[JackSpratts]

Milestones

Bo Diddley, a Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneer, Is Dead at 79
Ben Ratliff

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building it on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.

His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremelo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Mr. Diddley was a wild performer, jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrangled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat.

“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to bands like the Clash and the Fall.

In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, starstruck, told a journalist during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”

Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by his mother’s first cousin, Gussie McDaniel, who had three children of her own. After the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school there. Ellas studied classical violin from the age of 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when his sister gave him an acoustic model.

He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass. The group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Joseph Leon (Jody) Williams, then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.

The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, started playing at an open-air market on Maxwell Street. They were sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, who was known as Sandman because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board sprinkled with sand.

Playing with the Jive Cats was not enough to make a living in the early days, so Mr. Diddley found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn professional.

In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremelo on the guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and their soon-to-be producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”

That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a door — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one.

In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” “Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart.

Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp — in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”

The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jockomo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.

Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Pretty Thing” and “Bo Diddley,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.

For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model 60 Tremelo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock spring.

His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.

“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he told George White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at the age of 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.

Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against racial intermarriage.

During the late 1950s, Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley make albums to capitalize on the dance craze the twist, as Chubby Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing at least seven of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.

But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened for him: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made Bo Diddley sound quaint. When work all but dried up, he moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974. His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and two presidential inaugurals, George H. W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical importance.

Since the early ’80s, Mr. Diddley lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.

Mr. Diddley was married four times, most recently, in 1992, to Sylvia Paiz; his spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. Last Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.

Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

“I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at her real good.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/ar...hp&oref=slogin





Alton Kelley, Poster Designer, Is Dead
William Grimes

Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif. He was 67.
The cause was complications of osteoporosis, said his wife, Marguerite Trousdale Kelley.

Mr. Kelley and his longtime collaborator, Stanley Mouse, combined sinuous Art Nouveau lettering and outré images plucked from sources near and far to create the visual equivalent of an acid trip. A 19th-century engraving from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” inspired a famous poster for a Grateful Dead concert at the Avalon Ballroom in 1966 that showed a skeleton wearing a garland of roses on its skull and holding a wreath of roses on its left arm.

The Grateful Dead later adopted this image as its emblem. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Mouse also designed several of the group’s album covers, including “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead.”

Mr. Kelley was born in Houlton, Me., and grew up in Connecticut, where his parents moved to work in defense plants during World War II. His mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged him to study art, and for a time he attended art schools in Philadelphia and New York, but his real passion was racing motorcycles and hot rods. He applied his artistic training to painting pinstripes on motorcycle gas tanks.

After working as a welder at the Sikorsky helicopter plant in Stratford, Conn., he moved to San Francisco in 1964, settling into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. With a group of friends he helped stage concerts at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nev., by the Charlatans, a electric folk-rock band. On returning to San Francisco, he became a founding member of the Family Dog, a loose confederation of artists, poets, musicians and other free spirits who put on the some of the earliest psychedelic dance concerts, first at the Longshoremen’s Hall and later at the Avalon Ballroom.

Mr. Kelley was in charge of promoting the concerts with posters and flyers, but his drafting ability was weak. That shortcoming became less of a problem in early 1966, when he teamed up with Stanley Miller, a hot-rod artist from Detroit who worked under the last name Mouse. The two formed Mouse Studios, with Mr. Kelley contributing layout and images and Mr. Mouse doing the distinctive lettering and drafting work. Often, they took trips to the public library in a search for images from books, magazines and photographs.

“Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing,” Mr. Kelley told The San Francisco Chronicle last year. “But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Déco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever.”

One of their first posters, for a concert headlined by Big Brother and the Holding Company, reproduced the logo for Zig-Zag cigarette papers, used widely for rolling marijuana joints.

“We were paranoid that the police would bust us or that Zig-Zag would bust us,” Mr. Mouse said.

From 1966 to 1969, Mr. Kelley worked on more than 150 posters for concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore, publicizing the most famous bands and artists of the era, among them Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Butterfield Blues Band and Moby Grape, as well as the Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, and Country Joe and the Fish. They created three posters for concerts headlined by Bo Diddley, who died on Monday.

With time, Mr. Kelley’s drawing improved, and the partners virtually fused into a poster-generating unit.

“Kelley would work on the left side of the drawing table and Mouse on the Right,” said Paul Grushkin, the author of “The Art of Rock: Posters From Presley to Punk” and a longtime friend of both men. “They turned out a poster a week.”

At the time, the posters were put up on telephone poles. Everyone who attended a concert at the Avalon received a free poster advertising the next show on the way out the door. Some were sold in head shops for a few dollars. Today, mint-condition posters by Mr. Kelley and Mr. Mouse can command prices of $5,000 or more.

With the waning of the 1960s, Mr. Kelley and Mr. Mouse diversified. They formed Monster, a T-shirt company, in the mid-1970s. They also designed the Pegasus-image cover for the Steve Miller album “Book of Dreams” and several albums for Journey in the 1980s.

In their final collaboration, in March of this year, they contributed the cover art for the program at the induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On his own, Mr. Kelley designed posters and created hot-rod paintings that he transferred to T-shirts.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Kelley is survived by three children, Patty Kelley of San Diego, Yossarian Kelley of Seattle and China Bacosa of Herald, Calif.; two grandchildren; and his mother, Annie Kelley, and a sister, Kathy Verespy, both of Trumbull, Conn.

“Kelley had the unique ability to translate the music being played into these amazing images that captured the spirit of who we were and what the music was all about,” said the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. “He was a visual alchemist — skulls and roses, skeletons in full flight, cryptic alphabets, nothing was too strange for his imagination to conjure.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/ar...kelley.html?hp





Yves Saint Laurent, Fashion Icon, Dies at 71
Anne-Marie Schiro

Yves Saint Laurent, who exploded on the fashion scene in 1958 as the boy-wonder successor to Christian Dior and endured as one of the best-known and most influential couturiers of the second half of the 20th century, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 71.

The announcement was made by the Pierre-Berge-Saint Laurent Foundation, but the cause of death was not immediately released.

During a career that ran from 1957 to 2002, he was largely responsible for changing the way modern women dress, putting them into pants both day and night, into peacoats and safari jackets, into “le smoking” (as the French call a man’s tuxedo jacket), and into leopard prints, trench coats and, for a time in the 1970’s, peasant-inspired clothing in rich fabrics.

Mr. Saint Laurent often sought inspiration on the streets, bringing the Parisian beatnik style to couture runways and adapting the sailors’ peacoats he found in Army-Navy stores in New York into jackets that found their way into fashionable women’s wardrobes around the world. His glamorous evening clothes were often adorned with appliqués and beadwork inspired by artists like Picasso, Miró and Matisse. .

Among the women of style who wore his clothes were Catherine Deneuve, Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner, Lauren Bacall, Marella Agnelli and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild.

Mr. Saint Laurent achieved instant fame in 1958 at the age of 21 when he showed his Trapeze collection, his first for Christian Dior following the master’s death. But unlike many overnight sensations, Mr. Saint Laurent managed to remain at the top of his profession as fashion changed, from an emphasis on formal, custom-made haute couture to casual sportswear.

For many years after he opened his own couture house in 1962, his collections were eagerly anticipated by fashion enthusiasts, who considered his the final word on that season’s style. His influence was at its height during the 1960’s and 70’s when it was still normal for couturiers to change silhouettes and hemlines drastically every six months.

Among his greatest successes were his Mondrian collection in 1965, based on the Dutch artist’s linear paintings, and the “rich peasant” collection of 1976, which stirred so much interest that the Paris show was restaged in New York for his American admirers. “The clothes incorporated all my dreams,” he said after the show, “all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart — everything I love that I gave to this collection.”

Originally a maverick and a generator of controversy — in 1968, his suggestion that women wear pants as an everyday uniform was considered revolutionary — Mr. Saint Laurent developed into a more conservative designer, a believer in evolution rather than revolution. He often said that all a woman needed to be fashionable was a pair of pants, a sweater and a raincoat.

“My small job as a couturier,” he once said, “is to make clothes that reflect our times. I’m convinced women want to wear pants.”

By 1983, when he was 47, his work was recognized by fashion scholars as so fundamentally important to women’s dress that a retrospective of his designs was held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time the museum had honored a living designer. Diana Vreeland, the legendary magazine editor and the doyenne of the Costume Institute, who masterminded the exhibition, called him “a living genius” and “the Pied Piper of fashion.”

“Whatever he does,” she said, “women of all ages, from all over the world, follow.” That exhibition was followed by retrospectives in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tokyo and Sydney, Australia.

But the New York exhibition could be considered the apotheosis of Mr. Saint Laurent’s career, for after that he settled into a classical mode of reinterpreting his earlier successes. The boy wonder had turned into the elder statesman. He said in an interview in 1983: “A woman’s wardrobe shouldn’t change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.”

Yet because so many of his early designs seeped into the public domain of fashion (and into many other designers’ collections), he managed to retain his stellar position in the world of fashion through his retirement in 2002.

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent came a long way from Oran, Algeria, where he was born on Aug. 1, 1936, to Charles and Lucienne Andrée Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. His father was a lawyer and insurance broker, his mother a woman of great personal style. He grew up in a villa by the Mediterranean with his two younger sisters, Michelle and Brigitte.

Young Yves was said to be a quiet and retiring child (and as an adult was often described as quiet and retiring), who avoided all sports but swimming and developed a love for fashion and the theater at an early age. After seeing a production of Molière’s “School for Scandal” when he was 11, he recreated the play in miniature, pasting the costumes together. As a teen-ager, he designed clothes for his mother, who had them whipped up by a local seamstress. (His mother became his greatest fan, sitting in the front row at all his shows and wearing no one else’s designs.)

Although his parents wanted him to study law, Mr. Saint Laurent — lanky and brown-haired, his blue eyes framed by glasses — went to Paris when he was 17 to try his luck in theatrical and fashion design. He briefly studied design at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, leaving because he said he was bored. Shortly thereafter, he won first prize in an International Wool Secretariat design competition for his sketch of a cocktail dress. This led to an interview with Christian Dior, who noted an uncanny resemblance between Mr. Saint Laurent’s cocktail dress and one he himself was working on. Recognizing the young designer’s talent, Dior hired him on the spot as his assistant.

For three years, Mr. Saint Laurent worked closely with Dior, who called him “my dauphin” and “my right arm.” After Dior died suddenly in 1957, shocking the fashion world, the House of Dior named Mr. Saint Laurent its head designer. At 21, he found himself at the head of a $20-million-a-year fashion empire, succeeding a legend, the man who had radically changed the way women dressed in 1947 with the wasp-waisted New Look.

Mr. Saint Laurent’s first collection in his new position, shown on Jan. 30, 1958, was based on the trapeze, a youthful silhouette that started with narrow shoulders and a raised waistline, then flared out gently to a wide hemline. The collection was received with great enthusiasm, and Mr. Saint Laurent’s name was well on its way to becoming a household word across Europe and America.

He was credited by many with rejuvenating French fashion and securing his country’s pre-eminent position in the world of haute couture. Newsboys shouted his triumph across the streets of Paris while he waved to the crowds below the balcony of the House of Dior on the Avenue Montaigne. The dauphin was crowned king.

His last collection for Dior, in July 1960, was based on a “chic beatnik” look of knitted turtlenecks and black leather jackets. It was less warmly received, though eventually the style became the uniform of the avant-garde.

In September of that year, Mr. Saint Laurent was called up for 27 months of compulsory military service during the war France was then fighting in Algeria. He had previously been given deferments because 2,000 jobs depended on his talent.

About three weeks after his induction, he was hospitalized for a nervous collapse. In October 1960, the House of Dior gave his job to Marc Bohan, his former assistant. In November, Mr. Saint Laurent was discharged from the army and entered a private clinic near Paris. In later years, he suffered from depression and a dependency on alcohol and drugs, a dependency he attributed to the drugs he was given in a military psychiatric hospital. But he almost always recovered in time to take the ritual walk down the runway, however unsteadily, at the finale of his shows.

In January 1961, Marc Bohan’s collection for Dior was a huge success. Mr. Saint Laurent sued Dior for severance pay and damages after the house refused to reinstate him after his army discharge. He was awarded 680,000 francs by the court, then about $140,000.

In September 1961, Mr. Saint Laurent announced plans to open his own haute couture house in partnership with his lover, Pierre Bergé. Mr. Bergé remained his lifelong business partner and was responsible for the company’s financial success, although they split up as a couple in the early 1980’s. The fledgling house was backed by J. Mack Robinson, an Atlanta businessman, who later said his confidence was based on the excitement Mr. Saint Laurent created when he replaced Dior.

The first Yves Saint Laurent collection was shown on Jan. 19, 1962. It was the beginning of a success story that led eventually to a ready-to-wear line sold in the designer’s own Rive Gauche boutiques around the world; to 500 licenses for scarves, jewelry, furs, shoes, men’s wear, cosmetics and perfumes, and even cigarettes; to set and costume designs for the ballet, theater and movies (most notably, for Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour” in 1967); to a listing on the Paris Bourse, and to a host of awards, including the French Legion of Honor in 1985.

The House of Saint Laurent was acquired by various owners over the years, including Lanvin-Charles of the Ritz and Squibb-Beach Nut. In 1993, in a $636 million transaction, it became part of the state-owned French pharmaceuticals conglomerate Elf Sanofi, but 43 percent of the fashion group remained in the hands of Mr. Bergé and Mr. Saint Laurent, who were to retain control of the couture section of the business until the year 2001. His ready-to-wear and fragrance collections had been acquired by Gucci Group, the luxury conglomerate, the year before, and had since been designed — to Mr. Saint Laurent’s vocal displeasure — by the American fashion star Tom Ford.

“The poor guy does what he can,” Mr. Saint Laurent said of his successor.

Mr. Ford, who simultaneously designed the Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent collections with an overtly racy and sexualized aesthetic during those years, left the company in 2003; the Yves Saint Laurent collections have since been designed by one of his former assistants, Stefano Pilati.

In January 2002, Mr. Saint Laurent announced his retirement in Paris at a press conference at his couture house at 5, avenue Marceau, where many fashion editors and teary-eyed friends of the house considered the possibility that Mr. Saint Laurent had felt pressured to resign. He and Mr. Bergé denied that, and a week later announced plans to turn the house into a museum, which has since displayed exhibitions of Mr. Saint Laurent’s smoking jackets and the clothes he designed for Ms. Kempner.

The designer, of course, managed several times to create controversy during his career with, of all things, his fragrances. In 1971, he appeared nude in an advertisement for his men’s cologne YSL. Then, in 1977, he named one of his women’s perfumes Opium, which led to charges that he was glamorizing drug use and trivializing the 19th-century Opium Wars in China. Its slogan was “Opium, for those who are addicted to Yves Saint Laurent.” In 1992, his plans to call another perfume Champagne prompted a lawsuit by French wine makers (the Saint Laurent company lost).

In another legal battle, Mr. Saint Laurent won a 1994 suit in the French courts against Ralph Lauren, whom he accused of copying the design for his tuxedo dress (a style Mr. Saint Laurent reinterpreted many times over the years).

In 1992, a celebration at the Bastille Opera in Paris of the 30th anniversary of the House of Saint Laurent was attended by 2,750 admirers who applauded as 100 models took to the stage in clothes from the three decades. Writing about the event in The New York Times, Bernadine Morris said, “What was wondrous about these clothes, besides their breathtaking beauty, was that nothing looked dated.”

As befitted his success, Mr. Saint Laurent lived elegantly. All his homes — which he shared with a succession of French bulldogs, always named Moujik — were lavishly decorated and filled with antiques and artwork by his favorite artists, who included Picasso, Cocteau, Braque and Christian Bérard. He often said that Bérard was one of the greatest influences on his designs, particularly in the use of color.

“Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist,” Mr. Saint Laurent said at the announcement of his retirement. “I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/st...aurent.html?hp





‘Sex and the City’ Leads Weekend Box Office
Michael Cieply and Bill Carter

“Sex and the City” and its legion of female fans over the weekend gave Hollywood exactly what it needs to survive an uncertain summer movie season: an unconventional hit.

The romantic comedy, based on HBO’s long-running television series of the same name, unexpectedly overtook the latest “Indiana Jones” movie at the domestic box office, bringing in an estimated $55.7 million since opening with midnight shows on Thursday, according to Warner Brothers., which released the film.

The performance fell short of the $70 million-plus opening some foresaw after sellout crowds — 85 percent of the ticket buyers women, many viewing in groups — brought the film about $26 million in sales on Friday. Still, the weekend opening far exceeded industry expectations, which only a week ago were looking something closer to the $27.5 million taken in by “The Devil Wears Prada,” a similarly female-driven hit released by 20th Century Fox in June of 2006.

“It is kind of mind-boggling,” Sarah Jessica Parker, the “Sex and the City” star, said in a telephone interview from her Manhattan home on Saturday. “We are thrilled and humbled that the audience came out.”

“Sex and the City,” of course, benefited from the enormous audience awareness that came with the television series’s six seasons, strong DVD sales and continuing appearances in syndication on TBS. There was also no shortage of media attention showered on the return after four years of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, whether features about their clothes, their men or the show’s enduring influence (for good or ill) on the culture.

And yet surprise at the weekend performance was palpable, even among those who made the $65 million film. Ms. Parker, for instance, said she did not intend to sit home this weekend monitoring the box office results. But by late Friday, fans were sending messages and even photographs to her cellphone of women in line outside movie theaters across the country. (As the weekend went on, more men showed up, according to Warner Brothers.) A clutch of negative reviews did nothing to dampen the thirst for making a night or day of it at the theater.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon; it’s an absolutely incredible opening,” said Dan Fellman, Warner’s president for theatrical distribution, speaking by phone on Sunday. First-weekend ticket sales, he noted, were far beyond those of other R-rated comedies, including “American Pie 2” from Universal Pictures in 2001 and “The Wedding Crashers” from New Line Cinema in 2005.

The weekend opening also ranked as the strongest ever for a movie carried by a female lead (at least if ticket-price inflation is not taken into account). Paramount’s “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” was the previous record-holder, with $47.7 million in ticket sales for Paramount during its opener in 2001.

“I am so excited about the possibilities for movies about women,” Ms. Parker said.

Ms. Parker credited Michael Patrick King, the movie’s writer and director, with creating an update of the hit HBO television show that brought the characters forward. “It’s a movie about being a grown-up,” she said.

Grown-up women have never exactly been absent from the big screen. Women’s roles have been as complex and varied as Helen Mirren’s turn as Queen Elizabeth II, which won her an Oscar in 2007, and Meryl Streep’s performance as the semi-monstrous fashion magazine editor in “Prada,” which turned into a box office smash.

But the female audience has seldom showed its potential in the way it did this weekend.

As “Sex and the City” placed No. 1 for the weekend, Paramount’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” dropped to second. The film, directed by Steven Spielberg, had a strong $46 million in ticket sales, bringing its total to $216 million since opening on May 22.

But the weekend’s second major surprise came from Universal, which had some good news, even as its backlot suffered a major fire over the weekend. “The Strangers,” a horror film made for about $9 million, took in $20.7 million for the company’s Rogue Pictures specialty unit.

Like “Sex and the City,” the horror film was rated R — usually a limiting factor at the spring-summer box office, which has traded in recent years on sequels and fantasy films with softer ratings. Yet the movie became Universal’s biggest of the year, beating its “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” And it raised hopes that audiences will respond in large numbers to a number of studio films like “Pineapple Express” from Sony Pictures Entertainment and “Tropic Thunder” from DreamWorks and Paramount, which, in the coming weeks, will test viewer willingness to turn out in large numbers for something other than repeat performances.

Hollywood could use the help. Even with the strong performances of the Top 3 movies this weekend, year-to-date results still lag last year’s total. According to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking firm, tickets sales are off about 2.8 percent and attendance is down 5.5 percent compared with the corresponding time last year.

Whether the rest of the summer’s entrants will excite moviegoers as much as last year remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: The striking success of “Sex and the City” will spark immediate talk of another movie with Ms. Parker and her sidekicks — Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis.

“They might be talking about a sequel,” she said. “But it still feels like we’re opening this movie.”

She added: “Michael and I still have never discussed it. It would have been greedy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/mo...tml?ref=movies





Abuzz at Racy Novel of Sex and Hygiene
Nicholas Kulish

Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-18 audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best-seller “Wetlands,” by a television personality and author, Charlotte Roche.

With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Ms. Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel (“Feuchtgebiete,” in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, becoming the only German book to top Amazon.com’s global best-seller list.

The book, which will be published next year in the United States, is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper.

“Wetlands” opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen’s hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and — here is where the debate kicks in — just possibly female empowerment.

The subject has struck a nerve here, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women’s roles and image in society.

With its female chancellor, Angela Merkel, and progressive reputation, Germany would hardly seem to be thirsting for such a discussion. Yet, Germany has an old-fashioned tendency to expect women to choose between careers and motherhood rather than trying to accommodate both.

Last year, another German television personality provoked a storm of controversy about the role of women by suggesting that they should stay home to raise their children, and then referring approvingly to the Nazi policy of encouraging German women to have large families.

Beyond the historical land mines, there are also measurable gender-equality problems in Germany, Europe’s largest economy. Of the 27 European Union members, Germany is tied with Slovakia as third worst in the wage gap between men and women, with women earning 22 percent less, a figure surpassed only by Cyprus and Estonia.

So the topic is being debated in every newspaper and magazine in Germany right now. The discussion has been amplified by two nonfiction books about young women, the more traditional “New German Girls” and “We Alpha-Girls.”

A provocative female rapper in Germany, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records, grabbed headlines when she accused Ms. Roche of stealing her explicit form of empowering raunch. “I am what’s in the book,” said the rapper, 27, whose real name is Reyhan Sahin, in a telephone interview.

Germans have been accused, on occasion, of overanalyzing. Sometimes a funny, dirty book is just a funny, dirty book, but not this one, according to its author.

Ms. Roche, 30, has long identified herself as a feminist and, in a vein first explored in 1960s-era American feminism, describes the book as a cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women’s world.

Newspapers here have contrasted her unhygienic, free-spirited fictional heroine to an American-import model of womanhood: the stable of plucked, pencil-thin contestants on “Germany’s Next Top Model,” a popular reality show hosted by the German supermodel Heidi Klum.

But Ms. Roche told the audience here that her inspiration for the book came not from those women, but from the feminine-product aisle of her local store. Peeking out at the audience from under dark brown bangs, speaking in a childish voice that accentuated her transgressions against propriety, Ms. Roche explained, to howls of laughter, how the lemon-scented products called out to her in uncensored terms that she was, as the commercials put it, not so fresh, or at least not fresh enough.

“It’s not feminist in a political sense, but instead feminism of the body, that has to do with anxiety and repression and the fear that you stink, and this for me is clearly feminist, that one builds confidence with your own body,” Ms. Roche, the mother of a young daughter and more serious in person than onstage, said last week in an interview after her reading here.

Ms. Roche’s critics say that it is just a modern spin on not shaving your legs, this time for the genital-waxing generation. Meanwhile, sex sells and tends to grab the spotlight. As a result, a debate that might more profitably center on career counselors and day care is instead mired in old questions about sexual liberation.

With this in mind, critics have asked what practical help a book like “Wetlands” can offer, and even whether, by hyper-sexualizing the main character, it represents an all-too-familiar commercial ploy rather than a step forward.

“The combination of pornography and feminism is old, and was already a favorite marketing strategy for Playboy in the ’70s,” said Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s best-known feminist and founder of the magazine EMMA, modeled in part on Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine, in an e-mail message responding to questions about the recent books. “Right now we’re living through another revival.”

Those revivals come along fairly frequently — think the porn star turned “sex educator,” Annie Sprinkle, Madonna and Eve Ensler of “The Vagina Monologues” — with varying degrees of relevance to feminism.

“When a woman breaks a taboo, it is automatically incorporated into the feminism debate, whether it really belongs there or not,” said Ingrid Kolb, a German writer and longtime feminist.

While her generation in Europe and America grappled with many of the same issues in the early 1970s, there are differences, said Ms. Kolb, 67. For instance, the extremity of the beauty cult, particularly with surgery, was nowhere near what it is today.

The notion of sexiness and sexual frankness as feminism — pop empowerment, if you will — is well established on both sides of the Atlantic. As in the United States, “Sex and the City” roared past the new “Indiana Jones” movie for the top spot at the German box office last weekend.

“Wetlands” is something different. It is far more anatomical and scatological than erotic. In the interview, Ms. Roche said she wrote scenes specifically to build up arousal, only to bury them again in the repulsive. Lost in the whole hubbub is also a very sad story about a young woman who has undergone family traumas, the emotional core of the novel.

The event had something of a circus atmosphere. Some 200 fans showed up at the yellow-and-red-striped tent, paying more than $25 each to hear Ms. Roche read and answer questions. As the signing began, the song “Rivers of Babylon” pumped through the speakers, which, in the book, one of Helen’s lovers sang as an ode to her sexual readiness.

Ardent fans have shown up to her readings with avocados as presents and, in several instances documented in the local media, the unprepared have fainted at some of the scenes. In one of those, Helen describes saving dried semen under her fingernails as “a keepsake” to savor later. And as attested by the reading in tiny Tegernheim — a suburb of Regensburg on the Danube River, in famously conservative Bavaria — the controversy surrounding the book is more than a media ruckus just in Berlin and other big cities.

“ ‘Sex and the City’ is always just about sex, whereas this is more about hygiene, or, better put, not-hygiene. It’s just something completely new,” said Katja Bergmeister, 24, a student in Regensburg. She came with her roommate and her roommate’s sister, all in their 20s and all clutching autographed posters of Ms. Roche. “I could see how we would be able to speak more openly with one another now,” she said.

Ms. Bergmeister and her friends knew of Ms. Roche from her work as a presenter for music video channels, but many others said they had come to her through the book. “It’s sexuality like it’s never represented in women’s magazines, but more the way it is in real life,” said Silvia Wilfurth, 28, a psychiatrist. “It speaks to themes of the body and sexuality that normally are not addressed and that it is not bad at all to be discussed.”

Ms. Roche, who was born in Britain but moved to Germany when she was a small child, said she hoped to help women find “a language for lust.” The sensational response to her book was unexpected, but she has taken it all in stride, including her first turn under the big top. “I would say that my own profession is circus pony, so I feel quite comfortable,” she said.

Alex Bolland, the organizer of the reading, said that the local authorities had made him limit the event to an over-18 audience, but that he was still glad he could book Ms. Roche.

“There are almost no taboos today,” Mr. Bolland said. “I appreciate it when someone can show that there are still a few out there.”

Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/wo...e/06taboo.html





Obscene Losses

DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart—only worse.
Claire Hoffman

On Friday, May 18, Steve Hirsch, founder of Vivid Entertainment Group, the world’s largest producer of adult videos, was expecting a mysterious visitor. But Stephen Paul Jones was late. When Jones, an unknown figure in the pornography world, finally arrived in the all-white reception area of Vivid’s Los Angeles offices at 2 p.m., he was apologetic. His private plane had broken down, he explained, and he was forced to fly commercial. Hirsch, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, found that excuse a little slick. But he was eager to speak with Jones, so he let it slide and introduced him to two Vivid colleagues. When the four men sat down in the company’s conference room, Jones got right to the point: He wanted Vivid to buy his website, YouPorn.com.

As its name suggests, YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product. Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.)

Blond, barrel-chested, and wearing a sport coat, Jones oozed Silicon Valley confidence. According to Hirsch, he mentioned his Stanford M.B.A. repeatedly. He offered reams of documents and audience data, emphasizing YouPorn’s global reach. (Only 12 percent of the site’s traffic comes from the U.S., he said.) Jones told the men that he and one other executive, a young Malaysian man living in Australia, were the owners of YouPorn, and he stressed that with the site’s traffic, its opportunities were manifold: dating, gaming, mobile content, pay-per-view, webcams (“already very popular in China”), and more. He shared his vision of turning YouPorn into a “very cool brand, perhaps the Virgin of adult entertainment.” As Jones rambled on, Hirsch and his executives traded raised eyebrows. Malaysia?

Still, they were intrigued by YouPorn—and more than a little intimidated by its size. In recent years, competition from the internet had cut deep into the porn studio’s revenues. DVD sales, once Vivid’s financial bedrock, were down almost 50 percent since 2004, and the proliferation of cheap Web-based videos was stealing market share from the company, which specializes in high-end sex films. Vivid and its top rivals—Wicked Pictures, Evil Angel, Digital Playground, Red Light District, Penthouse Media Group, and Hustler, to name a few—had lately been getting an unwanted glimpse of the overnight crisis that the file-sharing revolution brought to the music industry and Craigslist brought to newspaper classified ads.

The meeting lasted an hour. As Hirsch listened to Jones’ pitch, he considered the risks of acquiring YouPorn. Hirsch had been in the adult-entertainment business long enough to be mindful of its legal pitfalls, and that was a chief concern. How do you verify the age of the participants in these thousands of sex videos—or, for that matter, the age of the audience?

For the time being, Hirsch put those questions aside and focused on the business challenge: How, exactly, would you monetize this site? All the features were free, and, as Jones admitted, the advertising revenue was meager—about $120,000 a month. Jones said he wasn’t too interested in figuring that out himself. He planned to grow the audience as large as possible and then “exit” to an established company with the resources and know-how to parlay the traffic into revenue. Not that he’s expecting the $1.65 billion Google paid for YouTube or even the $580 million Rupert Murdoch coughed up for MySpace. Jones told Hirsch he’d be willing to part with YouPorn for $20 million. Hirsch said he’d be in touch.

“It doesn’t make any sense!” Hirsch tells me a month later. It’s a hazy afternoon in June, and he is sitting behind his oak-slab desk, his eyes flickering between a pair of flat-screen monitors, one tuned to Bloomberg News and the other showing a YouPorn clip featuring a gaggle of naked women and an oxygen mask. “They’re giving porn away. You can’t make money on this.”

A compact, well-exercised man of 46, Hirsch is one of the biggest names in the $12 billion adult-entertainment business. The very picture of a respectable, down-to-earth smut peddler, he lives with his wife and two young children in a gated community in a quiet suburb in California’s San Fernando Valley, the industry’s global capital. He’s proudly sober, eschewing the rollicking parties of the sex business for quiet passions, such as his prehistoric-amber collection.

Hirsch’s life in the industry started early. In 1970s Cleveland, his father left a career as a stockbroker, says Hirsch, to sell stag films for Reuben Sturman, the porn pioneer who eventually went to jail for tax evasion. Hirsch went to work for Sturman during high school, and Sturman nurtured the young man into a sort of porn prodigy. In 1984, when Hirsch was 23, he co-founded Vivid with the then-novel idea of signing actresses to exclusive contracts and marketing them like Old Hollywood stars. He was just in time for the dawn of the VCR, and Vivid grew quickly. It has been the largest producer of adult videos in the world for more than a decade now, in part because Hirsch borrowed heavily from the Hollywood studios he can see from his office window: expensive sets, big names (most famously Jenna Jameson), and slick packaging. By porn-industry standards, his films are expensive. He says they typically cost $50,000 to $300,000 to produce and $20,000 to market and distribute; they sell for about $25 on DVD. The company makes approximately 60 movies a year and posts roughly $100 million in annual revenue.

But lately, success hasn’t come easily for Vivid and its upmarket rivals. Three years ago, 80 percent of Vivid’s income came from DVD sales. Today, Hirsch puts that number at about 30 percent, with the rest coming from a fragmented range of sources: subscriptions to Vivid.com, pay-per-view TV, internet video-on-demand, merchandising, and mobile-phone deals. Domestic DVD sales are down 35 percent this year alone. His revenue is flat, he says, but that’s mainly because he’s been cutting costs. Within five years, he claims, DVD sales will be close to zero.

Vivid’s situation is grim but not unusual. DVD woes plague the entire Valley, from multimillion-dollar corporate operations to backroom bottom-feeders: Total sales fell 11 percent in 2006, to an estimated $3.8 billion, according to Adult Video News, the industry’s leading trade publication. Hirsch’s company shares the high end of the market with about 20 other studios that each claim more than $20 million in annual revenues. Outside of those are at least 100 small producers who bring in $500,000 to $5 million a year, estimates Paul Fishbein, president of Adult Video News. These companies shoot on shoestring budgets of $10,000 or less (sometimes much less) per film. “Those rinky-dink companies are struggling to get 1,000 to 1,200 DVDs out at $8 to $10 wholesale,” says Fishbein. “That barely pays for the cost of a cheap production.”

And the decline of DVDs will only accelerate. “You’re going to see a precipitous drop now,” Fishbein says. “Hopefully for producers here in the Valley, that will be offset by internet sales. Hopefully.”
As the portion of Americans with broadband connections (47 percent and growing) continues to rise, consumers are becoming increasingly addicted to the immediate gratification of Web video. But suddenly, there’s a chasm between porn consumption and porn sales. While sales of internet-based adult entertainment grew 14 percent last year, to $2.8 billion, that figure would be substantially higher if there wasn’t so much free competition, especially from the user-generated adult sites.

So far, the Valley’s biggest players have tried to combat this by offering subscription sites, which give users access to a deep trove of content in exchange for a membership fee, usually paid monthly. Vivid.com is one of the more successful. With about 40,000 subscribers paying $30 a month, Hirsch says, the site generates roughly $15 million in annual revenue. Ali Joone, the founder of Digital Playground, charges the same monthly rate and says he has a comparable number of subscribers.

Much like the TV networks, movie studios, and record labels on the other side of town, porn companies are also engaged in a frantic attempt to diversify their offerings, filleting their films into smaller pieces that can be easily sold via an ever-shifting variety of digital distribution channels. From the pay-by-the-minute model on video-on-demand sites such as Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network and Hotmovies.com, to the four- to six-minute clips edited for mobile devices, the industry is looking to take the 90-minute sex videos from its old business strategy and carve them into bite-size moneymakers.

But for many companies, the sum of these new revenue streams doesn’t even come close to offsetting the decline in DVD sales. What’s happening in porn right now is directly analogous to what’s happening to the music industry—CD sales are down 16 percent since 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan—but worse.

“What you’re losing in the DVD market, you’re not making up on the paid internet side,” says Fishbein. “Instead of 99 cents a song on iTunes, these guys are doing 10 cents a minute for porn.”

The irony is that Hirsch and his ilk have always been the first to experiment with—and profit from—new technologies. The revolution began with VHS, which moved porn out of the theater and into the home. This made watching pornography private, an advance that created millions of new customers overnight. But to buy the stuff, you still had to venture out to the store, and who knew who you might run into?

The Web, in its early days, solved this problem. Few industries, if any, figured out e-commerce faster than the adult-entertainment business, and online DVD sales soared as a result. But Web 2.0, the catchall term for the crush of user-driven startups that have emerged in the past few years, has left the porn industry’s biggest players scrambling to keep up. For the first time, technology is hurting Big Porn. “Everyone was excited because they thought the internet was going to affect our business in a positive way, and it’s been the opposite,” says David Joseph, the founder of Red Light District. “It’s been a little scary.”

“Instilling the most fear are YouPorn and its closest competitors, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network’s PornoTube and Megarotic, which draws in users with a limited layer of free videos, then tries to sell premium memberships that offer more content and faster video streaming.

These sites didn’t invent free porn; they just made it exponentially easier to access. Of the three, YouPorn most closely resembles YouTube, with its stripped-down interface, unobtrusive advertising, and—for now, at least—content that’s 100 percent free. PornoTube and Megarotic feel more commercial, with plenty of links to the for-pay features. But the free parts of all three sites are basically the same. Some videos are lengthy (30 minutes or more), but most are closer to three minutes. Some are bona fide amateur videos, shot and uploaded by exhibitionists, but most are clips of copyrighted professional pornography. Of these, some are scenes from high-end features, but a larger percentage are so-called gonzo clips—unscripted, rough-cut footage in which the camera operator often jumps into the action. Some clips are posted by the porn companies themselves, as trailers for the full-length versions available on their own sites, but most are uploaded by users from their own collections. Some are gay, some are straight.

In other words, there’s something for everyone—and the sites are ridiculously easy to use. You don’t even have to log in to watch videos, much less pay. (You’re simply required to say you’re 18 or older.) And the sites can’t prevent users from uploading proprietary material produced by the major porn studios. All of which is why Hirsch and his counterparts in the Valley are at least as nervous as the Viacom executives who have filed a $1 billion copyright suit against Google, YouTube’s owner.

But for now at least, there’s no significant push to shut down the sites. Although producers in the Valley have largely resigned themselves to the fact that the copyright genie is out of the bottle, they’re putting user-generated sites on notice about former moneymaking features that are now posted for all to enjoy. A few major porn companies say they regularly monitor postings on PornoTube and YouPorn and email requests to take down copyrighted material. In July, Red Light District sent a cease-and-desist letter to YouPorn after a user posted “One Night in Paris,” the “official” full-length version of the Paris Hilton sex tape, which Red Light distributes. YouPorn removed the video.

By their very nature, though, user-generated sites might be vulnerable to other kinds of legal problems. If anonymous users post child pornography, it could be difficult for site owners to verify the ages of the performers. While these sites generally require viewers to confirm that they’re over 18, “my 11-year-old could go on at any point,” says Red Light’s Joseph. Earlier this fall, a German internet provider temporarily blocked access to YouPorn because the site didn’t comply with German age-verification laws. Up to now, U.S. user-generated porn sites have not been prosecuted.

There’s no sign on the door of PornoTube’s headquarters, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The building is concealed in a low-slung office park on the outskirts of the city, next to the railroad tracks and an aluminum factory.

Inside the air-freshened warren of bunkerlike offices, Suzann Knudsen, a PornoTube marketing executive who moonlights as a D.J. for sex-fetish parties, shows me around. She explains that despite PornoTube’s 15 million monthly visitors, the website’s parent company, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, views it as a marketing expense, not a profit center. The site was originally conceived as a feature within Xpeeps.com, A.E.B.N.’s X-rated social-networking site, to provide a way for members to trade sex videos. But soon after it launched, in July 2006, PornoTube had dwarfed Xpeeps’ traffic, and A.E.B.N. decided to turn it into a separate site. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The company has tried to monetize it by striking profit-sharing deals with two dozen porn studios to create promotional channels that funnel traffic toward the studios’ own sites. A.E.B.N. won’t disclose the value of these agreements or the small amount of advertising revenue generated by the ads placed on page margins, saying only that PornoTube breaks even. It’s worth it, Knudsen says, for the traffic.

But when traffic means tens of millions of people sharing porn, there are some unique business challenges. Daphne Reeder, a customer-service rep for PornoTube, spends her days trolling the site, investigating clips that have been reported as problematic. On the July morning when I visit, she had more than 500 videos to review, most of which had been red-flagged because their descriptions included words such as little boys, force, or rape. She says the community polices itself, with users and porn companies emailing to alert the site about child pornography, copyrights being violated, ex-boyfriends uploading once-private videos, and other issues.

Adult-video producers are legally required to verify that performers are of legal age. The 2257’s, as the verifications are known (after the corresponding section of the federal code), are a costly hassle to the porn studios. Vivid, for example, has an employee whose sole responsibility is 2257 compliance, and Vivid makes only 60 films a year. Reeder is one of 10 people working on compliance at PornoTube, which has about 210,000 videos. Every clip on the site is supposed to contain a link to “2257 info” documenting the age and identity of the performers, but many of the clips (mostly the genuine amateur videos) include no such information. In these cases, PornoTube attempts to perform its own verification. If it can’t, the clip is removed.

One of the items on Reeder’s to-do list is an age-verification complaint about a video called “Adriana Lima Blowjob.” It has no 2257 info. So Reeder cuts and pastes the name into a search engine and clicks through a few sites that say Adriana Lima was born in 1981. Reeder is about to move on when I point out to her that Adriana Lima is in fact a fairly well-known model and that the woman in the video is probably not she. Is PornoTube concerned about that? Knudsen, standing behind Reeder, tells her to take it down quickly. “We do the best we can,” Knudsen tells me repeatedly.

So how are big adult-video companies coping with the borderless erotic geography of the Web? By creating ever more expensive product. Like their counterparts on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, the studios realize they can’t fight amateur with amateur. Instead, Penthouse, Vivid, and others are more committed than ever to their version of the Hollywood model—big budgets, big names, big marketing, and content distributed across a range of platforms.

In a hilltop home in an affluent corner of the Valley, Kelly Holland, the 47-year-old head of production for Penthouse Media Group, stands behind a camera monitor. She wears crisp khakis and well-worn white sneakers, and her lens is trained on a performer named Dee Lilly, who is wearing a beaded black corset. Lilly sways lazily to soft rock. Curtains billow in a fan-generated breeze.

“Beautiful, baby girl, it looks gorgeous,” Holland encourages, as she watches on the monitor 10 feet away. Sitting beside her, a beefy lighting guy stares blankly out the window at the dirty swimming pool. The rest of the heavily tattooed crew—more than two dozen—wander in and out of the kitchen, where the caterer has laid out platters of just-cooked salmon, rice, and vegetables. James Sullivan, the chief operating officer of Penthouse, is visiting from New York. He stands behind Holland, studiously casual in dress shoes and a T-shirt. As the scene wraps up, Holland asks the actress to leave the frame. When Lilly stumbles, tripping over her towering plastic stilettos, Holland sweetly reassures her. “You’re so cute,” she says, “you don’t have to know how to walk.”

Holland’s plan for the day is to shoot two features, each cut in a hardcore and softcore edition, plus softcore and topless content for the Web and on-demand cable. Time is tight, and the director hustles the performers around the set in order to get the most footage for their day rate: usually about $800 to $1,500 for women, less for men. Today’s shoot is a conscious counterjab at the cheaply produced, handheld hardcore videos that flood user-generated adult sites and chip away at the big studios’ bottom line. The total budget for three days of filming is about $110,000.

As Holland shoots Lilly for the softcore episode, designed to be downloaded onto a cell phone, another director is shooting a feature in a nearby room. Titled The Looking Glass, it’s the story of a young suburban couple who buy their first home, only to discover that one of its sliding glass doors is a portal into an alternate universe where people have nonstop sex. In a bedroom done up like a Pottery Barn showroom, performers Alec Knight and Carolyn Reese are staging a crucial scene. With blond extensions and a thick mask of makeup, Reese is attractive in a girl-next-door-in-L.A. kind of way. Knight is equally average, for the most part. As they go through the motions, the cameraman urges them to act lovingly toward each other. No matter what position they’re in, they find a way to gaze into each other’s eyes.

Holland, a veteran in the growing ranks of female directors, believes women—and the men who want to watch with them—are customers she won’t lose to online viewing. “Women are more reliable, they are more loyal, and they spend more money,” she says. “For women, you have to make sure the girls have great manicures, great pedicures, and great lingerie—put them in La Perla or Agent Provocateur—and you can serve up some pretty explicit material.” Holland cites HBO’s new sexually explicit miniseries Tell Me You Love Me as evidence of just how mainstream pornography has become.

“It’s not just a man thing,” agrees Samantha Lewis, the C.E.O. of Digital Playground, who estimates that 45 percent of her Web-based sales (which include site subscriptions and DVDs sold online) are to women. “As each year goes by, we’re realizing, Oh my goodness. The percentages are climbing.”

The porn industry has long wanted to expand its female audience, but some producers concede it will take more than fancy sets, gauzy lighting, and a story line. “Women are just as unpredictable as men, only more so,” says Phil Harvey, the 69-year-old Harvard grad who 35 years ago founded Adam & Eve, a $90 million adult-film producer and sex-toy retailer based in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Harvey is a pioneer in marketing toys and videos to women and couples, having instituted a “sex positive” approach to pornographic retailing in the late 1980s. But as important as women are to Adam & Eve’s business—Harvey says 40 percent of its Web customers are female—he cautions against overgeneralizing. “At least five times we’ve tried to produce a women’s catalog, with cuddling and coupling,” he says drily. “It didn’t work.”

What has worked, Harvey says, is porn that is best appreciated on the big screen—or at least a television. Last year, Adam & Eve teamed with Digital Playground to make Pirates, an adult take on Disney’s billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Shot in high definition, set to an original score, and driven by a plot involving Incan magic and sea battles, Pirates was billed by its producers as an “electrifying and swashbuckling sex tale.” Digital Playground’s Joone says the film cost the two studios more than $3 million to make—one of the biggest budgets ever for an adult video—and the resulting three-disc set initially sold for $50. Harvey credits Pirates, Adam & Eve’s bestselling film of all time, with helping to pull the company out of a five-year growth slump that he attributes directly to intense competition from free porn on the Web.

YouPorn—the site Stephen Paul Jones tried to sell to Vivid in May—is a strange and mysterious business. There are no links to founders’ biographies, no contact information, no hint of who is behind this booming Web entity. Its domain is registered using a service designed to mask the registrant’s identity.

Back in July, I sent an email to the lone address on the site. It went unanswered. I asked around and, after a series of dead ends, was told that a Stanford alumnus—an outsider to the industry—had started YouPorn. A porn producer gave me the man’s cell-phone number. I left a voicemail. Jones called back a few hours later.

“It’s a brave new world, man. People are crazy. What can I say?” he said, during a freewheeling two-hour conversation that swung wildly from the subjugation of female porn stars to federal regulations governing obscenity to the existence (or nonexistence) of God. Jones insisted that the site was not intended to make money. “It’s not a profit center; it’s more of an experiment. If you wanted to be philosophical about it, it’s kind of an exploitative industry, and this is sort of the opposite.”

Jones said that “Stephen Paul Jones” was an alias. He said that he was 27 years old and worked at a Newport Beach, California, hedge fund, where he managed billions in assets. He used the alias, he said, because his bosses would fire him if they knew about YouPorn. He said he wasn’t the owner of the site anyway. He said it was founded by “a German” who wrote the underlying software and now runs the site’s day-to-day operations.

Still, Jones seemed proud of YouPorn. “People have been telling me that this site would die and the traffic would go away, and they’ve all been wrong,” he said. “When a new model enters the market and impacts other companies’ business by 15 percent of their revenue in a year, that’s historymaking.

“Porn is recession-proof,” he went on, “so if other companies’ sales are going down, there’s a reason. If the reason is the world saying ‘We like to blast ourselves over the internet,’ and the consumers of the world saying ‘We like the amateur stuff better,’ then that’s significant. You could call it a revolution.” He liked the sound of that. “Sure, why not?”

It turns out there is a Stanford alum named Stephen Paul Jones. But he’s fortyish, not 27, and he lives in South Lake Tahoe, California, not Newport Beach. In the past two decades, this Stephen Paul Jones seems to have had no connection to the adult-entertainment business. Public records show that he was involved in a handful of security companies. According to Stanford alumni records (he earned his M.B.A. last year), he enjoys skydiving, stunt piloting, and snowboarding.

Meanwhile, the man who says he’s 27 and uses Jones as an alias has stopped returning my calls. So I drive north to Lake Tahoe.

I knock on the door of a lodgelike three-story house with an enormous backyard. A blond, barrel-chested man answers, an entourage of children in tow. I tell him my name and ask to speak to Jones. “Wrong house,” he says, as his face goes hard. His wife asks what this is about. I say I am a reporter writing about an internet company. “Oh,” she says and gives him a look.

He hustles his family inside, grabs a pack of cigarettes, and comes back outside to yell at me. And from the minute he starts talking, I recognize his voice and his patterns of speech. This is the man I spoke to on the phone. This is the same Stephen Paul Jones.

Jones confirms this, apparently without meaning to, saying he knew during our phone conversation that I had an agenda because I told him that I didn’t like porn. (I told him no such thing.) He threatens to sue me, saying he has “Google’s lawyers.” Then he asks if we can talk somewhere farther away from his home. He drives his S.U.V. about a mile down the road, with me following. For the next 2½ hours, in a diatribe that is always convoluted and occasionally hostile, he keeps returning to one theme: his amazement at the sheer number of people who visit YouPorn every day. And he repeatedly insists that he is not the site’s owner.

But in his emails to Vivid executives, Jones had described himself as “the decisionmaker at YouPorn” and said that he and his Malaysian partner, Zach Hong, “own 100 percent of the company.” (Hong, when reached at his home in Australia, confirmed his involvement with YouPorn but declined to answer further questions.) In these emails, Jones sounded like a no-nonsense M.B.A. with an articulate, if familiar, vision for growing his Web 2.0 company. Among other things, he said he would follow “the Skype model” and cited a quote he attributed to one of Skype’s founders: “If we have 100 million users, and if just 1 percent of them give us $10 per month, we will have $120 million in revenue.”

Now, though, leaning against my car on a dark country road, Jones refuses to answer the most basic questions about the financial particulars of YouPorn or his plans for its future. As the conversation wears on, he sounds proud of the site one minute and worried about tarnishing his family’s reputation the next. After all, he says, he has five kids. He seems deeply conflicted about being in the sex business, much less a mastermind of the most popular adult site in the world.

Back in the Valley, Vivid’s Hirsch says that while he envies YouPorn’s traffic, he has no plans to buy the site, mainly because of the legal exposure associated with hosting user-generated pornography. But he also says that he can’t figure out how to make money through YouPorn and that it would be inconsistent with his strategy of focusing on high-end feature films. A.E.B.N. was also approached by Jones, says an executive there, and passed on YouPorn too.

According to several industry executives who say they would have heard otherwise, YouPorn hasn’t been sold. After our conversation near his home, Jones continued to deny that he owns the site.

As this issue went to press, YouPorn’s Alexa rank was 51—and rising.
http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lif...drudge/YouPorn





Dough! "Simpsons" Cast Gets A Hefty Raise

The standoff between "The Simpsons" voice cast and series producer 20th Century Fox TV is over.

After months of negotiations, the cast of Fox's long-running animated series reached a new four-year deal with the studio during the weekend.

Under the pact, the top actors will be paid nearly $400,000 per episode. While this is lower than the reported $500,000 the cast originally sought, it remains a significant increase from their current paychecks of about $300,000 an episode. (By contrast, Charlie Sheen is the highest-paid sitcom star, reportedly earning $350,000 per episode in 2006.)

Additionally, Dan Castellaneta, who voices Homer Simpson and has penned several "Simpsons" episodes over the years, is being named a consulting producer.

Castellaneta and most of the other key "Simpsons" voice players -- Julie Kavner (Marge), Nancy Cartwright (Bart), Yeardley Smith (Lisa) and Hank Azaria (Moe) -- are slated to begin work on the upcoming 20th season Tuesday.

As of Monday, the status of Harry Shearer, who voices Mr. Burns and Ned Flanders, among other characters, was unclear. Because of a last-minute snag, his deal did not close with the other cast members', and it was not clear if he would show up for work on Tuesday.

As a result of the drawn-out contract negotiations, the upcoming season of "The Simpsons" has been reduced by two episodes to 20. While the deal makes the voice cast available for four more seasons, Fox has yet to order the animated comedy beyond season No. 20.

The "Simpsons" cast and 20th TV have been down this road before. Most recently in 2004, the actors held up production of the 16th season by skipping two table reads during negotiations. They ended up more than doubling their previous salary.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/...-simpsons.html





Spike Lee Gets In Clint Eastwood's Line of Fire
Paul Lewis

• Director told to 'shut his face' after race comments
• Row over black casting in second world war films

Clint Eastwood has advised rival film director Spike Lee to "shut his face" after the African-American complained about the racial make-up of Eastwood's films.

In an interview with the Guardian published today, Eastwood rejected Lee's complaint that he had failed to include a single African-American soldier in his films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both about the 1945 battle for the Japanese island.

In typically outspoken language, Eastwood justified his choice of actors, saying that those black troops who did take part in the battle as part of a munitions company didn't raise the flag. The battle is known by the image of US marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

"The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go: 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate." Referring to Lee, he added: "A guy like him should shut his face."

Lee's comments came during a press conference to promote his own war film, Miracle at St Anna, at the Cannes film festival last month. "Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that ... But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Lee's own film, about members of the all-black 92nd Buffalo Division, which fought in Italy, is an attempt to set second world war history straight.

Eastwood, who described himself as libertarian - "Just stay out of everybody else's hair" - has a reputation for outspoken remarks. He once said he would kill fellow film-maker Michael Moore if he showed up uninvited at his house. His 2004 double-Oscar-winning film Million Dollar Baby was criticised by Christian groups who objected to part of the plot involving "assisted suicide".

Defending the racial make-up in his films as historically accurate, Eastwood referred to another of his films, Changeling, which was set in Los Angeles before the city had a large group of African-Americans. "What are you going to do, you going to tell a fuckin' story about that?" he said. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a movie and it's 90% black, like Bird, then I use 90% black people.

"He was complaining when I did Bird (the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker). Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else."

Eastwood's next project, The Human Factor, will be about Nelson Mandela's attempts to foster national unity in post-apartheid South Africa. Asked if he would remain historically accurate with depictions of the former president, he said: "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy."
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...d=networkfront





Why BitTorrent Causes So Much Latency and How to Fix It
George Ou

Anyone VoIP or online gamer who has a roommate or a family member who uses BitTorrent (or any P2P application) knows what a nightmare it is when BitTorrent is in use. The ping (round trip latency) goes through the roof and it stays there making VoIP packets drop out and game play impossible. I've personally experienced this and many of my friends have experienced it. When I had a roommate in 1999 and I had my first broadband connection, my roommate started using the hot P2P (peer-to-peer) application of its day called Napster. As soon as he started sharing, my online game would become slow as molasses and I'd experience a huge 500ms second spike in round-trip latency and any gamer knows that pings over 100 are problematic.

When it's just myself using BitTorrent, I can pause it while I make VoIP phone calls or when I want to game. But when it's time to ask your family member or roommate to stop using their application, it becomes awkward because why should they stop using their application just so you can use your application? My roommate paid for half the broadband fees so I couldn't always tell him to stop and he couldn't always ruin my latency making it a contentious situation for both of us. What makes it even more frustrating is that there's plenty of bandwidth capacity to theoretically satisfy both our needs, but something about these P2P applications make them them very bad housemates.

I decided to do some research on this and ran a series of tests which resulted in some very interesting data. I fired up various applications at varying rates of bandwidth utilization in the upstream and downstream direction and I measured latency to my first router hop (ISP router) beyond my home router. I ran continuous pings to the ISP router to check the round-trip latency above the normal baseline latency of 12 ms and plotted out the results. This test methodology measures network latency on the "last mile" which is what I'm primarily concerned about because that's where most of the damage is done by local usage of P2P applications.

BitTorrent downloads cause huge amounts of latency

The first set of tests I did were download tests. First I downloaded a file using HTTP which ran at 260 KB/sec (2.08 Mbps) which is roughly 87% of my peak download performance. I then set BitTorrent to also download at 260 KB/sec to compare the effect on my latency. To my surprise, there was a significant difference in the amount of latency increase between HTTP downloading and BitTorrent downloading despite the fact that both applications were downloading at the same average rate.

When you look at the two graphs immediately above, you see that BitTorrent causes an average increase in latency of more than 117 ms (milliseconds). Note that those 6 ping spikes in the graph were actually bad enough that they caused the ping to time out which means the latency was higher than one second. HTTP on the other hand didn't increase the latency nearly as much but it still caused an average of 46.7 ms increase in latency and it only peaked at 76 ms. So how is this possible when both applications are using the same amount of bandwidth? I did some thinking and this is the hypothesis I came up with.

Burst traffic fills up transmit queues

The difference in latency is caused by the fact that HTTP is a single source of data whereas BitTorrent is about 20 sources of data. Incoming data from from multiple sources via the fast core of the Internet can sometimes clump closely together when multiple sources happen to transmit data around the same time. So in the period of 20 ms (the interval between typical VoIP packets), up to 200 max-size 1472 BYTE packets can occasionally build up in the DSLAM transmit queue (blue square in illustration above labeled as "download queue") causing my ping requests to time out above the 1 second mark. But on average, we get around 23 of these packets causing sitting in the DSLAM transmit queue causing an average increase in latency of 117 ms. When there is a single transmitter, it might burst and clump packets close together but it won't be at the level of 20 transmitters.

With HTTP causing 76 ms of downstream delay, that means 15 of these 1472-BYTE packets are sitting in the DSLAM transmit queue causing a less extreme increase in latency. This is still problematic for VoIP communications and it can certainly ruin online gaming. So despite the fact that their is plenty of remaining bandwidth for my VoIP or online gaming traffic, it's the non-uniformity of the incoming Internet traffic that causes my VoIP phone calls and games to perform badly. Unfortunately since this is the downstream we're talking about, the consumer can't do much about it on their own end of the pipe because the delay is at the DSLAM which belongs to the ISP.

The only way to fix this problem is for the ISP to implement intelligent packet scheduling and application prioritization at the DSLAM to re-order those VoIP or gaming packets to the front of the transmit queue. With packet prioritization (generally referred to as QoS), your family member, your roommate, or your own video downloads won't need to be stopped and they won't interfere with your VoIP or gaming applications which makes everyone happy. Unfortunately, these types of QoS services may never see the light of day if poorly conceived Net Neutrality legislation gets passed that ban the sale of packet prioritization.

BitTorrent uploads cause excessive latency

BitTorrent or P2P uploads also cause a lot of upstream latency. I compared various types of upload traffic patterns to see what kind of increase in the upstream latency would result. First I tried running BitTorrent with a 47 KB/sec (376 Kbps) bandwidth cap which was about 90% of my upload capacity, then I ran BitTorrent with a 28 KB/sec (224 Kbps) bandwidth cap at 54% of my upload capacity, and then I ran BitTorrent with a 10 KB/sec cap at 19% of my upload capacity.

In either the 28 KB/sec test or 10 KB/sec test, I'm not being greedy by hogging all the available upstream bandwidth and I'm leaving more than the 11 KB/sec of bandwidth needed for VoIP and online gaming. Yet I found that the additional latency caused by BitTorrent uploads (seeding) was unacceptable for gaming and problematic for VoIP applications. Even when I severely limited upload throughput to 10 KB/sec, it didn't reduce the latency spikes although it reduced the frequency of those spikes. However, even fewer spikes in latency can pose the same problems for VoIP applications because they have to adjust their buffers to account for the worst-case network conditions. This would seem to indicate that BitTorrent is bursting packets rather than releasing the packets in a uniform and evenly spaced stream.

Next I tried using FTP at full throttle and I managed to get an FTP session going at 47 KB/sec (90% of my peak load) yet the latency caused by FTP at this extreme rate of throughput was less than the latency caused by operating BitTorrent at an average of 10 KB/sec. This would seem to indicate that FTP is outputting data in a more consistent manner that BitTorrent.

Lastly, I ran some latency tests during some VoIP phone calls using the Lingo service (competitor of Vonage). I had set Lingo to use the uncompressed G.711 which uses 11 KB/sec for both upload and download which makes it very comparable to BitTorrent uploading at an average of 10 KB/sec. But as soon as I ran the latency tests, I was shocked to see virtually no increase in latency. I realized that this is because the VoIP ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) device pulses small packets at exact intervals of 20 milliseconds at 50 times a second.

Smoothing out the packet spacing to reduce latency

After running these tests, I am beginning to conclude that it isn't so much the amount of data that causes excessive latency; it's the uniformity of data transmission. If the transmissions are spaced evenly, other packets from other applications can slip in between the packets rather than getting stuck behind multiple packets in the transmit queue. So would it be possible to engineer BitTorrent to transmit data uniformly and what would be the effect? I came up with the following chart to illustrate what this could mean for peaceful coexistence between VoIP/Gaming and BitTorrent/P2P.

I calculated that the max-size 1472 BYTE packet takes 28.3 milliseconds to transmit over my 52,000 BYTE/sec broadband uplink. If BitTorrent bursts 3 packets upstream over a 100 Mbps FastEthernet LAN connection, they will all sit in the upload queue of my DSL modem for 85 ms. Meanwhile, my VoIP or gaming packets get stuck behind those three packets for an additional 57 ms in the queue. This is shown in the first example in the illustration below with large 1472-BYTE red packets representing BitTorrent and small 223-BYTE green packets representing VoIP.

In the second example, I show what happens if BitTorrent simply spaced their transmissions evenly. It's still less than ideal but at least it significantly reduces the latency for VoIP or gaming packets.

In the third example, I show the ideal scenario where BitTorrent would reduce its packet size to 815 BYTES or less and pulse them out in 20 ms intervals at 50 packets per second. BitTorrent could essentially create a "VoIP friendly mode" that allows VoIP packets to fit cleanly between the BitTorrent packets and the increase in latency would be no greater than 15.7 ms and would typically average around 8 ms increase. BitTorrent could also have a "Game friendly mode" that uses 679-BYTE packets at 60 packets per second.

Now it is possible to solve this problem on the network level by prioritizing VoIP and gaming packets in the home DSL modem upload queue. Unfortunately, I don't have administrative access to the modem and implementing VoIP or gaming prioritization on my home router seemed to have no effect because there is nothing in the transmit queue of the home router since it connect to the DSL modem at 100 Mbps. Packets in the home router get forwarded as soon as they arrive and there is nothing to reorder in the queue because there is nothing in the queue. More advanced business-class routers like those from Cisco will allow you to configure the speed of the FastEthernet connection to match your DSL throughput so that the queue will migrate from the DSL modem to the router but this isn't very practical for most people. So it would make sense for application writers to try and make their application work as well as possible on the majority of home networks and broadband networks without QoS.

While modifying BitTorrent or the P2P application may not significantly fix the downstream problem, it would definitely fix the upstream latency problem which means that people will be more willing to seed and contribute to the health of BitTorrent. The download latency may improve if the dozens of peers sending information to me did it in a more uniform manner, but it is still possible that those peers will transmit at the same time which still causes packet clumping and bursting.

So why would BitTorrent or any P2P application vendor want to do this? Why couldn't they just say "it's not my problem"? Because it would fix their reputation as a bad housemate and more people would be willing to seed if it didn't interfere with their other applications like VoIP or gaming. Corporate IT departments may also ease their ban on the technology if it doesn't trash their Internet connection for the entire office. I am certainly a huge proponent of network-based solutions for dealing with latency problems, but improvements in the application can act to further reduce network latency even in the presence of existing network-based solutions. Furthermore, the vast majority of consumers do not have access to network-based solutions and it only makes sense for a P2P application vendor to cater to this market.

I will try to reach out to BitTorrent corporation to see if there is any interest in this and perhaps someone would be interested in modifying open source Azureus. It would be a very good feature to have or it would be a very interesting academic experiment at the very least.
http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid...7/Default.aspx





Oklahoma City Unveils New Wireless Network
AP

Oklahoma City officials are unveiling what they're calling the largest city owned and operated WiFi mesh network in the world.

The $5 million network covers a 555-square-mile area. It does not provide public wireless Internet access.

The network, for public safety and other city workers, was funded with money from a public safety sales tax and city capital improvement funds.

Police officers can use the network to access real-time data, while fire officials can locate water hydrants and review site maps and floor plans while responding to fires or accidents.

A demonstration of the network was scheduled this afternoon at City Hall.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
John Tierney

Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)

“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.

Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and computers. (For details, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.

“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.

He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.

“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”

Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/sc...tier.html?8dpc





New Design Enables More Cost-effective Quantum Key Distribution

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a simpler and potentially lower-cost method for distributing strings of digits, or "keys," for use in quantum cryptography, the most secure method of transmitting data. The new "quantum key distribution" (QKD) method, outlined in an upcoming paper, minimizes the required number of detectors, by far the most costly components in quantum cryptography.

Although this minimum-detector arrangement cuts transmission rates by half, the NIST system still works at broadband speeds, allowing, for example, real-time quantum encryption and decryption of webcam-quality video streams over an experimental quantum network.

In quantum cryptography, a recipient (named Bob) needs to measure a sequence of photons, or particles of light that are transmitted by a sender (named Alice). These photons have information encoded in their polarization, or direction of their electric field. In the most common polarization-based protocol, known as BB84, Bob uses four single-photon detectors, costing approximately $5,000-$20,000 each. One pair of detectors records photons with horizontal and vertical polarization, which could indicate 0 and 1 respectively. The other pair detects photons with "diagonal", or +/- 45 degree, polarization in which the "northeast" and "northwest" directions alternatively denote 0 and 1.

In the new method, the researchers, led by NIST's Xiao Tang, designed an optical component to make the diagonally polarized photons rotate by a further 45 degrees and arrive at the same detector but later, and into a separate "time bin", than the horizontal/vertical polarized ones. Therefore, one pair of detectors can be used to record information from both kinds of polarized photons in succession, reducing the required number of detectors from four to two.

In another protocol, called B92, the researchers reduced the required number of detectors from two to one. And in work performed since their new paper, the researchers further developed their approach so that the popular BB84 method now only requires one detector instead of four.

Although in theory quantum cryptography can transmit absolutely secure keys guaranteed by fundamental physical principles (measuring them will disturb their values and make an eavesdropper instantly known), the imperfect properties of photon detectors may undermine system security in practice. For example, photon detectors have an intrinsic problem known as "dead time," in which a detector is out of commission for a short time after it records a photon, causing it to miss the bit of data that immediately follows; this could result in non-random (and therefore more predictable) bit patterns in which 0s alternate with 1s. Furthermore, inevitable performance differences between detector pairs can also cause them to record less random sequences of digits. The new design avoids these issues and maintains the security of quantum-key-distribution systems in practical applications.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0529124827.htm





Watch Out for a Sneaky Blackmailing Virus that Encrypts Your Data

Kaspersky Lab found a new variant of Gpcode, a dangerous encryptor virus has appeared, - Virus.Win32.Gpcode.ak. Gpcode.ak encrypts files with various extensions including, but not limited, to .doc, .txt, .pdf, .xls, .jpg, .png, .cpp, .h and more using an RSA encryption algorithm with a 1024-bit key.

Kaspersky Lab succeeded in thwarting previous variants of Gpcode when Kaspersky virus analysts were able to crack the private key after in-depth cryptographic analysis. Their researchers have to date been able to crack keys up to 660 bits. This was the result of a detailed analysis of the RSA algorithm implementation. It has been estimated that if the encryption algorithm is implemented correctly, it would take 1 PC with a 2.2 Ghz processor around 30 years to crack a 660-bit key.

The author of Gpcode has taken two years to improve the virus: the previous errors have been fixed and the key has been lengthened to 1024 bits instead of 660.

At the time of writing, Kaspersky researchers are unable to decrypt files encrypted by Gpcode.ak since the key is 1024 bits long and they have not found any errors in implementation yet. Thus, at the time of writing, the only way to decrypt the encrypted files is to use the private key which only the author has.

After Gpcode.ak encrypts files on the victim machine it changes the extension of these files to ._CRYPT and places a text file named !_READ_ME_!.txt in the same folder. In the text file the criminal tells the victims that the file has been encrypted and offers to sell them a decryptor:
«Your files are encrypted with RSA-1024 algorithm.
To recovery your files you need to buy our decryptor.
To buy decrypting tool contact us at: ********@yahoo.com»
In addition, after GPcode encrypts files, it also displays the message shown below:

In this case, Kaspersky researchers recommend that victims try to contact us using another computer connected to the Internet. DO NOT RESTART or POWER DOWN the potentially infected machine.

Kaspersky Lab offers some help:

Contact us by email at stopgpcode@kaspersky.com and tell us the exact date and time of infection, as well everything you did on the computer in the 5 minutes before the machine was infected:

∙ Which programs you have executed,
∙ Which websites you have visited, etc.

We'll try and help you recover any data that has encrypted.

Kaspersky Lab analysts are continuing to analyze the virus code in search of a way to decrypt the files without having the private key.
http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=945





A New Way to Protect Computer Networks from Internet Worms

Scientists may have found a new way to combat the most dangerous form of computer virus.

The method automatically detects within minutes when an Internet worm has infected a computer network.

Network administrators can then isolate infected machines and hold them in quarantine for repairs.

Ness Shroff, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Networking and Communications at Ohio State University, and his colleagues describe their strategy in the current issue of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

They discovered how to contain the most virulent kind of worm: the kind that scans the Internet randomly, looking for vulnerable hosts to infect.

"These worms spread very quickly," Shroff said. "They flood the Net with junk traffic, and at their most benign, they overload computer networks and shut them down."

Code Red was a random scanning worm, and it caused $2.6 billion in lost productivity to businesses worldwide in 2001. Even worse, Shroff said, the worm blocked network traffic to important physical facilities such as subway stations and 911 call centers.

"Code Red infected more than 350,000 machines in less than 14 hours. We wanted to find a way to catch infections in their earliest stages, before they get that far," Shroff said.

The key, they found, is for software to monitor the number of scans that machines on a network send out. When a machine starts sending out too many scans -- a sign that it has been infected -- administrators should take it off line and check it for viruses.

The strategy sounds straightforward enough. A scan is just a search for Internet addresses -- what we do every time we use search engines such as Google. The difference is, a virus sends out many scans to many different destinations in a very short period of time, as it searches for machines to infect.

"The difficulty was figuring out how many scans were too many," Shroff said. "How many could you allow before an infection would spread wildly? You want to make sure the number is small to contain the infection. But if you make it too small, you'll interfere with normal network traffic."

"It turns out that you can allow quite a large number of scans, and you'll still catch the worm."

Shroff was working at Purdue University in 2006 when doctoral student Sarah Sellke suggested making a mathematical model of the early stages of worm growth. With Saurabh Bagchi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, they developed a model that calculated the probability that a virus would spread, depending on the maximum number of scans allowed before a machine was taken off line.

In simulations, they pitted their model against the Code Red worm, as well as the SQL Slammer worm of 2003. They simulated how far the virus would spread, depending on how many networks on the Internet were using the same containment strategy: quarantine any machine that sends out more than 10,000 scans.

They chose 10,000 because it is well above the number of scans that a typical computer network would send out in a month.

"An infected machine would reach this value very quickly, while a regular machine would not," Shroff explained. "A worm has to hit so many IP addresses so quickly in order to survive."

In the simulations pitted against the Code Red worm, they were able to prevent the spread of the infection to less than 150 hosts on the whole Internet, 95 percent of the time.

A variant of Code Red worm (Code Red II) scans the local network more efficiently, and finds vulnerable targets much faster. Their method was effective in containing such worms. In the simulations, they were able to trap the worm in its original network -- the one that would have started the outbreak -- 77 percent of the time.

Anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the time, it spread to one other network, but no further. The remaining 3 to 13 percent of the time, it escaped to more networks, but the infection was slowed.

In all cases, there was a dramatic decrease in the spread of the worm within the first hour.

To use this strategy, network administrators would have to install software to monitor the number of scans on their networks, and would have to allow for some downtime among computers when they initiate a quarantine.

According to Shroff, that wouldn't be a problem for most organizations. Very small businesses -- ones with only a few servers -- may have more difficulty taking their machines off line.

"Unfortunately there is no complete foolproof solution," Shroff said. "You just keep trying to come up with techniques that limit a virus's ability to do harm."

He and his colleagues are working on adapting their strategy to stop targeted Internet worms -- ones that have been designed specifically to attack certain vulnerable IP addresses.

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and Sarah Sellke's NSF Graduate Fellowship.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/541456/?sc=swtn





60 Minutes: Pentagon's Raygun Demonstrated on Mock Protesters
David Edwards and Muriel Kane

The Pentagon has been developing a raygun which can harmlessly repel enemies by causing a burning sensation in the top layer of the skin. However, according to CBS's 60 Minutes, the military is unwilling to actually trust this weapon enough to deploy it in Iraq.

"We are now stepping into the Buck Rogers scenario," explained Colonel Kirk Hymes, who is in charge of testing the "Active Denial System" at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.

Hymes demonstrated the weapon by staging what CBS somewhat oddly called "a scenario soldiers might encounter in Iraq" -- a handful of military volunteers, dressed as civilian protesters, who carried signs saying "peace not war" and threw objects at a small group of soldiers. A series of raygun blasts from half a mile away disrupted their chants and finally sent them running.

Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisiton Sue Payton calls the Active Denial System a "huge game-changer" which "would save huge numbers of lives." She told CBS, "It could be used to read someone's mind, in effect. ... If they continue to come at you, then you're fairly sure ... they're probably a terrorist or an adversary who wants to do you harm."

The Active Denial System was developed in secret for ten years before being unveiled by the Pentagon in 2001. As of 2004, it was being described as ready for use in Iraq within the next 12 months. This has still not occurred, and according to Secretary Payton, use of the weapon in Iraq is now "not politically tenable" because after Abu Ghraib "you don't ever, ever, ever want a system like this to be thought of as a torture weapon."

However, the failure to deploy the weapon as planned has raised suspicions that the real intention is to use it for domestic crowd control.

In 2006, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne was quoted as saying that the device should be used first on Americans, because "if we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation. ... If I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

Raytheon, which developed the system for the Pentagon, is currently selling a more limited-range civilian version of the system, under the name "Silent Guardian," which it promotes as being suitable for "law enforcement, checkpoint security, facility protection, force protection and peacekeeping missions."

Commander Charles "Sid" Heal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, who advised Raytheon in developing the raygun, told CBS that the real reason the system has not been deployed in Iraq is "cowardice." Heal, a former Marine, took a variety of non-lethal weapons to Somalia in 1995 and was dismayed to find that his superiors felt their supposedly humanitarian mission was better accomplished by killing. He would love to have the Pentagon's raygun available for such purposes as controlling prison riots.

The Pentagon is spending just $13.1 million on the raygun this year. Secretary Payton agrees this is "absolutely peanuts ... chump change," but she explained to CBS that with only a $475 billion annual budget, "we don't have enough money to do things that are the here and now." The raygun is seen as unproven because it has never been deployed in the field, and it has not been deployed in the field because it is unproven.

"Lethal weapons have an easier time getting into our system," acknowledges Colonel Hymes.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/60_Min...sted_0602.html





It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Are Made to Vanish From TV
Clifford J. Levy

On a talk show last fall, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail G. Delyagin had some tart words about Vladimir V. Putin. When the program was later televised, Mr. Delyagin was not.

Not only were his remarks cut — he was also digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily, leaving his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Mr. Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from TV news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Mr. Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”

It is also a striking indication of how Mr. Putin has increasingly relied on the Kremlin-controlled TV networks to consolidate power, especially in recent elections.

Opponents who were on TV a year or two ago all but vanished during the campaigns, as Mr. Putin won a parliamentary landslide for his party and then installed his protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev, as his successor. Mr. Putin is now prime minister, but is still widely considered Russia’s leader.

Onetime Putin allies like Mikhail M. Kasyanov, his former prime minister, and Andrei N. Illarionov, his former chief economic adviser, disappeared from view. Garry K. Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition coalition, was banned, as were members of liberal parties.

Even the Communist Party, the only remaining opposition party in Parliament, has said that its leaders are kept off TV.

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means TV set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Indeed, political humor in general has been exiled from TV. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor A. Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of Russian leaders, including Mr. Putin. It was canceled in Mr. Putin’s first term, and Mr. Shenderovich has been all but barred from TV.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on TV simply because their views are not newsworthy.

In interviews, journalists said that they did not believe the Kremlin kept an official master stop list, but that the networks kept their own, and that they all operated under an informal stop list — an understanding of the Kremlin’s likes and dislikes.

Vladimir V. Pozner, host of “Times,” a political talk show on the top national network, Channel One, said the pressure to conform to Kremlin dictates had intensified over the last year, and had not eased even after the campaign.

“The elections have led to almost a paranoia on the part of the Kremlin administration about who is on television,” said Mr. Pozner, who is president of the Russian Academy of Television.

In practice, Mr. Pozner said, he tells Channel One executives whom he wants to invite on the show, and they weed out anyone they think is persona non grata.

“They will say, ‘Well, you know we can’t do that, it’s not possible, please, don’t put us in this situation. You can’t invite so and so’ — whether it be Kasparov or Kasyanov or someone else,” Mr. Pozner said.

He added: “The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that we do not have freedom of the press when it comes to the television networks.”

Vladimir R. Solovyov, another political talk show host, said Mr. Pozner was complaining only because his ratings were down and he was looking for someone to blame if his program was canceled. Mr. Solovyov, a vocal supporter of Mr. Putin, said he had never been bullied by the Kremlin.

Yet last year, his show, “Throw Down the Gauntlet,” regularly featured members of opposition parties. This year, the only politicians to appear have been leaders of Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, and an allied party.

Asked why he had not invited opposition leaders lately, Mr. Solovyov said: “No one supports them. They have nothing to say.”

Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, a liberal and former member of Parliament who used to appear on the show, said Mr. Solovyov was covering up for the Kremlin.

“He lies, of course,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “My programs with him were among the highest rated programs of any in the history of his show.”

Mr. Ryzhkov said he was usually allowed to appear in lengthy segments on only one major channel: Russia Today, the English-language news station, which the Kremlin established to spread its viewpoint globally.

“I can go on Russia Today only because they want to make it seem that in Russia, there is freedom of the press,” he said.

After the Soviet Union’s fall, several national and regional networks arose that were owned by oligarchs. Though they operated with relatively few restrictions, their owners often used them to settle personal and business scores. One network, NTV, garnered attention for its investigative reporting and war dispatches from Chechnya.

Mr. Putin chafed at negative coverage of the government, and the Kremlin effectively took over the major national networks in his first term, including NTV. Vladimir Gusinsky, NTV’s owner, was briefly arrested and then fled the country after giving up the network. From that point on, executives and journalists at Russian networks clearly understood that they would be punished for resisting the Kremlin.

All the major national and regional networks are now owned by the government or its allies. And since the presidential election in March, neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Medvedev has indicated any interest in loosening the reins.

“Our television is very often criticized,” Mr. Medvedev said in April. “They say it is boring, it is pro-government, it is too oriented towards the positions of state agencies, of those in power. You know, I can say that our television — in terms of quality, in terms of the technology used — is, I believe, one of the best in the world.”

Valery Y. Komissarov, a former host on a state channel who is now a governing party leader in Parliament, said television coverage was a convenient scapegoat for opposition politicians and antagonistic commentators.

“These are people who are not interesting for society, who are not interesting for journalists,” Mr. Komissarov said. “But they want publicity and perhaps they want to explain away their lack of creative and political success by the fact that they are persecuted, that they are included on the so-called stop list.”

While the Kremlin has focused on TV because it has by far the largest audience, many radio stations and newspapers also abide by the stop list, either ignoring or belittling the opposition.

There are exceptions: a few national and regional newspapers regularly publish critical news and commentary about Mr. Putin and comments from those on the stop list. In addition, the Internet is not censored, and contains plenty of criticism of the government.

A small national network, Ren TV, pushes the boundaries, as does a national radio station, the Echo of Moscow, which has become the voice of the opposition even though Gazprom, the government gas monopoly, owns a majority stake in it.

The Kremlin seems to tolerate criticism in such outlets because they have a limited reach compared with the major television networks. The nightly news on Channel One, for example, is far more popular than any of its counterparts in the United States. It regularly is one of top 10 most-watched programs in Russia.

Mr. Delyagin, the political analyst edited out of the talk show last fall, said he was surprised to have been invited in the first place. He said he last appeared on a major network several years ago, before he began attacking the Kremlin and supporting the opposition.

“I thought that maybe she forgot to look at the stop list,” he said, referring to the program’s host, Kira A. Proshutinskaya.

(Last week, after a Russian-language version of this article was posted on a blog run by the Moscow bureau of The New York Times, Mr. Delyagin was invited to appear on a show on NTV.)

Ms. Proshutinskaya’s program, “The People Want to Know,” had been censored before.

Mr. Ryzhkov, the liberal former member of Parliament, went on the show last year, but its network, TV Center, refused to broadcast it.

In an interview, Ms. Proshutinskaya conceded that Mr. Delyagin had been digitally erased from the program. She said she had been embarrassed by the incident, as well as the one with Mr. Ryzhkov, explaining that the network was responsible. The Kremlin had so intimidated the networks, she said, that self-censorship was rampant.

“I would be lying if I said that it is easy to work these days,” she said. “The leadership of the channels, because of their great fear of losing their jobs — they are very lucrative positions — they overdo everything.”

The management of her network would not comment. But the network’s news director, Mikhail A. Ponomaryov, said journalists and hosts of talk shows had no choice but to comply with the rules.

“It would be stupid to say that we can do whatever we want,” he said. “If the owner of the company thinks that we should not show a person, as much as I want to, I cannot do it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/wo...russia.html?hp





McCain: I'd Spy on Americans Secretly, Too
Ryan Singel

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

McCain's new tack towards the Bush administration's theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies' cooperation with President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, before he'd support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity.

As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation's telecoms work with U.S. spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty.

But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain's views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush's.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush's longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration's analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001.

McCain's new position plainly contradicts statements he made in a December 20, 2007 interview with the Boston Globe where he implicitly criticized Bush's five-year secret end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is," McCain said.

The Globe's Charlie Savage pushed further, asking , "So is that a no, in other words, federal statute trumps inherent power in that case, warrantless surveillance?" To which McCain answered, "I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law."

McCain's embrace of extrajudicial domestic wiretapping is effectively a bounce-back from Fish's comments, made at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Connecticut last month. When liberal blogs picked up the story that McCain had moved to the left on wiretapping, the McCain campaign issued a letter insisting that he still supported unconditional immunity, as well as new rules that would expand the nation's spy powers.

The campaign's response was consistent with McCain's past positions and votes. But it riled Andrew McCarthy at the conservative National Review Online, who read the campaign's position as a disavowal of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, and a wimpy surrender of executive power to Congress.

"What does it mean when he says Sen. McCain does not want the telecoms put into this position again?" McCarthy asked. "Is he saying that in a time of national crisis, the president should not be permitted to ask the telecoms for assistance that is arguably beyond what is prescribed in a statute?"

That's when the campaign issued the letter explaining McCain's new views of executive power, and revealing that McCain would, in certain future circumstances, rely on the same theory of executive power in wartime.

A spokesperson for McCain's camp did not respond to a request Monday for an explanation of the difference between the new policy and the December interview.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-id-spy-o.html





Chávez Decree Tightens Hold on Intelligence
Simon Romero

President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of this country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash here from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms.

Under the new intelligence law, which took effect last week, Venezuela’s two main intelligence services, the DISIP secret police and the DIM military intelligence agency, will be replaced with new agencies, the General Intelligence Office and General Counterintelligence Office, under the control of Mr. Chávez.

The new law requires people in the country to comply with requests to assist the agencies, secret police or community activist groups loyal to Mr. Chávez. Refusal can result in prison terms of two to four years for most people and four to six years for government employees.

“We are before a set of measures that are a threat to all of us,” said Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, a justice on Venezuela’s top court, in a rare public judicial dissent. “I have an obligation to say this, as a citizen and a judge. This is a step toward the creation of a society of informers.”

The sweeping intelligence changes reflect an effort by Mr. Chávez to assert greater control over public institutions in the face of political challenges following a stinging defeat in December of a package of constitutional changes that would have expanded his powers.

Mr. Chávez, who has insisted the defeat will not dampen his ambitions to transform Venezuela into a Socialist state, said the new law was intended to guarantee “national security” and shield against “imperialist attacks.”

He lashed out at its critics as being agents of the “empire,” meaning the United States.

The law’s stated aim of protecting Venezuela follows a history of antagonism between the governments in Caracas and Washington, dating at least from the Bush administration’s tacit support for a short-lived coup against Mr. Chávez in 2002.

Recently, Venezuela has claimed it was subject to military intimidation from the United States, pointing to a recent violation of Venezuelan airspace by an American fighter jet and Washington’s recent reactivation of its Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American and Caribbean waters.

On Sunday, Mr. Chávez referred to critics of the intelligence law as de facto supporters of the Bush administration and of the Patriot Act, the American antiterrorism law that enhances the ability of security agencies to monitor personal telephone and e-mail communications.

Mr. Chávez’s new intelligence law has similar flourishes. For instance, it authorizes his new intelligence agencies to use “any special or technically designed method” to intercept and obtain information.

But the new law may also point to the influence of Cuba, Venezuela’s top ally, on intelligence policies. For instance, the use of community-monitoring groups to assist in gathering intelligence resembles Cuba’s use of neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution to report on antigovernment behavior.

“This is purely Cuban-style policy,” Juan José Molina, a legislator with Podemos, a leftist party that broke from Mr. Chávez’s coalition last year, said of the new intelligence law. “Our rulers want to impose old models upon us.”

Interior Minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín announced the intelligence overhaul in a public appearance here last week, saying it was needed to combat “interference from the United States” by having intelligence agency workers imbued with “ideological commitment.”

On Monday, however, Mr. Rodríguez Chacín softened his tone, saying the law would not lead to political intimidation or restrict freedom of expression. “We are talking about the responsibility all Venezuelans have with the security of the state and the resolution of any crime,” he said.

The drafting and passage of the law behind closed doors, without exposing it to the public debate it would have had if Mr. Chávez had submitted it to the Assembly, also contributed to the public uproar and suspicion.

One part of the law, which explicitly requires judges and prosecutors to cooperate with the intelligence services, has generated substantial concern among legal experts and rights groups, which were already alarmed by the deterioration of judicial independence under Mr. Chávez.

While the language of this passage of the law, and several others, is vague, legal experts say the idea is clear: justice officials, including judges, are required to actively collaborate with the intelligence services rather than serve as a check on them.

“This is a government that simply doesn’t believe in the separation of powers,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights organization. “Here you have the president legislating by decree that the country’s judges must serve as spies for the government.”

Mr. Chávez’s opponents here grasped for reasons as to why he chose this moment for the intelligence overhaul, with his government grappling with economic problems like climbing inflation and slowing economic growth even as the price of oil, the lifeblood of Venezuela’s economy, remains near record levels.

“Even within the Bolivarian movement, this would officialize Soviet- and Cuban-style purges, accusing dissidents of being spies, traitors or agents of the imperialist enemy,” El Nacional, a normally staid opposition newspaper, said in an editorial that ended, “This is revolting.”

In some ways, the changes would merely refine the control Mr. Chávez already exerts over intelligence operations. His government has already used voter registration data to purge employees deemed disloyal to the president from the intelligence agencies and other parts of the civil service.

Several legal activists said Monday that they were studying ways to appeal the law, but the viability of a legal challenge remains unclear.

“This is the most scandalous effort to intimidate the population in the 10 years this government has been in power,” said Rocío San Miguel, a prominent legal scholar who heads a nongovernmental organization that monitors Venezuelan security and defense issues.

Ms. San Miguel said information her group had collected could be deemed illegal under the new law. The group has data from military sources showing that Mr. Chávez’s efforts to create a force of one million reservists had fallen far short.

“Under the new law, this information could be considered a threat to national security and I could be sent immediately to jail,” she said. “Effectively this is a way to instill fear in NGOs and news organizations and parts of society that remain outside the government’s reach.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/wo...3venez.html?hp





World+dog Ignores Sweden's Draconian Wiretap Bill

'If your email crosses our border, we tap it'
Dan Goodin

Sweden is on the verge of passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government's spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country.

So far, hacks from the mainstream Swedish press seem to be on holiday, so news about the proposed law is woefully hard to come by. That leaves us turning to this summary from the decidedly partisan Swedish Pirate Party for details. We'd prefer to rely on a more neutral group, but that wasn't possible this time. According to them, here's a broad outline:

The En anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet bill (which loosely translates to "a better adapted military intelligence gathering") gives Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) direct access to the traffic passing through its borders. Now remember, we're talking about the internet, which frequently routes packets though multiple geographically dispersed hops before they reach their final destination.

This all but guarantees that emails and voice over IP (VoIP) calls between Swedes will routinely be siphoned into a massive monitoring machine. And we wouldn't be surprised if traffic between parties with no tie to the country regularly passes through Sweden's border as well, and that too would be fair game. (For example, email sent from a BT address in London to Finland is likely to pass through Sweden first.)

Once intercepted, the data will be searched for certain keywords, and those that contain the words will be pulled aside for additional scrutiny. A broad array of organizations will have use of the system, including the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the police, secret service and customs, and in some cases major businesses. The bill allows Swedes to be singled out, as well.

When the bill was introduced in early 2007, Google was reportedly so concerned about its consequences for privacy that it threatened to limit its ties to the country if the measure passed.

"We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden's borders if the proposal goes through," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said last year, according to this article. "We simply cannot compromise our users' integrity by allowing Swedish authorities access to data that may not even concern Swedish activity."

But so far, few outside of the pro-privacy universe have bothered to discuss the bill this time around. There have been no similar pronouncements from Google and representatives there didn't respond to a request for comment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has likewise been reticent about the bill.

"Surprisingly enough, there hasn't been that much written about it, even in the Swedish media," said Patrik Runald, a Swedish national and a security response manager for F-Secure who works in San Jose, California.

"The funny thing is when asked what do you want to look for, [backers of the bill] don't really specify what they're interested in," he continued. "It's a very broad bill. They basically can interpret whatever they like."

One of the few recent press mentions of the bill came from a publication called Cellular News in London. According to this story, Nordic and Baltic telecommunications provider TeliaSonera planned to move email servers out of Sweden to protect the privacy of its Finnish customers.

The bill is scheduled to come up for a vote on June 17. According to the Swedish Pirate Party, a majority of parliament currently backs the bill.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06..._wiretap_bill/





Sonera Moves Email Servers to Avoid Swedish Spy Laws

Sonera's Finland operations has confirmed that it is upgrading its customer e-mail system and plans to move its customers' e-mail services back to Finland at the end of April. At present, the servers are running on TeliaSonera's shared e-mail platform in Sweden.

"We decided to move Sonera's e-mail services back to Finland in order to protect the privacy of our Finnish customers. After the migration, e-mails sent from one Finn to another will not cross Finland's borders at any stage. At the same time, we were able to modernize our entire e-mail environment, thanks to which we are now better prepared for various types of failures," says Juha-Pekka Weckström, Senior Vice President of TeliaSonera Broadband Services Finland.

The removal is driven by the Swedish government's proposed law which would allow the National Defence Radio Establishment to intercept all electronic communications passing the national border.

In total, the number of email boxes to be transferred is approximately 500,000 of which 450,000 are used by private customers and 50,000 by business customers. For Sonera's private broadband customers, the e-mail service is available at no charge.

Increased mailbox size

Later this spring, Sonera will increase the size of its private customers' e-mail boxes in response to customer wishes. The standard mailbox size will be 500 MB, and an additional 500 MB is available for an extra charge. Those with a separately purchased communications package will have a mailbox size of 3 GB, which can also be upgraded by 500 MB for a fee. Sonera's broadband customers can create up to 5 mailboxes free of charge. Customers' e-mail addresses remain unchanged.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/30217.php





Data Retention Effectively Changes the Behavior of Citizens in Germany

A new survey shows that data retention laws influence the actual behavior of citizens in Germany. 11% had already abstained from single telecommunication acts, 52% would not use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.

The problem with surveillance is not primarily that some bored officer might learn about some embarrassing private detail (although this is a problem as well). The fundamental problem with surveillance is that it changes people. People under surveillance behave differently than people who are not monitored - differently than free people.

Unfortunately, this fundamental problem has just been proven in Germany. Since the beginning of this year, communication providers are required to record who communicated with whom and when (but not the content of the communication). This data is stored for six months and available to law enforcement in cases related to certain forms of crime.

A recent survey (German) by the well-known German Forsa institute now showed the social effects of this data retention law: Communication habits are indeed changing.

1.003 individuals have been questioned on May 27th and 28th. These are the results:

• 73% know about the data retention
• 11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions
• 6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention
• 52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention

And the sad fact: 48% still think that data retention is a necessary step for crime prevention.

"The deterring effects of this law is life threatening, for example if people do not call a drug counselor or psychotherapist" claims Patrick Breyer of Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, a network of civil rights and privacy activists.

Thomas Dreesen of the association of German specialized journalists is also worried: “Against the background of [the abuse of communication data by Germany’s largest telephone provide] it is obvious how easily such data can be abused to spy out journalists and expose whistle blowers. The law […] therefore threatens the freedom of press in Germany”

The study was commissioned by Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung [a network of civil rights and privacy activists], , eco [German ISP and Internet Association], Deutscher Fachjournalisten-Verband [German association of specialized journalists] and JonDos GmbH [an anonymizer company].
http://www.kreativrauschen.com/blog/...ns-in-germany/





Cellphone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of Habit
John Schwartz

News flash: we’re boring.

New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most of us can be found in just a couple of locations at any time, and do not generally go beyond a few miles of home.

“Individuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work,” the researchers found.

That might seem like science and mountains of data being marshaled to prove the obvious. But the researchers say their work, which also shows that people exhibit similar patterns whether they travel long distances or short ones, could open new frontiers in fields like disease tracking and urban planning.

“Slices of our behavior are preserved in these electronic data sets,” said Albert-László Barabasi, an author of the project and the director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. “This is creating huge opportunities for science.”

The researchers said they used the potentially controversial data only after any information that could identify individuals had been scrambled. Even so, they wrote, people’s wanderings are so subject to routine that by using the patterns of movement that emerged from the research, “we can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location.” .

The researchers were able to obtain the data from a European provider of cellphone service under antiterrorism rules that require all such companies to preserve call and location information. The researchers did not disclose the country the provider operates in.

Scientists have long wondered how to measure something as ephemeral as movement. If general rules and algorithms of people’s wanderings could be discerned, they could be used to create computer models for understanding emergency response, urban planning and the spread of disease, say the authors, whose work appears in the new edition of the journal Nature.

Previous attempts to find data that can shed light on the movement of large groups of people have used complex formulas to predict behavior. But more recent attempts have involved the search for data in a seemingly unrelated area that might shed light on movement.

One such paper, by Dirk Brockmann, a professor of physics at Northwestern University, tracks dollar bills as a surrogate for the movement of people, and found similar routines of movement that also resemble those of animal foraging.

The cellphone researchers pointed out that the new paper moved the field forward significantly because people hold on to their phones, and so the movement of individuals is more closely tracked than it can be with dollar bills that are passed from person to person. As the researchers put it in the paper, “dollar bills diffuse, but humans do not.”

Both lines of research, however, suggested that people do not really move around much.

Dr. Brockmann, who was a reviewer on the new paper, said he first approached it with some trepidation — “I said, ‘Oooh, I hope this does not completely falsify what we found.’ ” Instead, he found, “I was very happy to see that it was consistent with what we found, even though the patterns of travel were obtained by very different sets of data.”

As he put it, “the majority of people travel much less than that minority that travels a lot.”

But the new research, he added, gives greater insight into the movement of individuals while his tracks the flow of larger populations.

Dr. Brockmann said that the Nature paper should have said in which country the research was conducted, because geography could affect the statistics. A long and thin country like Sweden can require trips of distances that differ from, say, those in Germany. But he said new research he is gathering suggests that despite those differences, the patterns of wandering along the various scales “are quite universal.”

The use of cellphones to track people, even anonymously, has ethical implications, said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

“This research is very controversial, ethically,” he said. While researchers are generally free to observe people in public places without getting permission from them or review from institutional ethics boards, he said, “your cellphone is not something I would consider a public entity.”

“A cellphone is a personal possession to me,” he said, “not a tracking device.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/science/05mobile.html





Congress May OK 'Compromise' Bill to Derail Spying Lawsuits
Anne Broache

The U.S. Congress may soon vote on a new "compromise" spy law that would still likely derail pending suits against AT&T and other companies accused of opening their networks to the government in violation of wiretap law.

Democratic leaders, facing intense election year pressure from Republicans and more conservative "Blue Dog" members of their own party, had said they hoped to reach an agreement on a contentious rewrite of a 1978 electronic-surveillance law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, before their Memorial Day recess.

That self-imposed deadline passed without action. The major sticking point has been whether to grant so-called retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies facing lawsuits over allegations that they illegally assisted the National Security Agency, violating their customers' privacy.

The latest proposal, which Republicans are touting as a "compromise," would shift that debate behind closed doors, allowing a secret court to dismiss lawsuits related to the president's warrantless-wiretapping program--that is, during the period after the Sept. 11 attacks and before then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales agreed to submit the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program to the same secret court for review.

In order to dismiss the suits, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose 11 judges are appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court's chief justice, would be required only to consider whether the attorney general's "certification" requesting surveillance assistance from a communications company was terrorism-related and legally authorized by the president. That's according to a draft proposal and summary provided by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.)'s office and discussed at a press conference last week.

"It's clear that they're giving (the provisions) nice titles, and Bond is suggesting that he's made a lot of concessions, but ultimately, the way the provisions work out is, the administration gets what it wants," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington office, said in a phone interview. "The immunity provision is garbage."

Critics--including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which have filed legal challenges against the surveillance activities--say that would amount to a rubber stamp of sorts on any past warrantless eavesdropping.

Aides to Democratic leaders told CNET News.com that their bosses are reviewing the proposal and haven't yet taken a position on it. But civil-liberties groups say they fear that, thanks to political pressure, they will ultimately accept much what they call a "sham" compromise.

The White House and Republicans, of course, have preferred all along to give more blanket "retroactive" immunity to telephone companies. Earlier this year, they appeared poised to get their way, when the U.S. Senate voted to approve a bill that likely would have wiped out scores of pending legal challenges against the likes of AT&T and Verizon Communications.

But the House of Representatives ultimately objected to that approach and refused to call up that bill for a vote, opting instead to narrowly approve a version lacking so-called "retroactive immunity" for phone and Internet companies accused of wrongdoing.

The "compromise" this time around appears to involve a couple of things: Outside parties challenging the government's warrantless surveillance would be allowed to submit briefs to the secret court. There would also be an arguably lower legal standard than in the already-approved Senate bill for when court would be allowed to review the attorney general's "certifications," though civil-liberties groups said it's unclear exactly how that will work in reality.

Under the revised proposal, the secret court would also have the option of sending a legal challenge back to a regular federal court, if it--and a subsequent secret appeals court--determines the case against a phone company should not be dismissed.

There's no guarantee, however, that such a move, if it even occurred, would not result in the federal court simply throwing out the case itself. After all, appeals courts have already dismissed similar suits on the grounds that state secrets would be revealed.

And throughout it all, a good amount of secrecy would be required under the revised bill. For instance, the secret court would be prohibited from disclosing how or why it reached a particular conclusion about whether to dismiss a case, if the attorney general declared that such revelations would harm "national security."

What remains unclear is what happens next. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he now hopes to call up a compromise bill for a vote sometime before Congress departs for its August recess. Hoyer has also said "differences" remain to be worked out among their versions, but it wasn't immediately clear what those differences are, as a Hoyer representative didn't immediately respond to requests for elaboration.

Democrats, meanwhile, insisted again that intelligence agents aren't hamstrung by the lack of legal changes so far.

"Our intelligence community has the tools it needs to keep America safe, and we are absolutely committed to ensuring that this remains the case," Hoyer said. "The Director of National Intelligence has not informed us of any degradation in intelligence collection, and we continue to call on him to inform Congress if this changes."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9953745-7.html





WARGAMES and the Great Hacking Scare of 1983
Christopher Knight

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. AMC was running it last night and I wound up watching a good part of it.

In case you've never seen it before, WarGames is about David Lightman, a high school student who's an unmotivated slacker in class but a first-rate computer hacker at home. David's real talent is running automated searches for systems that can be dialed into via phone modem, and then cracking their security. While trying to locate a new video game company's system so he can do his own brand of beta-testing, David unknowingly winds up accessing a computer at NORAD and nearly starts World War III from his bedroom.

A quarter-century later, WarGames still holds up extremely well. Practically all of the technology depicted is now horribly dated (look at the size of those floppies that David is using!) but in spite of that, and perhaps even because of it, WarGames has become a curiously good snapshot of both Cold War bunker mentality and the introduction of computers into civilian life. It is also, I believe, one of the more successful morality tales about the fear of nuclear war: WarGames is not a "political" film as many of the time were. And neither does it make anyone out to be "the good guys" and "the bad guys". The genius of WarGames's longevity is that it wisely adheres to its own lesson: that to win the game, sometimes you have to choose not to play the game at all.

I thought that WarGames also merited mentioning (in addition to it being a terrific film) because of the reaction that it engendered upon its release. With its depiction of teens hacking into school systems to change their own grades, and then breaking into military-grade mainframes and coming a hair's-breadth from nuking the whole planet, WarGames initiated unusual paranoia in the mainstream press about the power of computers. I remember one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be "locked up" just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers. I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a short drive away.

And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.

Such news stories were very fashionable in 1983, and looking back I think the corporate media unwittingly demonstrated the moral of WarGames. It was an unfounded fear but the press played on it, and it wound up embedding itself into the popular conscience. I know of one friend whose parents were so horrified at the prospect of "accidentally" breaking into an unauthorized computer system, that they didn't buy a computer at all until 1998! After their fears were allayed, they eventually got on the Internet and found that it was a fine thing.

Now to be fair, WarGames was not the first movie about computers going awry and driving mankind toward nuclear apocalypse. 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project might have been the first to explore the theme, and of course there as also The Terminator. Many will convincingly argue that Dr. Strangelove had them all beat.

But WarGames was different: it wasn't only a computer glitch in a far-removed system or a demented military officer which we had to fear could doom all mankind. After WarGames, we were told that Jack D. Ripper could be anybody.

I don't know if the paranoia was completely without merit, though, but only because of one funny incident that happened to me. In the fall of 1994 I was using my first real computer to dial into various bulletin board systems, and there was one that had just started up in Eden. I tried to dial into it but instead of a computer I heard a voice telling me that "This number is not in service". I changed one digit in the prefix, thinking that maybe it was just the wrong number that I had been given. This time the modem did connect to another one, but the terminal window filled with gibberish. I changed the modem protocol, tried it again... and found that I had dialed into the computer system for the Eden branch of NationsBank (now Bank of America)! What was the first thing that popped into mind? Yup: WarGames. I hit the disconnect button so fast that I can still remember my heart pounding against my rib cage.

A few months after WarGames came out CBS began airing Whiz Kids, about a group of teenagers who built their own supercomputers and used it to solve crimes, and by that time the Great Hacking Scare of 1983 was in full swing. CBS execs were quick to emphasize that what the Whiz Kids characters did could not easily be pulled off in real life (which might have backfired: Whiz Kids had great potential but it was canceled after one season). The fear had pretty much diminished by 1987 when ABC's Max Headroom (a groundbreaking show that I've long thought has never been fully appreciated) came out, but it would still rear its head in the years to come, particularly with movies like 1992's Sneakers and Hackers in 1995. And then the success of Independence Day in 1996 finally turned the tables on the mistrust of computers as a tool. Suddenly hacking was not something that we worried would destroy the world: it could even save the world if it had to.

But for a long time, beginning in those strange days of 1983, there was a hesitancy to reach out and harness the computer: just as early man no doubt originally feared the flame. WarGames clearly announced that the digital fire, originally the province of the technology gods, was now a boon to mere mortals. And with it came a choice: we could use it to build, or to burn.

I like to believe that we have generally chosen the former.
http://theknightshift.blogspot.com/2...-scare-of.html





'Fair Use' Stipulation Planned for Intellectual Property
Yasukazu Akada

The government will ease its stringent restrictions on using copyrighted works, a development that will affect activities ranging from posting personal pictures on websites to developing Internet search engines, sources said.

The Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters, led by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, has decided to make a Japanese version of a U.S. copyright law stipulation that allows for the "fair use" of copyrighted works for criticism, analyses, media reporting and research.

The decision was made to make it easier for venture companies to start new businesses, such as developing a rival to Google. The government intends to revise the Copyright Law to include a fair use stipulation as early as next year.

The current Japanese Copyright Law, in principle, prohibits any copying of other people's works or distributing them on the Internet without permission.

Exceptions to the law are copying works for personal use at home or for use in schools.

The planned stipulation will largely follow the one under the U.S. copyright law, which bases fair use on certain factors, including: whether the use of works is intended for commercial purposes; and whether the use of works influences the market of those works.

The Japanese stipulation will also contain the condition that the use of other people's works must not unfairly hurt the interests of the copyright holders, the sources said.

The current Copyright Law is sweeping in its application. For example, blogs featuring holiday photos of authors posing with anime characters in amusement parks could constitute a violation of the law. That is because the law does not have a specific stipulation that allows such use.

In addition, the creation of parodies based on other people's works could also be considered a violation.

Those activities could be regarded as legal under the fair use stipulation.

Archive services that copy and store information on websites could also become legal under the revised law, allowing companies to start up such businesses, the sources said.

The Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters will agree to consider the fair use stipulation in its "intellectual property promotion plan 2008" next month. After that, a study panel will discuss the issue.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-...805280068.html





Overstock.com Sues New York State Over New Online Sales-Tax Law

Overstock.com, the online seller of excess inventory, sued New York state over a new law requiring more Web retailers to collect sales tax on shipments to residents in the state. The suit, filed Friday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, challenges the constitutionality of a statute requiring Web companies with no physical presence in New York to collect taxes. Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com seeks a court order declaring the statute unconstitutional.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1





Ben Stein Wins Right to Use Lennon's 'Imagine'
David Kravets

A federal judge on Monday freed the producers of a movie promoting intelligent design to continue using a 15-second recording of John Lennon's "Imagine."

A New York judge said the makers of Expelled had a right of fair use under copyright law to use a small portion of the work without Yoko Ono's permission. Ono, the wife of the late Beatle, brought the case in April, saying the movie's credits made it appear she had licensed the song to the movie.

"Internet 'bloggers' immediately began accusing Mrs. Lennon of 'selling out' by licensing the song to defendants," according to the complaint filed in April in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

About 65 minutes into the 99-minute movie, lyrics "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too" appear on the screen to the backdrop of music from the song. Premise Media, the producer of Expelled, critiqued the song and said such an idea could result in dictatorship.

"They put the song to a different purpose, selected an excerpt containing the ideas they wished to critique, paired the music and lyrics with images that contrast with the song's utopian expression, and placed the excerpt in the context of a debate regarding the role of religion in the public life," U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein wrote (.pdf) Monday.

Ono, who sued along with Lennon's sons Julian, Sean and EMI Blackwood Music, sought to have the song removed from future releases and the recall of all others.

The show's producers say it examines the scientific community's academic suppression of those who ask provocative questions about the origin and development of life. The movie is narrated by Ben Stein, a well-known actor and writer and consists principally of Stein's interviews with various proponents of intelligent design and defenders of Darwinian evolution.

The show was released in the United States on April 18 and within a month generated some $7.2 million in box office sales, and is to be released in Canada soon.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...ses-bid-t.html





Supreme Court Rejects Fantasy Baseball Dispute
Anne Broache

Major League Baseball has struck out in its attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intercede in a fantasy baseball dispute.

The justices on Monday said they won't take up MLB's challenge, backed by the National Football League Players Association, of prior court rulings favoring a fantasy league company. The announcement came without comment in a standard list of case statuses published by the high court.

MLB's Internet media arm, later joined by the pro-baseball players' union, had claimed that C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing--a Missouri company that sells fantasy sports products via the Web, e-mail, regular mail, and phone--was using baseball players' names and statistics without a license, thereby violating the players' rights to publicity under state intellectual property laws. (A right to publicity, of course, is a person's right to control and profit from the commercial use of his name and likeness.)

The original lawsuit actually came from C.B.C. The company sued MLB after the pro baseball association began providing fantasy baseball games on its own Web site. MLB offered C.B.C. a license only to promote MLB's products, not to continue selling its own fantasy baseball games. Fearing a lawsuit from MLB if it continued business as usual, C.B.C. filed its own suit.

C.B.C. won at the district court level and again last year at the appeals court level, which held that the company's "first amendment rights in offering its fantasy baseball products supersede the players' rights of publicity."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9957103-7.html





Record Companies Call for Baidu Boycott Over Piracy Issues
Aaron Back

Chinese and international record companies called Tuesday for an advertiser boycott of Baidu.com Inc. the country's leading search engine by search volume, over complaints of music piracy.

"Resolutely countering Baidu, which is the largest and most incorrigible purveyor of pirated music in China, has become a common goal in China," the companies said in a joint statement with industry associations including the Music Copyright Society of China and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
The statement was signed by record companies including Universal Music Group, EMI Group PLC, Sony BMG Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp., and local Chinese companies.

The group of companies and associations has sent a letter to advertising companies asking them "to carefully consider whether they should continue to place advertisements on pirating media," the statement said.

Baidu's search engine provides links to thousands of sites that carry unlicensed copies of music. Record companies have filed a series of lawsuits against the site in Chinese courts.

Baidu has said it pays great attention to protecting intellectual property rights and follows Chinese law. It has also said it is testing advertisement-supported music downloads with companies including EMI Group.

In addition, Chinese music distribution company R2G said it filed a new lawsuit against Baidu in a Beijing court on May 16th, alleging Baidu hasn't acted on legal notices related to the Web site links.

A Baidu spokeswoman said she hadn't seen the statement and declined to comment further.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...EB7D1465223%7D





How to Fit 1TB of Data on One Tiny Thumbdrive

New memory better, cheaper and more efficient than flash

Scientists at Arizona State University have created a new kind of solid state memory that they say is much cheaper and more efficient than flash. And crucially, because it uses a new kind of nanotechnology, storage capacities will be much higher than anything we have today, for a tenth of the cost.

The new memory is called programmable metallization cell (PMC) and one terabyte (1TB) USB thumbdrives are said to be just a few years away. The largest commercially available flash drives today are only 32GB in size - 30 times smaller and very pricey.

Smaller, better than flash

The new memory uses nano tech to charge copper particles on the molecular scale, making it 1,000 times more energy efficient as current flash memory. This bodes well for use in portable devices like phones and iPods.

"A thumb drive using our memory could store a terabyte of information," Michael Kozicki, director of ASU's Center for Applied Nanoionics, told Wired magazine. "All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it."

For the last eight years, the density of flash memory has halved, meaning that capacities have doubled every twelve months. But now flash memory is reaching its physical limitations, so this new memory could be stepping in at the crucial time.
SSDs set for boom?

The new memory could also be the answer for computer manufacturers who want to incorporate solid state hard drives but can't due to limitations of size and cost.

Wired says that PMC memory works in a vastly different way to current flash technology.

Flash uses electronic charges to physically store bits of information, whereas PMC works on the molecular scale to create nanowires from copper atoms. These nanowires record binary ones and zeroes, enabling a massive amount of data to be stored in a tiny space.

If a positive charge is passed through the PMC memory, the nanowires disassemble, allowing it to be used over and over again.

The first PMC memory chip is slated to go into production in April 2009.
http://www.techradar.com/news/comput...mbdrive-153126





Intel Said to Face Antitrust Investigation
Stephen LaBaton

The Federal Trade Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation of Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer microprocessors, for anticompetitive conduct, government officials and lawyers involved in the proceeding said Friday.

The officials and lawyers said that in recent days Intel, its smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices, and several of the world’s largest personal computer makers that buy semiconductors from the two companies have begun to receive subpoenas from the commission.

The investigation into accusations that Intel’s pricing policies have been designed to maintain a near-monopoly on the microprocessor market was authorized by William E. Kovacic, the new chairman of the trade commission, and has the support of the agency’s other commissioners.

It reversed a decision by his predecessor, Deborah P. Majoras, who had been blocking the formal inquiry for many months, frustrating other senior commission officials and some lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Ms. Majoras is a former senior official in the antitrust division at the Justice Department who was an architect of the Bush administration’s antitrust settlement with Microsoft in 2001. She stepped down two months ago to become the general counsel at Procter & Gamble.

In a statement on Friday, Intel acknowledged that it had received a subpoena on Wednesday and said that it had been “working closely” with the trade commission on a less formal review that had been under way since 2006. The company said it would cooperate with authorities.

“The company believes its business practices are well within U.S. law,” the statement said. “The evidence that this industry is fiercely competitive and working is compelling.”

An A.M.D. spokesman, Mike Silverman, said the company would have no comment.

Intel shares were down about 2.7 percent in afternoon trading.

Since it will almost certainly be many months before the commission decides whether to make a case against Intel, as European and Asian regulators have already done, the investigation could mark an important early test for the next administration on antitrust and competition policy.

Technically independent of the White House, the trade commission is led by appointees of the president. An administration seeking to show that it is more vigorous on antitrust policy than the Bush administration could use the Intel investigation to lay down an early marker.

A.M.D. has waged a global legal and public relations campaign against Intel hoping to persuade American and foreign regulators that Intel’s pricing practices violate antitrust laws.

The fight between the two — over a market that generates revenue of more than $225 billion a year — is among the largest antitrust matters pending before American and foreign regulators, and is considered to be among the most important since the antitrust cases brought against Microsoft in the 1990s.

Though Intel and A.M.D. are based in California — and their largest customers are American computer and equipment makers — A.M.D.’s complaints have received considerably more traction abroad.

This week, the Korean Fair Trade Commission said it would order Intel to pay more than $25 million for violating its fair trade laws. The Korean commission found that Intel violated antitrust law when it offered $37 million in rebates to the personal computer makers, Samsung Electronics and the Trigem Company, from 2002 to 2005 in return for a pledge not to buy microprocessors from A.M.D. Intel responded by saying it was disappointed with the decision and would probably appeal.

Lawyers involved in the proceedings say they expect that European regulators will expand their statement of objections, or official charge sheet, against Intel. Last year, the European Commission said the company had engaged in anticompetitive conduct by providing rebates to customers that limit their business with rivals and by paying computer makers to either delay or cancel the release of products that used A.M.D. microprocessors.

The European complaint said that Intel had abused its market dominance “with the aim of excluding its main rival from the market.” The complaint was the culmination of a six-year investigation.

Intel’s pricing practices are also being reviewed by investigators working for the New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo.

And A.M.D. has sued Intel in Federal District Court in Delaware. As a result of the crushing amount of evidence being gathered by both sides, a special master in that case this week delayed the start of the trial to early 2010. The trial had originally been scheduled for next spring.

Intel, which was founded by engineers who both developed the chip and made repeated innovations that made it smaller and more powerful, controls 80 to 90 percent of the microprocessor market. American antitrust law permits a company to hold a monopoly, but it forbids a company from leveraging its dominance to restrict competition.

A.M.D. has asserted that Intel offers rebates and discounts that, in effect, result in its chips being sold at prices below the cost of production, a practice that some courts in cases involving other companies have said can be a violation of antitrust law.

Intel denies that its discounts and rebates drive its prices below cost, or at predatory levels. Intel has said that it offered legitimate discounts based on the volume of chips that have been purchased by companies, and that consumers benefit when personal computer manufacturers — using the discounts — are able to lower the cost of making their products.

Intel executives have also said that, to the extent the foreign antitrust regulators have come down harder on the company than American officials, it is a reflection of the different approach towards antitrust law. The American approach towards antitrust has been historically aimed at protecting competition, while the others use antitrust often to protect rival companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/te...07chip.html?hp





South Korea Regulators Fine Intel $25 Million
Steven Musil

South Korea's antitrust regulators announced Wednesday that they would fine Intel 26 billion won ($25.4 million) for allegedly abusing its dominant position in the local chip market.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission said in a statement that the chip giant had offered rebates to two PC makers in South Korea in return for not buying processors from rival Advanced Micro Devices. Regulators also ordered Intel to stop offering the rebates.
Bruce Sewell, general counsel for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, criticized the ruling, and told the Wall Street Journal that the company is likely to appeal the KFTC's decision. "The conduct they're seeking to attack is the conduct at the heart of competition. It is offering lower prices in order to sell your products," he said.

The charges mirror those Intel faces from the European Commission, which also alleges that the chipmaker violated antitrust laws by abusing its dominant market position.

The KFTC charged Intel with violating South Korean antitrust laws last year after completing a two-year probe.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9960491-7.html





Microsoft Free - One Year Later
Mike Kavis

In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.

This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop....at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.

I put "Microsoft free" in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio's proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.

With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.

Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this "Microsoft free" laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.

I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.

I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won't work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.

All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgr...ar-later-25078





Microsoft's Ballmer on Yahoo and the Future
Peter Whoriskey

In an animated discussion with Washington Post editors and reporters yesterday, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer offered his far-ranging views of upcoming changes in technology and the media.

Among other things, he confirmed that Microsoft's discussions with Yahoo have continued, predicted that in 10 years all media will be delivered via the Internet and professed that he is confused by Google's moves in the mobile-phone market.

Also, he said that his favorite TV show is "Lost," but he'd rather watch it for free -- with ads -- than pay for it on iTunes.

Q Is Microsoft no longer interested in buying Yahoo? What about the effort by billionaire Carl Icahn to take over Yahoo?

AWill something happen with Yahoo? Every day is a new day. We'll see what happens.

We had no contact with Carl Icahn before he bought his stake . . . Obviously, he has talked to some of our folks since then. He's kind of an independent actor in the thing.

We made an offer; there clearly was a bid-ask difference. We offered less than they wanted. We did move on. We've had some discussions subsequent to that. We have not re-engaged in the discussions about the acquisition of the whole company. We are discussing other forms of strategic cooperation. That's 100 percent accurate.

Was Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang reluctant to make a deal because Microsoft's bid price was too low or because his ego was wrapped up in the company he started?

It's always impossible to tell. You sort of have to give people the benefit of the doubt. . . . We offered an incredibly generous premium versus where they were. Maybe some of these lawsuits will turn up interesting e-mail, but I don't think otherwise there will be any way to do the forensics of what was the real motive here.

What is your outlook for the future of media?

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down -- my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

10 years?

Yeah. If it's 14 or if it's 8, it's immaterial to my fundamental point. . . . If we want TV to be more interactive, you'll deliver it over an IP network. I mean, it's sort of funny today. My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can't sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It's just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. . . .

Also in the world of 10 years from now, there are going to be far more producers of content than exist today. We've already started to see that certainly in the online world, but we've just scratched the surface. . . . I always take my favorite case: I grew up in Detroit. I went to a place called Detroit Country Day School. They've got a great basketball team. Why can't I sit in front of my television and watch the Country Day basketball game when I know darn well it's being video-recorded at all times? It's there. It's just not easy to navigate to.

Given that Google has been leading the creation of open-source software for mobile phones and bidding on wireless spectrum, what do you think their strategy might be in that market?

I have no clue what [Google is] up to. It's very hard for me to understand what they are up to. . . .

I don't know what Google's angle is because it sometimes looks like Google wants to become a telecommunications company. And yet that may not be right. But that recent thing where they went in with Sprint and WiMax guys is very confusing to me. I think it's very confusing to a number of telecommunications companies, as well.

We don't aspire to buy spectrum and get into the direct-delivery game. . . . It's unclear to me why any of us would like to jump in and go compete with rest of the cable, mobile and telecom industry. At least we don't think we do.

Will Internet content generally be available for free, with ad support, or will there largely be fees and subscriptions?

I think there will be some things people subscribe to on the Internet, but I think that's going be more the exception than the rule.

My favorite TV program, "Lost," I watch on the Internet now. I don't DVR it, I just watch it on the Internet.

You don't buy it from iTunes to avoid the ads that come when you get it for free over the Internet?

Why? Because it's free. . . . I have to admit that I'm annoyed by the four 20 seconds [of ads], but not annoyed enough to pay a buck . . . I think at the end of the day most people say, "Heck, if I can get something that's pretty good that's ad-funded and the ads don't kill me, I'll take that over the thing I gotta pay for."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060403770.html





Are Digital Orchestras a Sign of the Times?
David Pogue

This past weekend, I attended an astonishing performance of "Les Misérables" performed by 13- to 17-year olds at a local theater program. Two things made it memorable: first, that this program's director was able to find such amazing voices in this age group, especially for a show where most of the characters are men. (In my experience, more teenage girls than boys are interested in theater.)

Second, the production came breathtakingly close to simulating a full professional production — on a church rec-room stage that measures about 30 feet across and 12 feet deep. We're talking tiny. "Les Minirables."

And yet it worked, partly because the carefully built, minimal sets and props were just enough to suggest their big-budget Broadway equivalents — and partly because of a digital orchestra that accompanied the cast.

But first, a disclaimer and some backstory: When I first came to New York in 1985, as a would-be Broadway composer, I landed my first real job at a theatrical licensing house. That's the kind of company your school or community theater calls to rent the materials (and pay for the rights) to put on a show that was once on (or off) Broadway.

The owner, a smart, forward-thinking guy, immediately asked me how he thought we could exploit the blossoming world of digital music to expand the business.

There was a really obvious answer: "Sell pre-recorded orchestra tracks." But I was really uneasy about taking that road.

I mean, a digital accompaniment can certainly boost a production's professionalism, especially when the only alternative is some beleaguered piano player stumbling through the songs, or a middle-school band honking, out of tune, through a score.

But my own musical career began as precisely that overwhelmed piano player, and, later, precisely that amateur orchestra member. And I knew that every professional musician was once, at some distant past age, a squeaky, honky amateur.

So what we (my boss and I) came up with was a clever technology that relied on MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) technology. For a few bucks, we'd rent you a computer disk that had only the rehearsal-piano part on it, plus the vocal lines. It let you rehearse the dance music slowly, then speed up as the dancers got better. You could make rehearsal tapes featuring, for example, just the tenor part. You could be rehearsing the chorus in the gym, while the dancers were simultaneously working with the computer accompaniment in the gym. It was a huge hit, it was used only for rehearsals, and it put nobody out of work.

(Historical note: To write the playback software, we hired a brilliant young programmer named Jeff Robbin, who, years later, wound up writing a little program called iTunes.)

But things have evolved. Today, that same company offers, for rental with your production of its most popular musicals, a full-blown, sampled orchestra, for use at performances. It's not a recording, exactly. While the conductor conducts, an assistant taps away on a strange little plastic keyboard connected to a computer. The tempo of the digital orchestra is actually controlled by this tapping, so there's still an element of real-time control. You can still follow the singer, if you like, or goose the tempo when the energy of the performance is high.

As you might imagine, I'm deeply conflicted about this development. In the tiny church last weekend, there was no orchestra pit, no fly space, not even a backstage area, so there would have been no way to put on "Les Mis" with anything more than a piano. So in this case, I'm quite confident that no players were put out of work, that nobody's musical participation was denied. And the result sounded magnificent; remember, there's no dialogue in "Les Mis"--it's 100 percent sung -- so the great-sounding orchestra was a huge part of the show's artistic success.

Furthermore, this digital product isn't actually intended to serve as the entire accompaniment, as it did last weekend; instead, it's marketed as a system to supplement live players. That is, if you have done your darnedest to get volunteer musicians for your community theater production, but you still haven't found a couple of woodwinds and a brass player or two (trust me—I've been there many times), you could use the digital system to fill in the gaps, thanks to its ability to play only specific parts.

But I can easily imagine this system being used to replace musicians, either at the budding level or the professional level, and that's what has me bothered. The way you produce the next generation of accomplished musicians is to encourage them when they're young and squeaky; what happens to that food chain when the overburdened English teacher-slash-drama coach decides to take the easy way out with a great-sounding digital orchestra?

Today's sampled sounds are amazing. Ever greater numbers of theatrical, TV and movie scores are played using these digitized sounds instead of live musicians; so really, this digital orchestra product is just a sign of the times.

I can't help remembering how fonts and laser printers wiped out the entire industry of hand typesetters. Today, we see it as an inevitable replacement of a slow, inefficient process. My question is: in 100 years, will anybody go to the trouble of hiring live musicians to using an equivalent-sounding inexpensive box? And will anyone mind?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/te...gue-email.html





When Every Song Ever Recorded Fits On Your MP3 Player, Will You Listen to Any of Them?
Karla Starr

There was a time when I knew what I wanted to listen to. I was poor, but I bought CDs anyway, and I had stacks of them, purchased with enthusiasm and knowledge shared among friends. A pricey endeavor, sure. But once I discovered Napster and CD-burning, finances stopped counting. I started storing my music on my computer, and saving songs was no longer a physical, deliberate effort; a mouse-click sufficed.

And I kept on clicking.

I'm now closing in on 95 gigabytes of music — just over 22,000 songs. Much of it I've never listened to, but there's no logic when passion gets in the way. You might say I have too much music at my fingertips. (Impossible! – Jack)

Google vice president Sukhinder Singh Cassidy predicts that in seven years, every song ever recorded in the world will fit into our pockets.

"The average 14-year-old can hear more music in a month than someone would have heard in an entire lifetime just 300 years ago," says psychologist Dan Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music. Thanks to digital music distributors like CD Baby, any independent musician's songs can now appear on iTunes. Heaps of old songs are finding new life in digital files, too.

According to Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr, more than 6 million songs are now in the iTunes store. That means I have about 5,978,000 songs to go. But does it mean I'll be more passionately involved with my music?

"It's too early to say how this will affect our relationship with music," Levitin says. "We might become more attached — because we have so much choice — or less, because the choice causes us not to bond or bind to a particular musical piece."

Why people desire what they do is intrinsically linked to imprinting, our states of mind during early experiences, and reinforcement. And what gets hammered into our psyches is influenced as much by the size of the hammer as by our psyches themselves. That's what allows intelligent people to enjoy the Spice Girls in the company of long-lost friends, tequila, and an impromptu "Wannabe" karaoke session — and why a John Cage piano concerto annoys those same friends.

A glut of choices means we spend less time listening to the same music as other people do, so we don't get as much reinforcement. Music is more portable and thus more personalized. Charles Areni, a former professor at the University of Central Florida and current professor of economics and business at the University of Sydney, speculates that our individual music libraries lead to "increasing dissatisfaction with radio, music CDs, and any other non-customized form of music consumption. Since consumers can now customize their music environments, any 'one size fits all' approach will not make anybody happy."

Social psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, identifies changes from our habit of listening to singles, too: "Less album listening means that people aren't forced to listen to things that don't turn them on right away, and as a result, tastes change less."

Yep, having 6 million songs on hand means that tastes actually change less. It's a common predicament for anyone wanting to expand tastes: knowing that there's no reason to listen to the end of a song, much less an entire album you don't "get" right away. Even though it ultimately will expand my palette, do I really have the patience to get into heavy metal, when I already know I love Spoon?

Faced with such overwhelming choice, most people are fine with using filters to narrow the field, such as self-styled experts from music magazines and popular Web sites. These "experts" define what's hip and cool. The danger is that we're unaware of how dependent on filters we are, and how they filter in the first place.

We're forced to leave out a lot, and possibly we'll never find the song that will change our lives. Are we okay with that? Pressing "shuffle" has replaced driving down to the local mom-and-pop record store on Tuesday and buying a new release. I never had this problem in high school, listening to OK Computer on repeat. Now my iPod is like a remote control or a slot machine, flicking through 500 songs, searching for another emotive spike. I find myself getting bored even in the middle of songs simply because I can.

The paradox of spending so much time changing songs, trying to find one you like, is that you wind up attached to none of them. "Yes, there is too much music product, and most of it is terrible," says Peter Crabb, an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University. "Kids can spend more time trying to figure out what to listen to and fiddling with their computers and MP3s than actually spending quality time listening to good music."

And there is good music out there. As Ravi Dhar, the director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, says, "At some point, one has to stop looking for the best strawberries and start eating them."
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2008-...o-any-of-them/





Boston Needed Lead Singer, Found One Online

Plucked from obscurity, man joins favorite band after karaoke wows founder
Desiree Adib and Stephanie Dahle

Tommy DeCarlo of Charlotte, N.C., dreamed of becoming a rock star, listening to his favorite band's albums and memorizing their songs.

"A Boston song would come on and I'd get fired up and I'd start singing it," said DeCarlo, 43, a father of two kids -- Talia, 19, and Tommy Jr., 17.

But dreams didn't pay the bills, so DeCarlo worked as a credit manager at a Home Depot store in Charlotte to support his.

Still, he never gave up singing along to his Boston CDs, and his daughter Talia took notice. She posted a MySpace page of DeCarlo singing karaoke to Boston songs after the band's lead singer, Brad Delp, committed suicide in March 2007. And, in an instant, DeCarlo's whole world turned upside down.

"I wanted to share [the karaoke] with ... other Boston fans," he said.

DeCarlo had to sing with the karaoke track because he had sold his keyboard in 2006, using the extra cash to buy Christmas presents for his children.

Meanwhile, up in Boston, members of the real band were struggling to continue playing as the coped with Delp's suicide.

"My wife was at her computer playing our tunes, and I asked whether it was us playing live," Boston founder Tom Scholz told USA Today. "She said, 'It's some guy in North Carolina singing your songs.' I said, 'I know Brad's voice, and that's Brad.'"

Still, a skeptical Scholz was intrigued.

"In order to believe it, I had to plug the computer into the big speakers so I could listen to the background music and see if it was the band," Scholz told ABC News. "And I realized it wasn't the band, it was a karaoke track. Somebody was singing to it, and it wasn't Brad."

So the band decided to give DeCarlo a shot -- as their new lead singer.

"I was like, 'Wow!'" DeCarlo told "Good Morning America." "I remember calling my wife and kids in the bedroom and I said, 'Look at this e-mail!' I couldn't believe it."

"I was like, 'Oh my goodness, I can't believe this is happening," said Talia DeCarlo. "It was crazy."

DeCarlo made his debut onstage at a tribute concert to Brad Delp last August. It was the first time he sang with a band in his entire life.

"Even at the tribute, I heard a few people say it was a little eerie to hear Tommy sing, because it sounded like Brad up there," Scholz said.

"My hope is to carry on what Brad meant," DeCarlo said.

DeCarlo and the rest of Boston will begin their summer tour on June 6, 2008, in Thunber Bay, Ontario, Canada.

And the keyboard that DeCarlo sold two years ago, trying to make ends meet? Yamaha is endorcing DeCarlo and shipping him a brand-new synthesizer. He is scheduled to receive it the day before he and the band leave for their tour.

Boston got lucky finding "somebody who is good at something, who loved it and all of a sudden, all the connections got made," Boston founder Scholz said. He added: "Thank God!" For DeCarlo, his ultimate "dream job" has become an unbelievable reality. "A lot of folks have said, 'Wow! You're living a dream.'"

DeCarlo laughed, "I've never dreamed this big. ... Never in a million years I thought this could happen."
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4971065&page=1

















Until next week,

- js.



















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