[JackSpratts]

BET Takes Heat for Animated Clip
DirtySouthMouth

BET is taking a bit of heat over an animated public service announcement encouraging viewers to pick up a book, brush their teeth, drink water and use deodorant.

The video was originally released as a MySpace single by Bomani Armah before BET later picked it up and aired it on "The 5ive."

The clip opens with a shot of "Raphael De La Getto High School," where police sirens and gun shots can be heard in the background. Next, we move to a Lil Jon-ish character rhyming about reading a "mothafuckin' book" over the theme to Beethoven's 5th ... with a beat on it, of course.

Hot 97 host Miss Jones and the LA Times have apparently both been criticizing the clip, for a procession of "negative black stereotypes, from a machine gun that shoots books, to the word ‘book' emblazoned across bouncing animated booties," as Vibe.com reports.

So, what was BET's response? The station's VP of animation told the NYTimes that the clip was meant to be "very satirical," and that it directly mimics and mocks current trends in hip hop (videos). True that.

Here's to wondering how this video would fare over at Funny or Die. I'm going with funny.

Watch the mothafuckin' video.
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/25745





Digital DJs

By posting MP3s of songs before they hit stores, black gossip and hip-hop bloggers draw visitors, and the notice of record labels
Vanessa E. Jones

When Ahsmi Rawlins uploaded an MP3 of 50 Cent's unreleased single "She Wants It," featuring Justin Timberlake, he was only doing what he'd done almost daily since 2005, when he started his hip-hop blog, Nah Right. Rawlins had always been the first among his friends to discover new music. Offering MP3s, videos, and news on Nah Right allowed him to bring his savviness to a larger crowd.

In the past year, as they've grown in popularity, black gossip and hip-hop blogs such as Nah Right; Concrete Loop; Young, Black and Fabulous; and Crunk & Disorderly have become the place where record companies, producers, publicists, and artists present music to generate buzz and gauge interest in an artist. They're the urban version of indie and rock blogs such as Stereogum and Brooklyn Vegan, which about four years ago began uploading MP3s and videos.

Unlike those sites, the hip-hop and gossip blogs have a forebear in mixtapes: the R&B and hip-hop music compilations that the record industry has used for decades to create early excitement for music. But mixtapes have faced perennial legal hardships because of crackdowns by the Recording In dustry Association of America. As mixtapes' popularity wanes, fans have turned to black gossip and hip-hop blogs to find songs by artists such as Kanye West, Beyoncé, Common, and Ne-Yo. The music often arrives on the Web weeks before the official CD is released.

"Music bloggers are the new tastemakers of the moment," says Rawlins, who's based in New York. "It's the immediacy of the medium. We can throw something up so quickly and it reaches people within hours. Me, Concrete Loop, sites like those with a big readership, we've really established this reputation for knowing what's good, knowing what's going to be next. Our opinion holds weight. They realize it and are trying to take advantage of it."

Like the DJs who make mixtapes, bloggers have received a mixed reception in the record industry. Many executives recognize that Internet exposure can create a following for the artists that can translate into record sales. The Game's CD "Doctor's Advocate" leaked last year yet still debuted in the No. 1 spot of the Billboard album charts, selling 358,000 copies. A recent Capitol Records press release about J. Holiday's R&B single "Bed" featured a quote from Concrete Loop's music editor Brian Davis, as a sign of the single's growing popularity.

"Singles have always gotten into the marketplace before the album," says Ronnie Johnson, executive vice president of Capitol Records' urban music division, which works regularly with the blogs through its interactive marketing department. "If . . . you're only one single deep, then you should have concerns. But if you have real artists and you have a solid album, there should be no real concern."

However, there's a limit to how much exposure the record companies want to give. Capitol, for instance, prefers handing out streaming audio, because free downloads can curtail single and album sales. Relationships can grow tense when material by a major artist or a potential blockbuster song leaks. The day after Rawlins posted "She Wants It," from 50's highly anticipated CD, "Curtis," he received an e-mail from an executive at 50 Cent's label, Interscope, asking Rawlins to remove the song from his blog. Bloggers have been sent cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of record labels or received calls from record executives asking them to remove songs. One recent Concrete Loop post featured five downloads from M.I.A.'s new CD, "Kala"; the next day the links to the downloadable songs were dead. Nah Right featured a yet-to-be-released video for Talib Kweli's new song "Hot Thing/In the Mood." Within hours the video window simply read "removed by copyright holder."

Interscope Records, which represents M.I.A. and 50 Cent, declined to be interviewed for this story. But there's an increasing realization in the music industry that it needs to adapt to the digital music age. As the number of new media departments at record companies increases, executives are trying to change the way they do business.

"We need business models of our own out there in an offensive way to get people to work with us so we can get paid for our music," says Christian Jorg, a recently hired senior vice president of new media and commerce at Island Def Jam. "We can't go back to selling as many CDs as we did five years ago -- that's just unrealistic."

The music the bloggers post comes from multiple sources. Record labels and online marketing companies such as Iced Media provide video and streaming audio to the blogs. Davis, who will be a senior at Clark Atlanta University, often gets MP3s from the artists and producers who've befriended him through Concrete Loop. Davis makes a point of detailing production credits and analyzing music in his music entries. His friendship with Bryan Michael Cox, who produced Mary J. Blige's smash "Be Without You" among other songs, began after Cox e-mailed Davis telling him he appreciated Davis's support.

In July, when Davis posted an unreleased song produced by Cox featuring the winners of MTV's "Making of the Band 4," which aired its season finale Sunday, Cox didn't get angry. Instead, says Davis, "He called me and was like 'Yo, I saw that you put the song on there. That's the bad version. . . . I'm going to send you the real version of the song so you can hear it.' "

Davis will wait until the last episode of "Making of the Band 4" airs before sharing it. Rules of conduct , says Kevin Hofman, Capitol's director of interactive marketing, regulate how bloggers deal with unfinished songs or videos. "The more seasoned bloggers," says Hofman, "they know better than that. It's kind of a code of ethics, believe it or not."

Rawlins gets leaked material like the 50 Cent/Timberlake song online. He wouldn't reveal where he found it, but noted it's not file-sharing websites, which remove copyrighted material if a record label asks. "The sites where I'm getting these leaks," says Rawlins, "the general public and record labels can't even get into. Nothing is pulled off of them."

Rawlins, who works as an online editor for the hip-hop magazine XXL, constantly interacts with the music industry. "I get multiple e-mails a week from labels," Rawlins says. "The independent labels are more open about sending the music. The [major] labels are more hush-hush. They'll say, 'Hey, check out this MP3,' knowing I'm going to post it anyway."

It's these mixed messages from the record companies that annoy the bloggers. As with the mixtapes, most bloggers suspect that the source of the leaks are music industry insiders. "Labels need to get better control of that," Davis says. "It's not us taking music from the studio and sharing it with everybody."

Johnson of Capitol Records pleads ignorance as to the source of the leaked music. He says, "The reality is we don't know where it comes from half the time." Hofman adds, "There are . . . a lot of different people involved in the production of these tracks, so it's hard to pin down where the leakage is. What we do is try to clean up the mess, replace downloads with streaming links."

Concrete Loop, for instance, used to be rife with downloads. In recent weeks, however, it has shifted to streaming audio. "We're trying as hard as we can to conform to what music industry execs and record labels want," says Davis. "Posting and sharing files illegally is a problem, so we're trying to do our best to move away from that."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/liv...8/digital_djs/





Audio Fingerprinting for Clean Metadata
Richard Jones

The veteran Scrobblers amongst you will probably remember our “moderation system” – this was a user-voting system that let you propose and merge artists, ultimately fixing misspelled artists by creating aliases to the correct version.

We Wednesday, 29 August 2007 are planning to bring this back in a big way, addressing not only artists, but albums and tracks too.

We don’t want to have to vote on the really obvious stuff (“01 – Radiohead”), so we are going to do as much as possible automatically, with various algorithms and data mining tricks. The entries we can’t be 100% sure about, and the remaining stuff, will again be thrown open to a public vote.

Phase 1 is now underway with the first public “beta” release of our new fingerprinting technology. This will mature into a nice sexy (free) API that lets you grab clean metadata based on an audio fingerprint. For now, all that it does is send the fingerprint data to bootstrap the moderation system. This doesn’t change any MP3 files on your computer. It does send useful fingerprint data to our moderation system so we can get the ball rolling. If you have a big MP3 collection, it will take a while… Thankfully it remembers where it got to, so you don’t have to do it all in one session.

Grab the fingerprinting app and let it scan your MP3 collection:

Download for:
Windows
Mac OS X
Linux .deb
Source code

What we’ll do next is figure out all the popular (mis)spellings for tracks with the same fingerprints. We will publish lots of stats, example data and graphs showing our progress as the fingerprint database grows in the coming weeks. We need people with MP3 collections (of any size/quality) to download and run the fingerprinter to make this work, so spread the word.

Remember, you don’t need to clean up your ID3 tags before running the fingerprint app: This time round, people with imperfect tags are actually going to be of some use to us, and don’t deserve all the terrible things we normally wish on them

Download the app, and watch this space for lots of stats and graphs detailing our findings in the coming days and weeks!
http://blog.last.fm/2007/08/29/audio...clean-metadata





Thumbs Gone in Ebert Show Renewal Impasse
UPI

The words Hollywood craves -- "two thumbs up" -- are gone while reviewer Roger Ebert and Disney-ABC work on a renewal of "At the Movies With Ebert & Roeper."

Disney-ABC Domestic Television waited until late last week to announce Ebert was withholding permission to use the thumbs, which he and late partner Gene Siskel copyrighted, reported the Chicago Sun-Times, for whom Ebert reviews movies. Ebert denied he withheld the designation.

The long-time movie reviewer is negotiating a new contract with the program from which he has been absent since cancer surgery last year.

"They made a first offer … which I considered offensively low," Ebert said by e-mail to the Chicago Tribune. "I responded with a counteroffer. They did not reply to this, and ... ordered the 'thumbs' removed from the show. This is not something I expected after an association (with Disney) of over 22 years."

During Ebert's absence, Richard Roeper, a fellow Sun-Times columnist and co-host since 2000, has been paired with guest critics.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Enterta..._impasse/8292/





Viacom hits me with copyright infringement for posting on YouTube a video that Viacom made by infringing on my own copyright!
Christopher Knight

"Chutzpah" is a Yiddish word meaning "unbelievable gall or audacity". An example of it would be the story of the kid who murders both of his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan.

That's chutzpah. So is this: multimedia giant Viacom is claiming that I have violated their copyright by posting on YouTube a segment from it's VH1 show Web Junk 2.0... which VH1 produced – without permission – from a video that I had originally created.

Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright!

The clip in question was pulled by YouTube earlier this morning, at Viacom's insistence.

Last fall, as part of my campaign for Rockingham County Board of Education, I produced three commercials that ran on local television. The first of them – which I simply dubbed "Christopher Knight for School Board TV Commercial #1" – was hosted on YouTube the same evening that the ad started running on WGSR in Reidsville. You can watch it at http://youtube.com/watch?v=nLi5B0Iefsk.

Well, the concept of a candidate for Board of Education pitching himself by using the Death Star to blow up a little red schoolhouse is admittedly unusual. The YouTube clip got around quite a bit: as of this writing it's received over sixty-six thousand views. I put it and the other two ads on YouTube so that I could post them on this blog (because I was trying to chronicle everything that happened during the course of my campaign). And I'd always intended to keep them up after the election too, in case anyone else might find and enjoy watching them. Heck, I've always liked to think that maybe someday, others might see how I was a candidate and feel led to run for office themselves!

A month and a half ago some friends let me know that the cable network VH1 was spotlighting the commercial on their show Web Junk 2.0, in an edition titled "Animals & Other Crap".

VH1 took the video that I had created and hosted on YouTube, and made it into a segment of Web Junk 2.0. Without my originally-created content to work with, VH1 would not have had this segment at all. They based this segment of Web Junk 2.0 entirely on the fruit of my own labor.

I got to catch the episode and was laughing pretty hard not just at host Aries Spears's witty commentary about my commercial, but that VH1 had found the commercial worthy of sharing with such a vast audience.

Please bear in mind that at no time prior to the broadcast of this show was I contacted by VH1 or its parent company Viacom. At this time, I've received no communication from Viacom whatsoever about this.

I was quite aware that they were using my own not-for-profit work for commercial purposes and that they should have contacted me. But I didn't really care that they were doing that, either. It was just nice to see something that I had worked on getting seen and appreciated by a lot more people than what I had intended for a local audience. And I was glad that Melody Hallman Daniel, the voice-over actress in the spot, received some widespread notice of her considerable talent.

I was so proud that my commercial had been highlighted on Web Junk 2.0 that I posted the segment featuring it on YouTube so that I could put it on this blog, just like I'd posted the original commercial.

Did I think about the issue of copyright when I did that? Of course I did! But if this wasn't a matter of Fair Use, then I don't know how anything else would qualify it as such either. I made the original video, VH1 used it without my permission and I didn't particularly have a problem with that. I thought that they would have readily understood that were it not for my creativity and effort, that this edition of Web Junk 2.0 would have had to find some material elsewhere.

And then this morning the following e-mail arrives from YouTube:

Dear Member:
This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Viacom International Inc. claiming that this material is infringing:

Web Junk 2.0 on VH1 features my school board commercial!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyVQwpByug

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

If you elect to send us a counter notice, please go to our Help Center to access the instructions.

Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.

Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.

So Viacom took a video that I had made for non-profit purposes and without trying to acquire my permission, used it in a for-profit broadcast. And then when I made a YouTube clip of what they did with my material, they charged me with copyright infringement and had YouTube pull the clip.

Folks, this is, as we say down here in the south, "bass-ackwards".

I have written to YouTube's division of copyright enforcement, telling them that the VH1 clip is derived from my own work and that I should be entitled to use it as such. So far I haven't heard anything back from them. After reading that last part of the initial e-mail that they sent me, I'm wondering how apt they might be to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to wipe out the accounts of anyone who even raises such a fuss about something like this, no matter how well-grounded it is.

What does this mean for independent producers of content, if material they create can be co-opted by a giant corporation without permission or apology or compensation? When in fact, said corporations can take punitive action against you for using material that you created on your own?

That's what's happening to me right now, folks. Viacom is penalizing me for using my own original material, which they used without permission to begin with.

I would really like to fight this as hard as I can. Unfortunately at the moment I lack the time and resources to do this on my own. I am also, admittedly, not an attorney. There's a good bit of knowledge of copyright law floating around in my gray matter, but it's not nearly enough to mount the challenge that I would like to levy against Viacom for doing this.

I want to publicly declare this: that I am not out for any money. Not a single penny. All I want is for the clip to be restored to its original address on YouTube. And I want it to be established that other creators of content have a right under Fair Use to show how their works are being appreciated in the wider world. I just want the rest of us who aren't affiliated with corporate media to have as much right to use our own work as "the big boys" enjoy for theirs.
http://theknightshift.blogspot.com/2...copyright.html





Science Fiction Writers of America Abuses the DMCA
Cory Doctorow

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to fraudulently remove numerous non-infringing works from Scribd, a site that allows the general public to share text files with one another in much the same way that Flickr allows its users to share pictures.

Included in the takedown were: a junior high teacher's bibliography of works that will excite children about reading sf, the back-catalog of a magazine called Ray Gun Revival, books by other authors who have never authorized SFWA to act on their behalf, such as Bruce Sterling, and my own Creative Commons-licensed novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom."

The list of works to be removed was sent by "epiracy@sfwa.org" on August 17, described as works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg that had been uploaded without permission and were infringing on copyright. In a followup email on August 23, SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt noted that the August 17 list wasn't "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows copyright holders to use "notices" to force ISPs to remove material from the Internet on a mere say-so. In the real world, you couldn't get a book taken out of a bookstore or an article removed from the newspaper without going to court and presenting evidence of infringement to a judge, but the DMCA only requires that you promise that the work you're complaining about infringes, and ISPs have to remove the material or face liability for hosting it.

As a result of SFWA's takedown notice, hundreds of works were taken offline -- including several that had not been written by Asimov or Silverberg. It appears that the list was compiled by searching out every single file that contained the word "Asimov" or "Silverberg" and assuming that these files necessarily infringed on Silverberg and Asimov's copyrights.

This implies that Robert Silverberg and the Asimov estate have asked SFWA to police their copyrights for them, but it's important to note that many of the other authors whose work was listed in the August 17 email did not nominate SFWA to represent them. Indeed, I have told Vice President Burt on multiple occasions that he may not represent me as a rightsholder in negotiations with Amazon, and other electronic publishing venues.

More importantly, many of the works that were listed in the takedown were written by the people who'd posted them to Scribd -- these people have been maligned and harmed by SFWA, who have accused them of being copyright violators and have caused their material to be taken offline. These people made the mistake of talking about and promoting science fiction -- by compiling a bibliography of good works to turn kids onto science fiction, by writing critical or personal essays that quoted science fiction novels, or by discussing science fiction. SFWA -- whose business is to promote science fiction reading -- has turned readers into collateral damage in a campaign to make Scribd change its upload procedures.

Specifically, in the Aug 23 email, SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt demands that Scribd require its uploaders to swear on pain of perjury that the works they are uploading do not infringe copyright. SFWA has taken it upon itself to require legal oaths of people who want to publish any kind of thought, document, letter, jeremiad, story or rant on Scribd. Not just "pirates." Not just people writing about science fiction, or posting material by SFWA members -- SFWA is asking that anyone writing anything for publication on Scribd take this oath of SFWA's devising.

Ironically, by sending a DMCA notice to Scribd, SFWA has perjured itself by swearing that every work on that list infringed a copyright that it represented.

Since this is not the case, SFWA has exposed itself to tremendous legal liability. The DMCA grants copyright holders the power to demand the removal of works without showing any evidence that these works infringe copyright, a right that can amount to de facto censorship when exercised without due care or with malice. The courts have begun to recognize this, and there's a burgeoning body of precedent for large judgements against careless, malicious or fraudulent DMCA notices -- for example, Diebold was ordered to pay $150,000 125,000 for abusing the DMCA takedown process.

I am a former Director of SFWA, and can recall many instances in which concern over legal liability for the organization swayed our decision-making process. By sending out this indiscriminate dragnet, SFWA has been exposed to potential lawsuits from all the authors whose works they do not represent, from the Scribd users whose original works were taken offline, and from Scribd itself.

In addition to the legal risks, SFWA's actions have exposed it and its members to professional risk. For example, the page that used to host my book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom now reads, "The document 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' has been removed from Scribd. This content has been removed at the request of copyright agent Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America." Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first novel released under a Creative Commons license, and I've spent the past four years exhorting fans to copy my work and share it. Now I've started to hear from readers who've seen this notice and concluded that I am a hypocrite who uses SFWA to send out legal threats to people who heeded my exhortation.

In discussing this with my agent, Russell Galen, I was made aware of another potential problem: Scribd does end up hosting infringing works (just like Flickr, Blogger, LiveJournal and any other site that lets users upload their own files) that writers and their agents can remove by sending in legitimate DMCA notices (Russ tells me that he's sent Scribd notices on behalf of the Philip K Dick estate, another of his clients). When SFWA begins to muddy the waters by asserting that the organization is its members' representative for copyright, they make it harder for actual copyright enforcement agents to do their job -- how much harder will it be for Russ to convince Scribd that he is Dick's representative now that they've been burned by SFWA?

There's no excuse for this. Even a naive Internet user should be able to understand that if you compile a list of every file online that has the word "Asimov" in it, you'll get a lot of works that weren't written by Isaac Asimov included in the search results. In the case of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the file included a blurb from Gardner Dozois, former longtime editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine -- and it was that "Asimov" in "Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" that triggered the takedown.

Even a naive user should know better -- and SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt (who got his position through an uncontested ballot) is a computer scientist and programmer with experience in this field. Indeed, he previously created a system called "Shades of Grey" that is supposed to ruin the ebook downloading experience by poisoning the Internet with corrupted copies of ebooks. He convinced SFWA to appropriate funds from its operating capital to patent this idea, on the basis that publishers would pay SFWA to use it to make science fiction ebooks less attractive to readers (I don't understand the logic of this either). During the last SFWA election, he promised to pay this money back.

SFWA's copyright campaigns have been increasingly troublesome. In recent years, they've created a snitch line where they encourage sf lovers to fink on each other for copying books, created a loyalty oath for members in the guise of a "code of conduct" in which we are supposed to pledge to "not plagiarize, pirate, or otherwise infringe intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, and trademark) or encourage others to do so." What business SFWA has in telling its members how to think about, say, pharmaceutical patents, database copyrights, or trademark reform is beyond me. In 2005, SFWA sent out a push-poll to its members trying to scare members off of giving permission to Amazon to make the full text of their books searchable online.

All of this is pretty bad, but this month's campaign against Scribd takes the cake. I'm a dues-paying SFWA member and past volunteer who relies on the free distribution of my books to sell printed books and earn my living. By fraudulently removing my works from Scribd, SFWA is taking money out of my pocket -- it's the online equivalent of sending fake legal threats to bookstores demanding that they take my books off their shelves.

Update: SFWA President Michael Capobianco writes,
Dear Cory,

I want to personally apologize for the mistake that caused your work to be pulled from scribd.com. It should not have happened and it will not happen again.

I've asked Andrew Burt to notify scribd.com of this mistake so your work can be restored as quickly as possible.

I want to respond to the flurry of activity that has resulted from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) mistakenly identifying several works as infringing copyright. First, some background. There have been discussions within SFWA for several months regarding websites that allow users to upload documents of all sorts for other users to download and share. Many hundreds of copyrighted texts have been put online at these sites, and the number is growing quickly. Some SFWA members complained about the pirating of their works to SFWA's e-Piracy Committee and authorized the committee to do something about it. SFWA contacted scribd.com, one of these sites, about removing these authors' works and generated a list of infringing works to be removed.
Unfortunately, this list was flawed and the results were not checked. At least three works tagged as copyright infringements were nothing of the sort. I have personally apologized to the writers and editors of those works. If you are a creator who has had material removed and has not yet been contacted, please email me at president@sfwa.org.

SFWA's intention was to remove from scribd.com only works copyrighted by SFWA members who had authorized SFWA to act on their behalf. This kind of error will not happen again.

Michael Capobianco
President, SFWA
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/30...on-writ-1.html





Bob Marley Family Says to Sue Universal, Verizon

The family of late reggae singer Bob Marley said on Thursday they will sue Universal Music Group and Verizon Wireless for using the iconic pop star's name, likeness and image without permission.

Fifty Six Hope Road Music Ltd, which is owned by the Marley family, said in a news release that Universal Music had entered an agreement with Verizon Wireless that granted the U.S. mobile service provider the right to utilize Bob Marley's name, likeness and image to promote a new set of ringtones.

The offer, announced on Tuesday, said Verizon Wireless customers would be able to purchase ringtones of some of Marley's music exclusively on its service.

"The agreement was entered into without the permission of the Marley Family," said the statement from Fifty Six Hope Road Music Ltd.

Universal Music Group, the world largest music company, owns Island Records, the label through which Marley recorded most of his global hits, such as "One Love" and "I Shot The Sheriff." His greatest hits compilation, "Legend," is the biggest-selling reggae album of all time.

"UMG has not received any suit from the Marley Estate," Universal Music Group said on Thursday.

The music company, owned by French media giant Vivendi, said the claims made in the press release were "meritless".

"Specifically, we are offering Bob Marley ringtones through Verizon in accordance with the terms of a long-standing contract between Bob Marley and UMG," Universal Music Group said.

Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke)
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...45298520070831





YouTube Seals UK Music Royalty Deal
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

YouTube has secured an agreement with the UK societies that collect royalties for 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers to legitimise the use of recorded music on Google’s popular video-sharing website.

The agreement to license 10m pieces of music to YouTube – in return for a flat fee which has not been disclosed – is the first of its kind, said Steve Porter, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance. “This is the first fully formed agreement,” he said, although some US collecting societies had reached interim arrangements with YouTube.

The agreement marks another milestone in YouTube’s attempts to win over owners of media content, who have expressed alarm at the amount of material available on the site that is either pirated or that generates no revenue for the companies that created it.

YouTube is to pay a blanket fee to the MCPS-PRS Alliance, exactly as many radio and television broadcasters do, for music to be used in its partners’ professional sites and in amateurs’ videos. The alliance will decide about how to distribute the revenues to its members based on an estimate of what music has been played on the site.

Andrew Shaw, the alliance’s managing director for broadcast and online, said it would work with YouTube to implement technology to improve the monitoring of which pieces of music are played. While it was impossible to monitor the millions of videos available on the site, they would concentrate on the top 5 or 10 per cent that attract the highest audience, he said.

“The long-tail is not worth calculating,” he added.

Mr Porter said the high rates of internet access and online video usage in the UK were among the reasons that YouTube had struck the deal with MCPS-PRS first, but forecast that it could become a model for agreements in other territories. Composers and performers have been eager to gain revenues from new services such as YouTube, however small, to help compensate them for the income they have lost from declining CD sales.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1f66322c-5...0779fd2ac.html





NBC Will Not Renew iTunes Contract
Brooks Barnes

NBC Universal, unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, has decided not to renew its contract to sell digital downloads of television shows on iTunes.

The media conglomerate — which is the No. 1 supplier of digital video to Apple’s online store, accounting for about 40 percent of downloads — notified Apple of its decision late yesterday, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity because negotiations between the companies are confidential.

A spokesman for NBC Universal, part of General Electric, confirmed the decision, but otherwise declined to comment. A spokesmen for Apple declined to comment. The decision by NBC Universal highlights the escalating tension between Apple and media companies, which are unhappy that Apple will not give them more control over the pricing of songs and videos that are sold on iTunes.

NBC Universal is also seeking better piracy controls and wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue, the person familiar with the matter said.

NBC Universal is the second major iTunes supplier recently to have a rift with Apple over pricing and packaging matters. In July, the Universal Music Group of Vivendi, the world’s biggest music corporation, said it would not renew its long-term contract with iTunes. Instead, Universal Music said it would market music to Apple at will, which would allow it to remove its songs from iTunes on short notice.

The action by Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s chief executive, will not have an immediate impact on iTunes. The current two-year deal extends through December, so a vast video catalog — some 1,500 hours of NBC Universal’s news, sports and entertainment programming — will remain available on iTunes at least until then.

Among the most popular NBC Universal shows available for sale on iTunes are “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Office” and “Heroes.” The company has been talking to iTunes about offering Universal movies, but has not done so to date because of piracy concerns.

The two companies could still reach an agreement on a new contract before their current deal expires. While each side has so far refused to budge, the talks will continue and have been free of acrimony, the person familiar with the matter said.

But the defiant moves by NBC Universal and Universal Music could embolden other media companies that have been less than thrilled with Apple’s policies. NBC Universal was the second company to sign an agreement with Apple to sell content on iTunes, and its contract stipulated that Apple receive notice of plans to cancel 90 days before the expiration date. Otherwise, the deal would automatically renew according to the original terms.

Assuming similar provisions in deals negotiated with media companies like CBS, Discovery and the News Corporation, a parade of 90-day windows will be coming due.

A move by NBC Universal to walk away or withdraw a large amount of content would probably hobble Apple’s efforts to move deeper into the sale of video-focused consumer electronics like the iPhone and a new class of iPods. While Apple’s early efforts in this area depended on music to fuel sales, analysts say video is what will drive much of Apple’s retail business in the future.

The iTunes service wields incredible power in the music business, since it accounts for more than 76 percent of digital music sales. And its influence is on the rise: Apple recently passed Amazon to become the third-biggest seller of music over all, behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy, according to the market research firm NPD.

But the sale of video online is still at a nascent stage. Media giants like NBC Universal are aggressively trying to move into the business — in part to avoid the piracy that has plagued music companies — but the revenue they earn from online video sales does not yet have a material impact on their financial performances.

So some media companies feel they have the upper hand: Apple, for now at least, needs their content more than they need Apple. And there are an array of companies — like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Sony — that would love to have NBC Universal as a partner to muscle in on Apple’s turf.

Then there is NBC Universal’s own Hulu.com, a venture in partnership with the News Corporation to build a video portal to compete with YouTube.

The risks that media companies face in removing content from well-known Web sites involve perception and promotion. NBC Universal could anger consumers by preventing them from easily watching shows and movies in the most popular way — through iTunes and the iPod. Television networks and movie studios have vigorously tried to avoid being branded with the same anticonsumer sentiment that has worked against the record labels.

And because iTunes is so popular, NBC Universal would lose an increasingly important way of marketing entertainment products, particularly fledgling television shows, to consumers.

For months, most media companies have grumbled that Apple underprices video and audio content as a way to propel sales of a much more significant profit center: iPods and related merchandise. (One noteworthy abstainer from the grumbling is the Walt Disney Company, which has Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, as a board member.)

The iTunes service has sold songs for 99 cents each since its beginning four years ago, except for the recent introduction of songs without copy protection. Episodes of television shows sell for $1.99, with movies priced at $9.99.

NBC Universal and other companies say they want to increase prices by packaging content— say an episode of “The Office” with the movie “The 40- Year-Old Virgin,” because they both star the comedian Steve Carell.

In the past, Apple has argued that a range of pricing would complicate the iTunes experience and squelch demand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/technology/31NBC.html





Apple Drops NBC After NBC Drops Apple
Dr. Macenstein

Fans of The Office may have to dust off their VCRs, as Apple today announced that it will not be selling the upcoming season of NBC television shows on its online iTunes Store.

The move follows NBC’s decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple claims they declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode. We’re not sure what the “wholsesale” price of a TV show is, but Apple says the proposed cost increase would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. ABC, CBS, FOX and The CW, along with more than 50 cable networks, are signed up to sell TV shows from their upcoming season on iTunes at $1.99 per episode.

“We are disappointed to see NBC leave iTunes because we would not agree to their dramatic price increase,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We hope they will change their minds and offer their TV shows to the tens of millions of iTunes customers.”

Apple’s agreement with NBC ends in December. Since NBC would withdraw their shows in the middle of the television season, Apple has decided to not offer NBC TV shows for the upcoming television season beginning in September. NBC supplied iTunes with three of its 10 best selling TV shows last season, accounting for 30 percent of iTunes TV show sales.
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/779





Sony to Unplug Connect Music Service
Matt Moore

Acknowledging its proprietary audio technology was a marketplace flop, Sony Corp. is shuttering its Connect digital music store and will open its portable media players to other formats.

The moves were announced Thursday at a Berlin consumer electronics trade fair as the Japanese electronics pioneer unveiled a pair of new digital Walkmans that can play the Windows Media Audio, MP3 and AAC audio formats.

Like rivals' players, including Apple Inc.'s iPods, Sony's NWZ-A810 and NWZ-S610 can play video and display photographs. Sony's models include an FM tuner, too.

Sony said it would phase out operations of its struggling Connect online store, which sold songs in the company's proprietary ATRAC format.

"This gives customers greater flexibility in their music software approach," the company said in a statement. "As a result, Sony will be phasing out the Connect Music Services based on Sony's ATRAC audio format in North America and Europe."

Sony spokeswman Linda Barger said the new Walkman players will no longer directly support ATRAC.

"We are offering conversion software to convert ripped non-secure ATRAC files to MP3," she said in an e-mail.

In a message sent to Connect users, the service said it would not close before March 2008, but it did not set a more specific date. The company's Connect e-book service for the Sony Reader are not affected.

In June, Sony Connect Inc. said it was eliminating some positions as part of a restructuring plan to shift resources to other online services, but had denied reports it was related to a planned shutdown.

Instead, the company said it was shifting its emphasis other network services, specifically one for users of the PlayStation video game console, the company said.

Sony Connect launched in 2004, but like other online music services, it has had a tough time competing against Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store, which is tied to the market-leading iPod portable player.

The new Walkman video players store up to 1,850 average-length MP3 songs on the eight gigabyte models, 925 songs on the four gigabyte models, and 440 songs on the two gigabyte models. Prices range from $120 to $230.

Additionally, a third line, the NWZ-B100, will play audio only (MP3s, AAC and Windows Media formats), and cost $80 for a two-gigabyte model and $60 for a one-gigabyte model.

Sony said that the new Walkman video players will ship with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player 11 to manage digital libraries.

"With this initiative, Sony is debuting an important option for digital media players as it opens new doors for a rich digital experience," said Dave Wascha, director of Windows Client Product Management at Microsoft Corp.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap4068948.html





Search Engine Sponsored Link Usage Studied
UPI

U.S. scientists have conducted one of the first academic studies of search engine-sponsored link technology.

The Pennsylvania State University study led by Assistant Professor Jim Jansen found clicks on sponsored links occur less frequently than previously reported but show growth potential.

Although sponsored links are a money maker for search engines, the study suggests consumers click on sponsored listings about once every 10 searches, suggesting consumers still prefer organic or non-sponsored links.

"While the click through was only about 16 percent, I interpret this as being a real boon for search engines," Jansen said. "Even at 16 percent, sponsored search is already a multibillion-dollar market, and this study shows there is plenty of upside growth potential."

The study by Jansen and Professor Amanda Spink of Queensland University of Technology is reported in the journal IEEE Computer.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science..._studied/1304/





Network Manager Tells of IS&T Services, RIAA Woes, Own Undergrad Experience
Yuri Hanada

Today, The Tech interviews Jeffrey I. Schiller ’79, network manager for Information Services & Technology, who discusses IS&T, file-sharing, and his memories of being an undergraduate at MIT.

The Tech: What is your role at MIT?

Jeffrey Schiller: I do many different things. I’ve been employed in what is now Information Services & Technology and its predecessor organization, which was called Information Systems, for about 26 years. I have the title of network manager, but when I started, my job was to build the network — it didn’t exist. I built the network, and today, I’m one of the people who manage it. …

TT: What does IS&T do, and what services does it provide for students?

JS: We are basically the central information technology organization at MIT. We maintain, obviously, the computer network, which we call MITnet. We also run the telephone system on campus. Pretty much if it has to do with infrastructure and computing, we take care of it. … We also have a training group, so they teach classes on simple computer use skills. It’s not the same thing as taking a computer science course. It’s how to use Excel, how to use Word, how to make sure your computer is not vulnerable to thieves and viruses.

TT: What is IS&T currently working on?

JS: … [One of the] major projects that are in our area are a conversion to voice-over IP telephone service. That means the network that you have today will not only provide network services but provide telephone services as well. That’s going to happen everywhere, I might add, not just at MIT, but we’re going to be one of the first organizations to go there. We already have a pilot that has probably about 1,000 to 1,500 phones already. … Our plan is that around 2011, we’ll have the campus completely converted. …

TT: What advice do you have for incoming freshmen, regarding computing?

JS: … One of things we can talk about is file-sharing. A big issue right now is peer-to-peer file-sharing, people downloading music and movies and all this other crap. The reality is a lot of us believe that what the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] and the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] are doing, trying to sue students, is wrong … but the important thing you have to realize is that it’s still stealing. …

You may not agree with the law. You may think, I should just download this stuff, and why can’t I. But the reality is that it is against the law and if you get caught, you’re going to be in trouble, and MIT will not help you. In the standard letter — I think all freshmen might get this letter from the dean’s office — it pretty much says, if you get caught, well, here’s the legal aid society’s telephone number. MIT will cooperate in an investigation. We will do exactly to the extent of the law. We will not volunteer any information that we don’t have to, but if we get subpoenaed we have to answer it. …

What we’re really seeing is a paradigm shift. What’s happening is that the record companies are becoming superfluous, because, with the network, you don’t need record companies to get your music. … Whenever there’s a paradigm shift, there are winners and losers. The losers never go gracefully. And so the record companies, the move companies — they’re all grappling with this paradigm shift, and they don’t like that they’re going to lose a certain amount of control. Believe me, they don’t like that a garage band could publish their music on the Internet and become famous without going through a record label. …

One of the things we’re really worried about at MIT right now is that the RIAA is saying, all these universities have all of these students stealing our music, why aren’t you universities doing anything about it? To make matters worse, companies are showing up saying, hey, we’ve got a technical solution. If the universities buy our technical solution, we can solve this problem. And the fact of the matter is, they just want to make money. Whatever they sell us won’t work. It may work today, but the peer-to-peer file-sharing guys are pretty smart enough to figure out a way to get around it. … Our concern, being the university kind of guy, is collateral damage that these devices are going to do. These people are saying that no student should be allowed to download this many gigabytes in a month, because, if they are, they must be stealing them. Well, maybe, maybe not — our student may be doing something different, they may be doing real stuff — why should we prefashion a statement saying you’re the bad guy?

But again, having said all of this, when it comes back around, downloading music is still a crime. You get caught, you’re in trouble, and the law is funny about this. You go to iTunes, you can pay for a song a buck, and download the song. So, what’s the value of that song? It’s a dollar. But if you steal, what’s the value of that song? $100,000. Per song. Now this is a pretty fucked up thing about the law. So, if the music companies say you downloaded a thousand songs, what does that turn into? That’s $100 million. They can sue you for $100 million, so they think they’re offering you a great bargain when they say they’ll settle for $3,000. …

One thing some students don’t understand is that they say, well you know, I don’t have any money so they can’t anything from me. But the reality is, they can garnish your salary for the rest of your life. What the music companies will argue is that as an MIT student, you have a potentially good earning capability. … Just because you don’t have money now doesn’t mean you won’t have money in the future, and they will go after that. And music companies want to make examples of people. They really do. So this is not the time to go tempt them.

Now, I’m not going to be the moral enforcer. I’m just telling you that’s the reality. That’s my advice to students. Don’t get screwed by it.

TT: What is your educational background?

JS: Well, I graduated from MIT, and I never left. …

TT: What were your first impressions of MIT, and how have they changed over the years?

JS: You have to understand that when I came to MIT, for every woman at MIT, there were 11 men. That made it a very different place than what it is today. On the other hand, there were plenty of other universities that had plenty of women, so the fact that it was an 11 to 1 ratio did not mean that there were a bunch of cloistered monks here. …

And you also have to understand that I was 18, and that was the drinking age, and so rush was a very different thing than what it is today. It started with the freshman picnic … The last speaker at the picnic was the president of the interfraternity conference, and the last sentence he would always say was, “Let the fraternity rush begin.” And in the meantime, hanging out at the back of the picnic, literally the back of the great court, were all these guys. When the guy says, “Let the fraternity rush begin,” all these guys would tear off their T-shirts they were wearing. Underneath their bland T-shirts were their fraternity house T-shirts, and they would run into the crowd of freshmen to drag you away to parties.

Now my sophomore year, I was living in a fraternity house. That was 1976, and our liquor budget was $5,000 — that was not the beer budget, that was the hard liquor budget, and those were bigger dollars. I remember driving to Martignetti Liquors over on Soldier’s Field Road and filling my car. We had two guys go and we weren’t sure if both were going to fit in the car when we were done; the trunk was full. And that, talk about heavy partying, that was what rush was about. …

I had some very famous professors my freshman year, including Alar Toomre over in the Math Department. He taught the 18.02 class I was taking — I think he’s still around — and it’s rumored that he has written several songs that have made it to Dr. Demento’s top 10 demented hits in the country, so he was quite the character.

And then I had my first physics class. The lecturer clearly would have been more comfortable speaking German. He was on loan from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and spelled centripetal force with a “z.” My recitation instructor would have been much happier speaking Japanese. And I didn’t like 8 a.m. classes, I decided. I remember this pretty well, actually, it’s pretty amazing. It was a little while ago.

But I fell in love with the place and decided one of the reasons I stayed here after I was a student here was there’s a very thick density of very smart people and there’s very few other places that you have that experience, but this is one of them. …

TT: Last question. If there’s one thing freshmen should do during their first semester, what would it be?

JS: Besides not taking 6.001? No, in all seriousness, I haven’t been a freshman in a very long time. So it’s hard for me to be a good granter of advice on that. But if I were to give advice — I’ve been an on-again, off-again adviser, and I’ve seen way too many students who show up here and hit the books — my advice would be pace yourself. You don’t have to do two years’ worth of work in the first semester. The course load is designed so that it should take you four years to graduate. Busting your butt now so that you can graduate, you think, a semester early or get more courses in isn’t worth it. …

The other piece of advice I would give is to keep in mind that, at MIT, everyone is coming here from the very top of their class. When you get to MIT, there’s going to be a bottom half, and the people at the bottom half of the class — it’s not a place that they’re used to being. The important thing is, if you find yourself struggling, ask for help. One thing that MIT is really good at is we’ve got tons of help. There are layers upon layers of help — whether it’s tutors in math, whether it’s counseling deans — there really is. …

I’ll give you another piece of advice — it’s not about the grades. … When you get into your career, no one’s going to care what grade you got, and certainly not going to care what grade you got freshman, sophomore year. They’re going to want to know, can you do the job. …

I was in grad school here, so I know how to get into grad school here. I can’t speak for other universities, and I can’t even speak for other departments, but electrical engineering at MIT — it’s hard to get in as an electrical engineering grad student if you were an undergraduate student here — but it’s not your grade. No one gives a shit about the grades.

It’s the references you get from the faculty, and it’s only one sentence that’s important. When faculty say, oh, this person’s a great guy, and all this and that — that’s noise. There’s only one sentence that’s important, and that sentence is, I would be happy to have them in my research group and pay for their education. That’s the money sentence. They say that, they mean it. And if you get three faculty to say that, you’re in and it doesn’t matter what your grades are. …
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N32/schiller.html





Sixty Seconds Of Privacy: Employee Use Of Peer-To-Peer Software Presents Data Security Concerns
Kristen J. Mathews

Welcome to Sixty Seconds of Privacy, an e-newsletter brought to you by the Privacy and Data Security practice group at Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner LLP.

Each edition of this e-newsletter addresses one interesting legal development in the area of privacy and data security, in a brief "question and answer" format. Each edition is intended to be read in about a minute, yet will update you on an important development. We pick the topics for this e-newsletter based on what our clients are concerned about. You are welcome to submit your questions or suggestions to us, and you may find your sixty second answer in an upcoming edition.

Question: Are there data security risks involved in the installation of peer-to-peer file-sharing software on corporate computers?

Answer: Yes, and those risks were demonstrated by a recent security breach incident at a major pharmaceutical company that was traced to the use of unauthorized P2P software on a company laptop. The data security breach occurred when an employee's spouse installed the software on a laptop provided by the company for the employee's use at home. According to the company's letter notification to its affected employees, the names, social security numbers, and, in some cases, addresses and bonus information of some 17,000 present and former employees could have been accessed and copied by third parties via the P2P software. Now the company is being sued by its employees in a putative class action.

The risk of a data security breach through the use of P2P software is no surprise to Rep. Henry Waxman, who held hearings in Washington on July 24, and concluded that the use of such software in government and corporate environments is a "national security threat." Tests conducted by his staff using popular P2P applications revealed that a multitude of varieties of sensitive corporate information is inadvertently made available on P2P file-sharing networks.

The security breach incident, and the results of Rep. Waxman's tests, underscore the importance of having, and enforcing, data security policies in the corporate environment. A properly drafted security policy should include the following:
Provisions prohibiting the installation of unauthorized software on all company computers, specifically including laptops and other computers provided by the company for use in the home environment.
Provisions prohibiting the use of company-provided computer equipment by anyone other than the company employee.

Finally, this incident also underscores the importance of advance planning in handling data security breach incidents, and having a properly drafted security incident response policy outlining steps that must be taken to comply with the 38 state data security breach laws now on the books. For some types of companies, having these policies in place is not only a best practice, it is also a legal requirement.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=51622





After Stumbling, Mattel Cracks Down in China
Louise Story

The alarm bell went off for Mattel just as it was preparing to announce that it would recall 1.5 million Chinese-made toys tainted with lead paint.

Surrounded by boxes of Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels cars and other sample toys, Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel’s executive vice president for worldwide operations, was leading a tense early morning trans-Pacific telephone conference with his team in Hong Kong, where it was 9 p.m. At the time, recalled Mr. Debrowski, Mattel thought it was dealing with at most “a single failure, from a single vendor who made a big mistake.”

But in the middle of the meeting on July 30, Mattel learned otherwise.

“I’ve got bad news,” interrupted David Lewis, senior vice president for Asian operations, who had just taken a call from the company’s safety lab in Shenzhen, China, where toys made by outside companies are tested. “We’ve had another failure. It was one of the toys in the Pixar cars.”

That was the moment that threw Mattel into turmoil, forcing the company — long considered one of the more successful Western manufacturers in China — to recognize that it had more of a systemic problem than simply an isolated case of one bad paint supplier.

Now Mattel, which appears to have stumbled in part because it had become overconfident about its ability to operate in China without major problems, is in crisis mode. Toys for the coming holiday shopping season are already shipping across the Pacific, and Mattel wants to catch any other problems that may have slipped through — before those toys land on store shelves and cause even greater damage to its reputation.

A big problem was that some of Mattel’s trusted vendors had turned to cheaper paint suppliers outside the company’s approved list. Mattel is now racing to increase its supply and product testing, no longer giving local contractors several months at a time to do the tests themselves.

Mattel executives are openly saying that there may be more recalls, if the company finds more problems in its investigation. And Mattel has quietly carted loads of toys and dolls to its own factories in Mexico to recheck the ones that have arrived from Chinese contractors in recent weeks.

“We have had recalls every year since I’ve been here,” Robert A. Eckert, Mattel’s chief executive, said in an interview at corporate headquarters here. But “the second recall was different; it was going to receive a different level of scrutiny.”

With its back-to-back recalls, Mattel — the world’s largest toy maker and the home, among others, of Fisher-Price toys, American Girls dolls, Matchbox cars and, of course, Barbie — has been pitched into the center of a boiling debate over the safety of products made in China.

The ever-growing pile of products recalled this year has sent consumers digging through their pantries and toy chests, scouting for everything from Thomas & Friends toy trains and children’s jewelry to toothpaste, dog food and, most recently, SpongeBob SquarePants journals. Wal-Mart recently disclosed that one of the biggest concerns of its shoppers is the safety of toys from China.

One mother was so infuriated by the recalls that she brought her children to Mattel headquarters this month with a car full of Mattel toys demanding that the company sort through them to tell her which ones were safe. (Mattel found that all of her toys were fine.)

“Mattel is very vulnerable in the short term,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director at Landor Associates, a brand-management firm, “because the spotlight is on them and the China issue is such a hot issue.”

Mattel has been manufacturing in Asia far longer than many companies (the first Barbie was made there in 1959). That led to long-term relationships with certain Chinese contractors, many spanning decades. Paradoxically, that appears to have contributed to Mattel’s problems: the longer it outsourced to a factory supplier with good results, the looser the leash became.

During Mr. Eckert’s tenure, the company has scaled back the number of companies it uses and the fraction of Mattel toys that they make, but it allowed its more reliable suppliers to do their own regular toy testing — with spot tests by Mattel only every three months.

The two contractors that caused this month’s recalls were among the most trusted. Lee Der Industrial, the supplier involved in the first recall, had worked with Mattel for 15 years. The Early Light Industrial Company, the contractor that made the Sarge cars in the second recall, has supplied toys for 20 years.

Mattel first got wind of its China problem in early July when a European retailer discovered lead paint on a toy, leading to Mattel’s first recall of 1.5 million toys globally on Aug. 2. Mattel shut its production at Lee Der, which made the 83 different recalled toys.

The recall on Aug. 14 was not as large, affecting 436,000 Pixar toy cars, but, combined with a separate recall of millions of toys with tiny magnets that had harmed some children who swallowed them, the blow to Mattel’s public reputation was substantial. The Pixar toys were made by yet another contractor, Early Light, which had subcontracted production of the car’s roof and tires to a company called Hong Li Da.

In both cases, the Chinese companies broke Mattel’s rules on what paint they were allowed to use. Mattel has certified only eight paint suppliers. Lee Der bought lead-tainted paint from an uncertified company. Hong Li Da, the subcontractor, used uncertified paint when a tub provided by Early Light ran out.

“I think it’s the fault of the vendor who didn’t follow the procedures that we’ve been living with for a long time,” Mr. Debrowski said.

He readily acknowledges the rising costs that companies in China are facing.

“In the last three or five years, you’ve seen labor prices more than double, raw material prices double or triple,” he said, “and I think that there’s a lot of pressure on guys that are working at the margin to try to save money.”

But isn’t Mattel putting pressure on its vendors to save money?

“No, absolutely not,” he replied. “We insist that they continue to use certified paint from certified vendors, and we pay for that, and we’re perfectly willing to pay for that.”

On the day of the second recall, Mattel announced a three-point plan that tightened its control of production, cracked down on the unauthorized use of subcontractors and provided for Mattel to test products itself, rather than rely on its contractors. The plan also included testing every batch of paint.

“We do realize the need for increased vigilance, increased surveillance,” Jim Walter, who reports to Mr. Debrowski on quality assurance, said on the day of the announcement.

Mattel makes its best-known toys, like Barbie dolls, in its own 12 factories. But even as it has increased the share of toys it makes itself to about half, it still relies on roughly 30 to 40 vendors to make the other half. Mattel now realizes it was not watching those companies closely enough, executives here said.

Mattel vetted the contractors, but it did not fully understand the extent to which some had in turn subcontracted to other companies — which in turn had subcontracted to even more. Mattel required its vendors to list subcontractors, so Mattel could visit them, but Mattel is investigating whether that procedure has been followed. A number of companies whose factories Mattel had never visited may have had a hand in making the toys that were shipped around the world.

Out of the public eye, Mattel is cleaning house. The company has fired four subcontractors and is evaluating more. Mattel also moved to enforce a rule that subcontractors cannot hire two and three layers of suppliers below them.

Mattel executives in Hong Kong are trying to figure out how many subcontractors became part of its lineup. Mattel’s Hong Kong office is also investigating to find a common thread among the lead recalls in China. Mattel has 200 full-time employees devoted to supervising and training Chinese contractors — but the Mattel employees are not stationed permanently at those factories.

As part of its effort to rebuild its image, Mattel is emphasizing that it is less dependent on Chinese contractors than most toy makers. It has run ads around the world featuring Mr. Eckert’s vow to do better.

“There aren’t many companies that own their own factories,” Mr. Eckert said in an interview in his office, “and there aren’t many companies that manufacture outside of China.”

Mattel closed its last American factory, originally part of the Fisher-Price division, in 2002. The bulk of its products have long been made in Asia. In the 1980s, Mattel decided to take more control of its core products, like Barbie and Hot Wheels cars, and built and purchased several factories. About 65 percent of Mattel products are made in China now. Or, as a Mattel executive rephrased it, more than a third of Mattel toys are made outside of China. Many Barbie dolls, for example, are produced in Indonesia.

Mattel executives showed off a factory in Tijuana, Mexico, escorting a reporter to demonstrate a safety lab with drop machines, temperature checks, not to mention tests for lead in paint. Fisher-Price’s Little People houses as well as Barbie playhouses are made there, largely because shipping costs from Asia for larger products add too much to the cost.

Mattel plans to buy large numbers of a portable lead detector that can be used in all its factories as well as those of its contractors. In the last few weeks, the safety lab in Tijuana has been used to double-check the work of Mattel’s Chinese suppliers.
“It’s to make absolutely sure this issue is behind us,” Mr. Eckert said in his office, surrounded by portraits of Barbie by artists like Andy Warhol and Peter Max.

Mr. Eckert has improved the company’s financial performance, but, looking back, he is happy that he resisted calls from analysts early in his tenure to sell off Mattel’s 12 factories and outsource all production.

When he lectures at business schools, Mr. Eckert often cites Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 recall of Tylenol as an example of how to do things right and recover from an initial disaster.

“It is a great example of building trust,” he said. “It became kind of a personal mission of the C.E.O. at the time, saying, ‘Here is the problem, here is what we’re doing.’ And it was clear that it really was not about the money.”

Mattel’s costs of doing business, he acknowledges, will go up with the additional level of testing. But the price, he says, will be worth it.

Mr. Eckert also has a new addition to the shelf behind his desk. Next to a portrait of his 16-year-old daughter is Sarge, the army-green toy jeep that Mattel recalled last week.

Mr. Debrowski, Mattel’s head of manufacturing, also keeps Sarge on his desk.

“Just to remember, you know,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/bu...mattel.html?hp





Efforts to Crack Down on Lead Paint Thwarted by China, Bush Administration
Kevin G. Hall

The Bush administration and China have both undermined efforts to tighten rules designed to ensure that lead paint isn't used in toys, bibs, jewelry and other children’s products.

Both have fought efforts to better police imported toys from China.

Now both are under increased scrutiny following last week’s massive toy recall by Mattel Inc., the world’s largest toymaker. The recalls of Chinese-made toys follow several other lead-paint-related scares since June that have affected products featuring Sesame Street characters, Thomas the Train and Dora the Explorer.

Lead paint is toxic when ingested by children and can cause brain damage or death. It’s been mostly banned in the United States since the late 1970s, but is permitted in the coating of toys, providing it amounts to less than six hundred parts per million.
The Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts, consumer advocates say. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach.

“The overall philosophy is regulations are bad and they are too large a cost for industry, and the market will take care of it,” said Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy at OMBWatch, a government watchdog group formed in 1983. “That’s been the philosophy of the Bush administration.”

Today, more than 80 percent of all U.S. toys are now made in China and few of them get inspected.

“We’ve been complaining about this issue, warning it is going to happen, and it is disappointing that it has happened,” said Tom Neltner, a co-chairman of the Sierra Club’s national toxics committee.

The recent toy recalls — along with the presence of lead in vinyl baby bibs and children’s jewelry — are prompting the Bush administration to take a deeper look at the safety of toys and other imported products.

President Bush has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to report in September on ways to better ensure safe imports. He's also asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to consider responses to lead paint threats to children.

But as recently as last December, the Sierra Club sued the Bush administration after the Environmental Protection Agency rebuffed a petition to require health and safety studies for companies that use lead in children’s products. The EPA and Sierra Club settled out of court in April, with the administration agreeing to write a letter to the CPSC that expressed concern about insufficient quality control on products containing lead.

The Sierra Club’s interest in lead paint in children's products grew out of the largest-ever CPSC-conducted recall. That action on July 8, 2004, targeted 150 million pieces of Chinese-made children's jewelry sold in vending machines across the United States. Since 2003, the commission has conducted about 40 recalls of children’s jewelry because of high levels of lead.

In March 2006, a 4-year-old Minnesota boy died of lead poisoning after swallowing a metal charm that came with Reebok shoes. The charm was found to contain more than 90 percent lead.

From 1994 until 2001, Ann Brown headed the CPSC under Presidents Clinton and Bush. She didn’t push for an outright ban on lead in all children’s products, partly because China’s rise to export prowess hadn’t yet unfolded.

“Today, I would say there should be an outright ban in any lead in any toy product,” she said in a telephone interview. “If I were at CPSC now, I’d say that trying to recall (tainted products) is like picking sand out of the beach — it’s just not possible.”

Before leaving her post, Brown unsuccessfully pushed for pre-market testing of children’s products. The idea largely died when the Bush administration took over, said Brown, who's working with Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The CPSC has only 100 field inspectors to police problems with all products sold to more than 301 million Americans. None of the inspectors are stationed in China or anywhere else abroad.

China remains very much under the microscope. It's fighting a CPSC proposal to bring the lead restrictions in children’s jewelry to the same levels as those imposed on toys and furniture — six hundred parts per million, which effectively amounts to a ban.
“We have done recall after recall since 2003. We would like to move towards a ban and make the marketplace safe,” said Scott Wolfson, a commission spokesman.

But in a March 12 filing, China was the only one of 48 interested parties to tell the panel that it opposed new restrictions on lead paint in children’s jewelry. Guo LiSheng, the deputy director of a Chinese global trade agency, warned against “unnecessary obstacles to trade” and advocated international rules that allow some lead content. He added that good product labeling was sufficient.

“We agree with the viewpoint of USA of protecting the children’s healthy and safety. And we consider that the method of stick warning mark on the children’s metal jewelry … may be more efficient than setting the limit of lead content,” LiSheng wrote from Beijing.

Of the 400 or so product recalls this year, about 60 percent involve products made in China, according to commission statistics.

In response to the toy recalls and tainted products, China announced last Friday the creation of a government panel on product safety. The government appointed Wu Yi, the vice premier and China’s top problem-solver, to head the panel.

Outside a Toys-R-Us store in Maryland’s capital city of Annapolis, Bruce Waskmunski suggested it was a no-brainer that lead should be completely banned from children’s products. He’s angry about the June recall of a Chinese-made Thomas the Train wooden toy that he bought his son.

“The only thing lead paint is in now (in the United States) is 40- or 50-year-old buildings,” he grumbled. “We’ve known about lead paint for years, but we’re giving away the penny to China.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/19070.html





Beijing Police Launch Web Patrols

Police in China's capital said Tuesday they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user's browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content. ADVERTISEMENT

Starting Sept. 1, the cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China's top portals, including Sohu and Sina, and by the end of the year will appear on all Web sites registered with Beijing servers, the Beijing Public Security Ministry said in a statement.

China stringently polices the Internet for material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening. Despite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers.

The animated police appeared designed to startle Web surfers and remind them that authorities closely monitor Web activity. However, the statement did not say whether there were plans to boost monitoring further.

The male and female cartoon officers, designed for the ministry by Sohu, will offer a text warning to surfers to abide by the law and tips on Internet security as they move across the screen in a virtual car, motorcycle or on foot, it said.

If Internet users need police help they can click on the cartoon images and will be redirected to the authority's Web site, it said.

"We will continue to promote new images of the virtual police and update our Internet security tips in an effort to make the image of the virtual police more user friendly and more in tune with how web surfers use the Internet," it said.

China has the world's second-largest population of Internet users, with 137 million people online, and is on track to surpass the United States as the largest online population in two years.

The government routinely blocks surfers from accessing overseas sites and closes down domestic Web sites deemed obscene or subversive.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070828/...a_web_police_1





BeliefWatch: Reincarnate
Matthew Philips

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control. Assuming he's able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks. "It will be a very hot issue," says Paul Harrison, a Buddhism scholar at Stanford. "The Dalai Lama has been the prime symbol of unity and national identity in Tibet, and so it's quite likely the battle for his incarnation will be a lot more important than the others."

So where in the world will the next Dalai Lama be born? Harrison and other Buddhism scholars agree that it will likely be from within the 130,000 Tibetan exiles spread throughout India, Europe and North America. With an estimated 8,000 Tibetans living in the United States, could the next Dalai Lama be American-born? "You'll have to ask him," says Harrison. If so, he'll likely be welcomed into a culture that has increasingly embraced reincarnation over the years. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 20 percent of all U.S. adults believe in reincarnation. Recent surveys by the Barna Group, a Christian research nonprofit, have found that a quarter of U.S. Christians, including 10 percent of all born-again Christians, embrace it as their favored end-of-life view. A non-Tibetan Dalai Lama, experts say, is probably out of the question.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/





Buddha Gets a Biopic

Born into a princely family in the sixth century B.C. in Kapilavastu on the border between present-day India and Nepal, Gautama Buddha abandoned luxury for spiritual enlightenment. Now the life of this man, who founded Buddhism, will be the subject of a film, Agence France-Press reported. Based on research by the Sri Lankan scholar Nimal D’Silva and others, the film will be shot in India and Sri Lanka by Shyam Benegal, an Indian director, for release in 2009. It is a venture of the Light of Asia Foundation, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Beyond Dream Entertainment, based in India. “The message of the movie gives answers to global crises of conflict and environmental problems,” said Navin Gooneratne, chairman of the foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/mo...ETSAB_BRF.html





Premature immolation



Burning Man's Icon Goes Up in Flames, 4 Days Too Soon
Joe Garofoli

A San Francisco man was arrested on felony arson charges today after the 40-foot-tall "Man" statue whose torching is the annual highlight of the Burning Man festival in Nevada went up in flames four days early, authorities said.

Paul Addis, 35, of San Francisco, was booked into the Pershing County Jail in Nevada on the arson charge and misdemeanor possession of fireworks, Sheriff Ron Skinner said.

Festival organizers, meanwhile, pondered the smoldering remains of the Man and promised to rebuild the big guy in time for Saturday's regularly scheduled burn in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno.

"The Man is still standing, and an assessment is under way to determine the structural integrity of the Man and the Green Man Pavilion," according to a statement posted today at www.burningman.com. "The event will continue as scheduled."

Jamie Thompson, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Land Management, which manages the land where the event is held, said the platform and material around the statue was intact.

Some 40,000 people are expected to gather in the desert by this weekend for Burning Man, and Thompson said about 15,000 revelers are already at the festival site. Many were on the playa early this morning watching the lunar eclipse when the fire ignited at 2:58 a.m., according to Burning Man organizers.

Thousands of festival-goers streamed out onto the playa from the surrounding Black Rock City encampment to view the spectacle, witnesses said. Black Rock City rangers rushed to the scene and doused the conflagration within about 25 minutes.

Reactions ranged from amusement and support to frustration and anger.

"I am disturbed that the Man is burnt. As I looked at it, I was going, 'This can't be happening,' " said Bob Harms of South Lake Tahoe, a seven-time burner.

Kyle Marx of Eugene, Ore., said the fire started from the Man's left leg and spread to engulf nearly his entire body.

"Some people were chanting, 'Let him burn, let him burn!' and some were chanting, 'Save the man, save the man!' " Marx said.

Several people were seen clambering up the tower of logs below the statue's platform base shortly before the fire began.

"Someone went to a great extent to interfere with everyone else's burn. I think, frankly, an attention whore has made a plea for attention," said a Burning Man volunteer named Ranger Sasquatch. "In three days, we will have this rebuilt."

A festival-goer who identified herself as simply Erica said she and her friends were "upset by the fact that someone would take this away from everybody who comes to the event just to see the man burn. To try to sabotage him is completely wrong. We wait all year long. This is an adult's Christmas party."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl.../BA2ARQRFI.DTL





A Fiery Q&A With the Prankster Accused of Burning the Man
Miyoko Ohtake

Paul Addis, the San Francisco playwright arrested Tuesday for allegedly torching Burning Man's giant effigy five days early, won't admit to setting the icon on fire. But he effusively praises the action -- whoever did it -- calling it a badly needed "reality check" for the desert art festival.

Addis, 35, says Burning Man has turned into an "Alterna-Disney," while the early burn acted as a protest aimed at the event's increasing commercialization.

The Tuesday morning blaze, for which Addis faces charges of arson and possession of fireworks, drew a mixed reaction at Burning Man and in the blogosphere: Some rallied to support Addis, saying the early blaze was a righteous move to reset burners' priorities, while others complained that the act threatened to ruin the festival's main event.

Wired News spoke with Addis by phone Thursday as he waited outside a hotel in Fernley, Nevada, for a ride back to San Francisco.

Wired News: So the big question is, did you set the Man on fire?

Paul Addis: For legal reasons I can't answer that. One of us is looking at a felony charge, and it's not you.

WN: Is the Black Rock Intelligence, a group you are openly a member of, claiming responsibility for burning the man? (See this statement from Addis; scroll down to update 18.)

Addis: This was a Black Rock Intelligence operation. But since the group has been disbanded, they can make no claim to responsibility. The Black Rock Intelligence has disbanded, and I am their sole surviving member. I got caught and the rest of them took their L-pills, potassium cyanide.

WN: Are you saying that the other members of the Black Rock Intelligence have all actually committed suicide?

Addis: Take it for what it is.

WN: OK, but if you were part of the Black Rock Intelligence and you're saying burning the Man early was a Black Rock Intelligence operation, isn't that the same as saying you did it?

Addis: No, because it could have been one of our other operators, and because they're all dead no one will ever know.

WN: Was the Black Rock Intelligence, a group you're a member of, responsible for putting the giant testicles on the Burning Man in 1997?

Addis: No, I did that. It was a solo operation. I was part of the building team who built the Man in 1997. I was standing in the back yard of the guy who had the man built. We had the legs assembled, and they were sitting in his backyard. I was on a break and thought, "What's missing from this thing?" and I turned around and I thought, "Balls!"

You can do things through different people with no one knowing the total project so I had one guy buy the balls -- they were huge 54- to 60-inch beach balls -- and I had another guy buy silver spray paint and so on. Then at Burning Man at around 4:30 in the morning I scaled up the robe, locked the balls in place and came down.

WN: And how was that received?

Addis: It was very well received. They stayed up there for hours. Burning Man was very cautious in taking them down, though, 'cause I had jokingly said I was going to fill them with hydrogen. It's that sort of zaniness that doesn't fly there anymore. The Burning Man organization doesn't have any sense of humor anymore and that streams and trickles down to the participants themselves.

WN: You went to Burning Man in 1996, 1997 and 1998 and hadn't been back until this year. Why did you stop going to Burning Man after 1998?
Addis: I decided after 1998 it wasn't worth it. Burning Man was only advocating social impact and responsibility in the name of its own self-preservation, survival and expansion, and I was not willing to be a part of that.

Burning Man in the period of 1996-1997 was the right place at the right time with the right minds. We had a great opportunity to put all of our hands on the wheel and really affect social evolution. We had a bunch of gifted people who had the chance to break the mold on a lot of things.

A lot of people were very interested in making sure the future of America was better than the past. We had lived through the Regan years and the Cold War. We already knew what we didn't want and had the opportunity to build a better place for ourselves and the future generations to come.

Burning Man was the perfect place but once it made the decision that its own survival was more important than its content or style, everything was lost.

WN: What do you mean by that?

Addis: Burning Man was losing money hand over fist through a series of bad decisions and a real lack of business acumen. They took a hit in 1997 that was almost fatal. That really cost the organization in terms of its fiscal stability and steady accounting and in that regard they had to do a mass appeal. And by doing that, they sacrificed everything. They took the edges off and they became the Alterna-Disney. You have a lot of people singing, "It's a Small World After All" but just to a different mouse.

WN: What did you think of this year's Burning Man?

Addis: Burning Man should stop the disingenuous Green Man immediately. It's all a lie. If you want to know how much a of a total lie it is, run a Google satellite photo of Burning Man right now and count the number of RVs there. And they're telling me it's an environmental movement? Bullshit. There are people sucking gas up there faster than they are passing it.

Black Rock Intelligence advocated the first Olympic RV Gas Tank Puncturing competition this year, offering prices to the top three participants. And while the gas was spilling out of all the gas tanks we were going to have people collect it and then open the first Black Rock Intelligence gas station: Set up at the exit of Burning Man and sell gas for $27 per gallon to RVs only.

Burning Man is offering no real alternatives to the current environmental crisis. The only one is wood-burning stoves for cooking. We're living in a world with 6 billion people and their only suggestion is wood-burning stoves? My advice: Stop doing the cocaine. It's starting to eat your brains.

Burning Man has been nothing about the Burning Man anymore except for burning the Man. It has more to do with raising money than spreading the theory of community so we can all live together. The only reason the organization has reached out to the environmentalists is they were courting public opinion on the lawsuit filed against them, and they reached out to the most easily manipulated population they could control. That's what Green Man is all about. Green Man is all about Burning Man getting the most green in their pockets.

WN: So in your mind, Burning Man has lost its purpose?

Addis: Burning Man doesn't accomplish anything anymore. What do we get out of Burning Man? Nothing. Do we get any leaders? We're down to one Ramone and two Vitos and no one from Burning Man is stepping out. There's no good music and only a precious few writers. These fourth and fifth generations of happy-go-lucky birds, what are they doing when they come back to the cities? Nothing. They go blow their wads for seven days at Burning Man and then go back to their jobs. They don't do anything else for the rest of the year.

WN: So what did burning the Man on Tuesday accomplish?

Addis: One, it was a reality check. Two, it was a history lesson. It was, "This is why this started. Why are you here?"

A very good friend of mine, Chris Radcliffe, who was part of starting Burning Man, went four years ago. I called him when he came back and he said, "Paul, everyone keeps waiting for something to happen and it never does." I think that is symbolic and really emblematic of Burning Man's suburbanization of the underground and homogenization of the underground.

There have been people talking about pulling this prank for years. There was a person last year who told people to bring barrels of gasoline to pour on the Man. But there could have been people having their first LSD orgasm and they'd just be reaching climax when everything blew up around them.

I wrote an e-mail to the guy saying it was stupid, reckless and that someone was going to get killed. And then they ended up not doing it.

WN: From your sense, what have people's reactions been to setting Burning Man aflame before the scheduled Saturday burn?

Addis: I have no idea. This could have been all for nothing. It could have made people think. I hope it has. That's all the Black Rock Intelligence has wanted is for people to think for themselves, whether they're in the streets, at Burning Man or in the ballot box. They don't have to like us; the only thing the Black Rock Intelligence has ever wanted was for people to think about what they are doing. If they come back to the same place as where they started, that's fine, at least they thought about it. But every once and a while you can break people out and there's another free mind out there with a Socratic operating system in it.

We're being programmed on every level: TV, radio, internet, advertising. It's everywhere. We believe in the true promise of the American Dream and that should be for everyone no matter what. We're jamming the program and allowing people the freedom of their minds rather than the programming someone else is trying to sell them.

That's the most important thing. We're not telling people what to think or how to think, just presenting alternatives and facts and everything else. Humor, that's the best way to do things. We're not out here to be preachers. But Burning Man has become just as nefarious a cultural programmer as General Electric or Disney.

You only need to look as far as Burning Man's media team to see it's like the Bush media team except with a different purpose. They exercise the same tactics to achieve the same results: to portray themselves in the best lights and to avoid negative media attention.

WN: What do you have to say to the people who are upset about the early Burning Man burn?

Addis: They're entitled to their opinions. I can certainly understand their feelings on it, but at the same time, the newbies who go along aren't from that same pranksterism and one-upmanship that used to be done at Burning Man.

So to them, the entire experience of Burning Man is a passive spectacle. To people who would say they are pissed off because the Man got torched, I say, "Why are you really out there?" If the burning of the Man means something, if it brings them some sort of cathartic connection, then build your own thing and burn it down. Don't be a passive audience member. Cross the line.

WN: You're arraignment is scheduled for Sept. 25 at Pershing County Courthouse in Nevada. How are you going to plead?

Addis: Not guilty to all charges.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifesty.../2007/08/addis





Amid All the Cheers, a Few Signs of Change
Kelefa Sanneh

Take a 19-year-old Disney-groomed actress, beloved by tweens and former tweens. Put her onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Give her a microphone. No, a working microphone. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right?

So you’d think. Hilary Duff certainly isn’t anyone’s idea of an all-around virtuoso. She probably sings a little better than her backup dancers and dances a little worse than her backup singers. And few grown-up fans — except for parents — were paying attention in 2002, when she released her first CD, a concept album loosely inspired by Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Myra. (It was called “Santa Claus Lane.”)

Yet Ms. Duff’s music is much better than it might be, and much better than it needs to be. Her recent album, “Dignity” (Hollywood), is full of neat little electro-pop songs that make her wispy voice seem like an asset. And on Monday night at Radio City Music Hall she spent an hour and a half onstage, earning trebly screams that probably would have been just as loud if she had been reciting her life story, putting on a fashion show or doing jumping jacks.

Instead she chose to sing, more or less, and she sounded pretty good. She performed almost the entire “Dignity” album, along with a handful of ancient favorites, including an emo’d-up version of “The Getaway,” which was released way back in 2004. There were a couple of duds, including “Gypsy Woman,” a funk-pop misfire that probably wouldn’t exist if the Romany community had a stronger political lobby. (A sample couplet: “That’s how she works/Her sick and twisted Gypsy curse.”) More often, she made it easy to enjoy dance-club hits like “With Love” and “Play With Fire.”

All night she stuck to sharp beats and simple refrains. Maybe she doesn’t have a choice; suffice it to say that operatic ballads are out of the question. And maybe her very unextraordinary singing is part of her appeal. A young fan usually looks at a pop star and thinks, “That could be me, if only I had the voice.” Ms. Duff takes away the “if only.”

She cheerfully acknowledges her influences, too. “Never Stop,” a snappy new-wave song from “Dignity,” morphed into “Major Tom (Coming Home),” the David-Bowie-inspired 1980s hit by Peter Schilling. “Outside of You,” another infectious “Dignity” track, quoted a melody from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” And immediately after “Beat of My Heart,” one of her Go-Go’s-iest songs, she went right to the source with her cover of “Our Lips Are Sealed.”

Before “Come Clean,” also known as the theme song for the MTV reality drama “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” she made a characteristically dispassionate (and, it seemed, underpunctuated) request for audience participation: “Hey you guys know this song help me sing O.K.” The girls in the crowd — some probably attending their first concert — spent as much time gawking as singing. There she was, their heroine, onstage in shiny short-shorts and high heels, singing songs that sounded kind of like sexy robot music or something. Weird! Cool! Hi! La! Ry!

Ms. Duff is clearly comfortable with her stardom. At one point she told her fans how pretty their multicolored glow sticks looked, knowing full well they had been purchased from her own well-stocked merchandise booths. But she must know that her empire is under siege from newer tween juggernauts such as Hannah Montana and “High School Musical.” And she must also know that she’s not a mainstream pop star like Rihanna, at least not yet. At times Monday’s concert felt transitional. She is a teenage idol who will be 20 in a month, and her music is growing up faster than her fan base.

Maybe Ms. Duff will figure it out; after all, she has already established herself as an overachiever. (If you’re wondering how busy her schedule is, this concert came less than 24 hours after she was a host of the “Teen Choice” awards in Los Angeles.) For now, anyway, she remains teen-pop royalty, and perhaps she was using the royal “we” when she delivered her statement of purpose near the end of the night, saying, “We’re capable of so much and we can do anything that we want to.” Sure seems like it.
http://nytimes.com/2007/08/29/arts/m...duff.html?8dpc





NBC Buys TV Group Overseas
Bill Carter and Eric Pfanner

NBC Universal announced yesterday the acquisition of a group of international cable television channels owned by Sparrowhawk Holdings of London, a deal that Jeff Zucker, the president and chief executive of NBC, said was the first sign of a strategic shift at the company.

“We want to transfer our portfolio into high-growth businesses and look to move away from businesses that are slower growth,” Mr. Zucker said in a telephone interview. “We are going to acquire and dispose and, at the end of the day, self-fund all of these moves.”

Mr. Zucker did not specify which parts of NBC Universal he intended to shed, and NBC executives emphasized that the portfolio reshuffling was viewed as a long-term project.

He also declined to name any potential acquisition targets. But NBC Universal has been among several media companies, including Viacom, at the center of speculation as potential bidders emerge for the Oxygen cable channel, which caters to an audience of women.

The Sparrowhawk deal — for a group of about 30 pay-television channels, including 18 versions of the Hallmark channel outside the United States — is the first that NBC Universal has closed since Mr. Zucker took the top post in February, and is consistent with his stated intention to expand the international holdings of NBC Universal.

“Media is growing much faster internationally than it is here,” Mr. Zucker said.

The deal is also a play to increase NBC’s revenues. NBC currently takes in about $200 million annually from its internationally distributed television channels, which include CNBC and the Sci Fi Channel. Analysts estimate that Sparrowhawk, which includes 30 or so channels, also earns $200 million a year.

“Our goal is to double our revenues in the next three years, and this represents a big step toward that end,” Mr. Zucker said.

The companies declined to name the deal price, but reports in Britain have put it at about $350 million. A group of investors — the private equity firms 3i and Providence Equity Partners, and the British television executive David Elstein — paid $242 million for the Sparrowhawk channels two years ago.

The channels will give NBC Universal, which is controlled by General Electric, greater exposure to the fast-growing television markets in Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. NBC Universal also plans to introduce new channels and expand existing ones into new markets, network executives said.

With less than 20 percent of its revenue coming from outside the United States, NBC Universal trails other media conglomerates like Walt Disney, which owns ABC, and the News Corporation, which owns the Fox network, in developing a global footprint. Mr. Zucker has said he wants to generate 30 percent of revenue outside the United States by 2010.

“In isolation, this deal isn’t going to get us there,” Peter Smith, president of NBC Universal International, said. “We’re going to need to do a fair bit more.”

Mr. Smith said the international Hallmark channels — the United States version is not included in the deal — would complement NBC Universal’s existing international channels because their programming was popular with women.

In addition to the Hallmark channels, Sparrowhawk owns Movies 24, which shows made-for-TV films in Britain. It also plans to start a channel for children called KidsCo in Central and Eastern Europe, and one in Britain called Diva TV that will be aimed at women.

James L. McQuivey, a media and entertainment analyst at Forrester Research, said an effort by NBC to move toward high-growth assets and away from slower-growth assets would probably move the company toward channels and Web sites aimed specifically toward younger audiences who want “to consume things like comedy and sexual content in small bites.”

If NBC Universal follows this course, he said, “they could end up looking a lot like Viacom.”

Mr. McQuivey said it was impossible to predict which parts of NBC might be disposed of as slow growth, noting that little that NBC owned was growing as slowly as its flagship network, which it was unlikely ever to unload. “They have things like Telemundo and iVillage” which are probably viewed by NBC as faster in growth, he said.

More important, he said, any attempt by NBC to acquire the Oxygen channel would probably be tied to how perfectly it aligned with its iVillage Web site, which also caters to a female audience. “It would be a natural fit between iVillage and Oxygen for things like cross-promotion,” Mr. McQuivey said.

Bill Carter reported from New York, and Eric Pfanner from London.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/bu...dia/29nbc.html





Knowledge Is Priceless but Textbooks Are Not
Michelle Slatalla

MY 18-year-old daughter recently perfected a new technique to avoid the stress of packing for college.

Her system consisted mostly of lying on her bed and watching me pack for her. That was fine with me, since it was possibly my last opportunity to interfere with her life — and to see what she kept in her drawers — before she left home.

“Do you want to take this empty beer bottle with you?” I asked, gingerly holding it between pincer fingers.

“Get out of my closet,” she said.

I found a pile of crusty cereal bowls behind a stack of sweaters.

“How are you going to survive at college?” I asked.

“I’ll develop a system,” she said.

“That’s very comforting,” I said, feeling like a reluctant magician as I conjured three forks, a coffee cup and the remains of a cake.

With this year’s news about the ways some unscrupulous colleges make an extra buck off students’ naïveté — from loan officers who accepted lenders’ kickbacks to schools that got cash incentives to steer students to expensive study-abroad programs — I felt it was expedient to warn my daughter about a big expense that looms before her.

Textbooks.

“Can’t I just buy them at the campus bookstore?” she asked.

I shuddered. As much as I hate to micromanage, I felt compelled to remind her that taking that approach can cost the average college student $700 to $1,000 a year for books, according to a Congressional advisory committee report released in May.

“Which is why,” I concluded, as I organized her T-shirts by color and neckline, “you should get cheaper books online.”

“Fine,” she said. “From which store?”

Good question. Although oodles of online stores and marketplaces — like Biblio.com, Abebooks.com and A1books.com — have in the past five years built large inventories of both used and discounted new textbooks, there’s no single site where you can always get the best deal.

That’s only one of the reasons that, until now, buying textbooks online hasn’t been nearly as convenient as walking into a bookstore, where students didn’t need to calculate the shipping costs, wonder how soon a book would arrive or worry whether they would end up with an outdated edition.

Which explains why most students still end up shopping on campus, said Dave Rosenfeld, a spokesman for Maketextbooksaffordable.org, a site operated by a coalition of student public interest research groups.

“A really savvy student might do the extra work to comparison shop or to call a professor to see if it’s O.K. to use an older edition, but that will be uncommon behavior in the marketplace,” Mr. Rosenfeld said in a phone interview.

“What about a person who stashes dirty dishes under a bed to avoid walking to the kitchen?” I asked.

“Even the savviest students are going to pay a lot of money for books,” he said tactfully.

The good news is that there’s a new tool this year to make it easier to shop online for textbooks.

Bookfinder.com, an umbrella search site that sifts through the inventories of hundreds of thousands booksellers worldwide, started a simple, easy-to-use textbook search tool. The way it works: enter a title, I.S.B.N. or author’s name in Bookfinder’s textbooks search box to navigate a huge database of 125 million new and used books. You can compare prices, shipping costs and the availability of less expensive editions published overseas.

Consider, for example, a textbook required for an advanced Japanese course at my daughter’s college. A Bookfinder search last week for “Genki II: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese II” turned up 24 new and used copies, at prices ranging from $20.94 at Amazon.com to $110.62 at Amazon.de. For each of the 24 copies, total price (including shipping) is listed on a single page, along with information about how soon the book will ship. Some sellers offer expedited delivery. Amazon, for instance, offers overnight delivery and discounts of up to 30 percent off on new copies of 200,000 textbooks.

“Our goal is to give students all the options of buying any new or used edition, whether it’s published here or for an overseas market, and then let them decide which books are the best deals for them,” said Anirvan Chatterjee, Bookfinder.com’s founder.

There are some caveats. My daughter, like a lot of freshmen, won’t know which textbooks she needs to buy until she completes registration on the eve of starting classes; some books she may need immediately. And some instructors may require the newest American editions of textbooks.

“But in most cases, most international editions published for Canada, the Philippines, Malaysia and India are really similar to the U.S. versions,” Mr. Chatterjee said. “So we’ve been working on really boosting our inventory of those books, adding 18 to 20 new international partners this year.”

Here are some practical tips for shopping online for textbooks this year:

THE BIGGEST SAVINGS are on the most expensive books. For freshmen who are already overwhelmed trying to find classroom buildings or negotiate a truce with a new roommate, shop around for one or two of the priciest textbooks you need. A new copy of a first-year textbook like, say, “Biology, seventh edition” by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece, which lists for $153.33, was available for $57.45 last week at Valorebooks.com.

SEARCH ONLINE for textbooks with nonspecific names like “Chemistry” or “Calculus,” using the International Standard Book Number (or I.S.B.N.) to make sure you buy the right book.

GET AN EARLY START. With students nationwide competing to get the best deals, shop as soon as possible. More and more schools — from big public universities like the University of California, Berkeley, to private schools like Lynchburg College — list required textbooks on their Web sites. The State University of New York at Binghamton’s site, for instance, lists required texts by course and individual instructor.

“Not that I want to interfere,” I told my daughter.

“Of course not,” she said.

I opened the bottom drawer of her dresser. There I found my favorite black cardigan, missing for months.

“Don’t worry, I can take care of myself,” she said, grabbing the sweater and packing it.

Maybe she can. I noticed my favorite belt (“missing” since April) was in already in her suitcase.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/fashion/30Cyber.html





The Devil Sells Prada
Caroline Weber

DELUXE

How Luxury Lost Its Luster.

By Dana Thomas.

Illustrated. 375 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

“Luxury,” Socrates once declared, “is artificial poverty.” I’m not poor, but there’s nothing like an afternoon spent shopping for luxury goods to make me feel that way. On a recent jaunt through some of Midtown Manhattan’s snazzier stores, I began to wonder why this should be the case. When, I asked myself, did it become commonplace to charge several thousand dollars for a mass-produced handbag? How could the flimsy designer sundress I bought on sale — a “steal,” the saleswoman assured me — still wind up costing a whole month’s salary? Why is my favorite brand of lipstick more expensive than a nice bottle of Italian wine? When did these products’ values grow so distorted, and what is the would-be customer to make of it all?

In the midst of my consumerist crisis, the question I should have been asking was: Dana Thomas, where have you been all my life? In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Thomas investigates the business of designer clothing, leather goods and cosmetics, and finds it wanting. Hijacked, over the past two or three decades, by corporate profiteers with a “single-minded focus on profitability,” the luxury industry has “sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers.” Hoodwinked? The truth hurts. After I read “Deluxe,” suddenly my new sundress no longer looked like such a steal. Au contraire, the book’s line of argument suggested, it was I who’d been robbed.

For Thomas, a cultural and fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris and the Paris correspondent for the Australian Harper’s Bazaar, the luxury industry is a sham because its offerings in no way merit the high price tags they command. Yet once upon a time, they most certainly did. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when many of luxury’s founding fathers first set up shop, paying more money meant getting something truly exceptional. Dresses from Christian Dior, luggage from Louis Vuitton, jewelry from Cartier: in the golden period of luxury, these items carried prestige because of their superior craftsmanship and design. True, only the very privileged could afford them, but it was this exclusivity that gave them their cachet. Although they may have “cared about making a profit,” the merchants who served this pampered class aimed chiefly “to produce the finest products possible.”

All that changed, however, in the last decades of the 20th century, when a new breed of luxury purveyor, epitomized by Bernard Arnault, now the chairman and chief executive of the multibillion-dollar LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton conglomerate, first came on the scene. “A businessman, not a fashion person,” Arnault realized that the mystique of the great brand names represented an invaluable — and historically underexploited — asset. Identifying the luxury sector as “the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins,” Arnault snapped up Dior, Vuitton and a clutch of other star brands. Then, by spending hundreds of millions on advertising, dressing celebrities for the red carpet, “splashing the logo on everything from handbags to bikinis,” and pushing product in duty-free stores and flagship boutiques all around the world, he turned these brands into objects of global consumer desire. In so doing, Arnault changed “the course of luxury forever.”

And strictly, Thomas argues, for the worse. Insofar as luxury has gone corporate, relentlessly focused on the bottom line, quality has disappeared. In order to keep margins high (in 2005, LVMH recorded more than $17 billion in sales and a net profit of almost $1.8 billion), Arnault and his competitors have cut costs wherever and whenever possible. The most obvious strategies involve using cheaper materials, replacing skilled artisans with computers and machines and outsourcing labor to less expensive markets like China. Sneakier tactics include “cutting sleeves a half an inch shorter” (“when you get to 1,000, you see the savings,” one employee told the author), replacing finished seams with raw edges and eliminating linings on the grounds that “women don’t really need” them. A grouchy aside: my aforementioned sundress is (a) an LVMH brand and (b) unlined. It is also (c) white, which means that a lining would sure have come in handy. But if Arnault can amass a personal fortune of more than $21 billion by forcing me to display my underwear, then who am I to complain?

In truth, the perverse reality of luxury consumption today is that so few people are complaining, and so many are clamoring for what Thomas refers to (a bit too frequently for my taste) as a piece of the “dream.” Paradoxically, as craftsmanship has waned, consumer appetite has grown — and not just among luxury’s original, elite clientele. The vast reach of contemporary advertising, distribution and product-placement efforts has effectively democratized luxury, making once exclusive brands available, if only in the form of logo-covered sneakers or sunglasses, to middle-market customers the world over. “Luxury-brand logos convey wealth, status and chic,” Thomas explains, “even if the bearer of the logo-ed product is a middle-market suburban housewife who bought it on credit.”

As a result, a designer jacket or handbag or watch no longer transmits reliable information about its wearer’s socioeconomic stature or background. Without quite coming right out and saying it, Thomas seems nostalgic for the good old days when “a middle-market suburban housewife,” say, couldn’t be confused with her betters. The author is shocked to overhear a woman “in a designer pantsuit, good jewelry and Chanel sunglasses” expressing interest in a fake Rolex. Spotting a couple loading shopping bags into a $380,000 car, she is surprised to learn that their loot came from an outlet store. In a discussion of the booming, underground market for counterfeit luxury goods, she compares “folks with a craving for the goods but not enough dough for the genuine thing” to petty teenage drug users — eager “to buy a couple of joints with their allowance or baby-sitting money.” She quotes a commentator on the last days of the Roman Republic, who contrasts an era of rampant, nouveau-riche acquisitiveness to an earlier and more “patrician” age when “people used to know their place.”

These hints of condescension are regrettable, for Thomas’s message is relevant to shoppers of every stripe. Whether upscale or middle-market, paying in cash or buying on credit, today’s customer is barraged at every turn with the logos that, for titans like Arnault, mean pure, corporate gold. “Deluxe” performs a valuable service by reminding us that these labels don’t mean much else. Once guarantors of value and integrity, they are now markers that point toward nothing, guiding the consumer on a road to nowhere.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/bo...w/Weber-t.html





The Muse Who Made the Guitars Gently Weep
Janet Maslin



WONDERFUL TONIGHT

George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

By Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor

Illustrated. 321 pages. Harmony Books. $25.95

Pattie Boyd calls herself a muse, and she has the ravishing love songs (George Harrison’s “Something,” Eric Clapton’s “Layla” and “Bell Bottom Blues”) to prove it. But in Ms. Boyd’s case, being a muse also means never having paid a light bill until she was 45, jobless and suddenly unplugged from the world of rock ’n’ roll royalty.

Now, in a spotty but scrumptious memoir that sounds more like the handiwork of Ms. Boyd’s collaborator, Penny Junor, she is ready to take stock of her amorous adventures. “Wonderful Tonight,” which takes its title from another of Mr. Clapton’s sublime, love-struck songs about her, devotes mercifully brief time to her formative years (“My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach”; “My only comfort was Teddy, my beloved bear”) and cuts quickly to the chase.

It meets the Beatles. And it meets them at the point where most of the world met Ms. Boyd: when she appeared briefly in the film “A Hard Day’s Night,” riding on a train and looking fetching in a schoolgirl’s uniform. Mr. Harrison immediately asked her to marry him, in a fit of prescience and snappish Beatle humor.

Ms. Boyd had been a successful London model in her dollybird days. She appeared on the cover of a book called “Birds of Britain,” prompting the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, in the introduction, to rhapsodize about “a swirl of miniskirt, beneath which limbs flicker like jackknives and glimmer like trout.”

This made her exactly the kind of female accessory that rock stars favored in the days when, as Ms. Junor has probably put it, “the capital was abuzz with creativity, bristling with energy.” Ms. Boyd would have been one tin-eared muse if she herself wrote passages like: “And, to use the old cliché, make love not war. As long as you were young, beautiful and creative, the world was your oyster.”

This book has a running food motif, which allows it to ask a priceless question: “Who would have guessed that the humble potato would play such an important part in my life?” Translation: Ms. Boyd appeared in a television commercial for potato chips, which led to the “Hard Day’s Night” casting call, which led to a place in history.

She quickly became part of the Fab Eight, since each Beatle traveled with a wife or girlfriend. And in January 1966 she and Mr. Harrison married, but not before he asked permission of Brian Epstein, the group’s manager. As the new Mrs. Harrison would repeatedly learn, “all of those musicians were like little boys in long trousers.” They never navigated the world for themselves, so neither did she.

Ms. Boyd doesn’t remember much about her Beatle years that has not already been described by pop historians. “George’s moods, I think, had much to do with what was going on between the Beatles,” she says vapidly. And this book includes perhaps the least useful account of the much-described 1968 all-star idyll in India: “If it was anyone’s birthday, and there was a surprising number while we were there, including George’s 25th and my 24th, there would be cake and a party.” But that’s not what you’re reading “Wonderful Tonight” for, is it?

There is exactly one big question for Ms. Boyd to answer here: What made her leave Mr. Harrison for Mr. Clapton, her husband’s close friend?

To its credit the book answers that question plausibly and fully. Mr. Harrison returned from India a changed man, Ms. Boyd says. He turned meditative and moody, “so if you talked to him you didn’t know whether you would get an answer in the middle of his chanting or whether he would bite your head off.” He also began to drink, sleep with his friends’ wives (most notably Ringo Starr’s) and become increasingly hard to find in their 25-bedroom house. Meanwhile mash notes from Mr. Clapton began to arrive.

“Wonderful Tonight” repeats enough of these letters to show that the plaintive beauty of “Layla” (Mr. Clapton’s name for Ms. Boyd, taken from the Persian writer Nizami) was no fluke. One letter reads, “for nothing more than the pleasures past i would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move.”

Ms. Boyd also says that Mr. Clapton told her he would begin using heroin if she wouldn’t leave Mr. Harrison for him, and that he made good on that threat. Mr. Clapton, whose own autobiography, “Clapton,” is imminent in an autumn that will be full of rock ’n’ roll memoirs, sees the heroin issue a little differently: He says he was already fully addicted. But he basically shares her idea of their grand passion.

So off she went, only to find that life at Mr. Clapton’s place, fittingly called Hurtwood Edge, was hardly an improvement. “It was as though the excitement had been in the chase,” she realizes amid many tales of drunken excesses, after Mr. Clapton had successfully traded drug addiction for alcoholism. “On reflection I see that being in love with him was like a kind of addiction,” Ms. Boyd says in one of many indications that she has logged long hours of therapy in dissecting her past.

“When the first thing you have in the morning is a packet of cigarettes with a large brandy and lemonade, you have a problem,” she recalls a friend’s having told Mr. Clapton. “Have you never heard of Shredded Wheat?”

Mr. Clapton eventually heeded this advice. And after all their tumultuous times together Ms. Boyd felt that he was no longer the live wire she had married. They eventually divorced, and this led her to the sadder, wiser post-muse period that the last part of her book describes.

“Our generation really did lead a revolution,” it concludes feebly. And: “I have known some amazing people and had some unforgettable experiences.” Her husbands’ music is what made them unforgettable. But her side of the story, for all its slick packaging and hopeless platitudes, is worth hearing too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/books/27masl.html





Democrats Face Online Diagnoses, but No Cure Yet
Michiko Kakutani

THE ARGUMENT

Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics

By Matt Bai

316 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

Although last year’s midterm elections ended in a historic Democratic take-back of Congress, party leaders and grass-roots supporters alike have acknowledged that the gains owed more to public unhappiness with the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush than with any bold new policies advanced by the Democrats. In fact, the current race for the White House finds the Democratic Party facing both a deep-seated identity crisis and a Republican Party that, while weakened, still boasts a redoubtable infrastructure buttressed by a daunting message machine.

In his illuminating new book, the journalist Matt Bai examines the health of the Democratic Party, focusing on the insurgent progressive movement that is taking on the Washington establishment — a largely Internet-driven movement that’s brought together wealthy venture capitalists, determined to help build a re-energized party; angry bloggers, furious with the Bush administration and fed up with Democratic moderates; and isolated suburban liberals in red states, eager to use the Web to connect with like-minded citizens around the country.

“The Argument,” which grew out of articles Mr. Bai wrote for The New York Times Magazine, combines lots of energetic reporting on the ground with some astute political analysis. The result is a colorful topographical map of the Democratic landscape: an anatomy of the party’s new progressive wing and its contentious relationship with centrist groups like the Democratic Leadership Council, and some sharply observed portraits of progressive power brokers like Howard Dean, the bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and the union leader Andy Stern.

While the reader might wish that Mr. Bai had spent more time assessing the impact that the insurgent movement and schisms within the party will have on the 2008 elections, he does provide some telling glimpses of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s often contentious relationship with bloggers, who remain skeptical of the sort of centrism she and her husband have come to represent, and of Barack Obama, one of the progressive movement’s would-be heroes, who has scolded insurgents for trying to impose purity tests on their elected leaders.

In one of the book’s more biting chapters, Mr. Bai draws parallels between “the most successful company of the last century” (i.e., General Motors) and “the dominant political party of the same era” (i.e., the Democrats) — two 20th-century behemoths, he says, that are reluctant to let go of old ideas and fonder of new marketing plans than of genuine innovation.

“Just as G.M. couldn’t begin to consider a world without Pontiacs,” he writes, “neither could Washington Democrats and their interest groups envision a world where every single liberal provision of the last 70 years didn’t exist intact. This made real innovation — the kind of innovation that had launched the modern Democratic Party in the first place — all but impossible. There were all kinds of specific new policy proposals on the Democratic shelf, just as there were always new models of Buicks and Pontiacs on the drawing boards. But there was nothing approaching a plan to restructure the modern social contract for an age when Wal-Mart, and not G.M., employed the most Americans, in the same imaginative way that the New Dealers had dreamed up a compact to meet the challenge of an earlier day.”

The Internet, in the view of many progressives, was going to change all that: the Web was going to be for Democrats what talk radio was for Republicans. As the political blogger Jerome Armstrong put it, the Web was going to change the nature of the party, putting power into the hands of passionate grass-roots activists and redrawing the country’s political map by organizing progressives not just in old industrial blue states, but in red-leaning states as well.

And yet, as Mr. Bai finds, the insurgents are often painfully split among themselves, and their emphasis on tactics and fund-raising underscores their own difficulty, thus far, in articulating a new paradigm for the party.

Echoing other journalists, like Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, Mr. Bai notes that the new progressive movement sprang, in part, from a desire to replicate the successes of the G.O.P. in building up a formidable infrastructure, including think tanks (like the Hoover Institution) to generate ideas, media outlets (like Fox News) to amplify the message, and a dynamic fund-raising apparatus.

A Power Point slide show created by a little-known political operative named Rob Stein presented an anatomy of American conservatism and plotted a Democratic response, and it began to spread virally in 2003 and 2004, bringing together a group of wealthy liberal donors who would eventually form the often strife-ridden Democracy Alliance.

For more middle-class activists, there was MoveOn.org, which was started in 1998 by Wes Boyd — the inventor of that once-ubiquitous screen saver of flying toasters — as a response to Republican efforts to impeach President Clinton. Mr. Boyd’s Web site, which asked people to sign a petition calling on Congress to censure the president and “move on,” soon became a virtual meeting place for disaffected liberals.

Later, under the direction of Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org would expand sharply, becoming a vociferous voice of the antiwar left and a serious fund-raising force. By the end of 2004, Mr. Bai reports, “its membership list had soared to over three million, and its annual budget had surpassed $25 million a year.”

MoveOn tended to be strongest, Mr. Bai notes, in states where the Democratic Party had withered away, leaving a vacuum. It became a kind of gathering place for liberals in red states and red districts (largely written off by Washington Democrats, who wanted to focus on winnable races in battleground states), and it soon evolved into “an outlet for frustration not just with the excesses of conservative ideologues, but with the Clintonian strategy of meeting them in the middle.”

In fact, Mr. Bai writes, Eli Pariser believed that “no actual center remained in American politics; there were only varying degrees of liberals and conservatives, both groups battling for the soul of America. Trying to appeal to the moderate voter, as Washington Democrats were always trying to do, was a waste of time.”

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, whose site, DailyKos.com, Mr. Bai describes as “the single most influential political blog in the country,” also criticizes Washington Democrats for trying to appeal to what he calls the “mythical middle,” insisting that the public is “just waiting for somebody to stand up and say what we believe.”

What unites “netroots” activists, Mr. Bai writes, is less any kind of governing agenda for the country than a commitment to “the principle of unyielding partisanship.” According to the blogger ethos, he says, “Republicans, whether staunchly conservative or not, were to be stomped, beaten and generally humiliated. And any Democrat who didn’t pursue that goal — who saw value, say, in cooperating with Republicans on a deal to reduce farm subsidies or to extend a package of tax credits — needed to be taught a lesson. It was a common theme among the bloggers that Bush was tilting toward dictatorship, and that those who didn’t condemn everything he did were appeasers whom history would harshly judge. Some bloggers started referring to collaborators within their own party as ‘Vichy Democrats.’ ”

In denigrating Washington insiders and the mainstream media, Mr. Bai says, the “netroots” culture not only dismisses “the individuals who fell into these categories, but all the knowledge such people had accumulated.”

“In a sense,” he goes on, “the way the netroots saw it, the more you knew about Democratic politics before 1998, the less relevant you actually were.” It’s an attitude that makes for a distinct lack of historical perspective, and when combined with bloggers’ focus on tactics and message, Mr. Bai points out, it results in scant attention being given to ideas and ideals.

For that matter, this book suggests that Democrats of all stripes — progressive and old-school, Internet-driven and Washington-based — have failed, thus far, to redefine their party with a new vision, and that as the 2008 elections approach, the party is still struggling to figure out exactly what it represents, other than a repudiation of Republican principles and policies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/books/28kaku.html





Ted Nugent Wants to Kill Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
DirtySouthMouth

Oh Ted, you're incredibly edgy. Ted Nugent has, by any honest calculation, trumped the Dixie Chicks, Rage Against the Machine and pretty much any other musician who has ever spoken out about politics.

As you can see in the video posted below, Ted had some incredibly harsh words and actions for two Democratic presidential candidates: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

While holding two machine guns and pacing the stage, The Nuge spit his venom encouraging violence against the two candidates.

Just so we're clear on this, here's the bulk of what he says in the video:

I was in Chicago, I said, ‘Hey Obama, you might wanna suck on one of these you punk.' ... Obama, he's a piece of shit, I told him to suck on my machine gun. Lets hear it! [crowd cheers] I was in New York, I said, ‘Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch.' ... She might want to suck on my machine gun.

The Nuge ended his speech by holding up two machine guns and yelling, "Freeeeedom!," William Wallace-style. While I'm a huge fan of the First Amendment, violence is about as cool as Ted Nugent is, so this whole thing sounds about right.

By the way, Ted, nice headset microphone
http://www.shoutmouth.com/index.php/news/25584





Democrats Say They Will Press Gonzales Inquiries
Philip Shenon and David Johnston

The resignation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales does not mean an end to several investigations into his actions and truthfulness during his tenure at the Justice Department, with Congressional Democrats promising on Tuesday to press their inquiries.

Mr. Gonzales is a focus of investigations by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, centered on his role in the dismissals of United States attorneys last year for what appear to have been political reasons. Other inquiries are being conducted by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility.

The White House said it would move quickly to find a replacement for Mr. Gonzales. A spokesman would not confirm the names of candidates under consideration.

Several names continued to circulate on Tuesday on Capitol Hill and within the department, including those of Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security and a former senior Justice Department prosecutor; Theodore B. Olson, who was solicitor general earlier in the Bush administration; and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general.

Colleagues said Mr. Chertoff was especially eager for the appointment. Although lawmakers saw him as a leading candidate, several Democrats suggested he would come under unflattering scrutiny if nominated because of his role in the government’s initially disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina two years ago and his involvement at the Justice Department in legal issues related to interrogation of terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“There would be a lot of careful questioning of Chertoff,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee. “There is not confidence among Democrats that he has an instinctive desire to side with the rule of law over politics.”

Mr. Chertoff, meeting with local officials in Mobile, Ala., on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, was evasive on Tuesday when asked about speculation that he was being considered as Mr. Gonzales’s replacement.

“The president will make the decisions he will make and will make any announcement when he chooses to do so,” Mr. Chertoff said. “I think I have given all the answer I am going to give as far as press speculation goes on who will fill that job.”

Democratic officials in Congress acknowledged that Mr. Gonzales’s departure, which they had sought for months, would most likely drain some of the drama and energy from their investigations of his work at the Justice Department.

But in other ways, his departure offers the Democrats new leverage over the White House in demanding information about the dismissals of the United States attorneys and about a government eavesdropping program heavily promoted by Mr. Gonzales that at one point was seen by some Justice Department lawyers as potentially unlawful.

Although Senate Democrats say they will not delay unnecessarily consideration of the nominee to succeed Mr. Gonzales, they can press for White House cooperation in the other investigations before moving to confirm a new attorney general.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said Monday that Congress would insist that Mr. Gonzales’s replacement “pledge to cooperate with ongoing Congressional oversight into the conduct of the White House in the politicization of federal law enforcement.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said although he welcomed Mr. Gonzales’s departure, it would have no effect on the committee’s pursuit of answers about who ordered the dismissals of the United States attorneys and whether Mr. Gonzales had told the truth to Congress about them.

“I intend to get answers to these questions no matter how long it takes,” Mr. Leahy said, suggesting that Mr. Gonzales could face subpoenas from the committee for testimony or evidence long after leaving the administration.

“You’ll notice that we’ve had people subpoenaed even though they’ve resigned from the White House,” he said, referring to Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and Karl Rove, who resigned this month as the president’s top political aide. “They’re still under subpoena. They still face contempt if they don’t appear.”

The investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, and its Office of Professional Responsibility involve the conduct of senior Justice Department officials, including Mr. Gonzales, in the dismissals of the prosecutors and in the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants.

Senate Democrats made a separate request last month for Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, the highest-ranking Senate-confirmed official at the Justice Department after Mr. Gonzales, to appoint a special counsel to review whether the attorney general had perjured himself in Senate testimony about either the United States attorneys or the eavesdropping program.

Mr. Clement, who will be acting attorney general until a permanent successor is installed, has not publicly disclosed whether he has pursued the appointment.

Tommy Stevenson contributed reporting from Mobile, Ala.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/wa...nzales.html?hp





A Scandal-Scarred G.O.P. Asks, ‘What Next?’
Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Scott Reed, a Republican strategist, was at a dinner in Philadelphia on Monday night when his cellphone and Internet pager began beeping like crazy. Only later did he learn why. His party was buzzing with news of a sex scandal involving a Republican United States senator — again.

Just when Republicans thought things could not get any worse, Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho confirmed that he had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer accused him of soliciting sex in June in a Minneapolis airport restroom. On Tuesday, Mr. Craig, 62, held a news conference to defend himself, calling the guilty plea “a mistake” and declaring, “I am not gay” — even as the Senate Republican leadership asked for an Ethics Committee review.

It was a bizarre spectacle, and only the latest in a string of accusations of sexual foibles and financial misdeeds that have landed Republicans in the political equivalent of purgatory, the realm of late-night comic television.

Forget Mark Foley of Florida, who quit the House last year after exchanging sexually explicit e-mail messages with under-age male pages, or Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist whose dealings with the old Republican Congress landed him in prison. They are old news, replaced by a fresh crop of scandal-plagued Republicans, men like Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, whose phone number turned up on the list of the so-called D.C. Madam, or Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Representative Rick Renzi of Arizona, both caught up in F.B.I. corruption investigations.

It is enough to make a self-respecting Republican want to tear his hair out in frustration, especially as the party is trying to defend an unpopular war, contain the power of the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and generate some enthusiasm among voters heading toward the presidential election in 2008.

“The real question for Republicans in Washington is how low can you go, because we are approaching a level of ridiculousness,” said Mr. Reed, sounding exasperated in an interview on Tuesday morning. “You can’t make this stuff up. And the impact this is having on the grass-roots around the country is devastating. Republicans think the governing class in Washington are a bunch of buffoons who have total disregard for the principles of the party, the law of the land and the future of the country.”

Then again, Washington does not have a monopoly on the latest trend among Republicans. Just ask Thomas Ravenel, the state treasurer of South Carolina, who had to step down as state chairman of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign after he was indicted on cocaine charges in June.

Or Bob Allen, a state representative in Florida who was jettisoned from the John McCain campaign last month after he was arrested on charges of soliciting sex in a public restroom.

Mr. Craig, for his part, has severed ties with the Mitt Romney campaign, despite his public declaration on Tuesday that “I did nothing wrong.”

In an interview Tuesday on “Kudlow and Company” on CNBC, Mr. Romney could not distance himself fast enough. “Once again, we’ve found people in Washington have not lived up to the level of respect and dignity that we would expect for somebody that gets elected to a position of high influence,” Mr. Romney said. “Very disappointing. He’s no longer associated with my campaign, as you can imagine.”

Republicans, of course, do not have an exclusive hold on scandal. As Democrats accused Republicans of engaging in a “culture of corruption” during the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans eagerly put the spotlight on Representative William J. Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who stashed $90,000 in his freezer — ill-gotten gains, the authorities said.

Still, there is a sort of “here we go again” sense among Republicans these days, especially since news of the Craig arrest broke on Monday afternoon. It is tough enough being in the minority, weighed down by the burden of the war in Iraq. Now Republicans have an even more pressing task: keeping their party from being portrayed not just as hypocritical and out of touch with the values of people they represent, but also as a laughingstock — amid headlines like “Senator’s Bathroom Bust,” which ran all Tuesday afternoon on CNN. The story also ran at the top of all the network evening newscasts on Tuesday.

“I’m hoping it’s a big mistake,” said one of Mr. Craig’s Republican colleagues, Senator Lamar Alexander, traveling Tuesday in Tennessee, his home state. “But it certainly does nothing to increase confidence in the United States Senate.”

With President Bush hobbled by his own political difficulties, the party can hardly look to him to lead them out of the morass. “If we had a coach,” said John Feehery, who was press secretary to Representative J. Dennis Hastert when Mr. Hastert was the House speaker, “the coach would take us in the locker room and scream at us.”

Some Republicans are indeed screaming, particularly the party’s social conservative wing, which places a high priority on ethics and family values. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, said the elections of November 2006, in which Republicans lost control of the House and the Senate, proved that voters want politicians in Washington to clean up their act.

“Exit polls show that was the No. 1 factor in depressing Republican enthusiasm,” Mr. Perkins said in an interview Tuesday. “There is an expectation that leaders who espouse family values will live by those values. And while the values voters don’t demand perfection, I do believe they want leaders with integrity.”

The perception that Mr. Craig is not living up to his own values is causing problems for him, and after his appearance on Tuesday, with his wife standing by his side, some Republicans confessed they did not know what to think.

“He sounded almost as convincing as, ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ ” said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative and onetime Republican presidential candidate, reprising President Bill Clinton’s remark initially denying involvement with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Mr. Craig is up for re-election next year and has promised to announce next month whether he is running again. Some, like Mr. Bauer, say he is unlikely to survive the current scandal; others, noting that Senator Vitter seems to have weathered his storm, say Mr. Craig might be able to tough it out. And at the rate things are going, says Mr. Reed, the Republican strategist, it might be only a matter of time before a new scandal pushes Mr. Craig’s woes off the front page.

“I’m a little afraid to say anything, because you don’t know what happens tomorrow,” Mr. Reed said. “That Vitter thing, that’s like ancient history now.”

Carl Hulse in Nashville contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/us...repubs.html?hp





U.S. Military Censors ThinkProgress

ThinkProgress is now banned from the U.S. military network in Baghdad.

Recently, an avid ThinkProgress reader — a U.S. soldier serving his second tour in Iraq — wrote to us and said that he can no longer access ThinkProgress.org.

The error message he received:

The ban began sometime shortly after Aug. 22, when Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste was our guest blogger on ThinkProgress. He posted an op-ed that was strongly critical of the President’s policies and advocated a “responsible and deliberate redeployment from Iraq.” Previously, both the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times had rejected the piece. An excerpt:

It is disappointing that so many elected representatives of my [Republican] party continue to blindly support the administration rather than doing what is in the best interests of our country. Traditionally, my party has maintained a conservative view on questions regarding our Armed Forces. For example, we commit our military only when absolutely necessary. […]

The only way to stabilize Iraq and allow our military to rearm and refit for the long fight ahead is to begin a responsible and deliberate redeployment from Iraq and replace the troops with far less expensive and much more effective resources–those of diplomacy and the critical work of political reconciliation and economic recovery. In other words, when it comes to Iraq, it’s time for conservatives to once again be conservative.

Not surprisingly, both the National Review and Fox News are still accessible.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/31/military-censors/





In Primary, Tech’s Home Is a Magnet
Laurie J. Flynn

For presidential candidates campaigning in Iowa, the place to be is the state fair. Diners are popular in New Hampshire. But for those visiting Silicon Valley, it’s the Googleplex.

The destination, Google’s headquarters, is packed full of young millionaires, just the kind of audience presidential candidates want to meet while building campaign funds. Already, Google, the fast-growing search and advertising company, has been visited by five candidates, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson.

When Representative Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Texas Republican, appeared, he attracted an overflow crowd of 250 people, and 100 others watched on monitors from another room. Mr. Paul garnered $3,350 from Google employees. But Mrs. Clinton got 10 times that amount from Google employees, and Mr. Obama raised nearly twice as much as she did.

Like auto factories a generation ago, Google is increasingly popular as a place to raise money and speak to a crowd, signifying the larger role that Silicon Valley is playing in presidential politics. Candidates passing through the Valley have never raised so much money so early. In the first half of the year, the computer industry contributed $2.2 million to all candidates in the primary, up from $1.2 million in the first six months of each of the last two presidential primary races.

Of course, campaign fund-raising is up across the board, as the 2008 election, lacking an incumbent and with partisan feeling already intense, is shaping up as the most expensive ever. And as in the nation as a whole, most money raised here in recent months has gone to Democratic candidates.

In a flip from the primary season for the 2000 presidential election, 60 percent of the contributions so far from people in the technology field here are going to Democrats. The Democratic candidates raised $1.4 million from the industry in the first half of this year, while Republican candidates raised $890,000. That total is up from $1.2 million in the first six months of each of the last two presidential primary races.

Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, had a slight edge over Mrs. Clinton during the first half of 2007, with $555,000 in donations of $200 or more from the computer and Internet industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, raised $551,000, while Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts, came in third with $435,000. (Contributions from the many lawyers and venture capital investors in the high-tech industry, among the largest political contributors, are grouped separately.)

Part of Mr. Obama’s appeal, it seems, is that he is considered something of a start-up, reminding many of the technorati of themselves. “The Valley is used to taking start-ups and making huge success stories out of them,” said John Roos, an Obama fund-raiser who is chief executive of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the Silicon Valley law firm. “Obama has that aura.”

Contributions so far might have been even greater, except that some of the tech industry’s elite appear to have been holding out in the hope that Al Gore would decide to join the Democratic race.

Mr. Gore sits on Apple’s board and advises Google, and he is widely seen as a crusader for causes dear to the Silicon Valley moneyed, including alternative energy and stem cell research. He even has his own start-up based in San Francisco, a cable network called Current TV.

“He’s certainly thought of as a ‘local boy,’ ” said Joseph W. Cotchett, a San Francisco lawyer and noted fund-raiser for John Edwards, the Democratic former senator from North Carolina. “Has it affected contributions? I think so,” Mr. Cotchett said. “I think some people are dragging their heels.”

But with less than five months until the first Democratic caucuses, the prospect of Mr. Gore joining the race has faded even here. “Gore has some interest, but it’s not accurate to say people are waiting,” Mr. Roos said.

Lawrence E. Stone, the Santa Clara county assessor and a major fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in Silicon Valley, said that, early on, many Valley Democrats had held off endorsing any of the candidates but that the wait-and-see sentiment was gone. Today, he said, the Gore factor is more often an excuse not to open the wallet.

“The most popular candidate is always a potential one — the one that’s not running,” Mr. Stone said. But that does not mean people in the Valley are not contributing. “I raised the same amount in one Silicon Valley event for Senator Clinton that I did in an entire campaign for her husband in 1992,” Mr. Stone said. “These days, if you’re not raising $200,000 for a candidate, you’re not a major player.”

John W. Thompson, chief executive of Symantec, held a fund-raiser recently for Mr. Obama at his secluded house in Woodside, Calif. In March, Charles E. Phillips Jr., Oracle’s president, was one host of a similar fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Roos, the Obama supporter, says that getting executives to part with $2,300, the maximum contribution, for a total of $4,600 for the primary and general elections, has been easier than ever, as he proved by inviting 125 friends and colleagues to his Bay Area house. “That’s without the candidate even being there,” Mr. Roos said. “We plugged him in by telephone and raised $300,000.”

Other luminaries of the tech industry, like Michael S. Dell, the founder and chief executive of Dell, had not placed their bets as of the end of June, the latest reporting period. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, had not donated to any candidates so far in this cycle, though in 2004 he donated the maximum to Senator John Kerry, another Democrat. Mr. Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell, has spread her risk, donating $4,600 each to Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards and $400 to Mrs. Clinton.

A contribution from Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google and a close associate of Mr. Gore, is also conspicuously missing, as are contributions from Google’s co-founders, the billionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

L. John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist and a longtime Democratic heavyweight, has donated $2,100 to Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. Mr. Doerr’s wife, Anne, has also given the senator $2,100.

Though they are outnumbered, Valley Republicans are beginning to open their wallets too.

E. Floyd Kvamme, the retired venture capitalist of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has contributed to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican former New York mayor. Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, has donated $2,300 to Mr. Romney, a former venture capitalist who was her colleague at Bain & Company in the 1980s. John T. Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive and one of the area’s highest-profile Republicans, has given $2,300 to the campaign of Senator McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Silicon Valley’s Democratic fund-raisers are now agonizing over the guest list to the hottest party of the primary fund-raising season — and this one is not at the Googleplex. It is a $2,300-a-plate gala at the home of Oprah Winfrey, an Obama supporter, on Sept. 8. (The house, in Santa Barbara, is conveniently between two California money centers, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.)

The problem? There will be 1,400 seats, and each of Mr. Obama’s 200 national co-chairmen is allotted seven tickets. The smart thing to do, from a money-raising perspective, is to hand them out to people who have yet to make a contribution, even though that might snub longtime supporters who have already reached the contribution limit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/te.../24valley.html





Point, Click ... Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
Ryan Singel

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.
The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.)

DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders.

A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists.

What DCSNet Can Do

Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.

FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf.

The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.

The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database, where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.

FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years, from 20 "central monitoring plants" at the program's inception, to 57 in 2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those endpoints connected to more than 350 switches.

Today, most carriers maintain their own central hub, called a "mediation switch," that's networked to all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI. The FBI's DCS software links to those mediation switches over the internet, likely using an encrypted VPN. Some carriers run the mediation switch themselves, while others pay companies like VeriSign to handle the whole wiretapping process for them.

The numerical scope of DCSNet surveillance is still guarded. But we do know that as telecoms have become more wiretap-friendly, the number of criminal wiretaps alone has climbed from 1,150 in 1996 to 1,839 in 2006. That's a 60 percent jump. And in 2005, 92 percent of those criminal wiretaps targeted cell phones, according to a report published last year.

These figures include both state and federal wiretaps, and do not include antiterrorism wiretaps, which dramatically expanded after 9/11. They also don't count the DCS-3000's collection of incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed. Far more common than full-blown wiretaps, this level of surveillance requires only that investigators certify that the phone numbers are relevant to an investigation.

The Justice Department reports the number of pen registers to Congress annually, but those numbers aren't public. According to the last figures leaked to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, judges signed 4,886 pen register orders in 1998, along with 4,621 time extensions.

CALEA Switches Rules on Switches

The law that makes the FBI's surveillance network possible had its genesis in the Clinton administration. In the 1990s, the Justice Department began complaining to Congress that digital technology, cellular phones and features like call forwarding would make it difficult for investigators to continue to conduct wiretaps. Congress responded by passing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, in 1994, mandating backdoors in U.S. telephone switches.

CALEA requires telecommunications companies to install only telephone-switching equipment that meets detailed wiretapping standards. Prior to CALEA, the FBI would get a court order for a wiretap and present it to a phone company, which would then create a physical tap of the phone system.

With new CALEA-compliant digital switches, the FBI now logs directly into the telecom's network. Once a court order has been sent to a carrier and the carrier turns on the wiretap, the communications data on a surveillance target streams into the FBI's computers in real time.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation requested documents on the system under the Freedom of Information Act, and successfully sued the Justice Department in October 2006.

In May, a federal judge ordered the FBI to provide relevant documents to the EFF every month until it has satisfied the FOIA request.

"So little has been known up until now about how DCS works," says EFF attorney Marcia Hofmann. "This is why it's so important for FOIA requesters to file lawsuits for information they really want."

Special Agent Anthony DiClemente, chief of the Data Acquisition and Intercept Section of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, said the DCS was originally intended in 1997 to be a temporary solution, but has grown into a full-featured CALEA-collection software suite.

"CALEA revolutionizes how law enforcement gets intercept information," DiClemente told Wired News. "Before CALEA, it was a rudimentary system that mimicked Ma Bell."

Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn't stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law's reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance.

New Technologies

Meanwhile, the FBI's efforts to keep up with the current communications explosion is never-ending, according to DiClemente.

The released documents suggest that the FBI's wiretapping engineers are struggling with peer-to-peer telephony provider Skype, which offers no central location to wiretap, and with innovations like caller-ID spoofing and phone-number portability.

But DCSNet seems to have kept pace with at least some new technologies, such as cell-phone push-to-talk features and most VOIP internet telephony.

"It is fair to say we can do push-to-talk," DiClemente says. "All of the carriers are living up to their responsibilities under CALEA."

Matt Blaze, a security researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who helped assess the FBI's now-retired Carnivore internet-wiretapping application in 2000, was surprised to see that DCSNet seems equipped to handle such modern communications tools. The FBI has been complaining for years that it couldn't tap these services.

The redacted documentation left Blaze with many questions, however. In particular, he said it's unclear what role the carriers have in opening up a tap, and how that process is secured.

"The real question is the switch architecture on cell networks," said Blaze. "What's the carrier side look like?"

Randy Cadenhead, the privacy counsel for Cox Communications, which offers VOIP phone service and internet access, says the FBI has no independent access to his company's switches.

"Nothing ever gets connected or disconnected until I say so, based upon a court order in our hands," Cadenhead says. "We run the interception process off of my desk, and we track them coming in. We give instructions to relevant field people who allow for interconnection and to make verbal connections with technical representatives at the FBI."

The nation's largest cell-phone providers -- whose customers are targeted in the majority of wiretaps -- were less forthcoming. AT&T politely declined to comment, while Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon simply ignored requests for comment.

Agent DiClemente, however, seconded Cadenhead's description.

"The carriers have complete control. That's consistent with CALEA," DiClemente said. "The carriers have legal teams to read the order, and they have procedures in place to review the court orders, and they also verify the information and that the target is one of their subscribers."

Cost

Despite its ease of use, the new technology is proving more expensive than a traditional wiretap. Telecoms charge the government an average of $2,200 for a 30-day CALEA wiretap, while a traditional intercept costs only $250, according to the Justice Department inspector general. A federal wiretap order in 2006 cost taxpayers $67,000 on average, according to the most recent U.S. Court wiretap report.

What's more, under CALEA, the government had to pay to make pre-1995 phone switches wiretap-friendly. The FBI has spent almost $500 million on that effort, but many traditional wire-line switches still aren't compliant.

Processing all the phone calls sucked in by DCSNet is also costly. At the backend of the data collection, the conversations and phone numbers are transferred to the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Data Management System, an Oracle SQL database that's seen a 62 percent growth in wiretap volume over the last three years -- and more than 3,000 percent growth in digital files like e-mail. Through 2007, the FBI has spent $39 million on the system, which indexes and analyzes data for agents, translators and intelligence analysts.

Security Flaws

To security experts, though, the biggest concern over DCSNet isn't the cost: It's the possibility that push-button wiretapping opens new security holes in the telecommunications network.

More than 100 government officials in Greece learned in 2005 that their cell phones had been bugged, after an unknown hacker exploited CALEA-like functionality in wireless-carrier Vodafone's network. The infiltrator used the switches' wiretap-management software to send copies of officials' phone calls and text messages to other phones, while simultaneously hiding the taps from auditing software.

The FBI's DiClemente says DCSNet has never suffered a similar breach, so far as he knows.

"I know of no issue of compromise, internal or external," DiClemente says. He says the system's security is more than adequate, in part because the wiretaps still "require the assistance of a provider." The FBI also uses physical-security measures to control access to DCSNet end points, and has erected firewalls and other measures to render them "sufficiently isolated," according to DiClemente.

But the documents show that an internal 2003 audit uncovered numerous security vulnerabilities in DCSNet -- many of which mirror problems unearthed in the bureau's Carnivore application years earlier.

In particular, the DCS-3000 machines lacked adequate logging, had insufficient password management, were missing antivirus software, allowed unlimited numbers of incorrect passwords without locking the machine, and used shared logins rather than individual accounts.

The system also required that DCS-3000's user accounts have administrative privileges in Windows, which would allow a hacker who got into the machine to gain complete control.

Columbia's Bellovin says the flaws are appalling and show that the FBI fails to appreciate the risk from insiders.

"The underlying problem isn't so much the weaknesses here, as the FBI attitude towards security," he says. The FBI assumes "the threat is from the outside, not the inside," he adds, and it believes that "to the extent that inside threats exist, they can be controlled by process rather than technology."

Bellovin says any wiretap system faces a slew of risks, such as surveillance targets discovering a tap, or an outsider or corrupt insider setting up unauthorized taps. Moreover, the architectural changes to accommodate easy surveillance on phone switches and the internet can introduce new security and privacy holes.

"Any time something is tappable there is a risk," Bellovin says. "I'm not saying, 'Don't do wiretaps,' but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?"
http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...007/08/wiretap





FBI: Strip-Or-Get-Bombed Threat Spreads

15 Stores Targeted In 11 States In Past Week, Police Say

A telephone caller making a bomb threat to a Hutchinson, Kan., grocery store kept more than 100 people hostage, demanding they disrobe and that the store wire money to his bank account.

Tuesday's incident may be part of a broader scam targeting other businesses around the country, the FBI said. Similar bomb threats are under investigation at more than 15 stores in at least 11 states -- all in the past week, authorities said.

FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said the threat appears to be related to a plot in recent days focusing on banks and stores in places like Detroit, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia and Newport, R.I.

"At this point, there's enough similarities that we think it's potentially one person or one group," Kolko said.

Police in Kansas safely led the 46 employees and 64 customers, some of whom had taken off their clothes, out of a Dillons grocery store after about 90 minutes.

Employee Marilyn Case told The Hutchinson News that store manager Mike Piros argued with the caller, but they relented when he continued to make threats and instructed them to "do it now."

Caller Threatens To Cut Fingers Off

He then demanded that one of Piros' fingers be cut off for every hour his demands were not met, and another employee got a butcher knife on his orders, Case said. Jim Peterson, a customer, told the newspaper that people became distraught.

"People came undone and started saying, 'No, no,"' he said.

Piros was not harmed. Police there initially said they were investigating whether the caller had hacked into the surveillance system, but later backed away from that possibility.

Authorities said the caller appeared to have visual access to the store, although officials were investigating whether the caller was out of state and may have hacked into the store's security system.

"If they can access the Internet, they can get to anything," Hutchinson Police Chief Dick Heitschmidt said. "Anyone in the whole world could have access, if that's what really happened."

On Wednesday, two other stores in Hutchinson also received bomb threats, said police Lt. Steven Nelson.

In Arizona, a bomb threat led to the evacuation of a Prescott Safeway on Tuesday.

A caller with an accent demanded $2,850, according to police and city spokesman Kim Kapin.

"The maximum that Western Union can send through its service is $3,000," Kapin said. Wiring money also includes a $150 service charge, Kapin added. "This individual was obviously aware of that."

Initially, the caller led employees to believe he was observing them.

"After a while, it sounded like he was just taking a shot in the dark at what they might be doing, or what they looked like or how they were reacting to his call," Prescott police Lt. Ken Morley said.

Sherry Johnson, a spokeswoman for Englewood, Colo.-based Western Union, said the company was working with the FBI and U.S. Secret Service to trace the money sent through the service.

It was also telling its agents to be on the lookout for the extortion plot.

"This is an ongoing law enforcement investigation," Johnson said.

A bomb threat at a supermarket in Millinocket, Maine, on Wednesday was tied to the scam. Authorities there said a caller threatened to detonate a bomb inside the store unless money was wired to a bank account. Click here to read about the incident.

An unidentified man called a Newport Wal-Mart on Tuesday morning, saying he had a bomb and would harm employees. He also demanded that workers transfer $10,000 to an account, said Newport Police Sgt. James Quinn. The store wired the money, Quinn said.

FBI Looks For Overseas Connection

The FBI was looking into whether the calls to the banks and stores were being placed from overseas and was compiling reports from local police departments to probe for similarities between the cases, Kolko said Wednesday.

"At this point, there's enough similarities that we think it's potentially one person or one group," Kolko said from Washington.

Police in Virginia said a similar threat was made at a store there on Tuesday. In that case, no money was sent and no bomb was found.

In Newport, the caller placed three separate calls to the store, Quinn said. An employee reported the bomb threat to police at 6:52 a.m., minutes before the store's scheduled opening.

Roughly 25 employees who were inside at the time were evacuated as a police SWAT team spent hours sweeping the building and bomb-sniffing dogs searched around cars in the parking lot. Neither the suspect nor any explosive device was found in the store, and no one was injured.

Quinn said police have identified the account where the money was wired, but he would not say where it was held. He said the caller used a land line from out of state, but would not say from where. No arrests have been made.

A similar call was made to a bank inside a Wal-Mart store in western Virginia late Tuesday morning, police said. An employee at a bank branch inside a Wal-Mart store in Salem was told that a bomb would explode unless an undisclosed amount of money was sent via Western Union. The store was evacuated and later reopened after no bombs were found, police said.

Another bomb threat was called in a few minutes later to a bank inside a store in Virginia's Pulaski County. That store was also evacuated and no bombs were found.

No arrests have been made in either of the Virginia incidents.

The store in Newport does not have a bank branch inside, but offers a money transfer service similar to Western Union, police said.

College Campuses Get Bomb Threats

Separately, the FBI is looking into bomb threats on college campuses, including three in Ohio -- the University of Akron, Kenyon College and a community college in Lorain County, Ohio.

No explosive devices have been found. Law enforcement officials said there was no evidence at this time linking the college bomb threats with those at grocery and discount stores.

Kenyon, in Gambier in central Ohio, received six separate bomb threats in a general admissions e-mail account between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Wednesday, college spokesman Shawn Presley said.

Local and federal authorities determined the threats to be a hoax and the school was not evacuated as officials swept buildings searching for the bomb, he said.

The University of Akron closed classrooms, labs and offices in its Auburn Science and Engineering building on Wednesday, after a secretary in a dean's office received an anonymous e-mail that included a bomb threat.
http://www.kpho.com/news/13996055/detail.html





New York Taxi Drivers Split Over GPS Technology, Possible Strike

One group says GPS technology infringes on the privacy of drivers and has called for a strike in early September, while another group says GPS produces bigger tips and opposes a strike.
K.C. Jones

New York City taxi drivers are split on whether they should strike in opposition to a new GPS requirement.

One taxi group plans to strike from 5 a.m., Sept. 5, through 5 a.m., Sept. 7, in opposition to New York City's requirement that all cabs be equipped with GPS technology beginning Oct. 1. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which claims more than 8,400 members, announced the strike dates this week, saying GPS infringes on drivers' privacy.

The New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers and other groups representing about 10,000 cab drivers oppose the strike.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission passed a rule stating that all New York City cabs must have touch-screen display panels, credit card readers, and GPS beginning this year. Many taxis already are equipped with the technologies, which allow passengers to get news, route data, and other information.

The TLC claims that the technology will not be used to invade drivers' privacy but will provide real-time maps and help passengers recover lost property. The TLC said it would use electronic trip reports to assess the needs of the industry, which it does now with paper trip sheets. New York City's contracts prohibit vendors from sharing information regarding off-duty locations of taxicabs with the TLC. The technology is also designed to notify drivers of emergencies. Passengers can turn the monitors off after mandatory safety information has been displayed.

The TLC says all cabs should accept credit cards because people generally tip more when paying with credit cards and pedestrians are more likely to hail cabs if they can pay with plastic. Tests showed that the credit card processing times are normally less than eight seconds.

"These systems were designed with taxi rider and taxi driver input to enrich the passenger experience, something the industry promised three years ago when it accepted a 26% fare increase," TLC Chairman Matthew Daus said in a statement. "While most of the industry is honoring that promise -- 73% have already chosen a system before the due date -- I am puzzled that this group is not telling its members that drivers with the systems are making significantly more money in tips!"

New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers Spokesman Fernando Mateo agrees, and said that service will not be interrupted. "Our member drivers that have installed GPS get better tips, drive longer rides, and get places more efficiently," he said in a statement. "It is unfortunate that some believe that providing better service to the public is a disadvantage, and we do not agree."

Joseph Sanscrainte, an expert in consumer protection and privacy issues and an associate in the New York office of Bryan Cave, doesn't think the GPS requirement is a privacy violation.

"Consent to the GPS system is implied by the fact that medallion owners have consented to partake in the highly regulated NYC taxi industry," Sanscrainte said in a statement. "The fact that the industry is so highly regulated means that the medallion owners have a reduced expectation of privacy."
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=201802271





State Senate Blocks Mandatory ID Implants in Employees

The bill would prevent employers in the state from requiring workers to have the devices.
Patrick McGreevy

Tackling a dilemma right out of a science fiction novel, the state Senate passed legislation Thursday that would bar employers from requiring workers to have identification devices implanted under their skin.

State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) proposed the measure after at least one company began marketing radio frequency identification devices for use in humans.

The devices, as small as a grain of rice, can be used by employers to identify workers. A scanner passing over a body part implanted with one can instantly identify the person.

"RFID is a minor miracle, with all sorts of good uses," Simitian said. "But we shouldn't condone forced 'tagging' of humans. It's the ultimate invasion of privacy."

Simitian said he fears that the devices could be compromised by persons with unauthorized scanners, facilitating identity theft and improper tracking and surveillance.

The bill has been approved by the state Assembly and now goes to the governor.

Nine senators opposed the measure, including Bob Margett (R-Arcadia), who said it is premature to legislate technology that has not yet proved to be a problem. "It sounded like it was a solution looking for a problem," Margett said. "It didn't seem like it was necessary."

One company, VeriChip, has been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration to sell implanted identification devices, and about 2,000 people have had them implanted, Simitian said. A representative of the firm did not return calls seeking comment Thursday.

CityWatcher.com, a Cincinnati video surveillance company, has required employees who work in its secure data center to have a microchip implanted in an arm.

Similar technology has been used for years to help identify lost pets.

Meanwhile, the Assembly approved a bill that would allow Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and other law enforcement officials to put thousands of inmates on detention in their homes, with electronic monitoring equipment attached to their ankles.

Baca sought the legislation to help relieve overcrowding in L.A. County jails and said he would assign about 2,000 inmates with low-level offenses to involuntary home detention if the governor signs the bill. Currently, inmates must volunteer for home detention. The Senate has passed the bill.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...la-home-center





Taiwan's Acer Agrees to Acquire Gateway for About $710 Million
Jason Dean

Taiwan's Acer Inc. said it had reached an agreement to acquire Gateway Inc. in a deal that values the U.S. company at about $710 million and pushes Acer past Lenovo Group Ltd. as the world's No. 3 vendor of personal computers.

In a joint statement, the two companies said Acer would make a cash offer for all outstanding shares of Irvine, Calif.-based Gateway for $1.90 a share, a steep premium to their closing price of $1.21 Friday. The deal has been unanimously by approved the boards of both companies and is expected to close by December, the statement said.

Acer's acquisition of Gateway highlights the rapid rise of what is becoming one of Asia's best-known brands. It also gives Acer a significant new foothold in the American market, making it a more formidable competitor to industry leaders Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. on their home turf.

Gateway, while not among the world's top five PC vendors, ranked third in the U.S. in unit shipments in the second quarter of this year, with about 5.6% of the market, according to preliminary estimates by market research firm IDC. Dell and H-P had a combined 52% of the U.S. market in the same period.

The newly combined company will have total revenue of more than $15 billion, and shipments of more than 20 million PCs a year, the statement said. Acer indicated in the statement that it would continue to use the Gateway brand, saying the combined entity would be a "multi-branded PC-company." The acquisition of Gateway "and its strong brand" will strengthen Acer's U.S. presence and "completes Acer's global footprint," the statement quoted Acer Chairman J.T. Wang as saying.

"We believe our complementary geographical and product mixes, and our mutual focus on the consumer market makes Acer an outstanding partner for Gateway," the statement quoted Ed Coleman, Gateway's chief executive as saying. "Acer has made impressive strides in the global PC market and the board and I welcome this merger."

Acer and Gateway said they expect the deal to result in significant cost savings, saying that "pre-tax synergies," which the statement didn't define, are expected to be at least $150 million.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118820817365109596.html





Apple Now Sells More than One in Six Laptops in U.S.

Coming next: A top-to-bottom iPod refresh, says analyst
Gregg Keizer

Apple Inc.'s share of the laptop market is growing -- the company now sells more than one in every six laptops purchased in the U.S., a research firm said today.

"Apple's definitely up," said Stephen Baker, an analyst at Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD Group Inc. "Their sales are continuing to grow faster than the rest of the marketplace."

NPD, which collects its data primarily from retail sources and excludes most online and all direct sales, said Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops accounted for 17.6% of June's unit sales, an uptick of more than three percentage points from May's 14.3%.

Baker attributed the jump in market share to refreshes that both laptop lines recently received. The lower-priced MacBook was updated in mid-May with faster processors and more memory, while 15-in. models of the high-end MacBook Pro were outfitted with new backlit LED screens in early June.

The market share increase pushed Apple past Gateway Inc. into third place on NPD's list of laptop sales leaders, behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Toshiba Corp. Research firm IDC also has Apple in the third spot; data it released last month put Apple's share of U.S. sales at 5.6%, far behind leaders HP (28.4%) and Dell (23.6%) but tied with Gateway.

Back-to-school sales during this month and next, Baker said, should be strong for Apple, but his forecast is that the company's share will remain stable through the quarter. "I don't expect it to improve any from the June numbers," said Baker.

The next move by Apple, said Baker, will likely not be in its computer business -- it refreshed the iMac family earlier this month -- but on the iPod side. "I'll stay firmly in the path of conventional wisdom and say that it's iPods next," Baker said. "They haven't been refreshed in almost a year."

Although bloggers and Apple-centric Web sites have been touting rumors of iPod announcements coming as soon as next Tuesday, Baker didn't have any inside information on possible release dates or even details. However, he did have some predictions.

"Apple will up the capacity of the Shuffle," he said. The diminutive player, which sells for $79, currently maxes out at 1GB.

"And Apple has to decide where they want to go with the Nano. It's a music player now, so the question is what can they do if they want to keep it in that form factor?" Some reports have surfaced with photos showing a shorter, wider Nano, with a screen better suited to video. At least one such posting has pulled the photos at Apple's request, fueling speculation that the images were legitimate.

"I think we'll also see a whole revamp of the iPod video line," added Baker, citing talk of an iPod with the same size and shape -- including screen size -- as the iPhone as one possibility.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list





Still burning for you

Georgia Man's Dell Laptop Bursts into Flames

Latest in a series of laptop fires
Truman Lewis

A computer network administrator at a Columbus, Georgia, hospital is the latest consumer to encounter the flaming laptop syndrome.

Douglas Brown said his Dell 9200 wide-screen laptop's batteries exploded into flames, it "looked like fireworks which would have been cool had it not been in my house."

Brown called 911 and the fire department responded with two pumpers, a ladder truck, the HAZMAT unit, an ambulance and the battalion chief.

"Way too much manpower for one little laptop," he said, but "I guess it sounded like it was more then it really was" to the 911 dispatcher.

It's the latest in a series of fires and meltdowns involving the lithium-ion batteries used in laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices.

Last year, a man in South Venice, Fla. blamed his Dell laptop for burning down his house. Earlier this year, a Macbook was blamed for a house fire in Australia.

In one of the most celebrated cases, a Dell laptop was blamed for setting fire to a pickup truck parked in a remote mountainous area in Nevada last August. The fire not only destroyed the truck but set off a box of ammunition its outdoorsman owner had left in the glove compartment while he went fishing.

Dell and other computer makers have recalled millions of batteries. It could not immediately be determined whether Brown's laptop was among the recalled units.

Brown said he called Dell and spoke with a representative named Cory who was "very nice and professional" but who then transferred him to someone who was not.

Brown said he asked the next service rep "who was going to pay for the damages to my house and the HAZMAT bill and (she) asked me if I had insurance.

"I would have thought Dell would have had a better answer then that," Brown said. "After all the fire was caused by their computer."

Brown said the laptop is now sitting the middle of his driveway.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0...dell_fire.html





Storm Hits Blogger

The ubiquitous Storm Trojan has found a new home – on spam blog sites in Google's Blogger network
Kelly Jackson Higgins

Careful whose blog you're reading these days: Researchers have discovered the Storm Trojan nestled in hundreds of blog sites in Google's Blogger network.

This Storm infection is not simple comment spam, where spammers post their junk messages and malware as blog comments. "These are blogs that post spam," says Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, who has been studying the posts. He says he hasn't seen any legitimate blogs bites being hacked and sprinkled with Storm, but he's still researching the trend.

Eckelberry, who first discovered Storm executable files on several blogger sites this week, says Storm is showing up on blogs that use the mail-2-blogger feature, where bloggers can post via email. Google does have a CAPTCHA defense in place to prevent this kind of infection, requiring some bloggers to manually enter their code in order to post their blogs.

"But these guys are somehow flying under the radar," Eckelberry says. "I have no idea how they are doing this."

One site he found that's laden with Storm as well as spam junk is http://www.visionbuzz.blogspot.com/, for instance. And a Google search for Storm's infamous keywords, including "dude what if you wife finds this" and "man your insane," comes up with hundreds of blog sites, he says.

Storm is often referred to as a worm, but it's technically a Trojan. It relies on social engineering, with a tempting message and link, and it's all about expanding spam and the underlying botnet behind it, notes Joe Stewart, senior security researcher for SecureWorks. Although it's less dangerous than a traditional worm, it ranks in the top five most prolific threats, he says.

"You're not in danger of identity theft -- it's really not all that dangerous to the person who's been infected... It's really more dangerous to the Internet architecture as a whole," he says.

The Trojan gives Storm's bot army the ability to launch powerful distributed denial of services attacks, Stewart says. "But that's not its only purpose. It's also to make money, [such as from] stock spam."

"It's very disturbing to have Storm executables being linked onto sites we can control. But blog sites that Storm is operating off of are hard to control," Eckelberry says. "We've been working with Google in getting this shut down, and Google has been very helpful."

Why are the bad guys starting to plant Storm executables in blogs? "It's all about the numbers," says Randy Abrams, director of technical education for Eset, an anti-malware vendor. "The more places you can get the links out to, the more uneducated users you will trick into clicking on them and then infecting themselves. This, in turn, expands the botnet, which increases the profitability of [the exploit]."
http://www.darkreading.com/document....WT.svl=news1_1





Google Begins Hosting News on Its Site
Michael Liedtke

Internet search leader Google Inc. on Friday began hosting material produced by The Associated Press and three other news services on its own Web site instead of only sending readers to other destinations.

The change affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press. It could diminish Internet traffic to other media sites where those stories and photos are also found - a development that could reduce the online advertising revenue of newspapers and broadcasters.

Google negotiated licensing deals with the AP and French news agency during the past two years after the services raised concerns about whether the search engine had been infringing on their copyrights. The Mountain View-based company also reached licensing agreements with The Press Association and The Canadian Press during the same period.

Financial terms of those deals haven't been disclosed.

The new approach doesn't change the look of Google News or affect the way the section treats material produced by other media.

Although Google already had bought the right to display content produced by all four news services, the search engine's news section had continued to link to other Web sites to read the stories and look at the photographs.

That helped drive more online traffic to newspapers and broadcasters who pay annual fees to help finance the AP, a 161-year-old cooperative owned by news organizations.

Now, Google visitors interested in reading an AP story will remain on Google's Web site unless they click on a link that enables them to read the same story elsewhere. Google doesn't have any immediate plans to run ads alongside the news hosted on its site.

Although the change might not even be noticed by many Google users, the decision to corral the content from the AP and other news services may irritate publishers and broadcasters if the move results in less traffic for them and more for Internet's most powerful company.

A diminished audience would likely translate into less online revenue, compounding the financial headaches of long-established media already scrambling to make up for the money that has been lost as more advertisers shift their spending to the Internet.

Google has been the trend's biggest beneficiary because it runs the Internet's largest advertising network. In the first half of this year, the 9-year-old company earned $1.9 billion on revenue of $7.5 billion.

Despite Google's dominance in search, its news section lags behind several other rivals. In July, Google News attracted 9.6 million visitors compared with Yahoo News' industry-leading audience of 33.8 million, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Yahoo Inc., along with other major Web sites such as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, have been featuring AP material for years.

Under its new approach, Google reasons readers won't have to pore through search results listing the same story posted on different sites. That should in turn make it easier to discover other news stories at other Web sites that might previously have been buried, said Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News.

"This may result in certain publishers losing traffic for their news wire stories, but it will allow more room for their original content," Cohen said.

Vlae Kershner, news director for the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site, backed up that theory, saying Google News mostly refers readers interested in the newspaper's staff-written stories. "This is going to have a very minimal impact on our traffic," he said.

Referrals from Google News accounted for 2.2 percent of the traffic at newspaper Web sites during the week ending Aug. 25, according to the research firm Hitwise.

Caroline Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, said she worries about anything that might erode her site's advertising revenue. "That's how we make money," she said. "We will be watching this carefully."

For its part, the AP intends to work with Google to ensure readers find their way to breaking news stories on its members' Web sites, said Jane Seagrave, the AP's vice president of new media markets.

In recognition of the challenges facing the media, the AP froze its basic rates for member newspapers and broadcasters this year and already has committed to keeping fees at the same level next year.

That concession has intensified the pressure on AP to plumb new revenue channels by selling its content to so-called "commercial" customers on the Web. Those efforts helped the not-for-profit AP boost its revenue by 4 percent last year to $680 million.

"AP relies on its commercial agreements to help pay the enormous costs of covering breaking news around the world, ranging from deadly hurricanes and tsunamis to conflicts like the war in Iraq," Seagrave said.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/...ap4073834.html





Google's Secret Society
Andy Greenberg

Who's the Google of social networking sites? The obvious answer may seem to be Facebook, given its rapid growth, successful cooperation with application developers, and ever-smarter ad targeting. But by some measures, the real answer is even more obvious: Google itself.

This week, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) is drawing attention to its often-ignored social networking site, Orkut.com, with a redesign intended to prettify the site's Spartan look. And attention is deserved: Despite its low profile in the U.S., Orkut now draws 38.2 billion page views a month worldwide, 7.8 billion more than Facebook, according to comScore Media Metrix.

In Brazil, where Facebook and MySpace are virtually unknown, Orkut has become a smash hit, with 15.6 billion page views monthly, by the count of Nielsen/Net Ratings. That kind of popularity doesn't just dwarf Facebook's Brazilian traffic, which is practically nil; it's also nearly 10 billion more monthly page views than Facebook draws from Americans.

Orkut's success in Brazil seems largely to be a fluke. The site hasn't made any special appeal to Brazilians, and only began to offer a Portuguese-language option in April of 2005, long after it had become the social network of choice in Brazil. One blogger argues that its name, which was taken from Turkish-born Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, is catchy in Portuguese and reminds Brazilians of a popular yogurt drink for kids.

But a bigger question than the cause of Orkut's popularity is the site's potential for profit. Facebook will earn more than $100 million this year, according to one of the site's investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. And with the right advertisers, Orkut's Brazilians and other foreign users could also be a significant source of revenue, argues Greg Sterling, a consultant with Sterling Market Research. "If you've got the ad coverage, an international user is as valuable as anyone," he says.

In fact, Google's foreign advertising coverage has been spreading. The company's revenues from sources outside the U.S. and Britain, earned almost entirely from selling targeted ads, amounted to $1.24 billion last quarter, nearly twice the number from just a year ago. That brings the percentage of Google's foreign revenue to 60.8%, up from 46.7% last year.

While that spending might make Orkut an unlikely "heavy-weight" of social networking, as blogger Michael Arrington recently wrote, the site will need to gain a much larger U.S. audience to compete long-term with networks like MySpace and Facebook. MySpace still leads the social networking market by a large margin, and Facebook tripled its audience in the last year, according to comScore, while Orkut grew only 64%.

But Google, which won't disclose Orkut's revenue numbers, has recently been putting more of its massive resources behind the site. On top of this week's redesign, the company last year sponsored a social networking project at Carnegie Mellon to develop a tool meant to improve Orkut's domestic popularity. The result was Socialstream, a prototype for a site that allows users to post text and multimedia content to a single page, then syndicate that content to any social network where they have a profile.

Combined with Orkut, Socialstream might be just the sort of Googlish innovation that breaks down the "walled-garden" approach to social networking favored by Facebook and MySpace and brings American eyeballs to Orkut. If Google could provide Orkut with a competitive advantage, it could easily build a community from the audience that uses its services like Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Maps, Google Calendar and its photo-sharing site, Picasa, says Sterling.

"Until now, Orkut has been an also-ran in the U.S. because it's been neglected by Google," Sterling says. "But with just a few tweaks and redesigns, and in combination with all of Google's services, it has the potential to really differentiate itself from MySpace and Facebook."
http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/28/goo...0828orkut.html





Survey: More Women Blogging than Men as Blogs Hit Mainstream
John Pospisil

The blogosphere has hit the mainstream, according to a new survey, which reveals that 80% of Americans know what a blog is, 50% regularly visit blogs, and 8% publish their own blog.

The survey also revealed that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 % of men.

The Synovate/Marketing Daily survey was conducted online with 1,000 adults in the US using Synovate eNation from July 30 to August 1.

"Because anyone can start one anytime, blogs are not necessarily seen as legitimate information sources despite the fact that some bloggers are experts in their area," said Tom Mularz, senior vice president at Synovate.

"However, as their prominence andinfluence continues to rise, this could certainly change."

When asked about the types of information they get from blogs, 65% said they get opinions, while 39% get news and 38% get entertainment. About one in three people read gossip on blog websites while only 2% use blogs to catch upon news about family and friends.

Loyalty to specific blogs is also fairly strong with 46% of blog readers saying that they visit the same blogs regularly versus 54% who instead usually surf for new and different ones.

Awareness blogs strongly correlates to age, with younger people being much more active.

Nearly 90% of those aged 25 to 34 know what a blog is, compared to just 65% of those aged 65 and over. Similarly, 78% of those aged 18 to 24 who are aware of blogs say they have visited a blog, compared to only 45% of older Americans.

As blogs have gained in popularity, so has the frequency with which they're read.

Though the majority of blog readers (39%) view them less than once a month, another 28% visit them monthly, 15% visit them daily and 5% read them several times a day.

Of course, while blog usage continues to grow, so does their attractiveness as a potential marketing tool. In fact, 43% of blog visitors indicated that they had noticed advertisements on blog websites, rising to 61% among those aged 18 to 24.

Almost one-third of consumers have clicked on an ad while reading a blog. But even though consumers are spending more time with blogs, they aren't necessarily replacing other media. Only 13% of blog readers say they spend less time with other forms of media (newspapers, television, radio) since they've started following blogs.

The main reason people read blogs? Almost half of those surveyed say it's because they find blogs entertaining, and another 26% read them to learn about specific hobbies or other areas they're interested in. Only 15% of blog readers say they do so for news, indicating that the more traditional forms of news consumption still have a stronghold.

Among those who said they have never read a blog, the main reason cited was that they're "just not interested". Another 15% said that they don't are about the opinions and ideas typically expressed in blogs.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...it-mainstream/





From April

Women Bloggers Whine About Comment Woes
Triston McIntyre

Negative comments, hurtful words and even threats are the daily routine for those in the blogging community; most writers might say they would rather receive negative feedback than not receive any feedback at all. However, women bloggers have raised their voices in protest of threatening or vulgar comments they receive to their writing and want codes of conduct initiated to protect themselves.

The Washington Times has reported that many women bloggers are intimidated by violently or sexually explicit comments left in response to their writing. Joan Walsh, a female editor-in-chief of the publication Salon, said, ""it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men."

Many feel the disturbing comments are made simply because their owners can maintain anonymity; even today blogs do not require users to login or register with the site.

One particular author, Kathy Sierra, who once ran a Top 100 blog by Technorati's criteria said, "I have cancelled all speaking engagements…I am afraid to leave my yard…I will never feel the same…I will never be the same."

Sierra wrote this in response to comments that indicated certain users wanted to perform sexual acts on her and then kill her in an explicitly violent manner.

As it stands, there are many women in academia and writing that feel intimidated by threatening comments and violent feedback. A group known as BlogHer has offered support for women who are feeling threatened by the malicious internet community.

That being said, allow me to say this: women are not the only people being targeted by violent comments or otherwise, and the problem was never largely addressed before it became a "female" issue.

If, perhaps, women were the only users being targeted, it might be justified to "sexify" the issue. However, the media is directly responsible for making this a sex-related issue, when in fact innapropriate comments infest the blogging world for both men and women.

Furthermore, not all women feel that the negative comments need be taken seriously. Michelle Malkin, a culture and politics blogger, says she has received plenty of comments regarding,"torture, rape, murder" of her and her loved ones. She said, "Keep blogging. Don't cut and run."

If female writers want to be effective against the onslaught of offensive comments, the number one way to do so isn't to make it a public issue. Have you ever let on to a small child that something they do bothers you? I can guarantee you, they will perform that act all the more because they know it will irritate you.

If women are to be considered equals to men in every regard (as they should), they must not isolate themselves as separate from men in the day to day abuse internet writers receive. Most importantly, they cannot stop blogging simply due to threats they feel they are receiving due to their sex.

This is not to say I don't feel that innapropriate comments and their owners need to be dealt with; they do. However, by sexually isolating women in this issue, the focus is taken away from the larger problem of moderating baseless commentary and is placed on gender issues. If the blogging community as a whole faces the very real problem of threatening or violent commentary, it can be dealt with in an effective manner.
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20...-comment-woes/





Resurgent Facebook Site a Challenge for University
Charles Mandel

Less than a week after Dalhousie University asked Facebook to pull a group titled "Stop dogs and puppies from being murdered at Dalhousie University," the group is back online on the social networking site and with more members than before.

The revival is worrying for universities, school boards, businesses and other institutions dealing with the new medium. Dalhousie's Facebook problem is just the latest for organizations wondering how best to deal with negative comment, threats and worse online.

In recent months, the Toronto District School Board suspended five high school students for "cyber-bullying" collegiate staff on Facebook, while Halifax police have investigated threats students made on Facebook to a teacher here.

"The real story here is the enormous impact and the speed with which these communities are growing,'' says Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

More than three million Canadians belong to Facebook, with nearly 800,000 of those in Toronto. Vancouver has slightly over 400,000 members, Calgary more than 230,000, Montreal around 199,000, Edmonton slightly less at about 195,000 and Regina and Saskatoon respectively with about 30,000 and 40,000.

Dalhousie has first-hand experience on how that rapidly-expanding Facebook community with its constant creation of discussion groups is presenting challenges to institutional reputations.

Since the animal rights group reappeared on Facebook, it's population has surged in just two days from 15,000 to over 21,000 people. Amy Scott, the group's administrator, thanks Facebook online for bringing the group back.

The group alleges Dalhousie is using dogs and cats in scientific research and states: "Kittens have had their brains mangled and eyes sutured shut at Dalhousie."

For its part, the university contends it's only used rodents and insects for more than the last decade and says it is now checking with its legal consul and weighing its options for possible action.

"It's a new kind of challenge because it's a new form of media that everyone is still wrapping their heads around,'' says Charles Crosby, a Dalhousie spokesman. "The whole process has been very eye-opening for us because it shows the dissemination of information is really changing."

Brendan Hodgson, vice-president of digital communications practice at Hill & Knowlton Canada, says institutions have to monitor what's being said about them because accusations do have the potential to damage their reputations.

"In this day and age - and it's a very different landscape than what it was just a few years ago - can you even respond to what may be hundreds of references in blogs or mountains of different Facebook groups?'' Hodgson asks.

In some instances, other people will jump in and defend the institution's reputation, something that's already happening with Dalhousie. Two new Facebook groups countering Scott's group have started up, one of which is called "Stop people from spreading lies about animal cruelty at Dalhousie" and which already has 300 members in three days.

"Let's face it,'' Geist says, "just about everybody who attends Dalhousie from a student level is a member of Facebook, so it's certainly an environment they can't ignore."

Geist says institutions need to not just track what happens on such sites as Facebook, but to become part of the community. "That, at the end of the day, is the best way to ensure their perspective is heard."
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/na...2dd33b&k=46972





YouTube Criticized in Germany over Neo-Nazi Clips

Video-sharing Web site YouTube has met with harsh criticism in Germany for hosting clips that incite racial hatred, according to a news report due to be broadcast on German public TV late on Monday.

The videos hosted on YouTube include clips of a 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda film "Jud Suess" and two music videos of outlawed German far-right rock band Landser, which show footage from World War II depicting Nazi military operations.

Report Mainz, which is due to air the program, said in a statement that Social Democrat (SPD) parliamentarian Dieter Wiefelspuetz said airing the clips on YouTube in Germany was scandalous. Report Mainz quoted him as saying: "Publishing these films amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of the people."

Report Mainz also said that Germany's Central Council of Jews Vice President Salomon Korn was considering pressing charges against Google Germany.

According to the statement from Report Mainz, German youth protection body Jugendschutz.net has complained to Google Germany more than 100 times and asked Google, which bought YouTube last year, to remove the clips.

Some of the material has been on the site for almost a year.

Google Germany was not immediately available for comment.

More than 60 years after the Holocaust, Germany is grappling with a rise in support for Nazi ideas. Neo-Nazi violence in Germany has reached its highest level since reunification in 1990.

(Reporting by Nicola Leske)
http://www.reuters.com/article/inter...51050320070827





German Left Slam e-Mail Spy Plan

LEFT-WING members of the ruling coalition have objected strongly to plans by the German interior ministry to enlist email spy software to monitor terror suspects.
A ministry spokesman confirmed that the proposed plank of new anti-terror legislation vetted the use of "Trojans" which smuggle themselves into a suspect's computer disguised as a harmless email.

It would then feed information back to police servers whenever the computer was connected to the internet.

The plans, which have circulated online and in the press in recent days, have met with sharp criticism both from the GdP police union and Social Democrats (SPD), who are partners in the left-right ruling coalition.

Opponents argue that the plans would violate Germany's Basic Law and its privacy protections, particularly if the Trojan software was hidden in an official email.

"The SPD will never lend a hand to changing the constitution simply to allow online searches," Ralf Stegner, the interior minister of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein said.

The opposition Left Party said that such measures would destroy Germans' faith in the state.

"No one will trust emails from the authorities because they could be snoop attacks," deputy Jan Korte, a member of the interior affairs committee in the Bundestag lower house of parliament, said.

GdP president Konrad Freiberg suggested passing the broader anti-terror legislation at least initially without the online search programme.

He did not want to hold up key crime-fighting measures because of the controversy over Trojan programmes.

Joerg Ziercke, director of the Federal Crime Office, defended the idea of Trojans in an interview with Stern magazine to be published this week.

He argued that so-called Remote Forensic Software could not be broadly used anyway because it would have to be tailored each time to the computer that had been targetted.

The anti-terror draft law also includes new powers for the federal police to involve itself in cases that poses a national threat even without a specific request from state police.

It would also allow them to launch probes based on suspect profiling if there was a specific threat of attacks and wiretap suspects' phones.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party and one of the most experienced members of her cabinet, raised hackles in July when he proposed more draconian measures.

In an interview with the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, he suggested the indefinite detention and "targeted killing" of terror suspects and a ban on the use of the internet and mobile phones by suspect foreigners living in Germany.

Germany has strict checks on its security forces in part due to the flagrant abuses committed during the Nazi era, and under the communists in what was East Germany.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...013044,00.html





Patent System's Revamp Hits Wall

Globalization fears stall momentum in Congress; AFL-CIO sends a letter
Greg Hitt

A bipartisan effort in Congress to overhaul the patent system -- a priority for some of the nation's biggest technology companies -- is hitting resistance because of concerns the U.S. might be exposed to greater foreign competition.

Patent overhaul appeared to be on a fast track earlier this summer. But plans for a quick vote got derailed last month after the AFL-CIO entered the debate, warning that innovation -- and union-backed manufacturing jobs -- might be at risk if the changes were adopted. The union has considerable clout in the Democratic Congress and expressed concerns with provisions that would expose patents to expanded challenges and might limit damages for infringement.

"At a time when the Chinese government is constantly being challenged to live up to its intellectual-property obligations, we do not want to take actions that may weaken ours," the AFL-CIO's legislative director, William Samuel, said in the pointed missive that was circulated on Capitol Hill.

The sweeping patent initiative -- backed by a business coalition dominated by technology companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- would indeed shift the balance of power of the U.S. patent system. It would make it a bit harder for holders to protect patents. Advocates of the legislation contend the current system encourages patent litigation and costly judgments against infringers -- and stifles innovation. They say the proposals are designed to bring patent rules in line with the rapidly changing U.S. economy, where inventions often reflect hundreds of potentially patentable ideas.

Mark Chandler, Cisco's general counsel, dismissed concerns that non-U.S. companies might gain some advantage by the bill. He said the proposed changes would strengthen companies at "the heart of innovation in the American economy," better positioning them to compete at home and abroad.

Opponents of the legislation argue that it would make it easier for foreign competitors to legally copy patented methods and products.

The maneuvering dramatizes how fears about global integration are spreading across many issues.

Such concerns have placed in doubt prospects for President Bush's trade agenda, including market-opening deals with Colombia and South Korea. Renewal of the president's authority to negotiate deals appears even more remote. Democrats in Congress are pushing to shore up programs that help workers who lose their jobs as a result of foreign competition.

The angst about globalization also helped fuel opposition to an immigration-overhaul bill that would have opened a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented workers. It has led Congress to enact rules governing foreign investments in the U.S.

The spillover of those worries into the patent debate "shows the breadth of the concerns about this model of globalization," says Lori Wallach, who heads Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, an advocacy group critical of the Bush agenda. "It's not just trade agreements any more."

Calls for changes in the patent system have been building for some time and gained traction after Democrats took control of Congress this year. In both the House and the Senate, bipartisan coalitions emerged to take up the issue. And the initiative, with the help of some savvy lobbying by business supporters, appeared on track for passage, despite the partisan-charged political environment on Capitol Hill.

The patent initiative, which has been pushed by the financial-services industry, as well, took an important step forward in July. Both the House and the Senate judiciary committees approved broadly consistent bills.

The White House made clear it was also on board. While raising concerns about some details of the legislation, the Bush administration has offered general support for "the goals" of the initiative.

But the labor-driven pushback gave Democratic leaders pause about rushing action on the legislation before lawmakers left town for the August break. Floor votes in the House and Senate are expected this fall.

From the beginning, the legislation has faced opposition. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies have voiced concern. So have large research universities and many manufacturers, such as Caterpillar Inc. and Dow Chemical Co. They contend that the legislation is too far-reaching and would stifle innovation by weakening the value of patents.

Then came the AFL-CIO. Leaders of the United Steelworkers union and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents high-tech workers, offered similar concerns. The legislation "could seriously threaten our nation's competitive edge in industries that rely on innovation," Gregory Junemann, president of the engineering group, warned lawmakers in another letter.

At about the same time, criticism with a strong antiglobalization bent began to emerge among rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties. In late July, Reps. Michael Michaud, a Maine Democrat, and Donald Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter noting "foreign competitors" welcomed the legislation. The letter was accompanied by an overseas newspaper story noting that pharmaceutical companies in India saw the legislation as an opening to break patent rights on brand-name drugs and gain an edge in the U.S. market.

"We just couldn't believe it" Rep. Manzullo said. "This is a very serious problem."

Eventually, more than 60 House members joined in an appeal to House leaders in both parties not to rush action. The request echoed of the same language used by the AFL-CIO: "It is especially important that these proposals not undermine our efforts to achieve better intellectual property protection for U.S. companies overseas, particularly in China and India."

Amid the concerns, House leaders backed off of tentative plans to run the measure through the floor before lawmakers left town for the summer.

Rep. Howard Berman, the lead sponsor of the legislation, said it is "hard for me to understand" why the legislation is being seen as hurting the nation's competitiveness. "To the contrary," he says, "it is the weakness and abuses of the current system that are impeding American innovation." The California Democrat predicted the measure will be brought up in September and win approval in the House.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118817303708409352.html





Brain Implants Relieve Alzheimer’s Damage

Toxic plaques cleared away
William J. Cromie

Genetically engineered cells implanted in mice have cleared away toxic plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

The animals were sickened with a human gene that caused them to develop, at an accelerated rate, the disease that robs millions of elderly people of their memories. After receiving the doctored cells, the brain-muddling plaques melted away. If this works in humans, old age could be a much happier time of life.

Alzheimer’s involves a protein called amyloid-beta, which makes up gooey clots or plaques that form in the brain. These toxic clumps, along with accessory tangled fibers, kill brain cells and interfere with memory and thinking. The situation has been compared to a build-up of cholesterol in coronary arteries.

“Delivery of genes that led to production of an enzyme that breaks up amyloid showed robust clearance of plaques in the brains of the mice,” notes Dennis Selkoe, Vincent and Stella Coates Professor of Neurologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School. “These results support and encourage further investigation of gene therapy for treatment of this common and devastating disease in humans.”

The first published report of the experiments, done by Selkoe and other researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s and McLean hospitals, appeared Aug. 27 on the Web site of the Public Library of Science.

The gene delivery technique employed by the research team has been used in several other trials with animals that model human diseases, including cancers. The procedure involves removing cells from patients, making genetic changes, and then putting back the modified cells, which should treat a disease or disability. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. So far, this approach has produced encouraging results for cancers, blood, muscle, and eye diseases, spinal cord injuries, stroke, Parkinson’s and Huntington diseases, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). “Several of these potential treatments have advanced to human trials, with encouraging outcomes for patients,” says Matthew Hemming, lead author of the report and a graduate student in Selkoe’s lab.

Another way to do gene therapy involves using a virus to carry the curative gene to target cells. However, two people have died and three contracted leukemia in experiments using this method. The drawback of using viruses this way is that the added gene often mixes with the patient’s genome in ways that can lead to unwanted side effects, including cancer and, possibly, death.

The Harvard team used skin cells from the animal’s own body to introduce a gene for an amyloid-busting enzyme known as neprilysin. The skin cells, also known as fibroblasts, “do not form tumors or move from the implantation site,” Hemming notes. “They cause no detectable adverse side effects and can easily be taken from a patient’s skin.” In addition, other genes can be added to the fibroblast-neprilysin combo, which will eliminate the implants if something starts to go wrong.
Will it work in humans?

This method worked well in the Alzheimer's experiments. “The gene that removed the amyloid-beta may not only prevent brain cells from dying, but will also remove the toxic protein that drives the disease progression,” Hemming comments.

The experiments proved that the technique works, but will it work in humans? One major obstacle, Selkoe says, is the larger size of a human brain compared to that of a mouse. That difference will require an increase of amyloid-busting activity throughout a much larger space.

One solution might involve implanting the genes and fibroblasts where they have the best access to amyloid-beta, in the spinal fluid for example, instead of trying to inject them into a small target. The amyloid-killing combo might be put into capsules that would secrete neprilysin into the blood circulating in the brain, eliminating the need to hit an exact spot.

This or some other clever maneuver that does not require surgery might eliminate the gooey plaques, but will that improve a person’s memory? And will the change be long-lasting? “Further work is needed to determine if reducing the plaque burden has cognitive benefits over a long period,” notes Hemming, “but there’s a wealth of evidence arguing that it will.”
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/...lzheimers.html





Mind Over Matter, With a Machine’s Help
Jason Pontin

WOULD that thinking made it so, people sometimes wistfully say. But Christopher deCharms, the chief executive of Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., believes the adage.

The company he founded has created technologies that teach sufferers to think away their pain, and plans to similarly treat addiction, depression and other intractable neurological and psychological conditions.

Omneuron is one of a number of new companies that are commercializing a brain-scanning technology called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Using large scanners to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain, the technology makes the brain’s activity visible by revealing which of its parts are busiest when we perform different tasks.

While fMRI dates back to the early 1990s, hitherto it has been used mainly by doctors in hospitals to make diagnoses. The commercialization of brain scanning is a recent development, spurred by the refinement of the technology. Omneuron, which Dr. deCharms founded in 2001 and whose research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, uses fMRI to teach people how to play with their own heads. Other entrepreneurs are working on ways to deploy fMRI as a lie detector, a tool for conducting marketing research or an instrument to make brain surgeries safer and more precise.

Here’s how Omneuron uses fMRI to treat chronic pain: A patient slides into the coffin-like scanner and watches a computer-generated flame projected on the screen of virtual-reality goggles; the flame’s intensity reflects the neural activity of regions of the brain involved in the perception of pain. Using a variety of mental techniques — for instance, imagining that a painful area is being flooded with soothing chemicals — most people can, with a little concentration, make the flame wax or wane. As the flame wanes, the patient feels better. Superficially similar to an older technology, electroencephalogram biofeedback, which measures electrical feedback across multiple areas of the brain, fMRI feedback measures the blood flow in precise areas of the brain.

“We believe that people will use real-time fMRI feedback to hone cognitive strategies that will increase activation of brain regions,” Dr. deCharms said. With practice and repetition, he said, this could lead to “long-term changes in the brain.”

In time, he hopes, a patient could evoke the effect without the machine.

In a 2005 study, Dr. deCharms and Sean Mackey, associate director of the pain management division at Stanford, showed that eight patients with recalcitrant pain felt their discomfort reduced by as much as 64 percent by using Omneuron’s technology.

If fMRI proves effective in treating pain, it could be big business. According to the American Chronic Pain Association, one in three Americans will experience chronic pain at some point in life. At any one time, more than 50 million Americans complain of pain. And Dr. deCharms contends that fully one-third find their pain resistant to traditional treatments like narcotics. Omneuron’s technologies could offer such patients some relief, and without side effects.

The pain-relief industry is huge: the average American spends as much as $900 a year on pain medications, whose effects are generally short-lived.

But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.

Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.

A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.

Joel Huizenga, the chief executive of No Lie MRI, said: “A technology gets known by its first product. For fMRI, that application is going to be truth verification.”

Mr. Huizenga says he would also like to sell fMRI to marketers who wish to determine whether consumers are responding to advertising, a commercial application of an emerging field of research called neuro-economics.

Other brain-scanning ventures include Cephos, another lie-detection company, and Imagilys, which sells fMRI to surgeons who want to map the brains of patients before operations.

For its part, Omneuron would make money not by building fMRI centers — which are expensive and fairly common in larger hospitals — but by selling clinical skills, software and equipment.

“I imagine the business model would be akin to Lasik eye surgery,” Dr. deCharms says. “We’d provide the technology to outpatient treatment centers.”

There are challenges to the commercialization of brain scanning, and the most important may be regulatory. Clinical trials can take many years, and federal approval is famously unpredictable. But until clinical data and federal approval are forthcoming, Dr. deCharms says, Omneuron cannot sell its technology as a clinical treatment.

Ed Boyden, an assistant professor at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher in neuroengineering, distinguishes sharply among different brain-scanning ventures. “If you want to commercialize this technology,” he said, “then the use has to approximate real-world situations.”

In his view, tests of fMRI truth verification don’t meet that criterion. For instance, in studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and 2005, subjects were told to conceal the identity of a card under questioning. FMRI was able to distinguish falsification 77 percent of the time.

Mr. Huizenga was so inspired by this research that he decided to start his company, confident that fMRI would soon identify lies 90 percent of the time.

But Dr. Boyden says he believes that being asked to tell a falsehood that everyone knows is a falsehood is not the same thing as lying to deceive someone. Thus, whatever brain patterns fMRI detects when a person constructs such a requested fiction may be different from whatever happens when we lie.

By contrast, Dr. Boyden says: “What I like about Omneuron is that it’s working with real-world situations. They gave people visualization strategies which they could monitor — and which produced real, measurable results.”

If Dr. deCharms and Omneuron are successful, and can teach us to train our brains to manage neurological and psychological conditions, they will have given us something that has challenged philosophers, psychologists and yogis alike: gaining some reliable control over our own thoughts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/bu.../26stream.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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