida said the cost to produce solar energy from thin film was still around one-and-a-half times as high as making it from the normal, multicrystalline type.

"The mainstream will still be multicrystalline," Machida said, but he added that demand for thin-film would also continue to increase, for example, for specialist varieties such as see-through panels for window glass.

Machida said the sun could send enough energy to Earth in as little as an hour to provide for all the world's energy needs for one year.

"We're wasting a lot of energy," he said.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/st...ectid=10399197
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