[JackSpratts]

Porn Movie Plus Tinny for $35
Patrick Gower

DVD pirates and drug pushers have joined forces to bring their punters a $35 porn movie and cannabis combo deal.

In a brazen marketing twist offered through cannabis tinny houses, they are also selling cannabis and a regular DVD movie for $30.

The Weekend Herald has learned that the Mongrel Mob and rival gang Black Power are offering the identical deal in their tinny houses in different parts of the North Island.

A cannabis "tinny" or bullet containing a small amount of the drug wrapped in tinfoil usually sells for $20.

Tony Eaton, executive director of the New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft, confirmed that its investigations had found evidence of the DVD-cannabis deals and said his group had told the police.

He said investigations led the federation to one of the gangs doing the deal in Auckland and separately to the other doing it in part of the lower North Island. Police were yet to execute warrants on the addresses.

Mr Eaton would not name the gangs, but the Weekend Herald understands they are the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.

"They are selling them [DVDs] part-and-parcel with cannabis through their tinny houses. They're doing combo deals.

"This is a big worry for us. These gangs are organised and all they are doing is putting another item down their distribution channels. Unfortunately, they are looking at us."

Tinny houses are one of the main methods of cannabis distribution to young people and police have previously voiced concern that other drugs such as methamphetamine, known as P, have been pushed through their established channels.

The federation, which is the Motion Picture Association's piracy watchdog in New Zealand, has 12 private investigators contracted to it and is running 50 separate investigations into commercial DVD piracy.

In another investigation, Mr Eaton said the federation would be laying a complaint against a Christchurch woman allegedly caught recording a movie trailer before the screening of the animated film Cars.

Hoyts Cinema staff contacted management and the woman, who was sitting with her family, was approached and her camcorder seized.

Mr Eaton said no one had been charged in New Zealand for recording screenings, but police were investigating a similar case in the South Island.

This week, the federation revealed it had sued 14 New Zealanders who among them sold more than 10,000 pirated DVDs on NZ websites, including Trade Me. Mr Eaton said they had shut down the distribution of pirated DVDs at flea markets and had taken down 1700 pirate DVD sellers from the Trade Me site.

"We've shut down the markets, and now we are casting our net wider."

Worldwide, the Motion Picture Association estimates piracy cost the film industry US$6.1 billion ($9.9 billion) in potential revenue last year.

Mr Eaton said some New Zealand dealers were making thousands of dollars a week through pirated DVDs and it was believed there were up to 30 operations in South Auckland alone.

Although all types were attracted to the trade, Mr Eaton, a former police officer, said links between organised crime and DVD piracy in New Zealand were strong.

He had heard from police officers who had raided gang houses and found piles of DVDs and not acted because they were unaware that charges under the Copyright Act carried a maximum penalty of five years.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/author/sto...ectid=10394708





Surveillance

9/11 Spawned Tech-Security Market
Brian Bergstein

During the Cold War, Canada's National Optics Institute developed a system to detect which type of enemy tank or fighter jet was approaching. After the Soviet Union's demise, such threats were deemed less likely, and the technology sat on the shelf.

Until 2003, when entrepreneur Eric Bergeron toured the institute with Sept. 11 on his mind.

"The flash I had was that we no longer look for Russian planes in the sky, but we do look for bad things in luggage," Bergeron said.

The X-ray analysis company that emerged, Quebec-based Optosecurity Inc., is only on the verge of putting its devices in real-life checkpoints. But its hopes are emblematic of the massive homeland security technology industry spawned by Sept. 11.

Contrary to the promises from technologists that began almost immediately after the attacks, these five years have seen few dramatic security improvements. But the market remains a source of riches - real for some companies, still largely dreamed-of for others - primed with billions of dollars from the U.S. and international governments.

Spending on domestic security across all U.S. federal agencies is expected to reach $58 billion in fiscal 2007 - up from $16.8 billion in 2001, according to the Office of Management and Budget. States and cities are annually contributing $20 billion to $30 billion more, Gartner Inc. Vice President T. Jeff Vining estimates.

Much of it lands with large defense contractors and systems integrators with long government ties and the heft to tackle huge projects. For example, Unisys Corp. got a $1 billion contract to set up computers, cell phones, Web sites and other network technology for airport security staff. BearingPoint Inc. won a $104 million deal in August to provide secure identification cards to federal employees and contractors.

Still, a lot of no-names are angling for a piece. Even a tiny slice could be revolutionary for them.

When Salient Stills Inc. was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder Laura Teodosio figured its software - which enhances the quality of frames captured from video, making them clearer to publish or analyze - would find its biggest success with media companies.

But after Sept. 11, the FBI became a user, and Salient Stills' customer focus shifted to law enforcement.

Today, revenue is less than $5 million, but it has increased every year. Teodosio credits the explosion in surveillance footage being captured by authorities and by regular people.

Optosecurity is at an earlier stage, having gotten only initial funding for upcoming trial deployments of its gear at North American airports.

Using the optical-recognition technology licensed from the Canadian institute, Optosecurity's devices attach to existing X-ray machines and are programmed to automatically spot weapons or their components. (Optosecurity will not say how many items it can recognize.)

"There is not a lot of money that has trickled down to startups," Bergeron conceded. "But the problem is that now (government customers) are running out of innovation. If you look at the checkpoint now, it is the same as the checkpoint 10 years ago, and the checkpoint 20 years ago."

Some measure of technology's limited impact since Sept. 11 can be gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security's budget request for 2007.

DHS cited 25 "key accomplishments" in the three years since it corralled 22 federal agencies, but most of the victories surrounded organizational changes or improved use of resources.

Only three items linked technology to better Sept. 11-style safety. One celebrated the rise of a data-sharing network that routes secret information among 56 federal sites.

The other two related to a single program, US-VISIT, which incorporates biometrics and machine-readable passports to tighten border control. DHS touted this about the program: Of the 44 million foreign visitors it had processed, US-VISIT had detected 950 people with criminal histories or immigration violations.

Requests for future technology initiatives, meanwhile, were more numerous. For example, DHS sought $692 million for explosive detection devices, $157 million for radiation monitors and $5 million to upgrade the satellite capabilities of the emergency alert system.

"The themes around much of the successes involving technology have been relatively basic at this point," said Greg Baroni, who heads the federal business for Unisys. "I see this as an emerging market. The large, advanced, state-of-the-art technologies are still being explored."

Even this basic phase has been pivotal for Unisys. Before Sept. 11, Unisys' federal business was so weak that the company was trying to sell it. Now the unit has doubled to nearly $1 billion a year, about $400 million of which comes from homeland security contracts. The group had 1,200 employees in 2001, but now has nearly 4,000.

Helena Wisniewski has worked in homeland security from multiple angles: At the CIA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, defense contractors and a biometrics company she founded. Now an administrator at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Wisniewski says innovations in the post-Sept. 11 tech market have been limited because of the pressures to get basic technologies in place quickly.

That environment also shoehorned some ideas into places they didn't work. Witness the rush to use facial-recognition biometrics to scan crowds for evildoers, even though the access-control technology was built for settings where people present themselves one at a time under good lighting.

"It's very difficult in a lot of circumstances to reduce a technology to practice in six months," she said. "We haven't really organized to sit back and look at an effective strategy for the longer term. I think we need an overall strategy, not just tactical solutions."

Gartner's Vining says the most successful security technologies so far have been improved communications systems and networks for information sharing. Police and intelligence agents have also benefited from new data-mining programs, he believes.

Several analysts expect the next wave to make more use of chemical, biological and radiological sensors, which figure to play a role in a $2 billion border security contract to be awarded shortly. Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., LM Ericsson and Raytheon Co. are seeking prime-contractor status on the deal.

Brian Ruttenbur, homeland security analyst for Morgan Keegan & Co., is also watching companies that help analyze intercepted communications and those that manage video surveillance.

Of course, even as technologies improve, none is likely to end the post-Sept. 11 era of hyper vigilance.

"We can't catch everything," Ruttenbur said. "I don't know of any single technology that can be right 100 percent of the time."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-03-23-19-36





Study Finds Sharp Drop in the Number of Terrorism Cases Prosecuted
Eric Lichtblau

The number of terrorism cases brought by the Justice Department, which surged in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has dropped sharply since 2002, and prosecutors are turning down hundreds of cases because of weak evidence and other legal problems, according to a study released Sunday.

The study, conducted by a private research group at Syracuse University, found that federal prosecutors have declined to prosecute two of every three international terrorism cases brought to them by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies since 2001.

The rejection rate was even higher for the first eight months of the current fiscal year, with 91 percent of the referred cases turned down for prosecution, the research group said. Among the most frequent explanations cited by prosecutors, the study found, were a lack of evidence of criminal intent by the suspect and “weak or insufficient” evidence.

The numbers brought differing interpretations from legal analysts, prosecutors and government officials, many of whom said they were surprised by the findings, and are likely to add to the debate over the administration’s legal tactics in prosecuting the fight against terrorism. The Justice Department immediately took issue with the study’s methodology and its conclusions.

The study “ignores the reality of how the war on terrorism is prosecuted in federal courts across the country and the value of early disruption of potential terrorist acts by proactive prosecution,” said Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman.

“The report presents misleading analysis of Department of Justice statistics to suggest the threat of terrorism may be inaccurate or exaggerated,” Mr. Sierra added. “The Department of Justice disagrees with this suggestion completely.”

Department officials declined to discuss any details of what they considered the flawed methodology.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has pursued a strategy of investigating and prosecuting terrorism suspects within the United States to “pre-empt” attacks, rather than waiting for them to unfold.

The strategy, which administration officials say helps explain the absence of any further attacks on American soil, has been seen in cases like the arrests of seven men in Miami in June in a plot that the F.B.I. said was “more aspirational than operational.”

The approach has led critics of the Bush administration to say that prosecutors are routinely bringing terrorism charges in cases that do not warrant them. But the data from the Syracuse group suggests that for every prosecution like the one in Miami, there are many other investigations that never become public because prosecutors conclude there is not enough evidence to take them to court.

The F.B.I. and other federal agencies bring what are known as referrals in cases in which the investigating agency recommends that federal charges be considered, often after investigations lasting months or years.

In 2001 and 2002, the Syracuse study found, federal prosecutors turned down only about 35 percent of the referrals brought to them in international terrorism cases. But that rate has climbed sharply over the last four years, with rejection rates of 77 percent in 2003, 65 percent in 2004, 82 percent last year and the 91 percent this year.

Last year, the Justice Department prosecuted 46 international terrorism cases — down from 355 in 2002 in the spike that followed the Sept. 11 attacks — but it declined to bring charges in 209 cases the F.B.I. or other agencies had referred, the study found.

The statistics “raise profound questions about how well the government is doing in dealing with this very difficult problem of terrorism,” said David Burnham, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which conducted the study by obtaining hundreds of thousands of records through a lawsuit brought under the Freedom of Information Act.

“It is clear that the prosecutors are deciding that a lot of the investigations being recommended do not cut the mustard and do not meet their standards,’’ Mr. Burnham said.

In all, the study found that in nearly 6,500 cases treated by the Justice Department as “terrorism” investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks, about one in five defendants have now been convicted. The median sentence for those convicted in what were categorized as “international terrorism” cases — often involving lesser charges like immigration violations or fraud — was 20 to 28 days, and many received no jail time at all, the study found.

The Justice Department, which has tightened the way it defines terrorism cases over the last five years, cites a much higher rate of success. Examining only those cases in which someone was actually charged, it said in a report in June that it had secured convictions or guilty pleas against 261 of the 441 defendants accused in connection with terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Brian Levin, an associate professor at California State University, San Bernardino, who studies terrorism prosecutions, said the numbers clearly reflected the government’s efforts to swiftly halt any possible plot, including many that might prove unfounded.

“The data suggests that if there’s a whiff of suspicion, they will come down in any way possible against a suspect and sort the evidence out later,” Mr. Levin said. “They’re obviously casting a broad net but throwing a lot back into the sea.”

A federal terrorism prosecutor agreed with that assessment. “You have to chase dead ends a lot of times — it’s inherent in this business,” said the prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

Moreover, in smaller-scale cases like identity theft or immigration fraud that may have some nexus to terrorism, the government may not have the time or resources to fully pursue a case, leading prosecutors to reject the filing of charges.

“The F.B.I.’s looking for bomb throwers,” the prosecutor said, “and we have a lot of small cases that there are no resources devoted to.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/wa.../04terror.html





Bush Admits CIA Has Held Terror Suspects
Steve Holland and Will Dunham

President George W. Bush acknowledged on Wednesday the CIA has run a secret detention program for terrorism suspects overseas and said 14 of those held have been transferred to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

With human rights organizations suspicious about a program that has remained in the shadows, Bush strongly defended the detention and questioning of terrorism suspects through this method and said the CIA treats them humanely and does not torture.

"Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives," Bush said in a White House speech nearly five years after the September 11 attacks.

Bush announced that the 14 suspects held by the CIA have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay for prosecution by military commissions he hopes the U.S. Congress will establish.

His administration has been forced to come up with a new method to try foreign terrorist suspects after the Supreme Court in June rejected the military tribunal system set up by Washington to try Guantanamo prisoners, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan.

Among the 14, Bush said, are the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two other al Qaeda leaders, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah.

"As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, can face justice," Bush said.

Secret Prisons

Senior administration officials said the CIA has held less than 100 suspects and after the transfer of the last 14 to Pentagon custody, the agency currently holds none.

Bush would not say where the CIA secret prisons have been located overseas but there have been reports of such facilities in Eastern Europe. The revelation of the secret prisons by The Washington Post last year sparked outrage among many European countries.

The United Nations committee against torture in May called on the United States to close any secret prisons abroad, but the senior administration officials said the program was essential and would remain open.

Bush's current focus on terrorism comes not only as the September 11 anniversary approaches but also as his Republican Party faces stiff challenges in the midterm elections in two months.

Facing a potential rebellion on Capitol Hill from some in his own party over the effort to create new tribunals, Bush said he would submit proposed legislation on Wednesday on how he believes the commissions should be set up.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said on Tuesday he and Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina were circulating their version of the legislation.

Their bill adheres more to military court martial procedures, and Warner's spokesman, John Ullyot, said there were "some sticking points with the administration" on it.

McCain said lawmakers had not see the specifics of Bush's legislation but had been briefed on it. "We do have some differences which we are in discussions about and I do believe we can work those out."

Bush said his bill would insist that terrorism suspects cannot use Geneva Convention protections to file lawsuits against U.S. personnel in U.S. courts.

Bush said passing the legislation "ought to be the top priority" of Congress's abbreviated election-year schedule in coming weeks.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria, Matt Spetalnick and Vicki Allen)
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...Art-R2-Today-3





Kids Buy Lunches With Scans Of Fingers

The never-ending march of technology now means school children here can pay for their cafeteria sloppy joes with their fingers.

Rome City Schools is switching to a scanning system that lets students use their fingerprints to access their accounts. In the past, students had to punch in their pin numbers.

"The finger's better because all you've got to do is put your finger in, and you don't have to do the number and get mixed up," said Adrianna Harris, a second grader at Anna K. Davie Elementary School.

The new system speeds lunch lines, said city administrators. It's being phased in to Rome High School, Rome Middle School and all the city's elementary schools. The city hopes to have the system in use next month system-wide.

Some parents are uneasy with having their children's fingerprints scanned, and wonder about how well the information is secured.

"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," said Hal Storey, who's daughter is a 10th grader at Rome High.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-05-07-12-14





HP Sought Director Records in Leak Probe
AP

Investigators for Hewlett-Packard Co. sought private telephone records of board members while hunting for leaks to the media of confidential company information, the computer maker said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.

The company also disclosed that outside lawyers it hired to review the matter could not determine if the probe "complied in all respects with applicable law." And it said the state attorney general in California is examining techniques used in the investigation. HP said it would cooperate with the state probe.

The company made the disclosures in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing notifying investors that its board will refuse to nominate one director, George A. Keyworth II, for re-election because it determined he was a source of the leaks.

HP said outside legal counsel met with the company's directors early last year to try to determine how details of board meetings were continuously being leaked to the media without company approval. The meetings did not reveal the source of the leaks and the leaks continued.

Further investigation revealed that Keyworth was the source of the information, the company said. Keyworth was asked to resign on May 18 but refused, the HP filing said. HP said it won't nominate Keyworth for another term on the board.

Another director, Thomas J. Perkins, abruptly left the company on May 18, citing personal frustration with chairman's handling of the matter, the filing states. The chairman is not named in the SEC document, but Patricia Dunn, 52, who has been on the board for eight years, was chairman at the time.

In June, Perkins requested information from HP regarding the probe and said he consulted legal counsel regarding concerns over phone and e-mail communication that may have been improperly recorded. HP said no recording or eavesdropping had occurred. But pretexting for phone records, a method used by investigators to gather information by disguising their identity, was used, according to the filing.

Perkins asked that an investigation into the techniques requested that HP conduct an inquiry into the propriety of the investigation.

A high-ranking HP committee then hired an outside counsel to look into the matter. The counsel advised the company that the use of pretexting at the time "was not generally unlawful" but couldn't confirm that the techniques employed by the private investigator were completely legal.

Based upon its investigation, Hewlett-Packard said its nominating and governance committee has recommended that controls relating to investigations be strengthened and that management should be in a position to assure that all aspects of company probes comply with applicable laws and HP's code of ethics.

SEC corporate finance staff also is currently looking into whether or not HP properly disclosed circumstances surrounding Perkins' departure. At the time of Perkins' resignation, the company didn't file a 502-b form with the SEC, which would have indicated Perkins' leaving was related to an internal disagreement.

Hewlett-Packard shares fell 50 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $35.95 in early trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-06-10-15-19





HP Director to be Pushed Out
Rachel Konrad

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s board will file a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, notifying investors that the computer maker's board will refuse to nominate one director for re-election because he leaked confidential information to the media.

HP board member George Keyworth, a physicist who served as science adviser to President Reagan from 1981 to 1986, will end his service on the HP board no later than March 2007, HP spokesman Ryan Donovan said.

"We believe that persons at all levels within the company - directors, officers and employees - must be held accountable and have the highest personal integrity," Donovan said Tuesday. "We've changed the culture of this company to one that's driven by accountability and meeting the needs of the customer. These changes have been painful, but we believe they're the right thing to do."

Keyworth's departure comes after a January article on CNET Inc.'s News.com, which included a quotation from an anonymous HP source who described a gathering of HP directors at a posh spa in Indian Wells. The source's comment wasn't inflammatory and didn't contain information about future products or restructuring plans.

"By the time the lectures were done at 10 p.m., we were pooped and went to bed," the source told News.com.

Nonetheless, the statement angered HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, 52, who has been on the board for eight years.

The non-executive chairwoman of the 11th largest company on the Fortune 500 oversaw the ouster of former HP CEO Carly Fiorina in February 2005 and the hiring of Mark Hurd as her successor - both high-profile moves that also were leaked to the media. Dunn, CEO of Barclays Global Investors from 1995 to 2002, has been on the HP board since 1998 and was elected chairwoman in February 2005.

Dunn oversaw an extensive investigation of leaks and, at a board meeting May 18, identified Keyworth as the source in the News.com article as well as other leaks dating back to early 2005. The board asked Keyworth, 66, to resign, but the former neutron physicist at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory refused to leave.

The investigation and attempted ouster of Keyworth riled another HP board member, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins, 74, a friend of Keyworth who immediately resigned and stormed out of the May meeting.

HP would not provide details of the investigation, but Donovan said the SEC filing on Wednesday would include a timeline and other information about the probe.

Within days of Perkins' departure, HP submitted a 502(a) filing to the SEC, standard practice when a board member resigns for relatively innocuous reasons. HP did not file a 502(b), required when a board member resigns because of a disagreement with the company.

In the months after his resignation, Perkins - co-founder of blue chip venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers - complained to other executives and to journalists about the investigation's potential ethical problems. He decried it as an invasion of privacy, noting that the investigation got details of phone calls to and from board members' homes.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-05-23-56-50





Hewlett-Packard Spied on Writers in Leaks
Damon Darlin

The California attorney general’s investigation into the purloining of private phone records by agents of Hewlett-Packard has revealed that the monitoring effort began earlier than previously indicated and included journalists as targets.

The targets included nine journalists who have covered Hewlett-Packard, including one from The New York Times, the company said.

The company said this week that its board had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press and that those investigators had posed as board members — a technique known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.

In acknowledging Thursday that journalists’ records had also been obtained, the company said it was apologizing to each one. “H.P. is dismayed that the phone records of journalists were accessed without their knowledge,” a company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said.

In an interview Thursday about the state’s criminal investigation of the Hewlett-Packard matter, Attorney General Bill Lockyer said, “A crime was committed.” But he added: “It is unclear how strong the case is. Who is charged and for what is still an open question.”

Mr. Lockyer said search warrants would be issued to obtain the records of Internet service providers in an attempt to trace the identities of the imposters. He said Hewlett-Packard was cooperating with the investigation into what he said was the first California case of a major corporation using such methods to obtain phone records.

An investigator with direct knowledge of the state’s inquiry characterized the list of targets as “extensive,” though that person would not elaborate. It could contain people other than journalists or directors.

Travis Dodd, general attorney with AT&T Services in San Antonio, who is working with the California prosecutors, said the records of John Markoff, a reporter for The Times in San Francisco, were a “target of the pretexting” in 2005.

Two other news organizations, the online technology news service CNET and The Wall Street Journal, said they had learned that their reporters had also been targets.

A top Hewlett-Packard official indicated earlier this week that the effort to obtain phone records had begun in January 2006 after an article appeared on CNET with accounts of a Hewlett-Packard management meeting. Those revelations prompted H.P.’s chairwoman, Patricia C. Dunn, to order an investigation of leaks, and the company has conceded that subterfuge was used by a subcontractor to gain phone records in the investigation.

Hewlett-Packard has refused to publicly disclose the names of the consulting firm it hired or the subcontractor that was used to pretext the records. The company has said that the outside consulting firm was instructed to conduct its investigation according to law and that the firm had told H.P. that its techniques were legal.

In May, that investigation identified the board’s longest-serving member, George A. Keyworth II, as the source of the leak. He rebuffed a request to resign, but the company said he would not be renominated. Thomas J. Perkins, another board member, resigned in anger over the way the investigation was conducted. His efforts to get the company to acknowledge the reason for his departure led to this week’s disclosures.

There had been earlier concerns at the company about leaks around the time of Carleton S. Fiorina’s dismissal as chief executive in early 2005. An investigation at that time, however, was only known to have involved interviews of board members.

Viet D. Dinh, Mr. Perkins’s lawyer, said Thursday, “If it is true that the pretexting started before January 2006 and dated back to 2005, it would suggest a deeper and more troubling chain of events than the hiring of third-party pretexters and would reach much higher to persons responsible at H.P.”

By Mr. Perkins’s account, only the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a powerful Silicon Valley law firm and outside counsel for Hewlett-Packard, conducted investigations into leaks in 2005.

A spokeswoman for the law firm, Courtney Dorman, said the firm “absolutely, definitely did not” use pretexting or hire anyone who did pretexting during the firm’s informal investigation of directors in 2005.

Mr. Moeller said Thursday that the company’s statements about the pretexting had never confined those events to 2006.

A lawyer for The New York Times, David McCraw, said on Thursday evening, “We are deeply concerned by reports that the rights of one of our reporters were violated.”

“To the extent that this is a criminal matter, we will cooperate with authorities to make sure any wrongdoing is prosecuted,” he said. “To the extent it is a civil matter, we will pursue whatever legal recourse is available. We expect as an initial step that H.P. will make a prompt and full disclosure of what took place in regards to our reporter.”

CNET said Thursday that phone records of two of its reporters, Dawn Kawamoto and Tom Krazit, had also been obtained. It said access to Ms. Kawamoto's records had been gained from the same Internet address used by the person who accessed the phone records of Mr. Perkins. A caller used the last four digits of her husband's Social Security number to establish an online account with AT&T to view the records. Access was gained on one date, in late January 2006, it said.

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

An article in The Wall Street Journal said records of its reporter, Pui-Wing Tam, had also been a target of pretexting activity. A spokesman for Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, declined to comment.

Investor reaction to the Hewlett-Packard board furor has been muted. The company’s stock closed Thursday at $35.42, down 2.85 percent from its close before news of the board’s turmoil was reported. Indeed, at a Citigroup investor conference where Mark V. Hurd, the chief executive, spoke and answered questions Wednesday, no securities analyst asked about the problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/technology/08hp.html





H.P. Chairwoman Aims Not to Be the Scapegoat
Damon Darlin

Patricia C. Dunn, Hewlett-Packard’s chairwoman, was known as a remarkable saleswoman as she rose to the top of the financial industry.

But on Sunday, she will have to sell her board on the idea that she should not be dumped as the scapegoat for the scandal rocking the company. While the agenda item is how the company handled an investigation of its own directors — and the possibly illegal techniques used to obtain their private phone records — the underlying theme is whether she should remain.

In a telephone interview Friday, Ms. Dunn moved to address some of the questions raised in the furor, defending her efforts to stop news leaks from the company’s boardroom while conceding that the methods had been “sloppy.”

Emphasizing that her actions had been taken with the board’s knowledge and approval, she said: “The chairman is not a unilateral power position. I am a servant to the board.”

While acknowledging calls from outside the company for her resignation, she said the criticism was unfair. “I fully intend to remain in these positions unless asked to vacate them by the board,” she said. “If they do ask me, I will step down.” But she is not lobbying or polling members. “This is not a job I asked for or a job that I particularly wanted,” she said.

Ms. Dunn, the former head of Barclays Global Investors, joined the Hewlett-Packard board in 1998 and took over as chairwoman after the ouster of Carleton S. Fiorina as chairwoman and chief executive early last year. Ms. Fiorina’s removal, after a hard-fought proxy battle over H. P.’s merger with Compaq Computer, supposedly brought an end to a fitful period for the board.

But while the business rebounded, boardroom tensions persisted, fueled by news leaks from within. The company ultimately hired private investigators to identify directors who disclosed information to the news media and those investigators posed as board members — a practice known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.

Those tactics have led to a criminal investigation by state prosecutors. “A crime was committed,” the California attorney general, Bill Lockyer, said Thursday, though “who is charged and for what is still an open question.”

The revelations emerged this week, set in motion by a former board member and pre-eminent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Thomas J. Perkins, who resigned in anger over the investigation in May and then pressed the company to acknowledge his reasons for leaving.

Ms. Dunn said Friday that she felt that a personal dispute was at the center of the storm. “Tom is a powerful man with friends in powerful places,” she said. “This brouhaha is the result of his anger toward me. He is winning the p.r. war.”

“He was the most hawkish member of the board for finding the leaker,” she added. “He wanted us to bring in lie detectors.”

She said Mr. Perkins was initially upset with her because she revealed the name of the leaker to the full board rather than handling it quietly in private. “He wanted me to handle this behind closed doors, without even revealing the name of the leaker,” she said. “I could never agree to that.”

Mr. Perkins could not be reached for comment Friday, but his lawyer, Viet D. Dinh, a Georgetown University law professor, said, “When red flags go up, that’s when boards should ask questions.”

Ms. Dunn said an initial investigation of news leaks from the board began in April or May 2005. She said she had turned to the head of corporate security to handle it, since that person also handles investigations of misconduct by employees, including unauthorized leaks to the press. “The more gentlemanly methods that were used in the past didn’t work,” she said.

She said she was not able to supervise the investigation because, as a member of the board, she was herself a potential target.

The investigation faced another problem. Not only could the board not supervise it, but the company employees handling it were in the difficult position of investigating their bosses. So they turned it over to an outside consulting firm that H. P. still refuses to identify; that firm, in turn, gave the investigation over to a firm that used the pretexting techniques.

It is not clear how the inquiry was supervised, though the company said the outside consultants were told to follow “applicable law.”

But Ms. Dunn said Friday that “it looks like there was sloppy work along the way.”

The second investigation, in January 2006, was run by the office of H. P.’s general counsel, Ann Baskins. It also involved outside investigators, Ms. Dunn said, and private records were viewed in both investigations.

She said that the company investigated 10 leaks and that evidence in 7 of them pointed to George A. Keyworth II, who was asked to resign at a board meeting in May. He refused, but the company said this week that it would not nominate him for re-election.
Ms. Dunn said they never determined the source of the three other leaks. “Our board is happy to know that the leaker is caught,” she said. She said the leaks had been “longterm, persistent and intractable” with potential for ruining trust among board members. She termed the attempt to stop the leaks a “noble cause.”

She said that no one on the board “endorsed, understood or approved” of pretexting and that the company was putting new guidelines in place to prevent such practices in future investigations. “It wasn’t implemented well,” she said. “But I had no choice but to follow this violation. It fell to me to do it.”

Ms. Dunn, the daughter of a vaudeville actor and a Las Vegas showgirl, has generally avoided the limelight. She declined repeated requests for interviews until Friday.

With Hewlett-Packard’s board preparing to meet Sunday by telephone, Charles M. Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, says Ms. Dunn may not have her job for long.

“I think it is going to be very hard for her to stay,” he said Friday. “This was a mess created in the boardroom itself and someone has to be ultimately responsible.”

The prospect of being investigated, he said, affects directors’ abilities to seek out information independent of management and makes it less likely others will come forward. “An investigation like that emasculates the board,” Mr. Elson said.

But Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management who has studied corporate governance, said that Ms. Dunn should not be blamed for the errors of the investigation and that she deserved credit for acting against boardroom cronyism by unmasking the leaker.

Were the board to act now to dismiss her, Mr. Sonnenfeld said, “It is showing nothing but cowardice.”

Ms. Dunn said she would write notes of apology to nine reporters whose records were also obtained through subterfuge by the investigators. She is also calling influential people involved in corporate governance for advice.

Nell Minow, co-founder of the Corporate Library, a corporate governance service company, said Ms. Dunn had told her that she had constantly consulted counsel and that she wanted it to be done legally.

“This is corporate America’s Star Jones situation,” said Ms. Minow, referring to the gossip that surrounded the firing of a member of the television program “The View,” which was portrayed as an amicable parting. “On the one hand you want to preserve everyone’s reputation and play nice, but on the other hand, there is a scorched-earth impulse here.”

Investors have seemed unfazed. Shares of H. P. closed at $36.17, up 2 percent, recovering nearly all of its losses since the disclosures began late Tuesday.

On Friday afternoon, the company’s chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, tried to raise the morale of employees through a videotaped and e-mail message. “Clearly things have happened here that are unacceptable,” he said. “Building a successful company means we will have our ups and downs, and issues will come up. We are dealing with an issue now. I am resolved that we will work through this and take the necessary action.”

Julie Creswell and Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/09/te...09hewlett.html





Intel Corp. to Cut 10,500 Jobs
Jordan Robertson

Shares of Intel Corp. fell in after-hours trading after the world's largest chip maker announced sweeping job cuts that some investors believed were not severe enough.

Intel shares fell 26 cents to $19.73 in after-hours trading Tuesday. Before the announcement, shares of Intel rose 11 cents to close at $19.99 Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Intel said Tuesday it will eliminate 10,500 jobs - about 10 percent of its work force - through layoffs, attrition and the sale of underperforming business groups as part of a massive restructuring.

The Santa Clara-based company said most of the job cuts this year will come from its management, marketing and information technology ranks, and will expand in 2007 to include manufacturing, design and other segments.

The cuts are expected to save the company $3 billion per year by 2008. Severance costs are expected to total $200 million.

Intel is fighting to reverse sinking profits and make it more efficient as it seeks to regain market share stolen by smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

"These actions, while difficult, are essential to Intel becoming a more agile and efficient company, not just for this year or the next, but for years to come," Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a statement.

About 5,000 of the affected positions have already been cut or will be eliminated this year through a previously announced management layoff, the pending sale of two businesses, and attrition, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.

The company plans to cut about 2,500 more jobs by the end of the year. The remainder will be shed in 2007, when Intel's head count will settle around 92,000, Mulloy said.

Many analysts and investors were expecting higher job cuts and a better-defined strategy for dealing with problem business units, said Nathan Brookwood, analyst with research firm Insight 64.

"This is not nearly as deep or as broad a cut as many had anticipated," he said. "They aren't talking about cutting back any substantial programs. They're saying, 'We can still do everything we were planning to do, but now we can do it with fewer people.' And I'm not certain that's a workable plan."

Intel has been under intense pressure to unload money-losing divisions and halt the encroachment of AMD on its lucrative core business making the microprocessors that act as the brains of computers.

Intel has been steadily losing profits and market share. Analysts have criticized it for reacting too slowly after AMD's 2003 launch of the critically acclaimed Opteron and Athlon 64 chips for servers and desktop PCs.

Speculation about massive job cuts has been rampant since Otellini announced in April the company was planning a broad overhaul targeting money-losing business groups in every aspect of its operations.

Intel, which had about 103,000 employees worldwide at the time, vowed to cut $1 billion in spending. It also launched the review of its business units.

The latest cuts come after three months of streamlining.

In June, the company said it planned to shed 1,400 jobs by selling a money-losing division that makes chips for cell phones and other handheld devices to Marvell Technology Group Ltd., which said it would absorb most of the workers in the $600 million deal.

The next month, Intel slashed 1,000 management jobs to reduce layers between top executives and supervisors. Five top executives were also reassigned to new positions, which the company said would simplify management and reduce the number of senior managers reporting to Otellini by two.

And earlier this month, Intel said it was selling its media and signaling business, which makes telecommunications motherboards and software. About 600 employees were expected to be acquired by the buyer, Eicon Networks Corp., which bought the business for an undisclosed sum.

Otellini said the current restructuring will be as expansive as the company's transformation in the mid-1980s, when it exited a business it helped create - making dynamic random access memory chips widely used to store information in computers - to focus on microprocessors.

That shift prompted one of Intel's largest rounds of layoffs ever, with the company eliminating more than 7,000 jobs, about 30 percent of its work force at the time.

Since then, Intel has avoided large-scale layoffs. But the dot-com crash did prompt the elimination of about 11,000 jobs - largely through attrition and buyouts - in less than two years.

Eric Ross, analyst with ThinkEquity Partners, said the estimated $3 billion savings from the cuts was higher than expected, and could help the company reverse its fortunes.

"They're going to lose a lot of share, the PC environment is tough, and they're bloated," he said. "But if they can cut costs enough, we're going to see a different company."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-06-00-23-12





Shirt is Bush to a T

A US student who sued school officials after he was made to censor his T-shirt that labelled President George W. Bush "Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief" and a former alcohol and cocaine abuser won an appeal yesterday to wear the T-shirt to school.

Zachery Guiles claimed his free speech rights had been violated when school officials made him put duct tape over parts of his T-shirt that showed a Bush image surrounded by cocaine, a razor blade, a straw and a martini.

In 2004 Guiles wore the shirt to school in Vermont once a week for two months.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/s...ectid=10399151





New Web Sites Seeking Profit in Wiki Model
Robert Levine

Every day, millions of people find answers on Wikipedia to questions both trivial and serious. Jack Herrick found his business model there.

In 2004, Mr. Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers. Although the business made a profit, he realized that the revenue brought in by selling advertising would not support the extensive site he had in mind. “If the page were about how to get a mortgage, it would work,” he said. “But the idea was to be the how-to guide to everything.”

So in January 2005 he started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users — free — were more informative than those written by freelancers.

“Wikipedia proved you could get there with another method,” Mr. Herrick said. Several months ago he sold eHow to focus on the new site, which now has 10,000 entries in English, Spanish and German.

Mr. Herrick is hardly the only entrepreneur inspired by the efficiency and low cost of what has become known as the wiki model. Although Wikipedia is operated by a nonprofit foundation, ideas for advertising-based wiki sites are beginning to take their place alongside blogs and social networking sites as a staple of Silicon Valley business plans.

In addition to Wikia, a site devoted to topics judged too esoteric for the online encyclopedia, there is ShopWiki, for product reviews, and Wikitravel, for tourism advice. Several start-ups allow users to operate their own wiki sites.

“Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and this is about the other 999,000 books in the library,” said Ben Elowitz, chief executive of Wetpaint, a start-your-own wiki site.

Others wonder how big that library can get. All of the companies making consumer-oriented wikis are privately held and do not release revenue figures. But so far not one of them has come close to the popularity of Wikipedia, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. WikiHow had 1.1 million visitors in July, Wikia had just over 270,000, and several other wiki sites had too small an audience to be measured by the Nielsen/NetRatings methodology.

Andrew Frank, a research director at the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm, said that all of this interest in wikis might rest on some naïve assumptions.

“The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable,” he said. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content. And he says he believes that ads on wikis could be worth less per impression than those on sites that aim at a more specific audience.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of wikis,” Mr. Herrick said. “But I’m not sure how many of them will make money. “

Others are more optimistic. Last month John Gotts, an entrepreneur known for buying the rights to domain names, agreed to buy the site Wiki.com for $2.86 million.

“I would never have paid this much for any other domain,” Mr. Gotts said. “I can’t think of one that would be worth more.” He pointed out that the site Wiki.com drew traffic before he bought it, even though it had little content.

The wiki concept was invented in 1994 by Ward Cunningham, a computer scientist who created a program called WikiWikiWeb as a way to share programming techniques. He named his creation after the Hawaiian word for fast.

“The subject I had in mind was the knowledge necessary to write good computer code,” Mr. Cunningham said, “but I realized it would have broader implications. It’s a medium that allows people to collaborate more easily than they could in systems that are modeled after the precomputer world, like e-mail.”

Over the last few years, wikis have gained traction as tools in the business world, where companies run them on internal networks to foster collaboration on complex projects. The Gartner Group has predicted that half of all companies will use them internally in some fashion by 2009. There has also been at least one failed experiment with wikis in journalism: The Los Angeles Times tried online “wikitorials” but quickly abandoned the idea.

Even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is looking for ways to broaden — and profit from — the wiki concept. With financing from technology luminaries like Marc Andreessen and Mitchell Kapor, he and Angela Beesley started Wikia, which includes 1,500 separate wikis, from the Star Wars-focused Wookieepedia to user-generated pages on depression. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, it was founded with some of the communitarian idealism of Wikipedia, and its business plan calls for it to donate money to that foundation.

“It’s never going to be a billion-dollar-revenue business,” said Gil Penchina, the company’s chief executive. He said that the site currently made less than a dollar a page per month, although the site’s growing number of pages could make that significant.

“It feels to me like Craigslist,” he said. “It’s a small business, but it’s a good business and it makes a lot of people happy.”

If wikis become a big business, some of that idealism may fade — and consumers may begin to resent contributing to the sites free. So far, though, the sites are growing fast, thanks to dedicated volunteers.

Sondra Crane, a 75-year-old retiree who lives in Altamonte Springs, Fla., has written scores of entries for wikiHow on subjects both practical (how to make pot roast) and profound (how to get old without feeling old). “I’ve been writing all my life and I always wanted to have my name known,” she said. “I’d like to get paid — I put a lot of hours in. But it’s nice to know that people are being helped.”

Wikia and wikiHow operate much like Wikipedia: they let all users contribute and stipulate that any content they generate may be used freely, much as open-source software is. Other start-ups, including Wiki.com, are departing from the traditional collaborative spirit of the wiki model, in that they will let users decide who has permission to contribute to the wikis they start.

Mr. Gotts, who has been paying for Wiki.com in $10,000 installments with a final payment of about $2.8 million due within six months, said that he intended to share revenue with those who used his site to start wikis. “The main way we’re going to make money,” he said, “is to lead the trend for users to make money.”

He said that he would let users register Wiki.com subdomains free on topics of their own choosing — he suggested that might be anything from soccer.wiki.com to smokedsalmon.wiki.com — in the hope they would attract advertising or e-commerce.

But Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PBwiki, another make-your-own wiki site, said that it was still too early to determine what model would turn wikis into money-makers.

“Nobody has found the de facto business model for wikis,” said “It’s kind of the Wild West.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/te...gy/04wiki.html





Wired News Lets Users Write Wiki Article
Anick Jesdanun

Wired News readers are getting a chance to shape the news: For an article about wiki collaboration software, anyone may contribute using, what else?, a wiki.

The online news outlet challenged readers to edit a 1,059-word article just like an editor would. The writer, Ryan Singel, has even posted interview notes and conducted additional research in response to questions raised by the community.

Over the past week, the story has gone through more than 300 drafts, doubling in size as one reader conducted her own interview and added quotes, wiki vendors added references to their offerings and others contributed additional examples to support the premise.

Singel said the experiment has gone smoothly so far, devoid of the pranks and vandalism he had feared when Wired opened up the story to changes. With wikis, anyone may change, add or even delete passages, regardless of expertise.

But Singel doesn't believe the community can ever replace professional editors: Large groups can't easily agree on what parts to cut out, nor are they always careful about style.

"The original story had a bit more of a narrative flow, art to it," he said. "The additional information detracts from that a little bit. ... There are still portions that feel a little like a manual or a primer."

Wired editors plan to release a final version Thursday after editors vet the story for style and glaring errors, Singel said.

News organizations have tried collaborative articles before. Esquire magazine ran a similar experiment on a story about the open encyclopedia Wikipedia. The Los Angeles Times also briefly opened its editorials to public editing, but suspended it after being flooded with foul language and pornography.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-06-18-39-32





Wal-Mart Finds an Ally in Conservatives
Michael Barbaro and Stephanie Strom

As Wal-Mart Stores struggles to rebut criticism from unions and Democratic leaders, the company has discovered a reliable ally: prominent conservative research groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute.

Top policy analysts at these groups have written newspaper opinion pieces around the country supporting Wal-Mart, defended the company in interviews with reporters and testified on its behalf before government committees in Washington.

But the groups — and their employees — have consistently failed to disclose a tie to the giant discount retailer: financing from the Walton Family Foundation, which is run by the Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s three children, who have a controlling stake in the company.

The groups said the donations from the foundation have no influence over their research, which is deliberately kept separate from their fund-raising activities. What’s more, the pro-business philosophies of these groups often dovetail with the interests of Wal-Mart.

But the financing, which totaled more than $2.5 million over the last six years, according to data compiled by GuideStar, a research organization, raises questions about what the research groups should disclose to newspaper editors, reporters or government officials. The Walton Family Foundation must disclose its annual donations in forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service, but research groups are under no such obligation.

Companies and such groups have long courted one another — one seeking influence, the other donations — and liberal policy groups receive significant financing from unions and left-leaning organizations without disclosing their financing.

But the Walton donations could prove risky for Wal-Mart, given its escalating public relations campaign. The company’s quiet outreach to bloggers, beginning last year, touched off a debate about what online writers should disclose to readers, and its financing to policy groups could do the same.

Asked about the donations yesterday, Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said, “The fact is that editorial pages and prominent columnists of all stripes write favorably about our company because they recognize the value we provide to working families, the job opportunities we create and the contributions we make to the community we serve.”

At least five research and advocacy groups that have received Walton Family Foundation donations are vocal advocates of the company.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, for example, has received more than $100,000 from the foundation in the last three years, a fraction of the more than $24 million it raised in 2004 alone.

Richard Vedder, a visiting scholar at the institute, wrote an opinion article for The Washington Times last month, extolling Wal-Mart’s benefits to the American economy. “There is enormous economic evidence that Wal-Mart has helped poor and middle-class consumers, in fact more than anyone else,” Mr. Vedder wrote in the article, which prominently identified his ties to institute.

But neither Mr. Vedder nor the newspaper mentioned American Enterprise Institute’s financial links to the Waltons. Mr. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University, said he might have disclosed the relationship had the American Enterprise Institute told him of it. “I always assumed that A.E.I. had no relationship or a modest, distant relationship with the company,” said Mr. Vedder, who has written a forthcoming book about the company. The book, he said in an interview yesterday, would eventually contain a disclosure about the Walton donations to the institute.

A spokesman for the Walton Family Foundation, Jay Allen, said there was no organized campaign to build support for Wal-Mart among research groups. All of the foundation’s giving, he said, is directed toward a handful of philanthropic issues, including school reform, the environment and the economy in Northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is based. “That is the spirit and purpose of their giving,” Mr. Allen said.

Mr. Allen said the foundation, which had assets of $608.7 million in 2004, the last year for which data is available, has never asked the research groups to disclose the donations because “the family leaves it up to the individual organization to decide.”
Those groups, for the most part, say they have decided not to share the information with their analysts or the public.

For example, Sally C. Pipes, the president of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market policy advocate, has written several opinion articles defending Wal-Mart in The Miami Herald and The San Francisco Examiner.

A month after a federal judge in California certified a sex discrimination lawsuit against the company as a class action in 2004, Ms. Pipes wrote an article in The Examiner criticizing the lawyers and the women behind the suit. “The case against Wal-Mart,” she wrote, “follows the standard feminist stereotype of women as victims, men as villains and large corporations as inherently evil.”

The article did not disclose that the Walton Family Foundation gave Pacific Research $175,000 from 1999 to 2004. Ms. Pipes was aware of the contributions, but said the money was earmarked for an education reform project and did not influence her thinking about the lawsuit. Asked why she typically did not disclose the donations to newspapers, she said: “It never occurs to me to put that out front unless I am asked. If newspapers ask, I am completely open about it.”

The lack of disclosure highlights the absence of a consistent policy at the nation’s newspapers about whether contributors must tell editors of potential conflicts of interest.

Juan M. Vasquez, the deputy editorial page editor of The Miami Herald, which ran an opinion article praising Wal-Mart by Ms. Pipes of Pacific Research, said his staff researches organizations that write opinion articles, including their financing. But that does not always require asking if the organization has received money from the subject of an article, he said.

The New York Times has a policy of asking outside contributors to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, including the financing for research groups.

Several of the research groups noted that their mission is to be an advocate for free market policies and less government intrusion in business. “Those aims are pro-business, so it’s not surprising that companies would be supporters of our work,” said Khristine Brookes, a spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation.

Last year, for instance, The Baltimore Sun published an op-ed article by Tim Kane, a research fellow at Heritage, in which he criticized Maryland’s efforts to require Wal-Mart to spend more on health care. He objected to the move on the grounds that it was undue government interference in the free market, a traditional concern of Heritage.

“The existence of Wal-Mart dented the rise in overall inflation so much that Jerry Hausman, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is calling on the federal government to change the way it measures prices,” Mr. Kane wrote. “Translation: Wal-Mart is fighting poverty faster than government accountants can keep track.”

Ms. Brookes pointed out that the $20,000 Heritage has received from the Walton Family Foundation since 2000 amounts to less than 1 percent of its $40 million budget.

Ms. Brookes said it was unlikely that researchers and analysts at Heritage were even aware of the foundation’s contributions. “Nobody here would know that unless they walked upstairs and asked someone in development,” she said. “It’s just never discussed.”

She said Heritage did not accept money for specific research. “The money from the Walton Family Foundation has always been earmarked for our general operations,” she said. “They’ve never given us any funds saying do this paper or that paper.”

A spokeswoman for the American Enterprise Institute said the group did not comment on its donors. The group’s focus on Wal-Mart has been notable. In June, the editor in chief then of the group’s magazine, The American Enterprise, wrote a long essay defending Wal-Mart against critics. The editor, Karl Zinsmeister, now the chief domestic policy adviser at the White House, said the campaign against the company was “run by a clutch of political hacks.”

Conservative groups are not the only ones weighing in on the Wal-Mart debate. Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart noted labor unions have financed organizations that have been critical of Wal-Mart, like the Economic Policy Institute, which received $2.5 million from unions in 2005.

In response, Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalmart.com, an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that gives money to liberal research groups, said: "While we openly support the mission of economic justice, Wal-Mart and the Waltons put on a smiley face, hide the truth, all while supporting right-wing causes who are paid to defend Wal-Mart’s exploitative practices.”

The lack of a clear quid pro quo between research groups and corporations like Wal-Mart makes the issue murky, said Diana Aviv, chief executive of the Independent Sector, a trade organization representing nonprofits and foundations. “I don’t know how one proves what’s the chicken and what’s the egg,” she said.

Last year, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a research and watchdog group, published a report, “The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy,” that warned of the potential influence their vast wealth gives them.

But Rick Cohen, executive director of the group, said he was more concerned about the role the Walton foundation’s money might play in shaping public policy in areas like public education, where it has supported charter schools and voucher systems.

“These are certainly not organizations created and controlled by the corporation or the family and promoted as somehow authentic when they aren’t,” Mr. Cohen said. “More important, I think, is the disclosure of the funding in whatever’s written, a sort of disclaimer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/bu...rtner=homepage





Australia’s ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Killed by Stingray
AP

Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian television personality and conservationist known as the ''Crocodile Hunter,'' was killed Monday by a stingray while filming off the Great Barrier Reef. He was 44.

Irwin was at Batt Reef, off the remote coast of northeastern Queensland state, shooting a segment for a series called ''Ocean's Deadliest'' when he swam too close to one of the animals, which have a poisonous barb on their tails, his friend and colleague John Stainton said.

''He came on top of the stingray and the stingray's barb went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart,'' said Stainton, who was on board Irwin's boat at the time.

Crew members aboard the boat, Croc One, called emergency services in the nearest city, Cairns, and administered CPR as they rushed the boat to nearby Low Isle to meet a rescue helicopter. Medical staff pronounced Irwin dead when they arrived a short time later, Stainton said.

Irwin was famous for his enthusiasm for wildlife and his catchword ''Crikey!'' in his television program ''Crocodile Hunter.'' First broadcast in Australia in 1992, the program was picked up by the Discovery network, catapulting Irwin to international celebrity.

He rode his image into a feature film, 2002's ''The Crocodile Hunters: Collision Course'' and developed the wildlife park that his parents opened, Australia Zoo, into a major tourist attraction.

''The world has lost a great wildlife icon, a passionate conservationist and one of the proudest dads on the planet,'' Stainton told reporters in Cairns. ''He died doing what he loved best and left this world in a happy and peaceful state of mind. He would have said, 'Crocs Rule!'''

Prime Minister John Howard, who hand-picked Irwin to attend a gala barbecue to honor President Bush when he visited in 2003, said he was ''shocked and distressed at Steve Irwin's sudden, untimely and freakish death.''

''It's a huge loss to Australia,'' Howard told reporters. ''He was a wonderful character. He was a passionate environmentalist. He brought joy and entertainment and excitement to millions of people.''

Irwin, who made a trademark of hovering dangerously close to untethered crocodiles and leaping on their backs, spoke in rapid-fire bursts with a thick Australian accent and was almost never seen without his uniform of khaki shorts and shirt and heavy boots.

Wild animal expert Jack Hanna, who frequently appears on TV with his subjects, offered praise for Irwin.

''Steve was one of these guys, we thought of him as invincible,'' Hanna, director emeritus of the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo and Aquarium, told ABC's ''Good Morning America'' Monday.

''The guy was incredible. His knowledge was incredible,'' Hanna said. ''Some people that are doing this stuff are actors and that type of thing, but Steve was truly a zoologist, so to speak, a person who knew what he was doing. Yes, he did things a lot of people wouldn't do. I think he knew what he was doing.''

Irwin's ebullience was infectious and Australian officials sought him out for photo opportunities and to promote Australia internationally.

His public image was dented, however, in 2004 when he caused an uproar by holding his infant son in one arm while feeding large crocodiles inside a zoo pen. Irwin claimed at the time there was no danger to the child, and authorities declined to charge Irwin with violating safety regulations.

Later that year, he was accused of getting too close to penguins, a seal and humpback whales in Antarctica while making a documentary. Irwin denied any wrongdoing, and an Australian Environment Department investigation recommended no action be taken against him.

Stingrays have a serrated, toxin-loaded barb, or spine, on the top of their tail. The barb, which can be up to 10 inches long, flexes if a ray is frightened. Stings usually occur to people when they step on or swim too close to a ray and can be excruciatingly painful but are rarely fatal, said University of Queensland marine neuroscientist Shaun Collin.

Collin said he suspected Irwin died because the barb pierced under his ribcage and directly into his heart.

''It was extraordinarily bad luck. It's not easy to get spined by a stingray and to be killed by one is very rare,'' Collin said.

News of Irwin's death spread quickly, and tributes flowed from all quarters of society.

At Australia Zoo at Beerwah, south Queensland, floral tributes were dropped at the entrance, where a huge fake crocodile gapes. Drivers honked their horns as they passed.

''Steve, from all God's creatures, thank you. Rest in peace,'' was written on a card with a bouquet of native flowers.

''We're all very shocked. I don't know what the zoo will do without him. He's done so much for us, the environment and it's a big loss,'' said Paula Kelly, a local resident and volunteer at the zoo, after dropping off a wreath at the gate.

Stainton said Irwin's American-born wife Terri, from Eugene, Ore., had been informed of his death, and had told their daughter Bindi Sue, 8, and son Bob, who will turn 3 in December.

The couple met when she went on vacation in Australia in 1991 and visited Irwin's Australia Zoo; they were married six months later. Sometimes referred to as the ''Crocodile Huntress,'' she costarred on her husband's television show and in his 2002 movie.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts... ner=homepage





The RIAA in Action
p2pnet.net

The Big Four Organized Music family has been victimizing its own customers since at least 2003. But instead of vigorously questioning the bizarre practice, the mainstream on- and offline print and electronic media support it, parroting floods of Big Four so-called press releases as though they're accurate reports from credible sources.

New York lawyer Ray Beckerman runs Recording Industry vs The People which among other things, high-lights some of the worst examples of how the music industry cartel persecutes men, women and even children. The site also carries links to court documents and lists lawyers who are currently defending Big Four victims.

The labels have numerous faux 'trade' units fronting for them and in the US, it's the mis-named RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) owned by EMI (Great Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and, finally, Warner Music (US).

Here's Beckerman's latest on the RIAA in Action.

The RIAA lawsuits pit a small number of very large recording companies against individuals who have paid for an internet access account.

On the plaintiff's end, the owners of the underlying copyrights in the musical compositions are not involved in the case; neither are many smaller record companies.

As to the defendants, since no investigation is made to ascertain that the defendant is actually someone who engaged in peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music without authorization, there are many defendants who have no idea why they are being sued and who did nothing even arguably violative of anyone's copyright. Defendants have included people who have never even used a computer, and many people who although they have used a computer, have never engaged in any peer to peer file sharing.

Sometimes the cases are misleadingly referred to as cases against 'downloaders'; in fact the RIAA knows nothing of any downloading when it commences suit, and in many instances no downloading ever took place.

It is more accurate to refer to the cases as cases against persons who paid for internet access which the RIAA has reason to believe was used by some person -- possibly the defendant, possibly someone else -- to engage in peer to peer file sharing.

Ex parte discovery cases.

At the core of the RIAA lawsuit process, is its initial lawsuit against a group of "John Does".

Here is how it works:

A lawsuit is brought against a group of "John Does". The location of the lawsuit is where the corporate headquarters of the internet service provider (ISP) is located.

All the RIAA knows about the people it is suing is that they are the people who paid for an internet access acount for a particular dynamic IP address.

The "John Does" may live -- and usually do live -- hundreds or thousands of miles away from the City where the lawsuit is pending, and are not even aware that they have been sued.

The RIAA is aware that most of the defendants do not live in the state, and are not subject to the jurisdiction of the Court, but bring the case anyway.

They are also aware that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure there is no basis for joining all these defendants in a single lawsuit, but do indeed join them in one case, sometimes as many as several hundred in a single "litigation".

The only "notice" the "John Does" get is a vague letter from their ISP, along with copies of an ex parte discovery order and a subpoena, indicating that an order has already been granted against them: i.e., instead of receiving notice that the RIAA is applying for an order, they instead are notified that they have already lost the motion, without ever even having known of its existence.[p2pnet emphasis]

They are not given copies of (i) the summons and complaint, (ii) the papers upon which the Court granted the ex parte discovery order, or (iii) the court rules needed to defend themselves. Most recipients of this "notice" do not even realize that it means that there is a lawsuit against them. None of the recipients of the "notice" have any idea what they are being sued for, or what basis the Court had for granting the ex parte discovery order and for allowing the RIAA to obtain a subpoena.

They are told they have a few days, or maybe a week or two, to make a motion to quash the subpoena. But if they were to talk to a lawyer they could not give the lawyer an iota of information as to what the case is about, what the basis for the subpoena is, or any other details that would permit a lawyer to make an informed decision as to whether a motion to quash the subpoena could, or could not, be made. What is more, the lawyer would have to be admitted to practice in the jurisdiction in which the ex parte case is pending, in order to do anything at all.

In other words, except for lawyers who are knowledgeable about the RIAA tactics, no lawyer could possibly have any suggestions that would enable "John Doe" to fight back.

So "John Doe" of course defaults. Then the John Doe "case" may drag on for months or even years, with the RIAA being the only party that has lawyers in court to talk to the judges and other judicial personnel.

The RIAA -- without notice to the defendants -- makes a motion for an "ex parte" order permitting immediate discovery. ("Ex parte" means that one side has communicated to the Court without the knowledge of the other parties to the suit. It is very rarely permitted, since the American system of justice is premised upon an open system in which, whenever one side wants to communicate with the Court, it has to give prior notice to the other side, so that they too will have an opportunity to be heard.).

The "ex parte" order would give the RIAA permission to take "immediate discovery" -- before the defendants have been served or given notice -- which authorizes the issuance of subpoenas to the ISP's asking for the names and addresses and other information about their subscribers, which is information that would otherwise be confidential.

In the United States the courts have been routinely granting these "ex parte" orders, it appears. (Not so in other countries. Both Canada and the Netherlands have found the RIAA's investigation too flimsy to warrant the invasion of subscriber privacy. Indeed the Netherlands court questioned the investigation's legality.).

Once the ex parte order is granted, the RIAA issues a subpoena to the ISP, and gets the subscriber's name and address.

The RIAA then discontinues its "John Doe" "ex parte" case, and sues the defendant in his own name in the district where he or she lives.

Thus, at the core of the whole process are:

(1) the mass lawsuit against a large number of "John Does";
(2) the "ex parte" order of discovery; and
(3) the subpoenas demanding the names and addresses of the "John Does".

This process has recently come under attack in 3 cases in Manhattan federal court: Atlantic v. Does 1-25 before Judge Swain, Motown v. Does 1-99 before Judge Buchwald, and Warner v. Does 1-149, before Judge Owen, in which "John Doe" defendants represented by Ray Beckerman and Ty Rogers brought motions to (a) vacate the ex parte discovery order on the ground that it had not been supported by competent evidence of a prima facie copyright infringment case, (b) quash the subpoena on that ground plus the additional ground that the complaint fails to state a claim for relief, and (c) sever and dismiss as to all defendants other than John Doe #1.

The moving parties were from Iowa, Texas, Long Island, and North Carolina -- i.e. not one of the John Does was someone who could properly be sued in Manhattan federal court.

All 3 motions have been denied.

The decisions are not appealable, since they are, theoretically, "interlocutory". However, it is the RIAA's usual practice to discontinue the "John Doe" cases, which means that there will never be a final judgment in the case, so the orders will never be brought to appellate scrutiny.

Settlement phase

After getting the name and address of the person who paid for the internet access account, they then send him or her a letter demanding a "settlement".

Their settlement is usually for $3750, non-negotiable, and contains numerous one-sided and unusual provisions, such as a representation that peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music is a copyright infringement (a representation that is far too broad, undoubtedly there are 'sharing' behaviors with digital files, as there are with cd's, that are not copyright infringements). Even certain innocuous provisions, worded in a way to make them obligations of the defendant but not the RIAA, are deemed 'non-negotiable'. At bottom, the settlement is cold comfort to the defendant, because it does not speak for the other potential plaintiffs -- the owners of the copyrighted work, or the other record companies not represented by the RIAA litigation fund.

Litigations against named defendants

If there is no settlement, the RIAA then commences suit against the named defendant in the district in which he or she resides. A boilerplate complaint is used which accuses the defendant of "downloading, distributing, and/or making available for distribution" a list of songs. There are actually 2 lists, a long list (exhibit B) and a short list (exhibit A). The long list is a 'screen shot' of a list of file names which were allegedly in a shared files folder. The short list is allegedly a list of song which the RIAA's investigators were able to download.

No details as to how, when, or where the alleged "infringement" took place.

If the defendant defaults, plaintiffs apply for, and apparently usually obtain, a default judgement for $750 per Exhibit A song -- a number which is over 1000 times the 70-cent amount for which the license to the song could have been purchased. This measure of damages has been challenged on constitutional grounds in UMG v. Lindor and Maverick v. Goldshteyn, both in Brooklyn federal court.

There have been several challenges to the sufficiency of the boilerplate complaint, in the form of a motion to dismiss complaint, 3 in Texas, 1 in Minnesota, 1 in Arizona, and 3 in New York; my firm has been involved in the 3 New York motions.

In Elektra v. Santangelo, in Westchester, the motion was denied.

An unusal result occurred in Interscope v. Duty, in Arizona. The judge denied the defendant's dismissal motion, not because he agreed with the RIAA, but because he didn't feel he understood the technology well enough to rule on the case.

Then, in Waco, Texas, in Warner v. Payne, in Fonovisa v. Alvarez in Abilene, Texas, and in Maverick v. Goldshteyn in Brooklyn, New York, the judges followed the Interscope decision, declining to decide whether 'making available' is a copyright infringement, and upheld the complaint. The motion was also denied in Arista v. Greubel, in Dallas, Texasa.

In Elektra v. Barker in Manhattan, the motion is pending, and the RIAA has cited to the judge their victories in the other six (6) cases.

In Elektra v. Barker, amicus curiae briefs have been submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and the Internet Industry Association, in support of Ms. Barker's motion, and by the MPAA in opposition to it. Additionally the American Association of Publishers requested permission to file such a brief, and the United States Department of Justice submitted a "Statement of Interest" taking issue with an argument made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Briefing has now been completed, and the parties are awaiting either a decision from Judge Karas, or the setting of an oral argument date if the judge feels that oral argument is needed.

The Department of Justice also submitted a "Statement of Interest" in Fonovisa, also on the side of the RIAA, relating to the same limited issue.

A new dismissal motion motion is being made in Westchester, in Warner v. Cassin.

In cases where the sufficiency of the complaint is not being challenged, or has been accepted by the court, the RIAA serves a number of pretrial discovery requests, calling for examination of the hard drive and numerous other items, and discovery is being litigated. There have been interesting discovery rulings in Elektra v. Santangelo in White Plains, Atlantic v. Andersen in Oregon, Motown v. Nelson in Michigan, and in UMG v. Lindor.

In Lindor the magistrate ordered the record companies to produce evidence, if any, relating to their employees' use of p2p file sharing to send music files to radio stations, and to produce 'chain of title' documents for any copyrights as to which the name of the plaintiff is not the name on the copyright registration, or as to which there has ever been any dispute of copyright ownership. Additionally, he ordered that defendant can take pretrial discovery into the plaintiffs' analysis of the hard drive, and precluded plaintiffs from proving any actual damages at trial.

Some of the other discovery rulings in Lindor: (1) the record companies can't have a blanket advance confidentiality order for their deposition transcripts, but will have to move for a protective order as to sections they want to keep confidential, (2) if they want to assert a privilege as to their agreements with their investigators they will have to make a formal protective order motion and submit copies of the agreements "in camera" to the Judge (i.e. show them it to the judge, but not to the other side), (3) if they won't produce the witness for UMG in Brooklyn, where the court is located, they have to either reimburse Ms. Lindor up to $500 for her lawyer's travel expenses or they have to have a videoconference where both lawyers are participating only by videoconference; (4) Ms. Lindor is entitled to followup interrogatories on the subject of the plaintiffs' 'investigation' methods.

In Priority Records v. Brittany Chan, a Michigan case, the litigation was brought against a 14 year old girl who allegedly engaged in file sharing when she was 13. The RIAA made a motion to have a guardian ad litem appointed so that its case might proceed against the minor, but the Judge rejected the motion because it did not ensure payment of the guardian ad litem's fees. The judge thereafter dismissed the case when the RIAA ignored his instruction to submit a plan that would ensure payment of the guardian ad litem's fees.

In an earlier case against Brittany's mother, the RIAA refused to withdraw the case against the mother, but then changed its mind and did withdraw when faced with the mother's motion for summary judgment and attorneys fees.

A similar scenario occurred in Capitol v. Foster, in Oklahoma, where the RIAA withdrew only when faced with the mother's motion for summary judgment and attorneys fees. The judge let the RIAA drop its case, but held that the 'voluntary' withdrawal did not make the RIAA immune from legal fees, and indicated that he may award the mother her attorneys fees. Ms. Foster has made a motion for attorneys fees, and was supported in her motion by an amicus curiae brief submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, Public Citizen, and the ACLU Foundation of Oklahoma. In their brief the 'friends of the court' told the judge that "the RIAA has wrought havoc in the lives of many innocent Americans" and that an award of attorneys fees is necessary to deter such conduct in the future. Meanwhile the RIAA has asked the judge not to accept the amicus brief.

In another Oklahoma City case, Warner v. Stubbs, the defendant -- represented by the same lawyer who represented Debbie Foster -- filed an answer and counterclaim saying that the RIAA's tactics amounted to extortion. The very next day the RIAA moved to withdraw its case.

In a Michigan case, Warner v. Scantlebury, after learning that the defendant died, the RIAA asked the Court for a 60-day stay to allow the family to "grieve", after which it said it intends to take depositions of the decedent's children. We have received unconfirmed reports that after a firestorm of controversy erupted over the internet, the RIAA now intends to withdraw the case against the deceased.

As of this writing, we are on the verge of seeing how defendants' summary judgment motions will fare in the courts. In February, 2006, Marie Lindor wrote a letter to Judge Trager asking for a premotion conference in connection with her planned summary judgment motion in UMG v. Lindor; the judge, however, referred the case to the Magistrate for pretrial discovery prior to summary judgment motion practice. After submitting to a deposition, and to an inspection of the hard drive of the computer in her apartment, after answering all of the RIAA's written discovery demands, and after arranging for her adult son and daughter to testify voluntarily at their depositions, she has now written to the Judge renewing her request for a summary judgment pre-motion conference and for a stay of discovery during the pendency of the motion. In August, 2006, a motion for summary judgment was made by the defendant, in Chicago, in Warner v. Wilke. The plaintiffs' opposition papers are due September 19th.
http://p2pnet.net/story/9801





The Death of Privacy
Jeffrey Rothfeder

In privacy circles, a mostly forgotten incident from the end of the dot-com euphoria aptly illustrates the lack of regard most companies have toward protecting personal data, even if they make a point of promising to do so.

The episode occurred in mid-2000, when Toysmart.com Inc., a Web-based retailer, went out of business. Among the assets the company put on the block during bankruptcy proceedings was one that caught the eye of regulators at the Federal Trade Commission: the names, e-mail and mailing addresses, and shopping histories of 250,000 Toysmart customers. Toysmart was offering these records to the highest bidder, despite an online privacy policy that explicitly stated the company would never share customer data with any third party.

With the Web surging with an enormous amount of commercial activity and sensitive information, the FTC had recently beefed up its Internet consumer-protection efforts. Commission regulators decided that Toysmart's blatant disdain for its own privacy oath was just too contemptuous to be ignored. Backed by 44 state attorneys general, the FTC sued to block the Toysmart data auction, arguing that it constituted a "deceptive practice." In early 2001, an agreement was forged under which Toysmart investor, the Walt Disney Co., would buy the company's customer data for $50,000 and then promptly destroy it.

"The Toysmart case and others like it—among them Living.com and CraftShop .com—proves what some of us have suspected all along: Many companies don't really believe privacy is something to protect when there's money to be made from confidential data, or when safeguarding sensitive data gets in the way of making money," says Luis Salazar, an attorney in the privacy practice group at Miami-based law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP. Last year, at the request of Senator Patrick Leahy (D– Vt.), Salazar authored a provision for a new bankruptcy law that makes it illegal for insolvent companies to sell personally identifiable information if their privacy policies forbade such activities.

The general disinterest in doing little more than the bare minimum to shield consumer privacy extends well beyond companies that are closing up shop. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, at the University of Ottawa, recently conducted an in-depth study of 64 major online sites, including those of Amazon.com Inc., Citigroup Inc., Staples Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc. and eBay Inc. The study found that, in general, an alarming number of Web-based operations are sloppy, if not downright negligent, when it comes to privacy practices. According to the CIPPIC report, released in April, "While almost all companies we assessed had a privacy policy and were thus aware of the need to respect customer privacy, many failed to fulfill even basic statutory requirements such as providing contact information for their privacy officers, clearly stating what they do with consumers' personal information and responding to access-to-information requests."

CIPPIC investigators called customer-service numbers at online retailers and asked if the company had a privacy policy and, if so, who was responsible for it. At 68 percent of companies it took more than five minutes to answer the question, and at 22 percent it took more than ten minutes. Moreover, respondents at 56 percent of the companies contacted by phone could not provide the name of the person in charge of the organization's privacy issues.

These findings, while disturbing, should not be particularly surprising when measured against the number of high- and low-profile data breaches that have occurred in the past two years. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, based in San Diego, has been keeping a running total of the leaks of sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, and driver's license numbers, by companies and government agencies since data aggregator ChoicePoint Inc. sold 145,000 consumer files to identity thieves in February 2005. Scores of incidents are chronicled, as many as three dozen a month, some involving global brands such as Toyota Motor Corp., Chevron Corp., Allstate Corp. and Equifax Inc. In all, more than 90 million records containing confidential information about individuals—in large part, consumers, patients and employees—have been stolen from U.S. organizations in the past 18 months.

The pattern that emerges is not pretty. Most companies claim that privacy is a priority—chiefly because they believe consumers are more willing to do repeat business with them if personal information is carefully handled. But in reality, many companies are woefully inept at protecting privacy. Some companies view robust data protection as too expensive to consider seriously, so half-hearted steps are taken instead. Others see the penalty for data breaches and privacy failures as too low to generate much concern. In many instances, management of privacy policies is handed off to chief privacy officers who report to the corporate lawyers, not a C-level executive, and whose main responsibility is to make sure the company's data policies are in line with government regulations and industry benchmarks. In other words, privacy is regarded as a risk that must be mitigated, not a strategic imperative.

"It's only been recently, as privacy breaches occur and make the headlines, that it's becoming obvious to everybody that companies haven't been doing a good enough job," says Alex Fowler, co-leader of the privacy practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "As time goes by, we'll get an even clearer picture of the data-handling practices of companies. My guess is we're not going to like what we find out."

At its core, protecting privacy is an information management issue. With the cost of computer storage plummeting, companies are maintaining more and more data, for longer periods of time, at rock-bottom prices. Executives are driven by the idea that any morsel of information about customer purchases, browsing habits and preferences could someday be valuable, so they simply can't bring themselves to erase anything. Consequently, personal information and less sensitive details exist side-by-side in the same databases, often accessible by multiple programs throughout the organization, many of which have long been forgotten. Without a complete, up-to-date inventory of what data they possess and how it is being used, which data should be segregated and which can be freely shared, many companies are making privacy breaches a foregone conclusion.

Budgets and leadership also play roles. Technology managers say they are loath to ask for the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost to create a blueprint of company data and a system for keeping confidential information from being easily accessed, when management has shown little interest in spending discretionary money on an activity with such limited tangible return.

Encrypting networked information, for example, would "take care of 95 percent of the internal privacy intrusions," says George Toft, a veteran IT manager who has worked at American Express Co., Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the Department of Defense and IBM Corp., and who currently runs My IT Department, a small computer-services firm in Anthem, Az. Yet few companies are willing to pay for this safeguard. CIO Insight's own research indicates that only 41 percent of companies surveyed encrypt stored data and documents. And only 56 percent encrypt data in flight, or during transmission.

Why? The No. 1 issue was the potential for performance degradation; No. 2 was cost. This attitude reflects a serious lack of leadership on the part of executives, notes George Tillmann, former chief information officer at consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. "Companies will not take privacy seriously until management does. So far, most managers prefer to see it as a problem that does not rise to the strategic level," Tillmann says.

Tillmann, who is now retired, argues that CEOs must set stringent corporate information retention policies and processes that "state explicitly what data can be stored, where it can be stored (on PCs, laptops, PDAs, and the like) and how it should be stored (encrypted or not). The policies need to address all types of data—customer, employee and supplier records—not just financial information. They should include guidelines for reducing the amount of information stored by getting rid of it as soon as it is not needed," he adds.

CEOs and other executives may be neglecting privacy safeguards and rigid privacy policies because the cost of failing to protect data is not as high as is commonly believed. It is de rigueur for chief executives to publicly state that protecting customer data is critical, because trust is an essential part of the relationship businesses have with consumers. Yet a closer look at the price of an actual breach reveals that, while not insignificant, it can be relatively minimal. In a recent study of 14 lost-data incidents, encryption company PGP Corp. found that the average opportunity cost of a data breach, measured by the "loss of existing customers and the increased difficulty in recruiting new customers" was about $75 per lost customer record. For typical successful retailers or financial services firms with billions in annual earnings, that represents an acceptable hit to the bottom line.

Moreover, in most cases, companies can easily avoid legal penalties for a data breach. There are nearly three dozen state laws that require companies to notify consumers if their private information has been leaked and a risk of identity theft exists. As long as these procedures are followed, companies are free from criminal liability for the leak itself.

"While there's a general sense that it's embarrassing to be involved in a data breach, and it is true that a breach doesn't do anything for your reputation as a trusted business, privacy is a business decision that ultimately comes down to a risk calculation. And many companies believe—wrongfully, from my perspective—that the price of data loss simply isn't high enough," says Gary Lynch, business continuity management practice leader at Marsh Risk Consulting, a division of New York City-based Marsh Inc.

Most executives don't like to think of it this way, but, so far, companies have created strong privacy policies only when forced to by federal legislation with very specific data-protection provisions. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, better known as HIPAA, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, require healthcare providers and financial services firms, respectively, to implement systems to protect the privacy of patient and customer information. Both bills have been criticized for being long on rhetoric and short on rigorous penalties, but few companies are prepared to ignore mandates from Washington, no matter how weak-kneed the law or how expensive it is to implement. Consequently, the privacy policies in the business sectors overseen by HIPAA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley are considerably more enlightened than in other industries.

These laws affect fewer than a quarter of U.S. companies, and as a result, their reach has been limited. Ironically, the European Union's privacy regulations have probably had a much more significant influence on the data-protection policies of a much wider group of U.S. companies.

The EU's data directive is the most stringent in the world. Passed in 1995, the legislation forbids companies in EU nations from using confidential information, which is quite broadly defined, for secondary purposes without the explicit approval of the consumer. That rule, and other restrictions allowing individuals access to companies' personal data and providing ways to correct errors, go well beyond the privacy protections practiced by almost every U.S. company. Consequently, with the adoption of the EU directive, U.S. companies with European operations and sales activities found themselves in danger of being legislated out of a lucrative market.

In 2000, after months of negotiations, the EU and the U.S. Commerce Department forged a safe-harbor agreement that allows U.S. companies to collect and share data in Europe in the course of doing business, as long as they promise to abide by a slightly watered-down version of the EU's data protection rules. Since then, hundreds of U.S. organizations have signed on to the accord.

Safe-harbor companies are required to follow the EU's austere data protection standards only when dealing with European consumers, or when managing subsidiary or affiliate businesses on the continent. The result: Most U.S. companies now have two sets of privacy rules—one for the European market, and another set of less rigid policies in the U.S. and other nations. However, a few companies were convinced that the EU approach served the consumer's appropriate expectation of privacy quite well. These companies saw safe harbor as an opportunity to create a single, strict data-protection regimen for the entire organization, wherever on the globe it operated.

In 2001, Eli Lilly & Co., the maker of Prozac, made the embarrassing mistake of sending out an e-mail to 600 users of the anti-depressant that contained the e-mail addresses of every recipient. In effect, Lilly had broadcast the names of Prozac patients to perfect strangers around the world. That incident resulted in a deal with the FTC under which Lilly agreed to improve its privacy practices, and coincided with Lilly's signing on to the EU's safe-harbor agreement. With these two activities on the front burner at the company, Lilly management, with the strong urging of Global Privacy Officer Stan Crosley, decided to make data protection a centerpiece of the company's strategic direction.

"Europe was a significant driver on privacy for Lilly," says Crosley. "It showed us that there was a different approach that could have a nice return for the company—not necessarily in dollars and cents, but in the gains a company can get from having good business practices. There is a distrust of large corporations among consumers. But we cannot survive in the pharmaceutical industry as a target of that distrust."

Lilly spent tens of millions of dollars over many months to develop a global data-protection system that contains a series of approval layers for accessing private information. Its information protocols are designed to ensure that the only people permitted to view discrete, confidential data are those who must access it to do their jobs. Furthermore, sensitive information is clearly marked and segregated from less classified data in order to make it difficult to inadvertently leak customer records.

"Information is valuable to us, and we realized that we would only be able to continue to collect it if we convinced consumers that we appreciated that things of value should be protected," Crosley adds.

Stories like Lilly's—particularly the role that the EU directive played in the company's conversion to a pro-privacy stance—bolster the notion that U.S. companies won't install comprehensive data-protection systems until government legislation forces them to. About a dozen bills have been introduced in the current Congress that tackle various aspects of data protection. The most expansive legislation is the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act, co-sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter (R–Pa.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Leahy, the committee's ranking member. Their proposal would require most companies with at least 10,000 digital files on individuals to adopt data-privacy procedures that protect against unauthorized access and use of personally identifiable information. Violators face fines and prosecution.

When it was introduced in mid-2005, the bipartisan legislation was expected to pass easily before the end of the year. But revelations about warrentless wiretapping of domestic phone calls by the National Security Agency and other terrorist-related law enforcement activities have preoccupied the committee since then, and the Specter-Leahy bill has yet to reach the Senate floor. None of the other data-privacy proposals have been voted on, in either house of Congress. Frustrated by the lack of action, Senator Leahy says that it signifies a general disinclination among lawmakers to tackle privacy problems. "The longer there is erosion of Americans' privacy rights, the more difficult it becomes to do something about it," says Leahy. "This Congress has not made a priority of privacy protection. I hope the next Congress will."

That can't come a moment too soon, says PwC's Fowler. As companies grapple with basic data-privacy concerns that should probably have been dealt with a decade ago, the issue is fast gaining in complexity. "Our notion of identity is going to change a lot in the new millennium. We're just scratching the surface now," Fowler says. "Which aspects of our data identity must be protected at all costs, which aspects of it are the most sensitive, is just beginning to come into shape even as the amount of data about us continues to expand. We need to step back and understand the dynamics of identity, and how it is shifting and putting pressure on businesses, government, regulators and policy makers from a social, political and cultural perspective. That is a discussion we are not having."
http://www.cioinsight.com/print_arti...=187895,00.asp





Facebook Feature Draws Privacy Concerns
Anick Jesdanun

The operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages. Instead, the new feature has drawn complaints from thousands of its users and even threats of a boycott.

The backlash is over Facebook's decision this week to deliver automated, customized alerts known as News Feeds about a user's closest friends, classmates and colleagues. Users who log on might instantly find out that someone they know has joined a new social group, posted more photos or begun dating their best friend.

"It's making it so much easier for people who want to do stalking to stalk," said Facebook user Igor Hiller, 17, a freshman at University of California, Santa Barbara. "Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet recording every single move."

A protest group created on the site, Students against Facebook News Feeds, had more than 600,000 members by Thursday, and more than 80,000 people had electronically endorsed a petition against the feature. A Web journal has even been set up calling for users to boycott the site on Tuesday, a week after the feature's debut.

"Anytime you're confronted with new information about yourself in a public place, it's surprising," said Andrea Forte, 32, a Facebook user and Georgia Tech doctoral candidate who studies online communities. "My initial reaction was mild dismay."

Facebook has long prided itself on privacy.

A user's profile details, including contact information, relationship status and hobbies, are generally hidden from others unless they are already part of that user's network of friends or institution, such as a college.

In addition, users have the option of hiding specific details from certain users, even ones already designated as friends - choosing, for instance, to show photos to college buddies but not to co-workers.

To join, one must prove membership in an existing network using an e-mail address from a college, a high school or selected companies and organizations. As a result, Facebook has fewer than 10 million registered users, compared with some 108 million at News Corp.'s MySpace.

Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said Thursday that privacy remains central to the site, but he acknowledged the company misstepped and "failed to communicate to our users actively what it actually meant for them."

All of the information presented had been available before, but a person had to visit a friend's profile page and make note of any changes - for example, noticing that the friend now has 103 friends instead of 102, and identifying which one got added.

Zuckerberg said people "can literally spend 10 to 20 minutes going through all the information in individual profiles." The new feature, he said, was meant to "surface the most interesting changes" made by a user's closest friends.

Chris Hughes, co-founder of the two-year-old, privately held company based in Palo Alto, Calif., said Facebook's software analyzes such factors as how often one communicates with a friend or views that friend's profile in determining whom a user deems most important.

He added that anything someone chose to hide to a specific person before would not suddenly appear in that person's feed.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was working on giving users additional privacy options.

The safeguards, expected as early as Friday, would let users block from feeds entire categories - such as changes to the groups they belong to - while still allowing people to observe such changes by visiting the profile page. Before, a user had to remove items one at a time from their personal feeds.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-08-04-27-48





Facebook Changes After Privacy Protests
Anick Jesdanun

Users of the online hangout Facebook revolted and won as the site agreed Friday to let them turn off a new feature that drew privacy complaints because it lets others easily see changes made to their personal profile pages.

"We really messed this one up," Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said in an open letter to users.

The backlash came over Facebook's decision Tuesday to deliver automated, customized alerts about a user's closest friends, classmates and colleagues. Users who log on might instantly find out that someone they know has joined a new social group, posted more photos or begun dating their best friend.

All of the information presented had been available before, but a person had to visit a friend's profile page and make note of any changes - for example, noticing that the friend now has 103 friends instead of 102, and identifying which one got added.

The feature was meant to help users save time. Instead, Facebook saw thousands of users joining protest groups on the site and signing online petitions. A Web journal was even set up calling for users to boycott the site next Tuesday.

The boycott was called off Friday, as was a protest Monday outside the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

"We think it's a good compromise," said Facebook user Igor Hiller, 17, a University of California, Santa Barbara, freshman who had organized Monday's protest. "We're happy with what they've done."

Zuckerberg told The Associated Press on Thursday that Facebook was working on giving users additional privacy options. The safeguards let users block from feeds entire categories - such as changes to the groups they belong to - while still allowing people to observe such changes by visiting the profile page.

The options were started Friday and essentially let users block all types of feeds if they want. Zuckerberg said Friday such options should have been offered from the start.

"This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it," he wrote users. "But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls."

Facebook has long prided itself on privacy.

A user's profile details, including contact information, relationship status and hobbies, are generally hidden from others unless they are already part of that user's network of friends or institution, such as a college.

In addition, users have the option of hiding specific details from certain users, even ones already designated as friends - choosing, for instance, to show photos to college buddies but not to co-workers.

To join, one must prove membership in an existing network using an e-mail address from a college, a high school or selected companies and organizations. As a result, Facebook has fewer than 10 million registered users, compared with some 108 million at News Corp.'s MySpace.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-08-18-42-29





Pollster Guilty of Fake Data Conspiracy
Michael P. Mayko

A polling company owner admitted participating in a conspiracy to falsify data in order to meet deadlines for clients, which included the campaigns of President Bush, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Mayor John M. Fabrizi.

Tracy Costin, 46, of Madison, admitted to U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall that she participated in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Costin, who owned and operated DataUSA, a survey and polling firm with offices in West Haven and Guilford, faces up to five years in prison when she is sentenced Nov. 30.

However a preliminary calculation of the federal sentencing guidelines call for Costin to receive a sentence ranging from 27 to 33 months in prison and a fine of $6,000 to $60,000.

As part of her plea agreement, Costin agreed to repay $82,732 to the clients of 11 jobs between June 2002 and May 2004. The clients were not identified.

However, court documents identify numerous political clients, as well as Metro-North Railroad, as customers of DataUSA, now known as Viewpoint USA.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward Chang said the firm's employees conducted telephone interviews using a scripted questionnaire.

But Chang said on several occasions when the company was running up against a deadline to complete a job, results were falsified. Sometimes, the respondent's gender or political affiliation were changed to meet a quota, other times all survey answers were fabricated.

FBI Special Agent Jeff Rovelli said 50 percent of information compiled by DataUSA and transmitted to Bush's campaign was falsified.

There was no indication that the Fabrizi campaign surveys were falsified.

Leonard Mastri, Costin's ex-husband, told the FBI the results for a Metro-North survey were fabricated.

Mastri, the former owner of Computer Guys and PM Consulting in Bridgeport, was arrested and convicted for selling computers stolen from Sikorsky Aircraft.

The FBI, along with agents from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, investigated both cases.
http://www.connpost.com/news/ci_4298956





Three From Clinton Administration Urge Disney to Cancel or Revise 9/11 Mini-Series
Jesse McKinley

Three members of the Clinton administration have written the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, to complain that the network’s coming two-part miniseries “The Path to 9/11” is fraught with factual errors and fabrications.

The letters ask that the five-hour movie, scheduled for broadcast Sunday and Monday, be either edited for accuracy or canceled, and ABC gave a small indication yesterday that some changes might be made.

One of the officials, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, said in her letter to the Disney executive, Robert A. Iger, that although she had requested a copy of the film, ABC had not given her one. But, Ms. Albright said, she has been told by people who have seen it that it “depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred.”

“It asserts as fact things that are not fact,” she wrote.

The concerns of Ms. Albright, as well as those expressed in letters from Samuel R. Berger, former national security adviser, and Bruce R. Lindsey, a Clinton White House aide now with the Clinton Foundation, were echoed yesterday by several Democratic members of Congress.

ABC, meanwhile, continued to explain that the mini-series, though largely drawn from the report of the Sept. 11 commission, was a dramatization, not a documentary.

But the network appeared to be leaving the door open to last-minute changes in the film.

“It is common practice to continue to make edits to strengthen a project right up to the broadcast date,” said Hope Hartman, an ABC spokeswoman.

The series, which cost almost $40 million, is to be broadcast without commercials, but Ms. Hartman said this had been planned, as a public service, and had nothing to do with any pressure that might have been brought on prospective advertisers.

Ms. Hartman said she could not confirm that Ms. Albright, Mr. Berger or the Clinton Foundation had requested any advance copies of the movie. She said such copies had been provided to “accredited media and educational institutions,” including talk shows.
In their letters, dated Tuesday, both Mr. Berger and Ms. Albright object to scenes in which they are shown adding obstacles to efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. In particular, Ms. Albright said a scene in which she refuses to support a cruise missile strike against Mr. bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistani government was untrue. Ms. Albright (played by Shirley Douglas) also said the suggestion that she had alerted the Pakistani military to an imminent strike was “false and defamatory.”

“Sept. 11 is not ‘entertainment,’ it is reality,” Ms. Albright wrote Mr. Iger. “Before you air your broadcast, I trust you will ensure you have the facts right.”

Mr. Berger (played by Kevin Dunn) said a scene in which he is shown refusing to authorize a strike to kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan “flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions” and will serve “only to grossly misinform the American people.”

Mr. Berger’s character is also seen abruptly hanging up during a conversation with a C.I.A. officer at a critical moment of a military operation. In an interview yesterday with KRLA-AM in Los Angeles, Cyrus Nowrasteh, the mini-series’ screenwriter and one of its producers, said that moment had been improvised.

“Sandy Berger did not slam down the phone,” Mr. Nowrasteh said. “That is not in the report. That was not scripted. But you know when you’re making a movie, a lot of things happen on set that are unscripted. Accidents occur, spontaneous reactions of actors performing a role take place. It’s the job of the filmmaker to say, ‘You know, maybe we can use that.’ ”

The producers and writers of the movie have said the script was based not only on the commission report but also on two books — “The Cell,” by the former ABC newsman John Miller and Michael Stone, and “The Relentless Pursuit,” by Samuel M. Katz — as well as personal interviews. They also say the script was vetted by lawyers, terrorism experts and former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, the commission’s chairman, who is credited as a senior consultant to the mini-series.

Mr. Kean, whose report criticized both the Bush and Clinton administrations, said Tuesday that the miniseries, like the report, was balanced. “People in both administrations are not going to be happy if it’s portrayed accurately,” he said.

Political pressure against a television drama is not unprecedented. In 2003, CBS dropped a four-hour miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan after a concerted campaign by Republican and conservative groups. That series, “The Reagans,” was later televised on the cable channel Showtime.

Marc Platt, the executive producer of “The Path to 9/11,” said he had known that turning a 600-page report into a five-hour drama would ruffle some feathers. “The challenge in any adaptation,” he said, “is how do you render it as dramatic as you can without exceeding the boundaries of what’s fair and accurate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/wa... tner=homepage





ABC Said to Re-Edit Key Parts of 9/11 Show
Patrick Healy and Jesse McKinley

Under growing pressure from Democrats and aides to former President Bill Clinton, ABC is re-evaluating and in some cases re-editing crucial scenes in its new mini-series “The Path to 9/11” to soften its portrait of the Clinton administration’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, according to people involved in the project.

Among the changes, ABC is altering one scene in which an actor playing Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser, abruptly hangs up on a C.I.A. officer during a critical moment in a military operation, according to Thomas H. Kean, a consultant on the ABC project and co-chairman of the federal Sept. 11 commission.

Mr. Berger has said that the scene is a fiction, and Mr. Kean, in an interview, said that he believed Mr. Berger was correct and that ABC was making appropriate changes.

The reassessment came as two Clinton aides mounted an unusual attack last night on the motives of Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey. In a letter to Mr. Kean, the two aides, Bruce R. Lindsey and Douglas Band, wrote that his defense of the mini-series “is destroying the bipartisan aura of the 9/11 Commission,” on whose findings the project is partly based. They asserted that Mr. Kean was driven by payments from ABC or his own partisan politics.

Mr. Kean, who called Mr. Clinton a good friend, said it was outrageous to suggest he was being swayed by money or politics, and added that any fee he received would be donated to charity. He said he stood by the film because he believed it would draw attention to the commission’s security recommendations, many of which have not been put into effect, and because the film did not pretend to be a documentary.

Yet Mr. Kean, as well as other members of the commission, did say they were concerned that their widely praised investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks might be diminished in some way by the mini-series.

“Mini-series often make things more dramatic by fictionalizing,” Mr. Kean said. “I don’t think the fictional moments reflect on the work of the commission, but I do hope that the controversy doesn’t tarnish it. ABC is trying to be as accurate as possible.”

Democrats and allies of Mr. Clinton unleashed full-throated appeals to ABC yesterday to cancel the broadcast, which is scheduled for Sunday and Monday nights. The Senate Democratic leadership sent a letter to Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, saying that broadcasting the film “would be a gross miscarriage of your corporate and civic responsibility.”

The national Democratic Party drew more than 100,000 signatures in 24 hours to a petition of complaint that it plans to give to ABC today.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, one of 10 senators at a news conference yesterday where the mini-series came up, left before she could be asked about it. A small throng of reporters who followed her out of the building toward her office were kept at bay by her aides.

The changes to the mini-series are still being made inside an editing suite in Los Angeles, with a variety of creative staff members and executives, including Marc Platt, the executive producer, who has been monitoring the editing from London, and David L. Cunningham, the director, who is being consulted at his home in Hawaii.

Mr. Kean said that two other parts of the film are also under review. One is a scene where an actress playing former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is apparently obstructing efforts to capture Mr. bin Laden. The other part suggests that Mr. Clinton was too distracted by impeachment and his marital problems to fully focus on Mr. bin Laden.

Mr. Platt said that he could not offer specifics about what scenes were being examined, but that editing was going on and “will continue to, if needed until we broadcast.”

“From Day 1, we’ve examined any issue or question that’s arisen,” he said. “And we’ll continue to do so until the last possible moment.”

Mr. Kean said he was surprised by the outcry, since most of the critics have not seen the film. He said Mr. Clinton had spoken directly to Mr. Iger last Friday; Clinton aides declined to comment.

Several 9/11 commission members said yesterday that they respected Mr. Kean immensely but that they were concerned about the ABC project and his role in it. One of them, Timothy J. Roemer, a Democrat, said he called Mr. Kean yesterday to urge ABC to make changes. Another, Jamie S. Gorelick, a former Clinton administration official, wrote Mr. Iger yesterday that the nation and schoolchildren would be poorly served if they drew lessons from the mini-series that were inaccurate.

Scholastic, the children’s publishing company, which had been working with ABC to use “The Path to 9/11” as a teaching tool, said yesterday that it was removing materials related to the film from its Web site. A spokeswoman said a new study guide was being prepared that would explain the difference between a docudrama and a documentary.

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/wa... tner=homepage





When Film School Isn’t Enough, the EnterTech Age Dawns
Sharon Waxman

On a blinding, 104-degree day at Arizona State University, the heat outside was fairly matched inside the classroom by a fervid debate over the past, in a new course on the convergence of entertainment and technology.

Flitting across centuries and millenniums, students and professors argued the reasons for technological evolution, brandishing theories involving Andy Warhol, film sprockets, the Chinese invention of the handgun, the Hegelian dialectic and tsetse flies.

But the course, called Entertainment and Technology, part of the film and media studies program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is anything but an exercise in ivory tower esoterics.

Instead it is the start of a new program to grant an undergraduate certificate, and eventually a master’s degree, in the nascent field the university calls EnterTech — where entertainment meets technology — with the idea of preparing young professionals to work in the warp-speed world of a changing Hollywood.

“We know that the dominance of 35-millimeter film is over,” said Peter Lehman, the director of the film and media studies program, and one of two professors who teaches the course. “We’re in a period of massive change and uncertainty. We need a new kind of person in this industry who understands that entertainment and technology are converging, and who is fluent in the concepts and the language of both.”

Apparently Hollywood agrees. An advisory board of two dozen veterans — mainly producers, lawyers and studio executives — has signed on to help shape the curriculum and speak to students about the challenges facing the entertainment industry.

Hollywood urgently needs people who can think in those terms, said Gene Schwam, a longtime publicist who had little trouble putting together the panel of advisers after he agreed to help get the program going.

“The digital age, and that 800-pound distribution gorilla, the Internet, is changing everything,” he said. “The technical people and the creative people need to be able to work together, and there is no forum for that now.”

Established film programs like those at the University of Southern California or New York University have tried to integrate new technology into their curricula, as with U.S.C.’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, which gives students access to computer-graphic software for making their films.

But Arizona State, with a film school that is just one year old, is taking a very different approach, training people who for the most part are not aspiring to work in the entertainment industry’s conventional job categories. “We are not turning out people who are going to be editors, cinematographers, writers, directors,” said Dr. Lehman, who observed that there are too many such film schools already.

“Ideally we should be teaching students to think of film in relation to new media in a quite different model than we had in the past,” he continued. “It’s not as simple as, ‘We need content for a new delivery system.’ It’s more, ‘We need to understand the new technology and how it will shape entertainment.’ We’re creating a new industry job, as it were.”

The program at Arizona State comes at a particularly fraught time for Hollywood as the industry grapples with rapidly evolving technology that is changing consumers’ leisure habits, with uncertain implications for the future. Innovations now happen over months rather than years. No sooner do studios devise programming for cellphones that can stream video content than social-networking Web sites like MySpace become the latest, greatest platform.

Meanwhile, bedrock areas like movie production itself, intellectual property rights and the financing of entertainment are all being affected by the changing technology, even as traditional media, like movies, struggle to maintain their dominance.

In that environment Dr. Lehman, who had been working since 1999 on establishing the new film school, and Mr. Schwam, who had been bemoaning the status quo, had a meeting of the minds during a chance encounter last year, when Arizona State honored Blake Edwards, the creator of the “Pink Panther” series.

David A. Young, vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said the university was moving in the direction of mixing disciplines. “We live in a trans-discipline world,” he said. “If you look at the big issues facing society, like curing cancer, it won’t be cured from a one-discipline approach.”

The EnterTech certificate follows on the heels of another new hybrid program, an earth- and space-exploration degree that combines engineering with science.

Dr. Young and Dr. Lehman pitched the EnterTech idea in the spring to a group of industry professionals at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, but also listened to what Hollywood had to say.

“They’re saying, ‘We have a problem,’ ” Dr. Young recalled. “ ‘Convergence is happening, but we’re not turning out people who understand it.’ And all the production people were saying: ‘Don’t start another production program. That’s not what we need.’ ”

The approach also dovetailed with the work of Paul Privateer, an associate professor of both film studies and, separately, science policy. He has also done strategic consulting for computer companies like Apple, Sun Microsystems and Unisys Corporation.

“When I got here, I was interested in creating a coalition of traditional academic subjects and technology in the real world,” said Dr. Privateer, who teaches the new course with Dr. Lehman. He refers to the new film program as a “Frankenstein adventure.”

In the classroom, Dr. Privateer outlined the purpose of the program as a whole, pressing his 25 undergraduate and graduate students to think about the issues raised and how they relate to their future careers.

“What we’re doing here is radically different” from programs at universities like Carnegie-Mellon or U.S.C., which both teach entertainment and technology, he told the students.

“I’m not suggesting that there’s some inherent causality between entertainment and technology,” he continued. “We’re admitting: Whatever technology is, whatever entertainment is, that relationship is inherently complex. It’s a chaos model.”

Students taking the new course said they were excited by the ideas raised, even if they were not sure how they would apply what they had learned. The certificate is available to any discipline, and the class included students majoring in psychology or comparative literature, or getting master’s degrees in business.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but this is definitely interesting,” said Joey Eschrich, 20, a junior in film studies who intends to become an academic.

David Kilopack, 20, a finance major who is planning to go into real estate development but is considering a career as a movie producer, said: “If I were going to do whatever I wanted in entertainment, I would start here. I see this as the basis of whatever is going to come. I’m not sure what I want to do, but this is the right environment to be in to find out.”

Alex Baer, 35, had a clear idea of what he wanted from the program. He is an executive for a German software company that programs content for mobile media, and was taking the course to “find out what we need to know about the narrative form when presenting it on different screens,” he said.

Dr. Privateer is developing two other core courses for the certificate, one focusing on “the science of entertainment,” as he put it, seeking to forecast the future of popular culture, and the other on “the science of technological evolution,” which will seek a model for forecasting technological change. All the courses will be part of the master’s program, which needs to be approved by Arizona’s Board of Regents before it can be administered.

Forecasting, Dr. Privateer pointed out, is extremely hazardous. But Hollywood, still mired in the past, is using models based on obsolete statistics from the last century, he said.

The entertainment industry needs new approaches and more sophisticated models, he said, like chaos theory. He is thinking of starting a consulting company himself, with some of his students. “There is incredible potential here for knowledge workers,” Dr. Privateer said.

Mr. Schwam agreed. “ ‘Star Wars’ was great in its day,” he said. “But it’s old-fashioned compared to what’s going on today.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/movies/06tech.html





Viacom CEO Ousted as Stock Price Falls
Geraldine Fabrikant

The chairman of Viacom, Sumner Redstone, said today that he was replacing his chief executive officer after a fall in the company’s stock price.

Mr. Redstone, who has been publicly unhappy with the performance of CEO Tom Freston, said this morning in a conference call that Viacom’s board had asked Mr. Freston to resign and appointed a team led by Philippe Dauman to take his place.

“The board was taking a look at our stock,” Mr. Redstone said, and how it had performed since Viacom and CBS were split earlier this year. “CBS was making new highs, and we were seven or eight points down from Viacom’s high. That comparison certainly influenced the board.”

Mr. Dauman will have the titles of president and chief executive. In addition, Thomas E. Dooley was appointed to the new role of senior executive vice president and chief administrative officer. The two men had long worked with Mr. Redstone before Viacom acquired CBS in 1999.

Although the company said today that Mr. Freston had resigned, Mr. Redstone, the 84-year-old controlling shareholder of Viacom, has been telling associates in Hollywood that he felt Mr. Freston was not a strong enough leader for the company, according to several people who have talked to Mr. Redstone but spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to jeopardize relationships in Hollywood.

That discontent boiled over recently when Mr. Redstone indicated that he was displeased that Viacom had not severed its relationship with Tom Cruise’s production company. Mr. Redstone has told associates that Mr. Cruise’s behavior had cost the company lost revenue on Mission Impossible 3 and that Mr. Freston and his hand-picked head of Paramount Pictures, Brad Grey, were too slow to terminate Paramount’s agreement with Mr. Cruise.

Mr. Redstone credits Mr. Dauman and Mr. Dooley, with whom he had worked closely before Viacom acquired CBS and CBS’s chief Mel Karmazin effectively took over their posts, with a key role in the 300 percent increase in Viacom’s share price between 1996 and 2000.

But Wall Street had less confidence in the changes yesterday than Mr. Redstone did. Viacom’s stock immediately slid when the news was announced. By midday it was down 5 percent.

Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said the “reasons for the change appear very short term and somewhat silly — the fact that Viacom has not performed well in the market for the seven months, while CBS has.”

Wall Street was also worried that Mr. Redstone is growing impatient with his company’s rate of investment in new media. “That worries investors that the company might spend irrationally,” Mr. Nathanson said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/bu... tner=homepage





MGM Expands Global TV, Plans 5 Movie Sequels
Bob Tourtellotte

Film and television studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc on Wednesday said it is expanding global TV sales to reinvigorate operations, adding some 100 new employees and promoting a key executive to run the unit.

The venerable studio, which owns the rights to the James Bond movies, also said it will make five future movie sequels that will include comedy "Legally Blonde 3," based on the previous two "Legally Blonde" hits that starred Reese Witherspoon.

MGM executives touted the TV plans as a major strategic move to tap expanding foreign markets where communications companies are rapidly building new high-speed video delivery systems for broadband cable TV, satellite TV and the Internet.

"There is a tremendous expansion in the marketplace that is occurring now," said Chief Operating Officer Rick Sands. He added that in overseas markets there is "an appetite for more, quality product, and licensees are paying substantial money."

He declined to comment on the expansion's cost.

Sands and Chief Executive Harry Sloan took the reins of MGM less than one year ago and set about breathing new life into the studio after it was acquired in spring 2005 by a consortium of private equity firms and media companies.

They first pumped up film distribution by signing deals to release movies made by independent producers. They also continued making sequels to major titles like this November's Bond title, "Casino Royale," and December's "Rocky Balboa."

Wednesday's announcement included the unveiling of thrillers "Species 4," WarGames 2, "Into the Blue 2" and romance "Cutting Edge 3," along the "Legally Blonde" title which, Sands said, will not star Oscar winner Witherspoon.

In TV, rebuilding MGM's worldwide sales group -- which licenses rights to show U.S. movies and TV programs overseas -- leverages Sloan's experience in foreign TV markets where he built Europe's SBS Broadcasting into a major player.

MGM has a library of more than 4,000 movies and 10,000 TV shows that it can license to foreign distributors, along with the new titles "Casino Royale" and "Rocky Balboa."

The company placed executive Jim Packer at the head of the TV effort and gave him the title of president, MGM Worldwide Television Distribution Group.

Sands said MGM hired around 100 new employees for the TV expansion, and expects to operate "lean and mean" from offices in cities such as Hong Kong, London, and Rome, among others.

MGM's major owners are Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp and Comcast Corp.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...DIA-MGM-DC.XML





Time Warner’s Anxious Autumn
BRichard Siklos

WITH the fall comes the harvest. Or at least that’s what Richard D. Parsons and his top dogs at Time Warner have hoped for in autumns past. But regardless of how much the chief executive and his allies regroup, retool and reorganize their sprawling media empire, the stock market just yawns. Every morning when they look at Time Warner’s ticker, it’s Groundhog Day.

Carl C. Icahn seems to be the only investor with a modicum of enthusiasm for the stock. Last month, he disclosed plans to form a new fund to scoop up more Time Warner shares so he could add to the boatload he already owned. And, by the way, he basically wants to bust up the place.

For his part, Mr. Parsons spent last week vacationing on Block Island, R.I., no doubt aware of whispers that Time Warner, the world’s biggest media company, has a turbulent autumn ahead.

Here are just a few of the whispers: Will Mr. Parsons stick around as chief executive or pass the reins in the next few months to his No. 2, Jeffrey L. Bewkes? Will the latest strategy of its AOL business — offering its online service free to high-speed Internet users — take flight? Is the financial performance of its publishing unit, Time Inc., becoming a worrisome drag, and is it time to spin off its venerable fleet of magazines?

But are these or any other bold moves that Mr. Parsons might make, including a huge stock buyback, enough to lift Time Warner’s shares and to get Mr. Icahn off the company’s back? Let’s consider the rumors, and Mr. Parsons’ options, in sequence.

Nary a week goes by without speculation that Mr. Parsons, who is 58, is ready for a change of scenery — perhaps, à la New York magazine’s recent conjecture, to make a bid to be New York’s next mayor. Mr. Parsons has said that this is not his ambition, and confidants say he is far more interested in big-time federal jobs, like secretary of education — depending on who occupies the White House after the election in 2008, which happens to be the same year that his current Time Warner contract is up.

There is also the question of how long Mr. Bewkes, 54, will remain content to wait in the wings. Mr. Bewkes has shown no signs of impatience, and Mr. Parsons already gives him the broad mandate of a true partner, as illustrated by the recent AOL strategy shift he championed.

HERE’S what Edward I. Adler, Time Warner’s spokesman, told me last week: “Dick is working hard running Time Warner and is committed to continuing his current role at least until the end of his contract. He and Jeff Bewkes are making the tough decisions needed to move the company forward and create shareholder value.”

My read is that even if Mr. Parsons is enamored of public service, he wants to leave Time Warner on his own terms. Bowing to Mr. Icahn’s demands is clearly not part of that agenda. He can point to some bright spots, too: sweeping up the legal, regulatory and managerial debris that the Time Warner-AOL merger left behind, and efficiently presiding over some of the most profit-churning media brands, from Warner Brothers to HBO to People magazine to Time Warner Cable.

But going out on top probably means a stock price above $20 a share, a level the company has not hit since April 2002, the month before Mr. Parsons assumed the helm. On Friday, the shares closed at $16.76. If the stock doesn’t hit $20 by next year, it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Parsons will still be the chief executive. After all, media stocks are no longer uniformly in the doldrums: shares of Comcast, for instance, have risen 41 percent off their 52-week low, and the company now boasts a market capitalization of $74 billion, eclipsing Time Warner’s $68 billion.

(Such are the vicissitudes of the market: the News Corporation and Disney have also outperformed Time Warner of late. But if you owned Time Warner stock for at least a decade, it has actually wildly outperformed both of those companies and Comcast.)

In the near term, one possible financial lifeline is the planned public listing next year of Time Warner Cable. That unit is the cable industry’s second-largest player, after Comcast, and the flotation could serve to bottle the same lightning that has ignited Comcast stock.

But just as cable is gaining steam and AOL is on a new path, Time Inc. — the smallest of the company’s five major operating businesses — remains challenged. Time Inc.’s operating income dropped 11 percent, to $388 million, in the first half of the year, compared with the same period of 2005. Revenue was roughly flat, at $2.45 billion.

Mr. Parsons told me recently that an advertising slowdown at magazines favored by men and the rapid migration of ads from print to the Internet explained the drop-off in publishing profits.

Time Inc. has already undergone rounds of cost-lopping under its chief, Anne Moore, and moving Time magazine’s publication date to Friday from Monday is one small sign of how the division is trying to reinvigorate itself in the Internet era. Even so, Mr. Bewkes is seeking bigger structural changes at the division, according to several people close to the company. Mr. Bewkes has zeroed in on the fact that Time Inc. publishes some 145 magazines worldwide, yet its 10 biggest generate a vast majority of its revenue. Expect them to get the bulk of attention and resources while some smaller titles drop their print editions (as Teen People recently did) and others are sold.

It is unlikely, however that a whole-hog sale of Time Inc., or any other division, will happen on Mr. Parsons’ watch. He has steadfastly maintained — and Mr. Bewkes has concurred — that Time Warner still makes more sense intact than in pieces. They can point to the ho-hum results of splitting up Viacom and CBS as evidence. They may also feel a bit gun-shy, given that Warner Music, a division they sold to Edgar Bronfman Jr. and other investors in 2004 for $2.6 billion, now has a market capitalization of $3.7 billion.

The elephant in the room, of course, remains AOL. Is its new strategy to thrive on advertising revenue sound, or is it too late for AOL to muster the firepower needed to dominate on the Web, as it once did? If the answer to either question is no, you can’t help wondering if selling or merging AOL with another Web player is inevitable.

If it came to that, my money would be on Yahoo, which was rebuffed last winter when AOL was courting online partners.

AOL’s new business model resembles Yahoo’s more than that of any other company, and Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel, was previously the co-head of the Warner Brothers film and TV studios. With Yahoo’s shares having fallen this year, there is less risk that Time Warner would deliver a repeat of the AOL merger fiasco by combining with another hyperinflated Internet company.

Finally, there is Mr. Icahn.

Mr. Parsons deftly handled Mr. Icahn’s well-publicized call for a breakup before the annual meeting earlier this year, getting the billionaire and his hedge fund partners to call off a proxy fight that was doomed. He could probably handle him again. But Mr. Icahn also learned some valuable lessons in his first run at Time Warner. He also takes pride in his ability to bide his time.

At the investor conference held by Mr. Icahn at the height of his campaign to dismember Time Warner last winter, he boasted that it took him years to persuade RJR Nabisco to split itself up. “I am a rite of spring. And every spring, we’d come and have a little proxy fight,” he recalled.

I asked him whether this meant that if he didn’t gain seats on Time Warner’s board, he’d simply come calling again. He replied that Time Warner was different from a food and tobacco company because the media industry was changing so rapidly: “I don’t think there’s a great deal more time if we miss this one.”

Yet here we are, a half-year later, and he is looking to buy more stock. A poor harvest this fall could lead to a bleak winter. And, with the spring, comes Mr. Icahn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/bu...pS9fyRhkt/tLCQ





The Good Side of Diamonds, Before a Movie Shows the Bad
Maria Aspan

A new Web site about diamonds is intended to tell retailers and buyers positive things about the diamond industry. But the site’s real target may be potential moviegoers and fans of Leonardo DiCaprio.

The site, diamondfacts.org, will officially open on Wednesday, according to the World Diamond Council, a trade organization. The site comes on the heels of an announcement in June that the industry would mount a public relations campaign in response to “Blood Diamond,” starring Mr. DiCaprio, to be released in December by Warner Brothers. “Blood diamonds” and “conflict diamonds” are the names given to the gems that finance civil wars in certain African countries. The movie is set in Sierra Leone in the late 1990’s, according to Warner.

According to Eli Izhakoff, the president of the World Diamond Council, the Web site is the culmination of a long campaign to increase public awareness of reforms in the diamond trade, especially the institution of a certification process for legitimate, nonconflict diamonds since the time period depicted in the film. “We’ve intensified our efforts because of this upcoming movie,” Mr. Izhakoff said. “We wanted to make sure that retailers and consumers get the facts about the good things that diamonds do.”

This isn’t the first time an industry has mounted a media defense against Hollywood. Oil companies silently weathered criticism after movies like “Syriana,” but mobilized active defenses against documentaries, like “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film by Al Gore. When it opened in May, groups associated with the oil industry used TV and the Internet to counter its claims about global warming.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group financed in part by Exxon Mobil, produced two TV commercials focusing on carbon dioxide. And a video on youtube.com, “Al Gore’s Penguin Army,” depicted a Gore-like figure blaming global warming for everything from Mideast conflicts to World Series results, while his penguin audience snored. According to The Wall Street Journal, the video was linked to a public relations firm serving Exxon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/bu...4diamonds.html





There’s Money in Dirt, for Those Who Find Bits of Silicon
Ilan Greenberg

Sifting black earth inside her hole, 14-year-old Nurzada Meerim admits to breathing problems. “But here is money,” she said, holding up a crinkled silver flake.

Across a vast landfill just outside this tiny farming town in eastern Kyrgyzstan, the heads of girls continually pop up from narrowly constructed 10-foot shafts. Mothers and other female relatives wait on the rim, hands outstretched to take the flakes and gnarled pebbles of silicon that the girls have retrieved from the soil. There are some men, too, and they bark threats to outsiders who walk past their holes.

The landfill covers the garbage cast off from a shuttered factory that produced mostly trinkets and souvenirs from silicon-bearing rock, as well as waste sent from a nearby Soviet-era uranium mine. Flattened plastic bottles carpet the area.

Local environmentalists and doctors who have visited the landfill have warned the Kyrgyz government of the site’s health risks, especially from high levels of radiation. But few salvagers of silicon in Orlovka can afford to let health issues stop their unsanctioned digging.

Central Asia is a trove of gold, silver, copper, coal, nonferrous metals and uranium, in addition to oil and gas, and there are plans to transform the region into a vast economy of extraction. The world’s most voracious economy, next door in China, has created lucrative markets that have governments and villagers alike across Central Asia focusing more acutely on digging for minerals.

“Mining is now starting to become the government priority,” said Andrew Sasanov, vice president of governmental relations at Centerra Gold, a Toronto-based mining company that already contributes nearly 10 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s gross domestic product.

China’s need for Central Asian materials is not limited to what is under the ground. Along China’s snaking border with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, anything made of metal is fair game. At night villagers steal hubcaps, roof tiles from houses, even manhole covers to sell in bazaars across the border.

It is China’s rapidly expanding computer chip industry that is fueling the rush for Orlovka silicon, which is sold by middlemen in the bazaars to Chinese traders in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. “They are getting rich,” an older woman standing near one of the digging holes said of the traders. “They are protected. But I say we sell them everything. It is just the garbage left by Lenin.”

Most holes are family-run. Nurzada works her hole for about nine hours every day with her mother and 16-year old sister. Both daughters, the mother insisted, will attend school in the fall with textbooks bought with money earned from digging silicon. The family was initially lured by rumors earlier in the summer that silicon diggers were hitting jackpots: large rocks worth as much as $25,000 for their silicon content.

But girls from Orlovka, a bucolic settlement of potato farms and small cattle ranches, and the people from the other nearby villages who take to the holes typically earn $10 a day for the approximately 200 grams of silicon slivers they manage to separate from the garbage and soil.

It is an excellent income in a country where more than 40 percent of the population live under the poverty line and the gross domestic product, at official exchange rates, is just $266 per capita, according to the International Monetary Fund. The Central Intelligence Agency puts the figure at a still paltry $2,100, using what is perhaps a more realistic measure of purchasing power.

“It doesn’t feel like work,” Nurzada said disingenuously as she glanced toward her mother, her face a spider web of dark lines from the sun.

Nearby, a stooped woman wearing a smock swirled in purple and red, who insisted on being called only “Grandmother,” bundled her silicon pebbles and headed to a silicon bazaar. There, among vegetable sellers and old men who shuffled along selling tin foil, Chinese middlemen perched over rusty metal scales were doling out money for silicon.

“When this mine is finished I hope we can find another one,” she said. “Nobody cares about this region. We can all starve to death and nobody will notice our bodies.”

Outsiders are not welcome in Orlovka. Asked for directions to the mine, a local farmer replied, “Silicon Valley is in California.” The men among the silicon diggers are especially wary of visitors, encircling outsiders who get close to their holes, some brandishing their short shovels like weapons.

“Don’t say anything!” one woman screamed from inside her hole, warning the others away from a visiting reporter. “We will get shut down, and then I would like to know, where will you work?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/wo...yrgyzstan.html





Chinese iPod Supplier Withdraws Lawsuit
Elaine Kurtenbach

A Chinese supplier of Apple Computer's iPod has withdrawn a defamation lawsuit it filed against two Chinese journalists over claims of labor mistreatment.

Foxconn Technology Group, Taiwan-based owner of the manufacturer Hongfujin Precision Industry Co. and the Chinese newspaper China Business News issued a joint statement saying the two sides had resolved the dispute after apologizing to each other "for the disturbances brought to both of them by the lawsuit."

The statement, posted on Foxconn's Web site, said each side had expressed respect for the other. Hongfujin said it recognized the right of media in overseeing corporate behavior, while the newspaper expressed its recognition of the company's contribution to China's economic development and competitiveness.

The two sides agreed to work together to protect workers' rights, it said.

The newspaper, which had said it would back its staff and their reporting regardless of the costs, ran the statement in its Monday edition.

Last week, amid a wave of bad publicity, Apple Computer Inc. announced it was trying to resolve a controversy over the lawsuit filed in a Shenzhen court by Hongfujin against two journalists who wrote a story criticizing treatment of workers on its iPod assembly lines.

Local and international media groups criticized Hongfujin's demand for 30 million yuan ($3.8 million) in damages as well as the local court's agreement to freeze the personal assets of the two journalists, China Business News reporter Wang You and editor Weng Bao.

Hongfujin subsequently reduced its demand for damages to a token 1 yuan (12 U.S. cents), and the local government announced it had ordered the company to set up a state-sanctioned labor union at the factory.

In a commentary Monday signed by China Business News' managing editor, Qin Shuo, the newspaper said it continued to back its employees but decided to compromise because the article in question had "weaknesses." Qin did not elaborate on what those weaknesses were.

"Even if we had won in court despite those weaknesses, it would not have been a true victory, nor would it have been fair to Foxconn," he wrote.

The allegations about Hongfujin's labor conditions first surfaced in an article in the British newspaper The Mail which reported in June that workers were being paid below minimum wages and forced to work 15-hour days making the iconic iPods.

Cupertino, California-based Apple responded by promising to immediately investigate conditions at the factory. It issued a report earlier this month saying that it found some violations of its stringent code of conduct but no serious labor abuses. It pledged to immediately redress some problems with overtime, employee accommodations and administrative issues.

The factory, which also supplies electronics components and accessories to other major companies such as Dell Inc. and Intel Corp., is a small city in its own right, with clinics, recreational facilities, buses and 13 restaurants serving its 200,000 workers, Apple's report said.

The report discounted allegations of forced overtime, noting that a chief complaint among workers was a shortage of overtime during slack periods.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-04-07-07-59





Apple Sets Stage for Movies on iTunes
May Wong and Gary Gentile

Could the company that helped catapult the legal music download market with iPods and iTunes now kick-start the online movie market?

Rumors of Apple Computer Inc.'s plans to launch a movie download service gained momentum Tuesday after the company sent invitations to the media, saying "It's Showtime," next week.

The media event scheduled for Sept. 12 is set in San Francisco and coincides with the opening day of the Apple Expo in Paris.

Sources at several Hollywood studios confirmed Tuesday they were in talks to sell their films through iTunes. But substantial disagreements between studios and Apple remain to be resolved and Apple's movie service could launch with a limited number of films, according to two studio executives who asked to remain anonymous because talks were still ongoing.

Speculation of the iPod maker adding full-length feature films to its online iTunes Music Store have swirled for months. Already, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company has become a multimedia powerhouse with its song and TV show downloads. Analysts said it would only be a matter of time before Apple started distributing movies online.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs became a board member and the largest stockholder at The Walt Disney Co. earlier this year through its acquisition of Pixar Animation Studios Inc., which Jobs also headed. That connection provides a natural toehold for Disney to be among the first to sign a distribution deal.

Apple's first experiment with a full-length TV movie on iTunes was last March when it started offering the Disney Channel's original TV movie, "High School Musical," for $9.99.

Apple and Hollywood studio representatives refused to comment on the speculation of a movie licensing deal.

Also, analysts and industry observers expect Apple to soon introduce a new iPod player with a widescreen display - which would be better suited for viewing movies.

Several studios are balking at Apple's demands, including selling all films for one price and making all films available for download the same day they are released on DVD, according to studio sources.

Studios already sell films through other online services, including Movielink, CinemaNow and Guba. Those deals allow the studios to vary pricing and availability.

Studios also have some concerns about the digital protection offered by Apple. Other deals use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media software, which more tightly controls how many times films can be transferred to various devices.

Studios want to retain more control over their product, believing, as the mantra goes, that "content is king" and that Apple needs big studio fare to sell any new video player more than studios need to sell films through iTunes.

One studio executive said Tuesday that deals being struck for a similar download service planned by Amazon.com are more flexible and allow for higher profit margins.

But watching movies meant for the big screen on a small portable display is still not ideal. Neither is watching video on a computer screen.

An AP-AOL Video poll released Tuesday found that only one in five online video viewers have watched or downloaded a full-length movie or television show. And fledgling online movie services such as CinemaNow and MovieLink have acknowledged that one of their biggest challenges remains the difficulties consumers face if they were to try to hook up their televisions to play videos from their computers.

Apple, in the meantime, has been forging ahead to make its products the digital media hub for consumers. Its iconic iPod player is designed for music and video on-the-go, its iTunes store is a leading destination for getting digital content, and its Macintosh computers are touted for managing all the multimedia.

Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research is one of many analysts who expect Apple to enter the living room soon with a product designed to connect to televisions.

Bernoff predicted in a report in January that Apple was creating a new set-top box and will unveil video licensing deals. Such an integrated hardware and software package would rattle video distribution similar to how its iPod-iTunes franchise transformed the music industry, he said.

"If Apple is successful here, they will really open up the online movie market," said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group.

Analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies added that competitors are sure to be closely watching Apple's next move, including Microsoft, which has said it plans to introduce its own branded online store and Zune portable media player later this year.

Apple shares rose $3.10, or 4.5 percent, to close at $71.48 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-06-06-18-55





Amazon.com Launches TV, Movie Service
Elizabeth M. Gillespie

Amazon.com Inc. launched a digital video downloading service Thursday, ending months of speculation that the Internet retailer would be getting into the online TV and movie business.

The service, dubbed Amazon Unbox, will offer thousands of television shows, movies and other videos from more than 30 studios and networks, the company said.

TV shows will cost $1.99 per episode, and most movies will go for $7.99 to $14.99; movies can also be rented for $3.99.

Amazon Unbox will offer shows from CBS, News Corp.'s Fox, MTV, Nickelodeon, PBS, BBC, A&E, Discovery Channel, Comedy Central and The History Channel, among others. General Electric Corp.'s NBC and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC were noticeably absent on the list of participating networks. MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central are owned by Viacom Inc.

Seven major studios are participating in Amazon.com's service: Viacom's Paramount, News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures, GE's Universal Studios, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., Lionsgate Entertainment Corp. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

Walt Disney Pictures is not participating. Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder of Walt Disney Co., and the announcement of Amazon's service comes just days ahead of the expected launch of a movie download service at Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Details of the scope of Apple's expected offerings are unclear, but its pioneering success and market dominance with its iTunes music and TV show downloads as well as its iPod media players have already cast Apple as a leading competitor.

Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment, said Amazon.com's entry into the digital distribution business will help jump-start the still nascent online movie business.

"We're going to have extensive, ubiquitous distribution from a variety of e-tailers," he said. "There are a lot of companies we're talking to."

Hollywood studios already sell films through other online services, such as Movielink, CinemaNow and Guba, but they haven't yet attracted a huge following.

Amazon.com's catalog of TV shows includes some of the same shows already available on iTunes and Google Inc.'s online video store, including CBS's "CSI" and Fox's "24."

Movies on Amazon Unbox include new releases like "V for Vendetta," "Inside Man," "Brokeback Mountain," "Walk the Line," and "Friends with Money," as well as classics such as "Ben Hur," "Chinatown" and "Poseidon Adventure."

Seattle-based Amazon.com said the service will work on any Internet-connected personal computer running Windows XP, the latest version of Microsoft Corp.'s operating system.

Bill Carr, Amazon.com's vice president of digital media, declined to comment on whether the company would later try to make the service work on machines running Apple's operating system, saying only: "It's our goal to reach as many customers as possible."
When customers download a show or movie, Amazon Unbox will automatically give them a second file that can be viewed on Windows Media-compatible portable digital players. Another service, called Unbox RemoteLoad, will allow customers to buy from one computer and download to another.

Movies often take an hour or more to download even with a solid, high-speed Internet connection. Unbox will use what's called a "progressive download," which will let people begin watching programs before they're fully downloaded - within five minutes of ordering for the typical cable broadband Internet user, Amazon.com said.

The downloads can be transferred onto DVDs for storage, and the DVDs can be used to play the movie on the computer with that downloaded the movie, but they cannot be played on a regular DVD player.

Benjamin Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, said offering downloads to a computer or portable device is a good starting point, but the end goal is delivering content to a TV. "Every little step is a good thing, but ultimately, being able to have a playback in the living room on a larger screen enhances the experience," Feingold said.

Those who rent a movie from Amazon Unbox can keep it for 30 days, unless otherwise noted, but have just 24 hours to view the movie once they start watching it, before it expires.

Studios started renting films online several years ago in hopes of combating illegal downloads. Video downloads have grown more popular since iTunes started selling episodes of TV shows last year.

Earlier this week, Apple sent invitations to the media saying "It's Showtime," for a Sept. 12 event in San Francisco. Sources at several Hollywood studios confirmed they were in talks to sell their films through Apple's iTunes online store. The executives asked to remain anonymous because talks were still ongoing.

Apple secured landmark distribution deals with major record labels in 2003, jump-starting the legal music download market. It was also the first to introduce TV show downloads last October, for $1.99 apiece.

In June, Apple officials said iTunes had sold more than 30 million videos and was selling videos at a rate of roughly 1 million a week.

Amazon.com shares closed down $1.07 Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, then inched up 17 cents to $29.90 in after-hours trading.

---

Editors: AP Business Writers May Wong in San Jose, Calif., and Gary Gentile in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-08-01-05-44





Marilyn in Paris, Revealing Herself
Alan Riding

Marilyn Monroe never visited France, and even at the height of her fame in the United States she might not have wowed Parisians. After all, with her dyed blond hair and splashy red lips, she seemed so American. And in the 1950’s and early 60’s, France had its own pouting sex kitten in the sultry form of Brigitte Bardot. But now, while Ms. Bardot is a largely forgotten figure who, at 71, devotes herself to promoting animal rights, Monroe has finally caught the French imagination, not as a sex symbol, not even as a symbol, but as a work of art: beautiful, tragic, forever 36 years old.

This summer she has been drawing reverent crowds to an exhibition of photographs taken by Bert Stern shortly before her death on Aug. 5, 1962. The show, “The Last Sitting,” which runs through Oct. 30 at the small Musée Maillol on the Left Bank, takes its name from the book first published by Mr. Stern in 1982 recording the star’s last photo session.

The 59 images on display here were selected by Mr. Stern in the early 1990’s from among the 2,500 he took of Monroe at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in June and July 1962. These prints were later acquired by the New York collectors Leon and Michaela Constantiner, who included some of them in a larger Monroe show, “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2004.

But Olivier Lorquin, the Musée Maillol’s director, wanted to show Mr. Stern’s 59 photographs in isolation and give them their own catalog.

“It’s the first time a museum has shown just my pictures,” Mr. Stern, 77, said with evident pride in a telephone interview from his home in New York.

The results, at least here, complete Monroe’s transition from pinup girl to 20th-century Venus. In a catalog essay Mr. Lorquin’s brother, Bertrand, a curator at the museum, evokes the nudes of Botticelli, Rubens, Velázquez, Goya, Ingres and Manet to give Monroe’s sculptured curves a place in art history.

The photographs, which include some of the most explicit images taken of the actress, show her principally in three situations: naked on a bed, baring her shoulders, back and legs; holding a transparent chiffon scarf before her naked torso; and covering her breasts with paper flowers. In other images she wears black cocktail dresses or plays mischievously with necklaces.

Yet if some of these poses might once have been considered shocking (and were, in fact, not published until 20 years after her death), they seem tame today. So rather than being hypnotized by Monroe’s raw sexuality, visitors here are invited to study the pictures for what they reveal about her.

“She was going through a hard time with her health, her career and her men,” Mr. Stern said, recalling that she had just been fired from the set of George Cukor’s unfinished movie, “Something’s Got to Give.” “I thought the photo session would be uplifting for her.”

Mr. Stern was on assignment for Vogue, but he notes in the catalog that he had always hoped to photograph Monroe nude and brought only some chiffon scarves and jewelry as accessories. Monroe’s assistant told him to order three bottles of Dom Pérignon Champagne. Monroe arrived five hours late — Mr. Stern remembers the day as June 22 — and, he says, within 15 minutes she had agreed to pose “topless” with the scarves.

“We worked from about 4:30 p.m. to about 3 a.m.,” he said from New York. “But then Vogue decided the first session was too sexy, and they wanted me to go back two or three weeks later and do fashion. After a while, she said: ‘I’m tired of doing fashion. Can we go back to doing what we did the first day?’ That’s when we did the pictures of her on the bed. By then, she was pretty drunk.”

Vogue published eight pages of the fashion shoot the day after Monroe died; it ran 12 pages of the nude images only in 1982.

While the fashion images are inevitably formal, enlarged black-and-white contact sheets of Monroe playing with the chiffon scarves show her endlessly improvising her poses and expressions; two images in this series also carry thick ink crosses indicating that she vetoed them. The color photographs of her on the bed, in contrast, are both more sensual and less revealing: she consumes the camera with her eyes, but lies on her front or covers herself with a sheet.

Yet it is in some close-ups that Monroe suddenly looks vulnerable: thick black eyeliner and heavy red lipstick suggest insecurity; the hint of wrinkles beside her eyes underlines the passage of time. Still more striking is a fresh scar on her stomach, the legacy of a gallbladder operation a few weeks earlier. And in one black-and-white close-up of her asleep, the Marilyn of legend comes close to looking ordinary.

Writing in the Paris daily Libération, Edouard Waintrop remarked on “her magnificent look, exhausted by time and the disappointments of life.” In the Catholic newspaper La Croix, Emmanuelle Giuliani wrote of “a triumphant beauty threatened every moment by a tragic fragility.” And for Françoise Dargent, Le Figaro’s critic, in this show Monroe “incarnates all the heroines that art has tried to devour through painting, sculpture and now photography.”

Are 1,500 to 2,000 visitors being drawn daily to the Musée Maillol by the knowledge that Monroe would soon die tragically, that this was her last chance to seduce the lens, that these were, in her own way, her final words?

Perhaps. Yet many of the visitors also seem to be discovering her — not as a name, not as an image, but as a person — for the first time.

“Marilyn never came to Paris,” Mr. Lorquin, the museum’s director, said, “but now she seems almost alive here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/ar...gn/05monr.html





Google to Offer Print-Archives Searches
John Markoff

Google plans to announce on Wednesday that it is offering a service that will permit Internet users to search through the archives of newspapers, magazines and other publications and uncover material that in some cases dates back more than 200 years.

The new feature, to be named Google News Archive Search, will direct Google searchers to both paid and free digital content on publishers’ Web sites, but will not directly generate revenue for Google.

Google would not state how many publishers were taking part in the new service, for which Google has independently indexed material from online databases and will display the results both as part of standard searches and through a new archive search page (news.google.com/archivesearch). However, it announced a number of partners including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale.

In contrast to Google’s book scanning project, which has led to legal skirmishes with some publishers over copyright issues, some of the partners involved with the new service said they had been pressing Google to offer access to their archives for several years.

The databases included in the service are part of what some have called the “dark Web” because they cannot be “spidered,” or indexed, by standard search engines and so have not been accessible through them.

“We have been asking Google and other search engines to please spider our content for some time,” said Patrick Spain, chief executive of HighBeam Research, a digital content library based in Chicago.

Some of HighBeam’s 3,300 publications and 40 million documents will be available free, while in other cases users will see just the headline and the first 600 characters of a document. To see the whole thing, users must be subscribers to the firm’s service, which costs either $20 a month or a $100 annual fee.

“This symbolizes a major moment,” said Allen Weiner, a research director at Gartner, a market research firm. Google has reached an accommodation with the content companies that will benefit both sides, he said.

In a number of cases the entire archive of publications like Time and The Washington Post will be reachable via a Google search. Time’s entire database is already freely available and supported by advertising. The magazine made its archive, consisting of 4,300 issues and 300,000 articles dating back to 1923, available free through www.time.com last month.

With some publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, searchers will be sent to Web sites where they will be able to buy individual articles.

Google executives said that the archive service would not generate revenue directly and that the company did not yet know how it would make money from it.

“We’re not focusing on monetization yet,” said Anurag Acharya, a distinguished engineer at Google who helped develop the service. “This is new territory for us.”

The new service is not encyclopedic, Mr. Acharya said, but instead presents users with a representative list of relevant articles that are arranged in a timeline fashion. The service tries to offer a pointer to the time period that is most relevant to the search query. For example, in the case of the search phrase “moon landing,” an arrow points the user to 1969.

Mr. Weiner of Gartner said he expected Google to link the archive service to its Google Checkout payment system. In the future, he said, video archives are almost certain to be added.

“They have to convince CBS News to make Edward R. Murrow available,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/bu.../06google.html





Silicon Valley to Receive Free Wi-Fi
Matt Richtel

A consortium of technology companies, including I.B.M. and Cisco Systems, announced plans Tuesday for a vast wireless network that would provide free Internet access to big portions of Silicon Valley and the surrounding region as early as next year.

The project is the largest of a new breed of wireless networks being built across the country. They are taking advantage of the falling cost of providing high-speed Internet access over radio waves as opposed to cable or telephone lines.

The project will cover 1,500 square miles in 38 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties, an area of 2.4 million residents. Its builders, going by the name Silicon Valley Metro Connect, said the service would provide free basic wireless access at speeds up to 1 megabit a second — which is roughly comparable to broadband speeds by telephone — in outdoor areas. Special equipment, costing $80 to $120, will be needed to bolster the signal enough to bring it inside homes or offices.

The consortium will also offer a fee-based service, with higher speeds and technical support, and will allow other companies to sell premium services over the network as well.

Diana Hage, director of wireless services at I.B.M., said she expected the project to cost $75 million to $270 million. She said the project was meant to be a public service and, by showing the potential for the technology, to develop and promote the companies’ commercial interests.

I.B.M. is providing project management, and Cisco is providing equipment. They are joined in the project by Azulstar Networks, which plans to handle network operations, and SeaKay, a nonprofit group that focuses on providing Internet access to low-income areas.

The consortium was selected to provide access by the San Mateo County Telecommunications Authority, an agency made up of cities and counties across Silicon Valley. After requesting bids last April, the agency received seven proposals, and announced Tuesday that it had selected Silicon Valley Metro Connect. The deal is not exclusive, and the cities are free to invite potential rivals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/te...6wireless.html





Toronto Goes Wireless In Downtown Core

Toronto Hydro rolled out the city's free Wi-Fi - or wireless Internet access - Wednesday morning. The service will be free for six months - and will allow people wireless access to the World Wide Web throughout the downtown rather than solely at pre-existing Wi-Fi hotspots, generally cafes and restaurants.

The project is the largest of its kind in North America, and Mayor David Miller is enthusiastic it'll be successful.

The signal will be available from Jarvis St. in the east to Spadina Ave. in the west, and from Front St. to the south, north as far as Bloor St. Customers will also be able to make phone calls over the Internet and, in time, watch video.

Toronto Hydro spokespersons insist the new initiative won't interfere with existing wireless hotspots in cafes and homes.

The rollout is happening a little later than first planned due to several delays relating to security concerns and public health worries.

The six-month grace period had raised fears among law enforcement officials that criminals would try to take advantage of the service. Users will now have to provide authentification using their cell phones.

There were also health concerns relating to exposure to electromagnetic fields - but Toronto Public Health is reportedly satisfied the network won't pose a safety risk.
http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_3348.aspx





For the New Face of CBS News, a Subdued Beginning
Alessandra Stanley

Katie Couric didn’t really need Walter Cronkite to introduce her yesterday at the opening of the newscast, saying with his familiar gravelly voice, “This is the ‘CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.’ ” The network’s new face handled her first day at the anchor desk — a shinier, lighter desk — calmly and competently.

The woman who stood out most last night was CBS’s chief foreign-affairs reporter, Lara Logan, an experienced and unusually pretty war correspondent who took a daring trip into Taliban-held territory in Afghanistan wrapped in a black chador.

“Am I allowed to smile?” Ms. Logan asked her surly mujahedeen escorts. She contrasted the Taliban’s ascendancy with old film from 2004, when she visited American troops in control of the same area and wore a flak jacket and Chanel sunglasses.

That segment displayed Ms. Couric’s commitment to covering foreign news as anchor and managing editor. But Ms. Logan’s arresting screen presence also helped deflect attention from Ms. Couric’s much scrutinized appearance (fitted white jacket over a black sheath dress).

Ms. Couric was subdued throughout the broadcast, perhaps a little spooked by all the fuss over her appointment. The network’s readiness campaign — the focus groups, the listening tour of America, the wardrobe questions — have prompted ample attention and some snickering. CBS executives have complained that Ms. Couric is being held to a cattier standard.

In an interview with Harry Smith on “The Early Show” on CBS yesterday, Ms. Couric delicately allowed that she was partly a victim of “residual sexism.” CBS, however, was perhaps the worst offender. The network recently doctored a publicity picture of Ms. Couric to make her appear longer and slimmer, something it did not do for Bob Schieffer.

American womanhood does not rise or fall on Ms. Couric’s success. She is the first woman to serve as the official solo anchor of a major network evening news broadcast, though plenty of women have filled in as solo anchors. Mostly, Ms. Couric is the first true celebrity to anchor a network news program.

Tom Brokaw was well known when he went from “Today” to the “NBC Nightly News,” as is Charles Gibson, who recently left “Good Morning America” to be the evening-news anchor on ABC. Neither is nearly as high wattage.

No other news figure, not even the glamorous Diane Sawyer, appears as often in People magazine or is stalked as relentlessly by gossip columnists and entertainment shows. And Ms. Couric revels in the show-business spotlight, whether as the focus of an episode of “E! True Hollywood Story” or making cameos on “Will and Grace” and in “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”

CBS is not paying her an estimated $15 million a year for being a woman — that is the cost of hiring the biggest star. And that star factor affects the “CBS Evening News” far more than a new format, new theme music or a redesigned set.

Ms. Couric greeted viewers informally with the words “Hi, everyone.” Her armchair-to-armchair interview with the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman was a conflation of her new role and her old one at “Today,” but Ms. Couric said little, interjecting questions like, “How do you do that?” She was also humble about her closing line, asking viewers to write in with suggestions for a sign-off other than “that’s the way it is” or “courage.”

The first program was certainly a work in progress. Hard news was followed by the softest of features, including a first look at the cover of Vanity Fair showing Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s long-unseen baby, Suri (adorable). Perhaps worried that the segment would look too frivolous, Ms. Couric introduced it with a clip of a 1949 CBS newscast with Douglas Edwards showing a baby picture of Prince Charles, as if there were a grand tradition of baby pictures at the Tiffany network.

Infants must be in vogue, though. ABC also showed baby pictures to mark Chris Cuomo’s first day at the news desk of “Good Morning America,” alongside a new weatherman, Sam Champion.

Rosie O’Donnell made a far brasher debut on “The View” yesterday, taking the seat of Meredith Vieira at the head of a glass table on the program’s new, sleeker set (the recently deposed Star Jones Reynolds has been airbrushed from ABC history).

“My name is Meredith Vieira, and welcome to ‘The View,’ ” is how Ms. O’Donnell began, quickly seizing the alpha role. She told funny, sometimes ribald stories, interrupting at will and speaking often and openly about her lesbian relationship and four adopted children. It was a vivid contrast to Ellen DeGeneres, who never alludes to her sexuality on her talk show.

When Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the Zeppo Marx of the foursome, said she donned a bathing suit to take a bath with her baby daughter, Ms. O’Donnell went wide-eyed at her prudery and recalled that when she took a more natural bath with her daughter, the child asked, “When do I get my fur?”

Ms. O’Donnell announced a surprise gift for the audience, a two-day cruise on a Royal Caribbean liner, and then made fun of the sponsor’s lengthy promotional segment.

“You better give us something more than a two-day cruise for that hour-minute-long package,” she said. “The audience has cramps in their arms from clapping.”

Joy Behar tried to hold her own by making a joke at Ms. O’Donnell’s expense and was soundly pushed back. Ms. O’Donnell looked at the camera and said waggishly, “And you all thought I was going to have problems with Elisabeth.”

Ms. O’Donnell is the first boisterously gay host of a major daytime talk show, but that doesn’t make her a touchstone of tolerance. Ms. Couric’s ratings at CBS will not be a test of feminism; they will be a measure of viewers’ flexibility.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/ar...n/06watch.html





Exposure Draft - Copyright Amendment (Technological Protection Measures) Bill 2006
Press Release

Summary of exposure draft provisions on technological protection measures

What is a TPM?

Technological protection measures (TPMs) are technical locks copyright owners use to stop their copyright material from being copied or accessed (eg. passwords, encryption software and access codes).

TPMs are used by copyright owners to support business models for distributing materials such as films and music online and self-protect against increased piracy. The Copyright Act 1968 currently establishes liability for the manufacture and commercial supply of devices or services which circumvent TPMs. The Bill creates new offences for circumventing TPMs and new exceptions to those offences.

Why is the Government changing the law?

The Government is introducing a new TPM scheme to create a more secure environment for copyright owners to release their copyright materials. TPM protection plays an important role in assisting copyright owners to protect their works from piracy. This means more material will be made available digitally and through online distribution channels.

The Government is replacing the current TPM scheme to implement the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA). The new scheme also has a mechanism for creating additional exceptions that provides the flexibility necessary to respond to technological developments.

TPMs must be connected with copyright infringement

The scope of the scheme is limited to preventing circumvention of TPMs designed to stop copyright piracy. The scheme will not cover TPMs which are not designed to prevent or inhibit people from infringing copyright. The scheme will not apply to TPMs solely designed for other purposes, such as market segmentation (eg region coding) or the protection against competition in aftermarket goods (eg spare parts) where the TPM does not have a connection with copyright.

New offences

To help combat piracy the new scheme introduces civil remedies and criminal penalties where a person circumvents an access control TPM. It also builds on the existing scheme which already provides criminal penalties for dealing in circumvention devices and services. To discourage the dealing in these devices, the provisions will provide strong criminal penalties of five years imprisonment and/or fines of 550 penalty units (currently $60,500).

New exceptions

The Government recognises that some exceptions to liability are also appropriate where there is legitimate use of copyright material. The Copyright Act already includes a number of exceptions to copyright infringement in special cases. It is not intended that the new TPM scheme should shift this balance in the Copyright Act. The AUSFTA sets out specific exceptions and provides for the introduction of additional exceptions.

The specific exceptions to TPM liability are included in the exposure draft. The exceptions included in the Bill are for:

• interoperability between computer programs
• encryption research
• computer security testing
• online privacy
• law enforcement and national security, and
• acquisitions by libraries and other related institutions.

A number of additional exceptions were identified in the Review of Technological Protection Measures Exceptions by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. Some of these will be included in the Copyright Regulations. Including the exceptions in the Regulations provides greater flexibility and improves the responsiveness of the scheme to changes in technology. The Government proposes to introduce the following additional exceptions for:

• reproduction of computer programs to make interoperable products (as authorised by section 47D of the Copyright Act 1968 in so far as it applies to articles)
• the reproduction and communication of copyright material by educational and other institutions assisting people with disabilities (as authorised by Part VB, Divisions 1-3 of the Copyright Act 1968)
• the reproduction and communication of copyright material by libraries, archives and cultural institutions for certain purposes (as authorised by sections 49, 50, 51A, 110A and 110B of the Copyright Act 1968)
• the inclusion of sound recordings in broadcasts and the reproduction of sound recordings for broadcasting purposes (as authorised by sections 107 and 109 of the Copyright Act 1968)
• access where a TPM is obsolete, lost, damaged, defective, malfunctioning or unusable and a replacement TPM is not provided, and
• access where a TPM damages a product, or where circumvention is necessary to repair a product.

The scope of these exceptions will be clarified in the exposure draft of the Regulations which will be available for comment in the next month.

Further review of exceptions

The Attorney-General’s Department is commencing a further limited review of the following proposed additional exceptions and would appreciate your comments by 22 September 2006. The exceptions to be considered would allow circumvention to gain access for:

• making back-up copies of computer programs
• correcting errors in computer programs
• allowing institutions to assist people with an intellectual disability
• making copies of works for inclusion in broadcasts, and
• making copies of copyright material for criticism, review or news reporting by broadcasters.

If the need for these additional exceptions is substantiated in the review process the exceptions will be added to the Copyright Regulations.

Further information about this review is available in the 4 September 2006 ‘E-news on Copyright’ which can be found on at http://www.ag.gov.au/copyright.

Next steps

The exposure draft of the Bill is available for comment for the next three weeks. As the Bill is expected to be introduced into Parliament in mid October, comments on the exposure draft must be received by Friday 22 September.

Please note that submissions supporting additional exceptions contained in the further review of exceptions must be received by Monday 25 September.

An exposure draft of the amendments to the Regulations will be available for comment in the coming weeks, please check the Department’s website http://www.ag.gov.au for updates.
http://www.ag.gov.au/agd/WWW/agdHome...2571DF0021BCA3





NZ Draws Line on DRM and Trusted Computing
Rob O'Neill

New Zealand’s lead state-sector authority has drawn a line in the sand to ensure government information security is not compromised by new "trusted computing" and digital rights management (DRM) technologies.

The policies, released by the New Zealand State Services Commission (SSC) today, are an acknowledgement of the risks posed by the trusted computing and DRM initiatives being driven by international IT vendors and media organisations.

They also call for new standards and features to be developed and included in trusted computing and DRM systems to meet the needs of international governments.

The policies are designed, the SSC says, "to ensure that the use of trusted computing and digital rights management technologies does not adversely affect the integrity (including availability and confidentiality) of government-held information or related government systems."

The policies are not New Zealand-specific, the SSC says, and other governments are invited to make use of and contribute to them.

"We believe that collaboration between governments is vital to ensure that these technologies develop in a way consistent with government requirements. By agreeing on a common set of principles and policies that reflect their requirements, governments can more effectively influence ICT product vendors to develop standards and features that will meet these requirements, for example a standard for disclosing the DRM restrictions associated with a computer file."

The policies outline basic principles that oppose externally imposed restrictions on access to government information except where government has given informed consent. Government must also have full control of any DRM encumbrance over the master copy of any information it owns.

They also call for a common set of rights definitions and proscribe the use of hardware or software that could modify or hinder access to information held by government. Such systems also cannot compromise information privacy. Agencies must have knowledge about the information flows into and out of such systems.

Trusted computing systems can, broadly, restrict access to information if the client system is not operating properly while DRM restricts access to protect intellectual property.

The SSC is inviting other government, vendors and interest groups wishing to collaborate on the project to visit its Web site.

The "Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management Principles and Policies" have been developed over the last year by officials from central and local government with input from vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...9270846,00.htm





Google Comes to HP's Aid
Stefanie Olsen

Ever heard of bit rot?

Google engineers apparently have in their work reviving an old indexing engine developed and left to rust by Hewlett-Packard.

The search giant announced that it's helped fix software bugs in the 2-decades-old Tesseract, an optical character recognition (OCR) engine originally built by HP Labs and retired in 1995 before the company released the code to the open-source community in recent months.

Why is Google interested in OCR? According to the company, which posted the news Thursday on its code page:

"In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing."

The project dovetails with Google's overall goal to index and organize the world's information--everything from campy high school videos to academic papers that have yet to be digitized. With open-source technology like Tesseract, other engineers or institutions could help digitize more information in the form of papers.

Google helped with the project at the behest of engineers at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who have been working with HP to clear the dust off Tesseract in the last two years. UNLV turned to Google to help fix several bugs in the old software, which in its day was one of the most accurate character recognition engines.

Tesseract was judged to be highly accurate in reading paper documents in a UNLV contest in 1995, before HP retreated from the OCR business and put the software into storage.

"Fortunately some of our esteemed HP colleagues realized a year or two ago that rather than sit on this engine, it would be better for the world if they brought it back to life by open sourcing it," Google said.

For the record, bit rot is typically jargon in the computing world for a gradual decay of storage media or buggy software, according to Wikipedia. In literal terms, there's no rust involved.
http://news.com.com/Google+comes+to+...3-6112231.html





Really Free Software
Matthew Rand

Mark Shuttleworth is rich enough to cause some havoc in the feel-good Linux community. In January 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Shuttleworth sold his South African security software firm, Thawte, to VeriSign for $700 million in stock. Shuttleworth cashed out almost immediately, walking away with the entire purchase price, just as VeriSign's stock began its rapid descent. “Life has been kind to me,” he says.

But the 32-year-old has no children and doesn’t feel much need to hang on to his money. He spent $20 million in 2002 to orbit the Earth for a week in a Russian Soyuz. “I don’t intend to create a dynasty,” he says.

Instead, Shuttleworth wants to give back, by offering universal access to a free operating system to run PCs and servers. The world already has several “free” versions of the open-source Linux operating system, but Shuttleworth’s version, called Ubuntu, undercuts them all on price--and works better, according to many respected sources.

Purveyors of supposedly “free” open-source software, Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ) and Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), make their money charging support fees for every desktop or server using their software. You can’t get their software at all without paying something for support.

Support fees for Ubuntu (translation: “humanity to others” in a South African Bantu language) are comparable to Red Hat’s and Novell’s, but they’re completely voluntary. Some of Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) developers use Ubuntu, for instance, but the company doesn't pay because it services its own machines. Other users might pay only to support those machines they deem crucial to operations.

“ Deutsche Bank could deploy 10,000 Ubuntu servers, and they would not have to pay us anything,” says Shuttleworth in a hypothetical example. “But my guess is for 1,000 of those servers, they would want a 24-by-7 support contract.”

Ubuntu now has 4 million users, half of which are governments, universities and a smattering of businesses. It adds new ones at a rate of 8% per month. After its public release in October 2004, Ubuntu quickly deposed Red Hat's Fedora as the most popular version of Linux on DistroWatch, a Web site that caters to Linux users. Ubuntu works in 22 languages, and Canonical, the company Shuttleworth set up to distribute his software, will send a free Ubuntu CD anywhere in the world. New users rave about the simple user interface, which has gained recent converts in a couple of well-known bloggers who switched from Apple Computer's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) OS X.

In May, Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) announced plans to offer Ubuntu on Sun’s Niagara chips, which power its newer Sparc servers. While Sparc servers aren’t a particularly big market, the stunt made clear that Shuttleworth aims beyond home hobbyists.

Canonical has burned through $15 million of Shuttleworth's money in two and a half years. He says that it will take him at least another two years to even know whether it has a chance to become profitable, and that it may never return his investment. But that doesn't matter. He's paying all the bills either way, along with setting up a $10 million endowment for the Ubuntu Foundation that's earning interest for a day when his attentions may drift elsewhere. (Shuttleworth tried out in early 2005 for the Donald Trump role on a South African version of The Apprentice, but lost to a politically connected head of a mining company.)

Competitors Red Hat and Novell say that they’re not worried and that Ubuntu's a welcome competitor. Todd Barr, director of enterprise marketing at Red Hat, which has more than 80% of the commercial Linux market, says Ubuntu has done a great job of “energizing the community” around open-source software.

But if Ubuntu starts gaining users in the corporate market, Red Hat has a lot to lose. The Raleigh, N.C., company netted $80 million on $278 million in revenue in its last fiscal year. A price war could swallow that 28% profit margin quickly. But though Ubuntu has enjoyed surprisingly fast growth in emerging economies such as Poland, Lithuania and Brazil, it so far has found little support among corporations, admits Jane Silber, Canonical's head of operations.

Peter Yared, a former Sun engineer who now runs ActiveGrid, a company that services software built on Linux, says that for now his company and most other service vendors support only Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux. What would it take for him to support Ubuntu? “Five customers asking for it,” he says.

The big score, of course, would be to steal users away from Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), whose Windows Vista has been plagued by delays. “Until now, Linux has only transformed the proprietary Unix market,” says Shuttleworth. “Guys like HP, IBM and Sun, who made their own proprietary versions of Unix. That's pretty much been blown away over the last four years.”

For Shuttleworth, free software is an inevitable progression, whether it comes from his company or not. So he claims to be unafraid of whatever Microsoft might throw at him if it feels threatened. “We're a bit like one head of the hydra, right? If you lop us off, there's a bunch of others that'll spring up in our place.”
http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...ml?partner=rss





It's Not Just Linux: Open Source Has Arrived

Open-source true believers have been saying forever that open source is the way to develop software. It turns out they've convinced most programmers that they're right. According to a newly released IDC study, open source isn't just hype; it's now the way most developers make software.

The study, which analyzed IDC surveys from over 5,000 developers in 116 countries in the spring of 2006, found that developers worldwide are increasing their use of open source. IDC found that open source-software is being used by 71 percent of the developers in the world and is in production at 54 percent of their organizations. In addition, half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increasing in their organizations.

The study, entitled "Open Source in Global Software: Market Impact, Disruption, and Business Models," wasn't just of open-source-friendly companies like IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. It also checked in on the open-source business models and developers of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, CA, AOL, Amazon, and Perot Systems. The results? One way or the other, open-source methods and software are used almost everywhere.

Open source is so pervasive that IDC declares in this study that open-source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s. IDC analysts also believe that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.

Specifically, IDC predicts that over the next ten years, open source will lead to vicious software price competition. While end-users will see that effect, IDC's analysts think that the overall effect of open source on the entire life-cycle of software invention and innovation will be even more important.

IDC also believes that despite all the hullabaloo over GPL 2 vs. GPL 3 and other open-source licenses, business models are what are really going to matter in open source's future. For all practical purposes, there will be only three business models that matter: the software revenue model, such as in SugarCRM; the public collective model, such as in Ubuntu or Apache; and the service broker model, which Novell and Red Hat have adopted.

"The use of open source beyond Linux is pervasive, used by almost three-quarters of organizations and spanning hundreds of thousands of projects," said Dr. Anthony Picardi, IDC's senior vice president of global software research in a statement. "The real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money."

"As business requirements shift from acquiring new customers to sustaining existing ones, the competitive landscape will move towards costs savings and serving up sustaining innovations to savvy customers, along with providing mainstream software to new market segments that are willing to pay only a fraction of conventional software license fees," Picardi added. "Open source software is ultimately a resource for sustaining innovators."

Of course, open-source friends could have told them that long ago. Now, however, even corporate IT analysis has caught on to the fact that Linux and open source has fundamentally changed how software is both developed and sold.

That hasn't, however, stopped open-source enemies from doing their darnedest to throw roadblocks into its ways. A perfect example of that happened last week.

Microsoft Corporate VP Gerri Elliott, who oversees Microsoft's public sector business, also sits on the U.S. Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Elliott managed to strike from a recent report language that advocated incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the U.S. after the report had been voted on.

While Microsoft may have won its battle with a committee, however, IDC's results show that it's losing the programming war as more and more programmers are flocking to open source.
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8445673704.html





Free, as in Beer
Lawrence Lessig

Ever since the birth of the free software movement, its defenders have struggled to explain just what "free software" is. If it is free, how do coders eat? And how do businesses that support the software – IBM, Hewlett-Packard – make any money from it?

The standard answer has been a slogan: "Think free," the movement's founder, Richard Stallman puts it, "as in free speech, not free beer." You can charge whatever you want for free software. But what you can't do is lock up the knowledge that makes it run. Others must be allowed to learn from and tinker with it. No one is permitted a monopoly on the teaching that stands behind it.

A bunch of Danes, however, apparently didn't get the memo. In June, a Copenhagen artists' collective called Superflex released version 3.0 of a new beer called – you guessed it – Free Beer. "Free beer?" you ask. "Think free," Superflex members helpfully explained at the launch, "as in free software." Under the supervision of Birthe Skands, former chief of development at Carlsberg Beer, the brewery is now scaling up quickly to meet unexpectedly high demand. The first batch of 2,850 70-cl bottles (generous at about 24 ounces, so the natural tendency is to share) sold out practically overnight. Distribution deals are being negotiated with other breweries, especially overseas. And Superflex has now established a Free Beer Foundation to spread the profits to other like-minded projects.

What makes Free Beer free is the same thing that makes free software free: Its recipe is open and licensed freely. Anyone can make improvements. But anyone who distributes an improved version must release the changes as well. Superflex keeps a log of the updates at www.freebeer.org, and it will release a new version every six months. Skands is inviting the world to help her make better beer, and in exchange the brewery is keeping the knowledge free for everyone.

Copyright mavens will wonder if such a license could really work in the US (where recipes are not copyrightable). But that quibble has slowed neither this particular "open business" nor the movement of which it is a part. Indeed, we're seeing an explosion of open source businesses. Some are about developing software, like the Firefox browser. Others simply leverage the model of free software to forge a different kind of business, from the wildly popular Web-tagging tool del.icio.us and the blog-tracking search engine Technorati to the extraordinarily successful video site Revver, which embeds an ad bug into freely licensed user-generated videos, then pays the users as the clips spread. All of these businesses build upon the value created by their users, while keeping that value free for others to build upon as well.

When we begin to look at the range of examples – OpenBusiness.cc has a prominent collection – we might learn something from the pattern. Some have already seen enough to publish their insights. The short list of these books is led by MIT professor Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation. Open source businesses, von Hippel explains, know that their customers are not idiots. These companies encourage customers to tinker with their products; they then learn from this tinkering how to make the products better. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks places this commercial practice in a larger and perhaps more significant social context: Although peer production is profitable for business, writes Benkler, "we are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us and how we act, alone and in concert with others." What he calls nonmarket peer production is a critical part of this transformation. The trick is not making it happen, but making it flourish. And if my Wired boss, Chris Anderson, is right (and obviously, he must be) that we've entered the land of the long tail – where digital technology supports a massively more diverse range of products and models for production – then, as he puts it, making the consumer a producer is an excellent way to move a business up the long tail. In this model, free knowledge can drive a particular kind of free market – at least a kind that seems to flourish in a digital world.

Stallman is annoyed that Superflex calls its project "open source beer": "You should have called it 'free software beer,'" he said prior to the Free Beer launch. But he no doubt recognizes the potential of this hack. As thousands are surprised by the quality of this fantastic beer yet puzzled by its name, at least some will read the explanation prominently printed on its large and striking label. And a few of those may then think a bit more about what helps innovation flourish. It's not any magic word, like free or open. It is instead a practice that encourages the widest range of innovators. Superflex has inspired this practice with beer. And perhaps with much more as well.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/posts_pr.html





How to Discover Your Real Power Supply Manufacturer
Gabriel Torres

More and more traditional companies from other segments are entering the PC power supply market. However, the majority of them actually don’t manufacture their products. In this short tutorial we will teach you how to find out who is the real manufacturer of a given power supply.

We can separate power supply companies into three groups: the ones that design and manufacture their own products (the minority), the ones that design their own products but hire another company to manufacture the products for them, and the ones that use OEM products, i.e. another company designs and manufactures their products, but adding the label, box and manual from the contracting company. Almost all well-known manufacturers that aren’t originally from the power supply business fall in this last category.

Is this bad? Maybe. As the quality of the power supply will not depend on the labeled brand but on the real manufacturer, a given brand can provide a terrific product line on their original business (memory, cooling or whatever) but a different quality level for their power supply line. But we strongly believe that manufacturers will choose other manufacturers with the same quality level or they would get burned pretty quickly.

We can also have the funny situation of two different brands providing exactly the same power supply, as many original manufacturers are providing products to more than one brand. In some situations you can also find the same power supply on the market under the real manufacturer brand.

Everything will depend on the agreement between the two companies, as this agreement will say if the original manufacturer can or cannot sell their products to other companies. Sometimes they will agree that products picked to be manufactured under “X” brand will be exclusive, but the other products can be sold to other companies. When this happens even if you won’t find two companies with the exact same product on the market, you may find very similar products being sold by two different companies. And this is happening a lot lately.

Keep in mind that a manufacturer can buy power supplies from more than one source. If you find out that model ABC from brand MNO was manufactured by company XYZ, this does not necessary mean that all other models from MNO will also be from XYZ.

So how can we find out who is the real manufacturer of a given power supply? On the label of almost all power supplies there is an Underwriters Laboratories (UL) record number, usually very small under a logo that looks like an “UR” seen in the mirror (we will show this logo on the pictures below, so you will know exactly how this logo looks like). With this number, you can go to UL’s website and check who is the owner of that record.

• Click here to open UL’s website Online Certification Directory.

Click on the link above and enter it on “UL File Number” and then hit “Search”. Then you should see the real manufacturer name. After you found the real manufacturer name, you can see on our Power Supply Manufacturer List the manufacturer’s website address. You can try, for instance, locate your power supply real model.

JonnyGURU pointed out to us that sometimes the manufacturer will pay for getting an UL record under their name, even thought they don't really manufacture the product. So sometimes the UL record will list the brand under which the power supply is being sold, not the real manufacturer.

Unfortunately power supplies that aren’t targeted to be sold in the USA may not have an UL number.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/370/1





Don’t Keep All Your Data in One Stash
Damon Darlin

If you put stock in a recent survey from Symantec, the company behind the Norton line of computer protection software, 57 percent of computer users who store personal data on their PC’s conscientiously back it up.

Those people can feel very good about themselves, because the same survey found that a quarter of computer users have lost computer data like documents, photos and music files, most commonly when the computer crashes.

For all those people who are feeling pretty good about themselves, here is something else to worry about: what happens to those beloved family photos or your extensive music collection if something should happen to your PC and your backup? A fire, flood or earthquake could destroy the backup sitting inches from the PC.

For years, big companies have been storing their backed-up data in multiple locations to protect it from disasters. The data of consumers also has value, and it is not always just an emotional value — like 99-cent iTunes music files, or videos downloaded at $10 a pop. It is not hard to accumulate a few hundred dollars’ worth of content that needs protection.

The recognition of the monetary value of data is one force driving the sales of external hard drives. The NPD Group, the market research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y., estimates that the market for external hard drives will grow 33 percent this year, to a $500 million category. That is largely because devices like the Western Digital My Book, Maxtor OneTouch or the Seagate Pushbutton Backup drives are easier to use and more stylish than past models.

Moreover, for about $150 you can get 160 gigabytes of storage, or about twice as much as you got for that price just three years ago.

Seagate, the leader of the hard-drive industry, is trying to solve the off-premises backup problem. It is pushing a device from its newly acquired Maxtor unit that allows consumers to back up data at home and off premises. The 500-gigabyte device, called Fusion, allows consumers to link the external drive to the home network so any computer on the network can grab content there.

Access is also possible from outside the home. The device comes with some elegant software created by Fabrik, a start-up company in San Mateo, Calif., that turns the hard drive into a personal version of Flickr or YouTube — you can invite others to view content. Some of the content on the drive can be designated public and the rest remains protected. The data can also be stored on Fabrik’s servers for 99 cents a month for one gigabyte of data and 49 cents for every gigabyte after that. One gigabyte is enough room to store 250,000 pages of text, 200 songs or about a thousand photos.

The network-attached storage category has not been as popular as regular hard drives, said Stephen Baker, vice president for industry analysis at NPD, because of privacy and trust issues. Consumers are wary about security once their data is stored or accessible remotely.

But the Maxtor Fusion may have other problems gaining acceptance. At about $700, it is nearly twice the price of other 500-gigabyte hard drives. Current Analysis, a San Diego market research firm, said consumers would pay only a $100 premium for this type of software and service.

The other problem comes after the box is taken home. The first part of setting up the storage device is a joy. Plug in the cables and turn it on. Run the software on the enclosed disc and within five minutes you can move data, photos, videos and music to the storage and to every device on your network. The second part, enabling the device to provide access to data from outside your home network is — well, let Maxtor’s user guide describe it: “This portion of the setup may prove challenging to complete.” Owners are faced with bewildering instructions about configuring the system to reroute dynamic D.N.S. addresses.

If you know what that means, then you won’t have a problem. For everyone else, be prepared to call Maxtor’s technical support to get it running. Better setup software could solve this problem.

(If you insist on knowing, computers seeking access to the home storage device from outside the home network have to know the address of the device. But because most Internet service providers do not assign a static address, an additional service has to be used to locate and route requests to whatever address your service provider has assigned to it.)

That said, the Fusion does what it promises. It is easy to store data and to designate what the public can see.

Mr. Baker predicts that the device will take some time to catch on. “It’s a next-year product,” he said. But David Tang, vice president for marketing at Fabrik, says it will appeal to the type of people using MySpace and to other creative types who want to share their content by streaming music or video to friends.

There are other solutions. Apple has been offering a backup service to Mac users who sign up for a .Mac account. It sells a one-year membership that entitles a user to one gigabyte of storage for $100. An additional three gigabytes costs $100 more.

There are several online backup services that work with the backup program on Microsoft’s XP operating system. For instance, Xdrive.com offers five gigabytes for $100 a year, and Backup.com offers the same amount for $500 a year.

It is worth shopping around for the best deal or considering a work-around. Google offers 2.7 gigabytes of storage space for anyone with a Gmail account. Although most people use it for archiving their e-mail messages, that is enough space to store 500 songs or 2,500 photos and a few spare Word files. You can do that by sending yourself an e-mail message with the files as attachments.

There’s an even easier way to take advantage of Google’s largess. Users of Internet Explorer can download a program called Gmail Drive. (A Google search for the term will point you to download sites.)

If you are using the Firefox browser, an even better downloadable add-on is Gspace. (You can find it at addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1593 or www.rjonna.com.) It puts a button on the toolbar of the browser that with a few clicks puts the file right into your Gmail account. Rahul Jonna, the Phoenix programmer who created it nine months ago, said the Gspace hack has been downloaded almost 500,000 times.

Its novelty may be limited. Google is considering a backup service called GDrive, and Microsoft says it will have a backup service called LiveDrive as part of its new operating system.

I.B.M. sees an opportunity in this consumer market for backup. It sells a consumer program named Tivoli that automates backup. Every time a file is changed, a copy is stored on the PC’s drive and a copy is sent to a backup device or a remote server. (That service is separate; you will not get to use I.B.M. servers.) The $35 program can be bought online only, in the “software downloads” sections of the Web sites of Circuit City, CompUSA, OfficeMax and Staples. I.B.M. is also selling the software to cable Internet providers, like Comcast, which will offer its customers automated backup to their servers.

Symantec, when it was done surveying the backup habits of users, decided it needed to jump in, too. Its new PC protection program for consumers, Norton 360, available in March, will include a function for backing up data online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/te.../07basics.html





So there

Is It Over? Log on and See
Melena Ryzik

AT the end of a teary call last January, Louise Zervas hung up the phone and realized her five-month long-distance relationship was over. Then she did what many people her age do after they have broken up: She went online and updated her MySpace profile, changing her personal status from “In a relationship” to “Single.”

“I wanted a clean break,” said Ms. Zervas, 29, a marketing executive in San Francisco.

Her ex-boyfriend, James Kenler, 27, a record label owner in Chicago, did not know about the cleanup, though, until a friend alerted him to Ms. Zervas’s updated MySpace page.

“I got a frantic phone call from him the next day, saying, ‘I thought we were still talking through this but apparently you’ve made your mind up, because your MySpace status says single,’ ” she recalled. “I felt really bad because I wasn’t trying to hurt his feelings or be malicious. I just thought I was following protocol — that that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Mr. Kenler disagreed. “There’s a waiting period,” he said, “before unleashing your profile on these sites.”

Breaking up gracefully is always hard to do. But in an age when young people practically define themselves by what is on their MySpace or Facebook profiles, properly noting your status — single, in a relationship, married, swinger — and dealing with other online mementoes has posed a host of new protocol challenges.

“It’s like this whole new etiquette,” said Ms. Zervas, who is now friendly with Mr. Kenler. “And nobody has really acknowledged the how-to’s because it’s not really formed yet.”

Unlike online dating networks, whose clientele is self-selected with a single goal (romance) in mind, the public sites air users’ dirty laundry to a broad interconnected audience of friends, family and colleagues. That has its benefits, especially when someone wants to broadcast a change of heart. Last month, for instance, Jenna Jameson, the porn star, became MySpace-single after separating from her husband.

For dumpees, though, the mouse-click announcement may be too quick and easy.

“It’s a tender time, and it just exacerbates it when you take it into a public forum with all your friends on it, and their friends on it, and everybody’s all linked up,” said Diane Mapes, author of the guidebook “How to Date in a Post-Dating World.”

“Emotions can be complex enough,” she added, “and every time you throw some new fabulous dating gizmo out there, and people try to figure out how to use it, it makes it more complicated. You need to learn a new set of rules.”

But what are the rules? How long are you supposed to wait to change your status after a breakup — or, for that matter, when a relationship begins? And beyond checking off status, what should you do with sexy comments a fling has posted? Or when do you downgrade an ex’s online avatar from your list of top friends?

Without a common understanding of how to approach those changes, there is a lot of room for confusion and heartache, say dating experts, therapists and people active on the sites.

“If you’re dating someone for a long time and they immediately change the status, it hurts more because you don’t want them to get over it that quickly,” said Elena Price, 20, a college student in Philadelphia.

Her last boyfriend, she said, “canceled” their relationship on Facebook a week after they broke up, and “it stung because it sort of shattered my last hope at getting back together,” she wrote in an e-mail message. Then she discovered that he had created a MySpace account listing himself as single even before he broke up with her. Ouch.

While some behavior is clearly caddish, much is open to interpretation. Even the sudden post-breakup switch from “relationship” to “single” may not be as cold as it seems.

“It could be a very painful and sad — ‘Oh, I can’t believe that I’m single’ — and then you’re painfully and reluctantly clicking the button,” said Alexander Cathcart Dobbs, 25, a graphic designer in Boston. “I did that. I was, like, crying, and readjusting my MySpace profile.”

Then again, some behavior is clearly meant to spite. One of Mr. Dobbs’s exes would frequently change her status to single — “to provoke me,” he said.

Manipulation like that is common, said Diane M. Berry, a clinical therapist in Manitowac, Wis., and the author of “Romancing the Web: A Therapist’s Guide to the Finer Points of Online Dating.” “So-and-so was my friend and we had an argument and she demoted me,” is a weekly refrain in Ms. Berry’s office. “It tends to cause hurt and anger,” she said.

To provide context for those swings, Ms. Mapes suggested that MySpace develop a new button.

“Instead of ‘single’ or ‘in a relationship,’ it should be, ‘We’re currently having a spat’ or ‘She doesn’t appreciate me,’” she said. “Since it is a gray area, we maybe need the gray-area button.”

Actually, in this case the technology is already there: On Facebook, which is geared toward college students, the categories are Single, Married, Engaged, In a relationship, and It’s complicated. The categories on MySpace, which skews older, are Single, In a relationship, Married, Divorced and Swinger.

But no matter how sensitively done, any tweak to a site could be upsetting. “Seeing that was like a kick in the stomach,” said Micaela Coady, 30, a health researcher from Brooklyn who was so affected by an ex’s status shift that she abandoned her Friendster account (she now blogs instead).

And the issues are no less complicated at the birth of a relationship.

After pressuring a guy she had been seeing into setting up a Friendster profile (back in 2004, when Friendster was cool), Shanta Thake, 26, a club booker in Manhattan, was alarmed to find that he had listed his status as “in a relationship.” Though they had been dating for several months, hers still said single because they hadn’t had ‘the talk’ yet, she said.

“I freaked out and called my best friend saying things like, ‘I don’t know if I’m ready for a relationship right now,’ ” she said.

By the time she had calmed down enough to amend her own profile, she found that her boyfriend — having presumably seen Ms. Thake’s status — had changed his back to single. They broke up shortly thereafter.

“I think the whole thing is so ridiculous,” Ms. Thake said. “Even when I was freaking out, I was thinking, is this really happening? Am I really going to decide this because I am unable to have a conversation with my boyfriend about our status, I have to look it up online? Has it really come to this?”

In a word, yes.

And so it requires a new etiquette, but even experts can’t agree about what that is. When it comes to breakups, some believe in a mourning period. (Wait a week, Ms. Mapes says: “You want to give it adequate time to make sure it is a breakup.”) But others advocate for quick removal, like a Band-Aid. “If it’s really over, you don’t want to hang on to it,” said Peggy Post, great-granddaughter-in-law of Emily Post and an etiquette expert.

Rules for other post-breakup issues, like deleting photos and comments, are also ambiguous: It depends upon what they are or how jealous your new boyfriend or girlfriend is, site users said. And demoting friends is never easy.

Still, declaring status can be illuminating.

“I thought it was sort of dramatic to go ahead and change the status,” Mr. Kenler said about Ms. Zervas’s clean break. But without that, “the relationship may have dragged on and been worse.

“The biggest problem in our relationship,” he added, “was miscommunication.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/fa...ml?ref=fashion


















Until next week,

- js.



















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