[JackSpratts]

Van Halen, R.E.M. Make Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
AP

Van Halen made a "jump" into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Monday along with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, R.E.M., the Ronettes and Patti Smith.

A panel of 600 industry experts selected the five artists to be inducted at the annual ceremony, to be held March 12 in New York.

Van Halen was the 1980s hard rock quartet led by guitarist Eddie Van Halen, outrageous lead vocalist David Lee Roth, and later rocker Sammy Hagar, that put out hits such as "Jump" and "Dreams."

R.E.M. was the quintessential indie rock band until breaking through to mass success in the early 1990s with songs like "Losing My Religion."

Grandmaster Flash led the most innovative act in early hip-hop, and the song "The Message" was like a letter from urban America.

Punk rock poet Patti Smith and Phil Spector favorites the Ronettes round out the 2007 class.

To be eligible, artists must have issued a first single or album at least 25 years before nomination.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/storyprint.php?id=1027890





Computers Join Actors in Hybrids On Screen
Sharon Waxman

James Cameron, the director whose “Titanic” set a record for ticket sales around the world, will join 20th Century Fox in tackling a similarly ambitious and costly film, “Avatar,” which will test new technologies on a scale unseen before in Hollywood, the studio and the filmmaker said on Monday.

The film, with a budget of about $200 million, is an original science fiction story that will be shown in 3D even in conventional theaters. The plot pits a human army against an alien army on a distant planet, bringing live actors and digital technology together to make a large cast of virtual creatures who convey emotion as authentically as humans.

Earlier movies like “The Lord of the Rings” series did this on a limited scale, as in the digitally designed character Gollum, whose performance came from the actor Andy Serkis, while others like “The Polar Express” have used live actors to drive animated images — so-called motion capture technology.

But none has gone as far as “Avatar” to create an entirely photorealistic world, complete with virtual characters, on the expected scale of the new film, Mr. Cameron said in a telephone interview.

“This film is a true hybrid — a full live-action shoot, with CG characters in CG and live environments,” said Mr. Cameron, referring to computer-generated imagery. “Ideally, at the end of the of day, the audience has no idea which they’re looking at.”

Jim Gianopulos, a co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, said that he expected theaters to update their facilities to accommodate the 3D demands of the film. “This will launch an entire new way of seeing and exhibiting movies,” he said.

“Jim’s not just a filmmaker,” Mr. Gianopulos added, referring to Mr. Cameron. “Every one of his films have pushed the envelope in its aesthetic and in its technology.”

The making of “Titanic,” Mr. Cameron’s last full-blown Hollywood feature, was the stuff of movie legend. Released in 1997, the film went far over its planned cost to become the most expensive production that had then been made, creating stunning visual effects with a combination of live action and computer graphics. But it also went on to become a historic success, taking in a record- breaking $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office and winning 11 Oscars, including the award for best picture.

Mr. Cameron said he had taken care to avoid the problems he encountered on that, his last gargantuan production, and was already four months into shooting some scenes by the time Fox gave final approval to the project on Monday. The shoot has been largely secret, in a building in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles.

“I’ve looked long and hard at ‘Titanic,’ and other effects-related things I’ve done, where they’ve drifted budgetwise,” he said. “This has been designed from the ground up to avoid those pitfalls. Will we have other pitfalls? Yes, probably.”

Mr. Cameron has already devised revolutionary methods to shoot the film, and expects to create still more methods to bring to life the vision of a completely photo-realistic alien world.

For its aliens, “Avatar” will present characters designed on the computer, but played by human actors. Their bodies will be filmed using the latest evolution of motion-capture technology — markers placed on the actor and tracked by a camera — while the facial expressions will be tracked by tiny cameras on headsets that will record their performances to insert them into a virtual world.

The most important innovation thus far has been a camera, designed by Mr. Cameron and his computer experts, that allows the director to observe the performances of the actors-as-aliens, in the film’s virtual environment, as it happens.

“It’s like a big, powerful game engine,” he explained. “If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It’s pretty exciting.”

Sam Worthington, a young Australian actor, has been named to play the lead, a paralyzed former marine 150 years in the future, who undergoes an experiment to exist as an avatar, another version of himself. The avatar is not paralyzed, but is an alien: 10 feet tall, and blue. Zoe Saldana, another relative unknown, has been chosen as the love interest.

“We could do it with make-up, in a ‘Star Trek’ manner — we could put rubber on his face — but I wasn’t interested in doing it that way,” Mr. Cameron said. “With the new tools, we can create a humanoid character that is anything we imagine it to be — beautiful, elegant, graceful, powerful , evocative of us, but still with an emotional connection.”

Mr. Cameron is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s foremost innovators, and he has been waiting to make the film, which he wrote more than a decade ago, while technology catches up to his vision. He began experimenting with these new filming techniques about 18 months ago, he said.

But he disputed the notion that the galloping pace of filmmaking technology has threatened the traditional role of actors or the emotional grip of a good story.

“There’s this sense of bifurcation, that really true artistic, cutting-edge filmmakers make these indie pictures, and that CG films are these clanking machines,” he observed. “I’ve tried to fight to inhabit both spaces. There’s a way to take all these technical tools and have them come from a place where the artist is still running the film. It’s not easy.”

While recognizing that it is was an expensive project, Mr. Gianopulos said that something like “Avatar” was precisely what the theatrical movie business needed in a time of stiff competition from video games and lavish home entertainment systems.

“What audiences are looking for, especially in the theater, is a unique experience,” said Mr. Gianopulos, whose studio also distributed the “Star Wars” series by George Lucas, though it does not own those films. It will fully own “Avatar.”

He added: “There is nothing as unique as what this film will be, as spectacle, as a presentation of a completely original world, in its presentation and its technology.” He said he expected the movie to become a series, and the actors were signed up to accommodate sequels.

The live-action shoot with actors will begin in April, with major effects being done by Weta, the filmmaker Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based effects company, which created the effects for his “Lord of the Rings.” The film is scheduled for release in summer 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/movies/09came.html





Digital Tech Sharpens Technicolor Films
The Hollywood Reporter

When watching the DVD re-release of Gone With the Wind, what once appeared as simply a green cloth shawl worn by Vivien Leigh is revealed as a garment of dark emerald velvet so rich it beckons touching.

Similarly, in the 1939 film's opening scene, while Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara rambles on about the tedium of war, the white bodice of her dress now displays precise lace patterns and threads.

Likewise, when Errol Flynn rides horseback into Sherwood Forest in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, the detailed pattern embedded on his and other soldiers' armor is so vivid that the number of small metal rings can be counted.

These elements have been made clearly visible through a patented technology created by Warner Bros. in collaboration with AOL. The process involves digitally realigning and sharpening the older film negatives of these classic movies shot on Technicolor three-strip film.

Known as Ultra-Resolution, the technique is in the running this year for a Scientific and Technical Academy Award and has restored films in the studio's vast library including Singin' in the Rain, The Searchers and The Wizard of Oz--prints that over time have suffered blurring or "color fringing," as well as shrinkage, stretching and other damage.

It was while observing a projected picture of Wind during some digital scanning that Chris Cookson, president of Warner Bros. Technical Operations and chief technology officer of Warner Bros. Entertainment, says he was inspired. He noticed a frame 5 pixels out of alignment and knew the resolution could be improved if somehow all the sharp edges could just be better matched.

"The purpose of Technicolor was to make color, not precise images," said Cookson, explaining that the Technicolor process used in the 1930s and '40s involved stacking together each frame of a negative to produce a full-color print. "In a sense, we're mining the film and audio elements that have been sitting on these prints all these years."

The restoration process got a helping hand from the otherwise disastrous 2001 takeover of the studio's Time Warner parent by AOL. Two sisters who serve as heads of research and development at AOL, Keren and Sharon Perlmutter, devised an algorithm to analyze each square block of a frame, detecting the edges of each original color record and adjusting the color alignment accordingly.

Although Warner Bros. holds four patents on the technology, with additional ones pending, the studio has shared the technique with other studios, recently being used to create a new negative for damaged scenes in Paramount's Chinatown.

Cookson, who points to the fact that the technology can also be used to build a new negative rather than just restoring one, recounted the reaction of Singing director Stanley Donen when he was shown the digitally restored version of his 1952 film.

"It looks like it did that day on the stage," Cookson recalled Donen saying.

For Cookson and those who worked tirelessly on the restoration of some of history's most classic films, the ultimate beneficiary is the film consumer.

"It not only benefits Warner Bros. and the industry at large, it benefits the movies themselves and the people who love them."
http://news.com.com/Digital+tech+sha...3-6146834.html





The World Has Nearly Ended, but Movies Manage to Survive
Jeannette Catsoulis

A faux documentary with a twist, “Ever Since the World Ended” unfolds in and around an eerily depopulated San Francisco 10 years after a mysterious plague has decimated humanity. But instead of making a movie about the aftermath of a disaster, the filmmakers, Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle, have tried something a little more clever and a lot cheaper: to envision what the first movie made after that disaster might look like.

The result is a rudimentary yet fascinating record of remembrance and reconstruction, accessed through survivor interviews and carefully chosen landscapes. Effects are all the more special for being minimal: a decaying Golden Gate bridge, a decomposing ship listing in the harbor.

The mood is gently melancholic, spiced with unexpected humor — like the self-described “last North American Indian” who resents being everyone’s spiritual backbone — and the free-floating tension of a world without laws. At a cozy commune, bees are raised and children receive piano lessons while the adults wonder whether to kill a violent man recently returned to the city. The remnants of civilization are being preserved, albeit with a certain moral primitivism.

Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, “Ever Since the World Ended” features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones, including Mark Routhier as a damaged former emergency worker and David Driver as a self-justifying scavenger.

What remains in the mind, however, is the film’s atmospheric blend of hope and trepidation: the challenge and terror of a world with too much space and too few boundaries.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED

Opens today in Manhattan.

Produced and directed by Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle; written by Mr. Grant; director of photography, Mr. Litle; edited by David Driver and Mr. Litle; released by Cyan Pictures. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 78 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: James Curry (James), Linda Noveroske (Linda), Brad Olsen (Santosh) and Ronald Chase (Teacher).
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/01/1...es/10worl.html





Wagner Loses Fight for "Angels" Profits
Leslie Simmons

A California appellate panel has ruled that actor Robert Wagner may be the owner of rights in the "Charlie's Angels" television series, but he is not entitled to profits from the big-screen versions of the popular '70s TV show.

In an opinion issued Monday, the 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected Wagner's claims that he and his children are contractually entitled to net profits earned by 2000's "Charlie's Angels" and 2003's "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," which starred Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu.

Wagner and his former wife Natalie Wood developed the TV series with producers Aaron Spelling, Leonard Goldberg and their Spelling-Goldberg Prods. Under an agreement with the production company, Wagner and Wood were entitled to 50% of the net profits Spelling-Goldberg received "for the right to exhibit photoplays of the series and from the exploitation of all ancillary, music and subsidiary rights in connection therewith."

Years after Spelling-Goldberg sold both its rights and obligations relating to "Charlie's Angels" to Sony Pictures Television, corporate sibling Columbia Pictures purchased theatrical motion picture rights from heirs of the show's writers, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, to whom film rights had reverted under Writers Guild of America "separated rights" rules.

Wagner argued that under his contract with Spelling-Goldberg, the "subsidiary rights" provision meant he and his children with Wood, who died in 1981, were entitled to share in 50% of the income "from all sources," including the films.

Columbia, however, claimed that while "subsidiary rights" may sometimes include movie rights, Wagner's contract with Spelling-Goldberg did not cover film revenue because Columbia acquired film rights not from Spelling-Goldberg but on the open market just as any studio could have done.

The unanimous three-judge panel agreed.

"For a right to be 'subsidiary' or 'ancillary,' meaning supplementary or subordinate, there must be a primary right to which it relates," Justice Earl Johnson Jr. wrote on behalf of the panel. "The only primary right mentioned in the contract is 'the right to exhibit photoplays of the series.'

"Thus, the Wagners were entitled to share in the profits from the exploitation of the movie rights to Charlie's Angels if those rights were exploited by Columbia as ancillary or subsidiary rights of its primary 'right to exhibit photoplays of the series' but not if those rights were acquired by Columbia independently from its right to exhibit photoplays," Johnson concluded, with justices Norvell Woods Jr. and Laurie Zelon joining.

Wagner's attorney, Samuel Pryor, said the ruling is "unfortunate and we think it's a mistaken decision."

"We think their opinion really came down to one narrow interpretation of the contract that might have been a reasonable interpretation, but that they erred in dismissing ours as unreasonable as a matter of law, given the evidence we had as to the intention of the parties and the lack of any evidence submitted by the other side as to what the contract meant," he added.

Pryor said he and his client are deciding whether to file a petition for review with the California Supreme Court.

Columbia's attorney, Martin Katz, said he did not see any basis for the state's high court to take the case.

"The court discussed both the words of the contract and the extrinsic evidence that was submitted by the parties, and after considering all the evidence, the court of appeal correctly concluded, as did the trial court, that Wagner's interpretation was not one to which the language was reasonably susceptible," Katz said. "So now there are four judges, the trial court judge and a unanimous panel on appeal that all agree with Columbia's position and have found Mr. Wagner's interpretation of the agreement unreasonable."
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...1_%5bFeed%5d-8





Hitchcock, Thrilling the Ears as Well as the Eyes
Edward Rothstein

“I must get that damned tune out of my head!” exclaims the beleaguered Richard Hannay as he is chased across the Scottish Highlands in “The 39 Steps.”

“I can’t get that tune out of my head!” complains Charlie, the unsuspecting niece of the Merry Widow Murderer, as she keeps imagining that waltz in “Shadow of a Doubt.”

“I can’t tell you what this music has meant to me!” exclaims the once-suicidal Miss Lonelyheart in “Rear Window,” with effusive gratitude to the song’s composer.

Innocents all, twisted round by suspicion, doubt, danger and confusion. And all haunted by music that, Alfred Hitchcock kept hoping in his lifelong quest, would haunt audiences as well.

It is that “damned tune,” after all, that leads Hannay to the heart of an international espionage plot and allows him to upend its nefarious goals. It is that “Merry Widow Waltz” that leads Charlie to guess that her admired doppelgänger, Uncle Charlie, may not be everything he seems. And it is that composer’s song (which prevents a suicide) that provides the sole salvational counterpoint to another plot, in which a neighbor murders and dismembers his wife, which Jimmy Stewart discerns from his rear window. Hitchcock’s characters are haunted by tunes for good reason. And while the achievements of his films and their scores have not lacked elaborate celebration (he worked with the best film composers of the 20th century and left his mark on their development), Hitchcock had something else in mind that may not be fully appreciated.

Bernard Herrmann, for example, who created the scores for “Psycho,” “North by Northwest” and some of Hitchcock’s other masterpieces, said there were only “a handful of directors like Hitchcock who really know the score and fully realize the importance of its relationship to a film.”

But it was more than that. For Hitchcock music was not merely an accompaniment. It was a focus. And it didn’t just reveal something about the characters who sang the score’s songs or moved under its canopy of sound; music could seem to be a character itself.

This might sound a bit grandiose, but take a look at Jack Sullivan’s fascinating new book, “Hitchcock’s Music” (Yale University Press). In his book “New World Symphonies,” Mr. Sullivan, who is director of American studies at Rider University in New Jersey, inverted the usual suggestion that American concert-hall music evolved under the domineering shadow of European influence. He showed instead how American music powerfully shaped the evolution of Europe’s art form. Now he shows that it isn’t just that Hitchcock believed that sound should serve image; he believed that image should serve sound.

“Hitchcock’s career,” Mr. Sullivan writes, “was an unending search for the right song.” “Rear Window,” he argues, discussing some of the songs, boogies, ballads and street sounds that make up the film’s score, “is Hitchcock’s most daring experiment in popular music.” And Hitchcock remade “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956 so that the “movie would be about music.”

Mr. Sullivan might have made his case more systematically; he is also hampered by hewing to a dutiful and sometimes awkward chronological trek through Hitchcock’s 50-some feature films. And he doesn’t do enough to remind readers of the films’ plots (even when discussing Hitchcock’s little-known 1934 biopic about the Strauss family, “Waltzes From Vienna”). But he examines Hitchcock’s meticulous notes about film scores, pays attention to every casual calliope tune and chronicles the director’s arguments with studios and fallings out with composers (Hitchcock eventually fired even Herrmann from his privileged perch) while revealing new ways of thinking about Hitchcock’s music.

Part of Hitchcock’s musical style is just a matter of sheer attentiveness and sly humor. When a carnival organ plays “Baby Face” in the background of “Strangers on a Train,” in which the murders of a wife and a father are plotted, or when Cary Grant, before the maelstrom, innocently walks through a hotel lobby in “North by Northwest” as Muzak plays “It’s a Most Unusual Day,” we can see the portly master winking over his characters’ heads.

“Mozart is the boy for you,” an ailing Scottie is told futilely by a friend visiting him in a mental institution in “Vertigo,” though Mozart doesn’t stand a chance against Herrmann’s vertiginous score.

Yet Hitchcock could also be wrong in his judgments, as Herrmann proved when he showed that, despite the director’s assertion, music should accompany the shower murder in “Psycho.”

But in Hitchcock’s most powerful films it is impossible to separate music from the visual fabric or plot. In “The Lady Vanishes” the leading man is an ethnomusicologist studying the endangered folk musics of Europe on the eve of World War II. The film’s elderly Miss Froy, though, has the real musical ears, listening closely to a guitarist’s serenade that has encoded within it a melodic message that must be brought to Britain before it is too late; she hears and recalls what the hero does not.

The 1956 remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” uses Arthur Benjamin’s “Storm Clouds” cantata, which was commissioned for the 1934 version of the film. In the remake an assassination is to take place at a climactic cymbal crash. The bad guys, here as elsewhere in Hitchcock’s works, are surprisingly musically literate. They play recordings for the assassin. They supply a score reader who follows along as Herrmann conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. And in the remake, Mr. Sullivan points out, the musical emphasis is heightened from the beginning.

The heroine’s musical past becomes crucial. Doris Day’s professionally trained voice thwarts the assassination with her anticipatory scream. Music’s powers even help her find her kidnapped child as she sings his favorite song, “Que Sera, Sera.”

Music has as much a role to play in these films as any of the characters. It might charm them or be used by them. But it also can reveal more than they know, offering secrets or promising salvation. Hitchcock’s music has such an independent life, it also seeps through film’s strict boundaries: Something that seems to be a score turns out to be a radio playing off screen (“Rear Window”); music that starts as part of a film score is heard again in the humming of a hero (in “Foreign Correspondent”).

“I have the feeling I am an orchestra conductor,” Hitchcock once told François Truffaut. He also compared film to opera.

Hitchcock, without ever drawing a line between the popular and high arts, explored his chosen genre with a firm belief about the powers of music. Music can provide an archetype for Hitchcockian suspense. Music can hint at more than it says; it can unfold with both rigorous logic and heightened drama; and despite all expectations it can shock with its revelations.

Mr. Sullivan’s book suggests that Hitchcock’s musical faith was more profound than any he could have had about people. And this faith was shared by a generation of film composers who worked with him and were also émigrés to the United States in the 1930s and ’40s, including Erich Korngold, Miklos Rosza and Dimitri Tiomkin.

Despite the events they lived through (which provided their own form of menace and resolution), they shared a conviction that the culture of music had such power that it could match the increasing dominance of film. It could stand in confidence alongside it, knowingly alluding to ambiguities, complexities and multiplicities that not even Hitchcock’s heroes could entirely figure out before the films end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/movies/08conn.html?





Lawyer Gave Information to Kerkorian
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

When Kirk Kerkorian’s longtime lawyer was indicted on wiretapping and conspiracy charges last February in the federal investigation of the Hollywood private detective Anthony Pellicano, the billionaire investor was mentioned almost as an afterthought.

There were no accusations that Mr. Kerkorian knew or approved of any wiretapping, and no indications that he had even been interviewed by the F.B.I. about Mr. Pellicano’s work on his behalf.

But in recordings that Mr. Pellicano secretly made of his own telephone conversations, Mr. Kerkorian’s lawyer, Terry N. Christensen, repeatedly said he told the billionaire — then 84, and locked in a legal dispute with his ex-wife, Lisa Bonder Kerkorian — what the private detective was learning from what prosecutors say were his wiretaps.

Mr. Christensen stops short of saying he has told Mr. Kerkorian that Mr. Pellicano was using wiretaps, but says he is providing Mr. Kerkorian with details of Ms. Kerkorian’s private conversations.

Mr. Kerkorian has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and it is unlikely that someone could be held criminally liable for the actions of an investigator hired by his lawyer without showing that the client knew of the investigator’s illegal acts.

Yet the recordings show how Mr. Pellicano’s information could affect a high-stakes lawsuit, and make clear that Mr. Kerkorian, according to Mr. Christensen’s assurances, was grateful for intimate information that helped his case.

“Tell me that the old man has a smile on his face,” Mr. Pellicano said on May 14, 2002.

“He does, O.K.? He’s happy,” Mr. Christensen said. “Our jaw is still hanging down.”

Mr. Kerkorian was then embroiled with his ex-wife in a nasty child-support and paternity battle. Mr. Pellicano heard Ms. Kerkorian talking to her lawyers, relatives and friends even as she and Mr. Kerkorian were wrangling over her demand for a $270,000 increase in monthly child-support payments. Ms. Kerkorian’s effort ultimately failed; a judge increased the payments by just $316.

The secret recordings also show how Mr. Kerkorian and his lawyer pushed the private detective to investigate another multimillionaire, the movie producer Stephen L. Bing, whom Mr. Kerkorian suspected of being the biological father of his ex-wife’s daughter.

A spokesman for Mr. Kerkorian, Dick Sobelle, declined to answer questions for this article. “We’re not at liberty to comment on any of this,” he said. Federal prosecutors declined to comment, as did Mr. Pellicano, who is in jail awaiting trial.

Mr. Christensen’s lawyer, Terree A. Bowers, declined to answer questions, but when told the thrust of this article, called it “irresponsible, unwarranted and a pack of lies.” He added: “In fact, there are absolutely no tapes or reliable evidence of any wiretaps involving the Kerkorian-Bonder litigation. The charges are and remain totally unfounded.”

The recordings are among hundreds that prosecutors have turned over to defense lawyers, along with tens of thousands of documents. That evidence was subject to a court protective order, and prosecutors are investigating The New York Times’s access to some of it.

Mr. Christensen and Mr. Pellicano, both of whom have pleaded not guilty to felony wiretapping and conspiracy charges, were among seven people indicted last February as part of an F.B.I. inquiry. Two have pleaded guilty, and the trial of the other five, after several delays, is set for August.

Mr. Kerkorian, through his holding company, the Tracinda Corporation, controls MGM Mirage, with its extensive hotel and casino properties. He bought and sold the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio three times from 1969 to 2004. Last year, he bought 9.9 percent of General Motors, trying to pressure it into a deal with Nissan and Renault, then retreated, selling his shares for a profit of $100 million. Forbes put his net worth at $8.7 billion last year.

Mr. Kerkorian will turn 90 in June. The recordings in which he is discussed by his lawyer and the private detective suggest he could be called to testify at their trial about what he knew and when.

The wiretapping on Mr. Kerkorian’s behalf began after his ex-wife sued to increase his child-support payments from $50,000 to $320,000 a month. Mr. Kerkorian had learned much earlier that her daughter, who was born before he married Ms. Kerkorian, was not his biological child. But now Mr. Kerkorian pressed his lawyer to find out who the father was.

On March 18, 2002, Mr. Christensen told Mr. Pellicano that “proof of exactly how she got pregnant” would be worth $100,000 to Mr. Kerkorian.

Over the next two months, Mr. Pellicano recorded at least 33 more conversations with Mr. Christensen. While they did not use the word “wiretap,” they freely talked about what Mr. Pellicano heard while monitoring Ms. Kerkorian’s phones.

On April 27, 2002, Mr. Pellicano reported hearing her discuss trying to leverage Mr. Kerkorian’s desire to spend time with her daughter into a bigger settlement. “This is her exact words, by the way,” he said. “ ‘How much money is he willing to pay me to get that?’ That’s her exact words.”

He also said Ms. Kerkorian had confided in her father about her case. “There’s no way except with my unique techniques that you would know this,” he said.

A few excerpts show the kinds of information Mr. Kerkorian’s side gained from learning of Ms. Kerkorian’s telephone conversations:

On April 22, 2002, Mr. Pellicano reported to Mr. Christensen that Ms. Kerkorian was furious at her lawyers and ready to fire one of them, Stephen Kolodny, but Mr. Kolodny talked her out of it. “I’ll tell you something, if we continue to get this kind of information with their strategy, we’ll really kill ’em,” he said.

Mr. Kolodny said he had no recollection of Ms. Kerkorian threatening to fire him in this time period.

On Saturday, April 27, two days before a settlement conference, Mr. Pellicano told Mr. Christensen he had picked up “massive detail” about Ms. Kerkorian’s settlement demands.

“She wants all her legal fees paid. You understand?” Mr. Pellicano said. “She wants retroactive support back to August of last year. She wants $125,000 a month. She wants a joint press statement saying that neither one of them was at fault, and they just both made mistakes.”

Repeatedly, Mr. Christensen said he intended to, or already had, told Mr. Kerkorian what Mr. Pellicano had learned from Ms. Kerkorian’s phone calls:

On April 27, Mr. Pellicano said Mr. Christensen might want to warn Mr. Kerkorian about something.

“She talks about killing him,” Mr. Pellicano said. “She says, ‘You know, I gotta kill him.’ She says those things. Now, whether she really means it or not, probably not. But does she say it? Absolutely.”

Two days later, Mr. Christensen returned to the subject. “Those comments and that discussion was pretty disgusting, and I’m thinking that I should probably, you know, give Kirk a heads-up,” he said.

Mr. Christensen’s lawyers later claimed that Mr. Pellicano’s information about such statements by Ms. Kerkorian was what led Mr. Christensen to become involved with the private detective in the first place.

Steve Sitkoff, a lawyer for Ms. Kerkorian, scoffed at the notion that she was ever a threat to anyone. “It’s ludicrous to think that she would ever mean any harm to Kirk or anyone else,” he said.

On May 10, Mr. Pellicano argued for telling Mr. Kerkorian not to trust the mediator in the case, Deborah Simon. After Mr. Kerkorian had left Ms. Simon a lengthy message, Ms. Simon told Ms. Kerkorian all about it, Mr. Pellicano said, and Ms. Kerkorian was thrilled.

“The elation was overwhelming,” Mr. Pellicano said.

“Well, I will let Kirk know the emotional high that Lisa got out of Deborah’s call,” Mr. Christensen said. Ms. Simon did not respond to messages at her home and office.

On May 14, Mr. Pellicano asked if Mr. Kerkorian had been briefed about another exchange he had overheard. “Did you tell him about that?” he said.

“Yeah, oh sure,” Mr. Christensen said. “He just couldn’t believe it.”

Ms. Kerkorian, who had a long relationship with the billionaire, married and quickly divorced him when her baby was a year old, and the two agreed at the time that the child was his.

By the time Mr. Pellicano was hired, the investor already had been told by his ex-wife’s friends that she had had an affair with Mr. Bing, the film producer, around the time when her daughter was conceived. So, after Mr. Pellicano tried to but could not confirm that Ms. Kerkorian had been artificially inseminated, Mr. Christensen pressed him to focus on Mr. Bing — who was already embroiled in a contentious and public paternity fight with the actress Elizabeth Hurley.

At one point, on April 28, 2002, Mr. Christensen told Mr. Pellicano that he took no pleasure in pursuing Mr. Bing. “But Kirk is going through this, and he’s been [expletive] defrauded, O.K.? And I am not resting until this is put to bed, and it’s not going to be put to bed until we find out who the father is.”

Ultimately, Mr. Bing, who declined to comment, was identified as the father of Ms. Kerkorian’s child, with the help of a DNA sample lifted from his trash.

As word broke of that finding, on May 15, 2002, Mr. Christensen told Mr. Pellicano to shut down the wiretap of Ms. Kerkorian after one final night of listening. The private eye said he hoped to work for Mr. Kerkorian again.

“Maybe the old man will give me something in the future,” he said.

“Well, that you can count on,” Mr. Christensen said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/bu...ia/11kirk.html





Carlo Ponti, Italian Producer, Dies at 94
AP

Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who discovered a teenage Sophia Loren, launched her film career and later married her despite threats of bigamy charges and excommunication, has died in Geneva. He was 94.

Ponti died overnight at a Geneva hospital, his family said Wednesday. He had been hospitalized about 10 days earlier for pulmonary complications, it said.

He produced more than 100 films, including ''Doctor Zhivago,'' ''The Firemen's Ball,'' and ''The Great Day,'' which were nominated for Oscars. Other major films included ''Blow-Up,'' ''The Cassandra Crossing,'' ''The Verdict'' and ''The Squeeze.''

In 1956, ''La Strada,'' which he co-produced, won the Academy Award for best foreign film, as did ''Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow'' in 1964.

But it was his affair with the young ingenue Loren that captivated the public, rather than his work with top filmmakers such as Dino De Laurentiis, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Ustinov, David Lean and Roman Polanski.

''I have done everything for love of Sophia,'' he said in a newspaper interview shortly before his 90th birthday in 2002. ''I have always believed in her.''

Born near Milan in the small town of Magenta on Dec. 11, 1912, Ponti studied law and worked as a lawyer before moving into film production in the late 1930s.

He was married to his first wife, Giuliana, when he met Loren -- then Sofia Lazzaro -- about 1950. At the time she was only 15 -- a quarter-century younger than Ponti.

They tried to keep their relationship a secret despite huge media interest, while Ponti's lawyers went to Mexico to obtain a divorce from his first wife.

Ponti and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 -- two male attorneys took their place and the happy couple only found out when the news was broken by society columnist Louella Parsons.

But they were unable to beat stringent Italian divorce laws and the wrath of the Roman Catholic church. Ponti was charged with bigamy.

''I was being threatened with excommunication, with the everlasting fire, and for what reason? I had fallen in love with a man whose own marriage had ended long before,'' Loren has said.

''I wanted to be his wife and have his children. We had done the best the law would allow to make it official, but they were calling us public sinners,'' she said. ''We should have been taking a honeymoon, but all I remember is weeping for hours.''

The couple first lived in exile and then, after the annulment of their Mexican marriage, in secret in Italy.

During this period, Ponti produced the film ''La Ciociara'' -- known in English as ''Two Women'' -- for which Loren won a best actress Oscar in 1962, and contributed significantly to the development of French New Wave cinema in his collaboration with Godard.

Ponti and Loren finally beat Italian law by becoming French citizens -- the approval was signed personally by French President Georges Pompidou -- and they married for a second time in Paris in 1966.

Despite many predictions that the marriage would founder over Ponti's affairs and the many dashing leading men who reportedly fell in love with Loren, the couple stayed together.

Ponti had several other brushes with the law.

He was briefly imprisoned in by the Fascist government in Italy during World War II for producing ''Piccolo Mondo Antico,'' which was considered anti-German. An Italian court later gave Ponti a six-month suspended sentence for his 1973 film ''Massacre in Rome,'' which claimed Pope Pius XII did nothing about the execution of Italian hostages by the Germans. The charges eventually were dropped on appeal.

Though Loren was better-known, Ponti amassed a fortune considerably greater than that of his wife -- and again fell foul of the Italian authorities.

In 1979, a court in Rome convicted him in absentia of the illegal transfer of capital abroad and sentenced him to four years in prison and a $24 million fine.

Loren, along with film stars Ava Gardner and Richard Harris, were acquitted of conspiracy.

It took Ponti until the late 1980s to settle his legal problems and finally obtain the return of his art collection, which had been seized by authorities and given to Italian museums.

He also survived two kidnapping attempts in 1975.

Ponti discovered many of the great Italian leading ladies, including Gina Lollobrigida, and had affairs with several. ''I don't like actors. I prefer women,'' he said at the time.

In recent years, the couple lived mostly in Switzerland, where they had several homes. Despite reports that he was seriously ill, Ponti attended the 1998 Venice Film Festival to accept a lifetime achievement award for his wife, who was kept away by illness.

Ponti had two sons with Loren -- Carlo Jr., a celebrated conductor, and Edoardo, a film producer. He also had two children from his first marriage, Guendolina and Alexander.

No date was given for a funeral, but the family said it would be ''strictly private.''

------

Sanminiatelli reported from Rome and Jordans reported from Geneva. Associated Press Writer Naomi Koppel in London contributed to this report.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Ponti.html





Yvonne De Carlo, Who Played Lily on 'The Munsters,' Dies at 84
Wolfgang Saxon

Yvonne De Carlo, a dark-haired Hollywood beauty who advanced from the chorus line to play Moses’ wife in a movie epic but who achieved her greatest popularity as Lily in the CBS television sitcom “The Munsters,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. She was 84.

The cause was heart failure, said Kevin Burns, a friend and television producer. She had been living at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, he said.

Miss De Carlo had had a prolific film career in the 1940s and ’50s when she was cast as Lily Munster, the wife of Herman Munster (Fred Gwynne), a bumbling Frankenstein’s monster with a soft heart who led a Charles Addams-flavored household peopled by the likes of an aging Count Dracula, the cigar-chomping Grandpa (Al Lewis).

The sitcom went on the air in 1964 and lasted only two seasons, but achieved a kind of pop-culture immortality in decades of reruns and movie and television spinoffs.

In her cape and robes and with a streak of white in her black hair, Miss De Carlo’s Lily was a glamorous ghoul and a kind of Bride of Frankenstein as homemaker, “dusting” her gothic mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane with a vacuum cleaner set on reverse. The humor mostly derived from the family’s oblivious belief that they were no different from their neighbors. It was Miss De Carlo, for example, who delivered one of the show’s signature lines: “Do you have a feeling we’re being stared at?”

She was born Peggy Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her father deserted the home, leaving her mother to make a living as a waitress. Ambition on both their parts led Peggy to study dance and dramatics and her mother to seek fame and fortune with her in California.

Peggy turned into Yvonne and took her mother’s maiden name, De Carlo, as her own. She started dancing in clubs at night and scouring the film studios for work by day. There were years of uncredited walk-ons and bit parts, like Bathing Beauty in “Harvard, Here I Come!” (1941) and Princess Wah-Tah in “The Deerslayer” (1943).

Her breakthrough came with a starring role in “Salome, Where She Danced” (1945), a Western with Rod Cameron and Walter Slezak, in which she played a European seductress. While the movie may have been forgettable, she became known as one of Hollywood’s most desirable young stars and advanced to pictures playing opposite some of the era’s most popular leading men.

Among them were Brian Donlevy and Jean Pierre Aumont in “Song of Scheherazade” (1947); Tony Martin in “Casbah” (1948); Burt Lancaster in “Criss Cross” (1949); Howard Duff in “Calamity Jane and Sam Bass” (1949) and “Flame of the Islands” (1956); Van Heflin in “Tomahawk” (1951); Joel McCrea in “The San Francisco Story” (1952); Ricardo Montalban in “Sombrero” (1953); and Rock Hudson in “Sea Devils” (1953).

One of her outstanding parts in those busy years came in the British comedy “The Captain’s Paradise” (1953). As Nita, the hotblooded other wife in Tangier, she taught a blithely bigamous English ferry captain (Alec Guinness) the flamenco, among other things.

After that, she made “Tonight’s the Night,” with David Niven and Barry Fitzgerald, and “Passion,” with Cornel Wilde, both in 1954. Three years later she starred with Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier in “Band of Angels,” after the novel by Robert Penn Warren. In 1956 it was “Raw Edge,” with Rory Calhoun, then, the same year, “Death of a Scoundrel,” with George Sanders playing the cad in question and Miss De Carlo doing, in the words of a reviewer for The New York Times, “a solid and professional job as the adoring petty thief who rises to eminence with him.”

One of her most prominent roles was as Sephora, wife to Charlton Heston’s Moses in the Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza “The Ten Commandments” (1956). “Yvonne De Carlo as the Midianite shepherdess to whom Moses is wed,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The Times, “is notably good in a severe role.”

She also appeared on Broadway in 1971 in “Follies,” the long-running musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman. She assumed the part of a fading movie star and took in audiences with her matter-of-fact presentation of Mr. Sondheim’s wistful “I’m Still Here.”

Altogether, Miss De Carlo appeared in nearly 100 films well into the 1990s, starting with uncredited roles and tapering into thrillers and sci-fi potboilers like “Silent Scream” (1980) and “American Gothic” (1988). There were also many cameo appearances, as in “Here Come the Munsters,” a 1995 television-movie reincarnation in which the Munsters invade America in search of Herman’s brother-in-law, Norman Hyde.

Miss De Carlo’s marriage to Robert Morgan, an actor and stuntman, ended in divorce. She is survived by their son Bruce Morgan and a stepdaughter, Bari Morgan. Another son, Michael, died earlier.

Many years ago Miss De Carlo’s name was linked in an off-screen romance with Howard Hughes, before he turned into a legendary recluse. Asked to reminisce about that chapter in her life by Ladies’ Home Journal in 1972, she said: “Howard taught me how to land a plane and how to take off. But he never taught me anything about flying in between. He thought that I had learned the difficult parts, and that was enough.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/ar...11decarlo.html





No Ceasefire in DVD Format Battle
Darren Waters

The high definition DVD format war will continue until a winner is declared, technology watchers have heard.

Blu-ray and HD-DVD are battling to become the pre-eminent hi-def format to replace the slowing DVD market.

The two formats are incompatible with each other and so consumers are being asked to choose both the player and the system when moving to high definition.

There is also no sign of the two camps working on a unified format, the Consumer Electronics Show was told.

'Wasted opportunity'

Some believe the industry at large is being damaged by the war due to consumer confusion.

Ben Keen, chief analyst with Screen Digest, said: "There is an awful lot of people in the US and Europe who have HD displays and no hi-def content.

"That's a wasted opportunity at this point. The industry is not exploiting that opportunity."

"The growth of the industry is much slower than it could be," agreed Dr H G Lee, chief technology officer of LG Electronics, which has announced the first player to accept both formats.

"We recognise that the two formats are here to stay."

But the backers of Blu-ray are much more bullish and are predicting victory.

Blu-ray has more backing from film studios and more makers of the players, but HD-DVD has sold equally well in the first year of release.

But the Blu-ray camp believes a library of exclusive titles and the power of PlayStation 3 - which has an in-built Blu-ray player - will see the format pull ahead in the next 12 months.

Mike Dunn, president of worldwide home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said: "I really believe the format war is in its final phase."

Supporters of Blu-ray believe that the late arrival to the market in 2006 of new next generation Blu-ray DVD players has given a more even picture than is true.

Studio backing

Currently there is an even number of titles available for both formats but most analysts predict there will be more content available for Blu-ray than HD-DVD next year.

Seven of the eight major US film studios back Blu-ray and five of them are exclusive to the format.

Andy Parsons, chairman of the US Blu-ray Disc Association, said: "It comes down to content and selection of content. No-one is going to buy any player without good array of content.

"As title population grows consumers will quickly see which platform has the titles."

In an ominous sign for HD-DVD, the backers of Blu-ray revealed that of the 20 biggest selling DVDs of 2006 the vast majority were from film studios supporting Blu-ray.

Toshiba and Microsoft, the principal backers of HD-DVD, see the future very differently.

They believe that the cheaper cost of HD-DVD - both in terms of hardware and the ability of firms to produce content on HD-DVD disks gives them the advantage.

Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of consumer technology at Microsoft, said the dual format player by LG - originally a Blu-ray only backer - was proof of the vitality of HD-DVD.

"LG are recognising there is a thriving market for HD-DVD. That's the most positive thing for me.

"It's going to show the way to other Blu-ray exclusive companies. LG is saying that HD-DVD is not dying.

"You can wish it goes away but I'm here to ensure that it doesn't."

Microsoft has sold more than 175,000 and says that they sold out as quickly as they were made.

Toshiba has said that it plans to sell more than 1.8m HD-DVD players in 2007.

Mr Majidimehr predicted that the lifespan of both formats would also be less than the current DVD format.

It has lasted 10 years with great success but Mr Majidimehr said the technology would be superseded by developments in online delivery of hi-def content.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/6243383.stm





Yahoo Introduces Mobile Service Software
Miguel Helft

After falling behind Google in Internet search and advertising, Yahoo is trying to remain No. 1 in the battle to deliver information and online services to mobile phones.

Yahoo’s latest weapon is software that will let users find information like weather, news, stock quotes and sports scores more quickly on their cellphones. The software, called Go for Mobile 2.0, was unveiled Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, just as Google announced a partnership to put its own mobile software on Samsung cellphones.

Internet services on mobile phones remain a tiny market today, especially in the United States. But industry analysts and Internet companies believe they will eventually outgrow the market for computer-based Internet services as the capabilities of cellphones and the bandwidth of wireless networks improve rapidly.

“We view the mobile Internet today as entering an era where the PC-based Internet was in ’96 or ’97,” said Steve Boom, Yahoo’s senior vice president for broadband and mobile. “It is just on the cusp of taking off.”

For Yahoo, securing a leading position in that market is especially important. The company has struggled over the last year, as Google solidified its lead in search and leaped ahead in online video by acquiring YouTube. Yahoo has also been criticized as lacking initiative and being slow to capitalize on Internet trends like social networking, now dominated by MySpace and Facebook.

Yahoo’s introduction of mobile software was reported Monday in The Wall Street Journal. The software, a revamped version of technology that the company introduced last year, makes it easy to move among various online services providing news, sports scores, maps, weather, movies, photos and e-mail. The free ad-supported services will be tailored to match a user’s settings, like ZIP code and stock preferences, on Yahoo’s existing online services.

The software will also be equipped with a search service, oneSearch, that will interpret a user’s intent and deliver results accordingly. For instance, when a user searches for a sports team, the service will make a bet that the user is interested in the latest scores, a team profile and news related to the team, and return those first. More general Web links, like those returned in typical Internet searches, will be de-emphasized.

“It’s the kind of thing that Yahoo very much needs to extend further onto the mobile platform,” said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a research firm based in Bethesda, Md.

The service is already available on about 70 handset models and is expected to be on some 400 devices by the end of the year, Mr. Boom said. Yahoo has signed agreements with handset makers to preload or distribute the software. Yahoo is also encouraging users to download the software directly onto their devices.

Yahoo’s mobile services were used by 6.8 percent of cellphone users in the United States in October, according to Telephia, a research firm. That made Yahoo, whose most popular wireless service is e-mail, the No. 1 mobile Internet company. But in mobile search, Google already tops Yahoo, according to Telephia.

Google said its cellphone search, e-mail and map products would be preloaded on Samsung phones. Deep Nishar, Google’s director of wireless products and strategy, said the company’s mobile search service already emphasized results that users typically want, like sports scores and movie times and locations.

To succeed, both companies will need to secure cooperation from wireless carriers, which could prove a challenge for some time as several offer competing services, said Julie Ask, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Yahoo said some overseas carriers had agreed to support its services. Mr. Boom said it was “a matter of time” before American carriers followed suit. As an incentive, Yahoo is offering to share revenue from any advertising on the system, he said.

Ms. Ask noted that, for now, most cellphone advertising consists of text messages sent directly to users, and that ad revenues from mobile search and Web browsing are minuscule.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/te...y/09yahoo.html





Surveillance

Court Challenge of ID Requirement Fails
Joan Biskupic

The Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a challenge to the federal government's policy of requiring airline passengers to show identification before they board flights, spurning arguments that the well-known but unpublished policy would lead to more secret laws.

John Gilmore, a founder of Sun Microsystems and an advocate of libertarian causes, sued the government because it has long refused to disclose the text of the regulation that forces air travelers to present an ID.

The question before the justices was whether travelers have sufficient notice of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) ID policy to satisfy constitutional due process of law, which typically requires a law to be published so people know how to comply with it.

On July 4, 2002, Gilmore tried to board two flights from California to the Washington, D.C., area without showing identification. Airline workers told him that if he would not show an ID, he would have to undergo more extensive screening. He refused.

"I believe I have a right to travel in my own country without presenting what amounts to an internal passport," Gilmore told USA TODAY in 2004. "I have a right to be anonymous."

Gilmore's lawsuit drew support at the high court from several media groups, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

In court briefs, the groups stressed the importance of the public knowing what the law says and the need to hold officials accountable as they impose anti-terrorism measures.

U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement told the justices in a brief that telling passengers about the ID requirement at airports is sufficient, and he emphasized that the TSA directive is part of "sensitive security information." He said the directive is part of a broad policy aimed at preventing hijackings and other potential threats to passenger jets.

In denying Gilmore's appeal, the high court gave no explanation and had no public vote, as is its usual practice in declining to hear cases. The justices let stand a lower court's ruling that said Gilmore had enough notice of the policy because airline workers had told him about it.

Gilmore's attorney, Thomas Goldstein, said the federal government's refusal to disclose the TSA directive has the effect of misinforming people. "Passengers are consistently advised that federal law requires them to show identification," Goldstein wrote in the appeal. "Passengers in reality can generally travel even without showing proper identification … (if) they undergo a more extensive security screening."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...hallenge_x.htm





Supreme Court Lets Stand Secretive Security

The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear a challenge to the secrecy surrounding the Transportation Security Agency's rules requiring that U.S. citizens provide identification to board domestic airline flights or submit to additional security screening.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled against the plaintiff, civil-rights activist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Gilmore, nearly a year ago. In November, a coalition of eight groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), filed a court brief supporting Gilmore's request for information about the secretive rules.

"'Security' shouldn't be a magic password allowing the government to escape accountability," Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney for the EFF, said in a statement published at the time. "The Supreme Court should hear this case and review why the TSA insists on keeping this basic information secret."

After 9-11, the Bush Administration has increasingly used secrecy to guard non-classified but sensitive information from potentially being used by terrorists to plan an attack while increasingly exercising surveillance powers. Government agencies have pulled information from the Web, while previously unclassified documents have been resealed. Meanwhile, the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed lawsuits over the National Security Agency's use of wiretaps to spy on American citizens who are suspected of ties to terrorism.

The TSA maintained in court documents that secrecy was necessary to ensure the security of passengers, while the EFF argued that the rules amounted to unconstitutionally secretive laws. The Supreme Court justices made no comment in denying (PDF) the appeal.
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/402





Senator Asks Bush to Explain Signing Statement That Gives President Authority to Open Mail Without Warrant

The following letter, acquired by RAW STORY, was delivered to President Bush Monday, in response to an article published in the NY Daily News which revealed that Bush had written into a "signing statement" that the President could open Americans' mail.

January 8, 2007

The Honorable George W. Bush

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I am deeply concerned about the signing statement that you issued on December 20, 2006, regarding H.R. 6407, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. It raises serious questions about whether the government is reading Americans’ first class mail without obtaining a search warrant or other court order as required by statute.

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act recodified in a different location an existing provision of federal law, without change, that states as follows:

No letter of such a class of domestic origin shall be opened except under authority of a search warrant authorized by law, or by an officer or employee of the Postal Service for the sole purpose of determining an address at which the letter can be delivered, or pursuant to the authorization of the addressee.[1]

In your signing statement, you stated that the executive branch would construe this provision “in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February 2006 on the National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program, Senator Leahy asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales whether the executive branch was relying in other contexts on the theory that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force gave it the authority to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other statutes. Specifically, Senator Leahy asked: “Did it authorize the opening of first-class mail of U.S. citizens?” The Attorney General attempted to avoid answering the question, but ultimately stated: “Senator, I think that, again, that is not what is going on here. We are only focused on communications, international communications, where one party to the communication is al Qaeda. That is what this program is all about.”

You have already confirmed that you have authorized the NSA to conduct surveillance of communications without obtaining the court orders required by FISA. Your December 20, 2006, signing statement now suggests that you believe you have the authority to violate the law with regard to opening regular mail. The American people and Congress are entitled to know whether you have acted on that theory. Please answer the following question: has your administration authorized any government agency to read Americans’ first-class mail without obtaining a search warrant, complying with the applicable court order requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or satisfying Postal Service regulations?

I look forward to your expeditious reply.

Sincerely,

Russell D. Feingold

United States Senator

1: A separate regulation, promulgated in 1996, states that the Postal Service can open a piece of mail when there is a credible threat that it contains a bomb or other explosive device. 39 C.F.R. § 233.11
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Se...ning_0108.html





YouTube Exposes Torture in Egypt
Kevin Anderson

American politicians quickly realised that no moment was private in the age of YouTube, and now Egyptian authorities are learning the same thing, even when the private moments are chilling scenes of police brutality. (Note: The videos contains scenes of graphic violence. Direct links to the videos are clearly identified.)

Camera phone images of Egyptian police "beating and sexually assaulting" a Cairo man were being circulated via mobile phone, according to Human Rights Watch, before they made their way onto the popular video sharing site. Police have been arrested and will face trial on charges of torture in the case, but the man in the video, Imad Kabir, has been jailed for three months on the charge of "resisting authority" in the incident.

Bloggers and Kabir's lawyer, Nasser Amin, are now putting pressure on authorities to guarantee his safety in prison. Mr Amin calls the disturbing incident a case of 'routine torture'. The El-Adly Video-Gate case, as bloggers are calling it, appear to be one of a number of cases of brutality. Bloggers have uploaded other footage to YouTube including this video of the interrogation of a woman accused of murder. (Note: The video contains scenes of violence that some readers will find offensive.)

Amnesty International, Human Rights watch and Egyptian bloggers including Wael Abbas and Demagh MAK are working to maintain pressure on authorities there to make torture less routine. But according to blogger and journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, bloggers could now face a backlash. Mr Amin:
warned of increased police interest in the blogosphere, and expected, if not a crackdown, a state grand campaign to discredit the bloggers.

Blogging has been adopted by political technically savvy activists such as Alaa Abd El Fattah in Egypt, who was the focus of an international campaign to secure his release after he was detained with 10 other activists last year during a protest to support reformist judges. If you want to get a taste of the blogs there, Alaa recently relaunched his popular Egyptian blog aggregator.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/arc..._in_egypt.html





The Snoop Next Door

Bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online. Our reporter on new Web sites for outing fellow citizens.
Jennifer Saranow

Last month, Eva Burgess was eating breakfast at the Rose Cafe in Venice, Calif., when she remembered she needed to make an appointment with her eye doctor. So the New York theater director got on her cellphone and booked a date.

Almost immediately, she started receiving "weird and creepy" calls directing her to a blog. There, under the posting "Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!" her name, cellphone number and other details mentioned in her call to the doctor's office were posted, along with the admonition, "next time, you might take your business outside." The offended blogger had been sitting next to Ms. Burgess in the cafe.
The dawn patrol: Tim Halberg filmed a newspaper-stealing neighbor, then put the video online.

It used to be the worst you could get for a petty wrong in public was a rude look. Now, it's not just brutal police officers, panty-free celebrities and wayward politicians who are being outed online. The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking (Caughtya.org) and leering (HollaBackNYC.com) to littering (LitterButt.com) and general bad behavior (RudePeople.com). One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre.

Helping drive the exposés are a crop of entrepreneurs who hope to sell advertising and subscriptions. One site that lets people identify bad drivers is about to offer a $5 monthly service, for people to register several of their own plate numbers and receive notices if they are cited by other drivers. But the traffic and commercial prospects for many of the sites are so limited that clearly there is something else at work.

The embrace of the Web to expose trivial transgressions in part represents a return to shame as a check on social behavior, says Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some academics believe shame became less powerful as a control over everyday interactions with strangers in all but very small neighborhoods or social groups, as people moved to big cities or impersonal suburbs where they existed more anonymously.

The sites documenting minor wrongs are the flip side of an online vigilantism movement that tackles meatier social issues. Community organization Cop Watch Los Angeles encourages users to send in stories and pictures of people being brutalized or harassed by police, for posting on the Web. The governor of Texas plans to launch a site this year that will air live video of the border, in hopes that people will watch and report illegal crossings. In a trial run in November, the site received more than 14,000 emails. Tips included spottings of individuals swimming in the Rio Grande, a person wearing a large white hat and a "wild" boy at the border. In China, Web postings have become a powerful social weapon, used to rally thousands of people to hound a man who allegedly had an affair with a married woman.

An Anonymous Tip

For people singled out, the sites can represent an unsettling form of street justice, with no due process. Chris Roth's driving skills have been roundly criticized online by self-anointed traffic monitors. "This man needs his license revoked," wrote one poster, who accused Mr. Roth of cutting in and out. Another charged him with driving on a shoulder and having the audacity to "flip off" an old lady who wouldn't let him cut in.

Mr. Roth found the critiques when an anonymous writer added a comment to his MySpace profile in late November directing him to PlateWire, one of the handful of new sites devoted to bad driving. There, a user had posted Mr. Roth's license-plate information -- his vanity plate reads "IDRVFAST" -- and complained about his reckless driving style. Subsequent posters found and listed his full name, cellphone number and link to his MySpace page, as well as comments like "big jerk" and "meathead." (He has no idea how they found his information.)
Chris Roth was criticized by anonymous posters on one site for his driving skills.

"There is no accountability. You can just go online and say whatever you want whether it's factual or not," says the 37-year-old Mr. Roth, of Raleigh, N.C., who works in technology sales. He admits he is an impatient driver and speeds, but he has no plans to change his driving style based on posts by anonymous commentators. "Who are they to decide what is safe or not?" he says.

If you type "ycantpark" into photo-sharing site Flickr, there are about 200 photos of bad parking jobs at Yahoo Inc.'s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. The company says the posts were started anonymously around 2005 by employees disgruntled with the parking situation. During that year, Yahoo hired more than 2,100 new employees, and finding a parking space become difficult. "I don't want to have my car posted up there so I definitely think twice about how I park," says Yahoo spokeswoman Heidi Burgett.

The digital age allows critics to quickly find a fair amount of information about their targets. One day last November, at about 11:30 a.m., a blog focused on making New York streets more bike-friendly posted the license plate number of an SUV driver who allegedly accelerated from a dead stop to hit a bicycle blocking his way.

At 1:16 p.m., someone posted the registration information for the license plate, including the SUV owner's name and address. (The editor of the blog thinks the poster got the information from someone who had access to a license-plate look-up service, available to lawyers, private investigators and police.) At 1:31 p.m., another person added the owner's occupation, his business's name and his title. Ten minutes later, a user posted a link to an aerial photo of the owner's house. Within another hour, the posting also included the accused's picture and email address.

The SUV's owner, Ian Goldman, the chief executive of Celerant Technology Corp. in the New York City borough of Staten Island, declined to comment for this article. According to an email exchange posted on the blog, Mr. Goldman said that he had lent the vehicle in question to a relative with "an urgent medical situation" and that he was not aware of any incident. The alleged victim has decided to drop the matter since the damage to the bicycle, which he was standing next to at the time, was under $20. Last month, Aaron Naparstek, editor of the blog, says he removed Mr. Goldman's home and email addresses from the site after receiving a "lawyerly cease and desist" email asking that the whole posting be deleted.

Other sites have also received complaints asking that posts be removed. Most say they will remove identifying information like phone numbers or full names when it comes to their attention or if asked. Yet lawyers say alleged wrongdoers shamed online typically have little legal recourse under libel and privacy laws if the accusations in postings are true, if they are posters' opinions about behavior witnessed in a public place and if the personal information listed is available to the public. "It becomes very difficult when it comes to the shaming sites in terms of what you can do in creating a case," says Daniel Solove, an associate professor of law at George Washington University Law School, who is working on a book about gossiping, shaming and privacy on the Internet.

Caughtya.org hosts pictures of cars illegally parked in handicapped spaces. (Other objects qualify, too; one photo from Plano, Texas, is called "Big Rubber Chicken parked in accessible parking spaces.") Playground snoops can log onto the five-month-old Isaw-yournanny.blogspot.com, where users have posted details about nannies committing misdeeds, like feeding children Ho Hos.

Few Postings

Some of the sites are attracting little attention. Caughtya.org lists fewer than 10 U.S. infractions, RudePeople.com has about six stories of rudeness and Irate-Driver.com has none.

Many ask for donations to cover costs, but some owners are hoping to make money. Mark Buckman launched PlateWire in May after almost getting run off the road a few months earlier by several drivers, including one who was looking in his backseat and steering with his leg. The site now lists nearly 25,000 license-plate numbers, chastised for moves like tailgating with brights on and driving too slowly in the left lane. To drum up revenue, Mr. Buckman recently added advertising and an online store with branded merchandise. Users in about 15 states can also pay $2 to have a postcard sent to an offending driver, directing the accused to the site. He plans to launch another site this year that will allow people to rate and complain about local businesses and individuals. "If I can create jobs and create an empire that would be awesome, but my main goal is to make a Web site that can actually make real world changes," Mr. Buckman says.

Yahoo photo site Flickr has an "I hate stupid people" group that focuses on shots of regular people parking or dressing badly, among other misdeeds. It has nearly 60 members, as does the similar "Jerks" group, for pictures of "neighbor cats pooping on your lawn" or SUVs parked in compact spots. On Google Inc.'s YouTube, users have contributed videos of minor wrongs, like people cutting in line. On the blogs, one poster refers to this new form of revenge as "blogslapping," a word that previously just referred to when one blogger criticizes another's blog.

Caught on Tape

After Tim Halberg's Santa Barbara [Calif.] News-Press didn't show up on his doorstep for six days straight last March, he grabbed his camera and launched a stakeout. He stayed up all night waiting for the newspaper to arrive. When it did, he attached a note declaring, "I'm watching you! Don't ever steal my paper again," and left it on the driveway. Then he waited with his front door open a crack to catch the thief. The robed culprit: His neighbor at the time, a man who looks to be in his 50s. Mr. Halberg captured him on video walking up to the paper, reading the note and walking away.

Mr. Halberg never approached the neighbor about the issue directly, but he found four of the older newspapers in front of his house the next day. The 26-year-old wedding photographer posted the video on YouTube, where it's been viewed more than 850 times.

Online shaming is happening across the world, with several well-publicized cases in China. Last fall, one blogger posted photos and the license plate number of a Beijing driver who got out of his car and threw aside the bicycle of a woman blocking his way. The driver was quickly identified by Internet vigilantes and soon apologized on television for his behavior. And on a popular Web site last year, after one husband accused a student of having an affair with his wife, other users posted the student's phone number and other personal details. After that, groups of people showed up at his university and parents' home, according to some reports. The student denied the affair.

Some suggest that public shaming could be used here as a tool for social betterment. In a paper in the November issue of the New York University Law Review, Lior Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago, suggested that roads would be safer if every car had a "How's My Driving?" placard on the bumper asking other drivers to report bad behavior.

The neighbor-as-Big-Brother approach is already being deployed offline. Since August, spectators at Cincinnati Bengals home games have been able to call 513-381-JERK to complain about rowdy fans. When a call comes in, security zooms in on the area with stadium cameras, confirms there's a problem and dispatches security. Initially, the hotline was receiving more than 100 calls a game, about 75% of which were crank calls. Reports were recently down to about 40 a game, with less than 25% being crank calls.

Posting a snarky message online is often safer than confronting bad behavior face to face. "You never know how people are going to react in person," says Scott Terry, 32, who works in advertising in Chicago. Last spring, he posted a photo on Flickr of a "cell phone bus yapper" who disrupted his morning commute. The caption: "Can't you use your inside voice?"

For others, posting can be revenge enough. In April, Grace Davis, 51, a stay-at-home mom in Santa Cruz, Calif., captured a "pushy customer" wearing a Hermès-like scarf and black sunglasses while ordering around sales people at Molinari Delicatessen in San Francisco with words like "gimme." Ms. Davis posted the photo online and wrote "Not nice! No fresh Molinari raviolis for you, madam" over the woman's face. "I can just happily walk away," says Ms. Davis, "because as we say in New Age Santa Cruz, 'It's out in the universe now.'"
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Lucky Year For RFID Privacy?
Erin Joyce

With the start of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas and the world of gadgetry and fun sloshing into the gadget-obsessed marketplace, it's pure tech catnip these days. If all that media overload isn't enough, the Mac faithful will be gathering in San Francisco to hear the oracle of cool, Steve Jobs, talk about the next Big iSomething – music, digital media, TVs, phones or all of the above coming to you from Apple.

At CES, we'll be seeing digital media distribution systems, VoIP, mobile phones, and digital media piped from one device to another to be viewed on the clearest, flattest screens ever. We'll be seeing more phones with GPS systems embedded that can help you track your kids' whereabouts -– or just track you. It's also expected to showcase RFID and its systems and illustrate how to use it to keep track of traffic, gadgets and security.

It's all so cool and so very busy, and it leaves a digital trail for a digital database called You.

What? You didn't know you'd be tracked with RFID? If you're a member of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, the privacy group founded by privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht, you would be expecting some notification that RFID systems are in use.

If privacy issues and data protection in the digital age were pushed to the forefront last year with all the notification of lost or stolen customer data, then this could be the year that RFID gets pushed into wider discussion, as well.

Why? Well for one thing, vendors are expecting 2007 to be a breakout year for RFID. Symbol Technologies, one of the biggest providers of RFID scanners and software systems for scanning products, said it is expecting to see a big jump in the use of item-level tagging, especially on apparel and consumer electronics on store shelves, as well as the use of more hybrid tags (a mix of active and passive tags on some products), tags with longer frequency ranges (more devices can scan from a farther distance), growth in pharmaceuticals, security, government and access control.

IBM is also moving aggressively to take advantage of the growth, but also to take a leadership role in helping to shape industry best practices about notification and use of RFID systems. It's a smart move for a company that's been awarded a bunch of RFID patents. The most recent one reads like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel: "Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-Tagged Items in Store Environments" (Patent #7,076,441).

It pretty much does what the patent title says it does: tracks you and your products throughout the store and can also be used to identify you against other databases. It's got Albrecht's consumer privacy group lobbying for companies to disclose when this technology is in use.

Congress has yet to take up the issue, but plenty of states are considering legislation that would at least notify consumers when they're being tracked by the RFID devices. It's just one among many reasons that I think RFID will be one technology that helps push tech companies into taking part in drafting RFID privacy policies and best practices.

A crazy quilt of legislation?

There are plenty of positive and good uses for RFID, but it's what consumers don't know and aren't clear about that raises suspicions between them and the companies or governments that use the technology. That's why the industry has to be more active about best practices and notification policies. Otherwise, a crazy quilt of state legislation about this awaits.

Harriet P. Pearson, IBM's vice president and chief privacy officer, heads up IBM's efforts to embed privacy thinking into the company's design efforts across all its technology divisions. RFID is just one of them, which is evident in the titles of some patents it's been awarded: "Method to address security and privacy issue of the use of RFID systems to track consumer products" (Patent 7000834); "Anti-tracking system to ensure consumer privacy" (Patent 7086587); "System and architecture for privacy-preserving data mining" (Patent 6931403).

Among Pearson's priorities is to make sure that IBM's policies, once set, are being managed. To speak with her is to get a glimpse of the rapidly expanding use of technology and how that data can impact our livelihoods -- for better and for not so good.

About a year ago, IBM adjusted its human resources policies to ensure its employees that it would not use genetic information, or any kind of genetic data, to make hiring decisions. Sure, if you want to disclose information voluntarily in order to get different coverage for health care, so be it.

But the point is, our genetic data is in the mix, too, not just our buying habits, monthly expenditures, food preferences and the like.

There was a time when Web sites didn't post anything on their sites about how they would use the information you left there when you registered, or purchased something or typed in your credit card info, for example. Now, we wouldn't even dream of doing business with a site that doesn't have a clear privacy policy posted.

Only after a few bankruptcies of early dot-com flameouts, which landed many customers' information in a bankruptcy court, did the industry start to get religion about best practices regarding privacy policies.

This could be a similar breakout year for RFID and how companies use it with consumers -- it's a great opportunity to be aggressive in shaping policies about disclosure of that RFID use and how information is used.

For example, the RFID tagging system on a person could help keep track of workers who toil in dangerous environments, such as coal mines or oil refineries. They could opt-in for a system that could locate them should they become trapped in a mine.

On the other hand, IBM's Pearson adds, there should be strong policies in place for item-level tagging for which IBM has helped a diverse group of citizen and companies devise policy. "IBM strongly supports notification that these are in use. We actively promote these best practices and a role for these innovations to enable privacy as well," she told internetnews.com. "The issue about privacy is how we think and act on the issue. Trust is the name of the game. Privacy is absolutely part of that trust equation."
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3652506





RFID Coming to Scooters, Diapers
Stefanie Olsen

Italian scooters and baby diapers could have a common link soon: embedded RFID tags tracking their whereabouts.

IBM plans to announce Wednesday that it has won two new customers for its radio frequency identification tracking software--an Italian subsidiary of Honda Motor and packaging maker Pliant.

Honda Italia Industriale, which sold 12.7 million scooters last year, plans to use RFID chips and IBM software to track motorcycle parts and tools circulating within its manufacturing plant in Atessa, Italy.

Pliant, based in Schaumburg, Ill., will sell a new RFID-embedded plastic wrap to consumer-goods companies that want to detect any tampering of their products in transit from manufacturer to distributor. Pliant is using IBM's software to keep track of RFID-marked cargo--everything from cereal boxes to diapers--in the warehouse.

"The goal of this program is to commercialize practical and cost-effective bulk packaging solutions that incorporate RFID technology," said Doug Lilac, Pliant's Technical Director for Innovation.

The news is a boon to IBM and an industry still in its early stages. While RFID tags are gaining ground in certain sectors--aircraft maker Boeing is tracking parts with the chips--many manufacturers and retail giants are reluctant to adopt the technology based on still-steep costs associated with the tags and potential consumer-privacy concerns.

RFID tags are computer chips placed on products, whether individually or in containers, to track the movement of those products. Sensors read the tags to monitor shipments and send alerts on conditions, like temperature and exposure to light, as well as on GPS (Global Positioning System) latitude and longitude.

The news comes a month after IBM introduced new software called WebSphere RFID Information Center, which helps manufacturers and distributors share data from the tracking tags.
http://news.com.com/RFID+coming+to+s...3-6148862.html





Canadian Coins Bugged, U.S. Security Agency Says

They say money talks, and a new report suggests Canadian currency is indeed chatting, at least electronically, on behalf of shadowy spies.

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence.

Security experts believe the miniature devices could be used to track the movements of defence industry personnel dealing in sensitive military technology.

"You might want to know where the individual is going, what meetings the individual might be having and, above all, with whom," said David Harris, a former CSIS officer who consults on security matters.

"The more covert or clandestine the activity in which somebody might be involved, the more significant this kind of information could be."

The counter-intelligence office of the U.S. Defence Security Service cites the currency caper as an example of the methods international spies have recently tried to illicitly acquire military technology.

Nearly 1,000 'suspicious' contacts

The service's report, Technology Collection Trends in the U.S. Defence Industry, says foreign-hosted conventions, seminars and exhibits are popular venues for pilfering secrets.

The report is based on an analysis of 971 "suspicious contact reports" submitted in fiscal 2005 by security-cleared defence contractors and various official personnel.

"On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defence contractors' employees travelling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons," the report says.

The report did not indicate what kinds of coins were involved. A service spokeswoman said details of the incidents were classified.

As a result, the type of transmitter in play — and its ultimate purpose — remain a mystery.

However, tiny tracking tags, known as RFIDs, are commonly placed in everything from clothing to key chains to help retailers track inventory.

Each tag contains a miniature antenna that beams a unique ID code to an electronic reader. The information can then be transferred by the reader into a computerized database.

Makes no sense

The likely need for such a reading device means the doctored coins could be used to track people only in a controlled setting, not over long distances, said Chris Mathers, a security consultant and former undercover RCMP officer.

"From a technology perspective, it makes no sense," he said. "To me it's very strange."

Then there's the obvious problem: what if the coin holder plunks the device into a pop machine?

"You give the guy something with a transmitter that he's going to spend — I mean, he might have it for an hour," Mathers said with a chuckle.

Harris speculates recent leaps in miniaturization could allow for a sophisticated transmitter capable of monitoring a target's extensive travels.

"I think we can be pretty darn confident that the technology is there for the sorts of micro-units that would be required to embed these things in a coin," he said.

"It's a brave new world, and greatly concerning on so many levels."

Passing the coin to an unwitting contractor, particularly in strife-torn countries, could mark the person for kidnapping or assassination, Harris said.

"You could almost, by handing a coin to somebody, achieve the equivalent of the Mafiosi's last kiss on the cheek."

The Defence Security Service report says employees of U.S. contractors reported suspicious contacts from individuals, firms or governments of more than 100 countries during the year.

Technologies that generated the most interest were information systems, lasers and optics, aeronautics and sensors.

A foreign approach often meant a simple request for information from the contractor.

Can contain built-in scanners

But the report also underscores clandestine means of acquiring secrets from U.S. employees, particularly those travelling abroad.

"It is important to recognize copiers and shredders can contain built-in scanners to copy the data."

Other common methods include placing listening devices in rooms, searching hotel rooms, inspecting electronic equipment and eavesdropping on conversations.

The report, which first came to light in a U.S. newspaper, has since been posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization that tracks the intelligence world and promotes government openness.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...d-defence.html





Testing the Testers

There is by now no doubt that there are serious problems with electronic voting machines: they fail to record votes, and even flip votes from one candidate to another. Election officials like to defend the machines by noting that they have been certified by independent testing labs. But the certification process has long been deeply flawed, and last week there was even more disturbing news — that the leading testing lab has been unable to meet the federal government’s standards.

Since last summer, Ciber Inc., the largest tester of voting machine software, has been unable to meet federal quality standards that will take effect later this year.

It is disturbing that if Christopher Drew had not reported this in The Times, the public still would not know. The Election Assistance Commission, the agency that evaluates the labs, did not reveal that Ciber fell short, and is still not saying what is wrong. Ciber, which is still working on meeting the standards, did not return our phone call.

Many Americans are using electronic voting machines that were certified by Ciber. Were those certifications done properly? Did whatever deficiencies Ciber has now exist then? No one is saying.

Since many jurisdictions, and some whole states, now use electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record, certification is extremely important. It is one of the few ways of determining whether a machine wrongly records votes, either by accident or by design.

Even before the news about Ciber, certification was a troubled process. The biggest problem is that the voting machine manufacturers pay the labs to do the examination and certification. This is a conflict of interest. If a lab raises too many concerns, it risks losing a client to a more compliant competitor.

There is also too little transparency. The labs, which see themselves as working for the voting machine companies, do not tell the public when they find problems or what those problems are.

Congress should pass legislation fixing the system. The vendors should continue to pay the costs, but the government should choose and pay the labs. That would make the labs responsive to the correct customer — the public.

It should also enact strong transparency rules. Voters should know how testing is done, and have full and timely access to the results. Congress should also require the Election Assistance Commission to be more open about how it evaluates the labs. If a lab falls short, the public — which may currently be using machines certified by that lab — should be told right away what the deficiencies are.

The veil of secrecy that hangs over certification is good for the companies that make voting machines and for the ones that test them. The government should not be protecting those private interests.

It should be protecting the voting public.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/opinion/08mon1.html





Front door to Redmond, Backdoor to You?

For Windows Vista Security, Microsoft Called in Pros
Alec Klein and Ellen Nakashima

When Microsoft introduces its long-awaited Windows Vista operating system this month, it will have an unlikely partner to thank for making its flagship product safe and secure for millions of computer users across the world: the National Security Agency.

For the first time, the giant software maker is acknowledging the help of the secretive agency, better known for eavesdropping on foreign officials and, more recently, U.S. citizens as part of the Bush administration's effort to combat terrorism. The agency said it has helped in the development of the security of Microsoft's new operating system -- the brains of a computer -- to protect it from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers.

"Our intention is to help everyone with security," Tony W. Sager, the NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group, said yesterday.

The NSA's impact may be felt widely. Windows commands more than 90 percent of the worldwide market share in desktop operating systems, and Vista, which is set to be released to consumers Jan. 30, is expected to be used by more than 600 million computer users by 2010, according to Al Gillen, an analyst at market research firm International Data.

Microsoft has not promoted the NSA's contributions, mentioning on its Web site the agency's role only at the end of its "Windows Vista Security Guide," which states that the "guide is not intended for home users" but for information and security specialists.

The Redmond, Wash., software maker declined to be specific about the contributions the NSA made to secure the Windows operating system.

The NSA also declined to be specific but said it used two groups -- a "red team" and a "blue team" -- to test Vista's security. The red team, for instance, posed as "the determined, technically competent adversary" to disrupt, corrupt or steal information. "They pretend to be bad guys," Sager said. The blue team helped Defense Department system administrators with Vista's configuration .

Microsoft said this is not the first time it has sought help from the NSA. For about four years, Microsoft has tapped the spy agency for security expertise in reviewing its operating systems, including the Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate customers.

With hundreds of thousands of Defense Department employees using Microsoft's software, the NSA realizes that it's in its own interest to make the product as secure as possible. "It's partly a recognition that this is a commercial world," Sager said. "Our customers have spoken."

Microsoft also has sought the security expertise of other U.S. government and international entities, including NATO. "I cannot mention any of the other international agencies," said Donald R. Armstrong, senior program manager of Microsoft's government security program, citing the wishes of those agencies to remain anonymous.

Microsoft's concerns extend beyond the welfare of its software when it seeks the security expertise of government agencies. "When you get into an environment where a Microsoft product is used in a battlefield situation or a government situation where if a system is compromised, identities could be found out," and it could be a matter of life and death, Armstrong said.

Other software makers have turned to government agencies for security advice, including Apple, which makes the Mac OS X operating system. "We work with a number of U.S. government agencies on Mac OS X security and collaborated with the NSA on the Mac OS X security configuration guide," said Apple spokesman Anuj Nayar in an e-mail.

Novell, which sells a Linux-based operating system, also works with government agencies on software security issues, spokesman Bruce Lowry said in an e-mail, "but we're not in a position to go into specifics of the who, what, when types of questions."

The NSA declined to comment on its security work with other software firms, but Sager said Microsoft is the only one "with this kind of relationship at this point where there's an acknowledgment publicly."

The NSA, which provided its service free, said it was Microsoft's idea to acknowledge the spy agency's role.

The NSA's primary mission is signals intelligence -- monitoring the communications of foreign powers, terrorists and others. But its secondary objection is "information assurance," under which the security of Microsoft's operating system falls.

Industry observers suggest that both the NSA and Microsoft have good reason to disclose their relationship. For Microsoft, the NSA's imprimatur may be viewed as a vote of confidence in the operating system's security.

"I kind of call it a Good Housekeeping seal" of approval, said Michael Cherry, a former Windows program manager who now analyzes the product for Directions on Microsoft, a firm that tracks the software maker.

Cherry says the NSA's involvement can help counter the perception that Windows is not entirely secure and help create a perception that Microsoft has solved the security problems that have plagued it in the past. "Microsoft also wants to make the case that [the new Windows] more secure than its earlier versions," he said.

Armstrong, the Microsoft manager, said: "The entire crux of Vista was security. . . . Security is at the forefront of our thoughts and our methods in developments and is critically important to our customers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...010801352.html





Opinion: 'Vista Casts A Pall On PC Gaming'

Will new features in Windows Vista have a chilling effect on indie PC game development? In this exclusive Gamasutra opinion piece, WildTangent founder and CEO Alex St. John highlights obstructive security controls embedded in Vista that threaten to do just that.

"I run a business called WildTangent, publishing online games from all the top casual game developers including Atari, Nickelodeon, PlayFirst, iWin, Popcap and many others with all the leading PC OEM’s including Dell, HP, Gateway and Toshiba. Collectively, we had to get a catalog of over 300 downloadable games compatible with dozens of Vista PC configurations shipping to 25 million consumers this year.

Our Vista saga began almost two years ago when Microsoft communicated to OEM’s that Vista would be shipping “imminently,” and that Windows XP would no longer be available as an OS option once Vista was released. So while the rest of the Internet and game development community went about their business safe in the knowledge that Vista was far away and many years from achieving sufficient consumer market share to merit special attention, my business was plunged into the heart of Vista migration in order to be ready to ship our game service and hundreds of games with all new Vista PC’s.

We have found many of the security changes planned for Vista alarming and likely to present sweeping challenges for PC gaming, especially for online distributed games. The central change that impacts all downloadable applications in Vista is the introduction of Limited User Accounts. LUA’s can already be found in Windows XP, but nobody uses them because of the onerous restrictions they place on usability. In Vista, LUA’s are mandatory and inescapable. Although Microsoft made some effort to soften the obstructions LUA’s place in the path of installing software in Vista, they still present a tremendous obstacle to downloadable game distribution and game compatibility with Vista in general.

The principal user experience problem with LUA’s is that when a consumer wants to download and install a game demo off the Internet, they must first click past the IE warning dialogs, and then respond to the security elevation dialog Vista pops up requiring an admin account name and password to enable the software installation.

For boxed games, this may not be super intrusive because consumers purchase relatively few boxed titles annually, and have already paid for the game at the point that they experience the elevation dialog. For downloadable games that come with a free trial, this presents a major obstacle to sales and distribution because it means that consumers surfing to find a game they like will be faced with an elevation dialog per game demo they want to download and try. The same will be true for core gamers surfing free downloadable demos. The frustration value of this experience is akin to what it would be like if you had to enter a username and password per song you wanted to try in Apple iTunes.

The intrusive dialogs are also oddly pointless, because Vista's frequent warning dialogs do nothing to differentiate legitimate commercial software from known hazardous products, so consumers will still mistakenly install malware. Kids will either have to ask their parents to respond to elevation dialogs per download they want to try, or have their own elevation account and password and continue to download whatever they want.

Vista’s obstructive security architecture extends into the new Vista Game Explorer and parental control system. The Vista Game Explorer is a top level Start Menu link to a new specialized folder in Vista specifically designed for managing games. It is intended to be the analog to the My Pictures and My Music folders found in Windows XP. Instead of being a link to a standard folder that happens to contain games, Microsoft “added some value” to the Game Explorer by binding it to a new parental control system in Vista.

The problem starts with installing your game and Vista and registering it with the Game Explorer. Unlike the parental control system, the Game Explorer is extremely prominent to consumers who are likely to expect to find the games they install in Vista listed there after installation. Microsoft has supplied compatibility listings for legacy games which will automatically recognize and register them with the Game Explorer when they are installed.

One of the pieces of information a game has to supply to register with Game Explorer is a ESRB rating. Games that do not supply a rating will be subject to the “Not Rated” parental control setting. Since games are “trusted” to supply accurate ratings information, one might expect that they are also trusted to handle parental messaging themselves. Not so, any game that registers with Game Explorer becomes “subject” to Vista parental controls which will proceed to block the game from running and offer to delete the link to the game if you try to run it from anywhere on the system other than within the Game Explorer.

The heavy handed implementation of parental controls presents several problems for PC game developers. First, most free family and casual games are “unrated” because the ESRB rating service, designed for multimillion dollar boxed titles, is too expensive for most small casual game developers. Any parent concerned enough about the games their kids are downloading online to use Vista’s parental control system are likely to block “unrated” content and break most family appropriate content that can be found online. Note that Vista’s parental control system does not apply to web games and is not accessible from the browser so parents who expect them to protect their kids from “all” online game content may be in for a shock.

Interestingly, the obscure warning dialog that Vista presents offering to delete your game icon when you try to launch it is not the same warning Microsoft makes for the games they supply to the Game Explorer. So although we filed this problem as a bug during the Vista Beta, the only games Microsoft “fixed” it for were their own.

One can only speculate as to what Microsoft was thinking when they made the Game Explorer, because the only useful context where parental controls work is when a consumer installs a game from a CD where presumably, in the case of young children, the parents checked the ESRB rating before buying it. The need for a highly specialized search folder for games is strange, since most consumers only own a few games. The greatest need for managing a long list of games and parental controls is for online content search and discovery, which the Game Explorer doesn’t support.

Since the Game Explorer is also inexplicably hard coded into Vista and “secured” from any modification, nobody can presumably fix its problems or otherwise augment it other than Microsoft. Considering the effort Microsoft must have invested in making the Game Explorer this onerous and immutable, it seems plausible that it was intended as a place holder for a subsequent game service offering from Microsoft.

In the interest of full disclosure I should make it clear that in a previous life time I was responsible for all of Microsoft’s OS strategy for games and media, from writing the original DirectX development plan, to managing Microsoft’s relationships with the industries leading game developers. 10 years after launching DirectX 1.0, I still have strong opinions and feelings about how to make Windows a great game platform, and probably feel a stronger sense of pique than most when I see Microsoft making careless or callous mistakes that impact game developers.

It’s perhaps ironic that I run my own online game publishing company now and have become a dependent customer of the platform and technologies I once worked to create. Some of you might call it “justice” -- if it is, I wish it for my successors working on Vista."
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=12314





Wireless Hot Spot Protection

Tips to secure yourself against the perils of connecting to a hot spot
Preston Gralla

Wi-Fi hot spots in airports, restaurants, cafes and even downtown locations have turned Internet access into an always-on, ubiquitous experience. Unfortunately, that also means always-on, ubiquitous security risks.

Connecting to a hot spot can be an open invitation to danger. Hot spots are public, open networks that practically invite hacking and snooping. They use unencrypted, insecure connections, but most people treat them as if they are secure private networks.

This could allow anyone nearby to capture your packets and snoop on everything you do when online, including stealing passwords and private information. In addition, it could also allow an intruder to break into your PC without your knowledge.

But there's plenty you can do to keep yourself safe -- and I'll show you how to do that in this article. If you follow these tips, you'll be able to make secure connections at any hot spot.

Disable ad hoc mode

Little-known fact: You don't need a hot spot or wireless router in order to create or connect to a wireless network. You can also create one using ad hoc mode, in which you directly connect wirelessly to another nearby PC. If your PC is set to run in ad hoc mode, someone nearby could establish an ad hoc connection to your PC without you knowing about it. They could then possibly wreak havoc on your system and steal files and personal information.

The fix is simple: Turn off ad hoc mode. Normally it's not enabled, but it's possible that it's turned on without your knowledge. To turn it off in Windows XP:
Right-click the wireless icon in the System Tray.

1. Choose Status.
2. Click Properties
3. Select the Wireless Networks tab.
4. Select your current network connection.
5. Click Properties, then click the Association tab.
6. Uncheck the box next to "This is a computer-to-computer (ad hoc) network."
7. Click OK, and keep clicking OK until the dialog boxes disappear.

In Windows Vista, there's no need to do this, because you have to take manual steps in order to connect to an ad hoc network; there's no setting to leave it turned on by default.

Turn off file sharing

Depending on the network you use at work or at home, you may use file sharing to make it easier to share files, folders and resources. That's great for when you're on a secure network. But when you're at a hot spot, it's like hanging out a sign saying, "Come on in; take whatever you want."

So make sure that you turn off file sharing before you connect to a hot spot. To turn it off in Windows XP, run Windows Explorer, right-click on the drives or folders you share, choose the Sharing and Security tab, and uncheck the box next to "Share this folder on the network."

If you're a Windows Vista user, it's even easier to turn off file sharing. When you connect to a hot spot, designate it as Public. When you do that, Windows Vista automatically turns off file sharing. You can also turn off file sharing manually. Choose Control Panel-->Set up file sharing, click "File sharing," select "Turn off file sharing," and click Apply. Then click "Password protected sharing," select "Turn off password protected file sharing," and click Apply.

Turn off network discovery

If you're a Vista user, a feature called Network Discovery makes your PC visible on a network so that other users can see it and try to connect to it. On a private network, this is useful; at a public hot spot, it's a security risk. When you connect to a hot spot and designate the network as Public, Network Discovery is turned off, so again, make sure to designate any hot spot as Public.

However, you can also make sure that Network Discovery is turned off for your hot spot connection. When you're connected, choose ControlPanel-->View network status and tasks. Then in the Sharing and Discover section, click the Network Discovery button, choose "Turn off network discovery," and click Apply.

Encrypt your e-mail

When you send an e-mail at a hot spot, it goes out "in the clear" -- in other words, unencrypted -- so that anyone can read it. A lot of e-mail software allows you to encrypt outgoing messages and attachments. Check how to use yours, and then use it at a hot spot. In Outlook 2003, select Options from the Tools menu, click the Security tab, and then check the box next to "Encrypt contents and attachments for outgoing messages." Then click OK.

Carry an encrypted USB flash drive

USB flash drives are cheap, and getting cheaper by the day. For about $50, you can buy a 2GB flash drive, which is more than enough space to carry Windows, the applications you use and the data you need. Make sure to get a drive that can use encryption. Then install Windows, your applications and your data on it.

On your laptop, keep no private data on your hard drive. When you connect at a hot spot, boot from your USB drive. That way, even if someone somehow gets into your PC, they won't be able to read or alter any of your data, because the data is encrypted on the USB drive.

Protect yourself with a virtual private network

Most hot spots are not secure and don't use encryption. That means anyone with a software sniffer can see all of the packets you send and receive.

But you don't need to rely on the hot spot for encryption. For a fee, you can use a virtual private wireless network that encrypts your connection. There are several available, but the one I've been using for years is hotspotVPN, and it hasn't failed me yet.

No special VPN software is needed; you can use XP's or Vista's built-in VPN capabilities. The service costs US$8.88 per month, or is available in one-, three- and seven-day increments for US$3.88, US$5.88 and US$6.88. You can also get more secure VPN encryption from the service for between US$10.88 and US$13.88 per month.

Once you subscribe, you'll get a username, password and IP address of a wireless VPN server. At that point, you run a Windows network connection wizard, fill in the username, password and IP address information, and you'll be ready to go. In Windows XP, choose Control Panel-->Network and Internet Connections-->Create a connection to the network at your workplace. From the screen that appears, choose the virtual private network connection, and follow the wizard.

In Windows Vista, choose ControlPanel-->View network status and tasks. Then click "Set up a connection or network," and then choose "Connect to a workplace" and then "Use my Internet connection (VPN)." Follow the wizard after that.

Disable your wireless adapter

There may be times when you're at a hot spot when you actually don't want to connect to the Internet. In that case, you can guarantee absolute safety -- disable your wireless adapter so you can't connect.

If you have a wireless PC card, you can simply remove it, of course. If you have a wireless adapter built in to your PC, you can disable it. In XP, right-click the wireless icon, and choose Disable. If you're using the adapter's software to manage your connection, check the documentation to find out how to disable it.

If you're using Windows Vista, choose ControlPanel-->Network and Sharing Center. Then in the Connection area, click "View status," and from the screen that appears, click Disable.

Watch out for shoulder surfers

Think all hacking is high-tech programming? Think again. "Shoulder surfers" don't need to know how to write a line of code to steal your password -- all they need to do is peer over your shoulder as you type. So make sure no one seems to be paying too close attention when they're directly behind you.

In addition, if nature calls because you've had too many double lattes, don't leave your laptop unattended when you go to the restroom. Laptop theft has become common in some places, most notably San Francisco, which was subject to a laptop crime wave. Consider bringing along a laptop lock and locking your laptop to a table. Some cafes even include ports to which you can lock your laptop.

Beware phony hot spots

Watch out for this latest hot spot scam -- someone surreptitiously sets up a hot spot near a cafe, created for the sole purpose of stealing personal information. You're asked to type in sensitive information in order to log in, and the thief makes off with your passwords and financial information. Ask a staffer at the cafe if there is, in fact, a hot spot available, and what its name is. Only connect to that network. And if you see two hot spots with the same name, don't connect to either --- one might be a so-called "evil twin" set up by a snooper to trick you into connecting to the phony hot spot.

Turn on your firewall

Windows XP and Windows Vista both have personal firewalls built in, so turn them on. In Windows XP, choose ControlPanel-->Security Center, then click the Windows Firewall icon at the bottom of the screen. From the page that appears, select On, and click OK.

In Windows Vista, choose ControlPanel-->Security-->Windows Firewall. The screen that appears will tell you if the firewall is turned on. If it's not, click Change Settings, select On, and click OK.

Windows XP's personal firewall is underprotected because it doesn't include outbound protection. (Windows Vista's firewall includes two-way protection.) If you're a Windows XP user, consider getting the free version of ZoneAlarm, which has both inbound and outbound protection.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...4194304;fpid;1





2 Deny Hacking Into L.A.'s Traffic Light System

Two accused of hacking into L.A.'s traffic light system plead not guilty. They allegedly chose intersections they knew would cause major jams.
Sharon Bernstein and Andrew Blankstein

Back in August, the union representing the city's traffic engineers vowed that on the day of their work action, "Los Angeles is not going to be a fun place to drive."

City officials took the threat seriously.

Fearful that the strikers could wreak havoc on the surface street system, they temporarily blocked all engineers from access to the computer that controls traffic signals.

But officials now allege that two engineers, Kartik Patel and Gabriel Murillo, figured out how to hack in anyway. With a few clicks on a laptop computer, the pair — one a renowned traffic engineer profiled in the national media, the other a computer whiz who helped build the system — allegedly tied up traffic at four intersections for several days.

Both men pleaded not guilty Monday morning to felony charges stemming from the case, and Murillo's lawyer said his client meant no harm when he signed on to the system that day.

But authorities say the pair picked their targets with care — intersections they knew would cause significant backups because they were close to freeways and major destinations.

They didn't shut the lights off, city transportation sources said. Rather, the engineers allegedly programmed them so that red lights would be extremely long on the most congested approaches to the intersections, causing gridlock for several days starting Aug. 21, they said.

Cars backed up at Los Angeles International Airport, at a key intersection in Studio City, onto the clogged Glendale Freeway and throughout the streets of Little Tokyo and the L.A. Civic Center.

The engineers' arrests last Friday point up the vulnerability of L.A.'s complex traffic control system.

City leaders said Monday they also underscore the delicate balance that employers must strike in a highly technical environment in which workers must be trusted enough to have access to important systems.

Some officials Monday called for an immediate review of ways to tighten security of the computer system, which manages 3,200 of the city's 4,300 traffic signals.

"The issue here was public safety," Councilwoman Wendy Greuel said. "What if there had been a major accident and we were not able to control the lights while the officers were on their way?"

Details of the case emerged Monday in interviews and court documents.

After access to the system was cut off for all but top managers, Murillo signed in as one of them, according to the criminal complaint. Murillo had helped design the nationally recognized system. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts.

By signing in, the engineers allegedly obtained the codes needed to unblock the computers that control traffic lights throughout the city. Soon, the lights at those four intersections were reprogrammed with a code that prevented city officials from fixing them.

"The red signal would be on too long for the critical approach and the green signal would be on too long for the noncritical approach, thus resulting in long backups into the airport and other key intersections around the city," said one source in the traffic department, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Murillo was charged with two felonies: one count of identity theft and one of unauthorized access to a city computer. Patel was charged with five felonies: one count of unauthorized access to a city computer and four of unauthorized disruption or denial of computer services.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Commissioner Catherine J. Pratt released the men on their own recognizance on the condition that they do not access city computers or set foot on Department of Transportation property without their attorneys.

If convicted on all charges, the pair could face several years in state prison, although authorities said that is unlikely because they have no criminal records.

Murillo's lawyer, James Blatt, said that his client was on paternity leave when the incident took place and did not receive an e-mail indicating that access to the traffic signal control center would be blocked during the strike.

He said Murillo didn't mean to do anything wrong.

"The issue in the case is Mr. Murillo's intent when he logged into the system," Blatt said. "Mr. Murillo has been an engineer there [at the Department of Transportation] for 17 years. He's highly regarded and respected by management and employees. It was not his intent to jeopardize the system or the citizens of Los Angeles."

Alan Eisner, who is representing Patel, said his client "unequivocally denies the charges against him and specifically denies illegally accessing or disrupting the [computerized traffic light] system. Mr. Patel has been an employee of the Department of Transportation for more than 12 years and has an outstanding work history. He and his family are traumatized by the allegations, and he looks forward to responding to the allegations in court."

After the arraignment Monday, city employees filled the hallway outside the courtroom, creating an impromptu receiving line as they filed past the defendants and their families. Officials from their union were not in court and did not return calls seeking comment.

In deciding how to handle security in the future, the city faces a difficult choice: set up systems that could impede the smooth functioning of its crucial traffic control efforts, or do nothing and risk another hacking incident.

Clifford Neuman, a computer security expert and the director of the USC Center for Computer Systems Security, said there are two primary ways to design computers to guard against malicious activity by insiders, but each can interfere with employees' ability to do their tasks and would probably be prohibitively expensive for the city.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...=la-home-local





Firms Fret as Office E-Mail Jumps Security Walls
Brad Stone

Companies spend millions on systems to keep corporate e-mail safe. If only their employees were as paranoid.

A growing number of Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other companies. Their employers, who envision corporate secrets leaking through the back door of otherwise well-protected computer networks, are not pleased.

“It’s a hole you can drive an 18-wheeler through,” said Paul D. Myer, president of the security firm 8E6 Technologies in Orange, Calif.

It is a battle of best intentions: productivity and convenience pitted against security and more than a little anxiety.

Corporate techies — who, after all, are paid to worry — want strict control over internal company communications and fear that forwarding e-mail might expose proprietary secrets to prying eyes. Employees just want to get to their mail quickly, wherever they are, without leaping through too many security hoops.

Corporate networks, which typically have several layers of defenses against hackers, can require special software and multiple passwords for access. Some companies use systems that give employees a security code that changes every 60 seconds; this must be read from the display screen of a small card and typed quickly.

That is too much for some employees, especially when their computers can store the passwords for their Web-based mail, allowing them to get right down to business.

So far, no major corporate disasters caused by this kind of e-mail forwarding have come to light. But security experts say the risks are real. For example, the flimsier security defenses of Web mail systems could allow viruses or spyware to get through, and employees could unwittingly download them at the office and infect the corporate network.

Also, because messages sent from Web-based accounts do not pass through the corporate mail system, companies could run afoul of federal laws that require them to archive corporate mail and turn it over during litigation.

Lawyers in particular wring their hands over employees using outside e-mail services. They encourage companies to keep messages for as long as necessary and then erase them to keep them out of the reach of legal foes. Companies have no control over the life span of e-mail messages in employees’ Web accounts.

“If employees are just forwarding to their Web e-mail, we have no way to know what they are doing on the other end,” said Joe Fantuzzi, chief executive of the information security firm Workshare. “They could do anything they want. They could be giving secrets to the K.G.B.”

Hospitals have an added legal obligation to protect patient records. But when DeKalb Medical Center in Atlanta started monitoring its staff use of Web-based e-mail, it found that doctors and nurses routinely forwarded confidential medical records to their personal Web mail accounts — not for nefarious purposes, but so they could continue to work from home.

In the months after the hospital began monitoring traffic to Web e-mail services, it identified “a couple hundred incidents,” said Sharon Finney, DeKalb’s information security administrator. “I was surprised about the lack of literacy about the technology we depend on every day,” she said.

DeKalb now forbids the practice, and uses several software systems that monitor the hospital’s outbound e-mail and Web traffic. Ms Finney said she still catches four to five perpetrators a month trying to forward hospital e-mail.

The Web mail services may also be prone to glitches. Last month, Google fixed a bug that caused the disappearance of “some or all” of the stored mail of around 60 users. A week later, it acknowledged a security hole that could have exposed its users’ address books to Internet attackers.

Even the security experts most knowledgeable about the risks of e-mail forwarding to personal accounts acknowledge doing so themselves.

“Of course I do it; who doesn’t?” said Kimberly Getgen Bargero, vice president for marketing at Sendmail, an e-mail software company in Emeryville, Calif. Ms. Bargero said she often used her Yahoo Mail account on business trips so she does not have to access her corporate network remotely.

It is difficult to quantify exactly how many otherwise model employees are opting to use services like Yahoo Mail or Google’s Gmail over their company’s authorized e-mail programs. Sophisticated users at the companies most lax about e-mail security can automatically forward all of their work e-mail to their personal accounts, hopscotching over the various requests for passwords meant to ward off intruders.

The more casual e-mail scofflaws send only the occasional message to their personal accounts — or just “cc” messages to their Web in-boxes to preserve them for later use — even when the messages contain sensitive company information.

Some companies frown on office use of any Web-based accounts, even for personal messages. At the business software maker BEA Systems, Anthony Bisulca, a senior security analyst, estimated that around 30 percent of his employees were using private e-mail accounts in the office, even though the company’s Internet policy clearly prohibits it.

But it is not easy to wean people off of their online mailboxes. “Of course they scream,” said Todd Wilson, an operations manager at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “They look at me like I have three heads.”

Mr. Wilson said that the use of the Web services had become a “huge concern,” partly because copies of the forwarded messages sit untouched on the school’s servers, taking up space.

Many corporate technology professionals express the fear that Google and its rivals may actually own the intellectual property in the e-mail that resides on their systems. Gmail’s terms of service, however, state that e-mail belongs to the user, not to Google. The company’s automated software does scan messages in Gmail, looking for keywords that might generate related text advertisements on the page. A Google spokeswoman said the company has an extensive privacy policy to ensure no humans at Google read user e-mail.

Paul Kocher, president of the security firm Cryptography Research, said the real issue for companies was trust. “If you can’t trust employees enough to use services like Gmail, they probably shouldn’t be working for you,” he said.

Many companies apparently do not have that level of trust. In a survey conducted last year, the e-mail security firm Proofpoint found that 37 percent of companies in the United States used software to monitor office use of Web mail.

The Internet companies themselves are looking to take advantage of consumer preferences for Web based e-mail services. This year, Google plans to introduce a more secure version of Gmail for use in large companies.

But Microsoft and other providers of traditional internal e-mail systems, which the research firm Radicati says generated $2.5 billion in sales last year, are helping companies combat employee use of the Web services.

The new version of Microsoft’s corporate e-mail service, Exchange Server, offers administrators improved tools to monitor the content of employee mail and block forwarded messages.

At the same time, upgrades to Exchange and Microsoft’s e-mail program Outlook have made it easier for traveling employees to access e-mail on the corporate network from a Web browser. Microsoft also recently began urging corporate technology departments to give employees more storage space in their e-mail accounts.

But the Web services are improving as well, and employees will no doubt continue to find them tempting.

“We have as high a security standard as any company,” said Ms. Bargero of Sendmail, “and sometimes it is just too difficult to access our e-mail.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/te...rtner=homepage





Superclick is Evil?
Michael Herf

I'm on my honeymoon in a hotel in Maui.

In theory the internet costs $15/day here, but due to a deal with Fairmont's "President's Club" I'm getting it for free. Guess I should be more thankful, but I'm not.

A company called "Superclick" provides internet connectivity for the Fairmont Kea Lani (and I just read Marriott and a bunch more have signed on). When you try to use your connection, you'll notice:

1. a lot of redirecting and other weirdness (sometimes with an IP and sometimes with "superclick" in the URL)
2. that every new URL you type ends in "?",
3. and if you look closer, you'll find secret frames around your webpages.

It turns out that Lorna and I both noticed and both got upset about it, so I'm spending a (small) amount of time figuring out how this thing works and what it's after. After all, I'm still on my honeymoon.

If you're running an older browser, I understand you'll get pop-under ads too, but Firefox seems to be mostly taking care of that for me.

I've spent a few minutes sniffing traffic, and Superclick's system appears to work like this:

1. They run a transparent Squid proxy on port 80. (A transparent proxy is one that is implemented for every connection on port 80.) You can verify this by connecting to a host that doesn't respond and getting an error page. Mine is a genuine squid error: "Generated Mon, 08 Jan 2007 11:13:36 GMT by localhost (squid/2.5.STABLE14)"

2. This squid creates a page that hosts a frame with (a) their page, and (b) the page you requested. Their page looks like this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>
<a href='http://mds.superclick.com/mds/adclick.php?hotelid=1330&bannerid=263
&zoneid=62&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.superclick.com' target='_bl
ank'><img src='http://mds.superclick.com/mds/adimage.php?filename=1pixel_trans_2
.gif&contenttype=gif' width='1' height='1' alt='' title='' border='0'></a><d
iv id="beacon_263" style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; visibility: h
idden;"><img src='http://mds.superclick.com/mds/adlog.php?hotelid=1330&banne
rid=263&clientid=115&zoneid=62&source=&amp;block=0&capping=0 &
;cb=a6e9a1a491ae0a580b3a1e58db523195' width='0' height='0' alt='' style='width:
0px; height: 0px;'></div></body>
</html>

i.e. their page does some tracking of each new page you visit in your browser, outside what a normal proxy (which would have access to all your cookies and other information it shouldn't have, anyway) would do. This "adlog" hit appears to also track a "hotel ID" and some other data that identifies you more directly.

Notably, I've observed these guys tracking HTTPS URLs, and of course you can't track those through a proxy.

While it is possible for the tech-savvy to establish a VPN to one's home network to avoid all this nastiness, but it suggests a bad trend - a lack of privacy when browsing, even through connections you're paying for?

Superclick advertises that it "allows hoteliers and conference center managers to leverage the investment they have made in their IP infrastructure to create advertising revenue, deliver targeted marketing and brand messages to guests and users on their network. ``Perhaps the most powerful aspect of MDS is that it can be integrated onto any third-party managed network, not just our own proprietary SIMS network,'' Natale added, ``In addition, we have developed MDS Analytics which provides marketers with real-time network performance and usage analysis, thereby enabling them to evaluate the ROI of their marketing efforts.''

Nice stuff. Now back to the honeymoon.
http://www.nerdblog.com/2007/01/superclick-is-evil.html





How the RIAA Litigation Process Works
Ray Beckerman
Last updated: January 5, 2007

Introduction
Ex parte discovery cases
The procedure
Legal challenges to ex parte discovery procedure
Settlement phase
Litigations against named defendants
Commencement of action
Default
Pro Se representation
Challenges to sufficiency of complaint
Counterclaims
Pretrial discovery
Damages
Voluntary discontinuance
Suits against children
Suits against the disabled
Death of defendant
Summary judgment
Settlement during litigation
Expert testimony.
Trial

INTRODUCTION

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 -- THE "JOHN DOE" PHASE.

Procedure.

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.

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".

Legal challenges to ex parte discovery procedure.

This process was challenged 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 were 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.

PRE-LAWSUIT 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. That this omission is significant is illustrated by the new wave of copyright enforcement actions by music publishers against guitar tablature sites. There is nothing to prevent them from suing the individuals who have settled with the RIAA over the sound recording rights.

LITIGATIONS AGAINST NAMED DEFENDANTS

Commencement of action.

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.

Default.

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. (See Damages below.)

Pro Se representation.

While it is of course preferable for a defendant to have legal representation in these matters, the economics often makes it impossible. We note that a pro se litigant in the Middle District of Alabama succeeded in staving off a summary judgment motion by the RIAA's legal team,which included the RIAA's top lawyer Richard Gabriel, in Motown v. Liggins (see Summary judgment below).

The most important things a pro se litigant should know about are as follows: (1) there is a pro se clerk in every federal court house; you should go in and see the pro se clerk for assistance in putting in your answer; (2) from the very outset you must make it clear that you are demanding a jury trial, and do not let anyone talk you out of demanding a jury trial; you must put a jury demand in your initial answer; (3) the RIAA's attempt to get your hard drive is invasive and improper, and you should not let it happen without safeguards; you should make a copy of the protecive order in SONY v. Arellanes and show it to the judge; (4) the RIAA does not necessarily have the right to take depositions of your family members, and you should ask the judge for protection from that; and (5) if there are any children 18 or younger involved, you should ask the judge to appoint a guardian ad litem to protect them, as was done in Priority Records v. Brittany Chan, and the order should provide that the RIAA has to pay for the guardian ad litem fees.

Challenges to sufficiency of complaint.

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, Texas.

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 Judge Kenneth M. Karas has scheduled oral argument for January 26, 2007, at 2:15 P.M., in Manhattan federal court.

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 Elektra v. Perez, 2006 WL 3063493, in Oregon, a case which wasn't on our radar until we tripped across the October, 2006, decision on Westlaw, the judge denied a motion to dismiss, and appears to have resolved the "making available" argument in the RIAA's favor.

Counterclaims.

The RIAA has a practice of making motions to strike counterclaims; if it cannot find a substantive basis for much a motion, it will seek to strike it on technical grounds, such as redundancy. Since motions to strike for redundancy are disfavored in modern federal practice, these motions have met with mixed success.

COUNTERCLAIMS FOR ATTORNEYS FEES

If a defendant counterclaims for attorneys fees, the RIAA will frequently move to dismiss such a counterclaim, arguing that it is redundant since a successful defendant does not need to have interposed a counterclaim in order to collect attorneys fees. It plans to make a motion to strike the counterclaim in Elektra v. Schwartz. A similar motion by the RIAA in Oregon in 2005, in Elektra v. Perez, was denied. The RIAA has not been able to cite any legal authority for its argument.

COUNTERCLAIMS FOR DECLARATORY JUDGMENT OF NON-INFRINGEMENT

The RIAA also moves to strike counterclaims for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, arguing that they are redundant because a judgment dismissing the plaintiffs' case would imply non-infringement. It has no legal authority for this argument. The only such motion of which we are aware was denied, in Capitol v. Foster in Oklahoma, where the judge rejected the RIAA's argument. However, in Arista v. Tschirhart in Texas, a defendant's motion to amend her answer to add a counterclaim for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement was denied.

The issue has now arisen again in SONY v. Crain in Texas, where the defendant -- an elderly Hurricane Rita survivor who never engaged in any file sharing, and who is defended by Legal Aid -- interposed a counterclaim for a declaratory judgment, and the RIAA moved to strike it. Ms. Crain's attorneys have pointed out to the judge that (a) the RIAA's only similar motion, made in Capitol v. Foster, has been denied, (b) the RIAA has no legal authority for its position, and (c) it is necessary to have the counterclaim because of the RIAA's practice of discontinuing the cases before trial, thereby depriving a defendant of the right to be vindicated on the merits.

Pretrial Discovery.

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. In some cases defendants' practitioners have fought back, demanding (1) protective orders against the RIAA's invasive and humiliating demands, and (2) discovery of their own. (See, e.g. UMG . Heard, SONY v. Arellanes, and UMG v. Lindor.)

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.

SELECTIVE PRETRIAL DISCOVERY RULINGS OR MOTIONS WHICH MAY BE HELPFUL TO DEFENDANTS' ATTORNEYS:

HARD DRIVE
*Plaintiffs may not have access to the defendant's hard drive; the hard drive must be turned over to a mutually acceptable neutral computer forensics expert; and his report must be done at the RIAA's expense. (SONY v. Arellanes)

DEPOSITIONS-CONFIDENTIALITY OF TRANSCRIPTS
*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. (UMG v. Lindor).

DEPOSITIONS-CONDUCT OF DEPOSITIONS
*If plaintiff being deposed by video conference, plaintiff's lawyer can't be in room with witness but must also appear by video conference; or in alternative RIAA must reimburse defendant's lawyer's travel expenses up to $500. (UMG v. Lindor).

RECORD COMPANY USE OF P2P
*Record companies ordered to produce evidence, if any, relating to their employees' use of p2p file sharing to send music files to radio stations. (UMG v. Lindor)

CONFIDENTIALITY OF MEDIASENTRY AGREEMENTS
*RIAA argued attorney client privilege, work product privilege, and confidentiality. Motion briefed and argued, awaiting decision (UMG v. Lindor).

WHOLESALE PRICES OF DOWNLOADS
*Defendant is entitled to "all relevant documents" and a deposition relating to the record companies' pricing of legal downloads, in connection with her affirmative defense challenging the constitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory. (UMG v. Lindor).

COPYRIGHT DOCUMENTS.
*RIAA ordered 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. (UMG v. Lindor).

SUBPOENA OF COMPUTER OF DEFENDANT'S SON
*Motion to compel in process of being briefed (UMG v. Lindor).

DEFENDANT'S DISCOVERY INTO HARD DRIVE ANALYSIS.
*Defendant can take pretrial discovery into the plaintiffs' analysis of the hard drive, including contention interrogatories and depositions. (UMG v. Lindor).

PRECLUSION AS TO SONG FILES
*RIAA precluded from using any song files not produced in response to document request (UMG v. Lindor).

PRECLUSION AS TO DAMAGES
*In view of failure to set forth actual damages in response to interrogatory, plaintiffs precluded from introducing evidence of damages. (UMG v. Lindor).

DISCOVERY CUTOFF
*Discovery cutoff extended to 60 days after RIAA turns over hard drive expert's report to defendant. (UMG v. Lindor).

EXPERT WITNESSES
*In UMG v. Lindor, in an attempt to stave off discovery into its communications and agreements with MediaSentry, the RIAA argued that MediaSentry's investigator Tom Mizzone is not an expert but merely a paid fact witness, and that what he did to "investigate" did not require any expertise, but was what any other Kazaa user could have done. They said that at trial he would not testify to any conclusions about infringement, but would merely recite what he did, and that Dr. Doug Jacobson would be the only expert, and the one to connect the dots. Thereafter, defendant served a notice to take the deposition of Dr. Jacobson, and a request for production of related documents.

Damages

The RIAA has not tried to prove its actual damages, and has been seeking $750 per song in statutory damages.

This damages theory is being challenged on constitutional grounds in UMG v. Lindor, Maverick v. Goldshteyn, and Elektra v. Schwartz, all in Brooklyn federal court, as well as in Arista v. Greubel and SONY v. Crain in Texas, Virgin v. Morgan in Pensacola, Florida, Interscope v. Korb in Charleston, South Carolina, and others. In Lindor, in the context of a motion for leave to amend the answer, Judge Trager ruled that Marie Lindor's assertion of the defense of unconstitutionality was not frivolous, and noted that while the RIAA could point to no legal authority contrary to its validity, Ms. Lindor had cited both caselaw and law review articles supporting its viability. For an excellent 2004 law review article on the subject, see "Grossly Excessive Penalties in the Battle Against Illegal File-Sharing: The Troubling Effects of Aggregating Minimum Statutory Damages for Copyright Infringement" By J. Cam Barker, 83 Texas L. Rev. 525 (2004)[Copyright Texas Law Review Association 2004][Reprinted with permission]*

In Virgin v. Morgan the defendant is also challenging the RIAA's damages theory on statutory grounds, based on Section 504(c)(2) of the Copyright Act, which permits the statutory damages to be reduced from $750 to $200 in certain instances of innocent infringement. But see BMG v. Gonzalez, where the Seventh Circuit held that defendant could not avail herself of the 504(c)(2) defense because of the copyright notices on plaintiffs' CD's, even though she hadn't seen the CD's, since she "readily could have learned, had she inquired, that the music was under copyright". (Ed. note: The illogic of Gonzalez cries out for a comment here. I feel that Gonzalez contradicts the plain language of the Copyright Act, as well as the obvious intent of the statute, and is inconsistent with the whole principle of copyright notice which permeates the Copyright Act. Obviously anyone could "readily" learn, by inquiring, as to the copyright of anything, since copyright registrations are publicly filed in Washington, DC, but the law imposes no such duty. However, the decision is from a court of appeals, and therefore has to be taken seriously by practitioners, even those outside of the Seventh Circuit. Hopefully the Seventh Circuit will come to realize its error, and/or other circuit courts will conclude otherwise, and/or the Supreme Court will catch up to this issue some day.)

Voluntary discontinuance.

In Priority Records v. Candy Chan, a Michigan case, the RIAA initially refused to withdraw the case against a mother who clearly had not herself engaged in file sharing, but then changed its mind and did discontinue the case when faced with the mother's motion for summary judgment and attorneys fees.

A scenario similar to that in Priority v. Candy Chan 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 Virgin Records v. Tammie Marson, the RIAA voluntarily dismissed its case when confronted with the impossibility of determining who used defendant's computer, and in Warner v. Maravilla it voluntarily dismissed -- after defendant had made a dismissal motion -- upon learning that the ISP had given them the wrong name. Both Marson and Maravilla were in the Central District of California.

A Georgia case, Atlantic v. Zuleta, in which defendant had a wireless router, the IP address was connected to a wireless router, and the defendant's roommate's first name was the same as the screen name, the case was discontinued "without prejudice".

Elektra v. Wilke, in Chicago, was withdrawn after Mr. Wilke made a summary judgment motion. See Summary Judgment below.

The most highly publicized of the RIAA v. Consumer cases, Elektra v. Santangelo, is being withdrawn, after over a year and a half of litigation, as the RIAA moves on to pursue two of Ms. Santangelo's children. The RIAA would like the dismissal to be "without prejudice", so that it would not be liable for attorneys fees. (See Capitol v. Foster July 13, 2006, Order). Ms. Santangelo is unlikely to agree with that approach, and would be expected to demand that the dismissal be "with prejudice", that she be ruled the "prevailing party", and that attorneys fees be awarded to her.

Voluntary discontinuances have taken place in Michigan in Warner v. Pidgeon, in California in Warner v. Maravilla, and in Washington in Interscope v. Leadbetter. In Maravilla it occurrred only after the defendant had moved to dismiss. In Leadbetter the RIAA tried to discontinue against the defendant but add her fiance as a defendant; the Court denied permission to add the fiance as a defendant, dismissed the case in its entirety, and indicated that it would consider the imposition of attorneys fees against the RIAA in a separate motion.

Suits against children.

In Priority Records v. Brittany Chan, the litigation against Candy Chan's 14 year old daughter (See Voluntary discontinuance above), who allegedly engaged in file sharing when she was 13, the judge had held that the RIAA could not sue a child without getting a guardian ad litem appointed. 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.

Continuing its policy of bringing lawsuits against children, on November 1, 2006, the RIAA commenced suit against two of Patti Santangelo's children, one of whom is only 16 years old. Elektra v. Santangelo II.

Suits against the disabled.

In Atlantic v. Andersen, Elektra v. Schwartz, and other cases, the RIAA has brought suit against disabled people, even knowing that they are disabled. In both Schwartz and Andersen the disabled defendants are people who have never downloaded songs or engaged in file sharing at all. In Elektra v. Schwartz, the defendant has severe Multiple Sclerosis, and gets around in an electric wheelchair. Her lawyer specifically asked the RIAA to drop the case; it declined. At this point the proceedings are stayed while Ms. Schwartz's attorney is attempting to collect medical affidavits in support of the appointment of a guardian ad litem.

Death of defendant.

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.

Summary judgment.

In an Illinois case where the defendant admitted to downloading 30 songs without authorization, the plaintiffs' summary judgment motion was granted. BMG v. Gonzalez. In an Alabama case where the defendant did not admit to personally having copied or distributed plaintiffs' song files, the RIAA's summary judgment motion was denied. Motown v. Liggins. (Interestingly, Mr. Liggins appeared pro se.)

As to defendant's summary judgment motions, we do not yet know how they will fare in the courts.

In August, 2006, a motion for summary judgment was made by the defendant, in Chicago, in Warner v. Wilke. The plaintiffs' initial response was to make a motion for expedited pretrial discovery, indicating to the Judge that, without it, they do not have enough evidence with which to oppose Mr. Wilke's motion. Thereafter, however, they dropped the case altogether, "with prejudice" (meaning they cannot sue again).

In Brooklyn, where all RIAA v. Consumer cases are assumed to be "related" and assigned to Judge Trager, the judge appears to have a policy of discouraging defendants' summary judgment motions until after the close of discovery. 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 again wrote 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. Judge Trager again said she couldn't make the motion, and wanted her to wait until after the completion of discovery. Judge Trager reacted similarly to Rae J Schwartz's request for summary judgment in Elektra v. Schwartz, issuing a formal order indicating that he thought such a motion to be premature.

We are anxious to hear the results of defendant's summary judgments in other districts, where summary judgments are permitted to be made in the ordinary course.

Settlement during litigation.

Settlements during the course of a litigation are not dissimilar to those prior to litigation. The RIAA seeks a larger amount, typically $4500 plus $375 court costs, nonnegotiable, and submits a form of settlement which is likewise nonnegotiable. It is difficult to obtain information on this process since most settlement discussions are confidential. In Capitol v. Foster, due to a waiver of confidentiality, there is some insight available into the process. There the RIAA was willing to make a payment of attorneys fees to Ms. Foster, but in an amount that was far less than she had incurred. The parties never reached agreement on the amount, and the matter of attorneys fees is being considered by the judge. One might speculate that there may have been settlements in which the RIAA withdrew its case and paid the defendant attorneys fees, but the RIAA would no doubt have insisted upon confidentiality of such a settlement, and so we would never know about it.

We are aware of the RIAA's claim that it accepts reduced amounts in "hardship" cases, however we have not confirmed the existence of any instance of them actually accepting a reduced amount.

Cases which are in litigation are under the aegis of a Magistrate Judge or District Court Judge, so it is always possible that the Court will become involved in the settlement process. In Maverick v. Goldshteyn, after the Court denied Ms. Goldshteyn's motion to dismiss the complaint, the Magistrate Judge, at the request of Ms. Goldshteyn, scheduled a settlement conference, at which the principals were required to attend, in person, and with settlement authority.

Expert testimony.

The RIAA has taken the position, in UMG v. Lindor, that MediaSentry's investigator is not an expert witness. Whether the Magistrate Judge will accept that contention remains to be seen. See USA v. Ganier, 468 F.3d 920, 925-926 (6th Cir. Nov. 15, 2006).

According to the RIAA, its only expert witness is a Dr. Doug Jacobson, an associate professor at Iowa State University, who is also the founder and a co-owner of Palisade Systems, a company that sells antipiracy software. The RIAA indicated, at oral argument on November 30, 2006, that MediaSentry will not testify to any opinions or conclusions about copyright infringement, but will only testify as to the steps it took, and that it will fall upon Dr. Jacobson to testify as to what MediaSentry's investigation actually meant.

Ms. Lindor has noticed Dr. Jacobson's deposition for February, 2007. We are not aware of any instance of Dr. Jacobson having testified at a deposition or trial. If any reader is aware of any live testimony by Dr. Jacobson, please let us know. Dr. Jacobson appears to be a dual-purpose expert, claiming to be qualified in both forensic and in internet issues.

Trial.

We do not have information on any trials, although it would seem that there must have been some, especially in cases where the defendants are representing themselves, without legal counsel. If anyone has information on any trials, and the results, please let us know. If the RIAA has had any trials, and lost, they're not going to tell me about it.

A bit of guidance as to the standards for trial has come down in UMG v. Lindor, in connection with a preclusion motion, where the Court held that "[a]t trial, plaintiffs will have the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that defendant did indeed infringe plaintiff’s copyrights by convincing the fact-finder, based on the evidence plaintiffs have gathered, that defendant actually shared sound files belonging to plaintiffs."

Likewise, the denial of summary judgment in the abovementioned Motown v. Liggins suggests that the plaintiff would have to prove actual copying or actual "distribution".

In both cases, it is not clear whether the judges have at this point considered that (a) there are certain types of file "sharing" which would not constitute copyright infringement, or (b) "distribution" is a defined term under the Copyright Act, one which requires a sale, transfer of ownership, lending, lease, or rental, of a phonorecord or other copy, to "the public".

(All litigation documents referenced above are available online and may be accessed through http://info.riaalawsuits.us or through "Index of Litigation Documents" at Recording Industry vs. The People (http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com))
http://info.riaalawsuits.us/howriaa.htm





Escape Media Group Introduces Grooveshark - the First Legal Peer-to-Peer Online Music Brokerage

New Music Community Compensates Members for Sharing DRM-free MP3 Files and Pays Royalties to Copyright Holders
Press Release

Escape Media Group, LLC today announced Grooveshark, a new peer-to-peer (P2P) music-sharing community that will compensate both copyright holders and members who participate in the community.

Grooveshark combines the best of P2P file sharing and online music purchase sites into one service at www.grooveshark.com. Visitors can browse songs uploaded by other members and pay to download MP3 files with no digital rights management (DRM) technology. Songs vary in price, but cost no more than 99 cents. Grooveshark will pay appropriate royalties to copyright holders by taking commissions from users' transactions and also compensate users with free music for community participation such as uploading songs, fixing song tags, flagging unwanted files or reviewing music. Members will be rewarded based on their level of contribution to the community.

"Our bottom line is value. By bringing the convenience and selection of a peer-to-peer network together with the recommendation power of a community of friends -- all the while removing DRM -- we can generate revenue to compensate both copyright holders and users," said Sam Tarantino, 20-year-old founder and CEO of Escape Media Group, the parent company of Grooveshark.

Because all Grooveshark files are DRM-free MP3s, they can be played on any computer or digital music player, so users no longer risk losing the ability to play songs in their collection if they change their computer or player.

Grooveshark will function much like popular P2P file exchanges. Members can offer their media library for sale through Grooveshark and discover and share new music with other members (only MP3 or OGG files without DRM). The difference: Grooveshark will broker music transactions by charging up to 99 cents for each song downloaded and use those proceeds to pay royalties to the copyright holders and reward members for community participation.

"Much of the success of P2P networks can be amplified by a community aspect -- allowing users to find someone with similar musical tastes and sample songs from their collection to find new artists or rare and unique songs and genres," said Tarantino. "By harnessing the power of user-generated content, Grooveshark can bring together online community elements, compensate artists and users and provide customers with control over their music by eliminating unfair DRM schemes," he added.

Grooveshark expects to begin beta testing during the first quarter of 2007. For more information, or to be notified when the beta version is available, visit www.grooveshark.com.

About Grooveshark

Grooveshark, a peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing community that brokers music transactions between members, is a service of Escape Media Group, LLC. By charging for the songs exchanged between members on their site, Grooveshark will compensate copyright holders and users while providing the convenience and selection of P2P file sharing in an online music community. All Grooveshark files are free of digital rights management (DRM) technology, allowing users to play the songs they purchase on any type of computer or digital music player. For more information, visit www.escapemg.com.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070109/latu030.html?.v=84





Review: Onshare Beta File-Sharing Software
Nigel Whitfield

Peer to peer file sharing is, potentially, a great way to let friends and colleagues access information on your system, but the popular networks are really geared up for an ‘all or nothing’ approach, and don’t give you much control over who accesses files on your system – hardly a recipe for security.

Microsoft’s Foldershare is one alternative, but its interface is a bit clunky, and you have to share whole folders with people.

Onshare, from the people behind the Onspeed internet accelerator, is designed to let you share files easily, with security in mind. Connections between peers are encrypted, it works fine behind firewalls, and the only people who can access your files are friends to whom you’ve given permission.

Those are granular; you can share some files in a folder with one user, and others with someone else, so there’s much less chance of accidentally sharing private material. You can also chat, instant messenger style, and include files in your messages.

It works, but we found it a little quirky; to be fair, it is beta software, but the interface takes some getting used to. The search box under Friends can’t be used to find new contacts, for example, only to search your existing list. If you click on someone to browse their files an Explorer window opens, but to search you get an Onshare window, which displays nothing until you click Find, unlike the search in your Friends list.

More annoyingly, sometimes the service didn’t work. Dragging and dropping a remote file produced a message that there was insufficient bandwidth top copy it, but double clicking to open it was fine. You can also only open or copy files, meaning you can’t drop a file in someone else’s folder; you have to share it from your computer instead.

If these quirks are ironed out when it comes out of beta testing, Onshare certainly has the potential to succeed, without the security issues of other peer-to-peer software.
www.vnunet.com/2172102





Connected Entertainment Group Demonstrates 'Media at the Speed of Life'
Press Release

Zoran Corporation (Nasdaq: ZRAN) announced that it will be showing its digital content delivery technology moving live content directly into the living room television and onto all types of consumer electronic devices, both console and handheld, at CES 2007 in Las Vegas.

The new technology will be shown running on Zoran's digital Connected Media Device and its Zplayer Ultra Portable Media Player reference design. The new technology enables the direct retrieval and sharing of audio, video, and digital images, via broadband, over connected consumer devices that can be used either inside or outside the home. Personal content archives will be accessible from anywhere in the home and anywhere in the world, and purchased content can be accessed through a multitude of devices within the same personal network.

"Zoran is pleased to be able to introduce the world's first 'Media at the Speed of Life' technology to create, capture, publish and distribute live content directly to the living room and to mobile devices. We've been working on the connected initiative for over a year, and with the help of our technology and networking partners we are able to demonstrate a complete system solution," said Brian Hofstetter, director Zoran's Connected Products Group.

Zoran partners contributing to the new technology and value added applications for Zoran's connected products include the following: -- Vidiva's software and user interface technology -- PassAlong Networks' content monetization and delivery infrastructure -- CinemaNow's feature motion picture delivery system -- AViga Systems' digital Touch Talk Type media retrieval -- Rotani's network management and performance enhancement software -- Solid State Networks' peer-to-peer file sharing -- Tzero's wireless high-definition content delivery -- Kestrelink's wireless networking solutions

For "Media at the Speed of Life" demonstration appointments, please contact your local Zoran representative.

About Zoran Corporation

Zoran Corporation, based in Sunnyvale, California, is a leading provider of digital solutions in the growing digital entertainment and digital imaging markets. With two decades of expertise developing and delivering digital signal processing technologies, Zoran has pioneered high-performance digital audio and video, imaging applications, and Connect Share Entertain(TM) technologies for the digital home. Zoran's proficiency in integration delivers major benefits for OEM customers, including greater capabilities within each product generation, reduced system costs, and shorter time to market. Zoran-based DVD, digital camera, DTV, multimedia mobile phone, and multifunction printer products have received recognition for excellence and are now in hundreds of millions of homes and offices worldwide. With headquarters in the U.S. and operations in Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, Zoran may be contacted on the World Wide Web at http://www.zoran.com or at 408-523-6500.
NOTE: Zoran and the Zoran logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zoran Corporation and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other names and brands may be claimed as property of others.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...4501622&EDATE=





British Watchdog Agency Bans Dolce & Gabbana Ads
Mary K. Brunskill

Britain's Advertising Standards Authority, a watchdog agency, has banned ads for the fashion house Dolce & Gabbana that have been criticized as condoning and glorifying violence. In one of the ads, two men are threatening a man in a chair while another man lies injured on the floor. In another, two men are supporting a wounded woman who is holding a knife.

Dolce & Gabbana argued the ads were "highly stylized and intended to be an iconic representation of the Napoleonic period of art," and while the ASA admitted they clearly mimicked the "theatrical effects of the genre," they said they could still cause "serious of widespread offense."

As an example of a potentially offensive instance, the ASA pointed out that one was published in The Times opposite a story about a crime involving a knife.

Dolce & Gabbana said no one had complained about the ads when they were published in other parts of Europe, Japan, China and the U.S., but the ASA upheld its ruling.

"The ads could be seen as condoning and glorifying knife-related violence," it said. "We reminded D&G of its duty to prepare ads with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society."
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006099020





Digital Billboard Up Ahead: New-Wave Sign or Hazard?
Louise Story

Their very name once told it all: a board to post notices or advertisements. But billboards are getting a makeover.

Billboard companies are adopting digital technology that rotates advertiser images every six or eight seconds — the better to catch the eye. The new billboards look like television screens, although the images do not move.

The problem, safety experts say, is that the new billboards may work too well, adding yet another distraction for drivers.

There are currently about 400 digital signs across the country. But within 10 years, as many as a fifth of all billboards — or about 90,000 — may be converted, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

The technology has excited both billboard companies, which can generate three to five times more money from the digital signs, and advertisers. Clear Channel Outdoor and Lamar Advertising, which has installed the majority of such billboards, promote the digital signs as more effective at getting consumers to pay attention.

“There’s a perception in the advertising industry that you have to up the ante,” said David Zald, assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. “We see so much information coming at us that for it to actually leap out and capture our attention, one has to go at a more salient level than you used to.”

But, he added, “there’s a trade-off between the advertiser’s need to grab our attention and the actual safety implications of that attention capture.”

The digital signs have also revived a debate in towns and cities that dates to 1965, when the Highway Beautification Act was passed, limiting the number of new billboards that could be erected. Billboard critics have long said the roughly 450,000 billboards in the United States scar the landscape along highways and local roads. Billboard companies counter that they have a right to sell the space.

In fact, billboards are not just for roadsides anymore. Advertisements have been popping up more frequently inside subways and buses, shopping malls, office buildings and airports.

Over the last two years, the category, which the industry refers to as out-of-home advertising, has been second only to the Internet in its growth rates. But it is still dwarfed by television and print. Marketers spent about $6.7 billion on out-of-home ads in 2006, of total ad market spending of $285 billion in the United States, according to estimates by Universal McCann, part of the Interpublic Group.

While the billboard industry says the digital signs are not dangerous, driving safety researchers say there has not been enough research to know for sure. Most driving studies have focused on cellphone use. Still, researchers said the digital signs may tax drivers’ awareness more than old-fashioned static signs.

“In my opinion, they’re definitely distracting,” said Deanna Singhal, research associate at the Traffic Injury Research Foundation, a driving safety group in Ottawa. “It’s going to not only keep their eyes away from the road more, but it’s also more cognitively demanding.”

A study commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration is recommending further research into whether the signs present risks to drivers, said Dale Keyes, who oversaw the research. The study, by the Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, a federal agency in Tucson, will be released in a few weeks. The federal government has also allotted $150,000 for a future study of digital signs.

Meanwhile, the signs are flying up. Lamar Advertising is converting about 28 traditional billboards to digital signs each month, and company executives consider new locations in weekly meetings, said Tommy Teepell, Lamar’s chief marketing officer. The company does not plan to convert all of its roughly 158,000 signs to digital, focusing instead on the ones in the most heavily trafficked areas, he said.

Lamar has so far heard mainly positive reaction, Mr. Teepell said.

“Typically, the response we get is people love it because they’re very attractive,” Mr. Teepell said. “The colors are attractive and the creative looks good. You don’t ever have colors faded in the sun.”

Eileen Furukawa, broadcasting analyst for Citigroup, said profit margins on digital signs can run as high as 70 percent, while static signs have closer to 45 percent profit margins. She is recommending that investors buy Lamar and Clear Channel Outdoor stock.

Digital signs are sold more like TV commercials than traditional billboard signs, ad executives said. Advertisers can buy spots for a single day or for a few hours, rather than weeks at a time as on normal billboards.

“Changeable signage is very much a part of the outdoor landscape as we move forward,” said Jodi Senese, executive vice president of marketing for CBS Outdoor, a division of CBS, which has not yet posted digital signs along highways.

Digital signs, Ms. Senese said, offer “immense creativity, flexibility and targetability for different demographics, which was really never an option for out-of-home advertising.”

Clear Channel Outdoor has created digital billboard networks in six cities, including Milwaukee, Tampa and Albuquerque. The networks can be cued to show the same ads all over the cities at once, mimicking how people usually see the same TV commercials while watching the same shows. Clear Channel Outdoor is also placing TV screens in mall food courts.

Digital billboards are one of the main growth areas for outdoor companies, and what is more, advertisers are eager to sign up, said Paul Meyer, president and chief operating officer of Clear Channel Outdoor. “You can’t avoid it,” Mr. Meyer said. “There’s no mute button. There’s no on-off switch.”

Billboard companies generally have to obtain permits from local governments to convert their signs to digital boards.

Some towns have turned them down; others are negotiating everything from a quota for conventional signs to the brightness of the digital images.

In Syracuse, for example, after passers-by began complaining that a digital sign installed last year was too bright, Lamar was quick to turn it down, said Charles Ladd, the city’s zoning administrator.

Omaha has not allowed digital signs, and does not plan to unless the billboard companies offer to remove multiple conventional signs for each digital sign.

“All they have to do is push a button,” Tom Blair, the city’s planner said, “and they can flash and disturb the motorists.”

Bill Brooks, mayor of Belle Isle, Fla., a town of 6,000 people near Walt Disney World, said he negotiated with Clear Channel Outdoor in December to allow the town’s first digital sign, in part because he does not want to risk entering a protracted legal battle.

As an active member of the National League of Cities, Mr. Brooks said he was well aware of the lawsuits other towns have faced over their billboard regulations. The American Planning Association and the National League of Cities have publicly accused the billboard industry of aggressively suing cities and towns over their billboard regulations.

Indeed, in the last seven years, there have been about 100 cases in federal courts, about three times the amount from 1993 to 2000, said Eric Damian Kelly, professor of urban planning at Ball State University. While almost all the lawsuits have involved traditional signs, the American Planning Association said digital billboards would probably be the next battleground.

Some consumers said the digital billboards provided entertainment on the road.

“I always read them when I drive by,” said Caitlin Neary, 22, who passes a digital sign in Connecticut when she drives to her parents’ house in Fairfield. “I always watch to see it change. It catches your eye more.”

But others said the signs are more distracting than cellphone calls. Lisa Christopher said she nearly had an accident when she first saw a digital billboard in Vestavia Hills, Ala., a suburb of Birmingham. Within days, Ms. Christopher, the former PTA president at a local high school, said she was getting calls from other worried parents.

“It was so bright, it almost jumped out at you,” Ms. Christopher said.

The sign was not up for long. Last month, the Vestavia Hills zoning board told Lamar Advertising to turn it off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/bu...11outdoor.html





Thanks for the Mac Memories
Daniel Terdiman

For fans of Macintosh computers, Tuesday brought a chance to hear some of the inside stories behind the history of the iconic machines.

At Macworld here, Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the team that built the original Mac, spoke to a crowd of about 50 people about the early days of the project.

Hertzfeld was on hand to promote his book, Revolution in the Valley: The insanely great story of how the Mac was made, at publisher O'Reilly's booth.

The book first came out in 2004, but that didn't keep a standing-room-only crowd from gathering to hear Hertzfeld tell the tales behind the famous project.

Looking a little bit stouter than he did in 1984, he began his talk by paying his respects to fellow Mac pioneer Jef Raskin, who died in February 2005.

"I'll begin with a tribute to Jef and tell you how Jef hated my book," Hertzfeld began. "The hardest part of all (was that) he really objected to a few of" the book's stories.

He recalled that Raskin had not been particularly pleased by an anecdote in the book about how fellow Mac team member Burrell Smith, whom Hertzfeld said had a talent for imitations, used to mimic Raskin.

"'Why, I, I, I, I invented the Macintosh,'" Hertzfeld said, quoting Smith imitating Raskin.

He also said Smith would then mimic a reporter responding to Raskin: "'Why, no, I thought Burrell invented the Macintosh.'"

And Smith would end the joke with one final Raskin imitation: "'Why, I, I, I, I invented Burrell.'"

Clearly fond of Raskin, Hertzfeld nevertheless poked a little bit of fun at him during his talk. Hertzfeld remembered his first week at Apple Computer and how Raskin sat next to him at one point and introduced himself.

"'I'm not only a mathematical genius, but a musical genius, as well,'" Hertzfeld said Raskin told him by way of greeting. "I thought, 'What do I say to that?' So I said, 'Good for you.'"

Hertzfeld also said Raskin had been critical of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs' "unique management style." So Raskin put together a written critique of Jobs' perceived managerial shortcomings and sent them to Apple investor Mike Markkula. But Jobs found out about the memo.

"Steve saw it and responded by asking Jef to take a three-month mandatory" suspension, Hertzfeld said.

He also recalled how prior to joining the Mac team, Hertzfeld had been working on a new operating system for the Apple II. But Jobs demanded that he stop working on the project.

"'That'll be obsolete even before it comes out,'" Hertzfeld quoted Jobs as saying at the time. "'What's more important than the Mac?'"

So Jobs yanked the power cord for the Apple II Hertzfeld was working on out of the wall and walked away with the computer, Hertzfeld said.

And while Hertzfeld is clearly fond of Jobs, he didn't hesitate to point out that Smith, whom he said "had a great knack for nicknames," used to call Jobs "the devil."

He also related that in the early days of the Mac team, anyone who wanted to quit Apple but who Jobs valued had to weave their way through Jobs' famous "reality distortion field" sessions.

"If Steve didn't want you to quit," Hertzfeld said, "you'd have to go through a reality distortion session with Steve."

Tales of Jobs and Woz
He said that Smith began talking about how, if he ever decided to quit, he would "'just pull down my pants and urinate on (Jobs') desk.'"

Apparently, though, Jobs found out that Smith was saying that. So later, when Smith finally did decide to leave the company, Jobs was ready.

"Are you going to do it?" Jobs asked of the urinating threat.

Later, Hertzfeld said, he got a phone call one day from the Cupertino, Calif., police. It turned out that Jobs had been parking his car in the handicapped parking spaces and that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak had reported it to the police, but had done so claiming he was Andy Hertzfeld.

"Steve (Jobs) thought the rules were for everybody else," Hertzfeld said. "So he parked in the handicapped spot. Maybe he thought the blue wheelchair symbol meant it was for the chairman of the board."

Still, despite some knocks on Jobs, Hertzfeld said that it's quite possible that the Macintosh wouldn't even exist today if someone hadn't "hit the undo button" and brought Jobs back to Apple years after his forced departure from the company.

Hertzfeld also had more Wozniak stories to relate to the gathered crowd. He remembered that Smith and Wozniak had both been big fans of the video game Defender.

After awhile, he said, Wozniak got so good at the game that he would come home from work and end up playing single games that would go on forever.

"Woz's wife would have to spoon-feed him his dinner," Hertzfeld said, "because the games would last three or four hours and he'd get hungry."

These days, Hertzfeld is a software engineer at Google, which he called "the greatest company ever."

Asked why Mac fans are so into talks like his and other historical recollections of the early days of the computer, Hertzfeld said it is because the fans are "passionate" about the machines.

"It's a spiritual touchstone...It's the love and care that Apple puts into it," he said. "It's not just a product. The key word is 'just.' It is a product, but I don't know about the 'just.'"
http://news.com.com/Thanks+for+the+M...3-6148831.html





In Gadgets, Excitement Is in the Price
Damon Darlin

Slumped on a bench at the end of the third day of the Consumer Electronics Show here, Ben Leet stared at a Sharp 108-inch flat-panel TV, the biggest television ever made, as he pondered what was remarkable about the thousands of products he saw.

“Well, this thing is wow,” said Mr. Leet, a senior consultant at DTC Worldwide, a British market research firm. “Each year the TVs get better.”

Still, the size was really just an incremental expansion over last year. And Mr. Leet was hard pressed to come up with anything along the miles of displays of TVs, set-top boxes, DVD machines, appliances, and the like, that could be called startling or life changing. Indeed, no new feature-rich product stole the Consumer Electronics Show — it seemed not to be aimed at “first adopters,” the guys down the street with the latest gadgets, but at the soccer moms with an eye for a bargain. “It is going mainstream,” Mr. Leet said.

For consumer electronics makers, the faster pace of price-cutting seemed to be even more of an obsession than a revolutionary new device.

Certainly, Apple sucked the life out of the annual electronics party this week with an announcement at its own show in San Francisco of a sleek multidimensional cellphone that first adopters are sure to drool over. But, at least by one measure, the electronics industry has a lot to celebrate.

Last year, manufacturers sold a record $146 billion worth of goods at wholesale in the United States. Sales in 2006 increased 13 percent from 2005, twice the average rate of growth.

“That has not happened in the past 20 years,” said Sean Wargo, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association.

The industry sold 160 percent more liquid-crystal-display TVs and 154 percent more global positioning satellite navigation systems.

At the same time, however, prices for many products fell faster last year than the typical pace of decline. Big-screen plasma TVs dropped 32 percent, according to the association’s economists. Competition pushed the average notebook computer price down 35 percent. The price of video players for cars fell 65 percent.

Even as executives of the big manufacturers here insisted that the big drops would not happen again this year, consumers can expect to see more of the same. Demand remains strong, and the relentless competition is creating a paradise for shoppers, who have packed their homes with an average of 25 consumer electronic devices, twice as many as just a decade ago.

In big-screen TVs, for example, “As much as I say they won’t fall as much,” said Robert Scaglione, the senior vice president for marketing at Sharp’s North American operations, “I can only hope they won’t.”

Sharp Electronics is one of several TV makers adding capacity this year. Its new factories are more efficient. Sharp can produce six 52-inch flat-panels for L.C.D. televisions with the same amount of effort it took to produce just two of them in its older plant. Sharp said production of all sizes of flat-panels would double this year and then triple in 2008.

Manufacturers, especially the smaller contract companies in Taiwan and China that make the panels for the lesser-known brands like Polaroid or Maxent, need to keep those factories running at full capacity and will cut prices to do so.

Vincent F. Sollitto Jr., the chairman and chief executive of Syntax- Brillian, takes advantage of that trend. In a luxury suite at the Las Vegas Hilton next to the convention center where the annual show was held, he explained how sales of the Olevia brand TVs doubled in 2006.

“A year ago, we were nobody,” Mr. Sollitto said. But the company priced the TV sets 20 percent below those of the major manufacturers and, for a few days after Thanksgiving, outsold Sony three to one in Circuit City Stores. “That’s what we can do,” he said.

“We will be prepared for what is coming and that is very aggressive price reductions throughout the year,” he said.

It is a similar story for computers, a category that only 18 months ago many industry analysts considered to be a sleeper. But sales of notebook computers grew 64 percent last year. Craig Marking, a product manager for Toshiba, said Microsoft’s release of a new operating system, Vista, will continue to stimulate demand. “It creates the opportunity for higher average selling prices,” he added.

He reasons that because Vista turns the PC into a multimedia entertainment device, the computer needs more memory and more sophisticated disk drives.

Once a putty-colored box for an office desk, the personal computer has been redesigned and is more often a sleek notebook, sometimes enrobed in shiny embossed carbon fiber. All those frills are supposed to entice consumers to pay more.

But executives at a scrappy PC maker, Acer of Taiwan, do not think that will happen. They took market share away from Toshiba and Dell in 2006 and they want to get more this year. “We sold 1.6 million last year; We will sell 3.2 million this year,” said Rudi Schmidleithner, president of Acer’s American operations.

Acer’s strategy is to put the latest technology in a PC, for example, installing devices that enable the highest speeds over a wireless network. But instead of considering the computer a niche product for the top of the market and getting fat profit margins, it then prices the products for the mainstream and makes money on volume. “We do not need the highest margins to run our business model,” Mr. Schmidleithner said.

That strategy ruins it for everyone else because the others have to lower prices if they do not want to lose market share. “Part of Dell’s problem is Acer,” Mr. Schmidleithner suggested. Those discounts, of course, put a smile on the faces of consumers.

Navigation systems, meanwhile, that use information from global positioning satellites were another fast-selling product category last year. That came as a bit of a surprise as well because most of the direction-giving devices intended for cars sell for $600 to $1,200.

Change is a afoot here, too. The barriers to entry are low. A G.P.S. device is a few generic semiconductors, a small L.C.D. screen and software. Garmin, an industry leader, has a gross profit margin of 50 percent.

Not surprisingly, more companies at the show were displaying navigation systems. Samsung Electronics, which claims just bested Sony as the No. 1 HDTV maker, has set its sights on this market. Increased competition can mean only one thing: prices are coming down.

The show was not about prices, of course, no matter how much they were discussed in meetings between retailers and manufacturers. The Consumer Electronics Show was supposed to be a showcase for retailers looking for the latest high-tech products that will lure consumers to the store. Watch for Powerline plugs that will use a home’s existing wires to move digital content, including HDTV programs or movies, around the house. Loads of hand-held video players are coming, along with new digital cameras that offer even more automated functions to improve pictures. ( Kodak hinted at a mode to remove the glow-eye from pet pictures.)

Some of those technologies will never catch on. At the show, the big debate continued to be about whether HD-DVD or Blu-ray would triumph as the standard for high-definition DVD players. LG Electronics offered a solution to reassure the hesitant consumer: a device that would play both kinds of discs.

But at $1,200, the Super Multi Blue is only for that first adopter. (The first adopters would be better off buying a Toshiba HD-DVD player for $600 and a Sony PlayStation 3, which contains a Blu-ray drive, for $670 because then they get two players and a game machine.) Jun Dong-soo, the senior vice president for digital devices at Samsung, scoffed at LG’s effort: “Without an affordable price, I don’t want to launch a dual format player.”

The fear of making the wrong bet on technology, by the consumer and the manufacturer, led Whirlpool to come up with an innovative alternative to another LG product: the TV in the refrigerator door. What happens when the TV breaks or becomes obsolete? From a tiny meeting room tucked far in the back of one of the exhibition halls, the company showed consumer electronics makers a socket built into the top of a refrigerator’s door from which any kind of device — a TV, a tablet PC, a battery charger, a DVD player — could be hung.

Whirlpool doesn’t plan on charging consumers any more for a refrigerator with the special socket, which it calls Central Park. That way more consumers will buy it and the larger installed base will entice electronics makers, which will further increase demand for Central Park.

Matthew Newton, an innovation consultant at Whirlpool, said, “We’d like to move as quickly as possible to get it into the mainstream market.” It was a sentiment heard a lot at the show.

•

The follow-up: As the holiday shopping season began, Your Money outlined some online tools that can be used to find the best deals when retailers drop prices suddenly.

As you well know, the prices continue to drop after the holidays. Take advantage of price-protection guarantees of the companies. They typically last for 30 days during which time the retailer will pay you the difference. But only if you notice the lower price and contact them.

The Web site Refundplease.com helps you automatically track price changes at Amazon.com. There is the problem of making direct contact with Amazon’s customer service. With a bit of sleuthing, Tim Noah, a writer for the online magazine Slate, found Amazon’s customer service phone number. It is (800) 201-7575.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/te...y/13money.html





The Problem With Made in China

AS A vote of confidence in Vietnam, the decision by Intel early in 2006 to spend $350m building a new factory in the emerging South-East Asian economy was hard to beat. And yet, before the year was out, the American chipmaker went further and raised its investment to $1 billion. In eight months Intel had committed as much money to Vietnam as it had to China in the previous ten years.

In the Johor region of Malaysia, another global firm, Flextronics, has fired up the production lines of a new M$400m ($110m) factory to make computer printers for another American firm, Hewlett-Packard. One of the largest contract electronics manufacturers, Flextronics already has vast facilities in China. But it chose Malaysia as the site for its latest investment.

Further east, in Indonesia, Yue Yuen, a Hong Kong-based shoemaker, has been ramping up its output of trainers and casual footwear for brands like Nike and Adidas. Production is increasing at the firm's factories in China and Vietnam too, but output in Indonesia is growing the fastest.

Although all three companies had different reasons for their decisions, the outcome was the same: they chose to avoid China's thundering economy in order to put their factories elsewhere in Asia. These companies are not alone. In the calculus of costs, risks, customers and logistics that goes into building global operations, an increasing number of firms are coming to the conclusion that China is not necessarily the best place to make things.

With its seemingly limitless supply of cheap labour and the rapid acquisition of technological prowess, China appears to be unstoppable. Indeed, the perception is that every factory closing in America or Europe is destined to reopen in China. Many have, helping China's share of the world's exported goods to triple to 7.3% between 1993 and 2005. In comparison, every member of the G8 group of rich nations, with the exception of Russia, saw its share fall. It is a similar story with manufacturing output. Whereas China doubled its share of global production to almost 7% in the decade to 2003, most of the G8 saw their shares fall. Interestingly, only the United States and Canada saw their shares rise—with just over a quarter between them. Most things nowadays might seem to be made in China, but North America remains the true workshop of the world.

Yet it is not only China that is booming as a base for low-cost production. Manufacturing and exports are growing rapidly in other parts of Asia (see chart 1). Taken together, South Korea, Taiwan, India and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) increased their share of global manufacturing from less than 7% to more than 9% in the decade to 2003. Exports also rose across the board. China is the emerging giant, but the investments that are being diverted away from the Middle Kingdom present the rest of Asia with a huge opportunity to become manufacturing hubs in their own right. The question is whether they can seize it.
Too far, too expensive

Scott Brixen, an analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, a Hong Kong-based investment bank, gives two big reasons why China has not found itself at the top of the list for some new factories: “Rising costs and a natural desire by companies for diversification.”

So far, most industrial development in China has taken place in the country's eastern coastal regions, particularly around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong. But costs in these centres are now rising sharply. Office rents are soaring, industrial land is in short supply and utility costs are climbing. Most significant of all are rocketing wages. In spite of the mass migration of workers from China's vast interior to the coast, pay for factory workers has been rising at double-digit rates for several years. For managers, the situation is worse still.

“China has become a victim of its own success,” sighs Peter Tan, president and managing director of Flextronics in Asia. He finds it especially hard to hire and retain technical staff, ranging from finance directors to managers versed in international production techniques such as “six sigma” and “lean manufacturing”. There are not enough qualified workers to go around, causing rampant poaching and extremely fast wage inflation. “China is definitely not the cheapest place to produce any more,” he says.

An analysis of labour rates across Asia by CLSA's Mr Brixen supports that view. Average wages for a factory worker, combined with social security costs, came to almost $350 a month in Shanghai in 2005 and almost $250 a month in Shenzhen. By comparison, monthly wages were less than $200 in Manila, around $150 in Bangkok and just over $100 in Batam in Indonesia. Although the productivity of Chinese workers is rising, in many industries it is not keeping pace with wages.

One solution is for companies to move inland where many costs are much lower than on China's heavily developed coastline. Indeed, the government has been promoting such a policy since 2000, to spread the benefits of development to China's poor interior. Domestic Chinese companies have led the charge into the hinterland and a small, but growing, number of foreign firms have followed them.

Intel is one. In 2004 it decided to invest $525m in a new plant in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to complement its existing factories on the coast in Shanghai, 1,600km (994 miles) away. Brian Krzanich, general manager of Intel's test and assembly business, says the company's decision was based on cost. The government was keen to promote its “go west” policy, so it offered Intel generous incentives. Needless to say, being so far inland raises transport costs for exporters. But Mr Krzanich reckons there are compensations, because labour and utilities are much cheaper than on the coast.

But not everyone is convinced. At Flextronics, Mr Tan's China factories are all located in eastern coastal provinces. “We have no interest in going west,” he says, because it is too expensive to get products to America and Europe from there. Other observers add that the shortage of management talent inland is even greater than on the coast. And it is not easy persuading expatriate workers to take their families to places like Chongqing and Chengdu, where foreign companions and international schools are thin on the ground. So many firms decide they would rather invest elsewhere in Asia.

Costs are only part of the equation. Just as important is diversification. Having already moved a big chunk of their production to China, many firms are reluctant to put any more of their eggs in the same basket. A research report written last year by the Japan External Trade Organisation concluded: “Due to the country's increasing business risks and rising labour costs...Japanese firms employing a ‘China-plus-one’ strategy—in which they invest in China and another country, namely in ASEAN—should consider placing more emphasis on the ‘plus one’ country.”

Japanese companies may be particularly wary, but such nervousness is now shared by managers from other countries. Some of their firms are concerned about growing unrest in China as swathes of the country's rural population, particularly in the west, fall behind the thriving east. Official figures record 87,000 incidences of rioting and social disturbance in 2005, much of it following the forced appropriation of farmers' land in the name of development. The actual number of cases of civil unrest could be far larger.

Equally important are concerns about growing protectionism. The United States and the European Union are becoming more assertive in holding China to account over its World Trade Organisation obligations. Companies worry that this could lead to sudden interruptions to trade.

Ask Yue Yuen, the world's largest contract shoe manufacturer. The company produces more than 180m shoes a year from factories in China, Vietnam and Indonesia, most of them bound for America and Europe. So when the European Union imposed anti-dumping duties in October 2006 on leather shoes imported from China and Vietnam, the firm was quick to raise its production in Indonesia. “Trade relations with other nations and the tariff and quota situation are vital considerations for where we invest,” says Terry Ip, a spokesman for the company.

So too are wage rates. With each shoe passing through up to 200 pairs of hands on the production line, Yue Yuen's operations are highly labour-intensive. In China the firm is experiencing rapid wage inflation. Although this is partly offset by productivity improvements which mean that overall unit labour costs are rising by 8% a year. Pay for factory workers is rising in Vietnam and Indonesia too, notes Mr Ip, but labour costs there are as much as 35% lower than in coastal China.

Another company with a China-plus-one strategy is Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing retailer. Last year it decided to reduce the share of clothes it sources in China from 90% to 60% as a hedging strategy against future trade disputes. New factories in Cambodia and Vietnam will make up the shortfall. Intel, with facilities in Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and China, is creating a diversified portfolio also.
Keeping secrets

China also has other risks, notably a lack of protection for intellectual property rights. Stories abound of foreign investors finding local companies churning out identical goods to their own, but under a different brand. For that reason a number of companies in industries such as medical devices have instead set up shop in Singapore. Often these products are capital-intensive, so labour costs are less important than strong intellectual property laws. Several chemical companies have even built facilities in Singapore with the intention of shipping most of their products to China. Feedstock is more easily available in Singapore, but just as important is confidence that valuable industrial processes will not be stolen.

Managers also worry about the rising value of the Chinese currency. Although nobody expects sudden leaps, the yuan does appear to be on a steadily upward trajectory, having risen by a further 4% against the dollar since the government first revalued the currency by 2.1% in July 2005. Pundits expect it will continue to rise by around 5% in the year ahead, which will do little to bolster China's attractiveness for export-based manufacturing.

Of course, cost and risk are not the only considerations in choosing where to put a factory. The quality of a country's infrastructure, the presence of suppliers and the size of the local market all count. For such reasons, China will remain an attractive place to invest.

Kumar Bhattacharyya, a professor of manufacturing at Britain's University of Warwick, believes the lure of China's burgeoning domestic market will outweigh the various concerns over cost. “Why do people go to India and China? The standard answer is for cheap labour, but most big technology companies go there for the market,” he says.

Naturally, industries such as textiles and clothing will always seek places with cheap labour, hopping from country to country as wages rise and equalise. However, for more complex and capital-intensive manufacturing, it is clear that foreign direct-investment flows are aimed at accessing local markets rather than low costs.

In emerging Asia markets simply do not come any bigger than China, with its 1.3 billion people. Individual wealth is still extremely low compared with figures for the United States and Europe, but a vibrant middle class is emerging in the big cities. With growth rates of more than 10% a year, China offers huge potential. Transport and other infrastructure in China is also in better shape than many other Asian countries and the quality and availability of suppliers is improving all the time, enabling highly integrated supply chains to develop within the country.

Yet other parts of Asia also offer sizeable markets. India has 1.1 billion people, an emerging middle class of its own and will grow at around 8% this year, although the country is a good deal poorer than China. To date, foreign investment in manufacturing has been limited—total investment inflows in 2005 amounted to a meagre $7 billion, compared with more than $70 billion for China (see chart 2). Hugely inadequate infrastructure is one of the chief obstacles in India, as is a business climate famous for its bureaucracy. Yet even there, more foreign companies are starting to open factories.
Manufacturing graduates

The car-parts industry is a good example, with both Toyota and Hyundai investing recently to take advantage of the almost 700,000 engineering and science graduates that India produces every year. It has even been suggested that Indian technicians could re-engineer some of the West's highly automated car-production lines to make them more labour-intensive for the Indian market. Firms making specialty chemicals are keen to combine technical expertise with low costs and a growing market. Even low-technology industries are interested: Yue Yuen is close to building its first shoe factory in India, attracted not only by the country's vast pool of cheap workers but also by efforts to set up special economic zones that offer tax breaks.

Most observers reckon India's manufacturing evolution is ten years behind China's, but progress is unlikely to be as swift or as smooth. A country that puts a higher value than China does on democracy and the rights of the individual will inevitably find it harder to push through infrastructure projects and reform to sensitive areas such as the rigid labour market.

With 560m people, the ASEAN trade bloc also offers a big population. South-East Asia has been the chief beneficiary of companies' decisions to diversify out of China. The problem is that the ten ASEAN nations have yet to form a single market. Although the region offers plenty of opportunity for export-based manufacturing, as a single market it remains highly fragmented. Companies want to be able to set up one factory to serve the whole region, but numerous barriers prevent them from doing so.

Governments in the region have announced bold plans to create the ASEAN Economic Community by 2015, with a free flow of goods, services and investment. Following a free-trade agreement in 1992, tariffs on the majority of goods traded in the region have fallen below 5%. Much harder to achieve will be the removal of non-tariff barriers, which would call for harmonising thousands of industry standards and customs regulations, and setting up independent bodies to govern regional trade and mediate in disputes.

Few believe that the ASEAN Economic Community will come about as its architects hope. Less developed nations, such as Myanmar and Laos, will integrate at a slower pace than countries like Singapore and Malaysia—if they integrate at all. Nonetheless, progress is being made and the rapid rise of China and India has added urgency to the process. Twelve areas, including electronics, health care, textiles and logistics, have been singled out as the first to be worked on.
AFP

Trainers to peddle harder

In the meantime, governments must also think how to get their industries into higher-value manufacturing. Although ASEAN received record levels of foreign direct investment in 2005, at $37 billion, much of the manufacturing coming into the region is basic, labour-intensive assembly work that adds only a little value.

“I get worried about ASEAN,” says Roland Villinger, a Bangkok-based partner at McKinsey, a consulting firm. He thinks the region urgently needs to add to the sophistication of its manufacturing—partly because India and China are improving so fast. He agrees that a lot of factories in ASEAN are part of a “China-plus-one or plus-two” strategy. However, he believes South-East Asia needs to be more than just a hedge against risk in China. And ASEAN has its own share of risks. Thailand's new military government seems to be doing its utmost to deter investment, including tighter curbs on foreign ownership and botched currency controls.
Smart but tiny

Bright spots do stand out. Singapore has a highly educated workforce, although its population is only about 4m. The country has a solid history of attracting sophisticated manufacturing that calls for strong technical skills and often involves extensive research and development. Malaysia too has had some success in moving into higher-value manufacturing. In May last year, for example, Intel opened a new research centre in Kulim employing 900 people to design microprocessors, chipsets and motherboards for use in its products worldwide. And in Thailand efforts to make the country the “Detroit of the East” are starting to pay dividends—at least they were until the present troubles. Thailand was set to overtake the United States last year as the world's largest maker of one-tonne pick-up trucks. Toyota recently set up a new research-and-development centre in Thailand for its light truck business.

Elsewhere in the region, though, governments talk a good game, but have yet to make enough progress. For the moment, as foreign investors choke on their China investments and look elsewhere, that does not matter too much. But as India sorts out its problems and as China grows into an ever bigger market, South-East Asia needs to integrate its own markets or see its newly found popularity among manufacturers slowly fade.
http://www.economist.com/business/di...ory_id=8515811





The Pirate Bay Plans to Buy Island
James Savage

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation', and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country.

The Pirate Bay says it is the world's largest 'bit torrent tracker', and is a popular way of sharing music, films, software and other copyrighted material online. It has been under the scrutiny of authorities in Sweden and around the world for some time.

The site was briefly closed down after raids by the Swedish police last May. After initially moving to the Netherlands, the site returned to Sweden in June. Swedish authorities have been put under pressure to do more to stop the site. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the US government have all lobbied for The Pirate Bay's closure.

According to a website set up to secure the purchase of Sealand, The Pirate Bay plans to give citizenship of the micronation to anyone willing to put money towards the purchase.

"It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internet access, no copyright laws and VIP accounts to The Pirate Bay," the organisation claims on its website www.buysealand.com.

The "island" of Sealand, seven miles off the coast of southern England, was settled in 1967 by an English major, Paddy Roy Bates. Bates proclaimed Sealand a state, issuing passports and gold and silver Sealand dollars and declaring himself Prince Roy.

When the British Royal Navy tried to evict Prince Roy in 1968, a judge ruled that the platform was outside British territorial waters and therefore beyond government control.

The British government subsequently extended its territorial waters from three to twelve nautical miles from the coast, which would include Sealand, but Prince Roy simultaneously extended Sealand's waters, claimed that this guaranteed Sealand's sovereignty.

The island is now being put up for sale by Prince Roy's son, Prince Michael, who styles himself head of state. A firm of Spanish estate agents has valued the island at £504 million (about 7 billion kronor), although Prince Michael told The Times of London that it is hard to gauge how much it will fetch in reality.

The Pirate Bay says it is looking at alternatives to buying the former naval platform.

"If we do not get enough money required to buy the micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somwhere and claim it as our own country," the organization says on its website.
http://www.thelocal.se/6076/20070112/





Milestones

Mr. Noodle

The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company’s signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

There are other versions of fast noodles. There is spaghetti in a can. It is sweetish and gloppy and a first cousin of dog food. Macaroni and cheese in a box is a convenience product requiring several inconvenient steps. You have to boil the macaroni, stir it to prevent sticking and determine through some previously obtained expertise when it is “done.” You must separate water from noodles using a specialized tool, a colander, and to complete the dish — such an insult — you have to measure and add the fatty deliciousness yourself, in the form of butter and milk that Kraft assumes you already have on hand. All that effort, plus the cleanup, is hardly worth it.

Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.

There are some imperfections. The fragile cellophane around the ramen brick tends to open in a rush, spilling broken noodle bits around. The silver seasoning packet does not always tear open evenly, and bits of sodium essence can be trapped in the foil hollows, leaving you always to wonder whether the broth, rich and salty as it is, is as rich and salty as it could have been. The aggressively kinked noodles form an aesthetically pleasing nest in cup or bowl, but when slurped, their sharp bends spray droplets of broth that settle uncomfortably about the lips and leave dots on your computer screen.

But those are minor quibbles. Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.

Lawrence Downes
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/op...5b6&ei=5087%0A


















Until next week,

- js.



















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