[JackSpratts]

Apple Betty

10.5 "Leopard" To Employ A System-Level, Encrypted Bittorrent Client And A Sharing-Reward System?

According to some of our oldest and most reliable sources within Apple's software development sector, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will include a system-level "BitTorrent" filesharing client that can be user-customized to 'donate' upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth.

The code in question was only recently developed, as part of a proposal that would probably not be part of the "Leopard Preview" delivered to third-party developers....but rather would be added to the operating system just prior to the "beta" stage that will follow later in the year.

Although implementing the code to secure the data traffic and break it up into pieces so small that individual users who enabled Sharing-Reward accounts would be unable to make any use of the data themselves is actually the easy part, getting Apple Legal and the executive suites to sign off on the concept will be a much larger challenge.

A somewhat similar p2p-based banwidth-sharing option was brought up during the 10.4 Tiger development cycle and dismissed out-of-hand because there were no good incentives for users to enter the shadowy world of peer-to-peer networking just to save Apple a few dollars. Now a group of developers at Apple think they have solved the most fundamental issues and want to bring the rest of the company on board.

Rewards would include credit at the iTunes Store and the Apple Store as well as other affililated offers like free airtime minutes for Apple's forthcoming "iPhone" and the like.

Uploads would use a unique port from other types of BitTorrent traffic so that network administrators can see it as separate and handle it accordingly.

Based on some rough math estimated for the proposal, the team pushing this concept believes they could cut Apple's bandwidth costs by hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per year and by always finding the closest peer-sharing hosts, the system would also save terabytes of Internet backbone bandwidth that is now used for Software Updates, QuickTime Movie Trailers, and iTunes Store downloads among other things.

This would likely be part of a larger Apple initiative to build-in more of the functionality that customers use everyday -- like P2P -- and bend it to Apple's own purposes while helping to legitimize (not to mention monetize!) those applications.

Along with this and potentially other BitTorrent-like bits of P2P functionality in Leopard, Apple is reportedly planning to build-in Quality of Service (QoS) code in the OS X 10.5 networking layer to prevent this and other advanced, bandwidth-intensive, two-way communications from slowing download speeds.

Under consideration is a self-adapting ruleset similar to that employed by a company called Ubicom under its "StreamEngine" brand -- a QoS system that automatically examines network traffic and decides which protocols are the most time-sensitive, then priorizites those protocols while buffering other data in a high-performance memory cache. Such adaptive code is normally too resource-intensive for software QoS and is usually relegated to hardware QoS devices like Hawking Technologies' "Broadband Booster," but with Apple rapidly moving to multiprocessor platforms like Intel's 'Core' architecture, the real-world performance penalty is expected to be negligible.

Of course, users will have the option of not enabling the Reward-Sharing system (it will almost certainly be off by default, to prevent legal snarls arising from customer displeasure at the "theft" of bandwidth without their knowledge) and of disabling the Adaptive Quality-of-Service option....but together they have the potential to make the digital lifestyle easier for both Apple and its customers with no discernible penalty under most conditions.

Although the legal, logistical and "vision" challenges to the Sharing-Reward concept are substantial and there is every possibility that this proposal will again be turned down, we think it's an excellent idea and we hope that the Executive Suites can see their way to bringing it to fruition.
http://macosrumors.com/20060429A.php





BitComet – The last File-Sharing Hero?
Thomas Mennecke

Shareaza hasn’t released a new version since October of 2005. eMule had a token update in March, however the eDonkey variant has remained virtually unchanged for at least a year. FrostWire, a fork of the Gnutella client Limewire last updated in February. Ares has been idle since January, while BearShare remains in hibernation.

This trademark slow pace of development has become an increasing standard in the file-sharing world, as many of the top applications progress at an excruciatingly slow pace. File-sharers have become accustomed to such slow development, as WinMX fans often waited years before seeing a subsequent version. Yet during file-sharing’s golden age, progress occurred with greater fever and new, independent networks arose frequently.

If we could transcend today’s file-sharing landscape to 2003, it would be virtually unrecognizable. In three years time, the P2P landscape has changed from being dominated by FastTrack to BitTorrent controlled. No longer is file-sharing preformed solely in a self-contained environment such as Kazaa or WinMX. When these applications were king, all the file-trader needed was to fire up their favorite application, and search for the file desired.

To a growing extent, this is no longer the case as using self contained P2P applications to find a desired file is becoming less of a viable option. Networks like FastTrack have become clogged with corrupt and polluted files, forcing the growth of verified hash link sites. Such hash sites provide the end user with verified links to various materials in the file-sharing world, near guaranteeing a successful match to the file desired. Although several half-hearted attempts to integrate this concept into FastTrack, it ultimately flourished on the more resourceful and advanced BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 networks. Verified sites eventually merged with indexing sites, which provide searchable gateways to the BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 networks.

New P2P network development – the actually community behind the applications – also appears to have stagnated. During the earlier days there never appeared to be a shortage of new P2P or file-sharing networks, as new communities appeared to spring up overnight. What we have today, Ares Galaxy, Gnutella, BitTorrent, FastTrack, eDonkey2000, DirectConnect, is essentially the same stockpile that existed three years ago. FileTopia provided some hope of breaking out of this mold with the purported release of 4.0; however no reportable progress can be documented since last year.

Another move witnessed by the file-sharing community is the transgression of file-sharing and P2P applications towards authorized distribution. Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, even applications placed high on the ivory tower such as Azureus and µTorrent, have implemented some form of authorized distribution deal.

The pace of development has slowed, the number of new networks has diminished, and those actually still in development release upgrades at a considerably less frequent pace. The cause of this slowdown can be attributed to any number of reasons; perhaps most obvious has been the entertainment industry’s crackdown on commercial developers. This crackdown has a far less impact on open source developers, but the widespread and less organized nature of this type of software development leaves the file-sharing world with a considerably slower pace of development.

In fact, file-sharing technology has arguable retrograded. Usenet, one of the oldest Internet mediums (circa 1979 technology), has quickly become one of the top methods for obtaining material online – a concept almost unthinkable only a few years back. BitTorrent progress has limped along, but remains relatively unchanged since its release. The only significant advance to the file-sharing community since 2005 has been the implementation of the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) layer to BitTorrent, Ares Galaxy, and perhaps one day, LimeWire. Yet LimeWire, like its commercial brethren, has been quiet since the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) distributed cease and desist letters to at least a half dozen developers on September 13, 2005.

Although development and new releases may have slowed, the demand for entertainment remains at an all time high. This demand has been supplemented by iTunes to some minor extent; however few file-sharing applications bear any resemblance to the past. Has the file-sharing world simply become complacent in the existing stock of P2P/file-shairng software, networks and communities?

This may be true for a wide margin of P2P and file-sharing software, but there are exceptions. The exception happens to be one of the more controversial file-sharing applications; BitComet. A client residing on BitTorrent, BitComet has managed to defy conventional file-sharing wisdom by keeping up with a feverish level of development. In fact, developer RnySmile has released three updates to BitComet in April – a pace virtually unheard up in the current P2P era. In fact, no P2P or file-sharing application has a comparable release rate.

BitComet is certainly not the last file-sharing application standing. Azureus and µTorrent have kept up a respectable pace, and both have introduced novel concepts and contributions in the furtherance of file-sharing technology. So is BitComet the last man standing, the one file-sharing application left to hold the line, the last hero of the file-sharing world? There’s no easy answer to that question, as many individuals have helped shape the landscape of file-sharing. Many accredit Alberto Treves’ defiance as one of the greater acts of file-sharing heroism, while others feel FrostWire is P2P’s final frontier.

Perhaps the file-sharing world has simply consolidated under BitTorrent. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and right now there doesn’t appear to be a need for the next quantum leap in file-sharing.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1170





Largest Solar Park in the World Opens in Germany
Christine Lepisto

The ribbon was cut on the World's largest continguous solar plant on 27th April 2006 in Germany. Construction on the 40 million euro (US$48 million) photovoltaic installation started August 2005. This plant demonstrates new standards in cost-efficiency for solar power. Using the master-slave inverter concept developed by Shell, the plant delivers the optimized energy output. Also, flexible installation technology--such as the use of either aluminum, wood or steel racks depending on material prices and the foundation on either concrete or piles--optimizes the costs. And if solar is viable in Germany, just imagine the efficiencies possible where the sun really shines!

Pocking receives an average of 1121 KWh/m2-year. 62,500 modules in 6 parallel linked units deliver power from earth's closest star to the houses of 3300 Germans via energy company E.on. That's a total of about 16,5 km (10 miles) of solar panels mounted on a former military grounds at Pocking, near Passau in Bavaria. The installation saves 10,000 tons of CO2 yearly--the equivalent of 1,000 hectares of woodlands.

Solar plants are the new skyscrapers. Last year Shell opened the formerly "world's largest" solar power plant near Leipzig, producing only 5 MW. The Shell solar plant in Pocking will soon be overtaken by the GE-Powerlight plant in Portugal at 11 MW, brought to you yesterday in TreeHugger. Hot on their heels is a 15 MW plant in South Korea, 100 MW in Israel. The current leader in announced capacity appears to be a 116 MW solar station in Portugal to be built by a consortium of German companies.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006...st_solar_p.php





Can Techie Oust Orrin Hatch?
Eliot Van Buskirk

Technology policy rarely makes for compelling campaign theater -- and rarer still moves the body politic -- but I can't help rooting for Pete Ashdown.

In a political mismatch of almost biblical proportions, the tech-savvy Democrat is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.

Hatch is a popular incumbent who has polled over 62 percent in past elections. Apparently, Utahans couldn't care less about the Republican senator's slavish endorsement of entertainment industry-backed bills that would, without understatement, create the equivalent of a copyright police state.

Hatch has terrorized techies from his Washington perch by sponsoring the much-loathed DMCA. He's on record saying it'd be a good idea to let entertainment companies remotely destroy the computers of those they suspect of copyright infringement. And he's a co-sponsor of the Induce Act, a moribund bill that aimed to hold tech companies responsible for creating devices that could be used to pirate digital content.

Ashdown is a political novice with impeccable tech credentials. He founded the first independent ISP in Utah, used to DJ raves, and uses a collaborative wiki for his campaign.

This has all the makings of a classic Old West showdown between Hatch -- seemingly beholden to the entertainment companies who contribute to his campaigns -- and Ashdown, who hopes to fight anti-tech policies and help Congress understand the internet from the point of view of someone who has been there.

Guess which one I chose to interview.

Wired News: You mentioned that you'd been to the Wired offices before. How did that come about?

Pete Ashdown: I have a friendship with Brian Behlendorf, who helped set up Wired's first venture on the internet, Hot Wired (now Wired News). He was also in charge of Organic and continues to be a member of the Apache Foundation -- a founding member of the Apache Foundation for that matter. And I initially knew him (from) the internet rave scene, because a lot of the early rave scene was connected through e-mail lists and the All Rave newsgroup, and of course there was a big concentration of that in San Francisco. So I came out to San Francisco frequently during that time.

WN: When I asked you if you had time for an interview, you referred me to your online calendar. I was thinking that this openness is admirable, when so many public figures seem to want to be anything but public, and I also saw that you have a MySpace page. What would you say the upsides and downsides of your open approach to this campaign have been?

Ashdown: Well I feel transparency is a big part of my campaign. That is needed in Washington. And what I see in Washington is certainly we have a lot of scandal (in which) the Democrats try and blame on the Republicans, but I view it as a larger scandal of money and politics. And what I see in Washington is the Democrats stomping around, and they stand up and sign these ethics declarations for the television cameras, and then they say, "We need more restrictions on lobbyists," but they really don't lead by example. And it's a really simple thing to make your office transparent. And when somebody takes on the mantle of public service, they lose the privacy that is in regards to that job.

Now certainly their personal privacy should still be respected, but when they are doing something in relation to making legislation, or meeting with individuals, that should be open and transparent. And it's easy to do. I mean, what I've done is elaborate in comparison to what Google calendar allows you to do. And so for these people to make the excuse that they can't do it, I don't believe it. I believe that they want to preserve the status quo. They want to keep the American people in the dark. And you know, there's also concern about safety. If people know where I'm gonna be next Friday, a sniper could come and kill me. Well, publish the calendar retroactively. I think people would still appreciate knowing what's going on and who you're meeting with.

In regards to the broader question of how MySpace and being open and transparent ha(ve) benefited me in this campaign, people are finding it refreshing. People are finding it remarkable that a candidate is taking this kind of approach and advocating this in government because it's so rarely seen. On the drawbacks, I really haven't seen a lot. You know, they may come later when the opposition tries to attack me, but I really feel that in my own business being transparent has been my policy and providing internet service in that we document the good along with the bad. And we put that out for all of our customers to see, and even our non-customers can go to the XMission website and see what the history of XMission is in regards to success and failure.

And my competition looks at that and says, "How in the world can you do that? Because it makes you look terrible." Conversely, my customers look at that and they say, "Thank you so much for keeping me informed about what's going on, because I know the cause of the problem when it happens."

WN: My column mainly focuses on digital music, so I have to ask, what do you see as the right balance between consumers' and corporations' rights when it comes to digital music, in terms of fair use and what should be allowed? How do you think that line should be drawn?

Ashdown: Well it's interesting you say individual and corporation, because there's a third party here, it's the artist. And I think the artist's rights should be held over the corporation rights. I believe that the internet presents a great opportunity for artists to make more on their work than what they were formerly doing with the corporate distribution system. And I think the writing is on the wall for that corporate distribution system, and that's the kind of backlash we're seeing from them in regards to lawsuits and restrictive legislation. So I absolutely believe the artists need to be rewarded for their work, should be rewarded for their work, and that the internet presents them an opportunity to do that in a more direct fashion.

So I support their rights, but I also support the rights of the consumer. I support the rights of the consumer when it's in regards to fair use. If I buy some media I should be able to do whatever I wish with that media inside the domain of my own home, outside of sharing it with somebody else commercially. That is, if I play it in the car for somebody else should I have to charge them a use fee? I don't think so. But if I'm out selling their music and the artist is getting no benefit from that, then that's an obvious violation.

I'm against the idea of DRM because it restricts the individual. It punishes the individual, (restricts) the innocent from being able to do what they wish with the property they've purchased. And if people say, "Well, the pricing for this is so low that we can only sell it to a certain kind of use," well, raise the price! You know, that's what the market's all about. If you want to raise the price so I have no DRM on my music, I may pay an extra 25 cents, or whatever you decide to do to get that music without the DRM encumberment.

WN: Have you seen evidence as more and more people go online and buy iPods, that Utahans might be realizing that Orrin Hatch may not represent their best interests as citizens or consumers? I mean, there are all these stories everywhere, everybody's getting online…. Do you think that's something that people are going to vote with?

Ashdown: I don't think it's a primary issue in Utah, although we have a very strong technology base and that receives a lot of support, at least verbal support from the technology base in Utah. I don't think most people are concerned about fair use as a primary issue. They're more concerned about the energy policy in this country, and how it affects them at the pump, and how it affects their security worldwide. They're concerned about health care, and they're concerned about jobs. They're concerned about the future of this country economically. So I think that is low on the list.

But I have been making an appeal to not only people in Utah, but people nationwide in regards to technology, that it is important that we have representation in Congress that understands technology beyond where the power button is on the computer, because these laws that are being made by a senator in Utah or a senator somewhere else affect everybody nationwide. We all have an interest in getting people into Congress that understand these things robustly. I get a lot of e-mail from people outside of Utah saying, "Man, you're, you're a great candidate. I wish I could live in Utah to vote for you," or "I wish you were a candidate in my state." Well there is a way you can vote for me, and that's sending financial support.

WN: So speaking of people in Congress and how much they understand about the internet, where do you stand on the whole "net neutrality" issue? What do you make of that? Do you think that the internet is fragile, like Larry Lessig says, and (that) it only exists because of careful planning, or is it kind of a naturally occurring thing that will just survive no matter what the rules are?

Ashdown: I tend to take more of the latter viewpoint. I've been doing XMission since 1993, which makes it one of the oldest internet companies in the country. And what I have seen is, you know, back in 1993 the internet was controlled by the National Science Foundation. And when they turned it over to private enterprise there was this idea that they would set up neutral peering points for entities to come together and exchange traffic. Now I'm in some of those peering points, and what I have seen, they're far from neutral, (and) that this idea of net neutrality has been long lost, in that if I try and exchange traffic with, say, a carrier on the level of MCI, they're going to put down all sorts of crazy requirements that there's no way a small provider of my size can meet. So I am forced to go another route to get into their network.

Now the thing is that the bureaucrats and the executives of these big telcos don't seem to realize is that they have as much need to reach my network as I have a need to reach theirs, even more so when you have an entity like Google. You have this guy just stomping around from SBC, I forget his name, but he's saying, "Google should be paying me money to traverse my network." Well, he receives as much benefit from having the connectivity to Google as Google receives and vice versa, in return. So if he decides to lower Google's traffic because they're not paying his extortion fee, his customers are going to react to that. "Why can't I get to Google? Why is it slow?" And so I think that this kind of balances out in the end.

I tend more to take an anti-regulation standpoint on the internet, and (though) it is very easy to say, "We don't want the government censoring the internet," it becomes a much more complex issue when we're talking about net neutrality. "Well we should have the government confirm that neutrality, and guarantee it." But does that mean that I can't prioritize video traffic and voice traffic in my own network, (which) is obviously needed, that has to be more of a real-time situation? You know, for a long time I prioritized gaming traffic, because that's what my customers desire.

So I tend to think that the government getting involved with more regulation on the internet is a bad thing. And so some of these calls for enforced net neutrality I don't support, because I believe that these situations will work themselves out in the end with the market that we have. Now you have the other question of, well, if you're a smaller player, if you're not a Google, if you're a mom and pop shop and you're on the rise, is your traffic going to be discounted in the face of these other entities that are able to pay for good traffic, say an eBay. And I argue again that there is enough customer draw on these major networks to say, "Hey, I can't get to this small entity; what's wrong with your network? What is breaking with your network?" that the customers of these large telcos are forced into net neutrality on their own.

WN: So the availability of alternate ISPs, especially smaller or independent ISPs, is going to act as a pressure valve on this whole situation then?

Ashdown:I believe so. But also independent entities, like some of the free wireless groups that are springing up. There's a great democracy that comes through the technology of the internet that really anyone can provide it. If you wanted to buy a connection from somebody and then send wireless out to your entire neighborhood, that's in the realm of possibility for individuals to do. It's not the same case when you're talking about satellite TV or broadcast TV. So this is a very unique medium that enables democracy and supports democracy and spreads by democracy.

WN: I have one more, very easy question: What software and hardware do you personally use to listen to digital music?

Ashdown: Well, on my desktop I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, not only in my campaign office -- I use Ubuntu exclusively, Ubuntu/Linux. I use Ubuntu throughout my office at X Mission. We do have a need for a few Windows desktops for running some of the accounting software we need, but that's for the secretary. We try and put Ubuntu/Linux on everything, and of course our servers (run Linux).

When it comes to music hardware, I have an iPod, 40-gig iPod, and I rip all my own music. I prefer when I buy music to go out and buy the CD, bring it home, rip the contents off it, archive the CD. Having been a DJ in the past, I just recently completed ripping my entire collection of CDs, which was over 2,000 CDs.

WN: Well, thank you so much for your time, and I can tell you if I were in Utah, I'd be voting for you.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70761-0.html





BlackBerry’s Legal Déjà Vu
Andrew Ross Sorkin

Do not bother hitting the “reload” button or clearing the cache in your Web browser — it will not help. Tuesday’s hauntingly familiar headlines about a patent-infringement lawsuit against BlackBerry maker Research in Motion are, in fact, new.

The lawsuit, filed by software company Visto, seeks to shut down the popular (and, for some, near-addictive) BlackBerry wireless e-mail service less than two months after a similar suit from patent holding company NTP was settled. Research in Motion agreed to pay NTP $612.5 million to resolve that earlier case, averting the possibility that its service would be shut down by court order.

For those who thought NTP’s lawsuit lacked merit, the large settlement raised concerns about what are known derogatively as “patent trolls” — investment companies that acquire intellectual property and then sue businesses that use similar technology. In recent months, Research in Motion chairman James Balsillie has been urging United States lawmakers to reform the nation’s patent law immediately so that similar legal troubles will not afflict another company.

There is an important difference between the NTP suit and the latest suit against Research in Motion. Unlike NTP, an entity that lacked business operations, Visto actually competes with Research in Motion, as Forbes.com points out. This relationship, and the following quote from a Visto executive to The New York Times, suggest that Visto may see a BlackBerry shutdown as its ultimate goal:

“We’re not seeking a royalty, we’re seeking an injunction,” Visto’s co-founder and senior vice president, Daniel Méndez, said. “Unlike NTP, we are a company with 400 employees and a viable business to protect. That’s what we’re trying to do with these actions.”

Meanwhile, Visto is just coming off of a legal victory in a case against Seven Networks, another wireless e-mail software maker. On Friday, a Texas jury ruled in favor of Visto in the lawsuit and awarded it $3.6 million.

R.I.M. said in a statement Monday that it was not infringing Visto’s patents, which it considers invalid, and was considering suing Visto for infringing on its BlackBerry patents. Its shares fell 4.7 percent to $73.03 Monday on the Nasdaq.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=2549





French DRM Law Gutted
Nate Anderson

It didn't take long for the new French DRM legislation to get spoiled in committee, and you can't blame French consumers for expecting canard à l'orange and being served some very dodgy escargot instead.

The legislation in question originally contained consumer-friendly provisions that would force technology companies to make their DRM schemes interoperable. This would have a potent effect on the dominance of Apple and iTunes, of course, since the Cupertino company has so far proved unwilling to license its Fairplay technology to anyone else. The non-interoperable nature of Fairplay has been crucial to the success of Apple's online music store, which has leveraged the popularity of the iPod to become the biggest seller of digital downloads on the Internet.

No one was surprised when the proposed French law was trashed by Apple as "state-sponsored piracy." There was even speculation that Apple might leave France altogether rather than risk opening its Fairplay system.

It looks like the French will still get to keep their iTunes Music Store, though, since the original bill was recently gutted in committee. Most of the consumer-friendly provisions in the legislation have since been removed or rewritten. To see how this worked, consider the following examples:

Previously, "information needed for interoperability" covered "technical documentation and programming interfaces needed to obtain a copy in an open standard of the copyrighted work, along with its legal information." Now this has been changed to "technical documentation and programming interfaces needed to obtain a protected copy of a copyrighted work." But a "protected" version of the work can't be played back in a different player, which means interoperability won't be attained with this clause.
Previously, the only condition for receiving information needed for interoperability was to meet the cost of logistics of delivering the information. Now, anyone wanting to build a player will have to take a license on "reasonable and non discriminatory conditions, and an appropriate fee." When using information attained under such a license, you will have to "respect the efficiency and integrity of the technical measure."
DRM publishers can demand the retraction of publication of the source-code for interoperable, independent software, if it can prove that the source-code is "harmful to the security and the efficiency of the DRM."

The new changes will be voted on soon, but they already have some French consumer groups up in arms. As anyone who has ever relied on RATP to get to work knows, the French are very, very gifted in the art of the strike, and stopdrm.info has called for one in the Place de la Bastille on May 7. Will anyone show up? Perhaps. 22 percent of under-25 workers are unemployed, and they're willing to take to the streets. If they're as concerned about DRM as about having jobs for life, the rally could be huge.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060501-6715.html





Government Report Takes Other Nations To Task On Piracy
Peter Pollack

The office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) has released its annual "Special 301" review of intellectual property rights, which looks at the state of IP infringement in 87 nations around the globe. As might be expected, a number of countries have made it to the 2006 Priority Watch List, including perennial favorites Russia and China. Additionally, specific foreign markets—both physical and virtual—have been labeled as "notorious" by USTR, in large part due to excessive media and software piracy.

Topping out the roll call of problematic countries in the report is China—one of only two nations important enough to be listed out of alphabetical order and the only one worthy of multiple pages (10 to be exact). The general theme is that China has made progress protecting intellectual property in recent years, but not nearly enough. Troubles mentioned include the fact that much of the Chinese counterfeiting and piracy black market is centered in the capital city of Beijing (right up the street from the American embassy), and that a large amount of Chinese intellectual property enforcement seems to be centered on European brands, with American nameplates taking a back seat.

China does not provide American copyright materials, inventions, brands, and trade secrets the intellectual property protection and enforcement to which they are entitled. China therefore remains a top intellectual property enforcement priority. [...] Faced with only limited progress by China in addressing certain deficiencies in IPR protection and enforcement, the United States will step up consideration of its [World Trade Organization] WTO dispute settlement options.

China—along with everyone else—fell short of USTR's worst rating of Priority Foreign Country, but the US government is clearly keeping the option open for dragging it before the WTO—an organization many feel the nation should never have been allowed to join.

The other notable black hat nation is Russia, which has not yet entered the WTO. Some in the US government have advocated tying WTO membership approval to that nation cleaning up its act. Apparently, piracy is so rampant in Russia that a large amount of infringing material is produced in government-owned facilities, and media industry reps have repeatedly asked the USTR to grant Russia the worst possible rating. That appears to be impossible for the time being, as by its own rules the USTR "may not designate a country as a Priority Foreign Country if it is entering into good faith negotiations or making significant progress in bilateral or multilateral negotiations to provide adequate and effective protection of IPR."

Ars readers may be interested to note that one of the markets mentioned by name in the report is Allofmp3.com, the Russian music download site that continues to exist due to a legal loophole despite several years worth of attempts to shut it down. USTR rounds out its inventory of electronic bad-boy markets in other nations with Baidu—a Chinese search engine which offers links to music files for downloading and streaming, and Kuro—a Taiwanese peer-to-peer network. Although each of these sites has been the target of legal action in its home country, the efforts have apparently not been enough to stave off the ire of the USTR.

There's no doubt that US companies do lose money to overseas piracy, and it is likely that losses due to filesharing pale in comparison to the underground markets that exist in other countries. The joke has been made that only one legitimate copy of Windows was ever sold in China, and although that is clearly an exaggeration, it's a very real issue, as evidenced by the meeting recently held between the president of China and officials from Microsoft.

When all is said and done, enforcement of anti-piracy laws in other countries is the result of a wide range of factors, up to and including diplomacy, economics, self-interest, and occasionally even ethics. It will be a long term process to find a balance that works to everyone's satisfaction, and it's even possible that some of the basic business models need adjustment. Whether or not the problems are ever solved to anyone's satisfaction is a question for the Magic 8-Ball, which currently reads, "Reply hazy - try again."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060501-6712.html





A Studio Chief's Jailhouse Visits to a Detective Raise Questions
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner

Two days before Christmas 2004, as Hollywood's A-listers were jetting to places like Aspen and Kona, Ron Meyer, the president of Universal Studios, made a trip to a decidedly less glamorous destination.

Mr. Meyer got in his Range Rover and drove more than 120 miles north from his home here to Taft, Calif., to visit Anthony Pellicano, the imprisoned private investigator.

Mr. Pellicano was in the 14th month of a three-year sentence for possession of explosives, but federal prosecutors in Los Angeles were digging into a mountain of evidence seized from his office that they say pointed to a gigantic eavesdropping enterprise.

While Mr. Pellicano's client list included some of the movie business's most influential players — as well as some of their angry ex-spouses — the only heavy hitter known to have visited Mr. Pellicano behind bars was Mr. Meyer.

Nowhere in the long-running investigation of Mr. Pellicano, who pleaded not guilty to wiretapping and conspiracy charges, has Mr. Meyer's name been associated with even a whiff of impropriety. But the relationship between the detective and the studio chief holds a lesson about doing business in Hollywood, where loyalty holds an exalted value, and where an executive who expects to survive at the top must be able to understand the industry's seamy underworld for what it is, without tumbling into it.

Mr. Meyer bridled at being asked by reporters about his relationship with Mr. Pellicano.

"I'm offended that my friendship would be questioned," he said on Saturday. "I like him the way anybody would like a friend. He's never given me any reason to feel differently about him. I'm not his judge, and all these charges against him haven't been proven. The only way I can judge anybody is how they treat me, and Anthony's never given me a reason to think of him as anything but a friend, and frankly, a stand-up guy."

Yet Mr. Meyer's visits raised questions with the government, and he wound up explaining them to the F.B.I. and a grand jury, evidence and interviews with agents show. Investigators asked Mr. Meyer about a debt Mr. Pellicano tried to collect for him, as well as his relationship with Michael S. Ovitz, his former business partner and co-founder of the Creative Artists Agency, and about a conversation in which Mr. Meyer urged Mr. Pellicano to "drop a dime on" Mr. Ovitz.

In an interview with two F.B.I. agents on March 31, 2004, Mr. Meyer said that he had met Mr. Pellicano through his wife, Kelly, who briefly worked as a typist in the detective's office a decade and a half earlier. After their marriage in 1992, Mr. Meyer told the agents, Mr. Pellicano often sent cards and gifts.

Mr. Meyer described Mr. Pellicano as a friend, but not a close friend, the agents wrote in a summary of the interview that was seen by The New York Times. The two men ate lunch together about four times a year, sometimes shooting pool, but were never guests in each other's homes.

Yet Mr. Pellicano never spoke to him about wiretapping, Mr. Meyer told the agents.

Mr. Meyer acknowledged to the F.B.I. that he had once retained Mr. Pellicano to collect a debt from a neighbor. In 1997, Mr. Meyer lent $300,000 to Bilal Baroody, a businessman with homes in Malibu and Spain. When the loan came due a year later, Mr. Baroody was gone and did not return Mr. Meyer's calls.

According to the F.B.I., Mr. Meyer later mentioned this to Mr. Pellicano, who offered to collect the debt, saying he had "guys in Spain." Mr. Meyer assumed Mr. Pellicano would find him and "pester" him, but Mr. Pellicano "never discussed the methods he would employ." Mr. Meyer wrote a check for Mr. Pellicano's $25,000 retainer, and also offered to split with him any money collected.

On March 15, 1999, prosecutors have charged, Mr. Pellicano had a police source illegally run a criminal background check on Mr. Baroody, who could not be reached for this article. Mr. Baroody was also in a dispute at the time with the late Edward Masry, a lawyer who used Mr. Pellicano's services.

Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he heard nothing more of Mr. Baroody until June 2002, when he received a letter in which his former neighbor promised to repay the debt someday.

Around 2000, Mr. Pellicano asked Mr. Meyer for a personal loan of $100,000, citing "business and family problems." Mr. Meyer agreed, without putting anything in writing. Mr. Pellicano later offered a "good-faith payment," Mr. Meyer told the agents, but said he had not yet resolved his problems. Mr. Meyer told him not to bother.

And in early 2003 — after Mr. Pellicano's arrest but before his incarceration — Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he was asked by Bert Fields, a lawyer and a friend, to give money to a trust for Mr. Pellicano's family. Mr. Fields, who often used Mr. Pellicano's services, has acknowledged being a subject of the wiretapping investigation, but has not been charged with anything and has said he was never aware of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Meyer agreed to help, envisioning gifts of $20,000 a year for two years, he told the F.B.I., but heard no more about it. Several months later, he raised the subject with Mr. Pellicano, who said he doubted anyone would be willing to help him. But Mr. Meyer offered to call potential donors, with the idea of raising $100,000 to $120,000, he told the agents.

Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I. that he contacted several people suggested by Mr. Pellicano, but the effort — a version of which is reported in the June issue of Vanity Fair — collapsed when only one other man made a donation, and Mr. Pellicano insisted that the money be returned.

The F.B.I. questioned Mr. Meyer closely about Mr. Pellicano's relationship with Mr. Ovitz, who was Mr. Meyer's partner at Creative Artists until 1995, when the two went separate ways in a bitter breakup.

For his part, Mr. Ovitz has told F.B.I. agents that in March 2002 Mr. Pellicano had alerted him to "a problem brewing" with Mr. Meyer, and offered to solve it "for a price." A month or two later, Mr. Ovitz asked Mr. Pellicano to get embarrassing information about Mr. Meyer, the agents' notes say.

Mr. Ovitz's lawyers deny that he hired Mr. Pellicano to get information on Mr. Meyer. As for the "problem brewing" exchange, an Ovitz lawyer, James H. Ellis, questioned the date and context in the F.B.I. account. Rather, Mr. Ellis said, sometime in 2002 Mr. Pellicano offered to heal the Ovitz-Meyer personal rift; Mr. Ovitz responded by saying there was "no amount of money he wouldn't pay" if that occurred.

In Mr. Meyer's account to the F.B.I., Mr. Pellicano asked Mr. Meyer in early 2002 whether taking Mr. Ovitz as a client would affect his relationship with Mr. Meyer. Mr. Meyer said Mr. Pellicano was free to work for Mr. Ovitz, but assailed Mr. Ovitz's integrity, saying that "Ovitz was capable of anything," Mr. Meyer told the F.B.I.

Mr. Meyer told the grand jury that months later, Mr. Pellicano intimated that he had come to the same conclusions about Mr. Ovitz.

Mr. Meyer also visited Mr. Pellicano behind bars three times — once at the San Bernardino County Jail and twice at Taft — according to evidence reviewed by The Times and confirmed by Mr. Meyer on Saturday. The first of those visits occurred shortly before Mr. Meyer's March 2004 F.B.I. interview.

When the F.B.I. agents asked Mr. Meyer why "a man such as himself" would drive so far to see Mr. Pellicano, Mr. Meyer said it was to keep a promise.

During the San Bernardino visit, Mr. Meyer told the agents, Mr. Pellicano's legal problems did not come up. Since they "had something in common with Ovitz," Mr. Meyer said, he brought up recent news reports about Mr. Ovitz's difficult tenure as president of the Walt Disney Company. Mr. Pellicano said things and made facial expressions that led Mr. Meyer "to conclude that Ovitz was somehow connected to Pellicano's legal problems," the F.B.I. wrote.

Apprised of this jailhouse encounter, Mr. Ellis, the Ovitz lawyer, said: "You've got to be kidding. Mr. Pellicano's legal woes appear to involve the unlawful possession of powerful explosives and the alleged wiretapping of dozens of individuals over several years, never once directed by or known to Mr. Ovitz. No facial expressions or hand gestures could possibly change that."

In a subsequent telephone conversation, Mr. Meyer urged Mr. Pellicano to "drop a dime" on Mr. Ovitz, according to a person close to the investigation who refused to be identified to avoid angering prosecutors. Mr. Meyer was asked about that remark before the grand jury, where a tape of the conversation was played. Mr. Meyer, the person said, testified that he told the detective that Mr. Ovitz would not have hesitated to turn on Mr. Pellicano if the roles were reversed.

In June 2004, Mr. Meyer visited Mr. Pellicano again, this time at Taft, the minimum-security federal prison where he had been transferred to finish out his sentence. He returned for a last known visit on Dec. 23 of that year.

Asked by reporters to explain his repeat visits to Mr. Pellicano behind bars, Mr. Meyer said: "I visited him because he's my friend, and I don't have anything to hide. I know the truth, and I don't care what anybody thinks.

"I feel no need to apologize for being his friend," he added. "And when he's able to have visitors, I'll go visit him again."

Correction: May 2, 2006

Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day on Monday about the friendship between Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios, and Anthony Pellicano, the private detective accused of wiretapping and conspiracy, referred imprecisely to the sources on which the article was based. It was based on government evidence, including written summaries of interviews by F.B.I. agents with witnesses in the case, not on interviews with F.B.I. agents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/bu...pellicano.html





Microsoft May Delay Windows Vista again – Gartner

Microsoft Corp.'s long- awaited release of the upgrade to its flagship Windows operating system will likely be delayed again by at least three months, research group Gartner Inc. said on Tuesday.

The research note, released to clients on Monday, said the new Windows Vista operating system is too complex to be able to meet Microsoft's targeted November release for volume license customers and January launch for retail consumers.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the Gartner report and it was still on track to meet its launch dates.

Vista is the first major overhaul of its operating system, which sits on 90 percent of the world's computers and accounts for nearly a third of Microsoft's total revenue, since Microsoft rolled out Windows XP nearly five years ago.

Microsoft originally targeted a 2005 launch for the new Windows, then pushed the release out to 2006 before announcing in March that Vista would again be delayed to improve the product's quality.

Gartner targets a Windows Vista release in the April-June quarter of 2007, nine to 12 months after Microsoft conducts a second major test, or "beta," release for Vista during the current quarter.

"Microsoft still wants to get it out as soon as possible, but slipping from January to March is nowhere near as bad as slipping from shipping before the holidays to after the holidays," a group of Gartner analysts wrote in the report.

Gartner said Windows XP took five months to go from a second test release to the start of production, but the magnitude of technological improvement in Vista is closer to Windows 2000, which took 16 months between the second test and production.

Once production starts, it usually takes between six- to eight-weeks for PC manufacturers to load the operating system onto new computers, Gartner said.

Microsoft shares were down 22 cents at $24.07 in afternoon trading on Nasdaq.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nN02271704





A Big Question Unanswered by a Tiny PC
David Pogue

ACCORDING to legend, they teach you in journalism school to remember the five W's: who, what, when, where and why.

This week, Microsoft unveiled a new kind of computer called the Ultra Mobile PC — and has good answers to four of those questions.

WHO Microsoft designed the hardware concept and wrote the software for it, just as it has in past years with palmtops, cellphones and media centers. So far, companies like Samsung, Asus and TabletKiosk have signed on to make and sell Ultra Mobile PC's.

WHAT Earlier this spring, "what" was exactly what Microsoft wanted people to buzz about. In an Apple-esque attempt to use suspense as a marketing tool, Microsoft dropped hints about a mysterious project called Origami and doled out weekly videos with cryptic captions ("...do you know me? ... and how i can change your life?"). Origami — the Ultra Mobile PC — turns out to be a very small touch-screen PC. Microsoft recommends a seven-inch touch screen, two-pound weight, wireless networking and, of course, Windows XP.

At 9 by 5.5 by 1 inches, the resulting machine is either one of the world's tiniest Windows laptops — so tiny there's no keyboard, trackpad or CD drive — or a palmtop that's so huge, you need two hands to operate it.

Samsung's Q1 is the first Ultra Mobile PC. It's a shiny black plastic-clad slab that costs $1,100 — twice the price of similarly configured laptops. It bears two U.S.B. connectors, an Ethernet jack, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless antennas, a Compact Flash slot (for a camera's memory card) and a video output for a projector or external monitor.

Inside, there's a 40-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of memory and a 900-megahertz Celeron processor. If that sounds slow, you're right; this is probably the slowest computer you've used in years. Just turning on the Q1 takes over two minutes (40 seconds from hibernate mode).

Standard screen resolution on the Ultra Mobile PC is an oddball 800 by 480 pixels. Those are such peculiar dimensions, in fact, that many of Windows's own dialogue boxes don't fit. Even when they're up against the top of the screen, they extend past the screen's bottom edge — so important buttons like OK, Print and Cancel are unclickable. In software, this is what's known as a Big Oops.

In such situations, a workaround is available. You can press a button to choose one of two higher screen resolutions: 800 by 600 pixels or 1024 by 600. This is not some kind of Harry Potter magic that creates new pixels from the air; the screen still has only 800 by 480 actual pixels. Instead, these modes are simulations, created through software trickery and resulting in slight distortion and text blurriness.

NOW, holding an Ultra Mobile PC in your hands is very cool and exciting for the first 30 seconds, and it certainly turns heads. Unfortunately, your next instinct is to try doing something on this computer — and that's when you discover that there's no keyboard, mouse or trackpad.

The trackpad problem is survivable, thanks in part to the touch screen. If something on the screen is big enough, you can just tap it with your finger. That's the idea behind the Program Launcher, a great-

looking, animated Windows XP overlay that offers big, fat, customizable category buttons (Connect, Listen, Play and so on) that help to organize big, fat program buttons (Internet Explorer, Media Player and so on).

When the targets aren't so big — the tiny system tray icons, for example — you can tap the screen with the flimsy plastic stylus.

You can also move the cursor by pushing against a textured, eight-

directional nubbin with your left thumb — while pressing a button labeled Menu with your right thumb. And you can "click the mouse" by pressing the Change Resolution button while also pressing the Menu button.

Unfortunately, even if you master these nonsensical button combinations, the nubbin doesn't let you control the speed of cursor movement or change direction in midmove. You're better off with the stylus.

The missing keyboard is a tougher nut to crack. Microsoft faced this challenge once before, when it created the Tablet PC (a touch-screen laptop design). And because it runs the Tablet PC version of Windows XP, the Ultra Mobile PC inherits the same tools. For example, there's an on-screen keyboard; a handwriting-recognition window that offers excellent accuracy but makes editing brutally frustrating; rudimentary speech recognition; and Windows Journal, a free-form note-taking program that lets you delete, search and move your handwritten phrases.

(In its vertical orientation — you can rotate the screen image — you might expect that the Samsung would make an exceptional match for Windows Journal, but it's actually unusable this way. The screen isn't smart enough to know what's touching it — so if you rest any part of your hand on the glass, you get a crazy zagging line of "ink.")

As an alternative, Microsoft offers a new on-screen keyboard called Dial Keys. It depicts the right and left halves of a split keyboard at the lower corners of the screen, arrayed in concentric arcs that match your thumbs' reach.

It's a cute conceit. Unfortunately, not only do these huge quarter-circles obscure your document, but of course you can't feel the keys. Picking away with your thumbs is marginally easier than tapping the rectangular on-screen keyboard, but still slow and awkward; for example, you have to change modes for access to numbers and other basic symbols.

Stylus, cursor-control nubbin, two on-screen keyboards, handwriting recognition, mouse-click button combinations — what a lot of workarounds! And how unnecessary; the mouse and keyboard solved the problems of text input and cursor control decades ago. It's as though Microsoft invented a car with an opaque windshield — and then devised camera and periscope attachments so you can see where you're going.

WHEN The Samsung is available now, and its successors will arrive in time for the holidays. But nothing in this first crop is anything like what Bill Gates envisioned a year ago: a one-pound machine with all-day battery life and a price tag of $500 to $800. That dream, Microsoft admits, is years away.

WHERE Since it's so hard to enter text, few will try to do e-mail, programming, word processing or spreadsheet work on this computer.

An Ultra Mobile PC is handy, though, at boardroom presentations. You can hook it up to a projector and tap through PowerPoint without having to endure the hardships of bringing a laptop.

Airplane tray tables come to mind, too. Music, photo and video playback are all easy to operate with just your fingers, and the Samsung has both stereo speakers and a flip-out stand that props the thing up.

Keep in mind, though, that the battery lasts only about three hours. Worse, there's no built-in DVD drive. You can buy movies from the Internet, but you'll need one of Samsung's external drives anyway ($220, or $300 for a superthin one); without it, you'll have no easy way to install software.

WHY This, of course, is the great unanswered question.

Does the Ultra Mobile PC exist because regular laptops are too bulky? No, because you can get a full-blown laptop that's about the same size. For example, the Fujitsu Lifebook P7120 is only slightly larger and more expensive — but gives you a keyboard, trackpad, much bigger screen, faster processor and built-in CD/DVD drive. (Even the tiny Oqo, a Windows computer small enough for a coat pocket, has a physical BlackBerry-style keyboard.)

Does the Ultra Mobile PC exist because a touch screen might be useful in niche industries like insurance investigations and package delivery? Maybe. But the speed and flexibility of a Tablet PC would make much more sense — and cost hundreds of dollars less.

Microsoft deserves some credit for trying to shake up the status quo. It's sad, therefore, that the Ultra Mobile PC feels so wrong. It aims to bridge the size gulf between a palmtop and a laptop, but winds up inheriting the worst aspects of each. Like a palmtop, it feels claustrophobic, clumsy for text input and, with its exposed touch screen, vulnerable. Like a laptop, it's expensive, has short battery life and requires two hands to operate.

In short, the lesson missed by the Ultra Mobile PC's creators doesn't come from journalism school; it comes from the School of Common Sense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/te...ace&ei=5087%0A





Net Neutrality Missing From Sweeping Telecom Bill
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Senate took the first serious step on Monday toward rewriting the nation's telecommunications laws, a move that raises politically sensitive questions about digital copyright and Net neutrality and that could take years to complete.

Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, released a 135-page draft bill (click here for PDF) that represents the most sweeping rewrite in a decade of laws dealing with video, satellite and broadband communications.

Stevens said in a statement that the legislation grew out of more than a dozen hearings and drew on proposals from other senators as well. "It attempts to strike a balance between competing industries, consumer groups and local government," the Alaska Republican said.

Absent from the legislation are any regulations related to "Net neutrality," also known as network neutrality, that companies such as Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Intel and Microsoft have been lobbying for during the past few months. Instead of handing the Federal Communications Commission extensive powers to police violations--an idea defeated in a House of Representatives committee vote last week--the FCC would merely be required to prepare annual reports on any problems.

Included in the massive proposal is, however, one requirement sure to please the recording industry: authorization for the FCC to start the process of outlawing digital over-the-air radio and digital satellite receivers sold today that permit users to record broadcasts. Those would be supplanted with receivers that will treat as copy-protected anything with an "audio broadcast flag" in the future.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, called it "a necessary and appropriate focus on an issue critical to record labels, songwriters, publishers, artists and many others in the music community." The RIAA is worried about newer receivers, such as the Sirius S50, that it says let Americans assemble a personal music library without paying for it.
Telecom reform or not?

Here are some parts of Sen. Ted Stevens' proposal to rewrite U.S. telecommunications laws:

Audio broadcast flag
Devices would be banned based on "consensus" of FCC-created review board, which has a year to do this.

Broadband taxes
Taxes would be imposed on VoIP and broadband providers.

Child pornography
FCC would be asked to come up with rules banning child porn on local video services.

Municipal broadband
Cities and states could set up their own networks, with some restrictions.

Net neutrality
No new powers for FCC; it would publish a report instead.

Video broadcast flag
Some over-the-air receivers likely would be banned within six months, but regulations allow some fair use.

VoIP providers
Companies offering Internet phone services would increasingly be regulated and taxed as traditional phone companies.

Stevens did seem, however, to bow to pressure from technology groups and the consumer electronics industry when devising related regulations to copy-protect digital video. His legislation would order the FCC to ban digital TV tuners, such as ElGato's EyeTV 500, that let users record over-the-air broadcasts and save them without copy protection.

But the bill does say that Americans should enjoy the right to share recorded broadcast TV over their home networks, make "short excerpts" available over the Internet, and that news programming generally should not be flagged. Those sections are likely to draw opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America and its allies; one source close to Hollywood told CNET News.com on Monday that "the movie industry has real problems with the broadcast flag language as it appears in the bill."

A bill's long journey
If history is any indication, it's unlikely that Stevens' proposal will be enacted until next year at the earliest.

Because 2006 is an election year, work on Capitol Hill is likely to drop off as November approaches, and the House leadership may not see eye-to-eye with Stevens. For instance, at a House hearing in November, some politicians suggested that it was premature to enshrine a broadcast flag requirement in federal law.

Enacting the 1996 Telecommunications Act--the last major law in this area--was anything but a rapid process. Then-Sen. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat, first introduced an amendment that would become the Communications Decency Act in July 1994.

"These measures will help assure that the information superhighway does not turn into a red light district," Exon said at the time. "It will help protect children from being exposed to obscene, lewd, or indecent messages."

Exon later glued his proposal onto the Telecommunications Act, which was introduced in the Senate in March 1995 and sponsored by Stevens' predecessor, Democratic Sen. Larry Pressler. But negotiations between the House and Senate dragged on for months, and President Clinton didn't sign the measure until February 1996. The dozens of contentious topics that Stevens chose to address are likely to complicate negotiations this time around as well.

Net neutrality, for instance, has become a rallying cry recently for Internet and software firms and liberal advocacy groups (and even one or two conservative ones) that say strict FCC regulations are necessary to protect the Internet. Net neutrality refers to the idea of the federal government preventing broadband providers from favoring some Web sites or video streams' connection speeds over others.

Large telephone and cable companies have argued against the need to put such principles into law, saying they're not interested in blocking sites or services but deserve the right to charge extra for such a "fast lane" to make their investments in bandwidth-hogging services and new technologies economically viable. Broadband providers have spent billions of dollars to run fiber or faster links to American homes and businesses.

Another contentious topic is whether municipal governments should be competing with private companies by running their own broadband networks. This bill would authorize it--and zap state laws, including one in Pennsylvania that have restricted such activity. (A bill introduced in the House last year takes the opposite approach and bans all such municipal networks.)
Ted Stevens

Under Stevens' proposal, called the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act, municipalities would face some restrictions designed to prevent discrimination by public-sector enterprises against private-sector ones. Governments would be forced, for instance, to post public notice of any projects they planned to undertake and to have an open bidding process if they planned to bring on any private corporations as partners. That provision borrows from a broadly pro-business broadband bill introduced last summer by Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican.

Raising broadband taxes
Also, if Stevens' legislation passes, a broader swath of Americans would be taxed for the Universal Service Fund, a controversy-plagued, multibillion-dollar pool of money that's currently used to subsidize telecommunications services in rural and other high-cost areas, schools and libraries.

Critics--including Stevens, a self-avowed USF proponent--have charged that the fund has steadily been dwindling because traditional services, such as long-distance, are taking in less money, while unanticipated voice technologies, such as voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, are not expressly required to pay up. (A number of the larger VoIP providers, including Vonage, have said they already pay into the fund.)

The Stevens-Inouye proposal would require all companies providing a "communications service" to pay into the fund, which most likely would translate into another line item on customer bills. The bill defines "communications service" as a telecommunications service, a broadband service offering transmission speeds of at least 200 kilobits per second in one direction, and an IP-enabled voice service that connects to the public-switch telephone network. That means services like the voice-chat feature on AOL Instant Messenger would not be subject to the tax.

It would be up to the FCC to decide how to levy the fees. It could choose, for instance, to charge an USF fee to each phone number or IP address or to continue the current model, in which companies contribute a fixed portion of their revenues to the fund.

Like a proposal introduced last week by Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, a Republican on Steven's committee, the new bill would also create a separate "broadband service for unserved areas" account within the USF that would allow up to $500 million of support each year for such ventures.

"The overarching theme of the bill we introduce today is deployment of broadband nationwide," Stevens said in a statement upon introducing the bill.

The approach, however, does not enjoy unanimous support. Free-market thinkers and their sympathizers, including Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, tend to argue that because of evidence that broadband prices are on the decline, the fund should be capped or even phased out entirely.

The bill also revisits freeing up bands on the broadcast television spectrum for various purposes, including more affordable broadband deployments. It sets forth requirements for a consumer education campaign related to the digital television transition, which Congress approved late last year. That measure requires broadcasters to vacate the analog spectrum by Feb. 17, 2009, so that it can be turned over to public safety workers and auctioned off for new wireless services.

Like a number of its predecessors, the bill also proposes allowing unused channels, or "white spaces," on the broadcast television bands to be snapped up for unlicensed wireless ventures.

Consumer advocates say the properties of that chunk of the radio spectrum would enable cheaper and easier setup of broadband networks. The broadcasting lobby has railed against the idea, fearing interference with their stations' reception. The new bill would require the FCC to vet such concerns and to set rules aimed at staving off such conflicts.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6067153.html





More Professors Ban Laptops In Class
Kathy Matheson

As the professor lectured on the law, the student wore a poker face. But that was probably because, under the guise of taking notes on his laptop, the student actually was playing poker - online, using the school's wireless Internet connection. The scenario is not uncommon in today's college classrooms, and some instructors want it stopped. So they have done the unthinkable - banned laptops.

The move caused an uproar at the University of Memphis, where law professor June Entman nixed the computers in March because she felt they were turning her students into stenographers and inhibiting classroom debate.

Students rebelled by filing a complaint with the American Bar Association, although the organization dismissed it.

At the University of Pennsylvania, law professor Charles Mooney banned laptops from his classes two years ago for similar reasons.

Around that time, said Mooney, he was serving as an expert witness in a lawsuit. During a break in his deposition, he recalled asking the stenographer if she found the case interesting. She replied that she didn't remember anything she had taken down, Mooney said.

"I thought, 'That's what my students are doing,'" he said.

The ban led to "a lot of grumbling," Mooney said. Some students even dropped the class.

But as an experiment, the professor permitted laptops this past year to compare the difference in students' performance. His conclusion: Don't allow laptops.

Penn law student Karen Yeh, 23, said a laptop prohibition in one of her classes this past year was unnecessary. The embarrassing possibility of being unable to answer a question posed by the professor was reason enough for students to pay attention.

"Nobody would've been surfing the Net," Yeh said. "You're just too scared to get called on."

But some students said online distractions are really no different from pre-laptop days, when they might do a crossword puzzle in class.

Ryan McKenzie, a third-year Penn law student, said so much of students' knowledge is gleaned outside the classroom that in-class distractions don't detract from learning.

"The class is only a small part of the whole experience," said McKenzie, 29. "It's much more independent study."

Paul Engelking, a chemistry professor at the University of Oregon, said he was disturbed to find students gambling online while they were purportedly working on an in-class assignment.

Yet even students who are diligently taking notes with their laptops are missing out on social interaction and jokes the teachers make, he said.

"There isn't even eye contact going on in the classroom," said Engelking.

One remedy instructors have, he said, is to establish penalties for Web surfing, codify them in a course syllabus, and then enforce them.

But even that leaves a lot to be desired, Engelking said.

"I'm not completely thrilled about being a policeman in my own lecture hall," he said. "I've got enough things to do."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





All hear this

'Skypecasts' Allow 100-Person Conferencing
Peter Svensson

Skype, eBay Inc.'s Internet telephone subsidiary, is extending its reach with "Skypecasts" - free audio conferences for up to 100 participants.

Skype is used mainly for person-to-person calling but also has a conferencing feature for up to 10 people, who can all speak at the same time. A Skypecast, however, will be moderated by a host who controls when someone can speak.

The service launches Wednesday in an "early preview" form, said Skype's vice president of global marketing, Saul Klein.

Users will be able to find Skypecasts on the Skype Web site, where all the conferences will be listed publicly.

Skype envisions Skypecasts as a way for people to discuss shared interests and hobbies. Six Apart Ltd., the parent of blogging and networking services TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal, plans to promote Skypecasts as a way of expanding online communities, Klein said.

The term "Skypecast" could cause some confusion among bloggers - it has been used to describe a recording of an interview conducted via Skype, then distributed as a "podcast."

Skype is also releasing a new beta, or trial version, of its main application that includes the option to send text messages to cell phones for a small fee.

Other new features:

- Contacts in Microsoft Outlook can be called directly from Skype.

- Groups of contacts can be shared among users.

- Users will be able to pay for services like calls to landline phones without leaving the application. In the previous version of the software, users went to Skype's Web site to pay.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Time Warner Profit Climbs Almost 60 pct.
Seth Sutel

Media conglomerate Time Warner Inc. reported Wednesday that its first-quarter profit climbed nearly 60 percent, driven by growth in its cable TV division and gains from the sale of its book group and other assets.

The New York-based company, whose holdings include Warner Bros., the Time Inc. magazine publisher, CNN and HBO, earned $1.46 billion, or 32 cents a share, in the first three months of the year, up from $915 million, or 19 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

Revenues rose 1 percent to $10.46 billion from $10.36 billion a year ago.

Excluding unusual gains and other one-time effects in both periods as well as the results from its book group, which it has agreed to sell to the French media and defense conglomerate Lagardere SCA, earnings rose 32 percent to $1.2 billion from $908 million in the same period a year ago.

On that basis, earnings per share rose to 26 cents from 19 cents, well ahead of the estimate of the 20 cents expected by analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

The biggest gains among Time Warner's far-flung properties came in its cable TV division, where operating income rose 25 percent on a 15 percent gain in revenues.

Time Warner Cable added 82,000 basic cable subscribers in the quarter, and the company also reported gains in signing up customers for premium services including digital video, high-speed Internet, digital video recorders and digital phone service.

The gains in cable as well as in TV and movie production and cable networks offset declines at AOL and in magazine publishing.

AOL continued to lose subscribers, shedding 835,000 in the quarter for a total of 18.6 million, as it remakes itself into an advertising-driven Internet company. AOL's operating income fell 14 percent as declines in subscription revenues more than offset gains in advertising.

Time Inc.'s earnings fell 12 percent in the quarter on weaker results at its overseas magazines as well as $12 million in restructuring charges as it revamped its corporate hierarchy. The sale of Time Warner Book Group, which was announced in February, resulted in a gain of $206 million.

The company also recorded one-time gains in the quarter from the sale of other assets, including a $20 million profit from the sale of two aircraft and gains from investments in a telecom company and Canal Satellite Digital.

Time Warner said it had repurchased $8 billion of its own stock - or 10 percent of its outstanding shares - under its current share buyback program, and expects to complete the full $20 billion buyback by the end of 2007.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Profit Falls as Sales Rise at Verizon
Ken Belson

Verizon Communications said yesterday that its profit dipped 7.1 percent in the first quarter as it absorbed the costs of integrating MCI and building a fiber optic network designed to deliver television to homes.

Sales, however, jumped because the mobile phone division, Verizon Wireless, continued to outperform its rivals and because demand was strong for broadband lines.

Verizon, the nation's second-largest phone company, after AT&T, earned $1.63 billion, or 56 cents a share, compared with $1.76 billion, or 63 cents a share, in the quarter a year ago. Excluding one-time costs, Verizon earned 60 cents a share, a penny more than financial analysts had expected.

Verizon said its integration of MCI, which it purchased in January, was ahead of schedule. The company expects to save $550 million in costs this year as a result of the merger. Verizon also said it had eliminated one-third of the 3,500 jobs that it planned to cut at MCI this year.

Revenue grew 25.1 percent, to $22.7 billion, compared with the $18.2 billion in sales Verizon generated in the first quarter of 2005.

Verizon said it operated 48 million phone lines at the end of March, 3.6 million fewer than at the end of the first quarter last year. But the company said the number of broadband subscribers jumped 47.1 percent in the first quarter compared with the period last year.

As in past quarters, the biggest contribution to growth came from Verizon Wireless. The company added 1.7 million new subscribers and sales grew 18.8 percent in the quarter. Like other wireless carriers, Verizon Wireless has been trying to persuade customers to use more data services to offset a slowdown in the amount of money generated from voice calls.

Monthly average spending per customer for wireless data services rose to $5.58, up 79 percent from the quarter last year. The company said it had 6.2 million subscribers for its high-speed mobile phone service.

Ivan G. Seidenberg, Verizon's chief executive, repeated that his company was interested in buying the 45 percent of Verizon Wireless owned by the British company Vodafone, but that Vodafone must decide when it wants to sell its stake.

Financial analysts, however, continue to voice concerns about Verizon's ambitious plans to install fiber optic cable to millions of homes by the end of the decade. The company's new network now passes 3.6 million homes and Verizon hopes to reach 6 million homes by the end of the year. The costs of connecting homes to the network remain high, though, and the number of customers buying services is relatively small.

The costs of building the fiber network shaved 6 cents a share off Verizon's earnings in the quarter.

Verizon is spending far more to build a new network than AT&T, which is extending its fiber optic cables to within 3,000 feet of homes and using existing copper cables to cover the remaining distance.

Despite the higher cost, Doreen A. Toben, Verizon's chief financial officer, said investors were starting to understand that her company's network would be more versatile than AT&T's and thus worth the extra cost.

"We've spent a lot of time getting bashed" because AT&T's network is cheaper than Verizon's, she said. But now "analysts seem to be taking a longer-term view."

Yesterday, Verizon's shares fell 15 cents, or 0.46 percent, to $32.64.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...y/03place.html





Microsoft Teams Up With Hollywood to Offer Original Web Shows
Lorne Manly

Nearly 10 years after wholeheartedly but prematurely embracing original entertainment programming on the Web, Microsoft is re-entering the fray. But instead of attempting to contort itself into a media company by hiring scores of relatively unknown writers and producers and go it virtually alone, this time Microsoft has chosen to team up with some high-profile Hollywood talent.

The first deal for its MSN Originals initiative is an alliance with Ben Silverman, one of the prime movers behind importing the reality show craze to the United States and the producer of shows like "The Office" and "The Biggest Loser" on NBC.

The one-year, multimillion-dollar deal calls for the creation of 10 Web pilots for MSN, each tailored to one or more strengths of the Web. Four shows have already been given the go-ahead, including a short-form comedy that can be described, in classic high-concept Hollywood style, as "The Office" meets "Reno 911" meets "Airplane," doled out in two-and-a-half minute bits starting this fall. Adding to the sitcom verisimilitude: Tom Arnold is close to signing on to star as the lovably flawed pilot for a commuter airline.

Another show, "Under the Influence," plans to pair a musician with one of his or her inspirations ("Unplugged" meets "Crossroads"), have them engage in a musical give-and-take, and then allow the audience to delve more deeply into the lives and music of other important figures in the musicians' lives.

Other approved pilots are "Face Off," an interactive "Crossfire" with a pop-culture slant, and the tentatively titled "Chef to the Rescue," which will allow people whipping up meals to get specific advice from a celebrity chef.

To harness the Web's attributes, many of the shows and applications will wrap around them community offshoots, commerce opportunities and the ability to dig deeper for related segments or information. Product placement, a specialty of Mr. Silverman, will also be an integral part of the programming.

And in a final twist, Mr. Silverman's Reveille, the independent production company he founded and runs, will be able to turn any of the Web shows into television series. Microsoft will have a financial stake in any resulting show. "We are all about building brands that can go across mediums," Mr. Silverman said.

Microsoft's move comes as it is looking to jazz up its MSN portal, one part of its accelerating competition with Google, Yahoo and AOL. Ultimately Microsoft executives want to lure more Web users to MSN, keep them there longer than they have stayed in the past and sell plenty of advertising to marketers wishing to woo them.

The deal is expected to be announced today at the MSN Strategic Account Summit, a Microsoft-convened gathering of marketing, technology and entertainment executives in Redmond, Wash.

Microsoft's previous foray into original Web content was not particularly auspicious. In 1996 and 1997 the company poured about a $100 million into shows like "475 Madison" (a dark comedy about a New York advertising agency) and "Project: Watchfire" (a serious look at U.F.O.'s) and mini-sites like Mungo Park (an outdoor adventure project) and the movie-obsessed Cinemania.

In November 1996, when MSN announced its transition from a proprietary service to a Web supersite, it unveiled a lineup of more than two dozen shows for what its executives — borrowing from the language of television — called a new season. In the ensuing months it found itself mimicking another tradition of the television business when it canceled almost all of the shows.

Within a few years Microsoft had dumped nearly all of the original entertainment programming for more practical, utilitarian services. "Perhaps we invested too much too quickly in content before the audience was there and the bandwidth was there," said Gayle Troberman, the director of branded entertainment and experiences for MSN.

Faster connections and the audience's embrace of Web video have persuaded Microsoft executives to intensify their original programming ambitions. But Microsoft executives have also learned to play to the company's strength: its collection of large numbers of Web users, thanks largely to the power of its Web browser and its ability to steer people to MSN.

While continuing to license content from existing media and entertainment companies (like clips of NBC shows or the streaming of new shows before they make their debuts on network television) and beefing up its user-generated content platform, MSN is adding a third pillar to its content strategy.

"We're going to partner with the experts," the new generation of content creators for the broadband experience, said Rob Bennett, general manager of entertainment and video services for MSN.

"We're not going to go build a massive studio in Santa Monica and go give someone a Handycam," Mr. Bennett added, in a playful dig at Yahoo's media efforts. (Yahoo recently scaled back its ambitious plans to produce television-style programming for the Web site, shifting more to user-generated content as well as repurposed fare from media and entertainment companies.)

Mr. Silverman and his staff — and the connections to talent they bring — are the attraction for MSN. Mr. Silverman's longtime relationship with Mr. Arnold, for example, helped interest the actor in the concept for the Web sitcom, tentatively titled "Airplane." And for "Face Off," Reveille is working with Woody Thompson, a co-creator of "Pop-Up Video," the VH1 creation in the 1990's that spurred a generation of wisecrackers to ironically and affectionately deconstruct the detritus of popular culture.

"We told Woody, 'The same way you took on the static music video, you should be attacking this new medium,' " Mr. Silverman said.

MSN meanwhile has the distribution to get these new shows in front of millions of people, quickly. And MSN has plenty of knowledge about what their audience flocks to. Entertainment, for example, represents about half of the searches on MSN, according to Mr. Silverman. Knowing that tidbit helped Reveille decide to make the most-searched entertainment-related query become the topic for the debate of the day for "Face Off."

MSN and Reveille executives understand that Web users want content they can snack on, and then — when the mood strikes and spare time materializes — immerse themselves in offshoots. That characteristic causes Mr. Silverman to rave about the possibilities of creating programming for the Web.

"It's creativity without walls," Mr. Silverman said. "You're never in one room."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/arts/03micr.html





Microsoft and Google Set to Wage Arms Race
Steve Lohr and Saul Hansell

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, described Google in an interview late last year as a worthy adversary, a company to test Microsoft's mettle. "This is hypercompetition, make no mistake," Mr. Gates observed.

The rivalry between the companies is growing more combative, and with good reason: the outcome is likely to shape the future of competition in computing and the way people use information technology.

A measure of how seriously Microsoft takes the challenge came last Thursday when it announced that its spending would rise sharply next year, about $2 billion higher than previous estimates. Much of the extra money, analysts say, is going to meet the threat from companies offering advertising-supported Internet services and software, led by Google.

"Microsoft doesn't have to kill Google, but it has to narrow the gap," said Richard Sherlund, an analyst at Goldman Sachs & Company. "It has to be in the same ZIP code."

To succeed, Microsoft has to make strong inroads into Internet services and software, where Google is a leader. "It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk," Ray Ozzie, a chief technical officer, warned in an e-mail memo to Microsoft employees last year.

Microsoft enters that battle from a stronghold: its lucrative, powerful business in personal computer software. Google has asserted that Microsoft's next Web browser typically steers users to Microsoft's search service, limiting consumer choice and potentially hurting Google, the leading Internet search engine.

Microsoft says Google's objections are mistaken, and that its new browser, Internet Explorer 7, increases a user's search options.

But Google has advantages of its own, and the Internet services business is very different from the desktop software industry.

The Internet model is one that offers search, e-mail, calendar, contacts and even word processing as services accessible remotely with a PC or hand-held device with a Web browser. Typically, Google invents a new service or feature, makes it a free Web-based service, and only later figures out how to make money on it from advertising of some kind.

That ad-supported software, distributed as a Web service, is a threat to Microsoft's model of selling licensed desktop software, at least in the consumer market. Corporations have so far shown less interest in ad-supported software as an Internet service.

To smaller software companies, Google's strategy appears to have the same competitive impact as Microsoft's tried-and-true practice of bundling more software programs and features into its Windows operating system.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, a Web newsletter, said that in some niches of the software business, Google is casting the same sort of shadow over Silicon Valley that Microsoft once did.

"You've got people who don't even feel they can launch a product for fear that Google will get in," Mr. Sullivan said.

Google, he said, has acquired companies and then made their products free, roiling the markets in which they compete. Google has introduced free versions of the graphics software made by SketchUp and of the Internet analytics service from Urchin, two companies that it bought.

And Google won a bid to offer wireless Internet service in San Francisco at no charge, hoping to make money by selling local advertising. If this model proves to be successful, it could cut into the business of other Internet providers and wireless phone companies.

Now Google is starting to move directly into Microsoft's core market. It recently acquired Writely, a Web-based word processor.

How far Google can eat into Microsoft's software franchise is uncertain. But Microsoft fears that Google could become a kind of operating system of the Internet in the same way that Windows is the dominant operating system of personal computing.

For its part, Google wants to avoid becoming the "next Netscape," a reference to the early leader in the browser market that Microsoft eventually thwarted.

"A lot of the people who are at the center of Google had done hand-to-hand combat with Microsoft in the 90's, and I don't think they have forgotten," observed John Battelle, the editor of SearchBlog, a Web log on search technology.

The group includes Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive and former executive of Sun Microsystems; Omid Kordestani, its senior vice president for sales and a former Netscape executive; and John Doerr, a Google director and venture capitalist who was a prime backer of Netscape, Sun Microsystems and other Microsoft rivals.

"They are very worried," Mr. Battelle said, "about Microsoft leveraging their I.E. monopoly," referring to Microsoft's commanding share of the browser market, which Microsoft includes in Windows.

The fears of both companies may well be exaggerated. For Microsoft, the PC promises to remain a powerful business and technology franchise for years to come. And Google should benefit from the fact that Microsoft, after a federal antitrust judgment against it and a settlement with the government, is more restrained in its tactics and behavior than it once was.

A major expense of their escalating battle lies in the very nature of the Internet services realm: the digital engine rooms and power plants that must be built to support it. Google does not disclose technical details, but estimates of the number of computer servers in its data centers range up to a million.

Last month, when reporting its quarterly earnings, Google reported a doubling in its rate of capital investment, mainly in computer servers, network equipment and space for data centers, and said it would spend at least $1.5 billion over the next year.

As Google grows, so does its need to store and handle more Web site information, video and e-mail content on its servers. "Those machines are full," Mr. Schmidt, the chief executive, said in an interview last month. "We have a huge machine crisis."

To catch up, Microsoft is also stepping up capital spending as it invests aggressively to build data centers worldwide. "It is becoming more capital intensive," said Mr. Sherlund of Goldman Sachs. "But the company has a bulging cash position and no debt. That's not a constraint for Microsoft."

However deep their pockets and established their names, the two companies will mainly compete on one point. "In the long run," Mr. Battelle said, "it's about whether you have the best service."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/te.../02google.html





All of a Sudden, Old Fashioned Wind-Up Energy Makes Sense

Mechanical clocks have existed since the 1300's and early last century, direct wind-up power was the only way to start your car - but only in the last decade has the seemingly obvious connection between wind-up energy generation and power reliant modern devices been made. British inventor Trevor Baylis saw the benefits of developing a wind-up radio for third world countries in 1991- his direct inspiration was to help combat the spread of AIDS by providing a means to transmit vital information about the disease to areas where no electricity was available - and the idea was first commercialised in 1996 when Freeplay released its wind-up radio.

Baylis's prototype wind-up radio operated by means of a coiled spring which powered a generator through a series of gears and played for 14 minutes after being wound for 30 seconds, but the latest models incorporate rechargeable batteries which allow the radio to be charged at any time - not only when its in use. The Freeplay Energy range also includes combination torch/radios, a short wave version and systems that incorporate solar power, batteries, or AC/DC adaptors as well as wind-up energy. The latest radios deliver around 50 minutes of operating time when fully wound which takes 60 turns.

Freeplay Energy has sold over three million units since its beginnings, and over 150,000 of these have gone to countries in the developing world - most of these through the assistance of government and aid agencies - and although the units are still relatively expensive there is a continuing push to make this technology count where it's needed most.

Sony and Phillps have entered the wind-up radio market and Motorola have teamed up with Freeplay to develop a wind-up mobile phone charger that offers 5 minutes of talk time for 45 seconds of winding. The product is designed to work with all Motorola phones and will be available in the US later this year. There are no plans for an Australian release as yet.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg for wind-up energy - mobile phones, MP3s, laptops and scores of other devices become far more energy efficient as well as critical to our daily lives. Products based on the Motorola Freecharge concept are already beginning to emerge from elsewhere and British company Atkin Design and Development have produced a next generation 'wind-up battery' that uses a supercapacitor instead of a rechargeable lithium battery. When this innovation was adapted to the wind-up radio, Atkin Design in conjunction with Sony produced a unit that plays for 90 minutes after one minute of winding.

The Freeplay range is available in Australia through Multi-powered products (www.multipoweredproducts.com.au) and the basic radio unit costs AUS$104.50
http://www.gizmag.com/go/1263/





If it only had a crank

Intel to Offer Its Own Plan for Global Internet Access
John Markoff

Aiming to help close the so-called digital divide, the Intel Corporation plans to announce a design for a sub-$400 educational laptop and a five-year, $1 billion program to train teachers and to extend wireless digital Internet access worldwide.

The moves are intended to bolster Intel's reach into new markets, but may also have an effect on the American market for computers in education.

The program is to be announced on Tuesday at the World Congress on Information Technology, a conference in Austin, Tex., where Intel's chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, will elaborate on it in a speech on Wednesday.

The initiative, called World Ahead, comes as Intel, the No. 1 chip maker, is embarking on what it says will be a $1 billion revamping program in the face of declining market share and a lagging share price. It will roughly double what Intel is spending annually on training and technology support in places lagging in digital development, Mr. Otellini said in a telephone interview on Monday.

The company plans to support the computer training of 10 million teachers around the world. It has already financed the training of three million, he said.

He distinguished Intel's efforts from other campaigns with similar aims by saying Intel would focus on full-featured computer systems with enough power and memory to run Microsoft software.

Intel's rival chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices, has backed the concept of reaching half of the world's population with inexpensive personal computers by 2015, and Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been designing a sub-$100 notebook computer for educational use in developing nations.

Those machines have either been designed to run open-source software or a subset of the complete version of Microsoft's standard desktop software.

The issue has been a highly charged one, both for political and business reasons.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Mr. Negroponte publicly debated the issue with Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, and his chief technology officer, Craig J. Mundie, who suggested that a better alternative to an ultralow-cost computer might be a combination phone and personal organizer that can be fitted with an inexpensive display and a keyboard.

On Monday, Mr. Otellini appeared to be making a point of defending the utility of the Intel-Microsoft desktop standard.

"We don't think you cross the digital divide with old technology," he said. "It doesn't need exotic technology and it runs real applications."

The new Intel design, to be called Eduwise, will include software for the classroom. Makers of the computer are to be named later.

Mr. Otellini dismissed the possibility that the emergence of such low-cost computers might cannibalize existing markets, saying that low-end portable computers were already close to these prices in the United States.

Mr. Negroponte, whose machine will have a handle, a hand crank and an innovative display screen, is in discussions with Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa to purchase millions of the notebooks.

He said that the Intel program was a step forward, but that focusing efforts on training teachers had serious drawbacks.

"Anything is better than nothing," he said, "but teacher training is the slowest way to improve global education and reaches very few rural, remote teachers in very poor places."

He argued that a more radical and more efficient approach was to equip children with technology. Intel has already announced several PC design initiatives for specific regions, including a desktop computer for the Indian market and another for Mexico. The Mexican machine is based on a partnership with Telmex, the Mexican communications company and involves a subsidy for a broadband Internet connection. The machine is priced about 20 percent below the consumer market price for a similar machine.

In addition to training and access to computing, Intel's focus will be on Internet connections. The company has already financed 175 experimental wireless networks using Wi-Max, a longer-distance version of the Wi-Fi networking standard.

Intel executives have said they believe that Wi-Max deployments will leapfrog stages of development in the nonindustrialized world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/te...gy/02chip.html





IM Worm Raises Bar By Using P2P For Herder Comm Channel
Gregg Keizer

Security companies alerted users Tuesday of a worm that spreads via instant messaging, plants a bot on hijacked PCs, and poses a special challenge to researchers hoping to trace the bot back to its controller.

Dubbed "Nagache.a" by the likes of McAfee and Symantec, the worm propagates through AIM (America Online Instant Messaging) and MSN Messenger, as well as via email and network shares. It will also install in a drive-by download - a secret installation invisible to the user - if the PC isn't patched against a pair of 2004 vulnerabilities in Windows.

In turn, Nagache.a installs a bot - a controlling component - that communicates to its handler, sometimes called a "herder," on TCP port 8.

However, unlike most bots, which are run by their herders through IRC, this bot is controlled via a peer-to-peer network that includes the infected machines. The traffic between the compromised computers and the herder is also encrypted, or at least not readable, said an analyst with the Internet Storm Center.

Other advisories said that the bot had raised the malware bar.

"The command and control channel that is used is unique, as the bot appears to connect to infected peers instead of a static list," said Websense in its online alert. "A peer-to-peer command and control channel makes it more difficult to block commands issued to the bot and the traffic over this channel uses obfuscation in an attempt to bypass intrusion detection systems."

Although AOL has blocked several of the IP addresses hard-coded in the worm to prevent the ensuing bot from communicating with its herder, "numerous other peers have been identified" the Internet Storm Center said in an update Tuesday. "It no longer makes sense to post a list of IPs. The best defense would to be to monitor activity in your flows for tcp/8, update anti-virus, and/or use the Snort signature to detect this activity."
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.a...&src=site-marq





Music-Sharing Programs Targeted
Jessica Langdon

Peer-to-peer programs like LimeWire and Kazaa found themselves in the federal spotlight as music companies filed suits against hundreds of people - including a woman at Sheppard Air Force Base - alleging they downloaded and distributed music illegally.

Peer-to-peer programs allow users to share music and other media files, and the recording companies and artists don't get paid for those exchanges.

Companies that hold titles to several copyrighted recordings - from "Falling Away from Me" by Korn to "Panama" by Van Halen - named Mallory Young, whose address is listed at Sheppard Air Force Base, as a defendant.

Young was one of 235 named defendants in suits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America on April 21.

The suit against Young seeks an injunction prohibiting her from downloading or distributing materials that belong to the plaintiffs' companies - which hold exclusive rights - unless she has direct permission and license to do so.

It would also require her to destroy any unauthorized downloads or copies of those recordings.

When delving into potential lawsuits, online investigators from RIAA use the same methods anyone else would to search peer-to-peer networks for copyrighted materials, and they confirm the files are copyrighted, a fact sheet explains.

At that point, the investigators don't know the users' identities - they know only the Internet addresses - and RIAA members file "John Doe" lawsuits until they can track down names.

Internet service providers supply the names, and suits are then filed with named defendants.

RIAA, which represents recording companies, takes the "songlifting" issue seriously, its president said.

"The theft of music continues to hurt our industry as a whole from songwriters losing their jobs to record stores closing their doors," a news release quoted RIAA President Cary Sherman,

Music theft "directly affects our ability to invest in the next generation of music," Sherman said. "Record companies are offering fans an extraordinary digital music experience, but the growth of the digital music market will suffer if we allow this theft to go unchecked."

Lawsuits were filed in federal district courts in Wichita Falls and other Texas cities as well as across the country on April 21.
http://www.timesrecordnews.com/trn/l...672025,00.html





Milestones: First person to ever to appear on TV dies

Vale: The Mother of Television

As extraordinary as it may seem, one of the people who created the first television died last week when Elma G. "Pem" Farnsworth, author of the Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier and wife of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, died in Bountiful, Utah at the age of 98. Pem married Philo Taylor Farnsworth in 1926. She was on her husband's lab team, handling technical drawings for his experiments with transmitting pictures through the air and was present on September 7, 1927, in San Francisco when his invention of electronic television was first demonstrated successfully. Pem was the first person ever to appear on television and is often referred to as "The Mother of Television." Her technical drawings of those early experiments are part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Institute. A devout Mormon, she derived her greatest satisfaction in encouraging young people, saying "if you believe you can do it, anything is possible."

After Philo's death in 1971, "Pem" dedicated herself to preserving his legacy, keeping his name in its rightful place among great scientists and inventors of the 20th Century.

She penned her autobiography Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier in 1990.

Thanks to her efforts Philo was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame, is represented in statuary hall in Washington, D.C., and featured with a handful of inventors on U.S. postal stamps.

Her wish was to live to see a film made of her husband's life.

Well into her 90's, Mrs. Farnsworth was successful in lobbying the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to create an award honoring her husband's contributions to the medium. She presented the first "Philo T. Farnsworth Award for Technical Excellence in Television" at the Emmy Awards in 2003.

A devout Mormon, she derived her greatest satisfaction in encouraging young people, saying "if you believe you can do it, anything is possible." Philo is quoted in the excellent book The Boy who invented Television, as saying, "I know that God exists. I know that I have never invented anything. I have been a medium by which these things were given to the culture as fast as the culture could earn them. I give all the credit to God."

Pem’s own book Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier (Pemberly-Kent Publishing) is now a collectable, as is the original biography, The Story of Television – the life of Philo T Farnsworth.
http://www.gizmag.com/go/5575/





Why You Should Care About Network Neutrality

The future of the Internet depends on it!
Tim Wu

The Internet is largely meritocratic in its design. If people like instapundit.com better than cnn.com, that's where they'll go. If they like the search engine A9 better than Google, they vote with their clicks. Is it a problem, then, if the gatekeepers of the Internet (in most places, a duopoly of the local phone and cable companies) discriminate between favored and disfavored uses of the Internet? To take a strong example, would it be a problem if AT&T makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail?

Welcome to the fight over "network neutrality," Washington's current obsession. The debate centers on whether it is more "neutral" to let consumers reach all Internet content equally or to let providers discriminate if they think they'll make more money that way.

The cable firms and the Bells have (to their credit, but under pressure) sworn off blocking Web sites. Instead, they propose to carve off bandwidth for their own services—namely, television—and, more controversially, to charge selected companies a toll for "priority" service. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin thinks there is nothing wrong with that. But critics say technological prioritization and degradation are the same thing—that given limited room on the network, whoever isn't prioritized is by implication degraded.

In trying to figure out who's right, let's forget about the Internet and look at KFC. The fast-food chain discriminates. It has an exclusive deal with Pepsi, and that seems fine to pretty much everyone. Now, let's think about the nation's highways. How would you feel if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for GM cars only? That seems intuitively wrong. But what, if anything, is the difference between KFC and I-95? And which is a better model for the Internet?

Two obvious differences are market power and the availability of substitutes. KFC is a small fry, relatively, locked in competition with the likes of McDonald's and Popeye's. KFC sells Pepsi? So what? McDonald's sells Coke.

It's a lot harder to substitute for an interstate. And if highways really did choose favorite brands, you might buy a Pontiac instead of a Toyota to get the rush-hour lane, not because the Pontiac is actually a good car. As a result, the nature of competition among car-makers would change. Rather than try to make the best product, they would battle to make deals with highways.

That's what would happen if discrimination reigned on the Internet: a transformation from a market where innovation rules to one where deal-making rules. Or, a market where firms rush to make exclusive agreements with AT&T and Verizon instead of trying to improve their products. There's a deeper point here: When who you know matters more than anything, the market is no longer meritocratic and consequently becomes less efficient. At the extreme, a market where centralized actors pick favorites isn't a market at all, but a planned economy.

What we're ultimately asking is a question that Adam Smith struggled with. Is there something special about "carriers" and infrastructure—roads, canals, electric grids, trains, the Internet—that mandates special treatment? Since about the 17th century, there's been a strong sense that basic transport networks should serve the public interest without discrimination.This might be because so much depends on them: They catalyze entire industries, meaning that gratuitous discrimination can have ripple effects across the nation. By this logic, so long as you think the Internet is more like a highway than a fried-chicken outlet, it should be neutral in what it carries.

This is the basic case for network neutrality—to prevent centralized control over the future of the Internet. But there's a long-standing rebuttal that goes like this: A broadband company already has incentives to make the network neutral, because it's a better network that way. If AT&T makes money on an exclusive deal, they'll lose it somewhere else. Whatever money AT&T earns by prioritizing Google rather than Yahoo!, it will lose by making its product—broadband service—less attractive to consumers. By this logic, regulating the Bells is a waste of time. AT&T and Verizon also say that they must be free to discriminate to justify their investments in building networks. If you don't let us discriminate, they say, we won't build.

It's true that the Bells might make extra cash by discriminating. But AT&T can extract cash in other ways, too, like charging its customers higher prices. I believe that it's better to have consumers pay more for service than to have AT&T picking and choosing winners on the network. Both are a cost to the economy, but the latter is a double cost. It creates costs that are passed on to consumers anyhow, and it also distorts competition between eBay, Yahoo!, and the like. Building networks at the expense of network applications has a logic O. Henry would enjoy, for it's akin to selling a painting in order to buy a better frame.

None of this is to say that a good network-neutrality rule must be absolute, or even close to absolute. It's an open secret that AT&T and Verizon want to become more like cable television companies. If Verizon wants to build a private network to sell TV, that would justify broad powers to control the network, a precondition to providing the service at all. No neutrality rule should be a bar to building better networks that do more.

But what must be banned are blocking, gratuitous discrimination, and choosing favorites. While it's one way to earn cash, it's just too close to the Tony Soprano vision of networking: Use your position to make threats and extract payments. This is similar to the outlawed, but still common, "payola" schemes in the radio world. Yes, there's money in such schemes, but they aren't good for the industry or the country. If allowing network discrimination means being stuck with AT&T's long-term vision of the Internet, it won't be worth it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/fr/rss/





Markey Introduces Net Neutrality Act
Evan Derkacz

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) threw down the gauntlet just moments ago, introducing the Network Neutrality Act of 2006 [full text HERE], which "[offers a] choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies, and safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. This legislation is designed to save the Internet and thwart those who seek to fundamentally and detrimentally alter the Internet as we know it."

In an unequivocal editorial today, the NY Times put it this way:
Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large fees would get priority over everything else.

The Times goes on to note that if the cable and telephone companies got their way, "[it] would be a financial windfall for Internet service providers, but a disaster for users, who could find their Web browsing influenced by whichever sites paid their service provider the most money."

Thus far, nobody who isn't working for the telephone and cable companies -- cough... Mike McCury -- those who will benefit at the expensive of ordinary internet users, has provided any legitimate opposition to Network Neutrality. To wit: watch Sean-Paul Kelley's excellent annotated video of Democrat Charlie Gonzalez's disingenuous spiel HERE. Gonzalez, as you'll find out, happens to be the recipient of a generous contribution from guess who...

During last week's debate on the earlier Markey amendment, calling on the House Energy & Commerce Committee to protect Internet freedom, the more the issue came to light, the more votes neutrality received.

This is that rare bird, a black and white issue, with large companies on one side and the vast majority of America on the other. Politicians will only oppose network neutrality so long as it stays in the darkest corners of debate.

Here's the updated action list, from Matt Stoller via parachutec:

1. SIGN a Net Neutrality petition to Congress.

2. CALL Congress now. Especially, tell your rrepresentatives in the House to support Markey’s Net Neutrality Act of 2006, but educate your senators on this issue too, as the fight will soon move there.

3. WRITE A LETTER to Congress.

4. MYSPACE: Add "Save the Internet" as a friend.

5. Check out the BLOG RESOURCES about this issue, including "Save the Internet" logo.

6. VISIT the SavetheInternet coalition Web site for more information.

The entire text of Markey's act is below or on his webpage HERE.

May 2, 2006- Introduction of the Markey Network Neutrality Act of 2006

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce the "Network Neutrality Act of 2006."

Broadband networks, Mr. Speaker, are the lifeblood of our emerging digital economy. These broadband networks also hold the promise of promoting innovation in various markets and technologies, creating jobs, and furthering education. The world-wide leadership that the U.S. provides in high technology is directly related to the government-driven policies over decades which have ensured that telecommunications networks are open to all lawful uses and all users. The Internet, which is accessible to more and more Americans with every day that goes by on such broadband networks, was also founded upon an open architecture protocol and as a result it has provided low barriers to entry for web-based content, applications, and services.

Recent decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and court interpretations, however, put these aspects of broadband networks and the Internet in jeopardy. The corrosion of historic policies of nondiscrimination by the imposition of bottlenecks by broadband network owners endanger economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread.

This network neutrality bill has essentially three parts. The first part articulates overall broadband policy and network neutrality goals for the country, and spells out exactly what network neutrality means and puts it into the statute so that it will possess the force of law. The second part embodies reasonable exceptions to the general rules, such as to route emergency communications or offer consumer protection features, such as spam blocking technology. And the final part of the bill features an expedited complaint process to deal with grievances and violations within thirty days.

The legislation states that a broadband network provider may not block, impair, degrade or discriminate against the ability of any person to use a broadband connection to access the content, applications, and services available on broadband networks, including the Internet. It ensures that broadband network providers operate their networks in a non-discriminatory manner. The bill also ensures that consumers can attach any device to the broadband operator's network, such as an Internet phone, or wi-fi router, or settop box, or any other innovative gadget invented in the coming years. Moreover, in order to prevent the warping of the World Wide Web into a system of "tiered service," the legislation will prevent broadband providers from charging new bottleneck fees for enhanced quality of service or the prioritization of bits.

Finally, if a broadband provider chooses to prioritize data of any type, it requires that it do so for all data of that type and not charge a fee for such prioritization. For instance, if a broadband provider wants to prioritize the transmission of bits representing a VOIP phone call for its own VOIP service, it must do so for all VOIP services so as not to put its competitors at an arbitrary disadvantage.

Mr. Speaker, from the beginning of Internet time until August of 2005, the Internet's nondiscriminatory nature was safeguarded from being compromised by Federal Communications Commission rules that required nondiscriminatory treatment by telecommunications carriers. In other words, no commercial telecommunications carrier could engage in discriminatory conduct regarding Internet traffic and Internet access because it was prohibited by law.

In August of 2005, however, the Federal Communications Commission re-classified broadband access to the Internet in a way which removed such legal protections. And how did the industry respond to this change? Just a few weeks after the FCC removed the Internet's protections, the Chairman of then-SBC Communications made the following statement in a November 7th Business Week interview: "Now what they [Google, Yahoo, MSN] would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. . . ."

In a December 1, 2005 Washington Post article, a BellSouth executive indicated that his company wanted to strike deals to give certain Web sites priority treatment in reaching computer users. The article noted this would "significantly change how the Internet operates" and that the BellSouth executive said "his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering." Meaning, that if the rival firm did not pay, or was not permitted to pay for competitive reasons, its service presumably would not "operate with the same quality" as BellSouth's own product.

Finally, on January 6, 2006, the CEO of Verizon, in an address to the Consumer Electronics Show also indicated that Verizon would now be the corporate arbiter of how traffic would be treated when he said the following: "We have to make sure [content providers] don't sit on our network and chew up our capacity."

I think these statements should give pause to those who might argue that we shouldn't do anything to enact strong network neutrality provisions because currently no harm is being done.

Do we really have to wait till these corporate giants divide and conquer the open architecture of the Internet to make that against the law? These telephone company executives are telling us that they intend to discriminate in the prioritization of bits and to discriminate in the offering of "quality of service" functions - for a new fee, a new broadband bottleneck toll - to access high bandwidth customers, we cannot afford to wait until they actually start doing that before we step in to stop it.

Once they start making money by leveraging that bottleneck position in the marketplace, will a future Congress really stare them down and take that revenue stream away?

Mr. Speaker, if we don't protect the openness of the Internet for entrepreneurial activity, we're ruining a wonderful model for low barrier entry, innovation, and job creation. Broadband network owners should not be able to determine who can and who cannot offer services over broadband networks or over the Internet. The detrimental effect to the digital economy would be quite severe if such conduct were permitted and became widespread. The deterioration of significant policies of nondiscrimination by the imposition of artificial bottlenecks by broadband network owners imperil economic growth, innovation, job creation, and First Amendment freedom of expression on such networks.

The Network Neutrality Act of 2006 offers Members a clear choice. It is a choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies, and safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. This legislation is designed to save the Internet and thwart those who seek to fundamentally and detrimentally alter the Internet as we know it. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support this bill and urge the House to take a decisive stand in favor of network neutrality.
http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/35728/





Web Ad

Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org

Is your office software legal? According to figures published by Microsoft, 35% of the software in the world is thought to be counterfeit or otherwise illegal.

After years of unofficially tolerating piracy as a means of securing market share, Microsoft is now going on the offensive to make sure copies of it's software are legitimate.

· It has just bought a software company specialising in detecting what software is installed on PCs.
· It is now using the internet to put piracy detection software into copies of MS-Office on people's PCs.
· around the world, the Business Software Alliance is setting up schemes to prosecute offenders - for example, in the UK it is offering large cash rewards to anyone who informs against organisations.
· Microsoft's licence agreements are complicated - it's easy to break them by mistake.

If you have a copy of MS-Office at work, at school, at home - are you sure where it came from?

Fortunately, there is a completely legal and free alternative. OpenOffice.org 2 is a fully-featured office suite, similar in functionality to MS-Office. OpenOffice.org 2 does everything you need: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and much more. It can even use MS-Office format files (.doc, .xls, .ppt), so you don't need to re-type your work. What's more, it does things MS-Office does not, such as create pdf files to give to other people.

If you can use MS-Office, you can use OpenOffice.org 2. Studies have shown it is ten times cheaper to move to OpenOffice.org 2 than it is to upgrade to MS-Office 2007.

A poll has indicated 86% of users would prefer to try OpenOffice.org 2 rather than buy MS-Office 2007.

So what are you waiting for? It costs nothing to try. If you like it, OpenOffice.org 2 costs nothing to use for as long as you like, wherever you like. Peace of mind at no cost.

Get legal - get OpenOffice.org today!

http://why.openoffice.org/





Investing Carefully In Hard Drives

Demand for hard disk drives is strong thanks to consumer electronics, but investors should be selective.
Amanda Cantrell

While sales of desktop PCs are slowing down, the spike in popularity of laptops, Xbox 360s, digital video recorders and iPods has boosted hard drive manufacturers nonetheless.

The explosion of digital content -- photos, music and videos that artists and even consumers make and then upload to the Internet -- is also good news for hard drive makers, since all those large files have to be stored somewhere.

Hard drive makers shipped about 103 million hard disk drives in the fourth quarter of 2005, which was nearly a 21 percent increase over the previous year, according to market research firm iSuppli Corp.

And the stocks of these companies have performed accordingly. Shares of Seagate (down $0.45 to $26.22, Research), the number one disk drive maker in America, have climbed 54 percent in the last 12 months and 34 percent for the year to date. Shares of Western Digital (down $0.02 to $21.45, Research), which commands a roughly 17 percent market share, gained 67 percent in the last 12 months and are up 15 percent for the year.

But investors should proceed with caution. The industry is still consolidating, and with mergers come risks. Seagate is acquiring its nearest competitor, Maxtor, in a $2 billion deal that will close later this year.

"Disk drive companies have been dying for decades," said Kevin Landis, portfolio manager of Firsthand Capital Management, a mutual fund firm specializing in tech stocks. "We're down to just the toughest, craftiest, most tenacious companies."

Also, the stocks of the biggest hard drive makers have already enjoyed strong growth, raising the question of how much higher they can go.
Demand still high

Still, the need for storage should keep the hard drive makers busy for years to come; they say trends are afoot that should keep their businesses growing at a good clip.

Brian Dexheimer, senior vice president for Seagate, said the growth of laptop computers is the biggest driver of his company's growth. "As you shrink things, the technology (inside them) needs to shrink as well," he said.

That's why his company is focusing on a new technology called "perpendicular recording," which enables a hard drive to store more information by squeezing bits together more tightly on a disk. It has already shipped some high-end hard drives with this technology.

Dexheimer said the second fastest growing segment is consumer electronics.

Digital video recorders – Tivo-like devices that record programs off digital cable TV – have been a big growth business for the company in the last three years, as has the gaming industry. That's thanks in part to the success of Microsoft's (Research) wildly popular Xbox 360, which uses Seagate hard drives.

And as more consumers create their own digital content, such as photos and videos, that creates the need for more storage space for both consumers and the companies who host all this content, like Apple's iTunes music store and YouTube's video-sharing site.

"We think we are in the catbird seat relative to what we think is a digital content revolution," said Dexheimer.

He added that an increase in corporate regulation and compliance laws in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley has also boosted the bottom lines of hard drive makers, since companies are required to retain more documents and e-mails for longer periods of time.

But hard drive manufacturers also face challenges. One is the proliferation of flash drives. These are currently used instead of traditional hard drives in such devices as the iPod nano, and manufacturers are working on making "hybrid" drives for laptops that combine the properties of traditional and flash drives.

Flash drives are smaller and use less energy, and flash prices are dropping. While computer drives aren't in danger of being replaced by flash drives, consumer electronics devices like video cameras and recordable DVDs will increasingly move to these devices, experts say.

"We're not threatened by it at all," said Seagate's Dexheimer on the proliferation of flash. He points out that the digital media that is stored on portable flash drives, like those found in MP3 players, is also generally stored on consumer hard drives and on servers run by the entertainment companies that sell the media.
Experts advise caution

Investors should still proceed with caution.

Seagate posted strong quarterly results last month, reporting a 17 percent increase in sales and a 20 percent quarterly profit increase from the year-ago quarter. But its shares took a hit in after-hours trading because of a disappointing forecast for the current quarter.

The company's merger with Maxtor is also giving some investors and analysts pause in the near-term. When the deal is complete, Seagate says the combined companies will command a 40 percent share of the market. Seagate currently has about a 30 percent market share.

"In general, mergers can be messy affairs," said Firsthand Capital's Landis, whose fund owns shares of Western Digital. "Seagate has done mergers before, but if you are choosing between two companies and one has just been through a merger, it feels safer to go with one that doesn't have room for the nasty surprise."

Seagate's smaller rival Western Digital also enjoyed a strong quarter, with a 23 percent sales increase and a 45 percent jump in quarterly profit. Both Seagate and Western Digital are trading at about 12 times expected fiscal 2007 earnings.

Analysts at Robert W. Baird & Co. recently upgraded Western Digital to "outperform," saying the company is better situated than foreign rivals like Hitachi to win business from Maxtor once the merger with Seagate is finalized. The analysts also point out that Western Digital bucked an industry-wide trend by actually shipping more desktop units in its most recent quarter than it did the quarter before.

The prognosis for the hard disk industry as a whole is healthy according to analysts and investors. Although the industry is still consolidating, Landis said that the demand for more and more storage will only increase as consumers find more stuff to download -- whether that's TV shows, songs or photographs.

Says Landis: "No one complains that their Internet connection is too fast or their computer is too powerful, and no one complains there's too much storage."

Analysts for Robert W. Baird & Co. do not own stock in the companies they cover, but the firm does banking business with Western Digital and Seagate.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/tech...ives/index.htm





Fox, BBC, Al Jazeera Most Trusted: Poll
Jeffrey Goldfarb

One-quarter of consumers abandoned a news source over the past year because they lost trust in its reporting, according to a new survey that also found the BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera the most trusted brands in their respective home regions.

Results of a poll of more than 10,000 adults in 10 countries by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Reuters Group Plc and The Media Center were released on Wednesday, with an additional finding that media worldwide were trusted by an average of 61 percent of respondents compared with 52 percent who said they trusted their governments.

"National TV is still the most trusted news source by a wide margin, although the Internet is gaining ground among the young," said Doug Miller, president of London-based research firm GlobeScan, which conducted the polling.

"The jury is still out on blogs," he added. "Just as many people distrust them as trust them."

The survey confirmed that media consumption is shifting online for younger generations, as 19 percent of those aged 18 to 24 named the Internet as their most important source of news compared with 9 percent overall.

Seventy-two percent of all respondents said they followed the news closely, including 67 percent of those 18 to 24 years old.

Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.

The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain's publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world's biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc..

Three Internet portals -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN -- received the next highest trust ratings across the 10 countries, when respondents were prompted with 16 different brand names.

Although trust in media has grown in most countries over the past four years, the survey found, 28 percent of people across the 10 countries either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement: "In the past year I have stopped using a specific media source because it lost my trust."

Germans were unique in the survey for naming newspapers more than TV as their most important news source, by a margin of 45 percent to 30 percent.

Among South Koreans, who have a comparatively low trust of media in general, 34 percent said the Internet was their most important source of news compared with 9 percent worldwide.

More than 1,000 people were surveyed in March and April in each of the United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia and
South Korea.

Reuters is a global news and information provider and The Media Center is a nonprofit think tank that researches media-related issues.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060503/...edia_survey_dc





Gone in 20 Minutes: Using Laptops To Steal Cars

High-tech thieves are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to stealing automobiles equipped with keyless entry and ignition systems. While many computer-based security systems on automobiles require some type of key — mechanical or otherwise — to start the engine, so-called ‘keyless’ setups require only the presence of a key fob to start the engine.

The expert gang suspected of stealing two of David Beckham’s BMW X5 SUVs in the last six months did so by using software programs on a laptop to wirelessly break into the car’s computer, open the doors, and start the engine.

“It’s difficult to steal cars with complex security, but not impossible. There are weaknesses in any system,” Tim Hart of the Auto Locksmith Association told the U.K.’s Auto Express magazine. “At key steps the car’s software can halt progress for up to 20 minutes as part of its in-built protection,” said Hart.

Because the decryption process can take a while — up to 20 minutes, according to Hart — the thieves usually wait to find the car in a secluded area where it will be left for a long period. That is believed to be what happened to Mr. Beckham — the crooks followed him to the mall where he was to have lunch, and went to work on his X5 after it was parked.

While automakers and locksmiths are supposed to be the only groups that know where and how security information is stored in a car, the information eventually falls into the wrong hands.

According to the Prague Post leaving such information on a laptop is what got Radko Souček caught for stealing several cars. “You could delete all the data from your laptop, but that’s not good for you because the more data you have, the bigger your possibilities,” he says. He says any car that relies on software to provide security can be circumvented by other software. “Every car has its weak spot,” he says. Souček faces up to 12 years in prison.

The Leftlane Perspective: Many modern cars now rely on software entirely for security. Gone are the days where microchips supplemented mechanical locks as an additional security measure. In the case of true ‘keyless’ systems, software is the only thing between a thief and your car. As computers become more powerful, will stealing cars become even easier? Never mind future cars with better security — what about today’s cars a few years down the road? With cars as inexpensive as the Toyota Camry offering entirely keyless systems, these concerns a relevant to all consumers.
http://www.leftlanenews.com/2006/05/...to-steal-cars/





The Microsoft malaise

Commentary: Eight Signs That The Software Giant Is Dead In The Water
John C. Dvorak

For the past year or so, this is what I've been telling people in private. Now that there appears to be some sputtering by both the stock and by those who defend Microsoft I think it might be high time to explain my position.

Let me preface by saying that Microsoft is not about to stop making gobs of money. It's just that there is virtually nothing interesting or exciting happening (with the lone exception of the X-Box360) with anything the company is doing.

To make matters worse none of the upcoming upgrades to the operating system or Microsoft Office appear to have any 'must-have" qualities needed to boost sales in a meaningful way.

Compare what is going on at Microsoft to Apple. And now Apple is piling on with new TV commercials ridiculing all the viruses and security issues you buy when you buy a Windows-based PC. Microsoft advertising ironically highlights dinosaurs.

Let's just look at a casual status report of Microsoft's bed-ridden condition:

1. Vista OS. It's now so delayed that its consumer version will miss the 2006 Christmas season. It's now supposed to arrive in early 2007. Even when it does, all of its promised cool features have been removed and it appears to be little more than a gussied-up version of Windows XP. It appears as if it is going to be a great disappointment. This should have been the company's number one priority.

2. Office 2007. There is nothing in this new suite that is going to do much more than sustain the product as a dominant office suite. Unfortunately seven different versions are going to be released which will just confuse things. A new enterprise version has been added which appears to have a Lotus Notes-like element called Microsoft Groove. This is being sold as some sort of solution for online collaboration. If it is anything like Notes it will create a lot of anguish with users.

3. MSN. Microsoft should have abandoned MSN a decade ago. There is a lot of talk about Microsoft becoming more of a publisher and selling advertising. Microsoft should be buying advertising not selling it. This is not a media publishing company; it's a software publishing company. Why people keep encouraging Microsoft to go in this direction is baffling.

4. MSN Search Engine. Again more of the same and pointless. Selling ads

5. Xbox360. The potential to become the dominant game platform and an eventual and enviable profit center. Unfortunately the company did not foresee the Sony delays and failed to manufacture enough units to satisfy the demand. This was an exhibition of poor planning and bad business intelligence gathering.

6. Pad-based computing. According to Gates just a few years back this was to become the dominant form of computing by now. What happened?

7. Dot Net initiative. The .Net framework that many believe is an example of how Microsoft can actually put together elegant and powerful architectures when it wants to, is being killed by Open Source systems that are free and almost just as powerful. Microsoft has been unable to cope with Open Source except to complain about it.

8. Preoccupation with Google. Microsoft is too easily distracted by successful companies who are not competitors. There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se. So the company obsesses on what Google is doing rather than concentrating on important Microsoft projects. Now Microsoft is about to do a deal with Yahoo to flank Google. This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size.

This only scratches the surface of the Microsoft malaise. Now if the investment community sees light at the end of this tunnel good for them. I sure don't see it. I see a company that has settled in and has become big, profitable, and unexciting, lacking real focus or spirit.
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Stor...s&siteid=lycos





Windows Defence on IE7 Search Is No Defence
Stan Beer

The news that Yahoo has weighed into the argument between Microsoft and Google over the bundling of Windows Live search as the default search engine with the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser is amusing. The source of amusement is not so much that the distant number two player in the search space is ganging up with the even more distant number three player. It's just that their arguments are so obviously ludicrous.

To bring us all up to speed, Google has complained to both the US Justice Department and the European Commission (EC) over Microsoft making MSN Search the default search engine in the new version of its dominant Internet Explorer browser, IE7. The current version IE 6 has about 85% market share. Google believes that Microsoft is once again trying use its near market monopoly to squash competition.

Google believes Microsoft is trying to make it difficult for users to choose any other search engine except Microsoft's on the browser by making its own product the default search window on the toolbar.

However, representatives from both Microsoft and Yahoo have publicly said that Google is being hypocritical. They say Google has deals with companies like Mozilla, which makes the second most popular browser Firefox and PC maker Dell, where Google is the default search window in the browsers.

If this is the best defence that Microsoft and Yahoo are able to put up in attempt to debunk Google's complaints, then I don't like Microsoft's chances in the courts. There is absolutely no comparison between what Microsoft intends to do with IE7 and what Google has done with either Mozilla's Firefox or Dell.

It is true that both Microsoft and Google make their search engines the default in the respective browsers. However, there is a huge difference.

In the case of Google, it pays hard cash to Mozilla and Dell to get the right to have its search engine placed as the default in the browsers. This is fair use of marketing capital. In addition, neither the Mozilla Firefox browser, which has 11% market share, nor Dell PCs have a near monopoly of the market.

By contrast, Microsoft has a browser, Internet Explorer, with 85% market share and it also owns a search engine with 11% market share. Microsoft does not need to pay one cent to place its search engine in the lead position on its browser, which sits on the vast majority of PCs in the world. What that amounts to is using a near monopoly position to stifle competition.

Microsoft argues that it will be easy for IE7 users to change the default search engine to Google if they want to. However, "easy" is a relative term. For any IE7 user, it's always going to be easier to just leave the default browser as it is - Microsoft's factory setting.

For those who argue that Microsoft should be free to do with its own software as it sees fit, they should recognise one fact. Today, about 95% of computer owners are locked into using expensive proprietary software running on an expensive operating system that is so insecure it has spawned an entire industry devoted to protecting users from hackers. This situation has arisen because of one market player has been allowed to become so dominant that it can use its position to effectively stifle competition.

Hopefully the Department of Justice and European Commission will both bear that in mind when they consider Google's complaint.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4134/937/





State Wants MySpace to Raise Minimum Age

Massachusetts Tuesday called on popular teen social networking Web site MySpace.com to strengthen protection of children against sexual predators, including raising the minimum age for users to 18 from 14.

The arrest Tuesday of a 27-year-old man in Connecticut on charges of illegal sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl he met through MySpace underlines the risks of the fast-growing Internet site that boasts about 60 million members.

"MySpace has not taken sufficient steps to ensure that the MySpace Web site is a safe place for minors," Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly said in a letter to MySpace.

He said a three-month investigation found that potential child predators were surfing MySpace seeking chats with potential victims and violent images or content were being posted to bully children.

"An adult can register as a minor member and use that profile to seek access to the profiles of countless underage members," he said in a statement.

MySpace allows teenagers and young adults to find friends and express themselves by posting profiles and blogs, or Web journals covering everything from their favorite singers to schoolwork and intimate personal details.

It generated a blizzard of headlines in national media this year that have raised alarm with parents and school authorities -- from "Man arrested in MySpace.com teen-sex case" to "Sex predators are stalking MySpace; is your teenager a target?"

Connecticut authorities said in March that two men -- one age 22 and the other 39 -- were arrested on allegations they had sexual contact with minors they met through MySpace. Another man was arrested early on Tuesday at a Connecticut hotel after a mother reported her daughter missing.

In February, California police arrested a 26-year-old for

felony child molestation after he met a 14-year-old on MySpace. "It's happening more and more all the time, both through MySpace and through chatrooms and other blogging sites," said Christina Slenk, a director of Web Wise Kids, a nonprofit Internet safety organization based in California.

Reilly, a Democrat running for governor, said his staff raised the state's concerns in a March meeting with officials at MySpace, which media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought for $580 million last year.

MySpace authorities were not immediately available to comment but its chief executive, Chris DeWolfe, told Reuters in March that it had several measures in place to prevent abuse.

He said the site prohibits children under age 14 from using it and restricts access to the profiles of 14- and 15-year-olds, allowing them to be contacted only by users that they add to their buddy lists.

MySpace also uses software to identify minors, flagging profiles with terms likely to be used by children under age 14. But DeWolfe said there was no fool-proof way to verify the age of all users.

Reilly said his investigation found that the safeguards failed. He asked MySpace to install an age and identity verification system, equip Web pages with a "Report Inappropriate Content" link, respond to all reports of inappropriate content within 24 hours and significantly raise the number of staff who review images and content.

He also wants filters to block sexually explicit or violent images, deletion of profiles of people who have abused the site, removal of all advertisements deemed inappropriate for children and free software that allows parents to block MySpace.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/interne...ction=cnn_tech





Hear the Noise or Block It Out. It's Your Choice, Instantly.
Ivan Berger

Filling your ears with music from noise-blocking earphones doesn't just diminish outside noises. It also reduces your ability to hear things you might want to, like traffic noise when you cross a street.

But taking the earphones in and out of your ears in these situations is a nuisance, so Shure is packaging a push-to-hear switch with its E500 earphones, which cut ambient noise by 30 to 37 decibels — the equivalent of bringing airliner cabin noise down to about the level of a quiet conversation. Press it, and the music in the headphone mutes, while an external microphone picks up ambient sounds.

The E500's will be priced at $499 with the switch when they arrive in stores this month. (The switch, which will work with all standard earphones, will also be available separately at $59.) The high price is partly because three miniature speakers are used in each earphone, a tweeter and two woofers, for better reproduction of high and low tones.

Modular cables for portable and home-stereo listening are included. And so are eight pairs of sleeves, to ensure that the E500 comfortably fills ears of any size.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/bu...eadphones.html





Snakes in the Garage Provide Easy Hookups for the Band
John Biggs



Those who like to rock 'n' roll all night and party every day may be interested in the LightSnake, a self-contained PC audio system from SoundTech made to let musicians hook up their instruments with a minimum of fuss.

The LightSnake is a single cable with a standard U.S.B. port at one end and a ¼-inch audio jack on the other. When it is plugged in, the ends of the cable light up and it is ready to serve as an audio input device on Windows and Macintosh PC's and laptops. The only thing left to do is plug in a guitar or other electric instrument for recording.

The 10-foot cord features built-in 16-bit digital sound processing hardware that improves and amplifies the audio before sending it to the PC. It requires no additional software on most operating systems.

The LightSnake is available at many online retailers and at Target for about $70. It is compatible with many digital audio recording programs, including GarageBand from Apple. Of course, a real garage band might consider a setup like this to be taking the stripped-down ethos a little too far.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/te...y/04snake.html





Fighting Crime With Cellphones' Clues
Noah Shachtman

THE case against Dan Kincaid was strong. A homeowner in northern Boise, Idaho, had identified Mr. Kincaid, 44, as the person who had broken into his suburban house. But eyewitness testimony isn't always rock solid, and Mr. Kincaid was refusing to talk. The police wanted more. So they searched Mr. Kincaid's BlackBerry e-mail-capable phone electronically, and found all the evidence they needed.

"Just trying to find a way out of this neighborhood without getting caught," Mr. Kincaid wrote to his girlfriend on Aug. 1, 2005, shortly after he had been spotted. "Dogs bark if I'm between or behind houses. ... "

"Cops know I have a blue shirt on," he continued. "I need to get out of here before they find me."

Faced with his e-mailed admission, Mr. Kincaid agreed to a deal with prosecutors over that crime and a string of others. In February, he pleaded guilty to five counts of grand theft, resisting arrest and burglary.

"We seized his phone," said Detective Jeff Dustin of the Boise Police Department, "and instead of a jump shot, this case is a slam dunk."

Cellphones are everywhere: 825 million were sold last year, according to the market research firm IDC. And the phones do more than just dial numbers. With expanded memories, increasingly sophisticated organizer tools and sharper cameras, they are playing ever larger roles in the lives of almost everyone — including criminals. Drug dealers, rapists and murderers across the country have been caught based, at least partly, on the electronic gadgets they carry around.

But extracting clues and leads from mobile electronics is no cakewalk. Unlike personal computers, 90 percent or more of which use the Windows operating system, cellphones rely on a confusing jumble of software that varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even phone to phone. Data is often hidden or encrypted. And as long as a phone is connected to its cellular network, there is always a chance that its call histories and text messages will be erased, deliberately or otherwise.

Police departments have only recently begun training investigators in the delicate art of mobile-electronics forensics.

"It's a gold mine of information," said Detective Lee Reiber, the Boise officer who extracted the messages from Mr. Kincaid's phone. "But law enforcement is still way behind the curve."

Detective Reiber, 34, a former minor league catcher and longtime computer programmer, has been the Boise department's resident cellphone recovery specialist for about a year.

He usually begins an investigation by isolating the electronic device believed to be involved in the crime. Suspects or their accomplices sometimes flood captured phones with messages or calls, resulting in the deletion of incriminating notes or numbers from the device's memory, which can only hold so much information at once. Connecting to the network drains battery life. So when Detective Reiber arrives on the scene, he places the phone in a "Faraday bag," a container made of triwoven copper, nickel and silver that keeps the phone from making or receiving calls.

Back at his office, Detective Reiber tries to copy everything stored on the cellphone onto a desktop computer, where he can analyze the information. It can be a tedious process. Mobile devices lack standard cables and ports, and manufacturers use dozens of different cables. Detective Reiber must maintain a stockpile, hundreds deep, to keep up with the staggering variety.

The assortment of operating systems running these devices is as varied as the cables that connect them, so there is no single software tool that an investigator can use to communicate with the operating system to extract the data. Amber Schroader, a cellphone and palmtop expert and chief executive at Paraben Forensics, which makes the best known of the extraction programs, said the company could crack a new operating system in about a week.

"But still, there are just too many phones," she said. "And the manufacturers work like families. Just because you can speak with me doesn't mean you can speak with my cousin in Switzerland. She probably speaks a different language."

But even with the right forensics program and the right cable, extracting cellphone data can be tricky. Several mobile phone companies use a six-digit code, called a Master Subsidy Lock, to prevent the devices from connecting to other companies' networks. The code has the effect of rendering many of the phones' files invisible to investigators. The same is true if a suspect has locked his phone with a personal identification number, or PIN.

"When that happens, it's like a six-foot cement wall with barbed wire goes up," Ms. Schroader said. "There's no looking through it."

With a court order, investigators can usually get a code from the manufacturer that unlocks the PIN. Inside the phone, there is often an astounding amount of information: deleted text messages; lengthy call histories; pictures and movies taken so long ago that the owner may not even remember taking them. In February, the police in Merrimack, N.H., recovered a Porsche and a $120,000 red Ferrari 355 Challenge from what the police described as a "chop shop" after finding pictures on a suspect's phone. Also in February, officers in Atlantic City found a stolen AK-47 submachine gun the same way.

"They're these oracles of information," said Richard Mislan, a professor at Purdue University's cyberforensics center. "We can predict so much about you, based on what's inside."

Detective Reiber recently helped catch a suspected local drug dealer, after he found pictures on a hand-held device of marijuana plants and growing equipment — as well a message telling the suspect that "we want the same as last time. can you do it? 40 dollars." Phone in hand, the officers searched the suspect's car and home, finding three ounces of marijuana, bags and scales.

"If there's no cellphone, there's no vehicle, no home, no bust," Detective Reiber said. "The phone was the key."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...097&ei=5087%0A





Switchboard in the Sky
Tim Gnatek

CHESTERHILL, a tucked-away village in Ohio's Appalachian southeast, has been on technology's periphery for years. Its 312 residents have limited cellphone service and no broadband Internet service. The town's antiquated telephone lines struggle to handle minimal Internet speeds for those who do dial up.

But thanks to a rural technology grant from the American Distance Education Consortium and a network built by Ohio State University's Information Office, residents are set to go high speed wirelessly. With a satellite receiver mounted at their library, and a broadcast antenna on the village water tower, Chesterhill, where 20 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, now has a 1.5-megabit Internet pipeline in the air.

Local governments across the country are getting into the wireless Internet business. Communities left behind by the high-technology revolution of the last two decades view municipal networks as an affordable means of renewing their economic competitiveness and a way to bridge the digital divide between technology haves and have-nots.

Big cities and their suburbs see potential in municipal Wi-Fi, too. Systems are being developed in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago, while last week Suffolk County on Long Island announced it was planning a network that would reach 1.5 million people spread over more than 900 square miles.

The new programs have put local governments into the telecommunications arena, where they sometimes work with conventional service providers and sometimes compete with them.

Many telecommunications providers are resisting such community networks, particularly when they overlap with the carriers' own service territories. Arguing that they are better suited to the task than their municipal rivals, telecommunications companies are bidding to manage civic networks. At the same time, industry-friendly legislative proposals at the state and federal levels threaten to limit municipal control.

Chesterhill's wireless network, which began service last month, has sparked excitement in the village and already led to several new community programs. The library will offer higher-education courses through regional colleges; the volunteer fire department will work with online distributors for discounted equipment; and local businesses expect to set up Web sites.

Ann Horner, a lifelong resident of Chesterhill and owner of the Posy Place, a flower shop, said she planned to discontinue FTD floral service and manage her own customers online. "I can keep that 20 percent, and my customers can get their full value," she said.

Municipal wireless networks are cheaper to build than cable or fiber- optic networks and are easier to deploy. According to one study by muniwireless.com, an industry Weblog, more than 120 such networks are up and running around the country, including some that allow public access and others that are exclusively for city services. Nearly 60 other cities and towns have requested proposals from vendors or taken steps toward creating networks.

Rollouts of municipal networks in major metropolitan regions like San Francisco and Philadelphia have attracted attention, but development of community wireless networks holds even greater promise for out-of-the-way and poorer areas. For these smaller cities and towns, the networks are a tool for more efficient municipal operations and a way to provide inexpensive Internet access to residents who could not afford it.

A case in point is the Tribal Digital Village, a high-speed network linking 14 remote Indian reservations spread across 250 square miles of mountains and valleys in San Diego County, Calif. The network operates by solar-powered antennas, which relay signals between tribal settlements as far as 26 miles apart. The mountaintop backbone attains transmission speeds in excess of 45 megabits a second, which is equivalent to the speeds used by Internet service providers and major Web sites.

Broadband access has greatly improved communications on a swath of reservation land that still lacks full telephone service — and in some places even water and electricity.

Michael Peralta, a descendant of the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians and the network's administrator, regularly scales the reservation's mountains to install and maintain the equipment, sometimes with helicopter assistance. Mr. Peralta says the newfound connectivity has quickly changed life on the reservation.

"There are elders who a little while ago didn't know what a computer was," he said. "Now they bug me whenever they can't get to their e-mail."

More than a social services project, the Tribal Digital Village is also a potential revenue source for the tribes. "There are million-dollar homes out there, and they can't get broadband," Mr. Peralta said. "We're looking at a new business plan that could provide broadband to those homes as well."

To speed the process and ease network responsibilities, some communities have turned to private companies for help operating municipal wireless intranets and providing Internet access to the public.

Several approaches are being tested. Philadelphia established a nonprofit corporation in 2004 to plan its municipal network. It contracted with the Internet service provider EarthLink to manage the infrastructure and make subsidized access available to the public, although the city has yet to finish plans or begin building the network.

In San Francisco, the city selected Google and EarthLink to offer tiered levels of wireless service. Google will provide free public access at near-dial-up speed, paid for by in-browser advertising, while EarthLink will charge around $20 a month for faster, ad-free service. It is unclear when the network will be completed, and last week a local politician threatened to block the arrangement for lack of public comment.

In Suffolk County, the plan announced last week calls for a comprehensive countywide network for use by the government and the public. Sharon Cates-Williams, Suffolk County commissioner for information technology, said that officials were evaluating how to pay for the system.

"It's a little too early to tell what we're going to do," Ms. Cates-Williams said. She added that she would look at other cities' business plans for ideas, and expected proposals from providers by the end of the year. "I want something that is not going to have any expense to the taxpayer, whether that's public or commercial or a combination."

Chicago announced in February that it would build a citywide wireless network requiring no public financing. City officials said they would begin requesting bids this spring from private-sector companies to install and manage the system. Other cities have chosen not to rely on existing providers but handle network administration on their own.

After unsuccessfully petitioning Verizon to bring broadband to their community, town officials in Scottsburg, Ind., decided to run their Wi-Fi network like a public utility. Scottsburg charges home users $35 a month for access to a 512-kilobit-per-second data stream (comparable to residential DSL service).

Some municipalities charge nothing at all. St. Cloud, Fla., where the city-led municipal network is among the showpieces of the community wireless movement, was the first to install a free citywide network, paying for it with money saved by administrative efficiencies generated by the network itself.

Glenn Sangiovanni, St. Cloud's former mayor, rallied for the network. "We had a true need for economic development," he said. "We needed a hook, and looked at making this a tech-savvy community."

Mr. Sangiovanni said that the rising cost of broadband service was the best argument for the public network. A study by the city showed that 47 percent of the residents were paying $450 a year for broadband, a third more than the average household's city tax bill. In all, nearly $4 million in broadband fees was leaving the community every year, Mr. Sangiovanni said.

"What if we could keep those dollars here, and spark the local economy with this project?" he said.

St. Cloud, an Orlando suburb of about 22,000 residents, spent $2.6 million to set up a network over 15 square miles. The city expects to save $650,000 annually in operating efficiencies like supplying Internet-based cellphone service to city workers. As of April 20, 45 days after it began service, 36 percent of the city had logged nearly 192,000 hours online. The network will not only help increase the efficiency of existing systems, officials say, but it will also help develop new services in health care, education and public safety.

"We're going to be doing things with public safety, and mounting video cameras in parks so our police force won't have to be everywhere in order to keep the city safe," said Howard DeYoung, director of information technology for St. Cloud. "This is going to open up performance dramatically."

When St. Cloud was considering its wireless plan, it hired MRI, a branding and consulting company, to hold public meetings on the subject to build support.

"We told them that this was no more expensive to install than a roadway intersection," said Jonathan Baltuch, MRI's president.

Despite having a free wireless network in St. Cloud, Mr. Baltuch said, there is still an option for existing providers there to sell better offerings. "Their opportunity is to deliver 20-megabit, or even 100-megabit service, to offer a luxury service to premium clients," he said.

Established telecommunications companies, meanwhile, argue that they are better equipped than local governments to provide the infrastructure for city wireless networks.

"In many cases, it's a much more effective solution to work with a service provider," said Jason Hillary, a spokesman for AT&T, which has bid on city projects in Houston and Grand Rapids, Mich. "We have infrastructure in a local level and at a backbone level, and we're updating the networks on a daily basis."

In some cases, industry spokesmen say, there is no need for municipal networks at all.

Link Hoewing, vice president for technology policy at Verizon Communications, said that carriers like Verizon are already expert at providing broadband service. "Where there's a lack of broadband, it makes sense for communities to take care of this," he said, "but in urban areas, we believe the private sector already responds well."

Mr. Hoewing said there was a role for community hot spots, however, in places like libraries and city halls, as well as in rural communities beyond the carriers' reach. "We have not supported outright bans on municipal Wi-Fi networks," he said.

Yet state and federal legislators are pushing for just that. Telecommunications companies and cable television providers are supporters of laws that could hamper cities' abilities to deploy networks, both wired and wireless. Fifteen states have passed such legislation.

Two federal bills introduced in 2005 threaten to rein in municipal broadband projects. The Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act, introduced by Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, and the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act, sponsored by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, would limit public services' ability to coexist with private providers.

John Eger, professor of communications and public policy at San Diego State University and a former director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, said such legislation could backfire if telecommunications companies shut out their largest customers, cities.

"Providers don't want a partnership, they want to provide it all by themselves," he said.

Mr. Eger faulted the federal government for failing to curtail the companies' influence over policy.

The Congressional battle may be shifting. Another new proposal, the Community Broadband Act, sponsored by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, would protect municipal broadband programs as long as the public providers did not discriminate against private ones. And last week, the House of Representatives defeated a proposed amendment to another communications bill that would have made it easier for supporters of incumbent telecommunications providers to block rural Wi-Fi networks.

"I would hope the incumbents stand back and look at what they're seeing across the country," said Jim Baller, a lawyer in Washington who represents local governments in utility issues. "There is a way to view this situation as an opportunity."

Mr. Baller says that municipalities considering wireless programs can draw a lesson from history, and likens the modern wireless movement to the rural electrification movement of the late 1800's. Then, communities beyond the reach of the electric companies took control of their electric futures and struck out with their own power plans.

"And they were successful," Mr. Baller said. More than 2,000 of the original electrification groups still exist in rural communities and big cities like Los Angeles.

"There are a great many parallels," he said. "Broadband is becoming today's platform for everything we do: economics, education, safety, medicine and cultural enrichment. You can't blink this away."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/te...b0d&ei=5087%0A





Shot a UFO in his pajamas

I Was Just Hunting UFOs, Says Pentagon's UK Hacker
Michael Holden

To the United States, he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation's security at risk by committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time."

But Briton Gary McKinnon says he is just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.

During his two-year quest, McKinnon broke into computers at the Pentagon, NASA and the Johnson Space Center as well as systems used by the U.S. army, navy and air force.

U.S. officials say he caused $700,000 worth of damage and even crippled vital defense systems shortly after the September 11 attacks.

The unemployed computer programmer is now battling extradition to the United States, where, if found guilty, he faces up to 70 years in jail and fines of up to $1.75 million. His lawyer fears he could even be sent to Guantanamo Bay.

It's all a far cry from how he first got into hacking: watching a film about a teenage boy who breaks into a military central computer and almost starts World War Three.

"I had seen the film 'War Games' and I do remember clearly thinking at the time, that's amazing -- a great big military computer system and a young, spotty teenager," the softly spoken 39-year-old told Reuters in an interview.

"HACKER'S HANDBOOK"

A decade later, McKinnon, armed with information gleaned from the book, "The Hacker's Handbook," began his snooping.

During 2000-1 from his home in Hornsey, north London, and using a computer with just a limited 56K dial-up modem, he turned his sights on the American government and military.

"My main thing was wanting to find out about UFOs and suppressed technology," he said insisting his intention was not to cause damage. "I wanted to ... find out stuff the government wouldn't tell you about."

He said it was easy, despite being only a rank amateur. Using the hacking name "Solo," he discovered that many U.S. top-security systems were using an insecure Microsoft Windows program and had no password protection at all.

"So I got commercially available off-the-shelf software and used them to scan large military networks ... anything I thought might have possible links to UFO information," he said.

ALIENS?

He said he came across a group called the "Disclosure Project," which had expert testimonies from senior figures who said technology obtained from extra-terrestrials did exist.

One NASA scientist had reported that the Johnson Space Center had a facility where UFOs were airbrushed out of high-resolution satellite images. So, he hacked in.

"I saw what I'm convinced was some kind of satellite or spacecraft but it was manufactured by no means I have ever seen before -- there were no rivets, no seams, it was like one flawless piece of material. And that was above the Earth."

However, his probing came to an end in March 2002, when British police arrested him.

"I was completely obsessed. I was completely addicted. It was like a huge game but I was getting very paranoid," he said.

McKinnon's own story might sound like the plot of a movie, but the charges he faces are deadly serious. He argues he is being made a scapegoat by U.S. authorities to deter other would-be hackers rather than address their own security flaws.

"I'm already being treated as a terrorist," he said. "I appear in an official American army pamphlet ... in a guide to combating terrorism in the 21st century."

The next stage of his legal battle takes place on May 10. But he hints that whatever happens, he has a lot more to tell.

"I can't talk about a lot of stuff that I found. It's just not the right time," he said with a smile.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060427/...in_hacker_dc_1


















Until next week,

- js.


















Current Week In Review






Recent WiRs -

April 29th, April 22nd, April 15th, April 8th, April 1st

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


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